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'...our interpretation has in a way lost sight of the everydayness of Da-sein. The analysis must again regain this phenomenal horizon... What are the existential characteristics of the disclosedness of being-in-the-world... in the mode of being of the they?' [167]
Heidegger starts this section by indicating that 'idle talk' is not to be understood in a disparaging sense, but a technical one. Nevertheless, his discussion undeniably has a pejorative ring to it. Heidegger fails to maintain a dispassionate stance on this subject - and those of the following sections - because, Dreyfus says, he entwines the 'structural' and 'psychological' senses of his concept of 'falling' (Dreyfus, 1991: 225-226). It is difficult to read these accounts without sensing an implicit judgement or, indeed, a wish to resist the fall.
'Idle talk' is how understanding and interpretation are communicated in language by Da-sein as everyday they-self. All language, by its very nature, distances Da-sein from a primordial relationship to things. However, when 'gossip' or 'scribble' is accepted and passed on uncritically without regard to the subject of its claims, it is even more the case that our understanding becomes uprooted and completely groundless. Overlooking this groundlessness and never short of something to say we presume we have reached understanding and, inquiring no further, close off any possibility of going back to the foundation of what is being talked about. This uprooted way of being is our 'everyday and stubborn 'reality'.'
A firmly-established tradition, to which we are strongly drawn, supposes that we find the truth in a pure beholding of the world, one untouched by concerns about use or interpretation. No less in our everydayness do we show a tendency towards a particular way of letting the world be encountered, namely a tendency to prioritise just perceiving (denoted by Heidegger as 'seeing', a term which encompasses every sense, not just sight) which tendency Heidegger designates 'curiosity'. If we finish a task, circumspectly undertaken, or we take a rest from it, our de-distancing character - now free of circumspection and the need to bring close those ready-to-hand things with which we were engaged - becomes intrigued by things further away, thus seeing the 'world', but only in its outward appearance. Then we see not in order to understand but just to see, jumping distractedly from one novelty to the next. 'Curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and marvelling at them... To be amazed to the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest.' (M&R)
Idle talk and curiosity feed off each other and together obscure what is, and is not, genuinely understood. Such ambiguity is not limited solely to my view of the 'world'. It extends to my being-with-others and my being-towards-myself.
Though not the result of any intention to distort, thrown being-with-one-another is a 'tense, ambiguous keeping track of each other.' Our understanding of others is first determined by what 'they' know and say. Idle talk 'slips in between' the beings who are with each other.
As for myself, if I am directed by idle talk then I can never keep up. For if I project my future along a particular path and devote my time to seeing things through, then the public world will have moved on thus rendering my achievements outdated. And if I do not then I constantly uproot myself, skating on outward appearances where 'basically nothing happens at all.' [§37] Perhaps more than anywhere it is in understanding possibilities that remaining in the 'they' is something to be decried. For it is hard not to despair at King's conclusion that 'people are as a rule misguided as to what are, and what are not, the genuine possibilities of their factical existence.' (King, 2001: 87) A case, indeed, of 'idle talk costs lives'. Perhaps Heidegger is simply being disingenuous when he declares this discussion judgement-free? Polt suggests as much when he says: 'It may be a fact that everyday existence is superficial, ambiguous and evasive,' but 'If we react to this reality with disapproval, that may be because of the pull of a different style of existence, authentic existence, which Heidegger will describe in Division II.' (Polt, 1999: 76)
Gelven maintains that Heidegger's account of falling needs 'little explanation' and calls the analysis of §35-§38 a 'fine phenomenological account.' (Gelven, 1989: 106) Dreyfus, on the other hand, declares Heidegger's discussion to be 'complex and confusing' (Dreyfus, 1991: 225), a consequence (he says) of entangling the structural and psychological senses of falling (noted in §35, above).
As already clarified, Da-sein's everyday way of being is inauthentic, characterised by idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. Together these constitute Da-sein's entanglement, meaing that it is 'initially and for the most part together with the 'world' that it takes care of' and, simultaneously, 'lost in the publicness of the they.' Thus absorbed, Da-sein finds itself 'fallen prey to the 'world'' (JS) or 'fallen into the world' (M&R). A helpful footnote adds 'the preposition 'into' is hardly the correct one. The idea is rather that of falling at the world or collapsing against it.' (M&R: 220)
As elsewhere Heidegger is at pains to stress that no criticism is implied by his analysis. 'Despite its air of deterioration, Heidegger insists that Verfallen (falling) is not a term of moral disapproval and has nothing to do with the Christian fall from grace.' (Inwood, 1999: 65) It is not a matter of having fallen from a higher mode of being for we have no practical experience of this, nor any theoretical apparatus to describe such a state. Equally, falling is not a matter of making unfortunate individual choices nor, indeed, something which one day we might grow out of. Verfallen is one of the essential constituents of care (existence and facticity being the other two) and (along with understanding, attunement and discourse) one of four structures that make up Da-sein's disclosedness.
Insofar as we always possess the factical potentiality to be an authentic Da-sein-revealing self, everyday absorption in the 'world' must represent a falling away, Yet we fall prey to the world which, we are reminded, is a part of our being. Thus, 'inauthentic being-with-one-another in the publicness of the they' necessarily remains a distinctive and positive human possibility (indeed the most common and 'nearest' one we have). Thus Da-sein falls 'out of itself into itself', a trajectory that Heidegger colourfully describes as being 'tempted', 'tranquillized' and spurred into busyness, thus aggravating 'self-entanglement' and resulting in 'alienation'. This whole 'movement' amounts to a 'plunge', characterised all the time by an inconstancy that is dubbed 'eddying'.