The Power of They – Part 2 (BT127/128) (2025) Картина - Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT127/128

The “they” is there alongside everywhere [ist überall dabei], but in such a manner that it has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the “they” presents every judgement and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability. The “they” can, as it were, manage to have 'them' constantly invoking it. It can be answerable for everything most easily, because it is not someone who needs to vouch for anything. It 'was' always the “they” who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been “no one'. In Dasein's everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that “it was no one”.
Thus the particular Dasein in its everydayness is disburdened by the “they”. Not only that; by thus disburdening it of its Being, the “they” accommodates Dasein [kommt . . . dem Dasein entgegen] if Dasein has any tendency to take things easily and make them easy. And because the “they” constantly accommodates the particular Dasein by disburdening if of its Being, the “they” retains and enhances its stubborn domination.
Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The “they” which supplies the answer to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein, is the “nobody” to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-other [Untereinandersein].

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

Связанные темы

Martin Heidegger