Attunement and Being-With

Abstract

Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger emphasize the public nature of the everyday: we not only share our world with others, but the intelligibility of that world finds public articulation. Wittgenstein emphasizes our attunement in sharing forms of life and constantly invokes the first person plural in talking about what ‘we’ do. This chapter offers a deflationary account of this ‘we’, resisting conventionalist and transcendental idealist readings. Heidegger’s account of Dasein as being-with takes on darker tones, as he describes the levelling influence of das Man, whereby we unreflectively align ourselves with what ‘one’ does. Contrary to some interpreters, the author argues that the influence of das Man, while inescapable, is not also suffocating, and that Heidegger’s account of distantiality allows us to see that we constantly maintain a necessary distance from das Man.