Premium
‘As One Does’: Understanding Heidegger's Account of das Man
Author(s) -
McKinney Tucker
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
european journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.42
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1468-0378
pISSN - 0966-8373
DOI - 10.1111/ejop.12257
Subject(s) - epistemology , appeal , agency (philosophy) , scope (computer science) , subject (documents) , extant taxon , embeddedness , power (physics) , metaphysics , philosophy , sociology , computer science , political science , social science , law , physics , quantum mechanics , evolutionary biology , library science , biology , programming language
: Heidegger describes Dasein as subject to a constant pressure to bring its intentional performances into agreement with those of its peers and thence with a generic description of ‘what one [ das Man ] does’, called Dasein's conformism . I argue that extant accounts of this pressure, which appeal to the essential social embeddedness of intentional performance, fail to account for both the scope and modal force of the demand to act as one does. I propose that we can better understand the role of das Man in Heidegger's account of intentional agency by exploiting a structural similarity between ‘Dasein’ and the familiar notion of epistemic capacity, or a power of knowledge. The result is an account that locates the source of das Man's authority not in our social nature but in our shared aspiration to ontological understanding.