Jeweiligkeit

Jeweiligkeit is a Heideggerian neologism coined by fusing the adjective je ("each," "every") with the verb weilen ("to tarry," "to while"), yielding a term that names Dasein's mode of being as always mine and always situated — each time particular, each time lingering in its own moment. The concept captures the irreducibly singular temporal situatedness of Dasein: that existence is not a general or transferable condition but something that belongs to this being, here, now, in its own tarrying. It functions as an ontological counterweight to the anonymous leveling of das Man: where das Man dissolves individuation into "what one does," Jeweiligkeit insists on the each-time-mine-ness of being, the irreducible "whiling" of a particular existence in its own moment.

Crucially, the theoretical move in McCormick's source text (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind) reframes this concept genealogically: Jeweiligkeit, like Gerede and resolute silence, did not begin as a pure philosophical category but emerged from Heidegger's concrete biographical and careerist circumstances. The opposition between authentic singularity (Jeweiligkeit) and inauthentic, circulating chatter (Gerede) was first lived as a practical distinction before it was elevated into existential-phenomenological doctrine. This historical-biographical anchoring means the concept carries a double valence: it is simultaneously a formal ontological designation and a post-hoc philosophical sublimation of a personal, strategic opposition to the academic milieu.

Within the source samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind, Jeweiligkeit appears as part of a cluster of concepts — alongside Gerede, idle talk, resolute silence, and authenticity/inauthenticity — whose genealogy McCormick traces back through Heidegger's careerist biography. Its place in the argument is to serve as the positive pole of an existential opposition: Jeweiligkeit names the authentic each-time-singularity of Dasein against which Gerede's impersonal circulation of speech is defined as inauthentic. Gerede, as synthesized in the canonical concepts, is the linguistic medium of das Man — it repeats and re-circulates speech without recourse to the matter at hand, producing "sham clarity" and dissolving singular Dasein into anonymous publicness. Jeweiligkeit is its structural counter-concept: what is lost when Dasein falls into idle talk is precisely this tarrying singularity, the "mine-ness" of each moment of existence.

The concept also resonates with the cross-referenced notions of Singularity and Repetition. Jeweiligkeit stresses the non-repeatable, each-time character of Dasein's being, which aligns with Heidegger's broader existential analytics where Dasein's ownmost possibilities (including death) cannot be delegated or generalized. Against the background of the Ideology concept — where ideology operates through the anonymous structural non-knowledge of participants and through the leveling of difference into the circulating same — Jeweiligkeit reads as the site that ideology (in its Heideggerian form, as Gerede and das Man) most systematically covers over. The genealogical point McCormick makes, however, complicates any simple celebration of Jeweiligkeit as an escape from ideology: if the concept itself was forged in careerist, biographical circumstance, it is already marked by the very practical-social world it purports to transcend.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.165)

Heidegger developed the neologism Jeweiligkeit— a conceptual fusion of the adjective je, meaning 'each' and 'every,' and the verb weilen, meaning 'to tarry' and, more poetically, 'to while.'

The quote is theoretically loaded because it exposes the word's internal structure: je (each/every) asserts irreducible particularity, while weilen (to tarry/to while) introduces a temporal-affective dimension — existence is not mere presence but a lingering, a dwelling in one's moment. The fusion of these two semantic fields in a single neologism condenses Heidegger's ontological claim that Dasein is always already individuated in and through its own temporal situatedness, making Jeweiligkeit a grammatical enactment of the existential thesis it names.