Gerhard Thonhauser

Heidegger’s account of the anyone is ambiguous. Some interpreters applaud the anyone as the best description of human sociality, while others think of it as an important critique of modern mass society. This chapter introduces the main idea leading up to this volume: Heidegger’s anyone should neither be reduced to its pejorative nor its constitutive dimension. Rather, the ambiguity of the anyone reflects the tension between the constitutive function of norms, rules, and conventions for human action on the one hand, and the critical aspects of conformism on the other. The anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action, but it does not provide its ultimate source of meaning or intelligibility. This evokes the question whether there are standards for our actions beyond the common sense of the anyone. I take this to be the question that Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit, translated as authenticity or ownedness, wants to address. After distinguishing two controversial dimensions for interpreting authenticity – romantic versus formal and individualistic-atomistic versus pluralistic-social – I will introduce the social dimension of authenticity as the focal point of this volume. In particular, I will identify as the main question whether authenticity can serve as a source of social critique and a motor for social change.

The negative aim of this paper is to identify shortcomings in received theories. First, we criticize approaching audiences, and large gatherings more general, in categories revolving around the notion of the crowd. Second, we show how leading paradigms in emotion research restrict research on the social-relational dynamics of emotions by reducing them to physiological processes like emotional contagion or to cognitive processes like social appraisal. Our positive aim is to offer an alternative proposal for conceptualizing emotional dynamics in audiences. First, we offer a notion of emotional sharing for studying the social-relational dynamics of emotions. Second, we propose a working concept of audience as a dynamic and dispersed social collective. Finally, we bring these elements together in the description of two scenes of jubilation.

This paper discusses Karl Löwith’s as yet little known contribution to an understanding of human sociality and social reality. It focusses on his accounts of “social roles” and “correflexivity” in human interaction, and the intelligibility of social artifacts through their connectedness with everyday practices. According to Löwith, the intelligibility of social behavior depends to a large extent on us ascribing roles to others. This is combined with the notion of correflexivity: Human social action is not simply directed towards others, but is already co-determined by the anticipation of their response; we relate to others in such a way that the anticipation of their potential relation to us, including an anticipation of their anticipation of our action, co-determines our initial relation to them. For Löwith, the understanding of others as having social roles and the correflexivity of social interaction are the basic infrastructure of human sociality. They form the background that makes others and their actions intelligible, thereby presenting them as potential partners for joint intention or action. In addition, the paper discusses Löwith’s criticism of universal ontology. He opposes any essentialist project, may it be metaphysical or naturalistic, in favor of a hermeneutic phenomenological method; such an approach fosters awareness of its own preunderstandings, opening them to critical examination and political contestation.

The aim of this paper is to clarify the notion of shared emotion. After contextualizing this notion within the broader research landscape on collective affective intentionality, I suggest that we reserve the term shared emotion to an affective experience that is phenomenologically and functionally ours: we experience it together as our emotion, and it is also constitutively not mine and yours, but ours. I focus on the three approaches that have dominated the philosophical discussion on shared emotions: cognitivist accounts, concern-based accounts, and phenomenological fusion accounts. After identifying strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and summarizing the elements that a multifaceted theory of shared emotions requires, I turn to the work of the early phenomenologist Edith Stein to further advance an approach to shared emotions that combines the main strengths of Helm and Salmela’s concern-based accounts and Schmid’s phenomenological fusion account. According to this proposal, the sharedness of a shared emotion cannot be located in one element, but rather consists in a complex of interrelated features.

This edited volume offers a new approach to understanding social conventions by way of Martin Heidegger. It connects the philosopher's conceptions of the anyone, everydayness, and authenticity with an analysis and critique of social normativity. Heidegger’s account of the anyone is ambiguous. Some see it as a good description of human sociality, others think of it as an important critique of modern mass society. This volume seeks to understand this ambiguity as reflecting the tension between the constitutive function of conventions for human action and the critical aspects of conformism. It argues that Heidegger’s anyone should neither be reduced to its pejorative nor its constitutive dimension. Rather, the concept could show how power and norms function. This volume would be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and the social sciences who wish to investigate the social applications of the works of Martin Heidegger.

In contrast to the focus on Being and Time in traditional accounts of the Kierkegaard-Heidegger relationship, new sources reveal that Heidegger referred to Kierkegaard much more frequently during the 1930s. In the note “My Relation to Kierkegaard” Heidegger’s presents his own account of this relationship. Discussing Heidegger’s account, my essay focuses on Kierkegaard’s role in Heidegger’s history of being: First, I highlight two reasons why Heidegger considers Kierkegaard a Hegelian. Second, I show that it was not the turn to Nietzsche that caused Heidegger to move away from Kierkegaard but a later transformation of his view that excluded Kierkegaard from that history. Finally, I provide an account of Heidegger’s understanding of Kierkegaard and especially his take on Kierkegaard’s Christianity.