Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 55 页

…Dasein, as everyday being-with-one-another, stands in subjection to others. It itself is not; its being has been taken away by the others. Dasein’s everyday possibilities of being are for the others to dispose of as they please. These others, moreover, are not definite others. On the contrary, any other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as being-with. One [man] belongs to the others oneselfand enhances their power…the “who” is not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The “who” is the neuter, the “one” [das Man]…the “one” is an existentiale; and as an originary phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein’s positive constitution.⁵⁹

For Heidegger, there is an essential ‘averageness’ which belongs to the ‘one’ and which corresponds to a ‘levelling’ of the possibilities of Dasein’s being. Obvious differences with Marx notwithstanding (most notably, the individual’s classed existence discloses the others as simultaneously definite and indefinite, conspicuously and inconspicuously dominant), there are nonetheless aspects of Marx’s analysis of alienated labour in the 1844 Manuscripts which resonate with this account of Dasein’s sociality. Three in particular stand out. The first is the likeness between (in Marx) the perversion of the human’s ‘genus-being’ into a means of individual existence and (in Heidegger) the disposal of the everyday possibilities of Dasein’s being as the others please. The second is a shared emphasis on the distortion of ‘the self’. For Marx, this is the alienation of the labour-process itself, understood as the ‘self-activity’ of the worker, and which is to be differentiated from something like ‘humans in the entire wealth of their being’. For Heidegger, the self of everyday Dasein is the ‘one-self’ [das Man-selbst] (as opposed to ‘the one itself’ [das Man selbst]), and this self represents ‘a particular Dasein dispersed into and distracted by concernful absorption in the world.⁶⁰ In Being and Time, the ‘authentic self’ stands in opposition to the one-self.

⁵⁶ Heidegger, BT, 154.

⁵⁷ Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural [1996], trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 8. Being Singular Plural is a determined attempt to rewrite Being and Time from the standpoint of Mitsein. For Nancy, ‘it is necessary to refigure fundamental ontology (as well as the existential analytic, the history of Being, and the thinking of Ereignis that goes along with it) with a thorough resolve that starts from the plural singular of origins, from being-with. Ibid. 26. The ‘“question of social Being” must, in fact, constitute the ontological question.’ Ibid. 57.

⁵⁸ Heidegger, BT, 156. Following this passage, which is quite similar to Marx’s position (see footnote 2 in this chapter) that the social is not just to be understood as directly communal activity, Heidegger states that ‘Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no other is presentat-hand or perceived. Even Dasein’s being-alone is being-with in the world.’ Ibid. 156-57. In other words, being-with in the world is the a priori condition of the lonely, isolated individual.

⁵⁹ Heidegger, SZ, 168, 169, 172 (BT, 164, 167). Confusingly, Macquarrie and Robinson translate das Man as ‘the they’ when they ought to translate Man and das Man as ‘one’ and ‘the one’ consistently throughout. Das Man will hereafter be rendered as ‘the one’ in Being and Time without recourse to a citation in Sein und Zeit.

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