Falling - Fleeing

Falling-Fleeing names the double movement that Heidegger's analysis of average everydayness discloses at the heart of everyday existence: to fall into the ordinary world of quotidian concerns (Das Man, idle talk, Gerede) is simultaneously and necessarily to flee from the possibility of authentic existence. The concept captures not a sequential two-step but a single, structurally unified gesture — the very absorption in the everyday is the evasion of authenticity, and vice versa. What the concept makes visible is that this flight is not innocent: to flee from authentic existence is already to be in a certain relation to it, to carry a latent familiarity with the very possibility one evades. The flight is thus self-betraying — it testifies, however mutely, to the pressure of what is being escaped.

Within McCormick's argument (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive), this double movement is crucially non-linear in its implications. The mood of anxiety and the practice of alltägliche Rede do not simply chain the subject to inauthenticity; rather, they open indirect, circuitous routes back toward authentic existence by disclosing the world's groundlessness. The fall into everydayness is not a simple degradation but a detour in which the subject's constitutive unease with groundlessness remains live, precisely because fleeing it requires acknowledging it. Falling-Fleeing thus names the paradoxical unity of evasion and inadvertent disclosure that structures everyday communicative existence.

This concept belongs to the Heideggerean strand of McCormick's argument (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive) and functions as the hinge between two cross-referenced canonical concepts: Das Man (the anonymous "one" of social conformity that characterises average everydayness) and Alltägliche Rede / Idle Talk-Gerede (the undifferentiated, circulating speech that is the communicative medium of Das Man). Falling-Fleeing specifies the existential dynamic those concepts presuppose — it explains why absorption in Das Man and Gerede is not mere passivity but active evasion, and why that evasion is structurally self-undermining.

In relation to the Lacanian canonical concepts supplied as cross-references, Falling-Fleeing resonates most strongly with Alienation and Anxiety. Like Lacanian alienation, the structure involves a forced, non-optional condition: one cannot simply stand outside the fall into everydayness any more than the Lacanian subject can opt out of the vel of alienation. Both structures yield a losing position regardless of which "side" one occupies. The echo of Anxiety is equally strong: just as Lacanian anxiety arises not from the absence of the object but from its threatening proximity — the dread of losing the gap that constitutes desire — Falling-Fleeing identifies the flight from authentic existence as driven by a familiarity with it that is too close for comfort. The concept does not import Lacanian vocabulary, but it occupies structurally homologous terrain: the everyday is not the simple negation of authenticity but its uncanny double, much as Das Ding functions as the intimate-yet-excluded kernel of desire rather than an external Other.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.223)

To fall into average everydayness and its worldly concerns is also to flee from their crucial alternative: authentic existence. And to flee from authentic existence is always to admit a certain familiarity with it.

The theoretical load of the quote is carried by the word "always" and the phrase "admit a certain familiarity with it": flight is not mere ignorance but constitutive acknowledgment — the subject's evasion of authentic existence is itself a form of recognition, making the fall into everydayness a self-betraying structure rather than a simple absence of awareness. The conjunction "also" in the first sentence is equally charged, marking falling and fleeing not as successive stages but as a single simultaneous movement.