/lit/ - Literature

>Thus the "they" maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Ovemight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been weIl known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in tum an essential tendency of Dasein which we calI the "levelling down" [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being. Distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, as ways of Being for the "they", constitute what we know as 'publicness' ["die Offentlichkeit"].

>Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right-not because there is sorne distinctive and primary relationship-of-Being in which it is related to 'Things', or because it avails itself of sorne transparency on the part of Dasein which it has explicitly appropriated, but because it is insensitive to every difference of level and of genuineness and thus never gets to the 'heart of the matter' ["auf die Sachen"]. By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covereà up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone.

>The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Seif - that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way [eigens ergriffenen]. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been. dispersed into the "they", and must first find itself. This dispersal characterizes the 'subject' of that kind of Being which we know as concernful absorption in the world we encounter as closest to us. If Dasein is familiar with itself as they-self, this means at the same time that the "they" itself prescribes that way of interpreting the world and Being-in-the-world which lies closest. Dasein is for the sake of the "they" in an everyday manner, and the "they" itself Articulates the referential context of significance. When entities are encountered, Dasein's world frees them for a totality of involvements with which the "they" is familiar, and within the limits which have been established with the "they's" averageness.