A simplified on-line version of A Study Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time available from Hinau Press Ltd. Tips on Using this Study Guide Prologue and Introduction       Method  Division One: BEING       I. The Initial Sketch of Personhood       II. Being-in-the-World       III. The World       IV. Self and Society       V. Being-there       VI. Care as the Being of Personhood  Division Two: TIME       I. Being-towards-Death       II. Authenticity       III. Time       IV. Temporality and Everydayness       V. Historicality       VI. Temporality and 'Within-timeness'

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Being and Time is about Being and, especially, about what it is to be a human person.

Being - The fact of an object's being what it is. The being of a tree, for instance, is what the tree is when it is being a tree.
        Being is most decidedly not anything mystical. The word 'being' is simply the noun form of 'to be' [to exist]. The verb 'be' is itself a form of 'is'. So if you wanted to talk about the being of persons, for example, you could just as easily talk about what it is to be a person.
        Being cannot be divorced from doing - a welded steel structure, for example, can only be a gate if it is doing, or can do, what gates do when they are being gates. This entails that the being of any object is always a function of its place and role in the scheme of things. So you cannot understand the being of a gate, say, for instance, without reference to the role of enclosures and controlled entry.
        Being is not a property like weight or colour - a gate does not 'have Being' in the way that has certain dimensions or a galvanised finish.
        For persons - the only beings who deal with being - being is always meaningful. So one of the ways of saying "What is a gate?" ("What is the Being of gates?") is to ask "What does it mean for something to be a gate"

The English word 'being' translates the German sein. The German derivative dasein [there-being] is untranslated in the English text but rendered as 'personhood' (qv) throughout this Study Guide. Another derivative, seiend (literally 'a being'), is translated as 'entity' or 'thing'.
 

Heidegger himself capitalises Sein throughout Being and Time, a practice followed by the translators in rendering Being with a capital 'B'. I find, however, that this tempts us to treat being as something spooky; the practice is, therefore, not followed in this Study Guide except in direct quotations from the text.

Entity - That which is (i.e., that which has being); any object of attention which exists, is real, and/or which goes to make up the world (qv). All material things are entities, but so are immaterial objects of attention such as time, space or personhood; so the word 'entity' means more than just 'thing'. All being is the being of some entity.

The analysis of human personhood is a means to an end which is not itself realised in Being and Time; this end is an understanding of the meaning of being in general. The problem, however, is that being is not some kind of thing or stuff which we can examine directly. Rather, all being is the being of some entity, and it is the entity which has to be examined to get at its being. For reasons explained in the Introduction, one particular kind of entity - the human person - is selected as the best entity to be examined in the pursuit of being. So making the personhood of human persons transparent to human persons quickly becomes, and remains, the subject of Being and Time.

Horizon - The framework within which certain entities exist and various activities must take place. An horizon in this sense is not something which we can go beyond but the limit of our 'world' (qv). In a practical sense, the horizon of our lives is the past back to our birth (or, at least, to as far back as we can remember) and the future until our death - so an individual's birth and death are the temporal horizons of his or her existence. Culturally defined possibilities also provide an horizon for our lives in that we take such definitions as defining limits beyond which persons simply cannot go in the realisations of their personhood. If, for example, children are assumed to be not competent to vote in public elections then the possibility of a child voting simply won't be entertained - it is outside the 'horizon' of childhood.

The introduction to Being and Time is concerned, first, with explaining Heidegger's project and, second, establishing the language that he is going to have to use. These are tied together in that:

his topic is Being,

he wants to 'get at' an understanding of being by analysing ['interrogating'] the only entities who are engaged with being - i.e., human persons - and

our traditional ways of describing human being are (a) inadequate for talking about what it means to be a human person, and (b) laden with misleading ideology, prejudicial assumptions, and the like.

p.26 - Any being is always that of specific entities; there is no Being as such somehow hanging around 'out there' waiting to be investigated. This means that entities are what is to be interrogated (i.e., Heidegger will try to 'get at' being by interrogating an entity that is, in effect, a reliable 'witness' to being). Only one such entity is accessible to him and that is human persons - i.e., those beings for whom being is an issue, those beings whose nature it is to be aware of both their own being and the being of everything else. So the personhood of human beings is what is to be questioned.
 

Note: It should be remembered throughout Being and Time that a human person is an amalgam [integrity] of the biological 'human' and an encultured 'person' - and it is only the being of the 'person' part that Heidegger is interested in. The person part of a human person is an encultured, self-conscious being who evaluates the world using language, rules and values. Our personhood is the aspect of being a person which we all share. It is the personhood of human persons - the way in which we are all alike as persons - that is spelled out in Being and Time. The human part of a human person is an animal of the species homo sapiens. Our humanity is the aspect of being a human animal which we all share. Humanity is, so to speak, the 'vehicle' of our personhood. Humanity, however, is not the subject of Being and Time.

pp.26-36 - These pages tell us why personhood [dasein, qv] is the entity to be interrogated and, in the process, gives a tentative sketch of the main features of personhood. Basically Heidegger's argument is that, because being is always the being of some entity, some entity has to be examined and understood as a means of getting at being - and human persons are the logical choice for being the entity in question. After all, human persons are the beings for whom both their own being and the being of everything else is an issue - a matter of interest, comprehension and concern. If we examine the being of, say, a tree, then we have problems of access (how could we possibly know what it is to be a tree?) and we could only discover the being of only one entity (which entails examining everything before we get to the understanding we seek). If, however, we interrogate human being, then there are no access problems, and if we grasp the being of the only entity for which being is an issue then we will know what it is for an entity to relate itself comprehendingly towards the being of every entity whatsoever (i.e., an understanding of what it is to understand being).

Dasein- The personhood ['being-there'] of persons - by which Heidegger always intends human persons (qv). The German word literally means 'there-being' (da, there; sein, being), and the important connotation of persons as being-there is that persons cannot exist as persons, and cannot be understood as persons, apart from their being in a world (qv) by which they define and realise themselves (cf; 'essence', 'existence' and 'there'). I will translate dasein as 'personhood' throughout this Study Guide, always keeping in mind that being persons is something we do rather than just something we are.

That Being is an 'Issue' for Personhood - A cat doesn't concern itself with being a cat, a tree doesn't concern itself with being a tree, but persons do concern themselves with being certain kinds of persons (a builder, woman, entertainer, thief, parent, American, Tutsi, successful, attractive, brave, and so on). This is because, unlike cats or trees, we define our own being [the kinds of person we are] as we go along. We are continually faced with possibilities from among which we can choose and, at each choice, we actualise at least one of the possibilities available to us while closing off others in the process. This actualising of only some possibilities defines us as one kind of self rather than another - a dishonest choice defines us as dishonest, fixing broken windows defines us as a glazier, and so on. We have to iterate these choices daily - being brave last week doesn't mean that you're being brave today. So living the life of a person is a matter of constantly (a) taking a stand on who we are and (b) being defined as who we are by taking that stand (no choice is 'once and for always' so we have to keep on choosing to be who we are). Added to this, the being of everything else on the planet is also an issue for us because we deal with things as what they are and persons as who they are. Only persons, for example, deal with spades as spades or cards as cards (i.e., we relate to them as meaningful and as fitting meaningfully into and with other things and/or activities).

p.31 - Heidegger wants to understand the meaning of being; this entails making an ontological [philosophical] inquiry rather than an ontic [psychological] inquiry. A simple distinction between these two could be articulated as "Ontic inquiry is about what things are (their physical properties and so on), ontological inquiry is about what they mean (their significance)". And perhaps the most vivid example of this difference comes about when we think of death as the end of existence. Death is obviously meaningful to us, but if we go out of existence (qv) when we die then being dead is not something that we can ever actually experience. This means that, although we can give a first-person ontological account of death - a philosophical account examining the meaning of death for us while we live - we cannot give a first-person ontic account because, once we are dead, we are no longer there to experience death let alone give an account of it.

Ontic, Ontical - The word 'ontic' has to do with things ['onta'] as the entities they are. So ontical inquiry is concerned with specific things and their properties; it involves 'third-person' [scientific] knowledge, and ontic knowledge is that pertaining to the distinctive nature of particular entity and/or kinds of entity. Knowing how tall Margi is, or how old Steve is, is ontic knowledge; knowing the significance of height or age to humans is ontological knowledge.

Ontological - Having to do with the meaning or significance of being rather than the structure and nature of various beings. So where ontic inquiry is practical, specific and/or scientific, ontological inquiry is philosophical, general and/or theoretic. Heidegger particularly wants to think about what it is - what it means - to be a person, and he reserves the term 'ontology' for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to what entities 'mean' rather than what they 'are'. He also has it that human persons are innately pre-ontological (qv) just through being aware of and having a concern about the nature of being.

Ontology - In this context, any systematic, theoretical, study of being (qv) - especially the philosophical study of being in the European tradition begun by the ancient Greeks.

Pre-ontological- Ontology is expressly theoretical; human persons are normally pre-ontological because, although we seldom spell out our theories of being, we do deal with entities according to practical ontological categories. For example, we distinguish between persons and things, or the real and imaginary, in such a way that, if someone treats a person as a thing, a real object as imaginary, or vice versa, then we notice their behaviour as confused. So someone who fell in love with a hammer, for instance, or who 'parked' her children in the garage, would stand out as having her ontological categories 'wrong' - a judgement which indicates that we have at least a pre-theoretical understanding of how ontological categories work. Part of Heidegger's argument is that we owe it to ourselves to get our pre-ontological understanding of personhood onto a proper ontological footing. Achieving this is what Heidegger wants to do in Being and Time. And one of the features of his analysis is that his theoretical [ontological] categories of being - ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, and personhood - are simply elaborations of our ordinary and pre-ontological way of grouping entities into useful things [the ready-to-hand], useless things [the present-at-hand], and people [persons].

Another term which will be frequently used:

Primordial - Most primary or fundamental to the essential nature of something's being. Knowing how to feed or amuse ourselves, for example - how to tend goats, drive cars or work in a shop - is more primordial to personhood [more immediately involved in our being persons] than is having theoretical knowledge about nutrition, agriculture, mechanical engineering or retail marketing and so on. Similarly, ontological inquiries are more primordial than ontic inquiries by being more fundamental to inquiry than are the factual details subsequently brought to light.

In Section 4 Heidegger justifies choosing human beings as the appropriate entities to interrogate (qv) in his pursuit of the meaning of being. He will also introduce the important notions of essence and existence.

Essence (1) - The distinctive attributes of an entity; the characteristic structures and/or behaviours which define its being (qv). The essence of a tree, for example, is a set of features which (a) it shares with other trees and (b) determines how it will live its life. The essence of a philosopher is also defined by a set of features which she shares with other philosophers and determines how she will live her life. The difference, however, is that the human (1) can choose to do philosophy or not, and (2) must go on choosing to do philosophy if she is going to define herself as a philosopher. The essence of a tree is fixed - its way of life is wholly determined by the actualities of its species-structure and environment. The essences of persons, however, are defined not only by their actualities but, more important, by their possibilities - we define our own essence in an ongoing manner by how we each choose to live our lives. And this, of course, means that, unlike non-persons, our essence is neither given nor fixed; a tree cannot be anything but the tree it is, but a philosopher can choose to be an academic functionary, a gardener, a goat farmer or a whore if she so pleases. So we get at the essence of a thing by asking what it is but we get at the essence of a person by asking who he or she is.

Existence - The lives of human persons, in which and through which they define themselves as the kinds of persons they are. The existence of persons is more than the lives of animals or plants because the essence of non-persons is wholly determined by factors such as their environment and membership of a species - a cauliflower or fish, for example, cannot choose to be or not be a philosopher. The essence of persons, however - our character - is defined on an ongoing basis by how we live our lives. This is because we are constantly choosing among various, limited but real, possibilities and are defined, as persons, by which possibilities we choose to actualise. So if, for example, you choose to build things then you define yourself as a builder, if you choose to tell the truth then you define yourself as an honest person. These kinds of self-defining choices are simply not open to plants or animals. Plants and animals live a life, but only persons lead a life; a tree or a cat can live a life in only one way, but persons can and must live in one way or another. In Heidegger's terms, animals, plants and persons all live, but only persons exist. Because persons choose among possibilities (which, by definition, are 'not yet'), our existence is always 'pointed' towards the future as well as rooted in a present that is defined by the past (qv, temporality). As will be demonstrated in due course, responses to possibility play a huge role in distinguishing existence from life.
 

Note particularly that phrase 'taking hold or neglecting'. If, for example, you have the chance of introducing yourself to a stranger then (a) that is an opportunity that you will either actualise [take hold of] or neglect, as you please, and (b) whichever option you choose will go towards defining your way of life and, thereby, who you are. So our essence as persons is not just defined by what we do but also but what we don't do.

p.33 - Heidegger now introduces his central theme; namely that, to whatever extent persons are understandable as persons, they are so in terms of their existence - i.e., in terms of a possible self who they realise [actualise] and maintain on an ongoing basis as they live the lives of persons. This theme will only become clear as the book continues.

The 'point of departure' for Heidegger is that our essence as persons is not something we discover or 'get in touch with' but someone we continually invent and re-invent in the process of living our lives.

Essence and existence - With things, their essence [what they are] determines their existence [their way of life or, if you like, their way of being what they are]. With persons, however, our existence defines our essence; we are born and 'pitched into life' before we begin making the choices which define what kind of person we are going to be (i.e., our essence). For most of our history, however, humans have implicitly or explicitly conceived of themselves as a kind of 'artifact' created by some sort of extra-human agency - a God or gods, evolution, social environment, genetics, aliens or whatever. With artifacts their essence precedes their existence both conceptually and in fact. If you are going to make shoes, for instance, then the essence of what a shoe is - what it is for, how it will work, and so on - is decided before the shoes are made. Applying this kind of view to persons implies that we too get our 'true' nature as selves from outside of us, from a force, forces or extra-human entity which/who created us with a preconceived pattern of who we are to be and what we are to be good for. In this case our happiness and fulfilment must consist in our living up to the external standards of that pattern - you find out who you were 'born to be' and be it - so both our nature and way of life come from outside of us. The truth, however, is that (a) human beings define their essence by choosing a way of life [an existence], and (b) there is no objective template or standard to which we can conform in order to be who we meant to be (there is, in fact, no 'meant to be' about selfhood at all - each human self is a unique experiment in personhood). Consequently, the nearest that personhood gets to having an essence is to have no essence save that which we create and maintain for ourselves as we live our lives - there is no pre-determined 'human nature' which provides us with an objective recipe for being Steve or Margi or Adolf or whoever. This being the case, no facts of the world or ourselves can determine who we should be [our selfhood or essence] and what we are good for; we must do it ourselves out of whatever possibilities life presents us with. Who we will be and what we will be good for is an individual matter of ongoing creativity.
        It might be thought from this that the essence of persons actually lies in their capacity for self-definition. This is partly right in that this capacity is what most vividly separates persons from non-persons. But it isn't wholly right because the essence of non-persons fixes how they live whereas, in persons, our capacity for actualising possibilities leaves the question of our essence open - we continue to create our essence for as long as we live. It seems best, therefore, to stick with Heidegger's formulation by saying that (a) the essence of persons issues from their individual and ongoing existence, and (b) only for persons is existence [the way of living a life] a question to be addressed through existing - in non-persons it isn't even a question - and that, consequently, only persons can be properly said to exist.

Heidegger also distinguishes two forms of understanding personhood; existentiell understanding is the kind of practical understanding that we get from living our own lives; existential understanding is the kind we get from analysing the meaningful structures [logic] of personhood which make existentiell understanding possible. Existentiell understanding is ontic (about ourselves as specific individuals), existential understanding is ontological (theoretical and general). So the word 'existential' refers to a general understanding of the common forms of personhood whereas the related word 'existentiell' (qv) refers to the understanding of the specific life-situation of a particular person. The point here being that an inquiry into being requires an existential understanding of personhood in general rather than an existentiell understanding of some individual person in particular. It is this consideration which will lead Heidegger to analyse the 'average everydayness' of human existence.

Existential - Having to do with the personhood of a person (qv, existence) with specific reference to personhood as meaningful for the persons involved. So when Heidegger talks of existential spatiality, for example, he intends spatiality as a meaningful experience of persons living their lives as persons - he is after the significance of spatiality to persons. Such understanding is ontological (qv), and spells out the meaningful structure [form] of personhood common to all persons without specific reference to any one individual's way of life in particular.

Existentiell - Having to do with the specific life of a particular individual in a particular circumstance. Existentiell understanding, for example, is the kind of understanding, of our own selves and our own situation, that we acquire in the process of actually living a life. Such understanding is ontic (about ourselves as specific individuals) and concerns the particular content of our lives.

Heidegger observes that, for persons, being in a world is something without which personhood would be inconceivable. This, of course, follows from our essence being our existence. After all, you cannot define yourself [your essence] as a builder unless you inhabit an environment in which (a) things need to be built and (b) materials for building things are available in ways that you can use them. Whether this environment is material or 'spiritual' is irrelevant - persons need a world (qv) in which to realise their essence as persons. The significance of this observation - which is profound - will be spelled out in Division One, Chapters II and III.

p.36f - It is not enough for Heidegger's purposes to 'get at' personhood just 'any old how'. He needs rather to get at what it is 'proximally and for the most part' - i.e., in the mode of 'average everydayness'. The horizon (qv) of this mode is the world (Division One) and temporality (Division Two).

Proximal - Most immediately at hand. Proximity differs from existential closeness (qv) in that we are, for example, closer to our own children than we are to other children even when those other children are geographically closer [more proximate] than our own. Proximity is related to being-among (qv).

Average Everydayness (1) - The ordinary life of normal persons in their everyday situations.

Heidegger intends to get away from the philosophical traditions that isolate persons as objects of study, just as if personhood was something disconnected from the daily world of work, rest, eating, gossip, entertainments, and so on. He wants to consider human personhood 'as it really is in the real world' so to speak. He adds 'average' to the notion of everydayness because what he is looking for in our everyday lives are certain 'essential structures', i.e., certain ways of being persons that are common and necessary in the ways that humans exist as persons. The phrase most often associated with this idea is 'proximally [most immediately] and for the most part'.

Temporality - The condition of persons being located in time, not in a thingish sense of just being 'there' as time passes but as living in a way that unites [integrates], and involves awareness of, a past, present and future - both individually, as we each understand our present and future in terms of our past, and collectively (as history). This is not fully spelled-out until Division Two.

Persons are temporal beings in that, unlike things, keeping track of time is important to us - if we are thinking of actualising a particular possibility, for example, part of our decision making process will include calculating whether or not we have the time for it. By asserting that temporality is the horizon (qv) of personhood Heidegger means that all our experiences as persons occur within a framework integrating past, present and future. As will be made plain in Division Two, temporality is neither ordinary clock time (which is a derivative phenomenon) nor the kind of quantitative, homogeneous, time invoked by natural science. It is, rather, a lived movement through what could be called 'the space of possibilities'; a movement in which we carry the past through the present and into the future. It is, in other words, a unity. This is because, as persons we 'point' to the future in the present, but only in terms of our past experiences; the past for us is not dead but still around as having-been. Selves, in other words, do not merely 'have' a past, we exist on the terms that our past presently makes available to us. This 'going back' to what it has been constitutes, together with a simultaneous 'coming towards' (the future) and 'being with' (the present), the unity of our temporality; persons hand down to themselves their own historical 'heritage,' namely, the possibilities of being that have come down to them. Except in cases of personal disintegration, folk behave in ways that (a) are consistent with past behaviours and events and (b) project this consistency into the future. This means that personhood can never be accurately considered 'out of time'; that is, as any sort of free-floating 'soul' or 'pure consciousness' or whatever. All of these claims made for temporality will be fully grounded (qv) in Division Two.

pp.41-46 - Temporality is the ground for historicality - an authentic or inauthentic awareness of history. By being temporal, human personhood is embedded in history in two senses: (a) the personal sense of each carrying our past with us into the future - the past defines our present and future possibilities, and (b) the wider (social) sense of our all being located with human history and therefore having only the options for personhood allowed by our time (Sir Lancelot, for example, could not have been a fighter pilot because fighter planes were not around at his time in history; by the same token, modern fighter pilots cannot be mediaeval knights because the mediaeval world has passed - that whole world view and frame of mind no longer exists). This means that a lack of historicality is a flawed mode of being a person.

Historicality - The tendency of persons to define the future in terms of what they already know - with what we already know being a product of the past. Because we are temporal (qv) we tend to 'historise' experience - bringing an authentic or inauthentic understanding of the past to the future through the present. Historicality is part of our being situated in a world (qv). In many important senses, personhood is constituted by its past experience in the world, whether a particular person is conscious of this or not. For instance, someone who is timid because of something in her childhood might not be aware that her childhood experiences are the cause of her timidity, but they are still part of her history and therefore actually constitutive of her present state of being and therefore her choosing of her future.
        Personhood is basically orientated towards ['points at'] the future - our being persons is a 'to be'. But the concept of historicality reminds us that persons view their future possibilities and potentialities in terms of past experiences and events which set the boundaries for future hopes and dreams - 'In the fact of its Being, personhood is as it already was'. This is why the notion of the past is so important - it is actually constitutive of our 'to be.' In this sense, the notion of the past does not exist for us in the sense of being something 'dead and buried'. A person's consciousness is shaped by what he has done, or what has happened to her, as well as by what he or she hopes, intends, or feels compelled to do. So the point to bear in mind here is our motivation in our 'to be' is limited by our sense of the past (historicity, qv). So our historical context is one of the constraints on self-realisation. History and historicality will be specifically explored in the end chapters of Being and Time.

At the bottom of p.42 Heidegger touches on an issue which affects our authenticity (qv). All of us grow up in and into a traditional way of interpreting ourselves; this is part of our historising, and the understanding it provides guides us in the realisation of who we are (through it the possibilities of our being are 'disclosed and regulated'). This tradition, however, can 'take over' our personhood. So not only do persons tend to 'fall back upon their world' and interpret themselves by its reflected light, they also tend to lose themselves in ['fall prey to'] the tradition of which they have taken hold. When this happens, the tradition obscures its own sources - we take it for granted as self-evident and forget that it has a questionable history; the assumed truths which 'everyone knows' are part of our fallenness. Much more will be said on this as the book goes along but, in the meantime, Heidegger's immediate point is that this is precisely what has happened in philosophy concerning the nature of being - which is why he is going to have to destroy (I would say 'deconstruct') the history of ontology in order to get back to the issues which it obscures. Having shown some historical ways in which this obscuring has occurred, he makes the point that this exercise is not 'negative' (merely or purely destructive) but 'positive' - he wants to 'get at' the issue of being a person without the misleading clutter which centuries of traction have handed down to him.

Fallenness ('falling prey to', 'falling into', etc.) - A form of inauthenticity (qv) in which persons become absorbed in being with other people, things and tasks, to the extent that their personhood no longer reveals itself. Fallenness is our normal mode of average everydayness (qv) and cannot be entirely escaped. The notion will be developed much further as we go along.

p.49: Heidegger's Method - In order to 'detoxify' ourselves from historical misunderstanding, we have to look at being persons anew. Heidegger's method for doing this is phenomenological. Before getting to this, however, we need to understand the notion of disclosedness which underlies it.

Disclosedness - The process of perceiving something as what it is and so uncovering its being what it is. There is no 'working out by inference' in disclosure; it's strictly a matter of understanding a meaningful object of attention directly and in its context - understanding a spade as a tool with a certain use and context, for instance, rather than as something isolated and apart from the world (qv, reflection and circumspection). To say that something has been disclosed does not necessarily mean that we have any detailed awareness of what is thus 'laid open', only that it has been 'opened up' to our attention; its details may be made explicit by further examination.
        Disclosing is something that (a) only persons do and (b) makes us persons. It is related to truth (qv) as an uncovering of things as they really are (i.e., not so much of what things are made of as what they mean, their being). It is, for example, only persons that can disclose a tree as a tree or a spade as a spade, not in the sense of giving them names but as grasping their significance as part of the world (qv) - we 'disclose' a spade when we open it for understanding as a spade. As only persons can do this, and doing this is part of what makes us persons, disclosedness is an essential part of being a person ('disclosedness [is] a basic state of that entity which we ourselves are [and is] constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, falling and discourse'). Indeed, Heidegger flatly asserts that dasein [personhood, qv] simply is its disclosedness. A good example of disclosedness is Heidegger's analysis of existential spatiality (qv). The being of space is not disclosed to us mathematically but by our being in spatial arrangements that are determined by what is relevant to our lives as persons (qv, closeness) and/or irrelevant (qv, distance).
        Full disclosedness is constituted of state-of-mind (qv), understanding (qv) and discourse (qv) - i.e., we disclose the being of what is 'there' by understanding and talking about it within the normal human context by which all understanding has some kind of emotional content (qv, mood).

It is disclosedness - the 'laying out' of something's being what it is to plain view - that phenomenology (qv) tries to achieve. And Heidegger explains his phenomenological method by breaking the word 'phenomenology' down to it's components 'phenomenon' and 'ology'.

Phenomenon - A phenomenon [singular] is any thing, fact or occurrence which is detectable by human persons, alone or with the help of instruments. Most phenomena [plural] are the normal objects of our perceptions in the everyday world; others have to be 'dug out' of semblances and appearances that cover them. The original Greek use of the term 'phenomenon' - which Heidegger invokes - was of 'that which shows itself in itself'; a spade, for instance, is a phenomenon when perceived as a spade. Phenomena are entities [things, forces, persons] - 'the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light' - which go to make up the whole of being. An important thing about phenomena is that they appear to us as meaningful. When we look at a tree, for example, we don't simply sense a myriad of meaningless differences in light, shape and colour; we perceive the tree as a tree, as an integrity distinct from the things around it ('Phenomenon in the phenomenological sense is that which shows itself as Being and as a structure of Being'). Although Heidegger thinks of phenomena in this sense, he is at pains to separate what he calls 'phenomenologically relevant' phenomena from mere seeming and appearing - the first of which hides a phenomena, the second of which reveals (or 'announces' it) it but only in a round-about way (as, for example, in the way that symptoms 'announce' a disease without themselves being the disease). The important point here is that Heidegger wants to get at the phenomenon rather than the appearance - the 'disease' rather than the 'symptom'.

We can get an idea of which phenomenon Heidegger is after by thinking of Kant's insights into space and time as phenomena which don't actually show themselves as themselves but which reveal themselves in what is shown. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that there are two fundamental concepts that human beings use to order the otherwise chaotic manifold of experience into a manageable form that they can comprehend. These concepts [space and time] are two kinds of form or integrity that we invoke to frame and order experience before we can 'make sense' of it (i.e., we don't sense space or time as objects in the world, but we need the ideas of space and time in order to make our sensing of objects meaningful). Space and time, however, are not just ideas; they are phenomena (they are 'there' in the world in a way that can be described without recourse to anything spooky), but they differ from 'phenomena as things' in that the various entities in space and time actually 'hide' what makes their accessibility possible. This means that the phenomena of space and time are not phenomenal in the sense of simply appearing as what they are, but neither are they signs of something else (as in semblance or appearing)). Space and time are 'there', but they are not show themselves as themselves (time, for example, reveals it's passing through changes in things that are not time). Added to this, they are a proper and meaningful subject of discourse (qv) and they can be brought to light as what they are if thought about in the right way. "This is precisely why our investigation requires the phenomenological method, in order to uncover that which proximally and for the most part remains hidden". Thus, like Kant, Heidegger believes that there is a phenomenon - being - 'hidden' within phenomena [entities] as usually understood - although he utterly rejects that this 'hiddenness' is any kind 'more real reality' or whatever. And, also like Kant, he holds that (a), this phenomenon matters and (b) approaching it in the right way (which, for him, means phenomenologically) can make it clear [uncover it] in the way that the Kantian approach made space and time clear.

Phenomenology - Literally the story ['ology'] of phenomena aimed at disclosing their being. Because the 'ology' of phenomenology is intended to be a disciplined and truth-revealing narrative, phenomenology is scientific. It is not, however, 'a science' in the traditional sense (i.e., a field of study such as biology or physics) so much as a method for giving any science the data it will use in evidence of a scientific theory. The basic idea of phenomenology is to put aside [bracket] pre-existing theory in order to simply describe what is there (the motto which Heidegger invokes for phenomenology is 'to the things themselves'). So, by approaching his study of being phenomenologically, Heidegger is deliberately trying to exclude any prejudicial theory, ethics or interpretation from his description; he is not saying that this is how people are in theory. He is simply trying to describe what is 'there'. Heidegger is convinced that our 'will to a theory' (as Wittgenstein called it) obscures more than it reveals; by eschewing theory, phenomenology is intended to reveal [disclose] what is - lay it out in its nakedness, so to speak - and therefore lead to understanding (qv). Even so, he points out there is always the need to be mindful of the possibility that language may have or will cover up the being of phenomena, and thus phenomenology must always be self critical and interrogative.

Truth (1) - We normally think of truth as an agreement between what is said and what it is said about; i.e., we think of truth as a function of discourse (qv). For Heidegger, however, as for the ancient Greeks, truth (the Greek alethia) is more primitive than this because truth is the initial 'uncovering' of something's being what it is (literally a-lethia, not being covered) that precedes discourse. This is a matter of taking phenomena out of their normal half-perceived state - when we are among entities and use them without really noticing them - and revealing or 'making plain' their being what they are. So it is that, in Being and Time, truth is not a judgment about the agreement between words and objects - that kind of judgement comes later - but a matter of perceiving objects 'truly' (i.e., as what they are). It is truth in this sense that phenomenology is concerned with, and it is truth in this sense that we achieve by using the phenomenological method. And it is precisely this 'uncovering' of the truth about human personhood that Being and Time is aimed at.
        Heidegger will later observe that (a) there can be no truth without personhood because persons, and only persons, disclose the being of entities (i.e., their being what they are), and (b) the full disclosedness (qv) of personhood is based on its concern with being-in-the-world (qv) - see 'being in the truth'.

Discourse - A disclosive (qv) use of language; that which makes up a narrative. Discourse is not a matter of making assertions ("X is y" claims) but of 'making manifest what one is talking about' - it's a way of making clear and communicating the being of things, of revealing what is 'there' but hitherto unnoticed. Discourse manifests itself in the use of language and, together with understanding (qv) and mood (qv) discloses the world to us (qv, disclosedness). Being and Time is a discourse.

Summary - Being and Time is basically about being - initially understood simply as 'whatever it is' that constitutes things as things. But being is always the being of some entity, so any inquiry into being must (a) pick some entity to interrogate and (b) find the most appropriate way of 'getting at' the being of the entity in question.

• Because any such inquiry is a mode of personhood [a way of being a person], the inquiry can be fully transparent only if it is preceded by an existential analysis of personhood (i.e., an analysis of the make-up and logic of personhood).
• The being of persons is such that (a) our own being is an issue for us and (b) we can grasp the being of entities. Such an intimate and revealed relationship with Being implies that the analysis of personhood should not only precede an investigation into Being but actually form the centrepiece of the inquiry.

Note: This process of freeing philosophy from a past which both makes it possible and gets in the way, foreshadows the argument that the necessary traditions of persons and societies similarly trap them in an inauthenticity from which they must keep recovering if they are to truly be themselves within their historical context.

In this Division, an account is given of our being-in-the-world as an essentially unitary or holistic phenomenon; not a juxtaposition of our being and the world but an integrity of our being-in-the-world as a kind of 'package deal'. The reason that Heidegger cannot simply say 'The being of personhood is one of being in the world' is that humans, in all cultures, have traditionally misrepresented to themselves the being of persons, the world, and what being-in the world amounts to. When we think of a person being in the world our image is pretty much of something that can be placed like a piece on a chess board or water in a glass - something that could be put in and taken out of basically spatial/temporal relationships without changing its fundamental nature. It is correcting this view, and making the actual state of affairs clear, that Division One is about. And the phrase being-in-the-world is hyphenated throughout to make the point that, although Heidegger articulates 'the-world' (Chapter III), the being who is in the world (Chapter IV), and 'being-in' (Chapter V) separately, they do not (and cannot) come apart in fact.
 

Our being-in-the-world, in other words, is an interactive integrity - not merely a fact, a being among things in the world, but an existential (qv) being-in-the-world as a meaningful whole.

p.67 - Persons are the entities to be studied [interrogated] in the pursuit of being as the object of inquiry. The being of persons is in each case somebody's 'mine' because any entity that chooses to be itself in a certain way thereby makes a possibility of personhood into its own unique actuality. Persons comport (qv) themselves understandingly towards their own being - they are caught up in a way of life that they choose rather than a way of life dictated by their membership of a species. So the idea here is that we define our being as persons through our conduct in the world [the necessary medium of conduct] and are thus 'delivered over' to our own self-definition. So whereas a sparrow, for example, can only build nests in a way dictated by its species-structure, persons can build, buy or rent, shelters of many different kinds.

Comport - Conduct or 'orientation'; to comport is to relate ourselves to something in a particular way. The German word (verhalten) refers pretty much to any kind of behaviour or way of conducting ourselves, including the ways in which we relate to objects or person and the ways we refrain or hold back from relationship. More technically, to comport ourselves is behave in a particular way towards of the object of our behaviour because of who or what that object is (e.g., we 'comport' ourselves in a particular way towards a lover because she or he is our lover). I sometimes translate the word as 'orient' as in "Persons orient themselves towards (i.e., behave in ways specifically related to) their own being".

Being is an issue for persons in that the form that our life is to take confronts us as a choice. So whereas our sparrow faces no questions about what kind of sparrow to be, persons have to address the question of what kinds of person we will be.
        The essence (qv) of persons lies in their 'to be' [their possibilities] - called 'existence' (qv) - while the essence of non-persons lies in structures and environments over which they have no control. The essence of a rock, for instance, is not something that the rock can do anything about; the essence of a carpenter or entertainer, on the other hand, is a possibility actualised by the person in question and is an essence they can change if they choose to (as shown by the numbers of folk who change careers). This essence is unique for each person (the being that is a issue for each self is in every case a 'mine'), so we should avoid generalised and thingish characterisations of personhood such as 'soul', 'spirit', 'consciousness', or whatever.

Essence (2) - The set of properties in virtue of which an object is the kind of object it is. This set of properties serves to characterize, define or identify objects as themselves. The essence of a fish, for instance, is that set of properties which (a) is common to fishes generally, (b) is built-in to the fish in question, (c) makes the fish what it is rather than something else, and (d) determines the fish's way of life. In persons, however, our essence is not what we are members of a class but who we are as distinct selves - it is our unique self-identity, personality, history and moral character. This essence is not something we are born with, and nor is it a pre-determined character that we are meant to realise but may fail to. It is, rather, an ongoing product of how we live our lives that is unique to each of us. Put simply, the essence of a tree defines the tree and its way of life whereas the way of life [existence] of a person defines her essence and, thereby, who she is as a person.
        Our essense as persons is commonly thought to be some sort of mind, soul, spirit or an innate 'self' which, in many belief systems, is given at birth and/or can survive the death of the body. Heidegger, however, recognises that the essence of a person ['who I am'] is neither a thing, a mental or spiritual 'substance', nor a pre-determined 'nature' to which we should but might not conform. It is, rather, a moral, psychological and temporal-historical character or personality individually defined by a person's ongoing existence in the world - my essence, which is defined by my way of life [my choice a career, values, etc.], is what makes me who I am; your essence, which is defined by your way of life, is what makes you who you are, and so on. It follows from this that, unlike things, which have no say in how they live, the essence of a person is not a 'given' but something which changes with each decision made throughout life - it is not a discovery but an invention. See also 'Existence'.

In our being-in-the-world, persons encounter everything that isn't a person as either relevant to our being-in-the-world or as not relevant to our being-in-the-world. So these two possibilities - 'ready-to-hand' and 'present-at-hand' - become Heidegger's basic ontological (qv) categories for everything that is not a person.

Ready-to-hand - Things that are relevant to a situation or project either as a help or as a hindrance (e.g., tools, devices, materials, parking spaces, etc., that we do or can work with). The being of entities that are ready-to-hand is defined by the practices in which they are employed, and their properties are established in relation to the norms of those practices. Areas of land, for example, are ready-to-hand only in relation to their uses - farms, building sites, nature reserves, ski slopes, and the like.

Present-at-hand (presence-at-hand) - Something that is 'there' but of no immediate relevance to what we are doing.

Traditionally, human thinkers have tended to consider the nature of entities in a detached, contemplative or scientific, manner - we think of them, and ourselves, as present-to-hand. It is part of Heidegger's thesis, however, that this is misleading because, in fact, entities make sense as phenomena (qv) only when considered as relevant to human endeavours and therefore meaningful for this reason (you cannot, for example, really understand a spade or parking space until you put them into a context of human usage). Much of Division Two will be devoted to correcting the mistaken tradition that considers time as merely present-at-hand.

p.68 - In every case, the being of a person is her or his 'my' to be. Non-persons live out their lives in ways determined by their environment and species-identity; but each person chooses their own way of being who they are. We each make various possibilities, that may well be common to many persons, into our particular actuality. Our personal 'ownership' of our own self-creation is our 'Mineness'.

Mineness - A feature, unique to persons, by which each person's essence (qv) is her or his own creation and property. This is in contrast to the essence of things which determines the way of life for each exemplar of a class. The essence of every tree, for example, is common to all trees, but the essence of every Mary or Mohamed is (a) different to every other Mary or Mohamed and (b) the personal property of the particular Mary or Mohamed who calls it 'mine'. Mineness is the feature of personhood that makes so many generalities about persons meaningless.

What you are, as a human, is roughly common to all human beings, but who you are [your essence] is yours in an exclusive sense because (a) you are the one actually creating who you are in fact, and (b) no one else is, was, or will be, your particular you. You can create your 'me' in awareness that your choices are yours and are creating who you are or in ignorance of what you are doing. Whatever the case, you, like everyone else, are defining your own 'who I am' in fact. We are each our own possibility, not just in the sense of having options but in the sense that we can own ourselves, lose ourselves (as when we say that someone tends to 'lose herself' in her job), never own ourselves, or only 'seem' to own ourselves - depending on the extent to which we do or do not behave like things that are 'programmed'. Most folk, for example, drift through life letting themselves [their being] be defined by their jobs, race, gender or social context. Such folk never own themselves because, although the self they create is still defined by their choices in fact, it is never 'theirs' in any deliberate sense - they are the self-made artifacts of fashion, ideology or popular belief.

Authenticity (1) - One of two ways of being-in-the-world as a person (the other is 'inauthenticity'). Being authentic is not a matter of being a certain kind of person (e.g., someone honest, open and sincere or whatever) but of how we go about being whatever kind of person we are making ourselves into. The word applies only to those beings who are or can be persons - beings who define themselves by actualising their possibilities - and what is at stake in its use is how much or how little those beings are understandingly related to their actual possibilities. Human beings are the persons that Heidegger is interested in. Because human beings are persons, we can be more or less authentic as persons; but a shellfish, for example, can neither be an authentic [self-defined] person nor an inauthentic [others-defined] person because it is not a person at all.
        Human beings are an integrity of sophisticated pack-animal and a self-aware realiser of individual possibilities. And, for as long as we live, we face the ongoing choice of living more like one or the other. Because Heidegger's subject in this project is our being as persons, it is only our authenticity as persons that he is considering. And being authentic, as a person, is simply a matter of living the life of a person - a self-realiser - rather than a circumstance-defined member of some social 'pack'.
        When we are being authentic as persons, our being as persons is 'transparent' to us; we each create and take ownership of our own 'me' in full awareness of what we are, our possibilities, past, and what we are doing. When we are being inauthentic persons, as we normally are, then our own being as persons is 'opaque' - obscured by public conformity, busyness, and the expectations of others.
        We are authentic as persons to the extent that we are self-defining individuals; we are inauthentic as persons to the extent that we are group-defined by social roles and expectations. Authentic persons are always individuals; so if you define yourself by gender, job or ethnicity, for example, then, although you may be an authentic member of the group in question, you are being inauthentic as a person.
        Inauthentic personhood is so much the usual form of human existence that none of us escape it entirely and most never escape it at all.
        Because the English words 'authentic' and inauthentic' have connotations of good and bad respectively, it is easy to read an ethic into Being and Time whereby being authentic is good and being inauthentic is bad. This is inappropriate because, for Heidegger, the terms are not intended in any moral or political sense at all. The difference simply connotes a characteristic of any entity whose being is an issue for it. Birds or chairs, for example, are not persons and therefore cannot be either authentic nor inauthentic as persons; humans, however, can be and are a mix of both. Heidegger gives examples of common 'inauthentic' being as being busy, excited, interested [engaged] or ready for enjoyment (i.e., states in which our being is dominated by the events we are busy with, excited by, engaged in or awaiting).

p.69 - Heidegger now formulates his guiding 'key' to understanding the constitution of personhood's Being.
 

In other words, we are defined as persons not just by our actualities (qv, facticity) but, more importantly, by our possibilities - by what we can choose to do or not do.

That we are constituted as persons by our possibilities (qv) is one of the key insights of Being and Time. Say, for example, that you have been a builder for all of your adult life. In this case, your whole adult existence is shaped and given meaning by your job; the time '7.00' on your bedside clock, for instance, is meaningful to you as the time you get up and get ready to leave for work. Then, for some reason - a serious injury perhaps - you can no longer carry on building. In this situation, what you discover is that what building actually represented to you was a field of possibilities which gave your life meaning. The death of these possibilities can leave you bereft and feeling lost (your alarm clock still reads '7.00' each morning, but that time is no longer a summons you to get ready for work and has therefore become meaningless). If the actualities of building defined who you are (i.e., if you were a builder in the sense that a rabbit is a rabbit or a tree is a tree) then you could not change any more than a tree could change being a tree if being a tree became no longer viable. But that fact that you can change - get a new career, change your life's direction, or whatever - shows that it is possibilities which you use to be who you are. Taking up one or more of these possibilities then opens up a new world for you in which you re-define who you are by a new way of life. This matters particularly because humans chronically misdefine personhood in terms of actualities - who you are is thought to be wholly or partly fixed by your race, gender, star sign, career, social class, or whatever. In doing this we think of persons as things - and so misunderstand ourselves.

One implication of all this is that there is no particular way of life which we can analyse as the 'proper' way of being a human person. So what Heidegger must do is put aside the myriad differences of detail in human lives (their individual contents) and focus on the 'existence-structures' [common ways of being a person] of human personhood - the form into which all those details fit. He is not after the 'essence' of personhood - which differs from person to person - but only the way in which we all normally go about realised our essence. To do this he goes for the 'average everydayness' of our personhood - the way of being a person which is both most proximal to us in fact and yet most overlooked.

Average Everydayness (2) - The normal way of being a person in which our daily lives are filled with various activities and inactivities which are meaningful in reference to how they serve or hinder person-related interests. Average everydayness is a highly specific mode of being a person; indeed, it is precisely in the mode of average everydayness that we normally 'comport' ourselves towards our being. 'Out of this kind of Being - and back into it again - is all existing, such as it is'. It is our everyday behaviours which reveal the nature of personhood as 'being-in-the-World' (qv) because our average everyday life is one of involvement in various practical activities.
        Analysis of average everydayness will reveal that our average everyday mode of living is actually inauthentic because, in our involvement with the world, and especially with other people, we (a) lose sight of our personhood and (b) 'scatter' ourselves among various activities.

pp.70-1 - According to Heidegger's analysis, the difference between persons and non-persons is much greater than that between humans and non-humans - so much so that he needs another vocabulary and another logic to accurately describe personhood. An example of this is the difference between categories (which apply to things) and existentialia (which apply only to persons). The categories of things are how we classify their being - e.g., horses are real, ideas are abstract, and so on. Categories apply to what something is, existentialia apply to who someone is. Authenticity is one of the existentialia of persons because only persons can be authentic or inauthentic in an existential (qv) sense.

Category - A class of being that applies to non-persons; e.g., the classes Animal, Mineral or Vegetable, are categories.

Existentiale (sing; plural = existentialia) - Classes of being which apply only to persons; e.g., honest and dishonest are existentialia because only persons can be honest or dishonest. Each existentiale is a range of possibilities within which (a) only persons can be placed and (b) any given person will be placed. Consider, for example, the range of attitudes that go from total scepticism to abject gullibility; a rock, tree, cow or motorbike cannot be said to be either sceptical or gullible about anything, but every person is always somewhere on the sceptical-to-gullible scale in reference to every possibility he encounters. This means that this range of attitudes is an existentiale.

The World - The context in which human persons live their lives as persons - i.e., not just our physical environment (although it includes a physical environment) but the whole integrity of nature, culture, space, time, actuality and possibility, within which we live our lives as persons and which shapes our dealings with things and people. The world, in this sense, (1) is a meaningful integrity about which we can have beliefs, and (2) includes the past which informs the present which, in turn, is packed with the possibilities that will define the future.
        To grasp what Heidegger means by a world, we can think about our use of the word 'world' in phrases such as 'the world of literature'. In these cases what we mean is a kind of domain, an integrity, about which we may have beliefs that are true or false according to the particular state of affairs in that world. For instance, the claim that Hobbits are real, which is false in the natural world, is true in the 'world' of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. 'The' world, in this sense, is an actual, rather than fictional, world - a shared and actual natural-cultural context - in which beliefs about our existence and environment as persons can be true or false.

Being-in - For persons, being-in is an engagement, an activity. Our being-in the world is radically interactive - we 'carry the world with us' as part of our being persons - and the personhood of persons cannot be understood except as participating in a world that it necessarily shares with other persons.

The traditional notion of our being in the world is that of a basically passive state. This idea implicitly detaches us from the world - we just happen to be placed among things in much that same way as items on a shelf or water in a glass. This makes being in the world something secondary to being a person (as when a 'soul' can be reincarnated in the way that water can be poured from one glass to another without affecting its essential nature). The world and persons in this case are merely present-at-hand (qv) to each other. This 'categorical' idea of being in does not apply to the being-in of persons in the world. As Heidegger puts it, 'Being-in is distinct from the insideness of something present-at-hand being in something else present-at-hand'. The notion of being-in is examined in detail in Chapter V of Division One.

Being-in-the-world - Our basic existential (qv) state. Being-in-the-world is a matter of being meaningfully engaged with the possibilities manifest in the world - an engagement which (a) is unique to persons, (b) defines the world as a world [a meaningful integrity] and (c) defines us as who we are and thereby realises our essence (qv). This concept emphatically breaks with the traditional notion of our being in the world as an item among others who best 'knows' the world contemplatively - more as a piece in a 'chess board of the gods' than a self-realising player in his or her own life-and-death game. What Heidegger points out in place of this inadequate and misleading notion is that personhood necessitates being engaged with possibilities in a world [an environment]. We cannot live the life of persons [beings who define themselves by making possibilities actual] unless we have a 'field of endeavour' in which to realise possibilities; we must be in a world before we can be persons. This world, moreover, must be material - a 'graspable' world with predictable consequences - because, without such a world, we could not enact our choices of who we are to be (i.e., we couldn't 'be' persons by means of the possibilities which we actualise).

pp. 78-79 - Being-in-the-world is the basic, essential [necessary] state of personhood. Ordinarily, however, when we think of persons being in the world, we think of them as 'placed' in the world as one thing among others (think, for example, of someone 'being' in the back yard). This traditional view of our being in the world is misleading because we are so actively engaged with being what and who we are, in and by means of the world, that neither it nor we make sense without constant reference to that engagement. So our being-in-the-world is more like being in love than being in a place.
        A good example of this difference is our being in space. On the geographic [objective] view, spatial relations are strictly impersonal; we are related to items in our world simply as one thing among others, and closeness is measured mathematically. Experientially, however, I can be closer to a friend I see across the street than I am to the stranger standing right next to me. Not only are these are two very different ways of being in the world, the second way (our 'existential spatiality') is a much better measure than the first of what it actually means to be a person in the world (you cannot capture what it means for you to be in the world mathematically any more than you can capture the closeness of a friendship with a tape measure).
        We tend to think of ourselves as geographically 'placed' because we are motivated to think of our being persons only when something 'breaks down' in our lives and/or when we draw ourselves aside from our daily lives to contemplate personhood or the meaning of life 'in itself'. In such a case we tend to view ourselves and other persons objectively - as things-in-themselves - rather than as 'working parts' of the world. It is this abstraction that gives us a false impression of personhood as something somehow disconnected from being-in-the-world.

pp.80-81 - Persons don't touch the world in the way that a table may touch a wall - i.e., in a way that is without context or meaning for either item. We engage with ['grasp'] the world in a way that is given meaning by our being persons; we deal with tables as tables and walls as walls. So, for persons, the things in the world are not just present-at-hand but ready-to-hand - we use or ignore them, understand or misunderstand them, concern ourselves with them.

Being-already-in - Being-already-in indicates the 'givenness' of our situation due to present states of affairs being fixed by past events which we cannot change (qv, thrownness). The significance of being-already-in is that it dictates our possibilities; it is our being-already-in a world, for example, that makes it impossible for us to go back in time and simply 'take back' something which we now regret saying or doing. As with being-among (qv), the significance of being-already-in becomes fully evident only in Division Two.

Being-among - (translated Being-alongside in the text). An inauthentic (qv) way of being-in-the-world (qv) as someone who is merely in the midst of things. Although it is inauthentic, being-among is our normal way of being-in-the-world. The phrase 'being-among' has two connotations: (a) that of our being more passive than active, of letting ourselves be defined by what is actual rather than being actively engaged in defining ourselves by what is possible, and (b) that of being 'at home' in the world - a state which contrasts sharply to the uncanniness (qv) that we experience when, in anxiety (qv), we do not feel at home. Being-among has connotations of 'being at home by being familiar with'. There is neither wonder nor commitment in merely being among the things of the world - we reduce ourselves to the thing-like state of objects around us. In Division two, being-among is equated with fallenness (qv).

pp.82-3 - The issue that Heidegger deals with here is basically that of distinguishing between human persons as already defined by the past and as still self-defining. The point is that, because we define our essence by actualising possibilities, we are never 'complete' for as long as possibilities remain open to us (i.e., for as long as we live). So we need to distinguish between our incomplete 'now' self (our facticity, qv) and the more complete self that we are always becoming.

Facticity - All the properties that third-person [objective] investigation can establish about a person: natural properties such as weight, height, and skin colour; social facts such as race, class, and nationality; psychological properties such as the person's present web of belief, desires, and character traits; historical facts such as his or her past actions, family background, and broader historical milieu; and so on. In short, our facticity is all the already-defined aspects of us that another person could describe using such forms as "He is...", "She was...","He likes...", "She tends to...", and so on. These are those aspects of us that, through being defined by a past which we now have no power to change, lie beyond the scope of our freedom. What isn't captured by our facticity is (1) what it is to be who we are subjectively, and (2) all those possibilities which haven't yet become actual - the 'expansion' of our personhood that isn't here yet but (a) is being progressively realised with each new choice and (b) affects our present choices by being what those choices 'aim at'.
        Our facticity is a function of our past, our being-already-in (qv) or what Heidegger will call our 'having been' (qv). It is, however, not merely the brute facts of what we are in the world but something which we 'take up into our being persons' and carry with us into the future as a defining and limiting factor on who we are (as when, for example, people of historically low stamina avoid strenuous exercise, thus condemning themselves to remain low in stamina).

Concern - Our personhood ways of always dealing with the world according to human projects, needs and wants. Heidegger's use of this word does not imply that persons are always caring and concerned, or that failures of sympathy are 'unnatural', but only that, as being-in-the-world, persons must deal with the world in such a way that everything in it is valued and dealt with in terms of their relevance to our interests.
        Our being concerned with things - even if we are not concerned for or about their welfare - is a 'character of our Being' or existentiale (qv). Concern, like all existentialia, is a range of possibilities - in this case, having to do with being variously concerned or indifferent - within which we all find a place somewhere. So our concern-related ways of dealing with objects in the world include not only concern, care (qv), and solicitude [our concern for other persons], but also indifference, carelessness and neglect. The point being that we can be indifferent to objects only because we can care about them whereas a cat, for example, is neither concerned with nor indifferent to being a cat because it is not a person and neither its own being nor the being of other cats is an issue for it. Personhood, however, is always occupied with and by the entities that it encounters in the world - concerned or indifferent about things and solicitous (qv) or indifferent about other human beings.

pp.84-86 - Being-in is not a property of personhood in the sense of being something which we could, in theory at least, go without or suspend for a while. We are not, and never can be, free from being-in a world. Ironically, this being-in is so much a part of us that it becomes invisible as we engage with the world.

Personhood (2) - Heidegger's basic concept (qv) of personhood [dasein] has now been further expanded by the observation that it involves being-in and concerned with the world (qv, concern). One consequence of this is that knowing the world [engaging with and discussing it] functions as a primary mode of our being-in-the-world. A more significant consequence is that personhood cannot by understood outside of each person's particular engagement with the world.
        One of the problems that a phenomenology of persons faces is the universal human tradition of dichotomising reality into subject [self] and object [world] and then trying to understand each pole in the dichotomy as a 'thing apart'. To overcome this 'thingish' concept of personhood, it is not enough to simply think about persons as things 'in' the world. We must understand that being-in-the-world - as an interactive unity of persons and the world - simply is the being of persons. If we take away the 'in-the-world' part then we have no personhood at all.

pp.86-89 - Because our fundamental being as persons is one of being-in-the-world and being-with the things and persons of the world, our fundamental knowledge is a kind of practical, 'hands on' know how (knowledge-how). Propositional knowledge [knowledge-that] is derived from knowledge-how. Philosophy, however, traditionally has it the other way around - i.e., knowledge-that is taken as the primary [primordial, qv] form of knowledge; when philosophers, linguists ans so on, analyse knowledge, it is always knowledge-that which supplies the paradigm.
        In this section Heidegger also notes the problem of 'knowing' as a kind of detached attitude (it leads to scepticism by artificially cutting us off from the world; we and the world become merely two items that are present-at-hand and our access to the world is made problematic). The fact, however, is that we know a hammer, for example, not by contemplating it objectively but by using it. Analogously, we do not know ourselves or the world by contemplating them but by using the world to be persons.

Note: The terms 'Knowledge-that' and 'knowledge-how' are not used by Heidegger himself but are nevertheless useful in distinguishing two kinds of knowledge that he talks about. Knowledge itself is basically a matter of having beliefs that are adequately justified by relevant evidence and/or experience. Knowledge-that is propositional - i.e., the kind of justified beliefs that can be expressed as propositions of the kind "I know that wine is made from fermented grape juice and beer is made from fermented grain." Knowledge-how [know-how] is the kind of practical understanding (qv) by which, for example, we can tell the difference between beer and wine even though both are drinks. We cannot always put our know-how into words but we constantly demonstrate it in our everyday engagements with the world (our being-in-the-world). So if, for example, someone asks for a beer and we give her a beer, even though we have beer, wine, tea, coffee and water to give, then we are exhibiting our know-how even if we are not at all sure of the exact [knowledge-that] composition of each kind of drink.

The fact that knowledge-that derives from knowledge-how can be confirmed by watching the way that human children start by 'playing' with things [knowledge-how] and only then begin to develop factual knowledge [knowledge-that] of what they are.

Although being-in-the-world is an irreducible integrity in fact, Heidegger considers 'the-world' as a phenomenon (in this section) before getting on to the 'being-in' part (Division V).

Worldhood (1) - The widely ramifying and integrated complex of things, concepts, roles, projects, assignments (qv), functions and functional interrelations within which alone it is possible for human beings to encounter things as things and persons as persons. So the worldhood of a hammer, for example, is that entire web of things, concepts, assignments and activities within which a hammer has its being as a hammer. An important feature of the world is that it is an integrity - a whole - and worldhood is what makes the natural-cultural-temporal environment of our personhood into an integrity [a world] rather than just a collection of 'stuff'.

pp.93-4 - It is the world, as an environment of personhood, with which human persons are engaged [being-in] in their everydayness. To get this world into view, Heidegger must locate a human interaction with entities that casts light on its own environment. Our everyday use of utensils (doorknobs, plates, scissors, etc) is just such an interaction.

pp.95-96 - The being of those entities which we encounter as closest to us can be 'brought to light' if we take as our clue our everyday being-in-the-world - i.e., our dealings in the world and with the world; our dealings with things with which we are concerned (qv). The kind of dealing which is closest to us in our everyday dealing with the world is not perceptual cognition (which leads to knowledge-that), but that kind of concern which uses things; a kind of dealing which involves its own kind of knowledge (knowledge-how or 'know how'). It is the kind of entities which we encounter in concern (things 'ready-to-hand') which Heidegger will now think about. And he makes the point that our 'everyday' approach to such items is our most 'phenomenological' because, when using a doorknob for example, we tend to put aside our 'interpretive tendencies' and simply use it as a doorknob. As being a doorknob is what it is, we thereby relate to its being directly and without any theoretical interference.

p.97 - Heidegger calls the ready-to-hand (qv) things which we encounter in concern 'equipment' to distinguish them from 'things' such as we understand them from the traditional notion misleadingly derived from perceptual cognition.

Equipment - Things that are used or useful towards some end (eating, shelter, sewing, writing, measuring, transport, music making, building and so on); that which is ready-to-hand in a positive sense. Equipment includes not only utensils and machines but anything that is assigned a purpose - e.g., rooms or houses (equipment for residing), farms (equipment for growing food); parks, reserves, hills or the seaside (equipment for recreation and/or wildlife preservation); parking spaces (equipment for parking vehicles), and so on. Items of equipment are always something in-order-to (qv) which belong to a 'totality of equipment'; a parking space, for example, is only a parking space in relation to the whole culture of vehicles, town planning, law, public access, and so on. Because equipment is used in-order-to do something, there is a multitude of reference-relations and assignment-relations which define a tool's place within both the totality of equipment and the practices of its employment.

In-order-to - The part of equipment's significance (qv) whereby we understand its being in terms of what it is for. A hammer, for example, may be used 'in order to' build something, attack someone, or shape a piece of metal.

Assignment and Reference - The rule-governed relationships between a piece of equipment and various person-related tasks, materials and purposes, within which it has meaning. To understand the meaning [being] of a hammer, for instance, you need to know the tasks to which hammers are assigned, the materials they work with, and the purposes for which they are used. There is no single English equivalent for the German word verweisung used by Heidegger, but the basic metaphor is that of turning something towards something else - e.g., assigning something to a task, or referring a reader to a particular text. So there's a 'towards which' (qv) relation involved - a tool, for example, becomes a tool only by being placed in 'pointed towards' relationships with other things, purposes and people from which it gets its being as a tool. This 'placing in relationships' is its assignment or reference. The world (qv) is a web of assignments and references.

Towards-which - The part of a tool's significance (qv) whereby we understand its being in terms of its having an assigned purpose within the totality of equipment (qv). Towards-which is related to a tool's serviceability for a given task. For example, a hammer's ability to drive nails into timber gives it a towards-which that makes it relevant in-order-to (qv) build a wood-framed shelter - it makes the hammer serviceable for the assigned task.

What Heidegger describes here is the natural-cultural integrity within which things and activities are meaningful. This 'totality' is integrated by the personhood of persons being-in-the-world. Persons, for example, need various kinds of shelter both for themselves and many of the projects which they undertake in the process of being persons. This need is met by equipment - clothing, tents, timber, bricks, hammers and saws, caves, animal skins, blocks of cut rock or snow, and so on. Each of these pieces of equipment has its being, as something ready-to-hand, through being part of a complex within which it is assigned different purposes and ways of being used; a piece of rock, for example, becomes ready-to-hand equipment by being assigned to a purpose. This integrated complex - the 'totality of equipment' - is, in turn, part of the worldhood (qv) of the world. And what matters here is that (a) this complex has its whole being in terms of the needs, rules and wants of persons - it is we who assign a purpose to this hammer in that circumstances, etc. - and (b) persons have to have at least some understanding (qv) the whole complex before they get to grips with its components.

pp.98-99 - Equipment can reveal its being only in dealings 'cut to its own measure' (e.g., digging with a spade, parking in a space, writing with a pen). This dealing reveals its being [nature] - we don't encounter a hammer's 'hammer-ability' when we think about it but only when we use it. This means that the being of ready-to-hand things is not grasped theoretically but practically. One side-effect of this is that the being of equipment is usually overlooked. Tools, for example, are normally inconspicuous to us because, when they are being used, we tend to concentrate on the task for which we use them (the towards-which (qv) at which the use of a tool 'points').

Circumspection - A way of looking at or for things as potential equipment (qv); the contrary to reflection (qv). Circumspection is interested sight (qv); the kind of perceptual framework we get when we have a need or project in mind; it is not disinterested and not contemplative. If, for example, we go into a market looking for a gift for someone then our view of the market is circumspective - we are looking with a purpose, 'keeping an eye out' for an appropriate item. This means that circumspection is an aspect of concern (qv), it 'belongs to concern as a way of discovering what is ready-to-hand'. The word 'concernful', attached to circumspection, indicates that it is what we are concerned with, and/or care about, that is approached in this way. Circumspection is related to disclosedness (qv); it is also what turns the sensory detection of objects into perception (qv, sight and seeing).

Reflection - The contrary to circumspection (qv). In reflective thought we 'disengage' ourselves from the world; we, in effect, 'stand back' and consider our objects of attention as 'things in themselves'. Reflective thought has its place in the scheme of things, but it is misleading because the meaning of phenomena (qv) is in their involvement (qv), and this meaning is what we miss when we 'stand back' from that involvement to consider things out of context as specific objects of attention. A particularly significant case of reflective misleadingness is found in our traditional and common misunderstandings of what it is to be a human self (qv). The essence (qv) of personhood is its existence (qv) - its way of living the life of a person in the world (qv). This means that we are only being persons when we are engaged in a project. But when we are so engaged we tend not to notice or think about who we are because we are absorbed in what we are doing. The only time we specifically think about who we are is when we disengage ourselves from the world, when we 'stop' to think about it. But the instant we do this we start to think about our selfhood as something 'apart', something of its own - something present-at-hand (qv). This immediately gives us a false impression of what a self is because 'something apart' from the world is precisely not what it is.

p.99/mid - The peculiarity of what is immediately ready-to-hand (i.e., equipment) is that it must, as it were, withdraw from our perception in order to be ready-to-hand authentically. That with which our everyday dealings most immediately dwell is not the tools themselves but the job at hand - what we are doing with the tools (e.g., when we use a brush for painting - which is when it is most fully [authentically] ready-to-hand - it is not the brush that we focus on but the painting, the brush itself tends to drop out of our attention unless it is lost or fails to work properly in some way).

Sight (1) - A metaphor of all intelligent sensing. Sight is meaningful by being 'seeing as' - e.g., seeing a hammer as a hammer. The point about sight is that all human sensing is meaningful; we don't just record wavelengths of light with our eyes, we see trees and spades and persons; we don't just record sweet or sour on our tongue, we taste chocolate or rice or fish. For us, seeing with sight [sense without cultural reference] is blind. So, even when we don't understand the theory of what we are doing when we use things, we still perceive them as what they are, what they are for and how they fit into the web of assignments and references.

Seeing - Sensory detection without understanding. Cows, for example see; persons both see and have sight (qv).

One way of distinguishing seeing and sight [seeing as] is to think of seeing as natural and sight as cultural [ready-to-hand]. This comes about because, in persons, our senses a assigned meaningful tasks - we sense with understanding. This means that sensory detection in persons has an in-order-to (qv); it is a piece of equipment that makes sense [has its being] only within the culturally-defined totality of equipment which constitutes our being-in-the-world.

pp.100-101 - Heidegger now explores the assignment or reference relations of tools being-for some purpose by going from the use of a needle in shoe-making to the existence of mining and smelting as a source of metal and farming as a source of leather and thread. At all points of these relationship we encounter not only ready-to-hand things and their context but the persons who use them (and, of course, the making of shoes in the first place is only something we do because people have a use for shoes). Thus it is that, through these relations, the 'public' world pervades every use of equipment - i.e., the working environment participates in a larger social world.
        It is through the needs of persons that the world of nature is discovered and 'environed' [made part of the world]; we only notice the sea, for example, because it is a source of food, transport, recreation and threat. While things present-at-hand are ontically (qv) prior to things ready-at-hand (iron ore, for instance, does and must exist before the smelting of ore into steel for needles), it is the handiness of ready-to-hand things that provides their ontological [meaningful] definition. So what makes our sight of a needle meaningful, for instance - that which reveals its being as a needle - is not its material constitution but its place in the overall scheme of things to do with human activities. This is why the mere aggregation of plants, animals, rock, water, etc, is not enough to account for the world as a world.

pp.102-107 - The being of what is ready-to-hand as equipment is determined by references and assignments (qv). But the worldhood of what is ready-to-hand (i.e., their version of being-in-the-world) is normally inconspicuous, unobtrusive and manipulable because if we are using a pen to write with, for example, we tend to ignore the pen and simply use it to get on with our writing. We normally notice the being of 'handy' objects only when they become unhandy in some way (e.g., they break down, become lost, or become obstacles to something else we are doing). When a thing breaks down it becomes conspicuous, when it is lost it obtrudes, when it becomes an obstacle it is obstinate. Thus:
 

When the ready-to-hand breaks down or is considered reflectively (qv), it becomes deprived of its 'worldhood' (qv) so that its being ready-to-hand is lost (i.e., the ready-to-hand becomes unready-to-hand - the traditional, and flawed, mode in which thinkers have tried to understand things). This means that:

• we notice the world only after the normally inconspicuous is made conspicuous by not being what it usually is (as when, for example, we suddenly notice a pen because it has run out of ink), doing this brings out the (misleading) character of things as unready-to-hand, and
• that, in turn, explains why we tend to confuse the world brought to our attention in this way - the world in which we are spectators rather than actors - as what the world 'is'.

This all becomes particularly relevant in Division Two when Heidegger explores what happens when our being-in-the-world breaks down. In the meantime, however, the point is that persons disclose (qv) the world but, if we tend to notice the world only in a reflective (qv) state then what we think that we have disclosed is not, in fact, the real thing.
        What should be remembered here is Heidegger's concept of truth (qv) as the uncovering [disclosure] of something's being what it is. This uncovering is a matter of revealing or 'making plain' a phenomenon that is otherwise obscured or taken for granted by our everyday indifference or pre-conceived ideas; it is a matter of paying attention. Truth is thus not an agreement between words and objects but a matter of perceiving objects 'truly' (i.e., as what they are). It is truth in this sense that disclosedness reveals ('brings into the light').

p.107 - A problem with human disclosedness is that, by being absorbed in 'accepted truths' and what we are doing, what we think we are disclosing is not always the real thing. This fact is significant for phenomenology (qv) because of our tendency to perceive what we are expected to perceive rather than what is really 'there'.
 

A good example of this was the popularity of UFO sightings in certain countries during the second half of the 20th Century. When our explanations of the world are dominated by religion rather than science, people think that they are disclosing the world by 'seeing' fairies, demons, ghosts and so on. In the few decades of the 20th Century when science dominated, the kind of folk to used to 'see' fairies started 'seeing' UFOs - which were more scientifically acceptable. In neither case, however, were these people disclosing the world so much as what they expected to see in the world (if you are religious then you expect to encounter 'supernatural' entities, if you are pseudo-scientific then you expect to encounter pseudo-scientific entities).

pp.114-116 - Things ready-to-hand are encountered within an environment of personhood (i.e., the world, qv). The relationship between the world and a piece of equipment is such that the world - the environment within which something counts as ready-to-hand - must already be at least partially understood before we encounter such entities as what they are; no one, for example, truly perceives a spade as a spade unless she has some notion of digging and how digging fits into the larger scheme of things. So the environmental context [the world], in effect, frees items for our consideration as the things they are [their being]. This is possible only because we (collectively) set up the totality of assignments and references within things are ready-to-hand in the first place - the world, as a meaningful environment, is our creation. The indicating ability of a sign and the hammering ability of a hammer, for example, are not properties in the usual sense of colour, shape or mass. Anything ready-to-hand is simply appropriate for some purposes and inappropriate for others; and its 'properties' as something ready-to-hand are bound up in the ways in which it is appropriate. But for something to be appropriate, it must have been assigned a purpose. And to say that the being of the ready-to-hand has a 'structure' [logic] of assignment or reference entails it of having been assigned or referred to some purpose by some person; assignment is a function of a person or persons making or adopting something for a role in some project which is of interest to them. Assignment, therefore, entails involvement (qv) in some person-relevant project, and the character of being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is just such an involvement - the relationship of an implement to some project is its 'assignment' or 'reference'. So when an entity within-the-world has been 'freed' for its being then what it is actually freed for is its involvement in some human-serving project - we see it for what it is and can subsequently begin to use it for its assigned purpose (or for the purpose to which we now assign it - discovering that an ironing board makes a useful make-shift workbench is an example of re-assignment). The assigned purpose of something ready-to-hand provides the 'towards-which' (qv) of serviceability and the 'for-which' of usability. And tracking the '...which' [the purpose] of any implement always ends with the needs or interests of some person or persons.

Freeing, Freeing for - The way in which the environmental context of something ready-to-hand allows its being to be perceived - a building site, for example, frees builders' tools and materials to be seen as tools and material for building; an Art Gallery likewise frees various bits of pretentious trash to be seen as art, and so on.
        The being of ready-to-hand things is normally inconspicuous. But, when we approach the world in an attitude of concernful circumspection (i.e, on the lookout for things ready-to-hand for some purpose) the environment of ready-to-hand things is frees them from their normal inconspicuousness - we notice items that are relevant to a situation as appropriate (i.e., we notice their being as equipment). This is because our situation is one of being-in-the-world and the world is an integrity structured, as a world, by persons - persons, just by being persons, have set up our natural-cultural environment in such a way that the things we need 'stand out' as what they are when we are looking for them. They are thus freed by the world (their environmental context) rather than by us as individuals - what we see is there to be seen only because of our cultural environment sets up certain things as ready-to-hand for a purpose.

Involvement - An existential involvement is a matter of being engaged in or with something to do with the projects and interests of persons - and it is the 'with' or 'in' relationship that is invoked by the terms 'assignment' and 'reference'. The idea is that when something or someone is involved with, or in, something, then it has been assigned to a role in some activity with which it is involved. A spade, for example, becomes a spade by being assigned to the role of a spade. This, in turn, requires (a) some person to do the assigning and (b) some human project in which a spade is involved (e.g., the gardening or ditch digging which is the reference (qv) which makes spades meaningful entities). So, as with the term 'existence', involvement has a special meaning in Heidegger and, also like existence, this meaning is limited to a situation pertaining to persons. A snail's shell, for example, is not 'involved' with safety or shelter in the way that human houses or clothing are because it is not 'assigned' to that task by a person acting within a personhood environment - the snail has no choice about having a shell, what shell it has, or how the shell is used.
        Although involvement is not a 'property of ready-to-hand things in the usual sense of 'property' (not what they 'are' in any ontic - thingish - sense) it is ontologically (qv) definitive of them (what they mean - their involvement is their significance or how they 'fit' in the world). So this involvement is the 'worldly character' of such things.

The question being addressed here is 'If the ready-to-hand is embedded in references and assignments then how does this work and how does it relate to the world?' The answer turns out to be in reference to the persons for whom some things are ready-to-hand - i.e., equipment becomes equipment [ready-to-hand] only because persons assign certain things to various purposes. Without this assignment, things are just 'stuff'. So the character of being which belongs to equipment is one of involvement. Any ready-to-hand entity is always (a) involved in an actual or potential task and (b) nested in an 'equipmental totality' (a working environment which integrates all sorts of tasks, tools, materials, purposes, conventions, and so on). This equipmental totality is, in its turn, 'assigned' [involved in, given over to] in the purposes of persons - the ready-to-hand is always encountered as contributors to or detractors from our mode of existence.

Because our essence as persons is our existence (qv), and being persons is not just what we are collectively but what we each do individually, we all continually face the question of choosing which among possible modes of existence to enact. Answering that question always (and necessarily) involves acting out our intentions in some way. This, in turn, presupposes that we exist in a world (i.e., an environment or 'field of endeavour' in which we encounter various objects as means of or obstacles to acting out our intentions). This being the case, our existence - our life as persons - must essentially involve a 'hands on' relation - an engagement - with the world we inhabit. This world, moreover, must be 'hard' - a material world with predictable consequences - otherwise we could not enact [realise] our choices of who we are to be. This further entails that (a) encountering objects as ready-to-hand - and thereby meaningful in reference to a possibility for our being persons - is the fundamental ground of acting out our being-in-the-world, and (b) our capacity to encounter objects as ready-to-hand involves grasping them in relation to our own possibilities-for-being.

p.117-118 - Most ready-to-hand items that we encounter already exist for an assigned purpose - we encounter a spade as a spade, for example, because it has already been assigned, by its manufacturer and/or supplier, to the task of being a spade. When we perceive such items as being for their assigned purpose then we 'let them be' what they are. Indeed, this a priori letting-something-be-involved is the condition for the encountering of anything as ready-to-hand in the first place, so that persons, in their dealing with things as tools, can thereby let them be involved. This means that when we encounter a spade as ready-to-hand (i.e., as something assigned to a purpose) we let it be a spade - something which, in turn, requires a knowledge of the 'totality of equipment' in which spades are spades rather than bits of junk. It is this 'letting be' which points to the aspect of personhood which Heidegger calls 'concern' (qv).

Letting be - Disclosing (qv) and accepting the a priori nature of some things as equipment (their 'worldly character' as ready-to-hand rather than just 'there'). For example, using a telephone as a telephone requires knowing in advance the tasks to which telephones have been assigned (i.e., we have to disclose their being). This 'letting be' is specifically related to our cultural environment [the world] 'freeing' them for our perception as part of a two-step process. First, our circumspection [our normal being 'on the lookout' for things as ready-to-hand] allows things to be freed by their environment - they 'stand out' precisely because our being-in-the-world (qv) is structured in such a way as to make ready-to-hand things conspicuous to circumspection (qv). And, just by being the process it is, this freeing involves freeing the item for an involvement (qv) in the task for which it has been assigned. Second, when we then recognise something as appropriate for its assigned task, we 'let it be' involved in the kind of project for which it is intended [assigned]. The combined produce of this freeing and letting be is understanding (qv).

p.118 - Freeing and letting be are a function of personhood (and only personhood) and then only because of our concern (qv) with things in the world (something which, it turn, is part-and-parcel of our being-in-the-world). When something (anything) shows itself to our concern - when we uncover its being what it is - then obviously it must already be ready-to-hand environmentally (it has a context in the world which we already understand) and is not merely something that is 'there'. Think again of the telephone example. The telephone is built with an assigned task in mind, for someone other than its builder to recognise it as a telephone [to understand its being a telephone] is for her to recognise it as something ready-to-hand [a tool or implement] which has a context in the world - she perceives it as something which has an assigned purpose even if she is not yet sure of what that purpose is. The point here is that even people who have never encountered a telephone before recognise one as a something ready-to-hand [something which has a purpose]. A cat or dog or cow, however, never recognises a telephone, or anything else for that matter, as ready-to-hand because they do not live in the kind of encultured world in which being ready-to-hand makes sense.

Understanding (1) - A matter of comprehending the world and its contents, including ourselves, in a practical way; we understand a car engine, for example, not when we know the theoretical physics and chemistry of internal combustion, but when we know what it is for, how to use it, and how to fix it. Understanding, in other words, is a practical matter of (1) recognising the possibilities of what we are dealing with and (2) of knowing how to utilise those possibilities. This comes before book learning, intellectual analysis or theoretical insight - i.e., Heidegger is not talking about the kind of intellectual knowledge that we achieve by extended study but the practical understanding that we gain by being-in-the-world. This is analysed more thoroughly in due course.

Freeing and letting be are part of our understanding of being (which, in turn, is part of our being persons). The understanding of something's being is simply a matter of, for example, recognising and using it as what it is. A cow may walk through an open gate, a dog may wear a collar, but only persons understand and use gates as gates and collars as collars - we understand their uses [their being what they are] and how they fit into the web of assignments and references.

p.119 - Consider a kitchen utensil such as a cooking pot. In understanding a pot as a pot [ready-to-hand] we must already understand the 'context of relations' within which, generally, some things are tools and, in particular, this thing has been assigned to the purpose of preparing food for eating. We recognise, in other words, not only that a certain item has a certain being [a particular assigned purpose] but also the whole context or frame of reference within which certain things are assigned for various person-serving purposes. Moreover, must do this before we 'let' a pot be a pot because at least some understanding of tool-using in general has to precede any recognition of anything as a tool.
        The assigning of things to purposes is something that persons do and, in doing this, we implicitly understand ourselves - our own being - as assigners of things to involvements with purposes, persons and other things. In other words, we assign ourselves to a role within the context or frame of reference [an integrity of assignments and references] within which things in the world are ready-to-hand. And this is also something which we do before we use an implement or space for an assigned purpose. This 'context of assigned relations' is the world (qv), and the locating of ourselves within the world - giving ourselves a place within the context of assigned relations involving implements, purpose and persons - is the 'worldhood' of persons just as it is the worldhood of things.
 

In other words, the world (which, as a world, is our creation) is the environment or context within which what we are, who we are, what we do, what we do it with, where we do it and why we do it, is meaningful. And the worldhood of the world - its integrity as a web of person-oriented assignments and references - is what makes what we are, who we are, what we do, what we do it with, where we do it and why we do it, meaningful [significant].
        Note also that our understanding of this world is not basically theoretical [knowledge-that] but a matter of familiarity with. That is why if we walk into a workplace for activities with which we are not familiar then it all seems mysterious to us - we can see and/or hear the things but the web of connections which makes them meaningful is missing. What is missing in this case is their significance (qv).

Worldhood (2) - The whole interrelated web of socially defined assignments and references, roles, concepts, functions and functional interrelations ('that referential totality which constitutes significance'), within which alone it is possible for human beings to encounter things and people as being what and who they are.
        The worldhood of objects [entities] is what they are in terms of their assignments and references (qv).
        The worldhood of the world is the condition [the being of the world] which makes it possible for us to discover and disclose things as things within the world (qv, freeing and letting be). This uncovering provides an existential (qv) way of figuring out the being-in-the-world of persons. The worldhood of the world is the integrity of everything within the horizon (qv) of significance (qv).
        The worldhood of persons is our locatedness within the world as the assigners of equipment (qv), other persons, and ourselves, to various purposes which have meaning in reference to the purposes of persons.

Significance - A word used in a way close to its everyday sense of 'meaning' but with the accent on meaning as a function of the interconnection of objects and persons in the world. The significance of things is disclosed by understanding (a) what they are for [their 'for-the-sake-of-which'] and (b) how they fit into the overall arrangement of assignments and references (qv). Specifically, understanding the significance of an object is a matter of understanding the relationships of 'in order to' (qv), 'towards which (qv), 'towards this' (qv) and 'for the sake of' (qv). As such, significance is related to signifying [sign-ifying] - the 'directional' relating of things to projects, persons, and other things, within the world as a 'web' of such relationships. The world itself is disclosed [revealed as a world] by the significance [relatedness to projects, person and things to each other and the whole world integrity] of its contents.

For-the-sake-of-which - The part of a ready-to-hand entity's significance (qv) whereby we understand its being what it is in terms of that for which it is used. The 'for-sake-of-which' of tools is always a need or interest of persons. Thus, whether we are talking of building a shelter, re-shaping the panels of a damaged car, or hitting an enemy over the head, hammers are always used as hammers for the sake of some person-defined purpose.

p.120-121 - The assignment relations, of which the world is made up, are like signs directing our attention from an object to projects, persons, contexts and other objects. So it is our familiarity with signs (which is basically a familiarity with language) which makes it possible for tools to be tools, the world to be a world, and us to be persons. It is through language that we assign [submit] ourselves to the world, and this assigning is essential to our being persons.

On p.121, Heidegger summarises the differences which he has been considering

1. Ready-to-hand - the being of those entities - tools, utensils and the like - within the world which we most immediately and most often encounter.
2. Present-at-hand - the being of things in nature; things which are not ready-to-hand but whose nature we determine 'through' the things in the world that we most immediately encounter.
3. Worldhood - the being [nature] of the world as the condition which makes it possible for us to discover things as things within the world. Worldhood is a function of significance (qv) and is what integrates persons, the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand into a whole.

Spatiality (the 'in' part of being-in-the-world)

In our actual experience, we understand space not as a mathematical abstract but in practical terms - closeness and distance are determined by the relevance and/or serviceability of objects for our current activities. For example, the neighbours over my back fence, who are geographically proximate, are existentially distant because I don't know them.
        Existential spatiality [the spatiality of persons] is based on our 'facing' the world - which gives us our initial directionality - and 'pointing' at things in terms of their relevance to us. Things are up, down, close, remote, to the left, to the right, etc., according to our location in the world. This kind of spatiality is authentic (qv) by being genuinely person-related.

pp.135-136 - When equipment is assigned, it is put into a relationship with ['pointed at' or 'directed' towards] other entities and persons in the world. In this case there is a sense in which the equipment - that which is ready-to-hand - is 'closer' to the items with which it is related than it is to unrelated items spatially closer at hand. This, in turn, means that there are two kinds of spatiality with which most things in the world are involved - closeness and proximity. Proximity is a 'geographical' concept - it has to do with the kind of mathematical distance that you get between objects on a map or graph - while closeness is existential spatiality - it has to do with our being-in-the-world. It is the existential spatiality of our being-in-the-world [closeness and remoteness] which Heidegger now wishes to bring out (disclose, uncover or otherwise 'bring to light').

Closeness & Distance - In the traditional (objective and thingish) view of persons being in the world, space is a four-dimensional abstraction mapped by mathematically measured coordinates. But in our actual experience, closeness and distance are determined by the relevance and/or serviceability of objects for our current activities - we understand spatial measure in terms of practical purposes. Thus a friend I see across the street will be closer to me existentially than a stranger brushing behind me at the same time; the things I look at through the glasses on my nose will be closer to me than the glasses I look through, and so on. The point of this is that the 'being' of existential spatiality (what it is as a meaningful experience) is, like temporality (qv) not 'either objective [in the world] or subjective [in the person]' but both - and this 'bothness' is disclosed (qv) by the subject's being-in-the-world.

Remoteness - The basic 'otherness' of all that is not us. Remoteness [existential distance from] and deseverance [existential closeness to, see below] are the poles of an existentiale (qv) within which all our relationships with what is not us can be measured. In this existentiale, remoteness is the 'default position' in our everydayness - our capacity to not notice what is going on is both fundamental and profound. It is otherness or 'not-us-ness' which closeness (qv) recognises and overcomes in deseverance (qv) - i.e., remoteness is the 'severed from us' aspect of de-severance.

Closeness - The overcoming of remoteness by concern (qv). Closeness is an achievement - we bring what is normally remote (qv) close to us by our concern. So closeness is distance measured in terms of relevance rather than yards or metres. When we perceive the world circumspectively (qv) things that are relevant to whatever project or projects motivates our circumspection will tend to be more 'there' for us than will things that are irrelevant. Such things are closer to us, in Heidegger's sense, than irrelevant things geographically nearer. So if, for example, you are climbing a hill to get a viewing platform that you can see from below, your goal - i.e., your object of concern - will often be your focus of attention to such an extent that it is much 'closer' to you than the ground beneath your feet which you don't notice. It is in this way that closeness (e.g., of the hilltop or view) differs from proximity (e.g., of that which is more immediately at hand but overlooked on the way to the hill top or view). Closeness is achieved by deseverance (qv).

Deseverance - The bringing of something close in the existential sense (qv, closeness). Remoteness (qv) is the default relationship of persons and things which are not persons - we are 'severed' from them - and de-severance is that part of the remoteness-deseverance existentiale (qv) by which we simultaneously disclose remoteness and overcome it. Deseverance is sometimes, but not necessarily, a matter of physically bringing something close; it is more often a matter of 'bringing things into a place of usefulness' (seeing them as actually or potentially ready-to-hand, qv) - something which is a function of our tendency to deal with the world in a 'hands on' manner ('Bringing close [deseverance] is not oriented towards an I-thing encumbered with a body, but towards concernful being-in-the-world...'). Because persons live their lives in a state of circumspective concern, they (a) are essentially deseverant - bring the remote close is a primordial, if neglected, part of being a person - and (b) carry their de-severing tendencies with them through life.

pp.138-140 - Meaningful spatiality derives from the being-in-the-world (qv) of persons. So something needs to be said about our own personal spatiality - our 'locatedness' - as part of our being-in-the-world. As has already been argued, we are not 'in' the world in the passive way that cans are in a box because our way of being in the world is one of engagement, familiarity and concern (qv). One effect of this is that we actively overcome the remoteness of things - their 'severance' from us - by bringing them closer in what Heidegger calls 'deseverance'. Another effect is that we define our own 'here' in terms of 'there'- i.e, we locate ourselves in relation to relevant items in the world.
 

Our 'here', in other words, is a function of there, in which 'there' consists of various things in the world which are relevant to our engagements. We are normally engaged with what is there. So the 'yonder' of there is primary [primordial] and our 'hereness' - our being-in (qv) - is derived from that. You can think here of one of those maps that has an arrow on it with You Are Here printed above it; the 'here' in this case is defined by where you are in relation to things that are not you (i.e., things that are not here).

Being-towards - That aspect of our being-in-the-world (qv) whereby we are always oriented towards various objects of attention. Spatially, being-towards is part of our directionality because we are always facing whatever object or objects engage their attention. This means that our being (qv) as persons is always being-towards entities with which we are concerned (qv). Temporally, we are constantly 'stepping out' of the past and into the future. This means that our being as persons is always being-towards a state of affairs which isn't yet but soon will be.
        One of the features of persons is that they are always being-towards comprehendingly - i.e., unlike things, we variously understand or misunderstand what we are 'pointing at'.

What Heidegger is giving us in all these descriptions is the authentic [genuinely person-centred] equivalent of geography. This person-centredness is not subjective; it is, rather, a function of our practical, everyday, engagement with the world. Perhaps the key sentences here are:
 

Circumspection (qv) is our way of seeing the world when we (a) are looking for something and/or (b) have a project or projects in mind. So circumspection is a function of concern (qv). This 'way of seeing' brings things closer to us in the existential sense given above - it de-severs things from remoteness (qv) and brings them into 'fields of play' or 'zones of operation'. So say, for example, that you go into a shopping mall with many shops having items for sale. In this place you are looking for some nails, something to cook for tonight's meal, and a gift for your daughter's birthday. The items which will satisfy these needs are all ready-to-hand and will all be looked for in circumspection - you'll be on the look out for appropriate items which will 'stand out' to you precisely because you're on the look out for them. Each of these items, however, belongs to a different 'field of play' - a different region - and each has its place in this region; that is, each has its role in the field of play. This gives you the directionality which is recognised by signs ('Hardware', 'Children's Wear' and so on) that point left or right to the person reading them (i.e., left or right is not merely subjective but indicative of the fact that we always face [approach] the world from a direction).
 

Again the point is that, for persons, nothing (including space) is merely 'there'. Space, distance and direction are for us personal and meaningful in terms of our engagement with the world and its contents (i.e., for our being-in-the-world). Indeed, it is only when we consider space non-circumspectly [disinterestedly] that it is 'neutralised' as mere dimension.

For the most part, persons are fascinated with and absorbed in their daily world. And Heidegger began his analysis of our being-in-the-world with the ready-to-hand because that is what we are most engaged with in our everydayness. Now he will broaden the phenomenological domain of 'the world' by considering the social engagement of persons with other persons; this will relate being-oneself and being-with-others.

Being-with - Being-with, which really means to being-with-other-persons, refers to the fact that the world of any person is one in which other persons are also being-in (qv). So our being-with other persons is not simply a matter of sharing a space with them as if they were merely present-at-hand (qv) or even ready-to-hand (qv). Being-with (1) entails that the society of other persons not only affects our way of life but, as will be shown, it dominates our possibilities and, thereby, who we are, and (2) is built into personhood to the extent that personhood isn't possible except in a world that persons share with other persons.
        Being-among, being-alone, being away or being missing, are all deficient (qv) modes [ways] of being-with.
        If personhood's being is being-with then an essential facet of the being at which is an issue for it is its relations with other persons; we establish and maintain our relations to ourselves in and through our relations with others, and vice versa. This integrity between being persons, being ourselves, and being-with others, is a major source of inauthenticity.

Deficient - Derived. Heidegger doesn't mean 'deficient' as 'lacking' so much as in the sense that some states follow from, or are parasitic on, others. The concept of being alone, for example, requires the prior concept of being-with. It's not as if we start out as isolated and then derive the idea of company from that. On the contrary, being with others is fundamental - embeddedness in community our primordial (qv) mode of being persons - and we derive the notion of being alone [being-without or not-being-with] from that. So being alone, in this sense, is a deficient [derived] mode of being-with. Similarly, knowledge-how [the practical understanding of how things work or fit together] is our fundamental belief-justifying relation with things in the world, it's where we start; knowledge-that follows and is derived from knowledge-how. Therefore knowledge-that is a 'deficient' mode of knowing in Heidegger's terminology.

pp.150-152 - The question of who a person is introduces the notion of a Self or Subject (the 'I'). The Self ['who I am'] is, most simply, whatever-it-is that maintains itself as the same 'me' throughout the life-long changes in its experiences and behaviour. Heidegger rejects the notion of a 'soul substance' but recognises that something remains 'I' throughout a life. This 'I' is revealed by asking who someone is rather than what she is.
        Heidegger warns us against taking the 'mineness' of 'I' as isolating the self as something somehow self-contained - something thingish. Both being-in-the-world, and the fact that our essence is our existence (rather than some sort of template or stuff) indicate that the self is neither thing nor substance.

The Self ['who I am'] - That aspect of being a person which (a) maintains its identity as 'I, myself' throughout the numerous changes it experiences and embodies from babyhood to old age, and (b) relates itself to this multiplicity in the process of maintaining this self-identity. It is important not to confuse this 'I' with the kind of present-at-hand self that seems evident to reflective rather than circumspective attention - the self is neither a thing nor a thingish essence because the essence of personhood, it will be remembered, is its existence (qv) - its way of life - rather than any kind of 'stuff' or pre-determined template.
        Heidegger is quick to point out that the word 'I' is merely an indicator - a way of picking out a particular person. This 'pointed at I' is objectified by being picked out, but a self considered in objective isolation - a self without an existential context - is falsely conceived because the fact of existence (qv) and a worldly context is already built into the notion of a person being-in-the-world. This claim will, as always, be expanded, explained and justified in the arguments to come.

p.153 - The true nature of the self is that which we maintain through time in our everyday dealings with the world (our being-in-the-world); it is what we do - especially with our sense of time - that makes us who we are. In his description of the environment which is closest to us (the workaday world), Heidegger noted that the ready-to-hand has its being and makes sense only by constant reference to the persons who use, buy or supply tools, materials and services, and whose interests our served by what happens in the workaday world. These people are not incidental to the world, and they are neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand - they are like us in also being-in-the-world (i.e., we don't just share a world with others, we share a being-in the world).

Others - In the misleading tradition in which we begin with the 'I' as a kind of body-imprisoned essence who must somehow 'reach out' to the world through the bars of its biological cage, the 'others' are 'everyone different from me' against whom the 'I' stands out. Against this Heidegger points out that, as a function of both ourselves and other selves being-in-the-world (qv), others are actually 'those who are like me'; those from whom I do not, for the most part, distinguish myself....my being-in-the-world is something I share with others like me.
        This matters because, in the inauthentic politics of 'us versus them', the 'others' are usually those with whom we are at odds in some way. In fact, however, and for all the effect they may have on our society, any political 'them' usually has little influence on our personhood - we avoid them too well. Our actual 'others' are those who are closest to us - our family, neighbours, workmates, and so on - with whom we deal most frequently in our everyday lives. It is these 'others' - the political 'us' - who have the biggest influence on our own personhood. Indeed, and as will be show below, it is the political 'us' which, as our 'Everyone' (qv), utterly dominates our self-realisation.

Personhood-with(translated Dasein-with in the text) - The aspect of being-with (qv) which we recognise in other persons only because we share it ourselves. This is not just something which, in fact, happens to turn up with persons; it is, rather, something essential to their being persons (or 'their being as persons' if you like). The point here is that personhood is an essentially communal affair in which common, public, paradigms of personhood dominate the individual.

p.155 - Other persons are not encountered objectively - as if we and they were pieces on a chessboard which we can observe from a spectator point of view - nor are they encountered subjectively - by beginning with who we are and then working 'outwards'. Both of these assumptions are products of reflective thought rather than our circumspective reality. Rather, other persons are encountered as 'like me' from out of the same world (qv) in which we dwell - i.e., others are encountered environmentally; as fellow 'players' in the same 'game' (we meet them 'at work'). And they, like us, engage in the game from a point of view of concern (qv).
        Remember here that the basic phenomenon of human personhood is neither a mind, soul or spirit nor a body; the basic phenomenon is the integrity of humanity [nature] and personhood [culture] in the natural-cultural world. This integrity cannot be broken in fact without destroying the human person (that a body without a mind isn't a person is plain, but the myth that you can have a person without a body and/or a world continues to bedevil our understanding of ourselves). So if you break the human-person-world integrity conceptually then what you are dealing with is no longer an actual phenomenon (qv) but merely a logical fiction that will leave you confused about what persons are.

p.156 - The Personhood-with of others is often encountered as ready-to-hand - i.e., we encounter other persons as sales staff, workmates, service providers, sex objects, and so on. But even if others become objectivised, they are not encountered as things merely present-at-hand; we meet them at work or play being-in-the-world. Even if we see others 'just standing around', they is not apprehended as a thing (we don't think of people standing around in the same way as we think of boxes just 'standing there')...'standing around' is an existential [person-related] mode of being - a tarrying alongside everything and nothing. So even here others are encountered in their personhood-with in the world.

pp.157-158 - None of the above entails either that persons are always in proximity to other persons or that we cannot be alone in the company of others; all it means is that personhood cannot be ontologically understood [it does not make sense as a phenomenon] except as inhabiting a world (qv) that it necessarily shares with beings like itself.
        Others can be absent only for someone to whom they can present. So being alone [being-without] is a deficient (qv) mode of being-with (i.e, the concept of being-without is parasitic on the concept of being-with). And feeling alone in the presence of others is actually a being-with them in a mode of indifference or alienation; once again, being-with is primary and essential - being-with provides the norm - all other interpersonal relationships are variations on this theme.

In the face of others, personhood must be interpreted in terms of care [concern, qv] about others and what they do or don't do - the care of persons being called 'solicitude'.

Care (1) - A existentiale (qv) of personhood whereby persons must deal with the world in such a way that things, people and events in the world always matter to us in some way. Being able to care or not care, always being variously concerned or indifferent, is a matter of always attaching value or disvalue to facts. And this inescapable ability is the 'existential unity' which integrates, nourishes and explains, all the other aspects of our being-in-the-world.
        The word 'care' is used by Heidegger in the sense of our caring about what happens rather than caring for something (although caring for is, like not caring for, an aspect of caring about). So calling this feature of personhood 'care' does not mean that persons are or should be always caring, concerned or solicitous, but only that the range of attitudes which have these as their norm characterise our dealings with the world (i.e., it is only because we care about, in Heidegger's sense, that we are always variously caring or careless whereas a wall or footpath, for example, is neither).

Solicitude - The range of personhood characters having to do with our being with other persons. Solicitude is an existentiale (qv) related to concern (itself a function of being-with). The range of solicitude includes such modes of care as love, indifference, friendship, liking, disliking, enmity, or neglect. As with all existentialia, solicitude entails that we can only be indifferent to others because we can care about them; we can hate only because we can love (whereas a tree, for example, can do neither). Deficient modes of solicitude (e.g., indifference, neglect) are the 'average everyday' human mode of being with one another. Such modes reduce others to 'things' (they become inconspicuous in the manner of equipment). Solicitude is guided by considerateness (qv) and forbearance (qv).
      Considerateness - The set of attitudes towards other people that ranges from caring about someone deeply to total indifference. Considerateness is an existentiale (qv), which means that all of our attitudes towards other folk are always more or less considerate - always somewhere on the scale of loving to indifference. Our 'place' on this scale guides where on the scale of solicitude (qv) we are in regards to another self or selves. So if, for example, we are indifferent to another then our solicitude towards that other will not be one of caring about her. Indifference is a deficient (qv) mode of considerateness. This means that caring about others is the 'norm' for the existentiale of considerateness.*
      Forbearance - The set of attitudes towards other people that ranges from tolerance to intolerance (a deficient mode of tolerance). Forbearance is an existentiale which guides solicitude (qv), and our attitudes towards others are always more or less tolerant.
 

* Calling care the 'norm' does not imply that caring is the 'proper' mode of personhood but only that our capacity to care defines the standard against by other modes of relationships are defined in much the same way that 1.0 provides the norm around which .5 or 1.5 are defined.

Note here that, as with being alone in the presence of others, even our average everyday mode of care is not like that of two things that are merely in each other's presence. Two cans side-by-side on a shelf are neither concerned with nor indifferent to each other. Persons, however, are always variously one or the other. Moreover, we can be indifferent only because we can care - others matter to us even as the world matters - so even indifference is a mode [a variation on the theme] of solicitude.

p.159 - Solicitude is part of our being persons and part of our being-in-the-world; after all, being-in-the-world is a matter of being concerned with the entities in the world that we are engaged with, and solicitude is just the aspect of that concern which has to do with other persons.
        Heidegger is not saying that we ought to care about others, or that authentic folk are good because they do care for others - all he is observing is that, like it or not, we are engaged with persons in a way that matters to us. And this is undoubtedly true - even a hermit impacts on, and is impacted on by, other persons in the world in a way that matters to him. His solicitude may be one of active hostility and/or contempt for others, but he is, nevertheless, never free from the being-in-the-world of others. Indeed, he carries it with him wherever he goes in the same way that he carries the world (qv) within him even as he tries to renounce it.
        Our actual being-with one another is nearly always a result of sharing common concerns. This sharing can be in a mode of distance and reserve - as when we work with people we don't care about. But it can also be authentic when the being of those involved in a common purpose is not 'taken over' by that commonality (which it usually is).

Heidegger links solicitude to circumspection (qv). This makes sense given that both are expressions of concern (qv) as our way of being-in-the-world (qv). Both are, therefore, ways of approaching the world and its contents (things and persons respectively). The two guides of solicitude - considerateness [the taking, or failure to take, the needs of others into account] and forbearance [tolerance or intolerance] - are also modes of approach. And the point here is that we are never truly indifferent to others; we always relate to others according to a range of measures derived from our own interests and projects (our own being-in-the-world). This is why, when people meet, they always 'eye each other up and down' as potential friends, allies, enemies, resources and/or sexual partners. Note also here that considerateness and forbearance are existentialia (qv); so what Heidegger is saying is not that we always approach others in a mood of consideration and tolerance - plainly we don't - but that we always approach others within a range of attitudes which have the presence and absence of consideration and tolerance as their measure.

pp.164-165 (Everyone) - The essential sociality of personhood means that our capacity to be ourselves always determines, and is determined by, the way in which we are or are not with others. This is especially because our usual sense of who we are is a function of how we think we differ from others. We may understand those differences as something to be eliminated (making conformity our aim) or emphasised (making non-conformity our aim), but both of these still make our selfhood a function of others. Being in a society 'dissolves' our selfhood in a kind of collectivity which simultaneously dissolves the others in the society as well. There is a sense in which, just by 'belonging', we become interchangeable (e.g., we farm as farmers farm, cook as cooks cook, teach as teachers teach, dissent as dissenters dissent, and so on). And this leads to the loss of authenticity which Heidegger calls 'distantiality' (qv).

Distantiality - The loss of authentic (qv) individuality to the crowd (qv 'they').

Averageness - In this context, a way [mode] of being a person in which the individual is defined by membership of a society or social group. In averageness we accept a loss of differentiation and our selfhood is levelled 'down' to a kind of 'lowest common denominator'.

Levelling (usually levelling off or levelling down) - The kind of homogenisation that goes with everydayness (qv) and Averageness. The world we live in is made of differences; authentic being recognises those differences while inauthentic being tends to lump whole ranges of difference into samenesses - everyone we meet at work is understood in terms of the classes 'management', 'worker', 'supplier', 'client'; every female we meet is understood in terms of the class 'woman' with a sub-class 'chatty', 'mother', 'flirty', 'bossy, and so on; and so on. This is not just a matter of superficiality but of assuming that we understand something or someone simply by knowing about the class which she, he or it, represents. The qualifications '...off' and '...down' refer to the fact that levelling tends towards simplification, devaluation, and 'lowest common denominator' thinking.

Everyone - (translated 'They' in the text) The set of communal values to which we conform in fact (and usually without noticing that we are so conforming); the undifferentiated 'everyone' in "Everyone's doing it" or "Everyone's got one"; the social norm or 'done way of doing things' which determines our behaviour and understanding of our possibilities. The size of Everyone varies according to the social group with which we identify and from which we take our personhood values, but we are all members of some Everyone.
        Everyone is not a 'them' but an 'us'; it is the abstract 'everyone' acting as a social norm. And the important facts about Everyone is that (a) it is an image rather than any actual group of persons, and (b) we are part of it. Everyone is the norm which dictates our self-image when we dress, speak, think and behave as people of our age, race, gender, profession, loyalties, socioeconomic class, or whatever, typically dress, speak, think and behave. So the Everyone is a kind of cultural dictatorship; an homogenisation in which all of us lose ourselves. This matters because Everyone maintains themselves in an averageness (qv) which leads to the 'levelling down' of individuality. It also leads to publicness (qv) and the Anyone-self (qv).

Publicness - The mixture of averageness (qv), distantiality (qv) and levelling down (qv) which controls the way in which the world gets interpreted by 'Everyone' (qv). Publicness is the set of 'normal' assumptions, beliefs and attitudes which dictates our being-in-the-world in ways and to an extent of which we are normally unaware. When we engage with the world, we do so in terms of public assumptions - we really do assume that success, gender, citizenship, personhood, and so on, are as we are conditioned to believe by 'Everyone'. Publicness thus rules not only on what is right and wrong for a person but also what is possible for various classes of persons - it is publicness that says 'Lawyers are...' or 'Gays want...' even when such claims come from the mouths of Lawyers or homosexuals. Because publicness is not based on authentic (qv) personhood, it becomes a way of not noticing the world; its assumptions obscure what is really going on and we confuse familiarity with ways of perceiving and/or doing things with some kind of truth (think, for example, of how popular notions of race, gender or sexuality obscure our perceptions of both ourselves and other persons; it is Everyone which defines the ever-changing politics of race or gender and we, as part of Everyone, filter our perceptions of personhood through these politics by seeing people as Black or White or Man or Woman, and so on). Publicness is so pervasive ['alongside everywhere'] and inescapable as to be found in everything humans do. Overcoming publicness in our ways of thinking about personhood in one of the primary difficulties faced by Heidegger in Being and Time.

pp.166-167 - The Everyone disburdens us of ourselves; it takes away - or, more accurately, we surrender to it - the responsibility for being who we are. Our 'who we are' becomes an 'anyone' as we let our race, gender, occupation, or membership of some group, define our way of thinking and way of life (and, because our essence is our existence (qv), we define our essence as selves - our own 'mineness' (qv) - in a kind of second-hand averageness). Moreover, just by doing this, the publicness of Everyone creates its own invisibility; Everyone is not something we can take a hold of, it just becomes 'how things are'.
        Our Everyone is something that we carry with us. It informs our selfhood to such an extent that, in a mode of average everydayness (qv) we are a 'Anyone-self' - we are 'lost' in publicness, 'absorbed' in the world; we adopt roles, we 'wear masks' and simply absorb the tastes and values of Everyone - we are Maori by being interchangeable with other Maori, builders by being interchangeable with other builders, and so on. In such a case we discover the world, and ourselves, as Everyone dictates.

The Anyone-self - (translated they-self in the text). The, more common and normal, contrary to an authentic (qv) self. Our Anyone-self - which is who we are in our average everydayness (qv) - is defined by Everyone (qv). The Anyone-self is still as real and 'mine' as an authentic self (qv, mineness) but its values, behaviour and way of being-in-the-world are not truly self-defined or self-owned. What is important about our Anyone-self is that (a) we do not start out as authentic and then 'lose' ourselves in publicness; we start in publicness - the Anyone-self is normal and primary - and authenticity is a modification of this basic state which we may or, more usually, may not achieve, and (b) the Anyone-self - our normal, everyday self - obscures our personhood. This is because our essence (qv) as persons is defined and realised by our existence - our self-definition is not a matter of our race, gender, religion, circumstances, upbringing, star sign, or whatever, but of what we do with our possibilities. And, in our average everyday way of being-in-the-world [our 'doing' of what makes us who we are], our existence is dictated by public expectation - we behave as 'people like us' are expected to behave (and this is as true of 'radicals' as it is of conservatives, of rebels as it is of middle-class conformists). This is not a matter of us each living by our own considered values or integrity - which is what taking responsibility for our self-definition is all about - but of absorbing the values of an Everyone.

What this all means is that the normal 'average everyday' mode of human personhood is inauthentic; the everyday 'me' is actually an Anyone-self as we lose ourselves in Everyone (we are not merely part of Everyone but are lost or absorbed in it). The result of this is that we tend to understand both ourselves and the world in terms of what Everyone makes available to us, and thus interpret our own nature in terms of the categories (worker, employer, Muslim, manager, Maori, woman, extrovert, successful, gang member, criminal, and so on) that lie closest to hand in our local culture. This means that we are inauthentic not so much in the outcome as in the process of creating our selves - i.e., we are all equal real, and our reality is equally 'mine' for each of us, our inauthenticity lies in the way in which we let Everyone define us rather than taking responsibility for ourselves. Such inauthenticity is most obvious when we are defending dubious behaviours and blame our upbringing, our circumstances ("I'm just doing my job") or some other person or persons ("It's not my fault, she shouldn't have been wearing that sexy outfit").

Three points should be noted about all this:

1. Everyone is 'we' - there is no moiety of persons 'out there' who constitute an 'Everyone'; Everyone is our norm - not someone else's.
2. Inauthenticity is not some sort of 'ontologically awry' state of being - as if we were somehow less real or less 'ourselves' when we are being inauthentic. Authentic and inauthentic self-creation are simply two forms of being-in-the-world. Whether or not one is 'superior' to the other, and, if so, on what grounds, is not a phenomenological issue.
3. Although our average everyday inauthenticity is a product of our socialisation, the trick to authentic being, should we desire it, is not to (a) cut ourselves off from others or (b) become a 'rebel'. What it needs is a different kind of relationship with others - one appropriate to a person among persons.

Lostness (1) - Refers to the fact that, when we let ourselves, our lives and our possibilities, be defined by Everyone then we lose our individual being in publicness (qv). Who we are is, in effect, scattered (qv) among all the people whose expectations we fulfil at the expense of knowingly choosing which possibilities to actualise in the definition of who we are. When we conform to our Everyone we are, in effect, 'lost in the crowd'; we make ourselves interchangeable with every other self who is doing the same thing - which is why gang members, for example, all dress, talk and think the same.. As will be shown in Chapter Two of Division Two, 'finding' ourselves in the Everyone is a matter of listening to our 'existential conscience' (not to be confused with our ordinary conscience, see notes on pp.312-315).

Scattering (fragmentation) - The study of Being and Time requires close concentration. Most of us find this concentration difficult to sustain because of all the distracting considerations that crowd our lives - tasks to do, schedules to keep, people demanding different kinds of interaction, distracting noises, entertainments to enjoy, memories, plans, interruptions, ideas and feelings that flow from a myriad sources, and so on. This kind of normal fragmentation of our time, and scattering of our concentration among umpteen objects of attention, is very much a symptom of our lostness (qv) in Everyone.

Being-there - The personhood of a human person as an entity composed of Being (qv) and There (qv, and see 'world'). Being-there [dasein] replaces the traditional notions of personhood as 'soul', 'spirit', 'subject', 'mind' or 'consciousness', with a more phenomenological (qv), world-embedded, understanding. The traditional idea of a persons as some kind of soul or essence - something that could be put into a world, and/or taken out of it, without ceasing to be itself - overlooks the fact that (a) we need a 'there' in which to Be, and (b) our 'there' is part of our being who and what we are (think, for instance, about how much of 'you' is defined by your body and your natural/social circumstances). The reality of our being and our 'there' are both usually misunderstood (cf; 'situation') but the indissoluble link between 'being' and 'there' is captured by the hyphenated compound 'being-there'.

pp.169-170 - Our being persons and our being-in-the-world is an integrity [a 'unitary primordial structure'] analysed, so far, in terms of being ourselves, concern (qv) and solicitude (qv) - we define ourselves through being in a world that matters to us. Moreover, our being-in (qv) the world is quite distinct from being merely being in the world as something merely present-at-hand. This matters because our traditional way of understanding things is to take them apart and, when it comes to understanding ourselves, we not only tend to take ourselves as apart from the world but also cut ourselves into bits - mind and matter, body and soul, nature and culture, and so on. We then worry about which 'bit' is primary [primordial]. The truth, however, is that human persons are not mind-souls trapped within bodies, who must 'reach out' to objects in the world from within their biological cage; we are already 'outside ourselves' existing in and as part of the world. The supposed 'gap' between ourselves as subjects and the objective world of is already 'filled' by our being-in-the-world (or, perhaps more accurately, there is no gap to fill in the first place because the original dichotomy, which places an excluded middle between the over-defined poles of 'self/subject' and 'world/object', is not and never was valid). This entails that we shouldn't let inherited ways of thinking blind us to the fact that our thoughts, feelings, desires, aversions and actions are directly engaged with entities themselves rather than our mental representations of them. Moreover, these entities appear to us not just as helps or hindrances, objects of desire or aversion, but in being what they are - we relate to them knowingly; comprehending that a spade is a spade, a cat is a cat, and so on.

'There' - Each person's own, unique and personal, locatedness in the world (qv) and time (qv, temporality). Personhood [being-there] is commonly and traditionally considered as 'a thing in itself', as something in the world only in the sense of an item located in a space full of things. But a central theme of Heidegger's thesis is that persons are not apart from the world, that our relationship with the world is an essential part of who we are and what the world is. We are located ['there'] in a natural-cultural-historical environment apart from which we would not, and could not, be persons. So the 'there' of being-there is our placement in the world, our location in the circumstances or situation (qv) in which we are who we are, and the 'standing place' in terms of which we define our 'here'.

p.171 - The traditional location of personhood is 'here', inside our selves. Against this, Heidegger has the basic location of personhood 'there' - in the world (personhood is dasein 'being there'). We derive our 'here' (qv) from this 'there' as part of our being-in-the-world. If we are within shouting distance of someone who asks us 'Where are you?" then we might answer "Here" but the usual response to "Where are you", "Where were you?" or "Where will you be?" is to locate ourselves in relation to various items in the world - we, in effect, invoke a part of the world and say "There, in this part of the world, is where I am/was/will be". This kind of self-location is part of our being-in-the-world (part of our being-there) and re-introduces Heidegger's notion of authentic [existential] spatiality because only a being with an innate spatiality can be 'there' in the sense required for being-in-the-world. It is this spatiality which 'opens' us to the world ('This entity carries in its ownmost Being the character of not being closed off').

The Existential Constitution of 'There'

Being-there has three equally primordial components; moods [emotion], understanding, and discourse. What this means is that our being-in-the-world is mediated by our emotional state-of-mind, our practical understanding, and the way we talk about the world and our being-in it (with 'talk' including thinking in language as well as writing and conversation with each other). Each of these elements will now be considered in turn.

pp.172-3 (Being-there as a State-of-Mind) - For human persons, moods are a fundamental part of our being persons and being-in-the-world; they are unavoidable and their effects are pervasive. They are, moreover, disclosive of the world and our place in it. Traditionally, we are conditioned to think of moods as entirely subjective - something solely to do with us rather than the world. And, increasingly, 'bad' moods or feelings are treated 'therapeutically', just as if they were flaws in our psyche that have nothing at all to do with the world or our being-in relationship with the world. Heidegger, however, insists that moods are part of our being-in-the-world and therefore disclose not just our state of mind (qv) but also the state of the world as a personhood environment.
 

State of mind - That part of being-in-the-world (qv) whereby the world both affects, and is affected by, our mood (qv). State of mind is an existentiale (qv) - which simply means that all of our dealings with the world are coloured by one mood or another (even apathy is a state of mind). The phrase is an approximation of Heidegger's neologism befindlichkeit, indicating the capacity of persons to be emotionally related to the world in ways over which we do not have complete control. A state of mind is an emotional 'atmosphere' which mediates our being-in-the-world; it's a kind of disposition towards experiencing the world in a certain way. But the important point is that states-of-mind are not merely subjective - not something which gurgles up entirely from within us and then prejudices our perceptions of the world. States of mind disclose [reveal] certain facts about our being-in-the-world - they are part of our reciprocal relationship with the world. In particular, states of mind disclose (a) our personhood as presently defined by past experiences (see 'thrownness'), (b) our being-in-the-world as a whole, and (c) our 'submission' to the world as something which matters to us and to which, therefore, we are vulnerable. Although these facts are disclosed by states of mind, the disclosure is not often noticed by us because our moods are so often ways of turning away from the burden of being persons in the world.

Mood - Whatever emotional relation [state-of-mind] we have with the world; the point of that 'whatever' being that the relationship of persons and the world is always informed by some emotional attitude to facts, events and things because these matter to us and affect us (so much so that their appearing not to matter to us is a mood which worries us and can, indeed, lead to suicide). A mood is more general and pervasive than an emotion (emotions have a very specific object) and affects our whole relationship with the world. Our moods (a) indicate how well or badly we are faring in the world in a way that is both prior to and beyond any intellectual analysis of our well-being, and (b) turn us towards or away from the world in ways that leave us more or less engaged and more or less aware of the being-in the world which is defining us as who we are.

Attunement - A rather nice metaphor of the role played by moods in human existence. It is probably best illustrated by thinking of a radio being tuned to various frequencies. When a radio is tuned properly it picks up signals that are there in the atmosphere. Similarly, our attunement enables us to be aware of certain facts of the world, and which facts we will be aware of will depend very much on how we are emotionally attuned to the world and the people around us.

p.174 - Moods both mediate and reveal [disclose] our being-in-the-world ('in a state-of-mind personhood is always brought before itself'). But not only can moods 'run ahead' of our understanding, persons for the most part evade the truth (qv) which is disclosed by our moods. Moods turn us towards or, more often, away from the burden of being who and what we are in the world. What we particularly evade in our moods is the 'there' part of our being-there [personhood]. This 'there' is our situation (qv); the part of being a person into which we are 'thrown'.

Thrownness - The facts of ourselves and the world - the actualities and possibilities - that are 'there' as a product of the past which we cannot change; that aspect of the 'there' in being-there [personhood] in which we find ourselves in a particular, historically conditioned, environment [the world] in which the space of possibilities is not of our choosing. The point here is that what has happened in the past fixes not only what the present actualities are (qv, facticity) but also the range of possibilities that are open to us. For example, an ex-smoker who ignored health warnings when he was young cannot go back and undo his having smoked for several years now that he recognises that it was a dumb thing to do. As an aspect of temporality (qv) thrownness represents the phenomenon of the past as having-been; i.e., the present is defined by a past which (a) we cannot alter, (b) is part of who we are, and (c) we carry into the future.
        Thrownness is similar to facticity (qv) in that it too is not merely a way of describing the 'brute facts' of our situation; it is more a kind of frame of reference which cannot avoid as we define our being in the world) even if we are not aware of doing so ('...even if proximally it has been thrust aside').

pp.175-177 - Moods not only disclose our being-in-the world before cognition (often, in fact, providing the frame of reference within which cognition takes place) but also often in ways that are beyond cognition. States of mind disclose personhood in its thrownness and, most often, in an attempt at turning away from [evading] the burden of being-in-the-world (a great deal is revealed by what we try to run away from). This is shown particularly by 'bad' moods (anger, hate, contempt, etc) in which, according to Heidegger, personhood becomes blind to itself.

Moods are an existentiale (qv), which entails that some mood or another always colours our engagements with the world. The propositional content of moods - the fact that they are informed by beliefs that may be true or false - means that, through a combination of knowledge and willpower, we can 'master' our moods to some extent. We cannot, however, be free of moods; persons don't cease to feel, they just feel differently, and even apathy is a mood.

There are three 'essential characteristics' of states-of-mind:

1. They disclose [reveal] our thrownness into the world and our response to facts of the world which we cannot change.
2. They disclose our current being-in-the-world as a whole.
3. They disclose our 'submission' to the world as containing things which matter to us.

p.178 - Because our being-in-the-world includes being-with others, moods have a measure of publicness (qv) about them. This is demonstrated in the way that it makes sense to talk about 'the mood of the country' or the mood of some group. What we feel, in other words, is often an expression of Everyone (qv) - we feel elated, depressed, angry or self-righteous because that is how those around us are feeling. This means that (a) moods arise out of our being-in-the-world, (b) this 'world' consists not just of facts but of socially-defined attitudes, roles and concepts, and (c) the influence of the world on us is such that even our most private feelings are informed by Everyone.

p.182 (Being-there as Understanding) - State of mind [mood], understanding and discourse are the three elements which make up the fundamental framework within which we are 'there' in-the-world. Of these, mood and understanding are primordial (qv). Understanding and mood inform each other - every emotion has an intellectual content [an understanding of the world] and every understanding has an emotional content. Both states of mind and understanding are part of the 'there' in being-there.

Understanding (2) - Our most primitive and immediate comprehending of the world, its contents, and ourselves, in their practical possibilities; we understand a hammer, for example, when we perceive it as a tool for striking something. Understanding is practical and pre-ontological (qv) - at the beginning of knowledge rather than being its culmination. And understanding is not necessarily as matter of being able to spell-out what we understand - that can only follow the interpretation (qv) which follows understanding. It is enough for understanding that we perceive something as what it is; if we perceive a hammer as a hammer then we understand it. This is not as simple as it may first appear because perceiving a hammer as a hammer requires (a) some kind of pre-conception of tools and their uses, (b) knowing roughly what a hammer is for - the purpose 'for-the-sake-of-which' it is a hammer, and (c) having some idea of how it is used (i.e., we understand its possibilities as something ready-to-hand for some purpose). There is, however, even more to understanding than this recognition of things as what they are. In the first place, understanding is always part of our ability to actualise our possibilities ('As understanding, personhood projects its Being upon possibilities'). In the second place, personhood is itself disclosed by understanding because understanding is the mode of disclosure by which the meaning and significance of being-in-the-world (qv) are revealed to persons. Understanding a hammer, for instance, discloses [reveals] (a) the significance of hammers - we get the point of there being hammers in the world - and (b) our significance as hammer users. So understanding finally has to do with knowing how to live the life of a person. As such, it involves not only knowing what things are but also:

• knowing how to actualise our own possibilities,
• being open to the future,
• comprehending the world as a context of assignments or references (qv); that is, as a totality [integrity] within which any given object relates to other objects and ultimately to the possibility of personhood's being.

Possibility - What is possible could 'be' but isn't. As part of the 'possible, actual, necessary' category (qv) of being, possibility simply signifies a state of affairs that is neither actual nor necessary. But, as part of the being of persons, possibility is a defining characteristic of our personhood - human personhood is an integrity of the actual and the possible. This is because persons do not have a fixed nature that determines their ways of being who they are; rather, our ways of being ourselves are realised from limited but real possibilities from which we choose and on the basis of which we project ourselves (qv, projection). This means not only that the world is a world of possibilities to persons but that we ourselves are 'possibility incarnate' - we are persons by being the kinds of entities which constantly choose which among various possibilities we will realise. See note on possibility under p.69.

Potentiality-for-Being - Refers to our own 'being towards' possibilities (contrast 'facticity' - which is our actuality as already-defined beings). The point being that, as well as being what they are, persons also have a potentiality for being many different kinds of person - a doctor may become a builder, for example, or a housewife may become a doctor. As with possibilities themselves, our potentiality-for-being is limited but real. It is because of our potentiality-for-being that we (a) care, (b) have to be engaged with a world, and (c) integrate the past and the future in our present being-in-the-world. Wherever Heidegger uses the hyphenated phrase potentiality-for-being he intends a primordial and defining feature of personhood as something more than its present facticity.

Personhood (3) - Persons are those beings who ask questions and for whom the understanding of being is part. We are also beings whose essence is not pre-determined but is, rather, individually realised in the process of each of us living the life of a person so that, in each case, personhood is uniquely somebody's 'mine'. This self-creation necessarily involves being-in-the world and being concerned with the world. This entails that persons are beings who (a) are constrained by their situation and (b) carry their past with them. But it also entails that, while the essence of things is defined by what they are, the essence of persons (which is our existence) is defined by the range of limited but real possibilities for our being persons. This means that persons (a) carry the past with them, (b) are oriented towards the future, (c) manifest a potentiality-for-being, and (d) project their being [who they are] onto their possibilities. So being a person is very much a matter of negotiating our self-defining possibilities by means of, and within the constraint of, our temporal (qv) and worldly context. The temporal nature of this engagement is the subject of Division Two.
        An important feature of persons is that our being a person is not defined by our actualities [who we already are as a result of past events] but by our possibilities (qv). So, for example, the 'being honest' of an honest person is not defined by past actualities but by what he or she does with her or his present possibilities for being honest. Being persons, in other words, is always a matter of stepping out of what is and into what will be. This is totally at odds with the common concepts of persons as what 'is' (cf; facticity) because it takes what 'is' as no more than the material we have to work with in being who we are (i.e., the self is a process, not a thing).

p.184 - Understanding anything, including ourselves, is a matter of knowing what the object of our understanding is capable of. Understanding, in this sense, not only discloses things to us but also us to ourselves as potentiality-for-being; indeed, it 'pertains to the whole basic state of being-in-the-world'. We are, however, frequently awry in our understanding because (a) we can make factual mistakes, (b) our state of mind can negatively affect our understanding, and (c) we usually interpret our capabilities in terms of thrownness [actuality] rather than possibility.
        It is here that we get back to the notions of freeing (qv) and letting be (qv) because understanding is not just about the actual interconnectivity of things in the world but the possible interconnections into which things may enter. In other words, not only are we person because of our own possibilities but, by being understanding, we free other entities for their possibilities. We do this by 'projecting' our possibilities onto them.

Projection - An existentiale (qv) of personhood that has to do with the fact that understanding (qv) a possibility means extending what 'is' forwards into what 'could be'. A cat, for example, may sleep on a sheet of paper, a fly may walk on it and a baby may chew it. But when I use a sheet of paper I 'project' what it is as a possible medium for some human purpose - writing on, wrapping with, and so on. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, I simultaneously project my possibilities as an actualiser of possibilities onto the paper. So projection is not a matter of something that we do when we think of it so much as that 'being projective' is what we are as beings who are always dealing with possibilities. However, and although being projective is 'pointed' at the future, what we actually project on is not our future being but our present potentiality-for-being (which, of course, carries our past with it into the future).

Project - As a verb (the main usage), to project is simply the act of projection (qv) - for example, we project our own possibilities [our being] on possibilities in the world whenever we make a choice. As a noun, a project is a task or engagement in which and by which we project [verb] ourselves [our possibilities] onto the possibilities before us. It is by our projects, and the way we undertake them, that we define ourselves as who we are.

p.185 - How we relate to the objects around us is most immediately determined by the projects [tasks] for the sake of which we are acting. These projects are not only performed for a particular end but as part of a general process that defines our existence, and therefore our essence [who we are], by realising certain possibilities of our being who we are. So, in relating to walls as a painter, for example, I not only paint walls and specifically define myself as a painter; I also generally define myself as variously careless or conscientious, knowledgeable or ignorant, tidy or untidy, and so on, in the way I go about painting walls. The specific end will be realised only when I am painting walls, but the general end will defined in everything I do - i.e., I will be careless or conscientious outside of wall-painting environment as well as in it. Both of these ends, the particular and the general, are what Heidegger calls 'for-the-sake-of-which'. And the point is that the general for-the-sake-of-which defines or constrains the particular. Thus, whenever I am engaged in a task, I project who I am onto the possibilities which that task presents by approaching and undertaking it as the kind of person I am being; if I undertake a different task then, although the task will be different, it will be the same 'me' projected on that task as on the other. This is part of a circular process because my essence is itself defined by my existence (i.e., the personality which I project in the way I live my life is itself defined by the way I live my life through my tasks). Moreover, the projected features of my personal character are projected only for so long as I am behaving in a way consistent with them; having been a mechanic in the past, for example, is not part of my projection but of my thrownness (qv) because projection has to do with possibilities rather than mere facts.
 

Because we are our possibilities, there is a sense in which we are all more than we are at present; we 'are' what we will be but, as yet, are not. So if there was an imperative to being a person (and there isn't) it would be along the lines of 'Become what you are'. This is because, as part of our self-creation, projection is the way of existing (qv) in which persons define themselves as certain kinds of person by living their lives as the kinds of persons they are defining themselves as in the process of living their lives. This, as this circumlocutory definition indicates, is a 'circular' process because we each live our lives as who we are by approaching and undertaking our everyday tasks in a way that is consistent with who we are. Who we each are, however, is not innate but individually defined during the process of us each living our lives as who we are. So if I am a careless person, for example, then I will project my carelessness onto my possibilities by approaching and undertaking what I do in a careless way. To the extent that I am a whole [integrated] personality, I will then drag this carelessness out of my past and carry it into my future - there will be a kind of consistency between carelessness and who I am. But this is not because carelessness is an externally given or fixed feature of my nature which I merely express - as if carelessness was something 'there' which somehow flowed through me. On the contrary, carelessness is an aspect of my being who I am only because I define myself as a careless person by continually being careless. So projection, in this case, is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy - part of a 'circle' - whereby I go on becoming who I am by selecting and actualising my possibilities according to the 'who I am' that I have already become by my previous selections and actualisations.

pp.186-188 - Understanding, as we have seen above, has to do with recognising possibilities. But understanding itself also has it own possibilities. In particular, it too can be variously authentic (qv) or inauthentic. Authentic understand has as its theme the whole integrity of our being-in-the-world; it doesn't focus on the world, or an aspect of the world, at the expense of self-understanding, or vice versa.
        What Heidegger is getting at here is the supposed dichotomy between the subjective and the objective and the subsequent pseudo-problems of which is primary, which is more real, how they relate, and so on. His whole point - and not just here but throughout Being and Time - is the being-in-the-world integrates the subjective and the objective to the extent that neither makes sense, or even exists, without the other. Neither is primary, both are real and, although different, both are inextricably part of the same integrity - and it is the integrity which is primordial. Authentic understanding recognises that fact. So, for example, to typify humans in purely objective terms - the sophisticated biological machines of psychology or biology - or in purely subjective terms - as some sort of self-contained feeling, thinking and believing ghosty-thing - are both equally inauthentic. We are human persons in a world, with equal emphasis on the 'human', 'persons', and 'world' in the being-in-the-world which integrates them all into one whole. When we sunder these then we 'divert' our understanding - which properly pertains to personhood's 'full disclosedness as Being-in-the-world' - into an 'existential [lived] modification of projection as a whole'.

Sight (2) - Seeing-with-understanding ['seeing-as']. Sight is distinguished from seeing (qv) in that, for persons, our sensing of the world is always meaning-laden ('all sight is grounded in understanding'). We 'see' the world as meaningful by projecting our own possibilities onto things in the world as part of those possibilities - i.e., we see the world as a world of possibilities. So I look at a piece of land, for example, and see its possibilities as a housing site, farm, park, garden or hunting area; I see string in terms of what it can be used for; I look at a piece of driftwood and see possibilities fuel to cook with or something decorative; and so on. Sight, in other words, discloses what is 'there' in terms of its being (qv) - which, of course, includes its possibilities for use by persons (qv, disclosedness).

When sight is turned on the whole of human existence (qv) then what we achieve is 'transparency' - a disclosedness (qv), and an understanding (qv) of being-in-the-world (qv) throughout all its many elements.

Transparency - Self-knowledge or self-understanding - just so long as 'self-understanding' is not confused with the currently fashionable, and highly theoretical, wallowing in every subjective slop and gurgle of our psyche. By Heidegger's understanding of being-in-the-world (qv), no one can be understood apart from all the actual and possible involvements of her or his existence (qv). The self, in other words, cannot be known or understood apart from its worldly situation (qv, thrownness), its temporal-historical situation [its past as still affecting the present], its attunement (qv, mood) and its possibilities (qv). So transparency, as self-understanding, discloses not just our actualities (our physical and psychological facticity, qv), and not just our possibilities, but also our ontology (qv) as persons - i.e., as self-defining actualisers of possibilities the world - our being-in the world, and our being-with others (i.e., our whole physical, social and historical context in the world and among other persons).

The disclosedness of the 'there', in understanding, is itself part of our own potentiality-for-being. We are not usually aware that, in our 'commonsense' understanding of the world, we are directly grasping being in itself. Nevertheless, this is what we are doing.

Mood and understanding together disclose the world to us, as a world, by projecting our own possibilities onto the world in which we exist and thereby have our being. This means that understanding has only a certain degree of autonomy because our projective capabilities are informed [conditioned] by our moods (and vice versa) while both our understanding and our moods are shaped by our absorption in Everyone (qv). Thus it is that our freedom to actualise any given possibility through our understanding, although real, is shaped and limited by (a) the 'thrown' situation (i.e., the facts of the matter as inherited from the past), (b) our cultural/historical setting, and (c) the prevailing moods which 'a' and 'b' embody. These facts are largely beyond our control and consequently constrain our possibilities within certain practical limits (i.e., you cannot really 'be whatever you want to be if you want it enough'). Consequently, we always face definite possibilities as specific persons. So while our thrownness always discloses the world in terms of possibilities which matter to us, so our projection is always thrown in two senses: (1) it is exercised in a 'field of possibilities' which we did not ourselves create or project and (2) it is exercised by who we have already made ourselves.
        The 'limits' of the world are not frustrations of personhood which truncate our being but realities without which personhood would not be possible; they are the material we have to work with which, like all materials, has its own real but limited possibilities. We are, for example, very prone to talking as if humans would be, or could be, perfect if it were not for our social, cultural or natural limitations. This is a 'half truth' at best because our 'worldly limitations' are actually what makes it possible for us to be persons in the first place. We are not improperly realised minds, souls or spirits, but properly realised human persons.

Starting at p.188, Heidegger takes us from understanding - our initial grasp of the world as meaningful - through interpretation and articulation to true-or-false assertions [propositions] about the world. What is important about this movement is that each step (a) narrows our focus and (b) takes us further from the being of equipment as ready-to-hand (qv) - ending up with our thinking of them as present-at-hand (qv). Consider, for example, our normal understanding of a train that we get on everyday to go to work. In this understanding, our concept of the train lacks 'depth' - we barely notice the train in its being a train - but is of something firmly embedded as ready-to-hand in the wider, everyday world (although even this understanding requires a fore-structure - concepts of machinery, transport, and so on - which enable us to understand this thing as a train). To turn our understanding into interpretation (the beginning of science) we need to focus on the train more narrowly as a 'thing in itself' - a set of motors, carriages, wheels, brakes, etc. Doing this presents the train to us in a narrower and more present-at-hand context - its convenience as a mode of transport is no longer foremost. But say now that we articulate our interpretation by saying thing's like "each carriage weighs 5 tonnes and has 50 seats." This proposition [assertion], although useful if true, not only has a particularly narrow focus but speaks of the carriage as something isolated - i.e., as something present-at-hand to reflection (qv) rather than ready-to-hand to circumspection (qv). This kind of speaking 'covers up' or obscures being by removing the objects of attention from the worldly context in which they have meaning and significance.

Interpretation - A continuation or appropriation [use] of understanding (qv) that has to do with working out the possibilities (qv) projected in understanding. Interpretation in effect mediates understanding and articulation, and is the beginning of science. When humans perceive something we perceive understandingly - we recognise it as part of the web of assignments (qv) by seeing it as a gate or a hammer or a telephone or whatever. When we interpret it, we bring its function more narrowly into view - we specifically acknowledge it as what it is and something that works in a particular way. This interpretation is not a function of our fancy - as post-modernists would have it - but of the thing itself. You cannot, for instance, interpret a train as a train by giving it any signification you like; you only interpret it as a train when you understand it as a particular kind of motorised vehicle for transporting goods and/or passengers within a general system of railway lines - i.e., as having the specific use for which it was built.
 

Interpretation is a matter of overcoming the usually inconspicuousness of the ready-to-hand in order to focus our attention on the thing itself. This usually happens when we have to interrupt a project (e.g., a passenger transport system) to fix a broken tool (e.g. a train) or adapt something for a purpose (e.g., bring in buses to move passengers stranded by a broken train). So say, for example, that a railway system is disrupted and you need to find another way to get to work. To seek an alternative you have to understand the train's 'in order to' as a device for moving passengers. This extension of your normal understanding is interpretation. Moreover, although this gives an example of inauthentic understanding - it is narrowly focussed on something in the world rather than 'the big picture' - it is still a mode, or continuation, of genuine understanding. Interpretation grows out of understanding and, usually, recedes back into it again (a alternative mode of transport that works immediately fades back into the background as we simply use it to get to work).

Articulation - The saying of an interpretation (qv). When something is disclosed as it is and we 'spell out' its being, then we bring its interpretation close in words. Space, for example, is a unitary phenomenon, but we can articulate space as 'in front of', 'above', 'behind', alongside, and so on. This 'spelling out' follows our practical use of space but precedes any theoretical claims about it.

Meaning - We grasp the meaning of something when we understand its possibilities for personhood; for example, we know that a hammer means when we grasp (a) its place in the wider scheme of things, and (b) what it can be used for. The grasping of possibilities is a matter of projecting (qv) our personhood on things in the wider context of the world [the whole natural-social environment within which things have possibilities]. This is why only personhood can be meaningful or meaningless. Meaning is part of understanding (qv) and makes the world intelligible [understandable]. Because meaning is a function of projection, what it discloses is not only the object upon which we project but also ourselves as persons.

pp.195-198 - Articulation can take two main forms: assertion and discourse. We can understand and interpret an object without saying a word. But, more often, we do 'say a word' by making assertions or telling stories that express our interpretation. Assertions, in which we predicate something of a subject, have been and are normally taken as the paradigm use of language by human beings. However, making assertions is just one of many uses of language, and it can be misleading as a paradigm. This is because, just as interpretation is grounded in and follows on from understanding, so is assertion (qv) grounded in and follows on from interpretation. Interpretation already narrows our focus of concern, and assertion continues this narrowing in a way that tends to 'flatten out' and decontextualise what is spoken about. For this reason, assertion is not the language use which we should use to typify human being.

Assertion - A proposition; a particular use of language in which we say [assert] something about something; a pointing out which (a) gives something a definite character and (b) communicates. For example, the sentence "This hammer is too big" is an assertion; it predicates a fact ("...too big") about a subject ("This hammer.."). Assertions have a meaning based on that of entities - the example does tell us something about a hammer in relation to the job at hand - but this meaning is narrowly focussed, reductive, and removed from context compared with the meaning of entities themselves - we focus on just one feature (size) of a particular hammer as an object of attention (something present-at-hand, qv).

p.203f - Making assertions is a way of being-in-the-world and is grounded in the seeing-as structure that underlies the meaning of entities (see 'sight'). But assertions alone can be misleading because they cover up the totality of involvements and signification that underpins our understanding of the world. A better disclosure of being is achieved by discourse (rede or talk) because (a) discourse is the wider use of language of which assertions are only a part and (b) it is as discourse that the intelligibility of being-in-the-world is revealed. An example of this would be the disclosure of complex behaviours such as love. To 'define' love as a "Love is...' assertion simply cannot capture the being of love in its many facets. What we need instead is a discourse - a set of reasoned narratives which capture all the meanings of various kinds of love in their actual settings. This is why poets are better at describing love than are psychologists.

Discourse - Narrative, the telling of a story which includes, but is more than, assertions. Discourse literally means 'talk' understood as our way of arriving at those structures of being which belong to the entities which we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or speaking about it. It entails 'making manifest' in the sense of revealing what we are talking about - it's a way of disclosing (qv) and communicating the being of things, of revealing what is 'there' but hitherto unnoticed. This does not imply that what is disclosed [made manifest] by discourse is somehow created or called into being by language. Talking of imaginary objects such as Pegasus or the Earth Goddess will not bring them into existence because discourse is just talk, it has no magic powers. However, discourse can bring ephemeral situations into focus in a way that nothing else can. For example, a person who is troubled by a problem is often advised to 'get it out into the open' by talking about it. And the insight justifying this advice is that discourse discloses states of affairs - it makes them manifest - and so presents them as objects of attention which can be dealt with straightforwardly as objects rather than as abstractions or chaos.
        Nowadays the word 'discourse' often connotes 'conversation' - i.e., two or more people discoursing with each other (often in print). This connotation, however, is absent from Heidegger's use of the word; the word implies a listener, but not necessarily a respondent.

Discourse expresses, says or articulates, the intelligibility of things - their meaningfulness or 'understandability'. Language - the totality of words, figures of speech and the rules of grammar - is the ready-to-hand means of discourse; it is the tool we use. But it is discourse, rather than language per se, that provides the framework within which all speech acts (including assertions) take place and from which they draw their being as speech acts. We could not, for example, assert that a hammer was the wrong size for a particular job unless the terms 'hammer', 'is' and so on, already had meaning. And we couldn't check the truth or informative value of the assertion "This hammer is the wrong size" unless we understood what was being asserted. These meanings, both of individual words and whole assertions, do not and cannot derive from an investigation of the world because we need to understand them before we can check the world to see if they picture it accurately. Once again, however, we must be careful not to let this fact drive a wedge between words and the world. It is true that our understanding of the words derives from our prior understanding of discourse, but it is also true that the conceptual framework of discourse is integrated with the world in that to understand the criteria for using the word 'hammer' just is to understand what a hammer is - to know what must be true of something in order for it to be a hammer - which, in turn, entails having a grasp of hammers as part of our being-in-the-world. At this level, linguistic meaning and the meaning [being] of entities are the same; linguistic meaning [discourse] discloses (qv) the meaning of entities and thereby speaks the basis of personhood's capacity to disclose entities in their being.
        It follows from this that the being of discourse discloses our being-in-the-world just as much as do states of mind (qv) and understanding (qv). And since our being is being-with (qv) discourse is essentially 'pointed' at others as a medium of communication and communion. Moreover, in our discourse, we communicate not only our understanding, and our mood, but also our common cultural inheritance. So discourse, mood and understanding must be understood as three 'internally integrated' aspects of our existential constitution as persons - three fundamental aspects of our being disclosive (qv) and our being-there (qv).

p.210 - In our average everyday mode of being persons we normally maintain ourselves in being an Anyone-self (qv). So articulating average everydayness (qv) entails asking how the Anyone-self lives - a task which also entails asking why humans are normally so unaware of their own being. Heidegger answers this last question in terms of idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity and falling. Putting it briefly, what happens is that, in our everyday engagements with each other, idle talk detaches us from the actual objects of our discourse, closing them off rather than disclosing them. This leads to curiosity in the form of seeking for novelty rather than genuine understanding. This, in turn, leads to an ambiguity whereby we don't differentiate between the meaningful with what is merely engaging and/or fashionable. All of these together constitute fallenness in which we lose our selves in the publicness (qv) of Everyone (qv) rather than disclosing ourselves in our dealings with the world - Everyone hijacks the 'me'. Although described in negative terms, fallenness is our normal mode of being who we are.

pp.211-212 (Idle talk) - All communication involves (a) a subject and (b) talk about the subject. In idle talk our concern for what is said overcomes our concern for the subject in such a way that we take what is said for granted, allowing it to 'infect' our understanding of the subject; we then tend to simply accept and pass on what is said as true. In this process, we think that we are learning something about subjects at the very same time as we are actually losing touch with them. By losing touch with the supposed subjects of our talk, what we say becomes groundless and, by mistakenly thinking that we are gaining in understanding, we (a) close off the subjects of our talk, rather than disclosing them, and (b) close off the possibilities of further discovery about them. So if, for instance, Everyone (qv) talks about ethnicity as important to our self-definition then we will begin to interpret human being just as if ethnicity mattered in the way it is popularly supposed to. Consequently, a kind of pseudo-understanding - the 'received wisdom' of Everyone - comes to dominate our everyday relations with the world and each other (in the case of ethnicity, as an often violent barrier to relationship).

Idle Talk - A kind of everyday discourse (qv) which doesn't disclose its object so much as close it off. This happens because in idle talk the subject of conversation is not so much an object but what is said about it. In trendy jargon, for example - a classic case of idle talk - we don't really disclose a situation (qv) but simply receive, discuss and pass on, what is said about it without checking the veracity of the claims or, in most cases, even understanding what it is that we pass on. The jargon, in other words, takes on a life of its own which becomes increasingly detached from what it is supposed to be about. These claims then become the interpretations (qv) and half-truths which 'everyone knows' as we are 'delivered over' to them.

Idle talk expresses what Heidegger calls 'average intelligibility' - a kind of levelled down (qv) group thinking. Average intelligibility - the wisdom of Everyone - presumes to understand everything; it becomes the authority whose interpretations become the whole justification for what we believe. And the Anyone-self doesn't distinguish this authoritative pseudo-justification from real disclosedness.

p.213 - The groundlessness of idle talk facilitates its publicness because it presents the possibility of understanding everything without having to go to the bother of checking it for ourselves. Idle talk is not deliberately or maliciously misleading, nevertheless it is mischievous.
 

All genuine understanding, interpreting and communicating flows out of and back into the 'average intelligibility' established by everyday talk. Even our moods are determined by Everyone. So there is no escape - this is not an alien environment (although, as we will see, it is an alienating environment) - this is our 'home' with which we cocoon ourselves.

p.214 - The pseudo-understanding embodied in idle talk has been 'uprooted' (i.e., it is no longer grounded in the actual world), so what we have in 'average intelligibility' is a kind of free-floating mythos that feeds on itself rather than on any actual situation. It is, moreover, this mythos rather than the world which we take for reality. Perhaps even more to the point, this cultural 'junk food' feeds us as well in the sense that we maintain ourselves with idle talk in our average everyday lives. So instead of authentically being in the world, we merely 'float' in it - being tethered to average intelligibility by its apparent omniscience, confidence and the security of what 'everyone knows'. Moreover, and because we are so used to our tether, being without it feels unnatural.

pp.214-216 (Curiosity) - By being detached from any particular project which might focus our attention on objects in our immediate environment, the 'dislocated' pseudo-understanding of idle talk tends to drift away from what is actually 'there' and towards the exotic, alien and remote. It seeks new objects not in order to grasp them in their being but in order to have stimulating novelties. In short, we become curious (qv). Curiosity is ordinarily a normal and important part of our being persons, it is part of our being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is primarily a function of concern (qv) which empresses itself in circumspection. Idle talk, however, detaches us, and our curiosity, from the world - our concern is no longer for the world itself but for what is claimed about the world.

Curiosity - Used in its standard sense but important because, as part of our 'fallenness' (qv), our normal curiosity becomes detached from the world and attached instead to idle talk (qv). It then becomes a search for novelty, stimulation and/or distraction rather than the being of ourselves and things in the world.

As our curiosity becomes detached from the real world so we become increasingly distracted by new possibilities; we seek the novel in a 'far and alien world'. As this happens we linger in any given environment for shorter and shorter periods of time and, by drifting everywhere, we 'dwell' nowhere. This is perhaps best seen in the way that persons are taken by the new and/or novel in dress, religion, entertainment, diet, self-understanding or ideology. To such persons - i.e., all of us to a greater or lesser extent - what is sought is distraction; we are actually avoiding reality rather than realising our possibilities within it. Sadly, and is so often the case with half-truths, we mistake this restlessness for being open-minded and/or full of life.
 

pp.217-218 (Ambiguity) - Idle talk and curiosity inform and motivate each other. And the blend of the two, with its allure of supposedly unlimited possibilities, is profoundly seductive. But, perhaps more importantly, by being systematically detached from our environments by idle talk, we lose the ability to distinguish genuine disclosedness from its counterfeit.
 

Ambiguity - An aspect of idle talk (qv) in which truth, half-truth and untruth become so mixed that we cannot pick our way between them. Ambiguity comes about because (a) idle talk is more attached to what 'Everyone says' than the actual world, and (b) the authority of Everyone carries more weight with us than does our own intelligence and understanding. So when, for example, books like The Last Cabbalist in Lisbon or The Da Vinci Code come along, purporting to be historically disclosive, then the very people who are sceptical of the historical eyewitness accounts we have of the events in question will accept as reliable the words of a highly biased novelist some centuries removed from those events.

The ambiguity of average everydayness is allied to our everyday curiosity in a manner shown by the way in which complicated and/or 'mystical' pseudo-understanding is, and always has been, routinely acclaimed as 'deep and meaningful' while real understanding is dismissed as dull and boring. The world of idle talk is the 'wide and easy way that leads to destruction'. But in a public world, dominated by idle talk and curiosity, ambiguity permeates the very understanding into which all of us find ourselves already thrown (qv) as part of our inheritance as persons. We are thus born into an already existing inertia, a 'current' against which we must 'swim' if we are to disclose to ourselves the world (and the self) that is being obscured.

p.219 (Falling and Thrownness) - The interconnected components of the Anyone-self - idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity - together constitute the being of our everydayness as 'fallen' away from ourselves and into the everyday world. Because everydayness constitutes the dominant and normal mode of our being 'there', fallenness becomes a kind of counterfeit disclosedness of personhood as we mistake the kind of 'self as thing' it discloses for who we really are.

Fallenness - A form of inauthenticity (qv) in which persons become absorbed with being-with-others, idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, to the extent that our authentic personhood no longer discloses [reveals] itself. Like the term 'inauthenticity' the term 'fallen' and its cognates is not intended to be pejorative but purely descriptive.
 

Lostness (2) - To be 'lost' in Everyone is to live a life defined by idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity. This involves understanding yourself in terms of the levelled down (qv) possibilities allowed by a particular culture - even though those possibilities are themselves not properly recognised. As Heidegger puts it on p.435, 'Proximally and for the most part the self is lost in the Everyone. It understands itself in terms of those possibilities of existence which 'circulate' in the 'average' public way of interpreting personhood today. These possibilities have mostly been made unrecognisable by ambiguity (qv); even though they are well known to us'.

p.220-221 - Fallenness is not some kind of morally corrupt state, nor are we fallen from a purer or higher primal status and/or into the world as some kind of lower environment. What happens is that we fall 'away' from being persons.
 

Fallenness is one of two possibilities of being-in-the-world; the other is that of being an authentic person. It is, moreover, the one into which we are born and within which we normally live our lives.

In fallenness - our normal 'everyday' mode of being who we are - we are severed from any genuine concern for the world, and from any genuine solicitude (qv) for our fellow humans, by our absorption in Everyone. And, because our being as persons is one of being-in-the-world, this dislocation entails that we are removed from any authentic understanding of ourselves and our grasp of which possibilities (qv) are genuinely ours as opposed to those which Everyone applauds.
        This 'falling' from authentic personhood is Heidegger's main explanation of why persons, to whom an understanding of being belongs, nevertheless cherish religious, philosophical and scientific traditions which systematically misrepresent the human way of being persons by interpreting our being in a way more fitting for things. Our inherent sociability, and subsequent tendency to lose ourselves in Everyone, means that misleading 'Everyone truths' become embedded in the idle talk from which our religious, philosophical and scientific 'experts' take their cue. Because experts are held in high esteem, this pseudo-expertise then gains even more authority than 'what everyone knows'. Moreover, our curiosity and ambiguity means that the only serious challenge to this then comes from trendy ideologues and pseudo-philosophers who offer novel theories which basically assault commonsense with complicated and/or mischievous nonsense. None of this is accidental because falling is built into our social absorption into Everyone and thereby into the Anyone-self that we normally are. This being the case, falling in not just an ontic (qv) state of personhood but 'a definite existential characteristic of personhood itself'. In short, our everyday attempts at being persons simply are inauthentic.

p.222 - By its very nature, the social environment in which we find ourselves thrown tempts us to 'fall away' from ourselves. Part of that fallen state is the unthinking assumption that fallenness just is the normal and proper state of personhood. The Everyone-world thus 'tranquillises' us. 'Tranquillising' may seem an odd word to use because our 'tranquillised state' is anything but tranquil. Indeed, it finds it expression in busyness. This busyness alienates us from our immediate environment and from ourselves - a self-alienation (qv) which, ironically, often takes the form of curiosity-driven self-analysis ['self-dissection'].

Note: The Everyone-world is my 'shorthand' for the everyday world of public opinion and social activity as a frame of reference which we all carry around with us. The Everyone-world is not a world of some 'them'; on the contrary, it is the social-cultural environment with which we are most familiar, the world in which we feel 'at home'. I use the phrase purely for convenience.

Tranquillising - The way in which the Everyone erodes our authenticity; the word 'tranquillising' has to do with a kind of mindless acceptance by which the public world gets to define us and our reality. By being absorbed in Everyone we accept an inauthentic narrative of ourselves and our possibilities. This acceptance, however, does not seduce us into tranquillity as normally understood but 'drives one into uninhibited 'hustle''.

Inauthenticity and absorption in the Anyone-self is the default position [basic state] for human personhood because we are thrown (qv) into a world (a) whose roles and categories are structured in inherently thing-like ways and (b) in which idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity are the guiding norm. This does not make inauthenticity 'right' or authenticity impossible, but it does mean that we can become authentic (qv) only by recovering ourselves from our original 'lostness'. Realising authentic personhood, in other words, is an achievement which does not come naturally to us.
 

p.224 Conclusion of Chapter Five - The leading question of this chapter has been about the being of the 'there' in 'being-there' [personhood]. In particular, Heidegger's theme has been the ontological [meaningful] constitution of the disclosedness (qv) which essentially belongs to personhood (i.e., part of the definition of personhood is its ability to disclose, or uncover, the being of itself and the world). The being of disclosedness is constituted by states-of-mind [moods], understanding and discourse. By our disclosedness we should understand ourselves and our world. The everyday being of personhood, however, is characterised by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. These show us the movement of falling, with temptation, tranquillising, alienation and entanglement as its essential characteristics. Because fallenness is our normal [average everyday] mode of being, it is this, inauthentic, mode of being which we take as actually disclosing the world, ourselves, and other people. This explains why the entities to whom being is a concern (qv) misunderstand the very being in which they are immersed.

Although Heidegger has insisted all along that being-in-the-world is an integrity (a being-in-the-world rather than a being in the world), he has had to talk so far as if its constitutional parts were distinct. Now it is time to get back to considering the integrity as a whole. He will do this, not by reconstructing personhood up from its pieces but by 'looking through' personhood to a 'unitary phenomenon' which provides a kind of ground from which all the pieces grow. This integrating factor is care (qv) - a phenomenon he locates from the perspective of existential anxiety (qv).

Care (2) - An existentiale (qv) of personhood referring to the fact that persons must deal with the world in such a way that things, people and events in the world always matter to us in some way. Being able to care or not care, always being concerned or indifferent, is a matter of always attaching value or disvalue to facts. And this inescapable ability is the complex 'existential unity' which integrates, nourishes and explains, all the other aspects of our being-in-the-world.
        Calling this existentiale (qv) of personhood 'care' does not mean that persons are always caring, concerned or solicitous, but only that the range of attitudes which have these as their norm characterise our dealings with the world (i.e., it is only because we care about, in Heidegger's sense, that we are always variously caring or careless whereas a haystack, for example, is neither).
        Care is not a simple property of persons but a complex set of temporal (qv) relationships [the 'care structure', qv] which embed us in the world. The temporal structure of care is articulated (qv) as

• existence (qv) - the future-oriented 'being-ahead' (qv) of ourselves,
• facticity (qv) - the past-recalling 'being-already-in [the world]' and
• fallenness (qv) - the present 'being-among' (qv) the things of the world.

Existential Anxiety (translated simply as anxiety in the text) - A state-of-mind (qv) which occurs when our being-in-the-world (qv) breaks down with much the same effect on our self-understanding as the breaking down of something ready-to-hand does on our understanding of it. Although Heidegger himself does not add the qualifier 'existential' to 'anxiety' - as I do - he does stress that the anxiety to which he refers is not that of popular psychology. This is because anxiety, as normally understood, is dumbed down (he says 'dimmed' down) in a way which obscures the existential phenomenon.
        In the normal course of events we potter along, using our personhood without really understanding it - much as we do with items of equipment. Sometimes, however, our careless [pre-ontological, qv] use of personhood can break down due to something going wrong - a serious illness or injury, the loss of a job or loved one, a brush with death, a failure, or just an awareness of the fatuousness of everyday life. In such situations our normal, and inauthentic, being 'at home' in the world also breaks down. This breakdown confronts us with what we really are as persons in much the same way as the failure of a piece of equipment forces us to confront what it does in our lives - something which we normally do not do while it is working (consider, for example, someone who unthinkingly relies on electricity but who is suddenly confronted with a sustained Black Out - the absence of electricity confronts her with her reliance on electricity in a way that nothing else could). Our anxiety at running out of possibilities confronts us with the fact that we always face the question of how to live our lives. This is an unpleasant confrontation which we normally seek to avoid. But, because anxiety forces us to face ourselves as truly being-in-the-world, it can free us to be ourselves rather than a Anyone-self.

p.225 - The kind of average everyday personhood which Heidegger has been describing lacks integrity - it is fragmented, entangled in Everyone and scattered among numerous objects of its curiosity. For all its inauthenticity, however, average everydayness does have one very seductive benefit: in it we can hide from the anxiety and responsibilities of being a person, we can become 'at home' in the world by letting ourselves be absorbed by idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity at the same time as we let Everyone define us. So realising an authentic mode of personhood existence will require recovering from our everyday fragmentation among Everyone even though such recovery will be less comfortable.

pp.226-228 - In keeping with his initial method, Heidegger is looking for a way of 'getting at' the unity of our existence (qv) via something accessible that is intimately connected with it. He finds his 'access point' in anxiety - the one state-of-mind (qv) in which we, as whole persons, confront the whole world as a unified phenomenon. His analysis of anxiety [angst] will lead him to the unity he seeks in care (qv) - the aspect of being a person whereby the world matters to us. The analysis of care will, in turn, disclose the flawed concept of reality (qv) which underlies scepticism. It is by correcting the flawed concept of reality that Heidegger corrects our flawed notion of truth (qv) and gets back to the primitive notion of truth that has long since become lost in tradition.

pp.228-230 (Anxiety) - In falling (qv) we are hiding ['fleeing'] from the fact that having to define ourselves by our possibilities entails a responsibility which we didn't ask for and feel ill-equipped to discharge. In hiding, the authenticity of being-oneself gets 'thrust aside' so that the person we disclose is an Everyone-defined actuality rather than a self-defining possibility. But what we hide from is always very revealing. In this case we flee from anxiety because of what it reveals about us - and what it reveals is our being-in-the-world (qv).

pp.230-231 - Anxiety and fear are both responses to the world as threatening. But whereas fear has a specific object - a thing or person which threatens us - anxiety is more the response of the whole person to the whole world as seemingly void of possibilities.
 

So say, for example, that you are used to defining yourself in terms of your family. Then your partner leaves you for another man, taking the children with her. This sudden 'vacuum' in your existence and self-definition leaves you confronting the fact that (a) you define yourself by your possibilities, and (b) a world of possibilities, by which you have been defining yourself, is no longer there. The emotional effect of this 'confrontation with emptiness' is what Heidegger calls 'anxiety'. This means that anxiety (a) is more about possibility than actuality, and (b) has no specific object as such and consequently no specific remedy (you cannot turn the clock back and re-access a world that has now gone). This matters because personhood defines itself from its possibilities, so anxiety gets us 'where we live' and is particularly relevant to our being-in-the-world (qv). In particular, anxiety confronts us with the knowledge that we are thrown (qv) into the world and thereby already delivered over to situations of possibility and choice which we didn't choose, didn't bring about, and don't control. We become anxious only because our being-in-the-world is one of an actualiser of real possibilities thrown into a world of real possibilities and, if these possibilities are taken away from us, then our personhood is left stunned and afraid. It is, moreover, precisely because our being-in-the-world is possibility-dependent that anxiety is the most basic emotion [mood] of persons and is itself the basis of fear (i.e., for persons, anxiety is not derived from fear; fear, rather, is derived from the more basic anxiety).
        Anxiety is the primordial fear of persons* in which what we confront is the being which we have turned away from in falling - a being defined by possibility (qv). There is nothing irrational or unjustified about existential anxiety even though, when we escape our anxiety, we agree with those who deceive themselves that anxiety is silly and foolish. Nevertheless, anxiety is an oppressive feeling - it makes us feel not only insecure but also insignificant - and, indeed, the turning away of falling is itself a means of avoiding anxiety.
 

* Keep in mind here the distinction between human and person. It is only as persons that anxiety is primordial. Animals may experience fear and stress that is biochemically analogous with ours - although even there they lack the belief component of human emotions - but they can be anxious only to the extent that they are persons.

p.232 - The world we confront in anxiety is, as it were, 'raw' - it has not been distanced or tamed by intellectualising or the confidence of Everyone. And it is our being-in this world, the world of possibilities, that we confront. So anxiety throws us back on ourselves as persons and back on our own authentic potentiality-for-being in this world. This is what makes anxiety a tonic for personhood. This is doubly so in that being-with-others is normally such an important part of our being-in-the-world. But, in a state of existential anxiety, others also lose their significance [meaning] for us - they are still 'there' but we don't 'connect' any more.
 

By 'stepping back', or being knocked back, from our involvement with the everyday world, anxiety frees us to be ourselves; we escape our Everyone and are finally free to be who we are (freedom, qv, is always freeing-for and, in anxiety, we are freed for ourselves).
 

What we are anxious about is our own, individual, being-in-the-world. So, once again, the anxiety which we treat as a 'bad' feeling - a feeling to be overcome or avoided - is the very feeling which most motivates us to 'get real' as persons by finding, and actualising, a new set of possibilities for being who we are.

p.233 - Anxiety individualises us. In the Everyone-world (qv) we hide in Everyone, but when we face our being as possibility - as we do in our anxious moments - then we are alone before the world as an alien and vaguely hostile place.

Individualisation - The exposure of our (a) aloneness before the world, and (b) difference from the 'Anyone-self' that we normally think we are. To say that anxiety individualises us is not to say that it reveals some sort of  'real me'. It cannot do this because our essence is continually being defined and redefined by our ongoing existence (qv) - and it is precisely the meaning of our existence which has been stripped off us in anxiety. So what anxiety discloses is not a defined self but a 'nothing' awaiting definition through the actualisation of possibility. It calls us, in other words, to 'take a stand' on who we are by exposing the hollowness of our 'standing place' in the world as defined by Everyone. In individualisation, you don't 'discover' who you really are - but you can begin to invent who you are as an authentic person.

What makes anxiety ontologically (qv) distinct is that, unlike our everyday state, it discloses the world and ourselves as what it and we truly are. What makes it existentially [experientially] distinct is that, in anxiety, we no longer feel 'at home' in the world.

Uncanniness - The disturbing feeling of not being 'at home' in the everyday world (contrast 'being-among'); a translation of the German word 'unheimlich' ['spooky' or 'eerie'] as a description of how the normally comfortable and familiar Everyone-world (qv) feels to us when stripped of its normal possibilities - i.e., in our moments of existential anxiety (qv). When we are tranquillised (qv) we feel at home in the Everyone-world which absorbs us. Anxiety undermines this tranquillity so that we feel disquieted, alienated, no longer thoughtlessly confident about the rightness of our everyday existence.

We normally translate our being-in-the-world (qv) as 'being at home' is the world - a translation apparently validated by the everyday publicness (qv) of Everyone. We are, in other words, encouraged by our sociability to feel comfortable with being an Anyone-self in an Everyone-world - the confidence of Everyone insulates us from insecurity. Heidegger describes this state as one of being 'absorbed' in the world. Anxiety, however, pulls us back from our absorption; the world no longer feels comfortably familiar, our tranquillisation (qv) fails.

Existential anxiety is a state of mind which we seek to avoid because of what it discloses. Anxiety, however, is always 'there', waiting for us at the instant we stop running. In a state of anxiety, specific objects in the world largely fade into the background while the real world - the world of possibilities - becomes 'the thing' which we face. Thus, instead of fleeing away from our being into details - as we do in fallenness - we turn from details to real being-in-the-world (this may well be why existential anxiety most often afflicts us in the dark, when the world's details are less obtrusive). Perhaps more importantly, in our anxious moments the Everyone-world shows itself to be trivial rather than vital. This disentangling of ourselves from the 'herd' means that anxiety can rescue us not only from our lostness in Everyone (qv) but also from our fallenness (qv); it can 'throw us back on ourselves' as a being for whom being ourselves is an issue and who can, therefore, be an individual self (qv).
 

By, in effect, confronting us with ourselves, anxiety forces us to recognise our own being as thrown projection (qv) - self-defining choosers in a world of possibilities with a structure we did not choose - who have lost ourselves in some Everyone (qv). As persons, we are always in the midst of things and events. Within all this clutter we can, in effect, hide from our own existence as potentiality-for-being - we let mere facts take over the definition of our selves and our lives. We are, in this state, 'at home' in the everyday they-world. Anxiety, however, faces us with the fact that, as persons, we are not really defined by the everyday world. This can motivate us to 'get real' with ourselves in a way that nothing else can. And the reason it can do this is because our basic relationship with the world is one of care (qv).

Thrown projection - The integrity of thrownness (qv) and projection (qv), unique to persons, by which we are self-defining choosers in a world of possibilities that has a structure which we did not choose (our thrownness is what we cannot change, our projection is the changeability by which we change ourselves through changing the world). This integrity is a fraught one because our thrownness and our being as projection 'pull' us in contrary directions. As persons, we must realise our possibilities from within a state of affairs that is actual ['thrown'] in that it is not of our making. So our capacity for projection - for realising possibilities as an expression of who we are and will be - is based in a state of affairs that is beyond our control but which we must nevertheless 'take over' and carry with us as the basis of our being. What this amounts to is that, in a world of things which we cannot change, we are responsible for being who we make ourselves through the changes we can make. Accepting the joint reality of both our thrownness and the projection of ourselves on our thrown possibilities is essential to understanding what it is to be a person.

pp.235-237 (Care) - Because our being as persons is one of potential [possibility] there is a real sense in which we are always aimed at the future by 'reaching' for something which we are not yet but will be. This means that the 'is an issue' part of 'being is an issue' (qv) is a matter of personhood being-ahead-of-itself - of charging full tilt into an open future. However, this 'being-ahead-of-itself' is integrated with our thrownness - our already being-in a world - which is why Heidegger talks of personhood as 'thrown' projection. We are an integrity of the actual ['being-already-in'] and the possible ['being-ahead']. It is only within this integrity that our 'being-already-in' in effect buries our 'being-ahead' - our potentiality-for-being - in the world. Thus, being-already-in the world [fallenness, qv] is the place into which we 'flee' the anxiety of being-ahead. This, in turn, is the state from which we can be freed by anxiety.

Being-ahead (personhood being-ahead-of-itself) - A feature of personhood (qv) related to possibility (qv) and our forwards thrust into the future. Because the essence (qv) of persons is defined by their existence (qv), we are an integrity of the possible and the actual. This integrity is part of our temporality (qv) because who we actually are at any given time is defined by a past while our possibilities are realised [actualised] in a future by our present choices. There is, therefore, a sense in which our 'now' behaviour is always moving towards a self that is not yet realised but will be in the future (cf; being-towards). It is this constant, present tense, stepping away from who we are now [our past] and towards who we will be [our future] that Heidegger evokes by talking of our being as persons always being-ahead of itself.
        If you think of being-ahead as the forwards 'thrust' of personhood related to possibility then our actuality [thrownness] provides the contrary 'drag' which has to be overcome by resoluteness (qv). The 'drag' of actuality is examined under the heading of 'being-guilty' in Division Two.

Through the experience of not being 'at home' which it brings, anxiety discloses [lays bare] the basis of our existence as thrown projection fallen into the world. The 'thrown' part of this, exemplified by our openness to states-of-mind (qv) shows us to already be in the world (something which is defined by its past). The 'projection' part, exemplified by our capacity for understanding (qv), shows us to be simultaneously 'ahead of ourselves' - heading into the future where our possibilities will be realised. The 'fallen' part, meanwhile, shows us to be presently preoccupied [absorbed] with the world. What we can note here is the temporality (qv) of past, future and present, in thrownness [past], projection [future] and fallenness [present]. It is this 'three in one' unity of being and time that discloses the unity of our being as care.

Care structure - Being-ahead-of-oneself (qv), being already-in (qv) and being-among (qv) as aspects of a single phenomenon (care) in terms of which inauthentic care can be articulated (qv).
 

Care and articulation - Articulation is the saying of an interpretation (qv). Care, for example, is a unified complex that has its being as a single phenomenon. But care can be articulated [talked about] as being-ahead [the temporal future], being-already-in [the temporal past] and being-among [the inauthentic temporal present]. This is similar to the way in which triangles can be talked about in terms of individual sides even though neither triangles nor their sides could exist as such without each other.

Care underlies, explains and ties together, all the aspects of personhood which have been examined in previous chapters. It is, for example, caring about what happens which explains both moods and understanding because if we didn't care then we wouldn't be affected by the world and wouldn't be motivated to understand it. Care also explains the difference between things ready-to-hand (those that immediately matter to us) and present-at-hand (those that do not immediately matter to us). Care explains our interest in other folk and what they do (solicitude) and our concern for things in the environment. Indeed, every aspect of personhood hitherto encountered 'grows' from care.

Care has the same sort of relationship to personhood as being has to entities - i.e., you cannot find it 'in' persons but you can only get at it 'through' persons. The tripartite structure of care is primordial (qv) because there is nothing under, behind or more primitive than care. But this does not mean that care is something simple. Even describing care as 'Being-ahead-of-oneself embedded in Being-already-in' doesn't really 'say' what care is. And what Heidegger will do, between here and the end of this chapter, is spell out some of the expressions or 'evidences' of care.

pp.244-245 - By this stage, Heidegger is satisfied that he has given a disclosure of personhood - the being of beings to which being is an issue - which is adequate for his purpose (which is, you may recall, to explain both why humans are the only viable way to 'get at' being while, at the same time, their grasp of being is systematically awry). Just by being what we are, persons have a kind of pre-ontological grasp of being - we recognise hammers as hammers, houses as houses, and so on (along with all that entails). For reasons given in Chapters 4 and 5, this pre-ontological understanding turns into the ontological misunderstanding which is normal for us.
        In particular, the foregoing chapters have explained how and why our understanding is 'diverted' into thinking of the world, and ourselves, in thing-like [present-at-hand] terms. Under this conception the world is no longer narrated as a natural-cultural unity of assignments and references (qv) but simply as a collection of things - including ourselves - in space and time. Heidegger now wants to take up that theme again and explain how our taking of the present-at-hand as real leads us into thinking that the collection of present-at-hand things is reality.

Reality - The world (qv) misconceived not as a meaningful whole but simply as a collection of things in space and time. Being (qv), in this case, becomes reduced to substance, and that which lacks substance - meaning, thoughts, feelings, etc. - is dismissed as 'not real' (i.e., lacking being - something which patently they do not lack).

pp.254-255 - The 'collection of things' concept of reality leads directly to scepticism [doubt that the world is meaningful] and thereby to nihilism [faith that the world is meaningless]. It also hides the fact that, far from being a bunch of stuff, the world is actually a web of assignments and references (qv) - the world, in other words, is a meaningful whole. If this wasn't the case, and if the world as a world wasn't disclosed by our being in it, then we wouldn't even be aware that the world contained things; we wouldn't know, in other words, that there was an external world to have doubts about.

pp.256-261 (Truth) - The logical notion of truth, as a relationship between an assertion (qv) and what the assertion is about, hides a problem. If truth is an agreement between words and objects then how can we tell that they agree unless we already know the truth about the object? We can, for example, adjudge the assertion "Picture x is hanging askew" to be true only if we know that picture x - the thing itself - is in fact askew. This, however, suggests that truth is not in the relationship between words and objects but in our original disclosing (qv) of the objects themselves. The truth of disclosure is primary, the truth of assertion is derivative of that. Truth, therefore, must be a kind of 'uncovering', a disclosure, of states of affairs.

Truth (2) - The 'uncovering' of things and states of affairs that is prior to the truth of assertions. I can, for example, truly say that a hammer is broken only after I have 'uncovered' its brokenness - just as someone else can check the truth of my claim only if she, in turn, can uncover the hammer's brokenness. Truth, in this sense, is a function of disclosedness (qv), and untruth is an obscuring [covering] of the truth. It is important for Heidegger's concept of truth that we locate it not in what we say but in how the world is as a world; truth is in states of affairs and the reliability of assertions about states of affairs comes after the 'uncovering' of states of affairs in disclosure.

pp.262-263 - Heidegger's concept of truth reappropriates that of the ancient Greeks who held that truth was aletheia (literally a-lethia - not-hidden).
 

Note two things about this passage: (1) it is our familiarity with things that normally 'hides' them - we use a hammer, for example, without specifically noticing that it is a hammer, the hammer becomes inconspicuous by being a means to an end - and (2) although Heidegger himself limits truth to the uncoveredness of entities, the same logic applies without difficulty to states of affairs. I suspect that Heidegger doesn't make this distinction because, unlike his readers, he never loses sight of the fact that the being of an entity includes the state of affairs in which in has its being. Once you internalise the idea that all being always includes a context of references [a state of affairs] then it becomes easy to let the integrity of entity and reference remain unspoken much in the same way that we speak of our faces, say, without feeling the need to constantly point out that our faces belong on our heads.

p.263 - Uncovering the being of entities (i.e., getting at the truth) is part of being a person in the world because it is a function of concern (qv) which, in turn, is a function of care (which, as we have seen above, is the 'Hallmark' of personhood; qv, care). Indeed, when you think of it, understanding things as what they are just is a matter of 'uncovering' their being; to understand that a hammer is a hammer, for example, requires uncovering it character and place (qv) in the web of assignments and references within which it is a hammer. This means that truth, in the 'truth as uncovering' sense, is a function of personhood - which is itself 'in truth' by being that which discloses.

Being in the truth - That aspect of personhood whereby we can cover, uncover, discover or be mistaken about, the being of entities. Being in the truth does not mean that all our beliefs are true but only that it is part of our essential nature as persons to disclose the being of things; disclosure, which is the ground of truth, is part of our existential constitution. What this means is that we can harbour true or false beliefs. A tree, for example, cannot have false beliefs about itself or the world because it cannot have true beliefs about itself and the world. Persons, on the other hand, can have true or false beliefs about themselves, the world and each other (cf; existentiale).

Note here that we now have three phenomena (qv) to which the name 'truth' can be applied:

1. The 'primordial' phenomenon of truth is the 'there' of being-there - i.e., personhood itself. Persons are the disclosers of being, disclosure is truth, therefore persons are 'in the truth';
2. The 'second sense' is of truth as an uncovering of entities (see definition); and
3. The traditional [tertiary] concept is of truth as an agreement [integrity] between words and object.

In the first place, it is important to always keep in mind that, although truth is an uncovering of states of affairs, it is not a function of things (it is not objective) or of persons (it is not subjective) but of persons-being-in-worlds. Some people are fond of talking as if truth was some sort of thing-like essence that exists independently of us; some kind of meta-narrative 'lurking' in worlds or states of affairs which we may or may not discover. This is not so. There is no Truth with a capital 'T' somehow hanging around 'out there' - there are only states of affairs which we may uncover more or less accurately. Truth itself is, and can only be, a function of persons in worlds because (a) truth is a function of understanding, and understanding is a function of personhood, and (b) truth is 'about' objects and, without a world, there is nothing for truth to be about. So it is only persons in worlds that makes truth possible and talk of truth meaningful.
        This does not mean, however, that, under dichotomy, states of affairs only recently found to be true were somehow false before they were 'made true' by being uncovered. All it means is that, before discovery, such states of affairs were neither true nor false because the concept of truth does not, and cannot, apply to that which is undiscovered or 'hidden'. Truth and untruth are, after all, something that comes into play only when something is disclosed.

There may be eternal or absolute truths but, because truth is relative to persons in worlds, such truths would require eternal or absolute persons in eternal and absolute worlds (although I am not sure what an 'absolute' world would be). The fact that truth is relative to persons, however, does not mean that truth is relative in the sense of "It's true if it's true to you". Truth is uncovering, and what is true is what is uncovered in the world - not what we would like to believe has been uncovered. There is, in other words, 'a truth of the matter' that depends on us to uncover it.

Humans presuppose that there must be truths in the same way that, in thinking about truth, we presuppose that we must be persons. After all, if we weren't persons then we wouldn't be presupposing anything. This is why scepticism is like taking a deep breath to argue that we don't breathe. You cannot doubt anything unless you are a person; truth is meaningful only to persons; and truth, as a disclosedness of the being of things, is a necessary part of persons being persons. An actual sceptic, therefore - one who genuinely lived the sceptical thesis - couldn't be a person even though only persons can be sceptical (cows, for example, are not sceptical about anything because they neither deal with nor articulate the being of anything). It is only the mistaken idea of the idealised subject [the 'pure I'] being 'in here' while objects of knowledge are 'out there' in a world of which we are not essentially part, that makes scepticism even thinkable.
        None of this is to imply that we cannot or should not have doubts about specific [ontic] claims to knowledge. The scepticism which Heidegger refutes is that which asserts that no assertions are true because we don't have access to valid justification. What Heidegger essentially points out is that, if we didn't have access to valid justification, then doubts about its validity wouldn't arise in the first place.

Personhood (4) - The end of Division One leaves us with a definition of persons as embodied beings whose fundamental state is one of being-in-the-world (qv) - a state which is centred on disclosedness (qv) and revealed as care (qv). Disclosedness - the revealing by persons of both their own being and the being of entities around them - may be authentic (qv) but is normally inauthentic (qv) due to our everyday lostness (qv) in Everyone (qv). Care has been articulated as a tripartite unity whereby thrownness (qv), falling (qv) and projection (qv) all matter to us simultaneously - a fact which will become crucial in understanding temporality because thrownness looks to the past, fallenness to the present, and projection to the future. The essence (qv) of each person is defined by her or his existence (qv) - we are defined as who we are in an ongoing manner by how we live our lives in the actualisation of our possibilities. This self-definition can also be authentic or inauthentic and, like both disclosedness and care, is normally the latter. Putting all these together; personhood is an understanding (qv) potentiality-for-being (qv) in a world (qv).
        In all of this we should never lose sight of the fact that being a person is not defined by actuality [who we already are as a result of past events] but by possibility. So, for example, being a teacher is not defined by past actualities [having been] but by what you do with your present possibilities for teaching - our being as persons is always stepping out of what is and into what will be. This is in sharp contrast with the common concept of persons as 'what they are' (cf; facticity) because it takes who and what we already are as no more than the material we have to work with in being who we are (i.e., the self is not a thing but a process of be-ing through time).
 
 

Heidegger is after a complete picture of the whole of human personhood from birth to death. Division One focussed on being-in-the-world and inauthenticity. Now this Division will complete that analysis by focussing on being-in-time [temporality] and authenticity.
        A difficulty which Heidegger faces in explaining temporality is that our everyday concept of time, as a sequence of moments, obscures the phenomenon of being-in-time which he is trying to describe. This is similar to the way that our inauthentic understanding of the world (qv) as an aggregation of things interferes with our understanding of the world as a realm of understood possibilities. The fact is that personhood simply cannot be explained as something that either moves through one moment after another or, alternately, is always 'there' in an ever-moving 'now'. This is because we are never wholly in the present; we always carry the past with us as we move into the future through a world of possibilities. This, in turn, entails that we unite [integrate] the past, present and future with each other in our daily lives. In short, persons are not merely 'among' moments of time any more than we are merely among things in the world.

pp.274-278 - Heidegger will first address the problem of giving a complete account of the whole of personhood given that (a) as possibility-defined beings, we are not complete for as long as we live and (b) when we are complete, in the sense of having run out of possibilities, we will not be complete persons so much as completely dead. Being-towards-death (qv), as a lived experience of persons, will be Heidegger's way into a existential account of death as part of our being. His way into authenticity will be via conscience (qv) or, at least, the desire to have a conscience as an expression of care (qv). As always, these terms will be fully explained only as the chapter progresses.

Death - The ever-present possibility of the impossibility of personhood when we 'run out' of possibilities. As a possibility, death 'impends' but, as a phenomenon (qv) of personhood, death does not impend as a 'someday' actuality because we never experience death as an actuality - death is, after all, the end of experiencing anything. Rather, death [the end of possibilities] impends as an ever-present possibility that we live with.
 

Demise - 'Existential death'; an 'intermediate' state, between dying and death, when we cease to exist (qv) as a person but continue to live as a human. A situation in which we 'give up' on existence and simply await death would be one of demise. Our 'existential death' [demise] is part of our actual death but may precede it by some time.

pp.290-293 - An ontological (qv), rather than ontic (qv), analysis of death focuses on the meaning of death for entities [persons] whose being is one of existence (qv). And what death means for us is an end of possibilities. This needs to be distinguished from the ending of life [perishing] because, for persons, biological life is not the whole story.
        It isn't possible to give a phenomenological account of death because none of us ever actually experience it as a phenomenon. However, we do experience the phenomenon of our being-towards-death [being-towards-an-end of possibilities] as part of our general being-towards (qv) - and this is what an ontological, or existential (qv), phenomenology must spell out. So what Heidegger is after is a description of what the ending of personhood means to us as part of our living 'now' - not death as something which has no meaning until it arrives (at which point it instantly becomes meaningless because we no longer exist) but death as it has a meaning for the existent while they still exist.

pp.293-294 - Death, as the end of possibilities, 'impends' as an ever-present possibility - we have a life-long being-towards relationship with the limits of our possibilities. The being-toward relationship is one of understanding (qv). And a change of focus, from considering death as a 'some day' actuality to considering the end of possibilities as a 'today' possibility, enables us to talk of death as something towards which we can stand in a comprehending relationship. The existential focus of death, therefore, is on a relationship with the limits of our possibilities - a relationship which we realise authentically or not right now.
        Although death impends by threatening us with the end of our existence as possibility, it does not merely impend in the way of an impending storm or visit to the dentist. This is because these events are part of being-in-the-world and being-with others. Death, however, 'cuts off' our being-in-the-world and is specifically non-relational; we are wholly on our own before a kind of emptiness.
 

As we will see, below, facing or avoiding these three facts (which I label a, b and c) will be crucial to our facing death authentically or inauthentically. To define each in turn:
        a. Ownmost - Our death, like our pain, is ours and ours alone; another can give his life for us (p.284/hi), but no one can die our death for us anymore than we can avoid dying at all.
        b. Non-relational - 'When Personhood stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other person have been undone'. The Everyone of social being is made wholly irrelevant by death.
        c. Not to be outstripped - There is no 'getting around' death. It is not a matter of no longer wanting to 'go forwards' but of not being able to go forward (that is, after all, what 'impossibility' means).

The end of possibilities [death] impends as an ever-present possibility that we live with. So being-towards-death (qv) is the actual death-related phenomenon of existence that we live with.
        A coming storm or visit to the dentist impends only for a limited time, but death impends all the time and for as long as we live. This means that death is an issue for our being-in-the-world in a way that no other possibilities are. In particular, the 'non-relational' aspect of death is such that, in our being-towards-death, we stand before our 'ownmost' potentiality-for-being; the possibility which is at issue is no less than our whole being-in-the-world. This ever-impending end of possibilities is something that we always relate to in one way or another. Moreover, the non-relational aspect of death highlights an aspect of our comportment towards all our existential possibilities because there is nothing quite like the end of possibilities to show us just how important possibilities are to our being as persons.

p.295 - Being-towards-death is part of our thrownness (qv) - we are dying from the moment we are born. This means that being-towards-death is a state of being which is built right into our existence as persons: it belongs primordially to our being-in-the-world. This state can be revealed, or witnessed to, by our attitude towards our finitude. As will be shown, facing our finitude, and the anxiety it entails, is a way of recovering from our fallenness (qv).

Finitude - The limits to our possibilities arising from (a) our circumstances, (b) what we are [specific and finite human beings], and (c) the nature of world in which we exist (cf; facticity). These limits are variously logical, physical, psychological and temporal; we cannot, for example, escape our mortality, the 'laws' of logic or nature, our physical limitations, or our social-historical context [the past]. Despite our finitude, to be authentic (qv) we must take responsibility for what we do, and what we cannot do, in the face of our situation. It is the guilt (qv, below), associated with what we cannot do, which authentic folk accept (see 'being-guilty' below).
 

Our attitude towards the end of our possibilities - our being-towards-death - can be variously authentic or inauthentic and is usually the latter as we 'flee' from death just as we flee from our existence as persons. Indeed, the possibility of death is just one among all the other possibilities of personhood from which we flee in our inauthenticity.

Being-towards-death - That inescapable aspect of our existence (qv) - our being-in-the-world (qv) - whereby we are hedged about by the limits of possibility from the moment we are born (Heidegger makes the point that being thrown into death is not a matter of living first and then dying 'later' but of living the life of a person finitely). Our being-towards-death is a fraught state because our authentic being is one of being-towards possibilities (qv); it is part of our potentiality-for-being (qv). Death, however, is a state of not-being-in-the-world, of having no 'live' possibilities before us, so being-towards-death is a being-towards the ever-present possibility of impossibility.
        Because our being-towards-death is ours and ours alone, it relates directly to our own, individual, potentiality-for-being - the unavoidable fact that only we can die our own deaths highlights the neglected fact that only we can live our own lives. For this reason, our being-towards-death can be authentic (qv) even though it is normally inauthentic.

pp.296-299 - Our average everyday being-towards-death is, like our average everyday being-towards life, basically one of evasion, concealment and idle talk (qv). This is all part of our Anyone-self (qv) in which Everyone (qv) provides tranquillisation about existence.
        In Everyone we hide from the responsibility of personhood; it requires no courage to be part of Everyone, and there is no anxiety because Everyone has everything under control. But Everyone is also a kind of oppression in that Everyone doesn't allow authentic courage or anxiety. To not 'play the game' is considered unwholesome and anti-social. Authenticity is suppressed so that the cultivation of a supposed indifference to death alienates us from our ownmost, non-relational, potentiality-for-being - we do not face death because we do not face existence (qv). This evasion is part of our falling (qv) - an evasion of or fleeing from our being as persons. The only 'saving grace' of all this is that it doesn't work and, as with anxiety (qv), it is what we evade, what we run away from, that is most revealing - and is what Heidegger will now try to make visible.

pp.299-304 - As being-towards an end of possibilities, our being-towards-death shows up our potentiality-for-being in a way that is wholly personal [non-relational] - it makes what Everyone does, and Everyone believes, irrelevant. For persons - beings which exist rather than merely live - facing death is a matter of facing impossibility (i.e., the utter contradiction of ourselves as possibility-realising beings). Part of our everyday inauthenticity about death is precisely the avoidance of facing up to this - we 'evade' our own finitude by, in effect, concealing the being of death as a future actuality rather than an ever-present possibility. Because truth is disclosure, 'concealment' [the contrary of disclosure] is the contrary of truth. And if we don't understand our own deaths [our finitude] then we don't understand our existence [our being] as persons - we lack truth, we lack certainty, and we lack conviction.

Truth (2) - This is where Heidegger most clearly spells out the 'double signification' of truth.
      1: Primordially, 'truth' means the same as 'being-disclosive' as a way in which persons behave (qv, disclosedness); in other words, being 'in' the truth (qv) and disclosing truth are part of our being-in-the-world because persons are beings who disclose being, and to whom being is an issue (these are connected).
      2: The understanding of truth as what is disclosed about entities when they are 'laid out' to view (see the first definition of truth above) is derived from truth in the primordial sense.
        Under this schema, the logical concept of truth, as an agreement between words and what the words are about, is actually a tertiary concept that comes into play only after truth in the second [disclosure] sense has been interpreted (qv) and put into words.

Certainty - Certainty is also a 'double' signification. Primordially, 'certainty' means 'being-certain' as a state of being; it is, in other words, a property of persons. To say that a state of affairs is 'a certainty' is derivative of this.

Conviction - A form of certainty, in its primordial sense (above), in which we let the testimony of 'the thing itself' - its truth in its secondary sense of that which is disclosed (qv, truth) - be the sole determinant of our being-towards (qv) it understandingly (see 'letting be').

The idea behind all these terms - truth, certainty and conviction - is that persons disclose (qv) being by dealing with things in their being; we understand hammers as hammers, needles as needles, trees as trees, and so on. We often do this badly, being misled or failing to notice the being of things out of prejudicial conditioning (our concealment of death is a classic case of our refusing to face the truth). But if we do it well - if we let 'the thing itself' be our evidence - then we disclose truth (second sense). If truth is disclosed in this way then we can achieve certainty (both senses). If we then behave ['comport' ourselves] towards the thing itself as a true thing, letting our understanding (qv) and our being-towards (qv) be guided wholly by the truth, then we behave with conviction. For example, a person who rejects an unfashionable racism only because Everyone does will conform to fashionable racism without demure. The person who has rejected racism out of conviction, however, won't be as 'loud' as Everyone (cf; reticence) but will be much harder to corrupt with fashionable racism. Behaving with conviction is part of being authentic as a person.

pp.301-302 - Everyone certainty differs from authentic certainty not as uncertainty but as false certainty; it's a kind of counterfeit. And the fact that we normally 'cover up' the truth of death confirms Heidegger's thesis that persons are normally in untruth rather than truth. Even the attitude towards death that accepts 'we all die someday' is not authentic because it dismisses death as a future actuality rather than really facing it and its significance to our present potentiality-for-being. There is a world of difference between acknowledging that our possibilities will end one day - assuming that our honesty goes that far - and living in awareness that all of our possibilities are vulnerable to impossibility all the time. The first is vague and indefinite, it changes nothing; the second is concrete, and it changes our understanding of who and what we are as potentiality-for-being.

pp.304-305 - Authentic being-towards-death it is not an abstract, theoretical, exercise, but a practical orientation towards life; it affects what matters to us, and thus shows the connection with care (qv) that Heidegger insists that it has.
        We cannot really understand our own being unless we understand the limits of that being. And our relationship to death, as the end of possibility, is actually manifest existentially [in how we live our lives] and, specifically, in the relationship we maintain to the possibilities of our being. It follows from this that authentic being-towards-death is not a matter of 'dwelling' on the subject, or expecting death at any moment, but of accepting our thrownness and finitude - e.g., we acknowledge the specific limits on our possibilities as persons. This will lead to Heidegger's insistence that an authentic being-towards-death reveals that we are related to our own being in such a way as to hold open the possibility of, and impose the responsibility for, living a life that is genuinely whole and genuinely 'mine' (qv) - i.e., we can, if we choose to, live the life of a person rather than just part of Everyone. Facing the truth of our finitude helps us to do this.

pp.306-310 - Death is a possibility which we can anticipate ['get ahead of'] or simply await. What we anticipate (or try to avoid anticipating by merely awaiting) is the state of having nothing, including ourselves, to actualise. This negation of possibility is precisely what throws the possibilities of our life into such sharp relief - it's like walking the boundary of a newly-purchased property in showing us just how much, and how little, we own. So, far from making life pointless, authentic being-towards-death 'offers support for becoming intent on something'. The anticipation of death 'switches on' our ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-being; it provides the impetus for living life authentically.

Anticipation - An authentic response to an unpleasant possibility. For example, we anticipate death as the end to possibilities when we stop dismissing it as a 'someday' [future] actuality and begin to deal with it as an ever-present possibility of life. The mountain climbers who do best, for example, are those who anticipate the possibility of bad weather by always being prepared for it even in fine conditions.

Anticipating death entails projecting (qv) ourselves upon whichever actual possibilities best realise our capacity for genuine individuality - i.e., we practice defining ourselves responsibly by choosing actual possibilities than letting ourselves be defined by what we are, have been, or wish we were. One of the ways in which anticipation does this is by 'wrenching' us away from Everyone. Our death has nothing to do with Everyone - it is ours and ours alone. Facing this fact instantly makes Everyone irrelevant - it individualises us by confronting us with a state of affairs that cannot be ducked, overcome or bought off, one that we cannot talk our way out of or bully someone else into carrying. Facing this demands authenticity from our personhood. Being authentic persons is something which only we can do for ourselves, and we can do this only by projecting (qv) our ownmost [personal and individual] potential-for-being on our being as care (qv). We all care in Heidegger's sense and, as numerous folk have discovered, honestly facing our own finitude changes what we care about by disclosing what the 'my-self' really wants rather than what the 'Anyone-self' is conditioned to want. So the anticipation of death enables us to 'get real'.
        Being authentic as persons is a matter of letting ourselves come 'towards' ourselves out of the future, rather than the past, as our ownmost potentiality-for-being. So the anticipation of death does not mean 'waiting for' or 'dwelling on' or 'actualising' our death of suicide but understanding that we are finite - particularly in our possibilities and the time we have to realise them - and living as authentic persons in the face of that (there is no truth-denial, responsibility-denial, or wishful thinking in anticipation). So anticipation of death is being-towards-the-end which understands and lives that understanding in the present. Anticipation will be linked to resoluteness (qv) in Chapter Three of Division Two and contrasted with 'awaiting' in Chapter Four.

Heidegger pictures authentic being-towards-death this in terms of liberty. Accepting the end of possibilities at face value, which entails accepting that we simply are our possibilities, frees us to be who we are becoming. It shatters the assumption that the Everyone life of actuality that we have been living is somehow obligatory - that we have to behave as we do because that is how men or women, or Muslims or working folk or whatever, behave. This is an uncomfortable place to be because giving up our Anyone-self can itself feel like dying, but it will alter how we select which of our possibilities to actualise.

Remember here that personhood is all about possibilities. So the anticipation of death does not somehow strip away our 'masks' and put us in touch with who we 'really' are (cf; 'authenticity' and 'essence as existence'). What it does, rather, is strip away our misunderstanding of the meaning [ontology] personhood and put us in touch with how we are.
 

Keeping this in mind is especially important when we consider the notions of authenticity, being-a-basis and resoluteness in the next chapter. At no point does Heidegger confuse being an authentic person with uncovering some kind of 'real self'. This is because our self is not something actual to be discovered but someone possible who we invent and reinvent on an ongoing basis as we live our lives.

Death is not only our ownmost, and non-relational, possibility; it is also absolutely certain.
 

The authentic certainty (qv) of death is not the kind that we get through the gathering of evidence. Our certainty of death is of a more primordial kind than intellectual certainty because it is part of our existential certainty of being-in-the-world. The idea here is that our existential (qv) certainty of death, like our existential certainty of life, and unlike our theoretical certainty of death, is not inductive ("Everyone dies, I am part of everyone, therefore I too will die"). It is more that we know that our possibilities are limited because it is possibilities that we live by; there is, if you like, a primordial understanding of death 'built into' our being existent.
        What we run out of at death is not actuality - our race or gender, for example, doesn't change - but possibility. In our everydayness, however, we allow Everyone understanding to define us not in terms of our possibilities but only in terms of our actualities - our race, gender, job, social position, 'destiny', and so on. What anxiety can do for us, in confronting us with death as the end of possibility, is open our eyes to the fact that Everyone understanding of our being is an 'Emperor with no clothes'. We can thereby gain the conviction necessary to live as ourselves - as authentic [self-defining] persons - rather than an Everyone defined Anyone-self.
    The end of possibilities, although certain, is uncertain in regards its certainty because we never know when we will die. This means that our disclosedness of death - a disclosedness which entails both understanding and state-of-mind - is ambivalent. Our understanding is of a certainty - we know that we will die - but our state-of-mind is of an uncertainty because life is uncertain and we simply don't know when we will die. The uncertain certainty of death brings us face-to-face with our thrownness (qv), our finitude, and our anxiety (qv).
 

This anxiety is a framework within which we understand our lives. And only if we are willing to pay the price of living with our anxiety can we achieve an authentic being-towards-death. This is because the anticipation of death individualises us as already shown; to be individualised just is to face the fact that we, and we alone, each realise our own possibilities in our own way and in a manner for which only we can be responsible. It is facing this reality, this responsibility for our own values and meaning, that the anticipation of death can free us for.

p.311 - We now get to a summary of Heidegger's thesis about authentic being-towards-death.
 

Basically this means that, if we stop trying to evade the reality of our existence as persons - an existence defined by possibilities - then we free ourselves from our Everyone (qv) and for the possibility of truly defining our own selves by our own values as realised in our choices. This freedom entails authentic being-towards-death in which there is no self-deception, no hiding from or denial of any reality - including our reality as possibility-defined persons. The 'symptoms' of an authentic being-towards-death are self-government, existential anxiety, and a commitment to ourselves as the only persons who are responsible for who we are and how we live our lives. This is not about discovering who we are or the 'real values' in life but about how we invent ourselves and our values by means of whatever possibilities are open to us. It cannot be anything else because what anxiety and death confront us with is not the 'ultimate meaning of life' but the ultimate 'nothingness' [nullity, qv] of personhood as potential waiting to be filled.

Heidegger stresses, in all this, that he is describing authentic being-towards-death only as an ontological possibility for persons - it is not as if he knows a bunch of authentic people and can describe the phenomenon of their being-towards-death from observation. Indeed, all his descriptions of authenticity up until this point have been hypothetical. They are based on a logical projection of the phenomena of personhood - somewhat like extending a graph from known data to predicted data - but they need confirmation, or what Heidegger calls 'attestation'. So attesting to authenticity will be the next step.

Attestation - When we attest to something we provide evidence for or stand as witness of the truth about a moot claim. So, in putting conscience (qv) forward as an attestation of authenticity - as he will in Chapter II - Heidegger is saying that conscience is the evidence we all have that authenticity, as he describes it, 'beckons' us.

pp.312-315 - In the normal course of events, personhood is lost in Everyone. And the attestation which Heidegger seeks - his evidence of authenticity - is something which breaks through this. What breaks through Everyone is what we commonly speak of as 'the voice of conscience'. And what matters in the attestation of conscience is not what it says, where it comes from or what metaphysical status it has (and he certainly doesn't invoke any divine input or 'moral law' to explain it), but only the fact that conscience (a) exists and (b) 'speaks' to us in contradiction of Everyone. This relates conscience to care (qv), which is the unifying basis of our being persons (and it might pay, at this point, to remind yourself of what care is before continuing). If Heidegger's descriptions of conscience and guilt are right then most of us will have experienced some degree of what he describes to some extent at some time. This feeling of "Yes, I've felt that" is the evidence [attestation] that he is invoking.
 

Note: As he did with 'anxiety' (above), Heidegger uses the words 'guilt' and 'conscience' in a sense that is 'close to but not quite' what they ordinarily mean. To distinguish his specialised concepts from ordinary ['vulgar'] conscience, and ordinary [moral] guilt, I refer to 'existential conscience', and 'existential guilt' - both of which are defined below. Heidegger himself does not use these phrases - he simply uses the terms in a specialised way that he defines in the text. However, because these terms has such a strong everyday presence - and one which can interfere with our understanding of his argument - I find it helpful to add the qualifier 'existential' just to remind us that we are not talking about conscience and guilt as ordinarily understood.

Existential Conscience (translated simply as Conscience in the text) - The suspicion we harbour that the life of 'Everyone' is not all that human existence is meant to be (i.e., not authentic, qv). Conscience in this sense is not a matter of feeling guilty about having done a specific wrong. It is, rather, the call to care (qv) that arises from the uncanniness (qv) of authentic being-in-the-world. We experience this as a kind of haunting, a dim and distant 'call' to 'get real' that occasionally struggles through everydayness into our consciousness. For this reason, Heidegger typifies conscience as a 'voice' which attests to the understanding, and possibility, of our being authentic persons. This voice discloses our being as care (qv) and speaks to us of existential guilt (qv, below). The call of this voice is a kind of discourse (qv) in that it tells us something about being persons.
        Conscience is entirely personal and 'speaks' to us as individuals in contradiction of the tranquillising voice of Everyone - it is what calls us away from 'going along with the crowd' and towards a personal integrity. The 'voice' of conscience expresses the fact that persons are already (a) given over to the task of existing and (b) 'thrown' into a particular set of facts that they did not choose but from within which they must choose how to go on living the life of a person. Existing as a finite persons entails having a responsibility - that of defining ourselves by how we live - which we are ill-equipped to discharge because of what we don't have (e.g., the knowledge, power and resources we would like, or the chance to realise alternate possibilities before we choose so that we can compare the outcomes and decide which is best). It is from this existential responsibility that the Anyone-self (qv) flees. But the voice of conscience recalls us to this fact about ourselves and thereby throws us into an anxious confrontation with our own potentiality-for-being - i.e., our own capacity for genuine individuality. This confrontation reveals our basic uncanniness ('personhood finds itself in the very depths of its uncanniness') in which we realise that we are (a) never all that we could be, (b) not something with which we can fully identify, and (c) not something to which our personhood can be reduced. This is why we can never authentically regard ourselves as fully 'at home' with the life into which we find ourselves 'thrown'. It is the fact that the voice of conscience is not 'at home' in the world that makes it sound to us like the voice of something 'distant', something 'outside' of who we are (which it most decidedly is not).

One thing which existential conscious has in common with ordinary conscience is that it speaks to us of guilt.

Existential Guilt (translated simply as Guilt in the text) - When Heidegger speaks of guilt, he is not implying the breach of some kind of moral law. He is, rather, speaking of the logical impossibility of actualising all of our possibilities - there is always, and necessarily, something left undone. Our existential guilt [the 'Guilty!' of existential conscience] arises from the various kinds of 'not' [nullity, qv] that mark our being as persons. There is, for example, all the possibilities that are not realised because each choice we make always closes off other possibilities. Perhaps more than this, there are all the possible selves that we could have been but are not. This awareness of what is not done and not do-able - our existential guilt - is the ground for ordinary guilt as the awareness of a failure, debt or wrongdoing.

Nullity - All the 'is not' and 'cannot be' with which we are surrounded because of our finitude and worldly situation. Part of our nullity is all that we cannot do because we are finite beings; part of it is all the possibilities that we are forced to neglect when we choose one alternative over another or others; and part of nullity is death - the end of possibilities into we are heading and which 'rides at our shoulder' on every step of life's journey. As will be seen, nullity has an important connection with conscience and anxiety.

Only persons have a conscience because only persons care, and conscience discloses (qv) something about us as persons.Disclosedness is, of course, a primordial fact of personhood. But the interesting thing about this particular kind of disclosedness is that it has the form of a 'voice' which seems to speak to us from somewhere that we are not. It is, in other words, a form of discourse (qv - and remember that discourse is one of the three aspects of disclosedness along with understanding and state of mind). What is more, conscience 'says' to us that we are guilty; in Heidegger's words, it 'summons' us to our own and most private being-guilty.

Being-guilty - The state of being-in-the-world as care (qv) in the face of nullity (qv). Being-guilty is simply part-and-parcel of being a person (see 'existential guilt'). It is not a matter of being guilty in any moral sense - i.e., not a matter of being condemned for having done something wrong - but of being the kind of entity who is thrown (qv) and fallen (qv).
        We can relate to our own being-guilty either inauthentically or authentically. To do so inauthentically is to 'close ourselves off' from the reality of our being thrown and fallen. To do so authentically is to fully grasp our finitude (qv) as thrice qualified by a 'not' - (1) the 'no longer' of our past, which we cannot change but which determines our present and future possibilities, (2) the 'not done' of all the alternate possibilities which we 'waive' when we choose to actualise one possibility at the expense of others (which, of course, we do every time that we make a choice), and (3) our non-being [death, qv] as an ever-present possibility of a total end to our possibilities. As will become clear in due course, when we are being authentic, our resoluteness (qv) projects itself on our potential for being-guilty by accepting responsibility for our finitude as well as our circumstances and what we do with them.

To the 'call' of conscience there corresponds a possible hearing of that call. As a possibility of personhood, this 'hearing' amounts to persons wanting to have a conscience - to be self-governing and self-responsible. This, in turn, amounts to a (usually suppressed) wanting to be our own selves - the 'choosing to choose a kind of being-oneself' which provides a motive, an impetus if you like, for resisting our own lostness in Everyone. We will come to know this 'choosing to choose' to be ourselves in the face of our finitude under the heading of 'resoluteness' (qv).

pp.315-317 - Only persons have a conscience because only persons care (qv), and conscience discloses something about our being as care. This disclosure is something very personal about our own being-in-the-world, about the 'there' of our own being-there (qv); conscience doesn't speak to Everyone but to us (it is part of our 'mineness', qv). This matters because, popular mythology notwithstanding, in listening to our conscience we are listening to ourselves.
        In listening to Everyone we are failing to listen to ourselves. This 'not listening to ourselves' is part of our lostness (qv). Before we can recover from this lostness, we have first to 'find' our lost selves, and it is the voice of conscience - the 'voice' of our 'myself' - that (a) calls us to do this and (b) locates the 'my self' which is lost and scattered in Everyone. This matters because, if Heidegger's thesis is correct, authenticity must be possible despite our chronic lostness. We must, somehow, be able to pull our own selves out of our own inauthenticity. But how are we to do this if we are totally lost in Everyone? The answer to this is that we are not totally lost - there is a part of our being which continues to witness to the possibility of our being authentic by 'whispering' to us that our normal inauthenticity isn't as right as it seems. This 'part' is our conscience. One aspect of this is that existential conscience is more than just occasional and specific feelings of guilt related to distinct acts of commission or omission. Conscience is more a kind of unease that niggles away at our confidence that the Everyone-life is all there is. It 'calls from afar to afar' and reaches that suppressed remnant of ourselves that wants to call us back to ourselves.

Perhaps the best illustration of what Heidegger is getting at here would be that of an addict. Addicts are 'lost' in their addiction in a way similar to Heidegger's thesis that we are all lost in our Everyone. But, somewhere in all addicts, there is an awareness that the addicted way of life and the self is realises are counterfeit in some sense; they are 'there' but not authentic. This awareness is real enough that it has to be suppressed - the addict has to work at keeping the 'voice of conscience' quiet. Because this suppression requires constant effort, the voice of conscience is never entirely stilled. And in this lies the hope of recovery because only the addict herself can recover from her addiction. Analogously, there lurks within all of us a suspicion that the 'Everyone-life' is inauthentic in some way. We normally suppress this suspicion, with some success, using the same kind of lies, dishonesty, and self-deception, that an addict does. But the suspicion never quite goes away; it's a kind of 'haunting' that occasionally breaks through all the bullshit and busyness of everyday life. This 'haunting', which is our only hope for recovering from our addiction to Everyone, is what Heidegger calls the 'voice' of conscience - a voice which counts as a kind of discourse because it has something to say.

pp.317-319 - As discourse, conscience tells us about our own personhood. It tells us nothing about the world and nothing about Everyone, but it does disclose something about us as individuals; the call of conscience makes Everyone irrelevant and, in effect, calls us to ourselves. Conscience doesn't tell us anything propositional - in this regard it is silent - what it does, rather, is 'summon' us to ourselves from out of our lostness in Everyone. It's a call; a summons to be a 'my self' rather than an Anyone-self. This call amounts to a demand from our neglected personhood that we start caring about it.
 

This means that, although the call of conscience doesn't have a specific propositional content, it does have a meaning in that it, in effect, calls us away from one place (Everyone) and towards another (ourselves as authentic persons).

pp.319-325 - To speak of conscience as a 'call' implies the existence of a caller. If conscience is the call of personhood to itself then the caller is obviously not ourselves as commonly understood; after all, conscience 'calls' against our expectations and against our will. The 'voice' speaks to us individually but tells us what we don't want to hear. This is where the folk-psychology of conscience as the voice of God or of some kind of law comes from; we don't like the call of conscience and feel as if it comes from 'beyond and over' who we are - we objectivise conscience.
        In contrast to the usual notions, Heidegger's argues that the 'caller' in conscience is ourselves as the potentiality-for-being from which we are hiding. We are thrown (qv) into a world where we must realise our potentiality-for-being in the face of limited but real possibilities. We make ourselves at home in this world by hiding in the everydayness of an Everyone life. In the mood (qv) which goes with this hiding, we 'close off' our thrownness. Conscience, however, manifests the uncanniness (qv) - the alienation [not-at-home-ness] which is related to our anxiety (qv). So Heidegger suggests that the 'caller' of conscience is precisely this suppressed potentiality for personhood which doesn't feel 'at home' in the world. This caller is not the 'real me' because who we really are is always being defined, in an ongoing manner, by whatever choices we make - and whether we make our choices authentically or inauthentically. Nevertheless, conscience is a symptom of our self-alienation as persons. It seems 'others' than us only because no 'me' is quite as alien to the fact-defined Anyone-self, which hides from its potential for authentic existence, as the possibility-defined my-self which confronts its own potential for authentic existence.
        Because the 'caller' of conscience is anxious about our potentiality-for-being in the face of our thrownness, conscience manifests itself as the 'call' of care.
    The notion that the call of conscience is the voice of a power outside of ourselves, or the call of a universal law, is actually a way of fending off conscience by making the voice of something other than ourselves. But recognising that conscience is in each case 'mine' doesn't justify dismissing it merely subjective. Conscience is the call of ourselves to be free of our own self-oppression and, as such, is a universal call of personhood to care (qv) as individuals and in our individual circumstances - conscience, then, is subjective but not 'merely' subjective because it is as much a part of our personhood as is language or care.

Freedom - Remember that, for Heidegger, freedom is always the freedom to be ['freedom for', see freeing] - in this case, the freedom to be an authentic person. The longing for freedom, which attests to our neglected personhood, is not a call to licence - even though that is how Everyone interprets it. It is, rather, a call to authentic personhood - which is a call to responsibility because authentic persons simply are conscience-owning, self-governing, individuals. Herd-driven selves - those for whom freedom from Everyone is licence - are not authentic persons but appetite-driven human animals.

That the intensity and content of conscience varies from person to person and time to time is not relevant to Heidegger's thesis. It is the mere fact of conscience in persons which he cites as evidence that authentic personhood beckons us even in our normal inauthenticity (think again of the addiction analogy). Moreover, something always 'follows' from the call of conscience - it is either suppressed or acted on. Both suppression and acting on (a) show an understanding of the call of conscience, and (b) require a certain way of being who we are. In particular, both suppression and acting show an understanding of conscience as the voice of some kind of responsibility - the voice of existential guilt (qv).
 

As a phenomenon, and regardless of our local circumstances, conscience always pronounces us guilty. If, as seems to be the case, our conscience tells us something about ourselves, then we need to know what we are guilty of. As it turns out, all that we are actually guilty of [responsible for] is being persons. This existential guilt of personhood does have something to do with a nullity (qv), a something 'not' done. The trick though is that our sense of guilt does not arise from any moral 'not done' but, on the contrary, our sense of indebtedness, our sense of something not done, arises from our existential being-guilty. In other words, our sense of responsibility does not arise from laws or moral codes; rather, laws and moral codes arise from our sense of being responsible - we generate them because of being the kinds of entity we are.
        The nullity ['nothingness'], which precedes and underwrites our existential guilt, arises from our thrown projection (qv). As persons, we realise our possibilities within the state of affairs in which we find ourselves. This state of affairs - which includes our own biological and psychological makeup - is not of our making. So our capacity for projection - for realising possibilities as an expression of who we are - is based in a state of affairs that is beyond our control but which we must 'take over' and carry with us as the basis of our being.
 

Being-the-basis - The basis of our existence is the set of facts which we have to work with in the definition of ourselves. But the basis of our being as persons - our being as possibility - is not our self-chosen selves. It is, rather, a set of 'what I am' facts - a genetic and historical inheritance, a natural-social environment - which we did not choose and over which we have little or no control. In order to define ourselves as who we are - in order to Be persons - we must 'take over' this basis of existence which is not ours. This 'takeover' of inherited circumstances which have, so to speak, been thrust on us, is what is involved in being-the-basis of our own personhood.

As well as being built in to our thrownness, nullity (the 'not-ness' surrounding our existence and being) is also built into our capacity for projection. After all, in projecting upon any one possibility we thereby waive all sorts of other possibilities - the time spent at a job, for example, cannot be spent in other ways at the same time. And we all know the concern we feel - sometimes vague and fleeting, sometimes downright scary - that the possibilities closed off by a choice may have proved more valuable than the choice we made had we gone that way. We can, however, never be certain that the choices we have made were optimal because we cannot go back in time and make a different choice in order to see how it works out in comparison with the choice we actually made. This means that there is no end of 'not' possibilities to haunt any being with care as its being. Because our being as persons is one of thrown projection (qv), and there is an 'is not' or 'can not' involved in both thrownness and projection, there is a nullity at the very heart of care (i.e., at the very heart of our being persons); there is a 'what we cannot do' because of our thrownness and a 'what we have not done' because of our projection. This unavoidable 'not' is the basis of our being-guilty (qv).
 

This means that our existential being-guilty is a not moral guilt. Not matter what we do, the mere fact of being finite means that something will remain undone, some possibilities will remain unrealised whether we know it or not ('being-guilty is more primordial than any knowledge about it'). And it is this fact that existential conscience reveals. In the uncanniness which we try to avoid in fleeing from anxiety (qv), personhood comes face-to-face with the fact that we are finite [limited], that our existence is contingent, that we are headed into nothing, and that most of our possibilities will not be realised. Everyone tells us that, if this is the case, then we shouldn't bother caring (this is the 'call to evil' that finds expression in so many pseudo-existentialists) - after all, if conformity to Everyone is our whole morality then freedom from Everyone is freedom from al morality. But existential guilt cannot be avoided by any form of personal existence, so the call of conscience - which is a call to being-guilty - calls us only to authentic guilt. Put simply, we can be guilty for what Everyone does or doesn't do, or we can be guilty for what we personally do and don't do. We can be responsible for what we do, and thereby for what we don't do, only if we genuinely choose which possibilities to realise - we turn away from the Anyone-self and stand as a responsible my-self before the world. And this, of course, is a matter of projecting our ownmost potentiality-for-being onto our situation - whatever it may be. There is, in this, not an escape from guilt but a kind of freedom to be guilty on our own terms.
        Authentic being-guilty entails accepting responsibility for our situation and what we do with it. As part of our normal inauthenticity, we give responsibility for our lives away to circumstances - we use our facticity (qv) as an excuse for not being our own selves. Authenticity (qv), however, demands that we project (qv) our ownmost potentiality-for-being on our own being-guilty. This entails taking responsibility for (a) the particular set of circumstances ['basis'] into which we are thrown and (b) the particular projections we make upon that basis. This makes the inescapable guilt of our existence 'mine' instead of 'theirs'. It's a way of 'facing facts', and being ourselves in spite of the facts, rather than using the facts as a hiding place. A readiness to take responsibility for our being in this way, which is a matter of being indebted to ourselves, amounts to choosing to have a conscience rather than repressing it. So being-guilty is not a matter of condemning ourselves under some moral or political scheme but of accepting authentic self-government by, in effect, putting ourselves under the rule of our own capacity for individuality and responsible self-choice.
        Because our fallenness (qv), our hiding in Everyone, is a matter of avoiding anxiety, responsibility and conscience, part of authenticity is wanting to have a conscience in the common sense of wanting to listen to the 'voice' that alerts us to our own guilt (and note that if this is the case then folk who don't have a conscience, or who deny their conscience, are neither morally corrupt nor sociologically crippled but merely inauthentic). So not only does existential conscience call us to authenticity, but authenticity creates a conscience in the common [existentiell] sense. Or, to put it another way, we do not feel guilty [have a conscience] because we have done wrong but become aware of doing wrong because we are existentially guilty. This is probably why only good folk worry that they are not good enough while everyone else is always confident that they are in the right (our inauthenticity hides itself from us in much the same way as self-deception is invisible to the extent that it is successful and only shows itself when it fails).

Although the 'call' of conscience is experienced as critical [negative] it is, in fact, a positive phenomenon in that the recognition of unrealised possibilities confronts us with our being as fundamentally possibility-realising entities. This is the attestation to [evidence for] a suppressed authenticity that Heidegger has been seeking.

pp.341-344 - If conscience attests to authentic potential-for-being then it should give us some idea of what authentic personhood is like. And, in this section, we get a precis of authenticity based on our common experience of conscience.

Conscience is a 'call' and, in understanding that call, we let ourselves take action on our own cognisance and take responsibility for that (noting that guilt is directly related to responsibility). So this is obviously an aspect of authentic personhood.

Understanding the call of conscience in this manner is a matter of wanting to have a conscience - of wanting to be self-governed by a kind of inner 'moral compass'. This wanting also discloses an aspect of our authentic being to us.

Disclosedness consists not only of understanding but also of discourse and mood. The mood invoked by conscience is one of anxiety. So wanting to have a conscience entails preparing ourselves for anxiety. The discourse of conscience is the call itself. There is no authentic counter-discourse to this call because, if we understand it, we simply leave Everyone and, in effect, return to ourselves (the call, remember, is not propositional - it tells us nothing about the world; it is, rather, a kind of summons to be a person rather than a Anyone-self). So both of these are aspects of authentic personhood.

Silence is a mode of discourse in that only those who can speak can choose not to speak - to keep silent. As the 'Anyone-self' is given to idle talk (qv), our authentic being calls us in and to reticence.

Reticence - The contrary of idle talk (qv). Everyone folk are full of confidence only because they are adrift from the strict discipline of having to adhere to certainty (qv) for the truth. Authentic persons, however, lack this false confidence and so are reticent - cautious, inclined to reserve judgment and 'hang back' from idle talk.
        Reticence is an 'echo' of the uncanniness (qv) which we experience in anxiety. So the discourse of conscience is calling us out of our everyday wordiness - it 'takes the words away' from the idle talk of Everyone.
 

Resoluteness - The kind of resolve required to be an authentic person despite our normal lostness in Everyone. Resoluteness is an authentic being-oneself through the disclosive (qv) projection (qv) and understanding (qv) of what is actually possible at a time. Genuinely 'being your own person' is difficult because we are all deeply embedded in some Everyone. To break the grip of Everyone we need to understand our own being as persons, accept our own finitude and being-guilty, accept existential anxiety, and project our selves on our actual [thrown] situation as it is in responsibility for ourselves and our actions (qv, certainty and conviction). This combination of understanding, acceptance, responsibility and reticent determination is 'resoluteness'.
        Resoluteness is a matter of 'letting oneself be called forth to one's ownmost being-guilty as opposed to being guilty'; this does not entail responding to our existential guilt (qv) with self-condemnation but by accepting personal responsibility for our own lives within our thrownness (qv).
        To own your own self in resoluteness is not a matter of finding your 'true' self and being that person - especially as it is precisely your self in this sense which can be overtaken by circumstances and/or 'die' to itself in anxiety (qv). Rather, to own yourself is a matter of understanding what is actually possible and choosing to be who you are on that ground - even if that is no longer the ground on which you have been defining yourself. So say that you have felt 'flattened' by a sense of futility. This sense undermines your sense of self; life seems meaningless. In such a state you have three broad alternatives: you give up, you bullshit yourself, or you accept the state of affairs, seize whatever possibilities remain open to you, and forge ahead with the process of being you in spite of the nullity (qv) around you. Taking this last alternative is resoluteness.

Resoluteness and disclosedness are intimately related. Disclosedness is primordial truth - i.e., not truth as a judgement (the traditional notion) but as an existentiale (qv) of our being-in-the-world. We are 'in the truth' in that we disclose being - we rightly or wrongly reveal things and persons (including ourselves) as what they and we are - just by being persons. The primordial disclosure, in this case, is that we are persons - i.e., entities whose essence (qv) is defined by existence (qv). In resoluteness, we have arrived at the truth of personhood which is most primordial because it is authentic - only in resoluteness are we 'truly' being persons (and, as we will see below, only in resoluteness do we even truly disclose our actual situation).

pp.344-345 - Authentic being-oneself is quite contrary to the kind of detachment from the world which many 'spiritualities' teach - we don't move 'out' of the world but from being lost and fragmented in Everyone to being solidly located in-the-world. Resoluteness 'returns' us to our particular place in the world, to specific concernful relations with actual entities and solicitous relationships with other persons, in order that we may (a) discover what our possibilities really are and (b) seize upon these possibilities in a way that is genuinely our own rather than dictated to us by Everyone. Resoluteness is therefore indefinite in the sense that being resolute will not specifically tell you what to do because (a) your actual possibilities will depend wholly on your particular situation, and (b) it is only through the disclosive understanding that comes about through acting resolutely that your actual situation - hitherto obscured ['covered'] by the ambiguity (qv), curiosity (qv), and pursuit of novelty of the 'Anyone-self (qv) - is given clear definition. Resoluteness, in other words, is about facing the facts; it is not a prescription for dealing with them.
        Everyone discloses ambiguity and a lack of resolution ("...the Anyone-self gets 'lived' by the commonsense ambiguity of that publicness in which nobody resolves upon anything but which has always made its decision" - anybody who's been on or dealt with a committee knows this phenomenon). When resoluteness calls us out of Everyone, it doesn't call us to licence but to responsibility for our social situation. In other words, among the facts for which we accept responsibility, and upon which we project our being, is the Everyone in which we are embedded.

Situation - The actual state of affairs which is concealed by Everyone (qv) narratives but disclosed (qv) by resoluteness (qv). Normally, in our being-there (qv), we interpret our 'there' (qv) in conventional and public terms which 'close off' our actual possibilities. Only the true 'there', disclosed by resoluteness (qv), is the 'situation'. The situation contains a definite range of actual possibilities which become the world (qv) in which we are authentic. It is to the situation that conscience (qv) calls us.

In resoluteness, we take a kind of action which (a) is an expression of our being as care (qv), and (b) takes place within a world. The world in which we act normally includes a situation which we are not truly disclosing. This is because, in our everydayness, we are in untruth more than in truth and our world is a mix of Everyone beliefs and wishing. Resoluteness does not first take note of this world and then act in it; rather, it discloses, and thrusts us into, our situation by acting concernfully in the world (resoluteness simply is authentic care). Resoluteness, in other words, reveals the context of its own activity.
        This is important because, normally, we wait for possibilities that we desire to turn up while ignoring the less attractive possibilities that actually exist. This means that we often don't act because the optimum possibilities aren't there. If, however, we anticipate the absence of optimum possibilities - as is reasonable given our thrownness - then we train ourselves to recognise the situation. In other words, we school ourselves to live with the possibilities that are there rather than (a) live by the mere actualities that are there, or (b) not live while we regret the possibilities that are not there.

To summarise what Heidegger is getting at in this chapter: Only persons experience conscience, and this experience attests to something about us as persons. Conscience has to do with guilt which, in turn, has to do with responsibility. We normally suppress or 'talk down' our conscience and, when we do hear it, we chronically misrepresent it as the 'voice' of some external agency to whom or to which we owe a duty. The duty, however, is not owed to God, other people, or to a moral law, but to our own personhood - or, if you like, our own authenticity - and conscience is actually a 'call' to become who we are authentically, to exercise our own agency. Because it is the anxiety of being who we are that we flee from in our everydayness, the 'voice' of conscience seems to call us from 'outside' - but this 'outside' is actually the uncanniness (qv) that we experience in anxiety. So if you were to ask yourself "Why should I go to the bother of being authentic as a person?", and come up with the answer "Because you owe it to yourself?", then this chapter spells out what the 'owe it to yourself' part of that answer means. And, if you want to know what authentic personhood is likely to be like, then you have to consider the way of life that your conscience calls you into when you honestly listen to it - a life of acting reticently but resolutely, responsibly and in acceptance of the existential anxiety which being a thrown-projection in the world - i.e., a person - entails.

The previous chapter suggested a connection between willingness to anticipate death and a willingness to accept responsibility for who and what we are [resoluteness]. In this chapter Heidegger will confirm this link because anticipation and resoluteness both have to do with human finitude. Anticipation has to do with facing finitude as mortality [death]; resoluteness with facing finitude as nullity (qv). Together, these picture each moment of our existence as haunted by (a) the possibility of our own impossibility, (b) the absence of full control over our own thrownness, and (c) the negation ['waiving'] of competing but unrealised possibilities.

pp.352-354 - Understandably, given the complexity of his preceding analysis, Heidegger begins by summarising where we have got to so far - with the added point that, unlike ordinary guilt, existential guilt (qv) is not a variable. What we have to accept is that we are finite and surrounded by the 'not' of unrealised possibilities no matter what we do or don't do. Resoluteness, therefore, in accepting our existential guilt, is authentic only when we accept that guilt as a constant in our lives. This, in turn, requires facing our own potentiality-for-being 'right to the end' which, of course, entails an authentic being-towards-death (qv) - i.e., anticipation (qv). Thus,
 

What this amounts to is that we cannot authentically confront our actual choices unless we grasp the full extent of our finitude - i.e., the emphatic limits of our power (the various kinds of 'not' with which we are surrounded; including, for instance, the possibility that all our efforts could come to naught in an instance). This is not a matter of merely projecting ourselves upon whatever possibilities happen to lie closest to hand, but of acting like persons whose choices are limited both in number and in the time we have to make them. In other words, we abandon our Everyone half-truths and wishful thinking in order to 'get real' about what we are doing when we live the lives of persons.
        Resoluteness also entails 'letting yourself be called forth to your own, personal, being-guilty'. This means that resoluteness, by taking responsibility for our thrown situation and what we do with it, calls us to exercise our capacity for moral self-government [the state of 'having a conscience'].

pp.354-358 - Here we get back to the idea that personhood is a 'null basis of its own nullity'. Our 'null basis' is that set of circumstances which we inherit from our thrownness (qv); i.e., the already-defined facts over which we have no control but from within which we must define ourselves as who we are going to be. The 'nullity' is our death - the ever-present possibility of the impossibility of existence. This possibility is ever-present because death is not something tacked on the end of our lives but something which challenges our being as care (qv) every moment that we live. The significance of our being a null basis of our own nullity is that, as persons, we are defined by our possibilities which, be definition, are 'not yet'. This process of self-definition by possibilities, however, is based on what we are not - the actualities over which we have no control [our not-us or 'null' basis] - and headed towards our not-being [our nullity at death]. Accepting this double-finitude puts are being persons into perspective. Only authentic being-towards-death [being-towards nullity] makes our responsibility as persons - our being-guilty - stark (for one thing, facing the reality of our situation as surrounded by the kind of 'nothingness' which we face in anxiety (qv) certainly makes all the politicking of daily life seem unutterably trivial). This is why, if the call of conscience is understood, (a) our 'lostness' in Everyone becomes apparent, and (b) we become capable of developing a conscience in the ordinary sense.
        Resoluteness, as a phenomenon, confronts the truth of our existence as persons; we are thrown projection; that is, we are self-defining and forward-looking beings who are saddled with a situation (qv) that we didn't choose, over which we have little or no power, and which is indifferent to our plans and wishes, and who must deal with this understandingly.
        Resoluteness, as a practice, is not a fixed or permanent state because part of our being as persons is being free to select among our real but limited possibilities. This means that if we are resolute - if we accept our situation as it is - then we are free not to be resolute. This, in turn, means that we have to keep choosing to be resolute - as with all the choices which define who we are, we have to keep repeating the choice. So the choice to be honest, for example, isn't made 'once and for all' but needs to be made every time that the opportunity to be honest or dishonest arises. The result of this is two-fold: (1) it undermines [subverts] our normal irresoluteness, and (2) it sets our whole being as persons free because it is not just something that slips into fixity but something which needs to be constantly iterated.

Anticipatory resoluteness - A state of being, related to authenticity (qv), in which we (a) face the ever-present possibility of impossibility with understanding - this is the 'anticipation' part - and (b) take responsibility for our situation (qv) and what we do or don't do with it - this is the 'resolute' part. Anticipation and resolution are integrated, and related to authenticity, in that both are ways of accepting our finitude without hiding in Everyone (qv). Heidegger defines anticipatory resoluteness as a state in which persons understand themselves with regard to their potentiality-for-being in such a manner that they will go 'right under the eyes of death' in order to 'take over' themselves (i.e., their existence, qv) in their thrownness.

With the notion of 'anticipatory resoluteness' we get back to the theme of wholeness with which Division Two began. The 'anticipation' part understands that death [the end of is possibilities] is an ever-threatening fact of human existence. Resoluteness entails accepting, and taking responsibility for, our situation (qv) as it is. Together, these two call us to an authenticity which involves and affects our whole being as persons throughout our whole lifetime.
        Anticipatory resoluteness is not a way of 'overcoming' death, but an understanding which, in effect, gathers our fragmented self-definition from Everyone and concentrates it in our hands. We stop putting faith in Everyone beliefs about some 'larger' meaning of life, the eventual triumph of justice and/or some 'other world' which will make things alright in the end. Instead we accept our situation as it is and take responsibility for what we do with that in the definition of ourselves as a whole person - it is, in other words, a call to personal integrity in the face of our actual situation. In a similar manner, wanting to have a conscience - wanting to be responsible for ourselves - is neither a call to 'drop out' from the world nor, alternately, to any kind of political action to change the world. Wanting to have a conscience, like anticipatory resoluteness, simply locates us in the real world as a whole and self-responsible self.
        Remember here that, as always, Heidegger is not prescribing an ethic but simply trying to describe a phenomenon - in this case, the phenomenon of authentic personhood. The question of whether or not we should be authentic cannot be answered on the basis of this description but only is we use the description as a Specific Fact Thesis in a moral argument based on a General Value arrived at quite independently of, and prior to, the description.

Authenticity (2) - 'Personhood is authentically itself in the primordial individualisation of the reticent (qv) resoluteness (qv) which exacts anxiety (qv) of itself'. In other words, the human who is being authentic as a person is a self-defining individual, quietly dedicated to the realisation her own potentiality-for-being-herself in the face of the thrownness of her situation (qv) - a situation which includes being-guilty (qv) and being-towards-death (qv) - even though this entails paying the price of existential anxiety (qv) rather than fleeing from it into a tranquillising Everyone.

pp.364-366 - Division Two began with concerns about how to describe the phenomenon of personhood as whole. In a purely 'static' sense - looking at what a person is 'frozen' in a particular moment of time - a complete description of human personhood can be given in terms of our existentiality, facticity, and fallenness. Existentiality refers to the fact that our essence as persons - our nature - is realised in the process of living our lives rather than being pre-determined by some or force outside of us. Facticity refers to the fact that we have an inherited constitution and context which we carry with us and from within which we must project ourselves in our self-realisation. Fallenness refers to the fact that, because of our social embeddeness, we normally define ourselves inauthentically in Everyone terms. Fallenness is our normal everyday way of being persons. It is the unity, or integrity, of these three which constitute the 'me' through which we normally express our being as care.

Care is a matter of caring about what happens. The word refers to the fact that, as persons, we can, do, and must, deal with the world in such a way that things, people and events in the world matter to us in some way. Being able to care or not care, always being variously concerned, indifferent or hostile, is a matter of attaching value or disvalue to facts. And this inescapable ability is the aspect of personhood which explains all the other aspects of our being-in-the-world. Together, existence, facticity and fallenness are the 'I' that each of us has to work with. This 'static' self is not, however, enough to account for the whole of existence. And the important connection here is that each of these static aspects of 'I' has a temporal equivalent: our existence 'points' at the future ('being-ahead', qv), our facticity points at the past ('being-already-in') and our fallenness points at the present ('being-among', qv).
        Being-ahead of ourselves is feature of our personhood which, like existentiality, is related to possibility. Persons are a living integrity of the actual and the possible; we simply cannot be understood without reference to the dual role that facticity and possibility play in our existence. This integrity is part of our temporality because who we actually are at any given time is defined by a past - our being-already-in-the-world - while our possibilities are realised [actualised] in a future by our present choices. There is, therefore, a sense in which our 'now' behaviour is always behaving 'towards' a self, and a world, that is not yet realised. This is our being-ahead of ourselves. Our being-among the world is a matter of being 'at home' in the world as part of our fallen state. The tripartite integrity of existence with being-ahead, facticity with being-already-in, and fallenness with being-among, describes the whole phenomenon of personhood by locating our being as care both in the world and in time.
        In each case the first (existential) and second (temporal) tripartite structure of care exactly 'fits' with the other - one in space, one in time. Thus:
 

Uniting all six of these elements is the 'key' to understanding personhood - especially given that the phenomena of death (qv), conscience (qv) and guilt (qv) are, as phenomena of personhood, also all 'anchored' in care.

This understanding of personhood has implications for an understanding of who we are as a self. If Heidegger's analysis is correct then the 'I' or 'self' is not the ground or substrate of personhood but the integrity which ties the all aspects of care together in space and time. This means that the self ['I'] must be conceived existentially - as a kind of living process of care - rather than a thing-like essence [soul, self, subject, mind, consciousness, or whatever]. Because being a person is a lived process, another way of saying this is that temporality is the basis of the primordial unity of the care structure (qv); in other words, temporality is the meaning (qv) of care. This will be explained shortly.

pp.366-369 - In giving his account of the self, Heidegger starts with then dominant link of the self or 'I' to the activity of thinking. Heidegger develops this notion by pointing out that persons don't just 'think' but 'think something'. If we simply 'think' then the 'I' reverts to being some kind of thinking substance [a mind or soul]; but if we 'think something' then the 'I' is a process going on in the world (the world provides the objects of our thinking, feeling, believing, hoping, fearing, and so on). This means that, in saying 'I', we actually express ourselves as being-in-the-world - a 'doing' rather than a being present-at-hand. This might not be what we think we are expressing; after all, we use the word 'I' simply to indicate ourselves in the everyday [fallen] sense. So the everyday use of 'I' covers our being-in-the-world by thinking of the self as a thing. In everyday life our care expresses itself in what Heidegger calls a 'fugitive' manner - 'the Anyone-self keeps saying 'I' most loudly and most frequently because at bottom it is not authentically itself'.
        The essence of an 'I' is its existence, so understanding the 'I' existentially must involve considering our potentiality-for-being (qv). Selfhood, in this case, is to be discerned existentially only in our 'authentic potentiality-for-being-one's-self - that is to say, in the authenticity of our Being as care.' Authentic potentiality-for-being-one's-self is what provides the constancy of the Self - the aspect of 'I' that remains 'me' throughout various times, events and changes. The self-constancy of the authentic self signifies her or his anticipatory resoluteness (qv).
        The upshot of all this is that (a) the self is not a thing or thing-like essence and (b) our being as care does not need to be located in a thing-like, self. The self, it will be remembered is 'that which maintains itself throughout its manifold experiences'. And what is really happening is that our ongoing [temporal] existentiality [our existence, facticity and fallenness], as the 'me' of care, provides the structure - the framework or vehicle - of our self-constancy [our endurance as 'me' over time] - existence, facticity and fallenness are not what we are but what supports who we are. The structure of care, therefore - our relating to entities, events and states-of-affairs as more or less valuable to us - includes the phenomenon of selfhood. To put it crudely, the human self is not a fact-defined thing but a kind of value-oriented process - not something we are but something we do over time. It is the constancy of the self over time that makes an analysis of temporality - our being-in-time - so important to an understanding of personhood.

Self-constancy - Our integrity as persons, particularly over time.

What Heidegger is dealing with here is commonly known as the problem of diachronic unity - how can someone be the same 'me' as a baby, child, adult and old person, given that our bodies and personality change so much over time? The usual answers are either that we have an enduring 'essence' [soul, self, mind, or whatever] or that our memories provide the link. These answers face far too many serious difficulties to be satisfying. But Heidegger's answer is that we are 'in' time temporally - we, in effect, wrap ourselves in time; holding the past, present and future together is something we do. Our temporal unity, as beings who simultaneously engage our having been [past] and will be [future] in our present being-in-the-world, entails that we integrate past, present and future just by being persons.
        It will be seen from this that the real 'problem' of diachronic unity is the traditional, and faulty, conception of time that it presupposes. This concept of time is of something basically made up of 'moments'; there's an unknown number of unborn moments lurking in the future, an uncountable number of dead moments buried in the past while, in the present, a constant stream of essentially disconnected [individual] moments flows by us on their journey from the future to the past. Moments are, under this concept, the 'atoms' of time. And the problem of diachronic unity then arises as the question of how we maintain ourselves as who we are from one moment to the next. This concept, however, is misleadingly artificial because, in actual fact, the past and future are both living to us - we carry one with us, through the present, into the other in which we already 'have a foot'. Thus the past, present and future are not discrete entities, as the traditional concept has them, because we unite them in our ongoing self-definition as persons.

Atomic time - Not a phrase used in Being and Time, but a concept implicit in everyday thinking in which time is thought of as a flow of experiential moments which are the 'atoms' out of which larger time periods are constructed.

pp.370-372 - Heidegger is after the meaning of being. Our being as persons is care (qv). So what is the meaning of care?
        Meaning (qv) is a matter of grasping the possibilities of an object of attention by projecting our possibilities as persons upon it within the wider context of the world. This projection not only discloses the 'upon which' of the object - although this is the primary signification of meaning - but also our own possibilities as persons. This means that when we seek the meaning of care - i.e., that which unities our being as persons - we are touching on the whole integrity of our being-in-the-world.
 

The meaning of objects of attention discloses their being what they are, and it is only because persons deal with being that the question of meaning even arises.

pp.372-378 - The link between care as an existential unity and care as a temporal unity, the link by which temporality is the meaning of care, is most evident in resoluteness (qv) because resoluteness has to do with turning our potential for authentic personhood into an actuality. This 'turning' presupposes an openness to time because any such transformation is, and must be, oriented towards the future - i.e., towards a future self (qv) which we have decided to be. But, to be authentic, this looking-forwards entails also looking back - i.e., acknowledging ourselves as having already been and our past as an inescapable part of our present. To this linking of future and past, resoluteness further discloses the current moment of our existence and presupposes our openness to the present; so the present is its existential context [its 'there'].
        It can be seen here why Heidegger insists that only authentic personhood, a condition from which we are normally removed, can reveal the whole of out being as persons. Authenticity entails resoluteness which, in turn, invokes a tripartite temporality (i.e., future, past and present).

What this all tells us is that the meaning of authentic care - the basis of its primordial unity - is temporality.

Temporality as the Meaning of Care - Temporality indicates the unique capacity of persons to integrate past, present and future concerns into our existence. Care, constituted of existence (the future being-ahead-of-itself), facticity (the past being-already-in) and falling (the present being-among), indicates that, as persons, the things and events in the world matter to us because it is through them that we realise our possibilities and thereby our essence (qv). Meaning concerns possibility. So to say 'temporality is the meaning of care' is to point out that our capacity for holding the past, present and future together is what makes care possible. And this, of course, is absolutely right; we simply couldn't exist as care - as beings who, from a basis informed by the past, define their essence by choosing present possibilities aimed at future states of affairs - if we weren't able to unite past, present and future into the process of being persons.

The tripartite unity of care has already been defined as being-ahead-of-itself, being-already in, and being-among; these correspond to our openness to the future, past, and present, respectively. So this is the link between being and time. We should not, however, interpret this link in ordinary [inauthentic] terms. In particular, four points should be noted:

1. Temporality is not the condition of being located in time in the thingish sense of just being 'there' as time passes but as living in a way that unites [integrates], and involves a variously authentic or inauthentic awareness of, a past, present and future. This matters for interpreting the being of persons because our ways of life are in fact modes of temporality [ways of being in the past, present and future]. Temporality particularly involves being in a unity of past, present and future. As persons we 'point' to the future, but only in terms of our past experiences; the past for us is not merely past but still around as having-been. Selves, in other words, do not merely 'have' a past, we live our past; we exist on the terms that our past makes available to us. This 'going back' to what it has been [repetition, qv] constitutes, together with a simultaneous 'coming towards' the future and 'being with' the present, the unity of our temporality.
2. Temporality, as an essential part of the being of personhood, is not some kind of external framework within which we just happen to exist. It is not, in other words, be scientific time; we exist not 'in' time as such but 'as' a temporality of 'done that, doing this, and am going to do the other'. This entails that our idea of time (and history) is a product of our innate temporality and not the other way around.
3. The past, present and future are not three distinct 'things' but a single, integrated and living, phenomenon. This follows from the analysis of care as a unity.
4. Whereas time is a relationship between events, temporality is an activity - a person-generated process of temporalising, of putting events in a temporal order. Temporalising (qv) is, in turn, the condition or ground of what Heidegger calls the 'ecstatic' quality of temporality - its 'standing outside of itself [its own unity]' as past, present, and future.

Having been - Refers to the fact that (a) who we have been in the past determines who we are now and (b) what the world has been in the past determines our present possibilities. Because the past is never dead for persons - we 'take it up' into our being and, in effect, carry it with us - our having been is part of our present being and, thereby, our future being. Our moods (qv) are basically an attunement (qv) to our having been - they disclose the world as seen through the 'eyes' of what has been [our past experiences]. Our having been is part of our facticity (qv) and our fate (qv); it often repeats itself (qv, repetition), and to avoid it is inauthentic (qv).

Ecstasis (sing. plural: ecstases) - The three ecstases are the future, the past [having been] and the present, seen as modes or expressions of human temporalising. The Greek root 'ecstasis' literally means 'standing outside' (sometimes translated 'rapture'). The idea is that the past, present and future 'stand out' from the basic unity of our temporality; they are not separate 'things' but all outgrowths of the same organic unity - like sprouts from the same stem. As will be shown, below, the ecstases of future, present, and past, actively pull us towards different temporal horizons (qv).

What we have here is a personal phenomenon - the unity of past, present and future as it is actually lived by persons. The common and artificial measures of time - clock time or historical dating - come after this existential phenomenon as socially useful adjuncts which, for all their usefulness, hide true temporality (i.e., temporality as it really is). We have conditioned ourselves to think of time as a kind of tape-measure made up of moments that we are alongside one at a time. But human time - existential time - is actually a lived unity of past, present and future which we create, within which we live out lives are persons, and which unites our lives into a whole. In other words, the categorising of events as past, present and future is merely something that we do with our temporality.

pp.378-380 - Because persons are possibilities who define themselves as persons by the possibilities we actualise, we are primordially open to the future. Because the possibilities which we actualise, and which define us as who we are, are not actual either 'now' or in the past, this openness to the future is actually a 'coming towards (or being-towards) ourselves' - i.e., a progress towards who we are becoming by the realisation of our possibilities. Being open to the future includes being-towards-death (qv, see also 'anticipation'). Being-towards-death, in turn, has to do with our finitude because being 'thrown' into death does not mean that we live and then we die but that we 'exist finitely' - we live our daily lives as finite beings. This finitude includes a limited temporal being-in-the-world. Thus, although 'time' goes on even when we are dead, temporality - our past, present and future - is the horizon (qv) of our personhood. This entails that, unlike abstract scientific time, lived human time is seriously finite

pp. 384-401 - Heidegger repeatedly stresses the integrity of human being in all its facets and locatedness. In this case the integrity of disclosedness, as understanding, state-of-mind, fallenness and discourse, is such that each informs the other; every understanding, for instance, has an emotional content (mood, qv), and every emotion has its cognitive content. What he now intends to show is that all the aspects of disclosedness are particularly integrated in temporality (which itself is integrated with care). Put crudely:

• Understanding 'points' to the future because we understand what it is to be a person only when we understand the role of possibilities in our definition. This corresponds to the being-ahead-of-ourselves aspect of care (qv).
• Our being thrown into states-of-mind (qv, moods) shows how our present existence is determined by the past (the already-having-been of care).
• Our fallenness, which corresponds to the being-among of inauthentic care, is very much our openness to our present environment (one of idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity).
• Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility in terms of our thrown (past), falling (present) and projective (future) being - none of which is primary, and none of which makes sense except in the company of others.

Whenever we recognise a genuine possibility, we thereby relate understandingly to our own existence as persons. In our normal everydayness, however, this understanding is flawed because we allow ourselves to be defined by circumstances, convention and wishful thinking rather than by taking charge of our actual possibilities. On the face of it, this would seem to indicate that our everyday temporalising lacks a future (inauthentic persons usually believe that they are living in the present but, by being defined by what already exists, they actually live in the past). Heidegger, however, argues that our everyday temporalising of the future merely takes oblique forms - namely that of awaiting (qv) an inauthentic future.

Awaiting - Basically a passive, and inauthentic, mode of anticipation (qv). Anticipation is a matter of projecting (qv) ourselves upon whichever possibilities best realise our capacity for genuine individuality - i.e., we define our essence as persons by choosing our own existence deliberately and with understanding that our time and power is limited. In awaiting, however, we simply wait for the future while letting ourselves be defined by what we already are or have been.

Inauthentic futurality is a temporalising that awaits the future instead of anticipating (qv) it - the future is not something with which we are actively and responsibly involved in creating right now. We are, in effect, awaiting our own potentiality-for-being. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the way in which folk wait for the weekend or holidays or retirement, or a journey or whatever, as a time when they will really be able to 'just be themselves' (our 'postponing' of death as a future actuality, rather than a present possibility, is another example of awaiting). Our potentiality-for-being in these cases is still future-oriented, but only towards a 'one day' when we have the time or the money to realise it.
        The point here is that our temporalising is disclosed even in inauthentic understanding. Authentic temporalising anticipates the future right now, inauthentic temporalising merely awaits it; these two are different but, in neither case, does the temporalising go away.
        Much the same kind of misrepresentation goes on in our inauthentically being in the present. Being in the present inauthentically is a matter of being-among (qv) what is 'there'. Authentic temporalising of the present involves 'now' being 'the moment of vision' - the time when we actively encounter our actual possibilities for the first time.

Moment of vision - Authentic being in the present as a location of possibilities. The moment of vision is not a kind of 'tipping point' or moment of revelation. Rather, the idea is that, to anticipate the future in authentic temporalising, we must tear ourselves away from being distracted by the proximal objects of our concern - and especially from the normal Everyone understanding of our own being in terms of such objects. We must then resolutely sight (qv) the present as the location of actual possibilities and, therefore, of a real existentiell choice. This discloses the actual resources of our present situation both in their individual reality and their relation to our individual possibilities. The moment of vision, therefore, is the present as a time of resolution in which we find some sort of grounds for going forwards.

Making present - The inauthentic alternative to the being in the present as a moment of vision. When we busy ourselves with what is immediately at hand then we merely happen to be there at the same time as our possibilities. This making present is related to being-among (qv) in that it is a way of merely being in the midst of our possibilities rather than understandingly engaged with them.

There cannot be a moment of vision [a time of resolution] without a recognition of our thrownness (qv) and our attunement (qv) to our thrown situation. Sight, after all, has to do with disclosing what is 'there' as it is. And, perhaps more than this, there can be no authentic grasping of the future without an equally authentic grasping of the past because the past determines both the present and the future in very specific ways. Thus, to be authentic, we must acknowledge the past as something which is not under our control but still constitutive of who we are. What this amounts to is that, if we are to genuinely exist (i.e., if we are genuinely going to become who we are) then we must 'own' the self which has already been created. This 'coming back' to our self is what Heidegger calls 'repetition'.

Repetition - A 'coming back to ourselves' by owning our past in the present choices by which we 'become' who we are in the future. Repetition 'hands us down to ourselves' and thus has an important role to play in maintaining who we are as a self throughout all the physical and psychological changes we go through during our lives (see 'diachronic unity'). Because the essence of persons is their existence, rather than any kind of predetermined fact, we are always becoming who we are. But this 'becoming' is grounded in, and informed by, what we already are (our 'having been') - we, in effect, carry our past with us. When we do this authentically, by owning our past, we acknowledge who we have made ourselves in our present moment of vision (qv). This 'repeating' of the past in acknowledgment is repetition.

Bringing all of these concepts together gives us an authentic temporalising as the anticipating repetition that maintains the integrity of who we are, as so far defined by our way of life, with who we choose to go on being. This is not a matter of never changing but of owning our past at each step into the future; it's a matter of being one person throughout life rather that failing to integrate our existence from birth to death (i.e, the temporal horizon of our lives). In contrast to this, an inauthentic awaiting (qv) of the future presupposes a mode of making present (qv) in which we (a) remain absorbed and 'scattered' in our immediate environment, (b) disclose the world as determined by Everyone, and (c) thereby endure an inauthentic mode of projection. In doing this we 'forget' our past.

Forgetting - The inauthentic alternative to repetition (qv). Existential forgetting is not a lapse of memory but a refusal to own the past as part of who we are. It is, in other words, a kind of repression. Moreover, it is a kind of repression in which we not only repress an awareness of just how much the past determines our selfhood and our mood but also of the fact that we are suppressing a large part of who we are (i.e., we 'forget' that we are forgetting who we really are). Dismissing the harm we have done by word, deed, or omission, is a common form of forgetting.

To sum up, we temporalise [create a temporal context for our lives] authentically when we anticipate the future and acknowledge the past in a present moment of vision. We temporalise inauthentically when we await the future and forget the past while busying ourselves with what is merely 'at hand' in the present.

p.389f (State-of-mind) - In his analysis of temporality (pp.384-401) Heidegger had it that states of mind are attunements dictated by past experiences. On the face of it, however, it might seem that some moods - fear of an immediate threat, or hope for the future, for example - are not past-oriented but aimed at the present or future.
        Against this, Heidegger argues that the kind of fear invoked as a counterexample actually triggers inauthentic temporalising by being more animal-like than person-like. Consider, for example, a man who is suddenly threatened by an attacker. If this man reacts instinctively to what is there then any notion of the future is subordinated to the more urgent task of continuing to exist; questions about how he should or should not exist simply vanish. But surely what we have here is the behaviour of an animal rather than a person; an action of instinct rather than reason. Such behaviour is perfectly understandable, and Heidegger is not sneering at such fear. His point is that instinctive [animal-like] fear invokes inauthentic temporalising because someone reacting as a human animal, rather than a human person, puts their personhood on 'Hold' and sacrifices responsibility for the future to a more urgent present-tense need to simply go on living.
        Contrary to reactive fear - which occurs in animals as well as persons - exclusively personhood moods like anxiety obviously provoke an authentic temporal grasp of our own existence as thrown into the world.

In anxiety, we do not face a specific threat but a kind of 'nothing' which confronts us with the uncanniness (qv) of the world and in the heart of our being.
 

When we find ourselves adrift in a world whose contents have momentarily lost their involvement for us, two facts are disclosed; namely that (1) no 'what is' exhausts the possible significance of our existence and (b) we are nevertheless already thrown into a world and are thus forced to choose only from among whatever possibilities the world allows. This, of course, 'points' to the past as our 'having been' (our thrownness). For this reason, existential anxiety tends to embody authentic temporality.
 

Thus Heidegger still insists that, despite the supposed counterexample of fear, all moods have the structure of being indicative of the past.
 

This applies even to indifference, a vague mood which seemingly squats wholly in the present, and hope, a mood which seems to be wholly open to the future. Hope, for example, is not as future-oriented as may first seem because it is actually related to the alleviation of some burden that we carry from our past.

p.396f (Falling) - Fallenness is a form of inauthenticity in which we become absorbed with being with others, idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. In this context, fallenness represents our temporalising of the present and, for the purposes of his temporal analysis of everydayness, Heidegger focusses particularly the curiosity part of fallenness. Curiosity, like fallenness as a whole, entails inauthentic temporality. Fallen curiosity (qv) drives us from one object of attention to another in a way that constantly consigns objects of attention to a past that is of no interest. This is not because of the new object's relevance to our being but only because it is new. Curiosity is thus an almost a text-book case of the awaiting (qv) which forgets (qv) and makes present (qv) and is, consequently, almost a paradigm of inauthenticity.

It might initially seem a bit odd that fallenness should be analysed on seemingly equal terms with understanding, state-of-mind and discourse - it suggests that fallenness, an inauthentic state, is as innate to the constitution of human persons as are the other two. In a way, it is. Fallenness is, if you like, the default position for persons simply because location in some sort of society [a being-with] is the necessary starting point of our personhood - we, for example, do, and have to, learn our language, emotional repertoire and self-identity from others. We can emerge from this, but only by tearing ourselves away from idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. This means that being fallen does come built into being a person - is not an 'optional extra' - it just that it doesn't come built-in as an inescapable condition.
 

Authentic personhood, in other words, is a possibility for us even though it is normally actual.

p.400f (Discourse) - Discourse (qv) unites understanding, state-of-mind and fallenness because it articulates the intelligibility of the world in terms of our being persons - a being made up of thrownness, fallenness and being projective.

Discourse manifests its worldly being in and as the use of language. Language normally restricts articulation to a particular tense ('is, 'was' or 'will be', and so on). But the use of tenses in language would not itself be possible unless the being of those who employ language was itself simultaneously open to all the temporal ecstases (qv). Perhaps more to the point, any articulation of care, in any one tense, will inevitably invoke the other tenses if it is to be adequate. For example, our capacity to project ourselves upon a given possibility - a capacity which 'points' at the future - requires that we utilise our present situation. But our attunement to the possibilities and constraints of our present situation is a product of the mood which arises from our past. Thus any discourse about our being - a discourse which articulates whatever is actually going on - will unite all the ecstases in a single narrative.
 

In terms of temporality, therefore, thrownness and state-of-mind both emerge from the past, fallenness dwells among the present, understanding and being projective both point to the future, while we unite all of these in our discourse.

p.401-418 - Division One showed that the care structure (qv) grounds our existence. If the meaning of care is temporality then our existence [our being-in-the world] must also have a temporal grounding. Our normal [everyday, inauthentic] mode of being-in-the-world is one of 'concernful being-among (qv) the ready-to-hand (qv) within the world'. And it is this 'everyday' mode of being who we are - the mode of being persons with which we are most familiar - which will continue to inform Heidegger's analysis of temporality.

Transcendence - Heidegger uses the word 'transcend' and its cognates primarily in the sense of 'being more or other than the sum of parts'. Persons are time-transcendent in the sense that, as thrown and fallen projection, we are always more than our present properties and circumstances; we relate our selves to possibility as well as actuality.

In his present context, Heidegger is naturally interested only in the time-transcendence of persons in the world. But note that, as possibility, human existence is actually transcendent in two senses:

1. by being 'aimed at' or 'reaching for' the future (the present, as defined by the past, is the temporal dimension of thrownness (qv), but the temporal dimension of possibility is the future), and
2. by 'reaching beyond' itself because all of its constitutive possibilities organize it 'outwards' toward (a) other entities in the world and (b) the world in its totality.

Although our normal modes of being-in-the-world are inauthentic, they can neither exist nor be explained without reference to authentic being-in-the-world. The link between the temporality of care and our normal being-in-the-world - which is actually a matter of merely being-among the things of the world - is provided by involvement.
 

Letting something be involved has the character of understanding that belongs to a towards-which (qv). Inauthentic understanding has the temporal character of awaiting. Awaiting has the character of a retaining (below) which is a way of making present (qv). And this is the kind of temporality which belongs to our everyday 'busying' ourselves with the world.

Retaining - A way of dealing with entities in the world that, in effect, isolates them as 'before us in the present'. Retaining is a narrow involvement (qv) which excludes a wider understanding both temporally and thematically (qv). An example of this would be a scientist working on something which is capable of doing enormous harm but which fascinates or 'absorbs' her to the extent that she doesn't bother to concern herself with the wider implications of what she is doing. By retaining the object of her fascination in this way, the scientist loses not only the whole being of what she is dealing with - the being to do with assignments and references - she also loses herself in her involvement with it (cf; lostness).The kind of forgetting (qv) involved in this inauthentic temporality is that of 'losing' ourselves in our tasks.

The point here is that both authentic and inauthentic modes of being-in-the-world express involvement (that is the sameness which unites them) but in different ways (that is their difference). The equipment (qv) that we work with in a daily lives normally has the property of being inconspicuous and unobtrusive. But when something ready-to-hand is studied 'objectively' then its nature changes - it becomes conspicuous. And what Heidegger wants to explore now is the ontological meaning (qv) of our being able to turn from our normal mode of being-in-the-world, a mode which accepts ready-to-hand things as inconspicuous, to the scientific mode which treats them as conspicuously present-at-hand. A 'turn' which, once again, is unable to explain itself and so needs reference to authentic personhood.

pp.415-418 - The world itself is also transcendent in the sense of being more than the sum of the entities in it. This is because the world is a web of assignment relations (a) within which any given object is encountered as ready-to-hand [handy] or present-at-hand [unhandy] and (b) without which nothing could be understood as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. The world, understood in terms of significance (qv) and its components ('in-order-to' etc.), is the 'there' of our being-there. As persons, our being is one of care, and the meaning of care [that which makes it possible] is temporality. It is the ecstatical unity of temporality - our holding together of past, present and future as an horizon (qv) - that allows for the world to be transcendent. Thus Heidegger talks of his ecstases (qv) as horizons to which ['whither'] we are carried away or dragged out.
 

In other words, each aspect of this threefold horizonal schema - the past, present and future - 'points at' an aspect of our worldly being as transcending, or standing-outside-of, itself (which is precisely why Heidegger calls these aspects of temporality 'ecstases'). So each ecstasis is one respect in which our distinctive mode of identity (and hence of our world) is one of transcendence (qv). Accordingly, we must understand the fundamental unity of personhood and the world as a function of our temporality 'holding everything together' within the horizon of our past, present and future, lives.
        Note here that once again we are back with a dynamic [ecstatic] being - being as 'doing' - rather than the static idea of our somehow being in the world and time merely as one object among others. The world - as a web of assignment relations to which we relate understandingly - is already presupposed just in the fact of our being persons. The complex structure of care (qv) - especially in the way it carries the past into the future through the present - already means that persons are more than the sum of their present parts. The innate temporality of persons means, in turn, that the world is also more than the sum of its present parts. In other words, the fact that we exist (a) in the world and (b) in an active unity of past, present and future, makes both ourselves and the world transcendent in the sense of being more than the sum of our or its present parts.

p.418f - The spatiality of personhood is no more a matter of merely being 'in' space than temporality is a matter of merely being 'in' time.
 

What this means is that spatiality, as a phenomenon (qv), is a function of personhood in the same way as is temporality. So existential spatiality is not scientific space any more than temporality is scientific time; in each case, scientific space and time as abstract coordinates are convenient measures that follow, and cover, the actual human phenomena of spatiality and temporality. In particular, our 'taking space in' is a matter of directionality and deseverance (qv) - we 'order' space according to our projects and interests. So here Heidegger explains spatiality in terms of 'making room' for ourselves in terms of a 'zone of operation' for our own being-in-the-world. In short, our spatial existence as persons in the world is primarily a matter of placing ourselves in relationships of closeness-to and remoteness-from various objects according to the requirement of our practical activities. This presupposes a disclosure (qv) of the practical world - the world of our practical concerns - and thereby of the world itself; a world which is founded in, and bounded by, the horizonal ecstases of past, present, and future.
        The point here is that, although space and time are fully integrated as a framework of our being, it is temporality, rather than spatiality, that is the more fundamental of the two. Bringing something existentially close (qv, closeness) discloses the structure of care. And care, in turn, is temporal - indeed, temporality is the very meaning of care. If spatiality is a function of care, and care is grounded in temporality, then temporality precedes spatiality as a necessary condition for it. This is why understanding our nature as temporal beings - an understanding which is chronically overlooked in both religious ans scientific thinking about persons, is essential to understanding the nature of persons as being-in-the-world.

Our everyday existence is mostly a matter of habit - of conventional and repeated ways of behaving that maintain themselves, with small variations, over historical time. And it is historical time that Heidegger will now consider.
 

Stretched - A metaphor invoked to capture the idea that our existence as persons is not confined to a succession of present moments but always simultaneously drawn out over an extended period [unity] of time - i.e., the horizon of our past, present and future, from birth to death.

pp.424-428 - The notion of everyday human existence being lived out on a day-by-day basis, and our personhood being 'stretched out' along a sequence of days, is implicit in the temporality and care-structure (qv) that underlies our being persons. But being 'between' birth and death, or of between the past and the future, is not a matter of simply being 'there' in a transient moment of time. We exist as simultaneously projecting (qv) and thrown (qv) - we are both forwards and backwards looking at the same time. So it's not as if we start with a 'I am me' kind of self-identical self who is then stretched out over so-many days; rather we are always and already both 'ahead' of and 'behind' ourselves (qv, being-ahead and having been). So our openness to the world, which is part of our openness to being, is grounded on a temporalising which issues in a history. This grounding - the creation of a personal history - is what Heidegger, on the model of temporalising, calls 'historising'.
 

History - A product of our temporalising (qv) by which we integrate our having been (qv) into who we are and will be. History is no more a chronology of events than existential time is a string of discrete moments. Rather, our history is a temporal unity by which we persist as a coherent being over time. World history - the story of historical events and changes in societies - is derivative of our personal historising (qv).

Historising - The process of creating a history (qv) by locating events in time.

pp.428-429 - The source of history is our temporalising and, as with the previous untangling of temporality and time, grasping history as a existential phenomenon (qv) requires separating the phenomenon from the popular, and inauthentic, ideas which cover it.
 

Although neither temporality nor history can be reduced to merely being 'in time', we do experience life as being in both. So the notion of 'within-timeness' will follow the ontological exploration of history.

pp.429-430 - Heidegger first gives four common notions of history. The most basic is of something 'dead and gone' in the past. Within this concept, it is sometimes admitted that the past has an effect in the present. This admission can, in turn, connote the second idea of history as a kind of context within which present events have a meaning. A third notion invokes the idea of changes over time - especially changes in human societies. Finally there is the notion of history as what has been 'handed down to us' as the Everyone narrative of how things are. All of these concepts have in common that they treat history as something we are 'in' rather than a context we create (and note the similarity between this kind of thinking here and in regards to the world or time - both of which are likewise treated as 'things' that we are merely 'in' rather than contexts we create).
        A problem with the above ideas of history is illustrated by the notion of historical artifacts. Such objects are, in fact, still present; they are historical only in the sense of belonging to a world (qv) which has a past ontologically derived from the temporalising of the world by persons.

It might pay to once again stress here the distinction between ontological and ontic. In this context, the word 'ontic' basically has to do with what things 'are'. The word 'ontological' has to do with what states of affairs mean. The point here is that history, like time and the world, is a meaningful phenomenon for persons. So when, for example, we talk of an historical artifact, we mean a present object, the meaning of which lies in the fact that it belonged to a world that once existed as a meaningful environment for persons but no longer does so. Ontically, the artifact is just an old jug or chair or whatever; it is only historical ontologically.

History is meaningful, and meaning is a function of care (qv). So what matters here is that it is persons, rather than 'Time' or the world, who are fundamentally historical. And our historicality is not a matter of any 'presence' in times past - I am not, for example, historical just because I lived through days in 1948, 1949, 1950, and so on. My historicality - my carrying of my past with me as meaningful - is part of who I am as a person.

pp.434-436 - Our historicality (qv) is based on our temporalising which, in turn, is the meaning [ground] of care. The resoluteness (qv) with which we exist authentically is a matter of accepting the thrownness (qv) of our situation. We, in effect, 'take over' our own past and hand it down to ourselves as an inheritance. This 'handing down' of our past to ourselves is the primordial basis of history in terms of our fate (qv) and/or our society's destiny (qv).

Fate - Our 'taking over' of our particular situation (qv) as defined by the being and circumstances which we inherit from the past (qv, thrownness). As such, fate is (a) always that of ourselves as a specific individual, and (b) not about a pre-determined future. Fate is wholly about the past and our understanding of how the past constrains our particular possibilities. The only external force acknowledged in the concept of fate is that of a 'have been' which we cannot change and which determines our present character and situation. Thus, to say "It is my fate to be faced with such-and-such a problem" does not imply any sort of extra-human agency or 'plan' - only that we are finite beings facing a world in which past events, over which we no longer have any control, have resulted in circumstances with which we must now deal. Our past is fixed, but our fate - our confrontation with the past - is something we can variously accept or avoid. We grasp our fate once we own the thrownness of our situation and act resolutely within it. The communal equivalent of our individual fate is our society's destiny (qv, below).
 

An example of this would be someone who has a health scare through a bad lifestyle choice such as overeating. So say that an obese person has a mild heart attack and is warned that she must take certain pills, lose weight, and exercise more, if she is to avoid a major, and possible fatal, coronary incident. Initially she determines to do this but, over time and with improving health, her resolve weakens (the lure of 'comfort, shirking, and taking things lightly' - those possibilities that are 'closest at hand' - tempt her away from resoluteness). To strengthen her resolve, she must, in effect, 'go back' to the original situation which gave rise to the resolution in the first place. She must, in other words, keep 'handing' her past down to herself. She mightn't like having to watch her diet and do regular exercise after years of sloth, but it is her 'fate' to have to do so if she is going to survive.
        The main point here is that personhood is a power, but the possibilities and impossibilities over which we have no control - our fate - both limit and undermine our power. The 'superior' power with which we face our fate is that of our freedom to do as we choose with whatever we have. So, for example, we cannot change our birth facts - race, gender, social-historical context, genetic inheritance, and so on - but we can and do choose what to do with them. Our only 'fate' in this case is the situation (qv) within which we exercise our freedom; it is this situation which must be grasped resolutely if we are to be authentic. As thrown beings, however, we are embedded in a particular physical, social and cultural setting in which some possibilities are open to us and some are not - no twenty-first-century New Zealander, for example, can genuinely be a witch any more than a twelfth-century witch could by an Air Hostess. This means that we all inherit a social, cultural and personal history which dictates a kind of 'menu' from which we must select our possibilities. Obviously we must 'read' this menu in order to understand our possibilities. This is extremely difficult given that our inherited ways of understanding ourselves is in terms of an Everyone menu. If we remain lost in Everyone then we no longer have a fate but merely a destiny (qv).

Destiny - The historically-determined facticity (qv) of a community; the communal Everyone equivalent of individual fate (qv). Destiny comes about because the structures and values of any society or culture (a) are shaped by the past actions and ongoing choices of its members and (b) determine the range of our own possibilities in much the same way as do our own individual past choices.

Where resolute individuals have a fate, irresolute [inauthentic] individuals can only have a destiny because their 'fate' is decided for them by their absorption in Everyone. This does not, however, imply that fate and destiny are alternatives; our personal fate is necessarily bound up with the destiny of our society - as the fate of ordinary folk caught up in economic or political turmoil demonstrates.
 

pp.437-439 - The importance of all this is that only a person can have a fate because only temporal beings can grasp the past, in the present, while choosing for a future. Morever, it is the grasping of the past - the acceptance of what it really means for the present and future - that constitutes authentic historicality.
        Our capacity to choose how to live - and thereby who to be - is real. But we cannot choose not to have that capacity or not to exercise it. Moreover, we have to exercise it (a) in a world that we did not define and (b) on the basis of a culturally-constructed understanding into which we are thrown. So our freedom as persons is rooted in a lack of freedom, and our power as persons is rooted in powerlessness. We cannot transcend these constraints, but we can be authentic persons if we accept them resolutely (qv, resoluteness and anticipatory resoluteness).
        Because part of our being-in-the-world is being-with (qv) others, our authentic historising includes a degree of 'co-historising'. The world we inherit is, after all, a social one in which the possibilities we inherit come down to us through various shared structures and practices. These possibilities are, moreover, typically taken up by us only with the cooperation of others - you could not, for example, work as an Air Hostess unless some folk make planes and other folk fly in them. At the same time, however, these socially-enabled possibilities can persist over time only if individual persons continue to commit themselves to the possibilities they embody. If we do this authentically then we renew the vitality of these choices and, thereby, the culture of which they are a part. This means that any culture will persist in a vital way only so long as individuals authentically grasp the possibilities enabled by that culture and, if they don't, the culture will wither away. In short, our historising is both an individual and communal affair and, to the individual, there corresponds a community; to individual fate, there corresponds communal destiny. So authentic historising includes what Heidegger calls 'fateful destiny'.

Authentic historising - The historising (qv) of ourselves which acknowledges both our own fate (qv) and the destiny (qv) of our society and culture.

Authentic historicality does not require that we understand the origins of our possibilities - only that we explicitly acknowledge the reality of our past-determined situation. Someone with a flair for poetry, for instance, need not know the origin either of poetry or of her own skill, but she does need to keep the historically-conditioned expectations of her 'audience' in mind, and speak to them 'where they live' if she is going to communicate her ability to them. By the same token, a mechanic, lawyer or parent, needs to know the historically-conditioned range of behaviours that a their society will find acceptable. Stretching the boundaries is one thing, but violating them will soon see you punished one way or another.

For persons, the ultimate purpose of owning the past is to project who we have made of ourselves, in the past, into the future - it has to do with our integrity as selves [the part of us that endures as the same 'me' over a great many changes]. This integrity involves a mode of repetition (qv) that, in acknowledging the past, also acknowledges the necessities of the present and the potential of the future. In doing this, any reclaiming of our heritage must flow from a resolute projection of our potentiality-for-being into the future from a present-tense moment of vision (qv). And this temporalising is what Heidegger calls 'the hidden basis of personhood's historicality'.

pp.439-441 - As foreshadowed previously, the most immediate problem Heidegger faces here is that of inauthentic historicality interfering with our understanding of authentic historicality. The Everyone narrative portrays history as a collection of events much as Everyone narrates the world itself as merely a collection of objects. In all of these kinds of narratives persons are pictured over and over again as merely one kind of present-at-hand object among other present-at-hand objects. So what Heidegger is doing here is running the common notion of history through the same 'detoxification' process that he has already applied to the world (qv), spatiality (qv) and temporality (qv). You should be recognising this process by now; it basically involves a move from the traditional static picture of a context [space, time, history, the world] as a 'thing' to understanding it as a dynamic relationship that comes about through our being the kinds of entity whose essence is existence. We are not, in other words, the passive victims of a purely material context; rather, we are the kinds of being who create a worldly, social and historical context as part of our being-in-the-world.

p.442 - The Everyone concept of history matters because we get 'lost' in Everyone (qv, lostness), and this includes being lost in Everyone history. So, if we are going to be authentic, we must disentangle ourselves from the myths which count as popular history and, in effect, 'pull ourselves together' as historical beings. A crucial part of this 'pulling ourselves together' is that of facing our responsibility for our own personhood in the face of our finitude. And part of this, in turn, is a matter of maintaining an integrity between our being, our having been (qv) and our will be - in which part of our having been is our social-historical setting. In contrast to our normal everydayness, being authentic requires neither ignoring the past nor trying to 'possess' it by means of revisionism - we 'let it be what it is' (qv, letting be).

pp.443-444 - In these pages, resoluteness (qv) is defined in terms of a loyalty to ourselves in the way we live our lives. This loyalty is a way of recovering our lost 'authority over ourselves'. Recovering this lost authority is a matter of repeated resolution (qv, repetition). As the obesity-heart attack example showed, resolving on a course of action is not a once-and-for-all commitment. It is, rather, a repeated and modifiable loyalty to ourselves over time and circumstance.
 

If this is the case then the possibilities for both responsibility and irresponsibility are as real as many folk have suspected. There is no objective law which will enforce our integrity - we can be responsible or irresponsible as we choose and, whichever we choose, we have to keep on choosing it day after day. Consider the issue of marital fidelity for example. It is abundantly clear that no 'once and for all time' marriage vow will stop a married person from being unfaithful to a partner if that is what she or he chooses to be and, by the same token, it is not the vow which actually keeps faithful marriage partners true to each other. Indeed, when you think of it, it is not even our commitment to our partners which keeps us faithful when we are tempted to 'stray'. What keeps couples faithful to each other is a continually repeated commitment to being the kind of person who is faithful. It is, in other words, our loyalty to ourselves as a certain kind of person that makes us trustworthy in this or any other situation in which we behave honourably.
        This kind of constancy - this repeated loyalty to ourselves as a certain kind of persons - stands in stark contrast to the inconstancy of those who are 'blown hither and thither' by circumstance. Such a person, tempted by the novelty of a new sexual partner, for instance, will cheat on an existing partner, if the opportunity arises, regardless of what resolutions have been previously made.

When we are lost in Everyone, our historicality doesn't disappear or cease to operate. But what happens is that both our historicality and the historicality of the world are 'covered' in two stages:

1. We understand - or, more properly, misunderstand - our own historicality in terms of the popular historical myths which misinform our Everyone, and
2. We interpret world history as somehow merely present-at-hand.

The point here is not that some of us incorporate the past, present and future into our being while some don't. The fact is that we all incorporate the past, present and future into our being, but that we normally do so inauthentically. This inauthenticity ultimately flows from the 'atomic' misunderstanding of time (and, therefore, history) as a sequence of moments that flow through the present from the future into the past (qv, atomic time) - we miss what might be called the 'living' unity of time. In an inauthentic interpretation of time, lives are 'scattered' across moments. In an authentic grasp of time, however, the past, present and future are integrated as a whole; we are 'stretched' but not scattered because we exist within a temporal horizon rather than merely living within time (and note that 'exist' is the operative word here - qv, existence). In inauthentic being, all things are 'levelled off' (qv); time is merely a place in which things happen to us; the past, present and future are all equally inauthentic. In authentic being, however, the past, present and future all live and are grasped resolutely - we not only project our being on them, but we project our being on them as they are.
        It follows from this that authentic being, and only authentic being, involves genuine self-constancy (qv) as we maintain ourselves as who we are over time. This kind of self-constancy - by which we remain true to our own character and values over time - is not self-identity, and neither is it a matter of either trying to remain unchanged over time or returning to a past state (a mistake which both conservatives and conservationists make). It is, rather, a matter of being open to a future in acknowledgement and ownership of a past-defined present.
 

In this chapter Heidegger is mainly concerned with explaining how existential time came to be cover up by public clock time. A great deal of the chapter is taken up with his analysis of time and history as pictured by various philosophers (notably Hegel). I do not go into this in this Study Guide.

pp.456-458 - Persons normally take time into our reckoning; we will, for example, calculate that we do or do not have time for a certain task. This kind of behaviour, which is (a) fundamental to our being as persons, and (b) is not found in non-persons, predates clocks and calenders. Nevertheless, persons do not normally have any clear understanding of authentic temporality because, in our everyday lives, we tend to take time as something present-at-hand. Heidegger attributes this concept to the way in which primordial time, among other everyday phenomena, is 'levelled off'. And the perversion of existential temporality into public time is explained in this chapter.

pp.458-464 - In our everyday understanding of the world, our understanding of time is evident in the way that we locate events in the past, present and future. These three general terms of reference, together, constitute what Heidegger calls 'datability'.

Datability - The everyday temporal categorising of events as during, before, or after, a defining moment (e.g., 'between the wars', 'the Victorian era' or 'before we were married').

Datability arises because, in our everyday lives, we are typically concerned with the things and events among which we find ourselves and are presently concerned. In such a context, past and future events tend to be thought of as something which has been or will be the focus of concern in a previous or coming present.
        Datability has its foundation in temporality. It differs slightly from the strictly atomic (qv) concept of time in that it allows for varying time intervals. So when, for example, we talk of not having time to complete some task, we reveal a sense of time as something that lasts, something that spans moments. It follows from this that time-spans vary according to the 'during' of an event - a 'now' for example, could be as short as the time it takes to flick a switch or as long as a decades-old conflict. This does not mean, however, that datability is entirely private or subjective. Other people are involved in events and this means that references to time-spans are usually public property - if I talk of an event as 'before we were married' then that temporal assertion can be variously disputed of agreed with - e.g., someone might assert that the event in question happened after 'we' were married. The basis of time in such cases is a matter of dating by what Heidegger calls 'environmental events'.

Authentic time keeping, for persons, is part of our being-in-the-world - a being which is occupied with tasks [projects, qv]. This entails that authentic time keeping is task oriented - we calculate, and give ourselves, the time it needs to undertake a project. Such timekeeping, however, is necessarily public because so many of our tasks are shared. The needs of a publicly-coordinated temporal context readily lends itself to the use of clock time - the kind of timekeeping in which all minutes are equal (qv, levelled off) and our everyday timekeeping reduces to atomic time (qv) in fact. In such a setting our personhood is obscured as inauthentic notions of human temporality become confirmed as simply 'how it is'.
        Public 'clock time', like all other inauthenticity, levels time off [it awaits (qv), rather than anticipates, the future and forgets (qv) the past] and privileges 'now' - which is precisely what we have in everyday time.
 

What is missing from this temporal everydayness is the possibility of relating to the present as a moment of vision (qv). Only someone who faces the present in anticipatory resoluteness can break through the levelling off (qv) of time in inauthenticity and thereby break free of Everyone. He can then realise his self-constancy (qv) by having [finding, or giving himself] time for what the situation demands. However, someone who is absorbed by and enacts the everyday concept of time is closed of from the kind of understanding that can take task-oriented timekeeping off the clock time of Everyone. So living in conformity with the datability, 'spannedness' (if I may use such a word), and publicness (qv) of everyday time, is a mode of temporalising that suppresses the possibility of truly understanding ourselves.

pp.472-479 - Another effect of our normally living in Everyone-time is that even when we think of time philosophically, we tend to think of it in terms of the time-keeping with which we are most familiar; that is, public clock time. In doing this, the basic structure of everyday temporality is again covered up. Moreover, because clock time is fixed and formalised by social convention, what appears central to our time-keeping is our making present (qv) of a kind of 'moving pointer'. In following a sequence of positions or numbers in a clock or watch, we 'check off' a series of successive 'nows'. This 'atomic' structure fits very well with our inauthentic temporality but misrepresents the existential time which presupposes an integrity of the three ecstases (qv).
 

pp.486-488 Returning to the Opening Question (the Meaning of Being in General)

In this abrupt concluding section, Heidegger reminds us that his analysis of our being as persons was only ever a means to an end. He has shown us that we are essentially worldly - un-worlded personhood just isn't possible. He has further shown us that our worldliness is founded on a three-part care-structure (qv) which is itself founded on the tripartite ecstatic (qv) temporalising of temporality (qv). However, these insights into the phenomenon of human personhood, as detailed and revolutionary as they are, are just the fore-structure (qv) for an investigation into the meaning of being in general. What we do with the insights gained from Being and Time is now up to us. One of the frustrating, and exciting, features of Being and Time is that Heidegger ends his analyses of human personhood without making any attempt to tell us what to do with it. So you tend to finish the book awestruck by the insights it narrates but asking "So what?" or "What now?". But those are questions for you to answer. Heidegger, rightly, offers no clue (and if you have understood Being and Time then you will understand why he is right to 'offer no clue').
 

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