Normalmente, não nos sentimos isolados dos outros, mas antes imersos no mundo juntamente com eles. “E assim, no fim de contas, um eu isolado sem os outros está igualmente longe de ser simplesmente dado” (152/116). Como são os nossos encontros com os outros no decurso da nossa atividade quotidiana? Tal como as parafernálias não são coisas dotadas de valor, também os outros não são corpos dotados de propriedades psicológicas. Normalmente, compreendemos os outros de imediato e sem mais demoras. Quando entro no gabinete do meu departamento, o estudante que está a trabalhar na secretária está a receber um recado. Quando saio para o pátio, o homem no banco está a almoçar. Não tenho de pensar nestas coisas. A maior parte dos outros estão ali, a fazer o que estão a fazer, tal como os martelos e as mesas estão ali, a ser o que são. É isto que Heidegger quer dizer, quando se refere à “inconspicuidade” e à “obviedade” que caracterizam o ser dos outros tanto quanto o ser da parafernália (158/121). Tal como acontece com a parafernália, o que os outros fazem tem sentido em termos do horizonte do mundo.
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Os outros e o que eles fazem são normalmente facilmente inteligíveis para mim, porque partilhamos um mundo. Heidegger chama aos outros “Dasein-com”.
Who is Dasein? Dasein is in each case mine, and that means that I am Dasein and so are you, are we not? Yes, but this answer obscures as much as it reveals. When we try to say who is in-the-world, we are left with little alternative than to say, “I am in-the-world.” The “I” is a “non-committal formal indicator, indicating something which may perhaps reveal itself as its ‘opposite’ in some particular phenomenal context of being” (151-152/116). That is, it is grammatically correct to say that it is I who am in-the-world, but this does not tell us who I am. As we have seen, we are immersed in the world of our concern, and our being does not matter to us as the significance of some isolated point of view from nowhere, but rather, as the life we are living in this world surrounded by this paraphernalia. Proximally and for the most part, we do not experience ourselves as distinct from the world. So, how do we experience ourselves?
We do not typically experience ourselves as isolated from others, (65) but rather as immersed in the world along with them. “And so in the end an isolated I without others is just as far from being proximally given” (152/116). What are our encounters with others in the course of our daily business like? Just as paraphernalia are not things invested with value, so others are not bodies invested with psychological properties. Typically we understand others straight away and without further ado. As I walk into my department’s office, the work-study student at the desk is taking a message. As I walk out into the courtyard, the man on the bench is eating lunch. I do not have to figure these things out. Mostly others are just there, doing what they are doing, as hammers and tables are just there, being what they are. This is what Heidegger means, when he refers to the “inconspicuousness” and “obviousness” that characterize the being of others as much as the being of paraphernalia (158/121). As with paraphernalia, what others do makes sense in terms of the horizon of the world.
Others are not, of course, paraphernalia. They do not show up as available for use. Rather, others are there with me in the world. “(Others) are neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand; on the contrary, they are like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too, and there with it” (154/118). To say that others are “there too” and “there with” Dasein is to say that we experience others in terms of what they are pursuing, in terms of their for-the-sakes-of-which. When I see the work-study student taking a message, I understand what he is doing as for the sake of his self-understanding as a student. He and I share a social horizon that makes what we do mutually intelligible.
By reason of this with-like being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in is being-with others. Their being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with. (155/119)
Others and what they do are normally easily intelligible to me, because we share a world. Heidegger calls others “Dasein-with.”