439 II. 5
Being and Time

future, it has become plain why the historizing of authentic history lies [387] preponderantly in having been. But it remains all the more enigmatic in what way this historizing, as fate, is to constitute the whole 'connectedness' of Dasein from its birth to its death. How can recourse to resoluteness bring us any enlightenment? Is not each resolution just one more single 'Experience' in the sequence of the whole connectedness of our Experiences? Is the 'connectedness' of authentic historizing to consist, let us say, of an uninterrupted sequence of resolutions? Why is it that the question of how the 'connectedness of life' is Constituted finds no adequate and satisfying answer? Is not our investigation overhasty? Does it not, in the end, hang too much on the answer, without first having tested the legitimacy of the question? Nothing is so plain from the course of the existential analytic so far, as the Fact that the ontology of Dasein is always falling back upon the allurements of the way in which Being is ordinarily understood. The only way of encountering this fact methodologically is by studying the source of the question of how Dasein's connectedness is Constituted, no matter how 'obvious' this question may be, and by determining within what ontological horizon it moves.

If historicality belongs to the Being of Dasein, then even inauthentic existing must be historical. What if it is Dasein's inauthentic historicality that has directed our questioning to the 'connectedness of life' and has blocked off our access to authentic historicality and its own peculiar 'connectedness'? However this may be treated, we cannot do without a study of Dasein's inauthentic historicality if our exposition of the ontological problem of history is to be adequate and complete.


75. Dasein's Historicality, and World-history

Proximally and for the most part, Dasein understands itself in terms of that which it encounters in the environment and that with which it is circumspectively concerned. This understanding is not just a bare taking cognizance of itself, such as accompanies all Dasein's ways of behaving. Understanding signifies one's projecting oneself upon one's current possibility of Being-in-the-world; that is to say, it signifies existing as this possibility. Thus understanding, as common sense, constitutes even the inauthentic existence of the "they". When we are with one another in public, our everyday concern does not encounter just equipment and work; it likewise encounters what is 'given' along with these: 'affairs', undertakings, [388] incidents, mishaps. The 'world' belongs to everyday trade and traffic as the soil from which they grow and the arena where they are displayed. When we are with one another in public, the Others are encountered in activity of such a kind that one is 'in the swim' with it 'oneself'.


Being and Time (M&R) by Martin Heidegger