Disclosure of Oneself and the Other (BT123/124) (2025) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT123/124

Being-with is such that the disclosedness of the Dasein-with of Others belongs to it; this means that because Dasein's Being is Being-with, its understanding of Being already implies the understanding of Others. This understanding, like an understanding, is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge about them, but a primordially existential kind of Being, which, more than anything else, makes such knowledge and acquaintance possible. Knowing oneself [Sichkennen] is grounded in Being-with, which understands primordially. It operates proximally in accordance with the kind of Being which is closest to us – Being-in-the-world as Being-with; and it does so by an acquaintance with that which Dasein, along with the Others, comes across in its environmental circumspection and concerns itself with – an acquaintance in which Dasein understands. Solicitous concern is understood in terms of what we are concerned with, and along with our understanding of it. Thus in concernful solicitude the Other is proximally disclosed.
But because solicitude dwells proximally and for the most part in the deficient or at least the Indifferent modes (in the indifference of passing one another by), the kind of knowing-oneself which is essential and closest, demands that one become acquainted with oneself. And when, indeed, one's knowing-oneself gets lost in such ways as aloofness, hiding oneself away, or putting on a disguise, Being-with-one-another must follow special routes of its own in order to come close to Others, or even to 'see through them' [“hinter sie” zu kommen].
But just as opening oneself up [Sich offenbaren] or closing oneself off is grounded in one's having Being-with-one-another as one's kind of Being at the time, and indeed is nothing else but this, even the explicit disclosure of the Others in solicitude grows only out of one's primarily Being with him in each case. Such a disclosure of the Other (which is indeed thematic, but not in the manner of theoretical psychology) easily becomes the phenomenon which proximally comes to view when one considers the theoretical problematic of understanding the 'psychical life of Others' [“fremden Seelenlebens”]. In this phenomenally 'proximal' manner it thus presents a way of Being with one another understandingly; but at the same time it gets taken as that which, primordially and 'in the beginning', constitutes Being towards Others and makes it possible at all. This phenomenon, which is none too happily designated as 'empathy' [“Einfühlung”], is then supposed, as it were, to provide the first ontological bridge from one's own subject, which is given proximally as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

Related themes

Martin Heidegger