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ground, inasmuch as this being-with-one-another and concern have the character of averageness. This averageness is an existential determination of the Anyone; it is that around which everything turns for the Anyone, what is essentially at issue for it. That is why the Anyone holds itself factically in the averageness of what belongs to it and what it takes as valid. This polished averageness of the everyday interpretation of Dasein, of the assessment of the world and the similar averageness of customs and manners watches over every exception which thrusts itself to the fore. Every exception is short-lived and quietly suppressed. Anything original is smoothed out overnight into something which is available to Everyman and no longer barred to anyone. This essential averageness of the Anyone is in turn grounded in an original mode of being of the Anyone. This mode is given in its absorption in the world, in what can be called the levelling of being-with-one-another, the levelling of all differences.
There is an existential interrelation among the phenomena of apartness, averageness, and levelling. The Anyone as that which forms everyday being-with-one-another in these ways of its being constitutes what we call the public in the strict sense of the word. It implies that the world is always already primarily given as the common world. It is not the case that on the one hand there are first individual subjects which at any given time have their own world; and that the task would then arise of putting together, by virtue of some sort of an arrangement, the various particular worlds of the individuals and of agreeing how one would have a common world. This is how philosophers imagine these things when they ask about the constitution of the intersubjective world. We say instead that the first thing that is given is the common world—the Anyone—, the world in which Dasein is absorbed such that it has not yet come to itself, just as it can constantly be this way without having to come to itself.
We noted that Dasein first of all does not live in its own and nearest. First of all and everyday, one's own world and own Dasein are precisely the farthest. What is first is precisely the world in which one is with one another. It is out of this world that one can first more or less genuinely grow into his own world. This common world, which is there primarily and into which every maturing Dasein first grows, as the public world governs every interpretation of the world and of Dasein. This public world advances its claims and demands, it is right in everything, not by virtue of an original relationship to the world and to Dasein itself, not because it might have a special and genuine knowledge of the world and of Dasein, but precisely by talking over everything while not going 'into the matters' and by virtue of an insensitivity to all distinctions in level and genuineness. The public is involved in everything but in such a way that it has already always