Book contents
- Heidegger’s Social Ontology
- Modern European Philosophy
- Heidegger’s Social Ontology
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Works by Heidegger
- Introduction
- Part I Being-In-the-World and Being-With
- Part II Forms of Being-With
- Chapter 4 Interpersonal Understanding
- Chapter 5 Shared Action
- Chapter 6 Two Types of Social Normativity
- Part III Politics and Authenticity
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Two Types of Social Normativity
from Part II - Forms of Being-With
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2023
- Heidegger’s Social Ontology
- Modern European Philosophy
- Heidegger’s Social Ontology
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Works by Heidegger
- Introduction
- Part I Being-In-the-World and Being-With
- Part II Forms of Being-With
- Chapter 4 Interpersonal Understanding
- Chapter 5 Shared Action
- Chapter 6 Two Types of Social Normativity
- Part III Politics and Authenticity
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In contrast to the small-scale we of shared action, this chapter analyses the large-scale and temporally prolonged we’s of communities governed by social norms. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the Anyone and of historicity, I distinguish between anonymous social normativity and historical social normativity. Anonymous social normativity provides a set of social norms in the form of a relatively stable, socially inflected comportmental pattern that we assume to be a universal default. However, this kind of social normativity comes with only a minimal awareness of its own nature, extent, and origin. Historical social normativity, on the other hand, implies a historical awareness in which social norms are disclosed as historical and hence as fragile and contestable. For Heidegger, this leads to the proto-political possibility of what I call communal commitments—roughly, commitments in which a group of people commit themselves to sustain a particular set of social norms across generations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Heidegger's Social OntologyThe Phenomenology of Self, World, and Others, pp. 159 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022