Chapter 4 of Being and Time

This chapter is about answering the question:

“Who is Da-Sein?”

Heidegger’s crispest answer to that question is

“Everything is the other, and no one is himself” (165 english; 128)

“It itself is not”

Heidegger’s answer to the question of who Dasein is refuses definition and formal logic. One can’t answer the question in the logical form of S is P, Dasein is X, insofar as Dasein is what it is not. In other words, Heidegger’s answer to the question who is Dasein doesn’t take so much a logical as it does an aporetic or disjunctive form.

In the introductory paragraph to chapter 4, Heidegger includes some prefatory remarks that lead him into this question. He begins by reminding us of the steps that he’s covered so far, namely, that he’s primarily been concerned so far with analyzing formally the worldhood of the world as an existential feature of Da-sein (the worldhoold of the world being that totality of references and assignments that criss-cross Da-sein’s fascinated engagement in a world that it always already finds itself in, which constitutes meaningfulness).

But then Heidegger reminds us of a methodological point that he had made previously, namely, that the goal of his analysis was to bring into view Dasein’s being-in-the-world from the particular perspective of its average everydayness (CF 69 and 76). So the aim of this chapter is to answer the question who is Da-sein in its everydayness? How can we bring the phenomenon of average everdayness into view? How to we get access to it?

The two key terms that structure Heidegger’s characterization average everyday Dasein are Being-with and Dasein-with. So answering the question of who am I ineluctably intersects with the question of my relatedness to others.

What we’re going to find is that Heidegger’s task in describing how we are related to others is analogous to his task in differentiating our relationship to things. Namely, just as Heidegger had argued that a theoretical relatedness to objects, contrary to the history of philosophy, is a founded as opposed to fundamental way of relating to things, so too here Heidegger is going to try undermine the view that we are first and foremost solitary subjects – the idea that what is most evident about ourselves is the singular “I” who

subsequently comes to be related to others – in favor of the view that we are constitutively mired in relations to others.