Other people and the way one does things

What you should be able to do

• Explain how being-with can shape an activity performed alone, and why it does not make other people equipment.
• Reconstruct the everyday authority Heidegger calls the they, including your own participation in it.
• Distinguish shared intelligibility from conformity and ethical justification, attending to unequal power.
• Explain how assistance can displace or support another person’s agency, and give a reasoned objection about how far this analysis can reach.

Alone with a jacket

Imagine Esther alone at home, shortening the sleeves of a jacket. She folds the cuff, pins it and tries the jacket on. The work is for herself: nobody is waiting for the result, supervising her or telling her how to proceed.

Yet the activity has a history that reaches beyond her. Someone taught her a stitch, or wrote the instructions she follows, and the jacket was made within practices of cutting and wearing clothes. The sleeve must accommodate her arm, but its shape also belongs to inherited ways of dressing, and what counts as a finished cuff or a suitable style is partly something she has learned among other people. She can change the design without inventing sewing afresh.

The previous lesson traced the connections through which a tool makes sense; now the question turns to the people already implicated in those connections. Esther can be physically alone while understanding what she does through ways of living she shares with others. Knowing where she learned a stitch would tell part of the history, but Heidegger asks a further question: how does the activity remain understandable now, as making a sleeve, improving a fit or changing a style? The practices she learned still supply terms in which she can understand what she is doing.

Heidegger’s claim is that our existence is structured by being-with: other people belong to the world within which our activities and possibilities make sense, even when nobody else is in the room. We need to understand this claim before deciding whether it adequately describes the differences between cooperation, isolation and domination.[1]

Who is doing the work?

Esther is doing the work, and identifying her answers an ordinary question about who made the alteration. Heidegger asks something further: how she understands and lives the possibilities involved in doing it. Answering that question takes us beyond identifying the person whose hands hold the needle.

In §25 of Being and Time he warns that saying “I” does not yet supply that account. We can correctly identify an individual without explaining that individual’s way of being, and we should not assume that a self is an unchanging inner object standing behind all its actions. The inquiry begun in lesson 01 asks about a being who has a life to lead.[2]

Esther might think of herself as someone who takes care of her clothes, as a beginner trying something new or as someone altering a style she has never liked. Each description places the activity within a way of living that others could recognize; even her disagreement has something to disagree with. Her life is hers, but not all of its terms originated with her.

Heidegger wants us to examine that relation, rather than begin with an isolated individual and then add society as an influence. His claim is stronger than the ordinary observation that people learn from one another: it concerns the kind of existence within which learning, refusing and understanding another person are possible. The jacket makes the proposal accessible, but it does not prove that every intelligible human possibility must have this structure.

Encountering someone within a world

When Esther visits a repair shop, she ordinarily encounters someone examining a seam or asking what alteration she wants. She does not first see a moving body and then infer that an invisible mind is directing it; the activity is already recognizable as something another person is doing. That person may explain it, misunderstand the request or propose something Esther had not considered.

Heidegger describes others as encountered within a shared world. We meet them through what they are engaged in, including things they have made or left for us: a jacket can refer us to its maker, and an unfinished repair can make someone’s absence felt. Not every relation to other people requires their physical presence.[3]

A tailor has a life in which the work has a place, and may care about the result, dislike the job or wish to be doing something else. Understanding someone through a role is therefore different from treating them as an item available for my use. In §26 Heidegger explicitly distinguishes the way others are with us from both readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. Their being-with does not depend on whether I value their contribution, or on whether they can successfully refuse what is demanded of them.

Shared understanding also has its limits. I may recognize someone as a worker and fail to understand what the work means to them, or mistake their silence for agreement. Familiar roles can make people intelligible while concealing what they would say about themselves. When Heidegger rejects the picture of a solitary mind building a bridge to another mind, he does not thereby establish that we know other people without asking, listening or reconsidering.

Being-with also includes unfriendly and indifferent relations. Passing someone by can involve avoiding a greeting, whereas two chairs merely standing side by side cannot avoid one another. We can recognize a person’s absence through an unfinished conversation or an expected visit. Solitude, too, can be welcome: calling being-with a structure does not require everyone to enjoy company or to regard time alone as a personal failure. The claim concerns the place of others in an intelligible life, not a quota of social contact.

The authority of what one does

Esther knows that a sleeve can fit in more than one way. She may nevertheless hear a particular judgment as obvious: one simply does not wear it like that. Who says so? Perhaps she learned it from a parent or a teacher. But the authority can persist when nobody present is issuing a command, and when no single person could claim to have invented the rule.

Heidegger calls this anonymous everyday authority the they. The expression is awkward in English; think of the “one” in “one does things this way.” It concerns the force of what is normally done, approved, noticed or dismissed. The commentator William Blattner calls it “the Anyone.” That wording helps us hear the impersonal expectation without picturing a particular group of people over there.[4]

I take part in this authority when I treat my expectations as what any reasonable person would expect. I can reinforce it by correcting a newcomer, laughing at an unfamiliar choice or assuming that the usual arrangement needs no explanation. The they therefore includes my own participation: it is neither an inferior mass of other people nor a hidden agent directing society.

Shared norms let people cooperate without negotiating the meaning of every gesture. You can recognize someone as waiting for a turn even when their way of asking differs from yours; a norm supplies a point of reference for understanding the difference without requiring identical conduct. We need not regard such familiarity as a failure of courage or originality.

But §27 also describes a flattening pressure. People measure themselves against what counts as success, suppress departures and adopt public judgments without making the issue their own. Even a performance of one’s difference can follow an approved pattern of being unconventional, and the wish to stand out is no guarantee that a person has examined the standard by which standing out matters.

The same authority can supply an excuse: this is simply how things are done. Such an answer may identify where an expectation comes from while avoiding responsibility for continuing it. A norm does not absolve the people who enforce it; an anonymous expectation can be carried by identifiable actions and decisions.

Shared intelligibility and conformism

Does a shared norm help us understand one another, pressure us to conform, or do both at once? The text makes the question hard. Heidegger treats the they as belonging to the constitution of everyday existence, while also describing public life in sharply critical terms. To make him merely a defender of cooperation, or merely an advocate of escaping the crowd, would remove half the difficulty.

Blattner describes a reading he calls existentialist, which treats the they as a deformation of being-with into oppressive conformism. Authenticity, provisionally understood as making a life one’s own, would then offer independence from that deformation. This reading captures the force of Heidegger’s criticism; its difficulty is explaining why he also treats the they as a basic feature of our existence.[5]

The reading Blattner associates with Hubert Dreyfus emphasizes the shared norms through which life becomes intelligible. In Blattner’s account, Dreyfus distinguishes that enabling function from conformism, finding two uses that Heidegger has not adequately separated. The reading preserves our dependence on a shared world while acknowledging the text’s hostility to leveling.

Blattner’s own proposal differs again. He treats competitive ranking and leveling as particular forms of public life that depend on more basic shared standards. Comparing ourselves with others already presupposes something that counts as success. His objection to the norm-enforcement account he attributes to Dreyfus concerns explanatory order: identifying a deviation already relies on a norm. That argument does not by itself give a history of how a particular norm arose.

Blattner thus tries to give the oppressive public life Heidegger describes a narrower place within the account. He acknowledges that some passages resist the reconstruction: Heidegger also presents leveling as an essential tendency. The distinction between intelligibility and conformism remains useful, but it does not make every sentence of §27 consistent or turn the they into an entirely neutral term.

We can nevertheless explain why owning a life would not mean escaping society altogether. The end of §27 presents authentic selfhood as a modification of the they, not an isolated condition beyond it, and a person can reconsider a commitment while still relying on shared language, assistance and practices. The later lesson on owning a life will develop this question. For now, rejecting every convention is no more a sufficient account of responsibility than following every convention is.[6]

When help takes over

How we live with others also shows in the help we give and receive. Heidegger calls our relation to other people concern in Stambaugh’s translation, or solicitude in the Macquarrie–Robinson terminology that Blattner uses. The technical term covers indifference and antagonism as well as kindness; it does not certify good intentions.[7]

Within solicitude, §26 describes two contrasting possibilities. Someone can take over what another has to do, displacing that person and potentially making them dependent; or someone can help the other understand and take up their own possibilities. Heidegger calls these leaping in and leaping ahead. His point concerns the other person’s relation to their life, not simply which pair of hands completes a task.

Suppose a friend takes Esther’s jacket, decides how it ought to fit and finishes the alteration while dismissing her objections. The jacket may be competently sewn, but Esther has been pushed out of deciding what is being done. Another friend might help her understand the alternatives, including the option of leaving the jacket alone, and that assistance gives her more room to decide what she wants and how to proceed.

The distinction needs care. Esther might ask a friend to do all the stitching because her hands are painful, and respecting that request can support her agency; requiring her to do the work herself, in the name of independence, could make matters worse. Conversely, someone can appear to leave her to decide while controlling the available choices. Counting the movements each person performs will not settle the question.

Heidegger acknowledges mixed forms between the extremes. These few pages supply no general rule for relationships. What they give us is a question to ask: what is this assistance doing to the person’s ability to understand and lead their own life? Answering it requires attention to consent, access, competence and the circumstances of dependence. Those are further judgments, not a moral code already contained in the term solicitude.

Whose norm, and at whose cost?

An expectation may be widely understood without being widely accepted. Someone can know exactly what a workplace expects and have good reasons for resisting it, and good reasons, too, for remaining silent when resistance risks their income or the work they are allowed to do. Outward conformity does not tell us whether the person endorses the norm.

Here a serious objection takes shape. Does the vocabulary of the they make very different relations look alike? Pronouncing a place name in a familiar way and submitting to a powerful person’s demand both involve expectations, but that common description may tell us little about who benefits, who can change the terms or who will suffer for refusing. Calling both everyday normativity could hide the differences we most need to explain.

A defender can reply that a shared structure need not erase the differences within it: an account of what makes a demand intelligible does not have to endorse the demand. Heidegger also describes dominating assistance and the evasion of responsibility through custom. These give criticism a foothold; the work does not overlook domination altogether.

The critic can grant those points and still ask whether the description is adequate even on its own terms. Someone whose customs I do not understand is still another person, and a familiar role may be precisely what they want me to question. Shared intelligibility must leave room for that encounter, including the discovery that I have misunderstood it.

The problem becomes especially pressing when the account speaks generally about public life. If it treats a powerful group’s standard as the ordinary world of everyone, exclusion can disappear from the description. To examine a norm adequately, we need to ask who can speak, whose interpretation is heard and what happens when someone says no. A norm can be understood from unequal positions, including the position of someone it excludes. Intelligibility does not establish justice.[8]

Blattner writes that Being and Time is not interested in politics or the state, and that boundary is contestable. His note 48 discusses Fritsche’s interpretation of Heidegger’s account of public life as politically prejudiced; Blattner suggests that the account of shared norms can survive criticism of the example. That is a proposed separation for us to assess. It does not establish that political commitments leave the philosophy untouched. The sustained historical inquiry comes in lesson 08, but we can already ask whose experience a supposedly general description makes ordinary, and whose it leaves out.

Application: a pronunciation and a workplace custom

Consider two invented cases.

In one town, people usually pronounce the name of the meeting hall, Avren, with the stress on the first syllable. A newcomer asks how to say it and receives a friendly explanation. Different accents are accepted, and someone who places the stress differently is still understood and welcomed. Following the local convention helps the newcomer refer to the hall in the familiar way.

At a workplace, junior staff are expected to keep their objections to themselves until a senior colleague raises the issue, and a manager calls this professional respect. A junior employee has relevant evidence that the group’s plan is mistaken, but people who have challenged the custom have received worse performance reviews. A senior colleague offers to raise the employee’s point under the colleague’s own name.

1. What makes each practice socially intelligible? Explain the part played by shared expectations without claiming that the participants all agree.
2. Does understanding both through the they show that they are equally justified or equally coercive? Explain the differences and identify what further evidence might matter.
3. How could the senior colleague’s assistance support or displace the junior employee’s agency? Give one thoughtful objection to Heidegger’s vocabulary or explanatory reach.

Full explanatory answer

The pronunciation convention gives people a shared expectation about how to refer to a place. The newcomer can ask how the name is pronounced because there is already a language, a name and a practice of using that name. Nobody in the present conversation needs to have invented the convention, though the person explaining it takes part in continuing it. The case illustrates the anonymous authority of what one says, while the friendly exchange shows a concrete relation between people.

The workplace custom also makes conduct recognizable. Staff understand the distinction between senior and junior positions, what counts as an objection and why a junior person’s intervention will attract attention. The employee can understand the custom and reject it, appealing to a different standard: whether the evidence supports the plan. The manager need not share the employee’s priorities for this disagreement to be intelligible. In neither case does sharing a world require approving its arrangements or pursuing identical ends.

The answer to the second question is no, on both counts. Calling both practices instances of everyday norms identifies a feature they share; it supplies no reason to treat them as equally justified. The pronunciation helps coordinate reference and, in the case as described, permits variation without exclusion. The workplace rule suppresses relevant evidence and makes a person’s standing depend on withholding it. Judgments about access to discussion, the quality of decisions and fairness of treatment provide reasons to criticize that rule, and its familiarity supplies no answer to those reasons.

Nor are the two cases equally coercive. Friendly instruction that the newcomer asked for differs from a threat to an employee’s assessment and opportunities. A pronunciation convention could be used to mock an accent or exclude a group, but those would be added facts, not features given in this case. Conversely, we should not assume that every way of ordering workplace discussion is oppressive; this scenario specifies the exclusion of objections by rank and a penalty for challenging it. Before proposing an adequate remedy, we would want more evidence about how decisions are made, what avenues for correction exist and who controls those avenues.

The manager and those assigning the worse reviews remain identifiable participants, and describing the rule through the they must not let them disappear into a force for which nobody is answerable. The junior employee also understands the norm, but the case does not put everyone on equal terms in sustaining it. Keeping quiet under pressure cannot simply be read as agreement, cowardice or failure to own a life. Understanding how things are done can coexist with recognizing that one cannot safely reject them in public.

The colleague’s offer is ambiguous. Raising the point under the colleague’s name might protect the employee from retaliation and advance a correction the employee wants, and in that case it supports the employee’s agency. It might instead appropriate the employee’s work, reinforce the rule that only senior voices count or prevent the employee from choosing how the issue is handled, and then it displaces that agency. The employee’s wishes, the risks, credit for the evidence and the possibility of changing the practice all matter. The same visible action can have different relations to agency. Refusing all help is not a necessary condition of agency, and speaking publicly is not a task the analysis may demand of someone facing retaliation.

Heidegger’s distinction prompts us to ask whether assistance takes the person’s concerns out of their hands or helps them exercise judgment about their own possibilities. It does not automatically select the right course: the employee might prefer a trusted colleague to speak, seek a different route or wait. A response that protects the employee today might still leave the unfair structure intact, and we can assess those two things separately. A full judgment needs the circumstances and the person’s own account; the labels alone cannot decide how much risk someone should bear.

A strong objection might argue that the they combines harmless coordination with institutional coercion under language too general to distinguish them well. Another might argue that describing others through familiar roles makes it too easy to overlook their challenge to those roles. A fair answer would acknowledge Heidegger’s account of being-with and his attention to dominating assistance, then ask whether the account gives us enough to examine unequal authority.

Toward the next lesson

Other people belong within the possibilities we understand, including those we reject or cannot safely pursue. Yet a situation also reaches us as welcoming, tedious, threatening or full of promise. “How a situation matters to us” turns to mood and possibility: how we find ourselves already affected by a world, and how we see ways of going on within it.

Sources and limits

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, §§25–27, read in Joan Stambaugh’s translation, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt (State University of New York Press, 2010), for being-with and the they. The supplied EPUB has textual defects and no verified mapping to print pages. Section numbers identify portions of the work across editions. Esther, the jacket and the application are original teaching material.

2. Being and Time, §25, for the question of who is doing the work. The distinction between identifying an individual and interpreting their way of being rests on the intact argument; a damaged clause about losing oneself is excluded. This does not repair the damaged sentence in §9 that lesson 01 excludes; that lesson’s account of everydayness keeps its separate support in §5.

3. Being and Time, §26, especially its opening, the account of being alone and the criticism of an initial bridge between isolated subjects. The account does not make understanding another person infallible. Uncertain wording in the closing discussion of mutual knowledge, and a broken sentence about counting subjects, are excluded from the argument rather than repaired from commentary.

4. Being and Time, §27, and William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide, second edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), chapter 4.v, “The Self and the Anyone,” pp. 66–76 by the EPUB’s anchors, including its closing study question and chapter notes 37–49, for the they. Blattner generally uses Macquarrie–Robinson with declared alterations, including “the Anyone.” His paired page references are not Stambaugh pages.

5. Blattner, chapter 4.v, especially the competing readings and notes 41–47. The existentialist and Dreyfus readings are presented through his account; the works he cites by Olafson, Dreyfus, Haugeland and Fritsche were not directly read for this lesson. Note 47 expressly acknowledges the reconstructive character of Blattner’s proposal, and his particular distinction between public competition and underlying norms is not presented as an uncontested statement by Heidegger.

6. Being and Time, end of §27. The link to owning a life prepares for later inquiry; it is not a full account of authenticity, conscience or resoluteness. Understanding need not entail agreement, and ownership does not establish moral rightness.

7. Being and Time, §26, for solicitude, independently checked against the available publisher-authorized preview of Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, translated by Joan Stambaugh (State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 114–115. That is the earlier, unrevised translation, not a print map for the revised EPUB. Both pages were read as images: they supply the two extremes and the mixed forms of concern, but not a complete alternate §26. The examples concerning requested assistance, access and agency are this lesson’s own critical development.

8. Blattner, end of chapter 4.v and notes 48–49. His claim about Being and Time and politics is contested here as an interpretation, not adopted as an exemption. Note 48 reports Fritsche’s political reading; that remains a mediated report, not a direct reading of Fritsche or of a political primary text. The objection from authority and exclusion, and the response to it, are original critical reconstructions. The notebook evidence in the study orientation remains mediated scholarship. No German text was collated, and no primary-source sentence is quoted in this lesson.