Average Everydayness

Average Everydayness is Heidegger's term for the ontological baseline of Dasein's existence — the undifferentiated, anonymous mode of being in which the self is not yet individuated but dissolved into the communal horizon of das Man. It is not a deficient or fallen state one temporarily occupies before recovering authenticity; rather, it is the structural ground from which all other modes of existence — authentic or inauthentic — must depart and to which they remain indebted. In this register, Dasein encounters itself not as a singular, resolute self but as the "they-self" (das Man-selbst): one does what "one does," thinks what "one thinks," speaks as "one speaks." Average everydayness is thus constituted by three interpenetrating existential features: Abständigkeit (standing-apart-from-others, or distantiality), averageness (Durchschnittlichkeit), and leveling down (Einebnung) — all of which jointly produce the phenomenon Heidegger calls "publicness." Together they ensure that genuine differentiation, whether of meaning or of selfhood, is systematically suppressed in favor of a smooth, frictionless intelligibility that masks its own emptiness.

The concept is inseparable from Heidegger's account of language: in average everydayness, authentic Rede degrades into Gerede and ultimately Geschwätz, producing a "sham clarity" (bathos/Trivialität) in which matters seem fully understood precisely because no one is genuinely engaging with them. The paradox at the heart of average everydayness is that Abständigkeit — the very mechanism by which Dasein tries to maintain distance from others and assert itself — paradoxically intensifies dependence on those others, since the self-definition gained through distancing is always measured against and calibrated to the anonymous public standard. Average everydayness is therefore not social conformity in a naive sense but a deeper structural condition: the anonymous they-self replaces resolute selfhood, and pseudo-communication substitutes for genuine disclosure.

In samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, Average Everydayness functions as the anthropological and ontological backdrop against which the book's communicative spectrum — from authentic Rede to Gerede to Geschwätz — becomes intelligible. The concept is the territory; the degradation of language is the event that happens within it. It cross-references directly to Das Man (the anonymous they-self that is its subject), Gerede (the linguistic medium that constitutes and sustains it), Babbling/Geschwätz (its communicative nadir), and Pseudo-Communication (its structural outcome). Abständigkeit, averageness, and leveling down are identified as its constitutive features that together produce publicness — making average everydayness less a description of idle behavior than a formal ontological condition.

The concept sits in a productive tension with Alienation and Authenticity/Inauthenticity as cross-referenced canonicals. Where Lacanian Alienation names a structural loss built into the subject's entry into the Symbolic — irremediable and constitutive of subjectivity as such — Heidegger's Average Everydayness describes a mode of being that is equally structural but oriented toward the possibility of an existentiell modification: authenticity is not an escape from average everydayness but a retrieval enacted from within it. Similarly, the concept extends the account of Gerede by supplying its ontological address: Gerede is not a random social vice but the indigenous mode of Signification proper to average everydayness, which means that Language in this register is always already subject to the leveling and distancing operations that dissolve genuine selfhood into the anonymous they-self.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.216)

Abständigkeit would eventually make its way into Being and Time, appearing alongside 'averageness' and 'leveling down' as a way of being characteristic of das Man and a basic constituent of what Heidegger calls 'publicness'

The quote is theoretically loaded because it names the three constitutive structural features — Abständigkeit, averageness, and leveling down — as co-constitutive rather than independent, and then immediately anchors them in "publicness," showing that average everydayness is not a psychological condition of individuals but an ontological structure of being-with-others; "characteristic of das Man" further signals that the subject operative here is precisely the anonymous they-self, not a singular Dasein.