distantiality

Distantiality (Abständigkeit  , an existential): everyday space of being-with, 126-128. See also averageness; levelling down; publicness (BT)

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In one’s, concern with what one has taken hold of, whether with, for, or against, the Others, there is constant care’ as to the way one differs from them, whether that difference is merely one that is to be evened out, whether one’s own Dasein   has lagged behind the Others and wants to catch up in relationship to them, or whether one’s Dasein already has some priority over them and sets out to keep them suppressed. The care about this distance between them is disturbing to Being-with-one-another, though this disturbance is one that is hidden from it. If we may express this existentially, such Being-with-one-another has the character of DISTANTIALITY [Abständigkeit]. The more inconspicuous this kind of Being is to everyday Dasein itself, all the more stubbornly and primordially does it work itself out. BTMR   §27

But this DISTANTIALITY which belongs to Being-with, is such that Dasein, as everyday Being-with-one-another, stands in subjection [Botmässigkeit  ] to Others. It itself is not  ; its Being has been taken away by the Others. Dasein’s everyday possibilities of Being are for the Others to dispose of as they please. These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by Others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others oneself and enhances their power. ‘The Others’ whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one’s belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part ‘are there’ in everyday Being-with-one-another. The “who” is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst  ], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the “they” [das Man  ]. BTMR §27

The “they” has its own ways in which to be. That tendency of Being-with which we have called “DISTANTIALITY” is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such with averageness, which is an existential characteristic of the “they”. The “they”, in its Being, essentially makes an issue of this. 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. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “levelling down” [Einebnung  ] of all possibilities of Being. BTMR §27

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 some distinctive and primary relationship-of-Being in which it is related to ‘Things’, or because it avails itself of some 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 covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone. BTMR §27

In these characters of Being which we have exhibited – everyday Being-among-one-another, DISTANTIALITY, averageness, levelling down, publicness, the disburdening of one’s Being, and accommodation – lies that ‘constancy’ of Dasein which is closest to us. This “constancy” pertains not to the enduring Being-present-at-hand   of something, but rather to Dasein’s kind of Being as Being-with. Neither the Self of one’s own Dasein nor the Self of the Other has as yet found itself or lost itself as long as it is [seiend  ] in the modes we have mentioned. In these modes one’s way of Being is that of inauthenticity and failure to stand   by one’s Self. To be in this way signifies no Iessening of Dasein’s facticity, just as the “they”, as the “nobody”, is by no means nothing at all. On the contrary, in this kind of Being, Dasein is an ens realissimum, if by ‘Reality’ we understand a Being that has the character of Dasein. BTMR §27