Heidegger and Sociology

For Heidegger, being in the mode of the they-self is an inauthentic mode of being for Dasein, yet it is a part of Dasein’s average everydayness to be in this mode. Heidegger realizes that we regularly appeal to the ‘they’ as a way of dealing with our everyday lives. This is not something we can get away from. It is part of Dasein’s ontological structure insofar as it is a Being-with-others. While we may be predisposed towards deburdening ourselves by projecting the ‘they’ it is still not an authentic mode of being for Dasein. Dasein is not Dasein when it is in the mode of the they-self because it loses its ‘mineness’. It no longer is for its own Being, but for the Being of the ‘they’.

This projecting of the ‘they’ is very similar to how sociology conceives of the way in which the individual is socially constructed by the group. The sociologist is generally interested in what different societies take to be knowledge as opposed to what knowledge is itself. The basic response is that society is a kind of normalizing force the instructs the individuals about how to act. The simple act of congregating in a group is enough to create a collective ‘moral’ feeling about how one should act.

This kind of naïve social epistemology has always bothered me. Heidegger’s account seems to me to be an accurate and powerful challenge to the idea that the socializing, normalizing force of the ‘they’ is the place one turns to for knowledge, or justification of that knowledge. Has anyone else come up against this problem? I know that this post goes a little outside the scope of this class, but I was wondering if anyone else has taken any sociology classes. In a way, the sociologist is committing the same offence as the lazy relativist, but the sociologist is much more rigorous in her approach. Let me know what you think.