In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, we find an extensive and serious discussion of a structural account of falling and the phenomena of which it is constituted. Heidegger begins this account with the phenomenon he calls idle talk. Idle talk is characterized as the perversion of the act of disclosing as it is in communication and the subsequent uprooting of Dasein’s understanding of the world. This characterization of idle talk is followed by an analysis of the phenomenon that is Dasein’s motivation towards such an act of disclosing. This motivating phenomenon which Heidegger lays out as a tendency towards finding truth in a mere beholding of the world is called curiosity. Lastly, Heidegger characterizes the resulting intelligibility of the one as ambiguous since everything is made intelligible to everyone. Such ambiguity is also described as the leveling of intelligibility. These distinct phenomena are wound together to form a coherent existential analytic of the everyday being of Dasein and how the relationship between one’s own authentic self and the ‘they-self’ operates in the disclosure of significance to Dasein. My goal in this paper will be to thoroughly explicate the meaning of Heidegger’s theory of idle talk while clarifying the role it plays in the structure of falling and the existential role it plays in the disclosure of Dasein and entities in the world.
Heidegger characterizes idle talk as a mode of falling, which is one of the four fundamental structures of being-in (the other three being discourse, attunement and understanding). Idle talk can be sometimes confused as a constituent part of discourse because of the everyday use of the terms. Discourse can make itself manifest through language i ...