Being And Time

A discussion of the “who” of Dasein in the last chapter led Heidegger to an account of our being-with-others as constitutive of this. It also led to a discussion of a totally absorbed mode of this being-with, where our distinct self is lost in the generality and obscurity of the “they.” Such lostness is the ordinary and initial state of everyday Dasein. As such, to grasp our being-in-the-world properly, and its possibilities for authentic and inauthentic being, it is necessary to examine the nature of this “they” more closely. Heidegger does this in Chapter 5 by first looking at two phenomena that have up to now been kept in parentheses. These are moods and discourse. He does this because both are constituting modes of understanding, related modes of how the world is disclosed to us. As we saw in the last chapter, understanding, or its absence, is key to the nature of the they. In short, it is necessary to analyze moods and discourse to understand understanding, since through this we can then truly grasp the “they.