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# Marx and the Concept of Historical Time
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Yet individual action cannot be the only standpoint from which totalisation and its relation to temporalisation is intelligible. What historical totalisation compels us examine – a question which is suppressed by Heidegger, underdetermined by Sartre and simply unasked by Marx – is the ongoing constitution of complex relationships between individual, social and historical temporalities. Take, as one example, Marx’s conception of the ‘social individual’. For Marx, this individual is already and entirely determined by society27, such that the social relation – not the individual – is the basic constituent of society. And yet, he also suggests that this individual is ‘the great pillar of production and of wealth.’28 At the level of the materialist concept of history, it is unclear how this ‘social individual’ should be read, in no small part because Marx’s analyses of social individuality and the social individual are completely tied to his critique of political economy (e.g. to capitalism). At best, we can only suggest that the materialist concept of history schematises the development of the social individual at the level of different modes of production. The point here is that it would be inadequate, and actually misleading, to temporally read the ‘social individual’ exclusively from the standpoint of its individuality. Yet this standpoint remains the privileged point of departure in the philosophy of time. The simple fact is that existing discourses on temporalisation are principally tied to the individual as the crux of that which is implicitly temporal. The individual may be a social or collective individual, as it is (to varying degrees) in Heidegger and Sartre, but the individual is to date the predominant basis of temporalisation within the modern European philosophical tradition more generally. As Sartre articulates it (this sentence comes right after the quotation that frames this chapter): ‘Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, the only conceivable temporality is that of a totalisation as an individual process.’29 There is no prevailing philosophy of time which begins its account of temporalisation from either the standpoint of the sociality or the historicality of the act. The philosophical tradition that we have inherited resists the possibility of theorising temporalisation from any other basis than that of the individual. The philosophy of time needs to think temporalisation from an origin other than individual praxis, as in Sartre, and other than the ‘in each case mineness’ of death, as in Heidegger. In order to be properly systematic, this philosophy must register the social and the historical as implicitly temporal in their own right, from which the complex relationship between individual, social and historical temporalities can be investigated in their reciprocal – and asymmetric – determination. The individual is this chapter’s necessary point of departure, but we must also insist that a concept of historical time can only be constructed out of Marx’s work when and if ‘temporalisation itselfis conceived in direct relation to historicalisation. The meaning and consequences of this will remain unknown until the concept of historicalisation is investigated in its own right. The final section of this chapter, on Sartre’s Critique, begins this exploration.
21 Louis Althusser, ‘The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy’, in Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings [1966-7], ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York and London: Verso, 2003), 174.
22 Ibid.
23 Labica, Marxism and the Status of Philosophy, 280, 365.
24 Each in his own way, Althusser, Labica and Marx fail to critically appropriate the place of ‘nonphilosophy’ within Feuerbach’s Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy [1842], a place which qualifies the decisiveness and originality of their respective formulations of a science of history.
25 Herbert Marcuse, ‘On Concrete Philosophy’ [1929], trans. Matthew Erlin, in Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. John Abromeit and Richard Wolin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 36. Marcuse’s ‘concrete distress’ derives from Kierkegaard’s stance that ‘qualitative pressure’ must be placed on philosophy in order to exist in the public realm, as only the public realm realises the immense concrete difficulties of social and historical existence, of ‘existing-with-one-another’.
26 Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 40, 119.
27 Marx, Grundrisse, 248.
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28 Ibid. 705.
29 Sartre, CDR 1, 53. Emphasis added. The ‘as I have shown elsewhere’ is a self-reference to Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [1943], trans. Hazel Estella Barnes (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003), 130-193.
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2.1 Marx and Heidegger: a Framework for Dialogue
There is no immediate nor obvious relationship between Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein and Marx’s conception of the human. Unlike Sartre’s existential reading of individual praxis, the very possibility of reading Heidegger and Marx in relation to one another must first be established before Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s totalising being-towards-death is brought into relation with Marx’s philosophy of history. There is no reconfiguration of materialism as human practice in Heidegger, nor even an identifiable concept of materialism as such. Nonetheless, the project of Being and Time is to explicate human action as implicitly temporal, to produce an existential analytic (Dasein) whereby time becomes the horizon for understanding human action. It is difficult to overstate the decisiveness, originality and critical function of this analytic. It engenders a philosophy of time which has no counterpart in the modern European tradition because it is unrivalled in its attempt to generate and sustain a framework for grasping, after Kant, the entire field of time [Zeitinbegriff] itself. Heidegger’s concept of ‘originary temporality’ is, as William Blattner puts it, ‘a manifold of nonsuccessive phenomena’ which aspires to ‘explain ordinary time’30, or what Heidegger generally refers to as ‘the vulgar conception of time’. The fact that Being and Time attempts this explanation is unprecedented, and it is as consequential to the philosophy of time as are the particular merits and limits of the work itself. Every philosophy of time after Heidegger, particularly the anti-Heideggerian philosophy of time, remains (and not simply in a chronological sense) a post-Heideggerian philosophy. Heidegger is therefore an unavoidable route, and, this thesis argues, an undeniable asset, to the concept of historical time. Hence before we tackle the relationship between totalisation and temporalisation, we need to consider the ways in which Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein dovetails with Marx’s concept of the human. What dimensions of Being and Time resonate with Marx’s work more generally?
Being and Time disrupts any fixed distinction between theory and practice, between a ‘first philosophy’ (prōtē philosophia [πρώτη φιλοσοφία], which is for Aristotle metaphysics) and a practical philosophy, and therefore between thinking and action. In Heidegger, Reiner Schürmann argues, ‘…action itself, and not only its theory, loses its foundation or archē,’ and by extension, ‘action deprived of archē [is] the condition of the thought which deconstructs the archē.’31 The essence of Dasein lies in its ‘to be’ [Zu-sein], but this being (or ‘be-ing’, from the German seiend, the gerund of the infinitive sein) is not a static ‘presence-at-hand’ registered by categories of existentia (ontological ‘whats’), but is rather the movement and motion of an entity inclined and orientated towards a ‘there’.32 In Being and Time, Dasein is reciprocally figured as a form of kinetic thinking and thinking kinesis, and hence it rejects the division between sensibility and conceptuality as authorised by Kant’s transcendental logic, in addition to the function of the cogito in Descartes’s philosophy of self-consciousness. Exceeding Kant’s critiques, Dasein gives us categories and existentiale, ontological ‘hows’ or dynamic states of Dasein’s fluid character which (Heidegger claims) collectively constitute the sense or ‘meaning of being’ [Seinssinn] as such. The where of Dasein’s existence is what Heidegger names ‘the world’, but this world is not an ontical totality of entities we passively find ourselves in, but is rather the ‘wherein’ of Dasein’s act of understanding, an act already in the process of making itself and already in the process of exceeding itself.33 Significance makes up the structure or ‘worldhood’ of this world and gives this act of understanding its phenomenological intelligibility. In Heidegger, ‘understanding’ is not a cognitive act but an existential ability-to-be [Seinkönnen]. More precisely, understanding is an existentiale constituted by projection upon possibilities, without which there is no world. Dasein cannot be without already always being an understanding ability-to-be in a world.
30 William D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 26.
31 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy [1982], trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1, 7. Schürmann is undeniably a deconstructionist, and thus reads Heidegger’s professed ‘dismantling’ and ‘destruction’ of the history of ontology in Derridean terms.
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Heidegger’s notion of world is structured by a complex relationship to the necessity and universality of a priori synthetic judgements in Kant. 34 On one level, Heidegger is faithful to Kant, even as he expands and recodes the divisions within Kant’s transcendental logic through his own framework of ontological difference (the difference, that is to say, between being and entity). As Heidegger states: ‘…in the problem of a priori synthetic judgements still another type of synthesis is concerned which must bring something forth about the entity not first derived from it through experience. This bringing forth of the determination of the being of the entity is a precursory act of reference to the entity. This pure ‘reference-to…’ (synthesis) first constitutes the direction and the horizon within which the entity is first capable of being experienced in the empirical synthesis.’35 And yet, Being and Time makes clear – even if it is not explicitly stated by Heidegger – that an internal difference within one of the coordinates of ontological difference creates a tension with the function of ontological difference as the condition of possibility of a priori synthetic judgements. This is because the existence of a particular entity (more specifically, the understanding ability-to-be of Dasein) is itself the condition of the intelligibility of the being of any entity. Dasein is an ‘ontically distinctive entity because ‘it is ontological.’36 It is an entity whose very being makes being ‘an issue’ for it, and this being towards which it comports itself is what Heidegger formally designates as ‘existence’. Dasein’s existence (which in Heidegger is the ontological meaning of experience) is the condition of possibility of a priori synthetic judgements, be they existential (‘precursory acts of reference’) or cognitive judgements. Specifically, being-in-the-world is this condition: ‘…being-in-the-world is a state of Dasein which is necessary a priori.’37 Consequently, Heidegger’s concept of world significantly modifies the contours of purity in Kant, such that (1) existence, the essential being of Dasein, can be ontologically disclosed as originary only if no cognition is, to borrow Kant’s term in the Critique of Pure Reason, first ‘intermixed’; and (2) cognition is absolutely dependent on empirical acts and experiences within the world. In this regard, Heidegger’s stated desire to enact a transition from ‘pre-ontology’ to ‘fundamental ontology’ in Being and Time engenders the possibility, to repeat a manoeuvre in the previous chapter38, of reconstructing a decisive passage from the introduction to the ‘B’ edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in the following manner: ‘…although all our existence commences with cognition, …it does not on that account all arise from cognition.’39 As with Marx and Engels’s first historical act, Heidegger’s ‘world’ imposes the a posteriori, which is to say experience and the empirical, on Kant’s a priori whilst holding on to the necessary and universal character exclusive to this a priori. This is, in Marx and Heidegger alike, a distinctly temporal exclusivity. In Marx, this is the sense in which the ‘creation of fresh life’ – as one domain of the biological – wholly depends on social and historical time for its intelligibility. In Heidegger, this is how the temporal character of the ‘earlier’, the ‘in advance’, the ‘prior’, the ‘beforehand’, etc. must be read40, along with the temporality of necessity and universality more generally: ‘in each case’ through facticity and finitude. The key issue here is that Dasein registers a basic tension within ontology itself: the a priori is conceivable only when Dasein as an existential analytic preconditions Dasein as a self-understanding (‘existentiell’) entity, and yet only this self-understanding, only Dasein’s ontical affairs, secures being-in-the-world as the necessary and universal makeup of the a priori. The importance that Heidegger attaches to the world is beyond dispute: ‘…Dasein, insofar as it is, has always submitted itself already to a “world” which it encounters, and this submission belongs essentially to its being.’41
33 Ibid. 119.
32 Heidegger, BT, 67.
34 Most basically, Heidegger suggests that ‘Kant reduces the problem of the possibility of ontology to the question: “How are a priori synthetic judgements possible?”’ Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 18.
35 Ibid. 20. ‘Entity’ used in lieu of Churchill’s translation of ‘Seiendes’ as ‘essent’.
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36 Heidegger, BT, 32.
37 Ibid. 79.
38 See footnote 62 in Chapter 1.
39 Once again: ‘But although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience.’ Kant, CPR, B 1-2, 136.
40 ‘Can the a priori which in the tradition of ontology is held to be a characteristic of the determination of being be explained by asserting that the ‘earlier’ which it implies ‘naturally’ has nothing to do with ‘time’? Certainly, it has nothing to do with the ‘time’ recognized by the ordinary comprehension of time. But is this ‘earlier’ positively determined thereby, and is this annoying temporal character pushed aside? Or does it not reappear as a new and more difficult problem?’ Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 249.
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We must now address the question of the relationship between Dasein and individual human beings (entities), because this question grounds any attempt to develop a ‘framework for dialogue’42 between Dasein and Marx’s conception of the human more generally. This framework is, this thesis argues, a vital (and to date unexplored) aspect of what Heidegger in his 1949 ‘Letter on Humanism’ calls ‘the historical in being’, that dimension of being within which, for Heidegger, a ‘productive dialogue’ between phenomenology and existentialism, on the one hand, and Marxism, on the other, ‘first becomes possible.’43 The crux of the matter – the condition of this framework – is the possible conjunction (but by no means unity) between the individuation of Dasein in Being and Time and the social individuation of the human in Marx. The problem of individuation is at the heart ofBeing and Time: from the outset, Dasein is not just nor immediately presented as an individual.44 A pivotal part of the contribution that ‘being-in-the-world’ makes to the philosophy of the subject is its irreducibility to individual human entities. However, this is not to accept the terms of Heidegger’s understanding of this contribution, i.e. the notion that being-in-the-world is a new kind of subjectivity because it completely evades the ‘common, subjectivistic concept of “subject”.’45 On one level, Dasein is not a substantial (present-at-hand), thinking ‘I-thing’ [Ichding] outfitted with a body; it is not a (conventionally rendered) Cartesian subject. But on another level, it must be this subject. It must, on Heidegger’s own terms, be this concept of the individual consistent with the (so to speak) common, individualistic concept of the ‘individual’. As we will see, this need not be a problem for Being and Time, even if Heidegger creates it as one. Being-in-the-world is not an ‘originary existentiale’ in isolation from ‘world-historical happening’ [weltgeschichtliches Geschehen], but Heidegger precludes the possibility that the ontological structure of this happening might (and on his own terms need) structure the Seinsfrage itself (the question of the meaning of being in general). The issue here, first of all, is that the ontological structure of world-historical happening (in Marx and Heidegger alike) constitutes the existence of the isolated and alienated – which is to say the ‘common’ – individual.
41 Heidegger, BT, 120-21. ‘The world is therefore something “wherein” Dasein as an entity already was.’ Ibid. 106. As Macquarrie and Robinson note, Heidegger’s use of angewiesen (‘submitted’) and Angewiesenheit (‘submission’) in this passage simultaneously means to assign, to allot, to depend on and to be at the mercy of something. Ibid. 121.
42 See David Schweickart, ‘Heidegger and Marx: A Framework for Dialogue’, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 229-43. Whilst individual labour does not figure in his account, Schweickart persuasively analyses how Heidegger’s critique of Marxism as a humanist (which for Heidegger = metaphysical) discourse in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ enriches our understanding of liberatory praxis.
43 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ [1949], trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks [1967], ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 259. For Heidegger, since ‘estrangement attains an essential dimension of history’ in Marx, ‘the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts.’ Ibid.
44 Consider the following passage: ‘Being and the structure of being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein’s being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation.’ Heidegger, BT, 62.
45 Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic [1928], trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 195. See as well Einar Øverenget, Seeing the Self: Heidegger on Subjectivity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 103. In the Leibniz lectures, Heidegger problematically reads the transcendental subject in Kant, and the a priori which it activates, as ‘worldless’, so as to clear space for ‘being-in-the-world…[to] fundamentally transform the concept[s] of subjectivity and…the subjective.’ Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 195.
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Akin to Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘life-nexus’, what is pre-given in Being and Time is Dasein’s being-in-the-world, not its individualised existence (for its part, the pre-givenness of Husserl’s ‘lifeworld’ in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) derives from Heidegger’s ‘world’). Being-in-the-world is ontologically prior to the individual; it is only from being-in-the-world that Dasein as an individual entity first becomes possible. In Heidegger, to render Dasein as a pre-existing individual is to render it as originally presentat-hand, a fallacy that reverberates with Lukács’s position in History and Class Consciousness (1923) that the ‘individual subject’ is quite simply the product of the generalised reification of social relations.46 In fact, much of the scholarship in the American analytical tradition also maintains that Dasein cannot be reduced to discrete human entities, that there is, in other words, no ‘separate and unique Dasein for each person.’47 In his analysis of the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein, Charles Guignon emphasises Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is ‘not the egotistical person, not the ontically isolated individual.’48 For Guignon, ‘in the description of everyday being-in-the-world, what emerges is a picture of Dasein which is closer to Dilthey’s conception of “objective mind” than it is to the Cartesian subject or a monad…there is no plural for “Dasein”, and Heidegger seldom speaks of “a Dasein”. “Dasein” is not a “count noun” that ranges over particular individuals, but is more like a “mass noun”. It captures the idea of a “clearing” of intelligibility which can more properly be understood as a cultural totality than as a collection of individuals.’49 Carol White maintains that Dasein is first and foremost the entity we all are: it is what we share in common. This is the sense in which the individual is, following Marx, the bearer – the personification – of Dasein. The relationship between Dasein and the human is ‘graphically ontological’: ‘we are the entity through whom what it is “to be”…is revealed, and thus we are the “there”…where Being is disclosed.’50 The structuralist overtones here are obvious. White attributes the predominant misreading of the individuation of Dasein to translation. She is explicitly critical of Macquarrie and Robinson’s continual pluralisation of Heidegger’s collective singular term ‘das Seiende’ (entity or whatis). Thus, ‘“das Seiende…sind wir je selbst” becomes “we are ourselves the entities” and “das Sein des Seienden” becomes “the Being of entities”.’51 For White, the individuation of Dasein denotes the demarcation of Dasein from other domains of what-is, such that its being cannot be confused with that of other entity. Individuation is the constitution of Dasein’s existential self as itself, radically situating the ‘there’ of Dasein. It is only because of this individuation that one individual can be differentiated from another. Is it possible to suggest, therefore, that Dasein is originarily a social rather than individual entity?
46 Highlighting §10 and §83 in Being and Time, where Heidegger explicitly discusses the reification of consciousness, Lucien Goldmann provocatively suggests that Being and Time is a direct (and yet unacknowledged) response to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy [1973], trans. William Q. Boelhower (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 27-39. Goldmann’s understanding of Heidegger is suspect, but it is certainly possible that Heidegger’s derivation of the ‘present-at-hand’ from the ‘ready-to-hand’ could be cross-read with Lukács’s account of reification as yielded by the instrumental rationality of capitalist social relations.
47 John Haugeland, ‘Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism’, in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honour of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1, ed. Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000), 46.
48 Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [1928], in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 2: Vorlesungen 1923-1944, Band 26 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 172.
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These are convincing readings of Heidegger, but they must be squared with Heidegger’s constitution of Dasein as a social entity, such that an individual Dasein [ein einzelnes Dasein] – an entity which definitely figures in Being and Time – encounters what Heidegger calls ‘the others’. On the surface, the category of ‘the social’ rarely appears in Being and Time. In its place, catalysed by the question of ‘who’ Dasein is in its everydayness, Heidegger presents two existentiale as ‘equi-originary’ [gleichursprünglich] with being-in-the-world: ‘beingwith’ and ‘Dasein-with’.52 For Heidegger, being-in-the-world is being-with others: ‘the world is always the one that I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-world.’53 The others are intraworldly entities. They are confronted in the ‘environmental context of equipment’, the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ structure which grounds the world as a referential totality of signifying actions. Put differently, the encounter with the others is fundamentally enabled by what Heidegger designates as the ‘ready-to-hand’, an entity whose essential being (‘readinessto-hand’) is defined by an ‘assignment’ or ‘involvement’ within-the-world. The ready-to-hand is not defined by being a tangible object in space (this is the present-at-hand), but rather by its practical relation to the world. This brings us to Heidegger’s formal definition of the others:
49 Charles B. Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 104.
50 Carol J. White, ‘Dasein, Existence, and Death’, in Heidegger Reexamined, Vol. 1: Dasein, Authenticity, and Death, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (London: Routledge, 2002), 333. 51 Ibid. 332. Emphasis added. Macquarrie and Robinson frequently interject ‘one’ and ‘one’s’ into their translation where ‘one’ [man] and ‘one’s’ [eigenen] do not appear in the German original, effectively compelling the English-language reader to comprehend Dasein as only an individual and not also a transindividual entity. To name two examples: ‘einen Ausstand an Seinkönnen’ becomes ‘something still outstanding in one’s potentiality-for-Being’ (Heidegger, BT, 279) and ‘Endlichkeit der Existenz becomes ‘finitude of one’s existence’ (ibid. 435). However, it is crucial to note that ‘one’ and ‘one’s’ regularly appear in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s sociality. Thus ‘Mitsein ist eine Bestimmtheit des je eigenen Daseins’ is accurately rendered as ‘Being-with is in every case a characteristic of one’s own Dasein’ (ibid. 157). Emphases added.
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By “others” we do not mean all the rest but me – those over against whom the “I” stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one [man] does not distinguish oneself – those among whom one is too. This being-there-too…with them does not have the ontological character of a being-present-at-hand-along-“with” them within a world. This “with” is something of the character of Dasein; the “too” means a sameness of being as circumspectively concernful being-in-the-world.54
This passage expresses a complex sociality at the core of the being of Dasein. As an existential analytic, Dasein represents an incipient ontology of the social as a particular kind of‘transindividual individuation’.55 Specifically, Dasein’s sociality is a twofold individuation: following White, it sets Dasein off from other domains of entity (only Dasein, not the readyto-hand nor the present-at-hand, is capable of being-with) but only because, and here opposing White, this sociality differentiates one individual Dasein from another as ‘for the most part’ indistinguishable. Neither the ready-to-hand nor the present-at-hand are capable of being social, but, unlike Dasein, they are radically differentiated within-the-world. Herein lies a crucial dimension of the world, and to push Heidegger further than what he offers, the readyto-hand within-the-world: it conditions Dasein’s by and large undifferentiated sociality with the others. The world ‘frees’ the others, not as ready-to-hand nor as present-at-hand, but as ‘like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too, and there with it.’56 For Jean-Luc Nancy, this sociality forms ‘the very humble layer of our everyday experience.’57 The others are the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein, and this is the existential meaning of their being, their ‘Dasein-with’. As Heidegger puts it, ‘this Dasein-with of the others is disclosed withinthe-world for a Dasein, and so too for those who are Daseins with us, only because Dasein in itself is essentially being-with.’58 Heidegger fills out his characterisation of the others with an existentiale (and a thinly disguised fear of the masses) he names the ‘one’:
52 Ibid. 149. §26 of Being and Time, ‘The Dasein-with of Others and Everyday Being-with’, has been widely commentated on and is crucial to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito.
53 Ibid. 155. As he puts it a bit later: ‘So far as Dasein is at all, it has being-with-one-another as its kind of being.’ Ibid. 163.
54 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927] (hereafer SZ), in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1: Veröffentliche Schriften 1914-1970, Band 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 158 (BT, 154).
55 The notion of ‘transindividual individuation’ has recently gained currency in the Anglo-American academy, primarily due to a growing reception of Gilbert Simondon and his commentators. See, for instance, Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual [1999], trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2013). For readings of Marx which draw on Simondon, see Luca Basso, Marx and Singularity: from the Early Writings to the Grundrisse [2008], trans. Arianna Bove (Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2012), as well as Jason Read, ‘The Production of Subjectivity: from Transindividuality to the Commons’, New Formations 70 (Winter 2011), 113-31.
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…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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