Publicness

Publicness, as deployed in this passage from McCormick's conceptual history, names the ontological mode of being proper to das Man — the anonymous "everyone" and "no one" of average everydayness. It is not merely a sociological description of collective life but a structural condition of Dasein's fallen existence: the horizon in which what is "closest to us," the innocuous initial givens of the day, are taken as self-evident, shared, and settled. Publicness absorbs and levels all genuine questioning into the comfortable circulation of what "one" already knows, what "most of us" already agree on. It is the atmosphere in which Gerede thrives — idle talk does not merely occur within publicness, it is its constitutive medium, producing and reproducing the anonymous consensus that masquerades as understanding.

Crucially, publicness in Heidegger's 1923 hermeneutics of facticity lectures functions as a ruinant structure — it actively covers over Dasein's confrontation with its own facticity and the anxiety that such a confrontation would provoke. By substituting the average, the for-most-of-us, for genuine self-understanding, publicness is phantasmatic: it presents the sediment of inherited interpretation as transparent reality. Academic disciplinary discourse is, on this reading, exemplary rather than exceptional — it does not stand above publicness and Gerede but recapitulates them at a higher register, mistaking the smooth circulation of consensus-concepts for genuine inquiry into the matters at hand.

This concept appears in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p. 158) as part of McCormick's reconstruction of Heidegger's pre-Being and Time lectures on the hermeneutics of facticity. It sits at the intersection of three cross-referenced canonicals: Gerede, das Man, and Facticity. Publicness is best understood as the modal correlate of Gerede — if Gerede names the linguistic mechanism of idle talk (the uprooting of speech from its referential ground), publicness names the existential space that Gerede produces and inhabits. Together they constitute the ontological structure of average everydayness. Relative to Facticity, publicness functions as a covering movement: where facticity in the Heideggerian register names the unchosen thrownness that Dasein must appropriate or flee, publicness is precisely the mode of flight — the "for-most-of-us" substitutes an anonymous givenness for the singular confrontation with one's own thrown existence.

The cross-reference to Anxiety is also structurally significant. Publicness, on this account, is not merely a social phenomenon but a defense against anxiety — specifically, the anxiety that would arise if Dasein were to face its facticity directly, without the buffer of shared opinion. This aligns with the Lacanian understanding of anxiety as what emerges when the gap that sustains desire (or, here, the gap between Dasein and its ownmost possibilities) threatens to close or be recognized. Publicness keeps that gap safely covered. The further cross-references to Ideology, Phenomenology, and Singularity suggest that McCormick deploys publicness as a critical concept: the leveling movement of publicness is structurally analogous to ideology's misrecognition function, and its negation — the singularity of resolute Dasein — is what both authentic phenomenological inquiry and genuine speech must wrest back from it.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.158)

As this kind of averageness, the innocuous initial 'givens' of the day which are closest to us and these givens as a for-the-most-part and for-most-of-us, publicness is the mode of being of the 'every-one'

The phrase "for-the-most-part and for-most-of-us" is theoretically loaded because it captures the double anonymizing logic of publicness: statistical averageness ("for-the-most-part") fuses with social generality ("for-most-of-us") to produce a pseudo-universal that dissolves the singularity of any individual Dasein into the undifferentiated "every-one" (das Man) — the entity who is ultimately no one in particular.