Edit When I think about the question, "What is the other?" there are three main things that come to mind. First, I believe that defining "the other" is highly dependent on others. That is, we are in relationships constantly. We are not just in relationships to people but also to everything else around us. We are always in a state of needing each other. For example, we are engaged in different states of relationship like me needing my professor for education, and my professor needing me for money. There are also physical needs like needing water. This is why I support the notion that the other is simply yourself from the perspective of the other person. You create yourself based on what other people want you to be. We then abide to a fixed set of categorical norms that in part cause a lot of our actions. For instance, holding a job or having a career are things that are expected of us. Furthermore, we are highly dynamic entities.

When it comes to answering the question of what is the public vs. The other, the pubic is indeed what we are supposed to be. Have you ever found yourself in a state of changing your views, beliefs and future plans? A lot of this comes from the notion of the externality of the world, which had an effect on us in the first place. There is also the element of what caused us to change a certain mindset. We are dynamic in that we are always planning what to be. This is also what I mean when I claim that to see the self, you must include the other in it.

Jus as the individual has roles, the other and the public occupy series of various roles. I have the role as a student, daughter, friend, and girlfriend. We are all acting on a stage. Life is about changing scenes and scripts. We change our roles, but in the end we are all actors. Sometimes we get a gig in a movie, and it is fast and good money. Other times, business is slower.

So what is the private, then? The private to be is the person who is able to resist the objective norms and have the courage to do otherwise. For instance, when you see a person walking in the street naked, this person acts according to his or her own rules. I am not supporting this behavior, but only saying that it comes from a passionate and authentic act, one that was invented by the individual. It did not come from anywhere else. Our role, our real role, is one that is completely detached from fixed sets of principles.

Moreover, authenticity can align to a high degree with death. I highly believe that we are stuck in a time pool, and one that we cannot escape from. But the notion of having near death experiences is not even the end, since even you will not be there when it happens. To illustrate leaving the conformity realm, I remember that I was very close to death once. I was 12 years old and in the pool. It was just my cousins and me. Suddenly I found myself at the deep end of the pool. I found myself not being able to swim back up and I remember this feeling of being outside of any realm. It is something I had not felt before or since. It was real. So moments like those are the private, to be able to confront and be honest with yourself.

Let us now look at the works of Heidegger and Sartre to establish how my story aligns with the point of the text. The thesis is that other is the same as what others want you to be. In "Being in Time," Heidegger raises the question of what it means to be in the world. Heidegger's methodology is that everything from ground up must be reevaluated. Truth should no longer be understood as a correspondent or based on evidence. What we have to do is acknowledge that a description itself is already an interpretation of reality, and philosophy should be perspectival. In other words, we cannot do this in a platonic matter because we are presupposing we know what is actually is. So we have to describe being in an ontological sense. This is what Heidegger calls hermeneutics, which means interpretation. He does this by eliminating all of the concrete terms and creates a new language. He describes the human experience in a different way. He forms the...

We exist inside time, never outside. This is the horizon and the framework for understanding what constitutes being. With that is said, the philosopher's interference between the something and the nothing is exactly where humans live. To understand my point, we must first focus on the fact that Heidegger renames humans and calls them da sein, which he describes as entities who are located in space and time. It is uncertain exactly where in space or time. Human beings had no choice in being in the world. We were put here and have no control over our ascribed statues. Then, where are we? For instance, we may be sitting in the subway with headphones in our ears. Are we really there, or merely acting? According to Heidegger, even when we get to death we are not there to experience it. By that time we will be gone. With all that said, the da sein live between the no longer and the not there yet, and are always dispersed in time. This affirms the notion that we are fundamentally incomplete. We have been thrown in the world. We are no longer, but death is not yet.
Heidegger holds that we live in an ontic way. That is, we live existentially. Moreover, we treat everything in life and our surroundings as pure stuff, what Heidegger calls equiopotentiality. Even though we treat things as stuff, these things have an influence on us. When you sit in the car, you think you are the master of it, but if the car does not turn on then you are actually not in control of it. Thus, everything can have influence or power over us.

We can see that this is an extension of Hegel's master and slave arguments, but Heidegger is far more interested in focusing on the relations and engagements we have with the world rather than the power dynamic of those relations. In the example above, he wants to show how we are interconnected beings rather than focusing on dialectics and who holds the greater power. For instance, all the people around us going to Starbucks to get a coffee use the barista as a tool. You are using your professor to get an education, and your professor is using you to make money. We can choose toe let the simple stuff pass by, and never fully focus on it, or we can choose to pay attention. For example, if we are leaving the classroom and the door is not open, that is when we realize its value as an object. It is only when something is not working do we recognize its value. This illustrates Heidegger's argument that not only have we dispersed in time, we have never really been focusing on that fact.

This brings us to the authenticity of death. The only certainties that we can have in life are related to death. Heidegger believes that death can be the most authentic thing we have. Everything else is not authentic. In all our daily engagements it seems that "we are mooded. Everyone is the other, and none is themselves." There seems to be no finding of self-being. Rather, there are bundles of interactions followed by attunements based on our moods, which are intact. We are in a state of having various attitudes toward things in the world. Our moods force us to be in a state of themes, too. We are in the state of attunement a lot of times, and this can create anxiety. Heidegger does not want us to avoid death. If you claim that you are not scared of death, you are lying to yourself. We really have no idea as to what death really is. The real authenticity lies in an anxious and passionate freedom towards death. Once that freedom is experienced, we can have a certain relationship to time. If we are aware of the fragility of time, this will make us treat our time different.

A question and objection that might be raised here is how this makes our time different. After all, realizing death and time, we wonder how things might change. Heidegger would respond by claiming you should acknowledge time and the actuality of it. Because a lot of us avoid the notion of death, we act like it is never coming. If we acknowledge death, this it causes…