1.1 Heidegger’s Early Lectures

The phrase that is central to this Element – being-in-the-world – can be found prior to SZ. The phrase figures prominently in his 1924 Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and close approximations appear in his 1923 Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity lectures, where he uses “being ‘in’ the world” without hyphens, as well as “being-‘in’-a-world,” “being-‘within’-a-world,” and “to-be-‘in’-the-world.” However, the ideas that come to be condensed into this hyphenated expression can be traced back even further, to some of Heidegger’s earliest lecture courses starting in 1919. In this section, I want to examine some of Heidegger’s explorations in these very early lectures that initially point to – and begin to deploy – the notion of being-in-the-world. In accordance with the preliminary status of this early material – and in keeping with the brevity of this Element – this section will contain only a series of sketches to prepare the way for our examination of SZ.Footnote ⁵ But these samplings from lectures ranging from 1919 to 1923 provide important insights that will assist us in understanding his more refined ideas; of interest as well are tentative formulations that did not make the cut, so to speak. Conjecturing as to why will prove useful as well.

1.2 1919: Es Weltet (It Worlds)

At the outset of Part Two of his 1919 course, The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview (IOP),Footnote ⁶ Heidegger promises his students that they will “for the first time … make the leap into the world as such” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 63). Heidegger’s vow follows a series of false starts and dead ends in a quest to characterize what he refers to as a “primordial science.” By primordial, Heidegger is trying to determine what serves as originary in relation to the numerous specialized sciences – natural and otherwise – such as physics, biology, and history. A primordial science “will not be a science of separate object domains, but of what is common to them all, the science not of a particular, but of universal being” (GA56/67: 26).Footnote ⁷ None of the special sciences has the requisite generality to account either for their own possibility or for the possibility of the others.

A great deal of the first part of the lecture course is devoted to explaining why psychology is ill-suited to serve as a primordial science. Although psychology promises a general account of experience, as well as of the subject who has experiences, Heidegger complains that psychology misconceives the character of what he calls lived-experience. Whereas psychology characterizes experience as a kind of psychic process that occurs within the subject, Heidegger thinks that more careful attention to the character of a subject’s lived-experience points away from anything characterizable in terms of inner processes: “When we simply give ourselves over to this experience, we know nothing of a process passing before us, nor of an occurrence” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 65). When we conceive of – and talk about – experience, there is a danger of objectifying that experience, treating “it” as a something that occurs in the manner of a process or sequence of events whose relation to anything else is obscure. As Heidegger sees it, the challenge is to describe experience without thereby objectifying it.Footnote ⁸

Heidegger’s lead-up to the leap begins with an interrogation of what presents itself as the barest, most general, and in this way, most primordial form of experience: the experience of “there is,” which he considers more expansively as “there is something.” The generality of such an interrogative gesture risks emptiness, but Heidegger’s point here is that even this bare “there is something” goes beyond the model of internal psychic processes whose connection to anything external has not been clarified. Even in the experience only of “there is something,” we can already discern something “non-thingly” about it: “The ‘relating to’ is not a thing-like part, to which some other thing, the ‘something’ is attached. The living and the lived of experience are not joined together in the manner of existing objects” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 69–70). Relating to is comportment toward something, an active encountering – and making sense – of something. In this way, it is already beyond any kind of internal psychic process.

To illustrate this, Heidegger pivots to a more concrete example, which both he and the students to whom he is lecturing can enact and attend to without having to look any further than where they already are. The “there is something” can be filled in – given definite content – by considering the lectern Heidegger is currently using. What Heidegger wants his students to notice here is the familiarity and immediacy in play in the experience of the lectern. The experience of the lectern is not pieced together from a series of sensory processes that involve the awareness of something less than the lectern; he and the students do not infer that what they see is a lectern on the basis of something they initially discern or have, such as sensations of colors and shapes. There are, Heidegger contends, no such prior processes: The lectern is seen directly by both him and his students when they enter the room, and in more or less the same way. Both Heidegger and the students see it as the place where the lecturer stands. As the lecturer, Heidegger sees it as the place for him, while the students see it as the place in the classroom toward which they are expected to look. When the students enter the classroom, they take in the lectern as playing a particular role in what they are up to – attending a class meeting – and the same is true for Heidegger. They thus do not experience the lectern as an isolated thing that then might be understood as standing in relation to other things that are likewise initially experienced as isolated. The lectern is instead experienced from out of and against the backdrop of a broader environment: the classroom, the university building that houses the classroom, the university, and so on. The lectern is “given … from out of an immediate environment” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 72). This environment should be understood as an “environmental milieu” that “does not just consist of things, which are then conceived of as meaning this and this.” Instead, “the meaningful [das Bedeutsame]Footnote ⁹ is primary” and this fullness of meaning is “immediately given to me without any mental detours across thing-oriented apprehension” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 73). Although the example of seeing the lectern involves attending to just one item – the lectern – seeing it as a lectern involves grasping its significance in relation to the environment in which it has its place. We can think of that environment both narrowly and widely: narrowly, as the immediate environment of the lecture hall and the university, but more broadly as the public realm within which the university is situated. Hence Heidegger’s characterizing the environmental milieu as involving “lectern, book, blackboard, notebook, fountain pen, caretaker, student fraternity, tram-car, motor-car, etc.” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 72). Tram-cars and motor-cars are not typically found in lecture halls, but the environment within which lecture halls are found is not cut off from the broader surroundings of roadways and traffic.

Heidegger’s appeal to seeing the lectern culminates with his noting that “living in an environment, it signifies to me everywhere and always, everything has the character of world. It is everywhere the case that ‘it worlds,’ which is something different from ‘it values’” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 73). Heidegger’s use of weltet as a verb formed from the German Welt is nonstandard, just as it is in English (even though “verbing” has become commonplace, especially in American English). Heidegger’s “it worlds” here indicates – and emphasizes – the kind of signifying that pervades our lived-experience, the “everywhere and always” wherein the lectern is apprehended. Seeing the lectern as a lectern involves seeing it within that “environmental milieu;” the milieu is prior in that an understanding of it informs the seeing of the lectern, rather than the other way around. That is, we do not first see the lectern, the seats, the walls, and so on, and from all that piece together the idea of a university as composed of such things. While it is no doubt true that the university’s facilities include such items, their significance flows from university to item. Seeing the lectern as a something-for-teaching-in-a-classroom is an instance of such worlding. The primacy of “it worlds” is further emphasized by Heidegger’s differentiating it from “it values.” To conceive of the lectern as something with the value of being used for lecturing invites the kind of model of understanding Heidegger wants to avoid: We first apprehend the thing – the wooden box, the brown rectangular object, or what have you – and then assign to that the value of being good for lecturing. Heidegger rejects this model not just because it starts with a collection of initially value-less objects, but because it relies on a conception of value-assigning subjects who are initially isolated or cut off from the world.

Using world as a verb – “es weltet” – further underscores a categorical difference between the particulars that populate an environment and the world comprising those particulars. The world is not one more such item, the largest or most general thing, “inside” of which all these particulars can be located. To say that these particulars – and the experience of them – world does not mean that they are all located in a common space (even if they happen to be), but instead that they signify one another in ways that show their interconnections, their fitting together into – and within – a common way of life. They are connected in the way that the words of a language are connected to one another (in contrast to the words making up other languages). It worlds is akin to saying something like it Englishes for everything that I say or write, insofar as I am speaking or writing in English. Whenever I speak, I am not doing two different things – saying the particular thing I am saying and speaking English – but that what I am saying is in English is indicated every time I speak. Being-in-English is not a further word or bit of grammar in addition to particular words and grammatical structures, but the holding together of all of that into a whole language set off from other whole languages such as German, French, and Chinese.Footnote ¹⁰

1.3 1919/1920: Life and the Threefold Sense of “World”

Not surprisingly, given its proximity to the lecture course just considered, Heidegger’s 1919–1920 Basic Problems of Phenomenology is guided by many of the same questions and concerns that animated the IOP lectures. The guiding question of the lecture is succinctly stated early on: “How do we wish to establish a strict science in this constantly flooding fullness of life and worlds” (Reference GanderGA58: 37–38)? Again we see a desire for a new kind of science – an originary, primordial, and now strict or rigorous science – whose target is life as it is most basically or fundamentally experienced. Central to these lectures is the interplay between the pair of concepts he invokes in articulating his basic question, the interplay between life and worlds (in the plural). Life and worlds for Heidegger are only notionally separable from one another: “All life lives in a world. Overall, what happens to worlds and to parts of the world happens in the living stream and pull of life” (Reference GanderGA58: 36).

In these lectures, Heidegger pluralizes world in more than one way. First, world is categorically plural. He distinguishes among three senses of world: the environing-world, the with-world, and self-world. Second, what belongs to these categories – particular worlds – likewise admits of pluralization: There are as many self-worlds, for example, as there are selves (living individuals), but even world in the other two senses admits of multiplicity as well. At the same time, we should not think of world in these three senses as designating freestanding, independent notions; on the contrary, the three permeate one another.Footnote ¹¹ Heidegger characterizes “life in the environing world” as an “unstable circumstantiality” that involves “a peculiar self-permeating of the environing world, with-world, and self-world, not out of their mere aggregation.” He adds that “the relations of the self-permeating are absolutely of a nontheoretical, emotional kind. I am not the observer and least of all am I the theorizing knower of myself and of my life in the world” (Reference GanderGA58: 39).Footnote ¹²

Heidegger’s talk here of self-permeation follows on from an illustrative description of worldly life that moves freely among the three senses of world. The passage is worth quoting at length:

Living in – or having – a self-world is not something I do separately from living in a with-world or in an environing-world. In living in – or having – any one of them, I thereby also live or have the others: The self-world designates the “personal rhythm” of my life, which I live out in a broader array of places and regions (environing-) in which I encounter myriad others (with-world ) likewise navigating these places and regions with their own personal rhythms. In the second chapter of the lecture course – starting at § 9 – Heidegger introduces another image that develops “the peculiar self-permeation” he noted previously: What he here refers to as factical life comprises a “multiplicity of telescoping layers of manifestation.” The word translated (appropriately) as telescoping is ineinanderschiebender, which could be clunkily rendered as pushing-into-one-another. The clunky rendering helps us to see that Heidegger is not talking primarily about the optical properties of telescopes that allow us to see things up close that are very far away. Rather, he is playing off of the physical structure found not so much with telescopes proper but with instruments such as an old-fashioned seafarer’s spyglass whose differently sized cylindrical segments nest into one another (we might also here think of telescoping antennas of the kind found on older cars and transistor radios). Worlds in Heidegger’s three senses are related to one another in this telescoping manner: Each “segment” is another “layer of manifestation,” a different way in which the worldliness of life is evident. If we compress the telescoping segments completely, we get a broad sense of a public world, but we can expand the telescoping segments by narrowing our gaze to consider the smaller segments: First, we can consider the environing-world at more fine-grained levels. Heidegger’s example in his earlier lecture of the way the lectern worlds illustrates this: The environing world from out of which things such as trams and trolleys are encountered can be “expanded” to reveal the academic world of the university, which is nested within that broader environs. The sense of nestingFootnote ¹³ here is not physical containment, but a nesting of senses: The sense of the academic world borrows from – and depends upon – the sense of the broader environing world. In keeping with Heidegger’s appeal to permeation, we can appreciate how the kind of sense things make in the academic world are permeated by more broadly applicable senses. Although academia has its own specialized range of activities and paraphernalia, much of what goes on in this world carries over from more general and generic ways of living: chalkboards are for-writing-on just as much outside the halls of a university as they are within them.

The environing-world at both levels of description points toward the with-world, which again admits of finer- and coarser-grained levels of description: for Heidegger’s audience, one’s instructors and fellow students are integral to life within the university, but all of them are related to other others; these relations vary considerably in terms of the level of personal connection or intimacy. One’s family and friends make up a dimension of the with-world, but also more or less anonymous others that contribute to the hustle and bustle of life in any particular community (all those (almost faceless) others on the tram-car, for example). We can think of the self-world as referring to the narrowest segment of this telescoping structure, which refers to the particular rhythms and flows of an individual life: my life in contrast to the lives of everyone else. I have a biography that pertains to me exclusively and I correspondingly have a pattern of living that is marked by a particular combination of habits, routines, priorities, interests, aspirations, thoughts, fears, anticipations, recollections, and so on. The surroundings that are familiar to me – where I feel most at home – are not familiar in that way to more than a handful of other people (my wife and children, in my case) and even so, my familiarity is differently inflected even from theirs: My activities within our shared residence, for example, center upon different tasks and in some cases involve items that no one else in the house uses (or even knows how to use). That my familiarity is inflected differently does not relegate my self-world to a realm of Cartesian privacy: What is familiar to me are worldly spaces and places, populated by things that are used and spoken of in ways that are common across individuals. “I live in the vital direction of pull into a world, and I live it out” (Reference GanderGA58: 96). I can try to describe this “pull” – the contours and rhythms of my life – which I might preface by saying, “Welcome to my world.” But the “I” does not exclude the “we.” “We are standing in our factical life, and we speak and understand in the circle of our understandability” (Reference GanderGA58: 98). Heidegger’s emphasis here on our indicates the way the myriad self-worlds found telescoped within the with- and environing-world are informed by and relate to those broader senses of world: “I live factically always caught into meaningfulness, and every meaningfulness has its encirclement of new meaningfulnesses: horizons of occupation, sharing, application, and fate” (Reference GanderGA58: 104–105).

Although I warned against hearing Heidegger’s talk of telescoping as referring to the optical properties of telescopes, there is something in the image of how telescopes are used that is applicable here.Footnote ¹⁴ If we consider further the nesting cylinders of a telescope – or spyglass – one looks through it from the narrowest or smallest cylinder, the eyepiece. Although what one sees from that vantage-point is crucially affected by the optics found in the larger cylinders, nothing is really apparent without looking (and looking from just there). In Heidegger’s taxonomy of worlds in these lectures, the self-world corresponds to what in the spyglass is the eyepiece: The self-world is the locus of life in the most fundamental sense. Living individuals are what populate and animate worlds in the other two senses and worlds in the other two senses are accessed through the self-worlds of individuals. Although self-worlds are permeated by the other- and environing-world – just as what I see through the spyglass is determined by the optical properties of the larger cylindrical segments – without selves, worlds would be lifeless. We might here adapt Kant’s famous dictum about concepts and intuitionsFootnote ¹⁵ and say: Worlds without selves would be empty, while selves without worlds would be blind.

1.4 1923: A Tale of Two Tables

As the title to his 1923 lecture course – Ontology – the Hermeneutics of Facticity – suggests, Heidegger here continues, and develops considerably, ideas that had been in play as far back as 1919. The IOP course ends with an appeal to “hermeneutical intuition” as an alternative to Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as essentially reflective. And as just seen, factical life is central to his BPP lectures. The two notions work hand in hand: “The expression ‘hermeneutics’ is used here to indicate the unified manner of the engaging, approaching, arresting, interrogating, and explicating of facticity” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 9).Footnote ¹⁶ The approach is hermeneutical insofar as it works from factical life (the forehaving) and back to it: “The fate of our approach to phenomena and our execution of concrete hermeneutical descriptions of them hangs on the level of the primordiality of the forehaving into which Dasein as such (factical life) has been placed” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 80).

How do these “hermeneutical descriptions” involve a sense of world ? In the second part of the lecture course, Heidegger offers what he calls a formal indication of the “forehaving” that serves as the starting point for the interpretive development of any hermeneutical descriptions.Footnote ¹⁷ We can understand formal here as provisional in the sense that the initial pointing leaves open the content of what has been indicated. Formal indications require some kind of “filling in.” But even without filling in, formal indications – as indications – point toward what is to then be interpreted, but also – and importantly – point away from conceptions of factical life that amount to misinterpretations. Both the positive and negative moments deserve consideration. Here is Heidegger’s formal, provisional characterization of the forehaving operative in factical life: “The forehaving in which Dasein (in each case our own Dasein in its being-there for a while at the particular time) stands for this investigation can be expressed in a formal indication: the being-there of Dasein (factical life) is being in a world” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 80). As formal, this indication needs “to be demonstrated in intuition.” Doing so involves addressing the following three questions: “What is meant by ‘world’? What does ‘in’ a world mean? And what does ‘being’ in a world look like?” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 85).

We can work toward answers to these questions by considering the example Heidegger develops at length. Rather than a lectern in the lecture hall, Heidegger instead considers a table in his home. I said before that Heidegger’s formal indication points both toward and away; his handling of the example of a table incorporates these negative and positive dimensions of his gesture. Heidegger especially wants to exclude two prevalent ways of describing the experience of the table and, by extension, factical life more generally. He refers to both in the lectures as misunderstandings, that is, ways of mischaracterizing or outright missing what pertains to factical life. The first such misunderstanding is what he calls the subject-object schema: according to this schema, to experience a table is to become aware of one object among others in one’s experiential field. The table is experienced as a spatial, material thing possessing various properties: a particular weight, shape, hardness, color, and so on. These properties are experienced perspectivally by the perceiving subject: At any given time, I see the table from a particular angle. As I move around the table, I see it from a multiplicity of angles; in each case, the table has a slightly different apparent shape, but the changes can be understood as a function of the table’s actual shape and my spatial location (along with facts about my height, the direction of my gaze, and so on). The changing apparent shapes thus form a series; the orderliness of the series conveys to me the stability and persistence of the table as an object with a constant shape. I don’t see that constant shape directly, but I can infer it from the way the series of apparent shapes holds together. Similar considerations pertain to my seeing the table as having a constant color, which I likewise don’t see directly, but infer from the various ways the color appears from different angles (some of which produce patches of glare on the table, for example, thereby making those bits of the table’s surface appear nearly pure white), along with facts about the lighting conditions, and so on.

Seeing the table as one object among others divests from the table any and all of its practical value. The second misunderstanding Heidegger wants to avoid is evident here: the prejudice of freedom from standpoints. The idea here is to insist upon the primacy of the most neutral characterization of the table. The table is manifest as merely an object – one object among others – that possesses in itself a range of properties. Anything pertaining to its practical value is secondary, something that the perceiving subject projects into or onto the table. Considered apart from the perceiving subject’s interests and values, it is a particularly shaped arrangement of matter and no more. That is what the table really is, while everything else we might want to say about the table is subjective imposition.

The key question here is whether we recognize in these descriptions the way tables are manifest in everyday experience. Heidegger wants us to see just how artificial these schemata are. Notice first that these schemata direct our attention to a table, a single something-or-other divorced from any kind of setting or context. But in our everyday experience, we do not experience some table or other – or tables in general – but this or that table, such as the one found in this room in this house and used for these activities.Footnote ¹⁸ The table is experienced as part of the room, as having been on that side of the room before, but now closer to the window to take advantage of the sunlight that shines into the room in the afternoon. The table has chairs around it where the different members of the family sit, perhaps for meals but also for various activities such as doing homework, writing letters, and working on an arts-and-crafts project. Different members of the family might have their respective places to sit: The elder brother sits there, while the younger brother sits across from him, and the parents sit at each of the narrower ends. The daily traffic through the room involves the table and takes account of its presence: Members of the family walk in and out of the room without bumping into the table, various items are placed onto and taken off the table throughout the day, and so on. At the same time, the table is scarcely noticed, but relied upon without anyone’s stopping to pay any particular attention to it (no one usually walks around the table to attend to the changes in its apparent shape unless someone has signed up for a drawing class). The table bears the history of the family who uses it: Various scratches record a child’s mischievous moment; the discoloration in one corner indicates the injudicious use of paint thinner; a scorch mark in the middle testifies to a toppled candle. “That is the table – as such it is there in the temporality of everydayness” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 90).

Heidegger’s first question for developing his formal indication is, “What is meant by ‘world’?” We can work toward an answer to this question by reflecting on the kind of description of the table Heidegger favors as truer to how such things are experienced in everyday life. That kind of description locates the table within a broader setting – the room, the house, and so on – and describes its role or place in the ongoing lives of the family whose table it is, who are familiar with the table and make use of it as they go about their lives. How the table is experienced – what the table primarily is – is as situated in the world of that family. World in this sense “shows itself as that wherefrom, out of which, and on the basis of which factical life is lived” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 86). The key notion for understanding the sense of world here, as with his earlier lectures, is significance (Bedeutsamkeit): “The as-what and how of [the world’s] being-encountered lie in what will be designated significance” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 93). We will consider Heidegger’s more developed account of significance in SZ shortly. For now, let us just consider how he answers the two other questions he raises to fill out the formal indication of being in a world. The second of these three questions is: “What does ‘in’ a world mean?” The table is something found in a world, in this case, in the world of a particular family. The sense of “in” is a spatial sense, but that sense is not captured by giving the table’s GPS coordinates or the like. To say that the table is in that world means that it has a place in that world and a role within that family’s ongoing life. The members of the family are also in the world, not just by being located in a particular geographical space (although that is true about them just as much as it is for the table). Rather, the members of the family live in that world. The members of the family are in the world in a way that is related to, but importantly different from, the way the table is in the world. The table is significant – and has the significance it has – because of its significance to and for the family. Nothing is significant to or for the table: The table is found in that world, but the table doesn’t live there. Nothing matters to the table, but the table does matter for the people who use it, who care for it or neglect it as the case may be. This asymmetry between the table and the people who use it points toward the beginnings of an answer to the third question: “And what does ‘being’ in a world look like?” The table is just there in the world, but those who live in the world are the ones for whom the table has whatever significance it has. Again, the table matters to the people who use it: Mattering is the registering of significance, which is why Heidegger says that the “being of the world and that of human life are designated in the same manner with the term ‘being-there’” (Reference Bröcker-OltmannsGA63: 86). More on this in Section 2.

2.1 Looking Ahead by Looking Back

In Section 1, we considered three of Heidegger’s early lecture courses from 1919 to 1923. Here are some of the key ideas:

1. i. World as a wherein or from out of which

2. ii. World as a space or structure of significance or meaningfulness (both translations of Bedeutsamkeit)

3. iii. World as coordinate or correlative with life

4. iv. World as multidimensional, encompassing self, others, and environment

5. v. World as both categorically and concretely plural

In his 1924 lectures on Aristotle, Heidegger begins using the hyphenated phrase being-in-the-world with far greater frequency. As before, life is a fundamental concept: Only what is alive can be said to have a world. This is true for animals as much as for human beings:

To say that an animal has a world means that an animal is oriented toward – and responsive to – its environment in ways that reflect its needs and capacities. Primarily, there are things that an animal typically does – and has to do – in order to keep itself alive (and also reproduce, thereby keeping its species alive).Footnote ¹⁹ What shows up to or for the animal is conditioned by those demands: The animal’s environment is carved up, so to speak, in terms of opportunities and obstacles for it and what counts as an opportunity and what counts as an obstacle varies in accordance with the animal’s nature. What shows up as something to eat, for example, will be very different for a snake than for a deer; likewise, for what shows up as a threat. What counts as a good place to hide, a safe place to sleep, a suitable mate, and so on will all vary in accordance with the kind of animal we are considering. In this way, we can think of the world of the snake and the world of the deer as different worlds, even if they are located in more or less the same place.

Although Heidegger here includes animal life within the range of what has a world, in the Aristotle lectures, he marks out human existence as distinctive in terms of the form that having a world takes: “The being-in-the-world of the human being is determined in its ground through speaking. The fundamental mode of being in which the human being is in its world is in speaking with it, about it, of it” (Reference MichalskiGA18: 18).Footnote ²⁰ That speaking and language are fundamental here preserves the interplay Heidegger registers in his earlier lectures of self and others: In speaking, I talk about the world, and I talk with and to others.

While the Aristotle lectures underscore the connection between being-in-the-world and life, such that the “basic mode of the being of life” just is “being-in-a-world,” in SZ, the category of life is hardly mentioned and when it is, it is relegated to a decidedly secondary position in relation to an ontology of Dasein:

Whereas the early lectures generally were saturated with talk of life – the flow of life, sympathy with life, lived-experience, the intensification of life – SZ is largely purged of all such talk. What motivates the purge is Heidegger’s conception of his project in SZ as a formal and transcendental project. As a development of a fundamental ontology, it is necessary to steer clear of any contingent, empirical dimensions of human existence (human existence is his only available – but not necessarily the onlyFootnote ²¹ – instance of Dasein). Even though it is true that we are biological beings, what pertains to our biology is in no way essential to – or necessary for – being a being with Dasein’s way of being.

2.2 Dasein’s Worldly Existence

In the introductory remarks prior to the start of Division One, Heidegger says that being-in-the-world is “a fundamental structure of Dasein” (SZ: 41), adding that this structure is a priori. He also refers to it – in the title to the second chapter of Division One – as “the basic stateFootnote ²² of Dasein.” A further point in his opening remarks bears emphasizing: After noting its a priori character, Heidegger adds that being-in-the-world “is not pieced together,” but rather “is primordially and constantly a whole” (SZ: 41). This is in keeping with his characterizing it as a unitary phenomenon. Rather than consisting of separate – and separable – parts that are independent of one another, as a unitary phenomenon, it should be thought of as having non-separable moments or aspects that can be variously emphasized, albeit without losing sight of the phenomenon as a whole. This exemplifies what I referred to in the Introduction as the holographic structure of SZ: While Heidegger, in the course of his investigation, concentrates on one aspect or another of what is designated by his hyphenated expression, the account that emerges always implicates – and so brings into view – the other aspects. Illuminating any one aspect ultimately gives us an impression of the whole.

The exposition of Division One accordingly concentrates serially on different aspects of being-in-the-world, segmented (roughly)Footnote ²³ as follows:

1. i. -in- (Chapter Two)

2. ii. -the-world (Chapter Three)

3. iii. Being- (Chapter Four)

4. iv. Being-in- (Chapter Five)

The first chapter gives a preliminary explication of Dasein, which, as indicated earlier, emphasizes the way this account should not be construed as a chapter of – or relying upon – any kind of psychology, anthropology, or biology. Put more positively, Heidegger develops further ideas first mentioned in the opening sections of the work: that Dasein’s “‘essence’ lies in its existence;” that Dasein “has in each case mineness” (SZ: 42); and that Dasein has its being “as an issue,” and so “comports itself towards it” (SZ: 44).Footnote ²⁴ These ideas are, among other things, preparatory for Heidegger’s explication of the sense of “in” in the phrase being-in-the-world: Since Dasein is “never to be taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand” (SZ: 42), the sense of “in” at issue in Dasein’s being in the world is not a matter of spatial-material containment. Dasein is not in the world in the way that water is in a glass or my desk is in my study (see SZ: 53–54). Even though it is true that each and every one of us is materially located in that way (e.g. I’m spatially located inside my house as I write this), fixation on that spatial sense of in only obscures the phenomenon Heidegger wants to explicate.

Rather than any kind of spatial containment, the sense of “in” is here one of involvement. Heidegger traces the German in to innan, where the an designates being accustomed to something, familiar with it, or looking after it (SZ: 54). Dasein is in the world in the sense of being familiar with it and feeling at home in it. The sense of “in” can be understood here along the lines of the way we say in English that someone is in business or in academia, which primarily designates a principal locus of that person’s activities regardless of where spatially those activities take place (and even if they are often engaged in at particular locations, such as office towers or college campuses). Keeping this sense of “in” at the forefront is crucial for understanding how Heidegger explicates the notions of world and worldhood.

2.3 A New Typology: Worlds from “A” to “The”

Our examination of Heidegger’s early lectures in Section 1 documented how the idea of world figures prominently throughout. Moreover, we saw how Heidegger in different courses tries out different ways of talking about, and characterizing different senses of, world – world as a verb (“es weltet”); a threefold taxonomy of self-world, other-world, and environing-world related through “telescoping layers of manifestation;” and being in a (rather than the) world – before finally settling on the terminology of being-in-the-world. In Chapter Three of Division One of SZ, he offers a new taxonomy of the senses of “world” that does not correspond to any of his prior terminological and conceptual ventures. This is not to say that all of what precedes SZ has been abandoned. Far from it: many of his earlier ideas persist, albeit without always being designated with dedicated terms, and it will be helpful at various points to refer back to these earlier discussions.

The taxonomy Heidegger offers in SZ now distinguishes among four senses of “world.” These four senses can be sorted into two categories: a categorical sense, which Dreyfus in his commentaryFootnote ²⁵ helpfully construes as an inclusive sense of world, and an existentiell-existential sense, which Dreyfus glosses as designating involvement. The pairs in each of these two categories can be further sorted into an ontical sense, that is, a sense pertaining to particular entities and their arrangement, and an ontological sense, which pertains to the way of being of those particulars. Here is how Heidegger himself marks out the different senses:

1. 1. “World” is used as an ontical concept, and signifies the totality of those entities that can be present-at-hand within the world.

2. 2. “World” functions as an ontological term and signifies the being of those entities that we have just mentioned. And indeed “world” can become a term for any realm that encompasses a multiplicity of entities: For instance, when one talks of the “world” of the mathematician, “world” signifies the realm of possible objects of mathematics.

3. 3. “World” can be understood in another ontical sense – not, however, as those entities that Dasein essentially is not and which can be encountered within the world, but rather as that “wherein” a factical Dasein as such can be said to “live.” “World” has here a pre-ontological existentiell signification. Here again there are different possibilities: “world” may stand for the “public” we-world or one’s “own” closest (domestic) environment.

4. 4. Finally, “world” designates the ontological-existential concept of worldhood. Worldhood itself may have as its modes whatever structural wholes any special ‘world’ may have at the time; but it embraces in itself the a priori character of worldhood in general. We shall reserve the expression “world” as a term for our third signification. If we should sometimes use it in the first of these senses, we shall mark this with single quotation marks (SZ: 64–65).

We do not need to worry overly about the first two notions of world, as they are indicated primarily to be set aside. They are not, we might say, where the action is as far as Heidegger is concerned. Indeed, Heidegger says that he will reserve the term world as primarily designating the third of the four senses he delineates. Still, that there are four senses in play indicates a certain unruliness in the notion of world, and that is perhaps as it should be. Even without yet entering into Heidegger’s ontological project, our ordinary uses of “world” are varied and not entirely systematic: We talk about the world of stock-car racing, a particular loved one being the whole world to someone, a trip to a neighboring state (or county, or even just a neighbor) as entering a different world, and so on. Some of these uses are no doubt figurative, but we should not lump all of them into that category. Heidegger’s own more systematic regimentation absorbs rather than eliminates this unruliness: His third sense of world, the very sense he favors, freely admits of pluralization and is naturally spoken of in the singular with the indefinite article – “a world” – rather than the definite. Just why this should be thought of as unruliness will become clear as we proceed further: Demarcating worlds and distinguishing them from one another is anything but cut and dry.

In exploring Heidegger’s taxonomy more fully, we need to confront a question that has been lurking throughout: How, if at all, are we to understand talk about the world in contrast to talk about a world (and likewise worlds in the plural)? Notice already that this one question actually contains several. For example, we can ask about the singularity of the world in relation to the first sense. I take it that there is an issue to be raised there, but that is an issue as to the propriety of talk of a (physical) universe, as opposed to, say, a multiverse, about which I get the sense some scientists see fit to speculate.Footnote ²⁶ That sense of unity and singularity is accordingly a scientific question, which does not properly arise within the project of SZ. And to ask about unity when it comes to the second and especially the fourth sense is to ask about the unity of a category: does what it means for something to be a world admit of a unified account? Whereas in the case of the second category, I don’t think we should expect a unified account, as the principles of inclusion will vary in accord with whatever kinds of entities are at issue, Heidegger is (clearly) committed to an affirmative answer to this question in the case of the fourth sense – the worldhood or worldliness of the world – as indicated by his talk in his taxonomy of the “a priori character of worldhood in general.” That leaves the third category, the very one that Heidegger privileges for using the term world. In what sense does this sense of world admit of a sense of the world?

Rather than try to answer this question directly,Footnote ²⁷ let’s consider more closely a number of aspects of world in the third sense in order to see how a question of unity or singularity might come into view. World in the third sense designates “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live,’” which freely admits of pluralization. Such plurality is readily seen in the ease with which we differentiate among the variety of historical worlds – the world of ancient Egypt; the world of the Romans; the world of the Han Dynasty; and so on – but even more so if we consider Heidegger’s appeal to one’s own “closest (domestic) environment.” In his gloss on Heidegger’s four senses, Dreyfus warns against “beginning with my world” (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991: 90), as it risks miring us in a more traditional – and problematic – conception of subjectivity. For now, I want to flout that warning. It will turn out that doing so will only reinforce the point Dreyfus wants to make in issuing it. Domestic environments can be understood as worlds. They typically involve a range of various kinds of places – rooms, yards, entryways, and so on – as well as a range of various kinds of entities – furnishings, utensils, machines, devices, and so on. Worlds in this sense have various patterns of activities on the part of those who live there: departing for work and returning at the end of the day (unless one works at home); preparing meals; sleeping and rising; leisure time; and so on. Such patterns of activity can also be divided into everyday patterns, as well as exceptional patterns, such as those for holidays and celebrations, as well as periods of crisis and disruption (illness, severe weather, power outages, and, as we’ve learned in recent years, pandemics).

These patterns are familiar to those who live within a particular domestic environment. I know my way around my house, for example, as do my wife and children (and even our dogs). I don’t have to invest much – if any – thought in how to get from one part of the house to the other, and I (often) know where things are, and even when I don’t, I typically know where to look. Someone visiting my house does not have such knowledge, although for reasons that we will get to, most people visiting my house can make pretty reasonable guesses. Domestic environments are idiosyncratic in various respects, so that we can think of certain forms of knowledge as shared by those who live in that environment that observers and visitors lack. Consider the stock example of cooking in someone else’s kitchen. Doing so typically involves far more in the way of opening and closing drawers, cabinets, and cupboards than when cooking at home. In my own kitchen, I know where things are, both in a cognitive sense (I can tell you if you ask me) and in a more embodied, practical sense in that I can reach and rummage for various things without giving it too much thought.

Roughly speaking, it makes sense to talk about a world whenever we can delineate a totality of practices that are bound together and set apart from other such totalities. My own domestic environment is one such totality; the academic world in which I also travel is another. Talk of worlds in this way resists the sweep of Occam’s Razor, as the number of worlds it makes sense to delineate is difficult to reign in. Wherever there is a factical Dasein, it makes sense to talk about that factical Dasein as living in at least a world, but most likely multiple insofar as that factical life admits of multiple dimensions or sets of patterns that are bounded off from one another. In explicating the fourth sense of world, Heidegger refers to “whatever structural wholes any special ‘worlds’ may have at the time” as modes of worldhood. We shall return to this shortly.

Worlds can be understood as totalities, but the delineation of such totalities is a complicated matter, as worlds do not divide neatly. Worlds such as my domestic environment are totalities, but they are open-ended totalities. In keeping with Heidegger’s earlier idea of telescoping layers of manifestation, my domestic world corresponds to a narrower telescoping segment that points toward, and is nested within, larger segments that bring others and a broader environment into view. That there are always telescoping layers of manifestation means that my domestic world is accessible from without. More generally, a world is accessible insofar as it includes routines, patterns, practices, and artifacts that are recognizable from the standpoint of a perspective that lies outside of it. Not everything pertaining to a world’s routines, patterns, practices, and artifacts must be immediately recognizable; accessing them can include learning what they are, how they work, and so on, as happens when we – the we who inhabit this world – come across radically unfamiliar customs and practices. Such learning is abundantly evident in the efforts needed to understand the language of the world being accessed: translation affords one avenue of access, but there is also the possibility of mastering the language in a way that surpasses translating. A corollary of Dreyfus’ rejection of the idea of a “private sphere of experience and meaning” (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991: 90) is that no world is private in an essential sense. Any world no matter how idiosyncratic and exclusive – a domestic environment with only one inhabitant, say – is nonetheless accessible. Sometimes, this accessibility is assured owing to the nesting of that idiosyncratic world in a common contemporary world shared by its inhabitant and whoever is accessing it. Something like this happens anytime we meet new people or walk into a new home, although it will only be jarring to the extent that the idiosyncrasies are pronounced. But access can also be secured without such contemporaneous nesting, as happens when historians and archaeologists strive to learn more about past worlds that are not nested within any contemporary world (owing to their being no longer up and running at all ). Even the untrained eye can identify a great deal when it comes to ancient and foreign artifacts: utensils for cooking, weapons for hunting or fighting, dwelling places, various tools, and so on.

So far, we have considered, following Heidegger’s remarks about the third sense of world, examples that encourage the use of both the indefinite article (a world) and the plural (worlds). How does world in the sense we have so far explored hang together with a sense of world as singular, as, that is, involving the definite article (the world) and resisting pluralization? In his commentary, Dreyfus provides a succinct answer: “Such worlds as the business world, the child’s world, and the world of mathematics, are ‘modes’ of the total system of equipment and practices that Heidegger calls the world” (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991: 90). What Dreyfus says here does not quite hew to what Heidegger actually writes about ontical worlds as modes. They are not modes of the world, but of worldhood or worldliness (Weltlichkeit): “Worldhood itself may have as its modes whatever structural wholes any special ‘worlds’ may have at the time.” If there is indeed a “total system of equipment and practices,” then it too is a world in the third, ontical sense, which means that it too – just like my own domestic environment – can be characterized ontologically in terms of worldhood. This in turn implies that such a total system would itself be a mode of worldhood in just the same way as the business world or the world of the child. Although Heidegger says that worldhood “embraces in itself the a priori character of worldhood in general,” that would not make it a mode of itself. Dreyfus’ identifying more local or regional totalities as modes of a larger totality appears to conflate the ontical with the ontological.

What Dreyfus refers to as a “total system of equipment and practices” might count as the world in the third, ontical sense, even while it would be a bit of a fudge to refer to other, “smaller” ontical worlds as modes of it. But should we be at all wary of the idea of a “total system of equipment and practices?” How is the idea of a totality – a kind of maximal totality – meant to be spelled out here and in what sense is “it” a system? At any given time, there are myriad ontical worlds up and running, so to speak, ranging from any given factical Dasein’s own domestic environment to broader, more public worlds. Many of these worlds are systematically related via permeation and by involving telescoping layers, but worlds in general do not form an obvious system even if they are accessible from other worlds. Consider as an especially pertinent analogy the variety of human languages: Different languages comprise different systems. Just what to include in such systems is a delicate matter, but for starters, we might consider a vocabulary and a grammar. English is one such system (or perhaps a family of systems, depending on how one counts dialects and the like); German is another, as is Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Finnish, and so on. What holds for worlds in Heidegger’s third sense would appear to hold in this case (hence the pertinence of the analogy): It makes good sense to talk about languages in the plural and to use the indefinite article (English is a language). Moreover, all of them can be regarded as modes of language, in parallel to the way ontical worlds are modes of worldhood. That is, ontologically, the various human languages are on a par as all being languages, just as all the many ontical worlds are equally worlds. At the ontical level, however, there is no total system – the language – of which the many human languages are modes. There are just different languages that are all equally languages. They can be made to be systematically related to one another through translation: the different human languages are thus accessible to one another, but this can be true without there being a singular language to which all the many human languages belong. This in turn suggests that the sense of talk about the world where “world” is understood in Heidegger’s third sense is far from obvious.

Worlds are systematic totalities. If they are to be understood as modes, they are not modes of some greater systematic totality. They are instead modes or instantiations of systematicity. Systematicity is not itself a system, just as worldhood is not itself a (or the) world. If we wish, as Heidegger clearly does, to persist in referring to worldhood as a sense of world – he does, after all, mark it off as a fourth sense of the term – then it would be best glossed as lacking any kind of article, definite or indefinite, just as in EnglishFootnote ²⁸ we leave off any kind of article, definite or indefinite, when talking about language: English, German, Chinese, and so on are languages (in the plural) and each of them instantiates or is an ontical manifestation of language. It would be a kind of category mistake to ask about the grammar and vocabulary of language, although it might be worthwhile to ask if such things as having a vocabulary or having a grammar belong essentially to language. Rather than say that various ontical worlds are modes of the world, understood as a kind of all-encompassing total system, it would be less misleading – less inviting of the charge of a category mistake – to think of these various ontical worlds as modes of world (no article).

According to the third sense of world, then, there are many ontical worlds, all of which exemplify the phenomenon of world. That is, the phenomenon of world (no article) can, via the practice of phenomenology, be brought to manifestation by reflecting in the right way on any such world. Doing so would not be a matter of cataloging the details of any particular world,Footnote ²⁹ but delineating the structures essential to anything’s being a world. The key idea here is significance (Bedeutsamkeit): A world is primarily a structure of significance and primarily for the inhabitants of that world. As I noted at the outset, the unity of Heidegger’s account of the structure of significance – that signification has a unitary structure that every ontical world instantiates such that it is a world – means that worldhood is a unified ontological category. This is a nontrivial claim on Heidegger’s part, to say the least, but it does not amount to the unity of the world in his third sense of world; indeed, it almost encourages a disunity through the idea of a multiply-instantiated ontological structure.

In the 1924 Aristotle lectures where being-in-the-world figures prominently, Heidegger appeals to a sense of nature as the “already-there” ground for any particular human worlds, rather than another region alongside other particular worlds: “Nature is not a being-region standing alongside this world, but rather is the world itself such as it shows itself in the environing world in a definite way” (Reference MichalskiGA18: 266). And further: “Nature is the always-already-being-there of the world” (Reference MichalskiGA18: 266). Nature – the natural world – can be thus understood as the site for all the many particular human and historical worlds. Although traces of this idea of the world as the natural world (or nature) persist in SZ, the view laid out in his Aristotle lectures cannot be reconciled with much of what Heidegger says in the ensuing years. His references to nature in SZ are far more muted and qualified. He says, for example, that in using equipment, “‘Nature’ is discovered along with it by that use – the ‘Nature’ we find in natural products.” Nature is here encountered within the world and as something ready-to-hand: “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’. As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too” (SZ: 70). Furthermore, if we look just slightly beyond SZ, to his 1927 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is even more clear there that nature is something discovered within the world: “An example of an intraworldly entity is nature” (Reference von HerrmannGA24: 240). World here “devolves” upon nature, but as something foreign to it in the sense that nature can be as it is regardless of its having been uncovered, as “being within the world does not belong to the being of nature” (Reference von HerrmannGA24: 240). This is in sharp contrast to Dasein, since “to exist means to be in a world” (Reference von HerrmannGA24: 241). Notice, however, the indefinite article.

Despite Heidegger’s movement away from a more naturalistic conception of world – in keeping with his movement away from the category of life – SZ retains certain naturalistic elements that provide another avenue for thinking about the unity of the world. These elements appear in his discussion of world-time very late in SZ.Footnote ³⁰ Heidegger’s exceedingly complex ideas on time and temporality are well beyond the scope of this Element. I will restrict myself here to noting that his appeal here to world-time allows us to make a sense of a unity – a sense of the world – that does not just mean a big world made up of all the smaller or “special” worlds somehow aggregated into a totality. A fundamental feature of world-time is time-reckoning, which has what Heidegger calls “astronomical and calendrical” dimensions. This astronomical and calendrical form of time-reckoning points to elements and dimensions that all worlds have in common: passing from day to night; the accumulation of such days; the marking off of those accumulations into further units; the passing of the seasons; and so on. Moreover, these patterns and markers allow for coordination across different worlds. What we might call natural world-time points toward a sense of the world as a temporal “wherein” for the myriad historical worlds there are, have been, and will be. But the world in the sense of a temporal “wherein” is not itself a further ontical world of the kind we considered above. “It” is not one more “segment” of the telescoping layers of manifestation, but something more like the principles in virtue of which telescopes have the structure they have. World-time is marked by a kind of transcendence, indeed the same kind of transcendence as Heidegger accords to the world:

Note here Heidegger’s talk of “the world itself ” as what is transcendent. Dasein is always in one or more ontical world – always familiar and involved with a meaningful milieu – but Dasein transcends toward the world, which is not one more world in Heidegger’s third sense of world. What this means is that Dasein is never just in a world in the third sense; its particular world as one world among others, one world among indefinitely many possible worlds. (To think – or live out one’s life – otherwise is symptomatic of inauthenticity.) This notion of transcendence is retained and developed further in many of his writings and lectures immediately following SZ. These writings will be explored in Section 4.

2.4 Worldhood, Significance, and Publicity

From the very first lectures we considered, from 1919, wherein Heidegger tried out the verb-phrase, “es weltet,” he repeatedly characterizes the sense of “world” (along with those of “worlding” and “worldhood”) that interests him in terms of meaningfulness or significance (Bedeutsamkeit). In Chapter Three of Division One of SZ, Heidegger provides a detailed account of significance and its structure. Many of the important elements in Heidegger’s account have been touched upon or mentioned in passing since the start of Section 1, but it is important to see how they all come together in SZ.

Let’s start, more or less as Heidegger does, by considering the kinds of things we encounter and make use of in our everyday dealings. Rather than mere material objects of various dimensions and with various properties – what Heidegger refers to here as simply things – we encounter what he refers to as equipment: pens, paper, laptops, coffee mugs, screwdrivers, backpacks, lawnmowers, and so on. Importantly, Heidegger says that “taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (SZ: 68). This is evident already in the barest characterization of any item of equipment, namely, that it is something-for-something: The pen is for writing, the backpack is for holding my stuff for the camping trip, the coffee mug is for holding my coffee, and so on. Considering any one item – or kind – of equipment leads us toward other things: other items of equipment (consider the interconnection between hammers and nails, screws and screwdrivers, and so on), but also various ranges of tasks and activities (pounding in nails, drinking coffee, jotting down a note), along with a variety of projects (building something, writing an article, getting away from it all). Holding among this constellation of equipment, tasks, and projects are relations of reference: a hammer refers to nails, as well as to hammering, and fastening pieces of wood together, building a house or piece of furniture, and so on. These are relations that Heidegger designates as with-which, in-order-to, and toward-which: a hammer is something with-which one hammers in nails, in-order-to fasten pieces of wood, toward the building of something.

Implicit in all of these relations of reference is, of course, Dasein: what establishes and sustains these constellations of equipment, tasks, purposes, and projects is their being understood and put to use in those ways. Concernful Dasein is the animating principle of these various contexts of equipment: what makes a hammer a hammer lies in its being used as a hammer; divorced from – or divested of – that use, the hammer is no longer equipment, but only a mere thing. Heidegger makes this animating principle explicit in the final referential relation that holds all the other relations together – for-the-sake-of – which refers explicitly to Dasein’s self-understanding, what it takes itself to be up to or doing in putting equipment to use in various ways. Heidegger calls the for-the-sake-of the “primary ‘towards-which,’” which “pertains to the being of Dasein, for which, in its being, that very being is essentially an issue” (SZ: 84). All the other referential relations are subordinate to – and dependent upon – this principal relation. Equipment is constituted by its involvement in this web of relations – involved in these ways and for these purposes – and equipment is thereby, as Heidegger puts it, “freed” for this involvement through – and in relation to – Dasein’s concernful activity. We can think of this talk of freeing as operative at different levels: When I head downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, my trusty coffee mug stands out, along with the coffee pot, as most salient for what I am up to; in that way, it is freed for its involvement in my drinking a cup of coffee, in contrast to the many other things that populate my kitchen but mostly lurk in the background as I pour myself a cup. But this kind of episodic freeing does not stand alone. When I walk into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, I am not starting from scratch in terms of what might be put to use for my purposes.Footnote ³¹ When I reach for the cup, I am not thereby making it be a coffee cup, as though for the first time; rather, my actions are determined in relation to a prior freeing up of meaningful items of equipment that are involved in various activities. Freeing up the cup is not something I do on that occasion except in the sense of its now standing out that it has been so freed.

Coffee cups are involved in the making and consuming of coffee. As such they refer back ultimately to coffee drinkers, those of us who enjoy such beverages. Being a coffee drinker is a role that any of us can take up, and in doing so, I understand myself as having that role, as being, among many other things, a coffee drinker. As so assigned, different aspects of my environment stand out as salient in ways that they largely do not for those who do not drink coffee: coffee beans, grinders, mugs, and so on all become relevant in virtue of my occupying that role. Heidegger calls this way of occupying a role assigning: I assign myself the role of being a coffee drinker. The idea of assignment – in contrast with involvement – hangs together with the special status of the for-the-sake-of. It is not up to the coffee mug to play the role it does in our everyday lives, but I can decide to give up coffee, either because I’ve lost the taste for it or my doctor urged me to do so or for some other reason.

Heidegger’s analysis of the structure of significance in terms of involvements and assignments leads ultimately to the phenomenon of world:

To which he adds: “And the structure of that to which Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldhood of the world” (SZ: 86).

Another dimension of Heidegger’s account of worldhood, while already implicit in what we have considered so far, gets treated more explicitly in Chapter Four of Division One. Recall that Heidegger’s earlier typology of world – in the BPP lectures – involved the triad of the self-world, the with-world, and the environing-world. Insofar as we can map that terminology onto Heidegger’s later discussion, we can see that the first and third elements of that earlier typology have been treated: Dasein’s self-understanding is interwoven with an environing world in which various kinds of equipment are involved in tasks and projects that are subservient to that self-understanding. Self-understanding and world-understanding are mutually implicating: Understanding myself as a coffee drinker hangs together with all of the various gear for making and consuming coffee, as well as the skills and techniques for making coffee, not to mention the various kinds of farms, shops, cafes, and other venues implicated in the production, sale, and consumption of coffee. It is important, however, that we not lose sight of the middle element, the with-world; otherwise, as Dreyfus worries in his commentary when it comes to starting with the world of the self, we are liable to understand Dasein as a kind of meaning-giving subject, who projects or imposes individually meanings onto what are otherwise bare objects. That this is not so is already evident in the way I described my trip to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. While my doing so just then is a result of my having decided to get another cup of coffee, I do not in that episode – or really at any time beforehand – decide what is to count as a coffee cup (or coffee, a coffee maker, a kitchen, and so on). While there might be times – on a camping trip, say – where I’ll have to poke around and find something that will suffice as a makeshift coffee cup, my doing so is still guided by a prior understanding of what coffee cups are. That prior understanding is something I acquired from growing up in surroundings already populated by things like coffee cups and coffee makers. What coffee cups are, how they are to be properly used (as opposed to all the things they can be used for, like holding pencils or drinking orange juice), and so on are things I learned – or discovered – about my world rather than anything I devised or decided.

If we then ask who exactly decided these things, it is not entirely clear at whom we might point. Of course, for particular kinds of things – Velcro, for example, or Post-It notes – there might be a particular person or group of people we can single out as being responsible for there being such things and for having at least some authority on how they are to be used (although that authority is limited, as once the inventions begin to circulate, how they are to be used can change dramatically). There are, however, limits to this kind of pointing out, since those particular inventions were devised and created in an already-given context replete with lots of already-meaningful items with designated proprieties of use. That kind of inventing or devising cannot, so to speak, go all the way down. Similar considerations pertain to the meanings of words. While sometimes a particular person or group of people is responsible for coining a new word, we cannot apply the model of coinage to language as a whole. How would the “first” words be introduced? How would their meaning be explained? And as already noted with inventions, coined words will often change meanings or take on new ones irrespective of the intentions of the original coiner.

What we find in everyday life is a kind of authority – this is called (and used as) a coffee cup; this is called (and used as) a pencil; and so on – but without any specifiable authority figure. Heidegger calls this anonymous authority das Man, sometimes translated (unhelpfully) as the “they,” but more accurately translated as “the one” (although that can be misleading, as it suggests a kind of solitary and all-powerful authority figure). Translators have often instead reached for the Anyone to convey the way this kind of authority holds sway within a shared, communal world. Everyone experiences this authority as binding on them in more or less the same way, as das Man “articulates the referential context of significance” (SZ: 129), in other words, the everyday world. Indeed, the authority is so pervasive that we largely don’t notice it at all, except in cases where there are deviations from how things are usually done or from what things are usually called (as when we see someone stirring paint in a coffee cup or using a hammer to prop open a window).

Even when I’m alone, this kind of anonymous authority is still operative in that I recognize and make use of things in largely generic ways: I drink coffee from a mug as anyone does, toast bread as anyone does, think to myself – and talk to the dogs – in English as anyone does, and so on. Although there may be quirks or idiosyncrasies in how I do things, especially when I am by myself, what’s quirky or idiosyncratic about such things will still be readily recognizable to, and understandable by, others. And, of course, I am (happily) not always alone. The worlds we by and large navigate are not just pervaded by an anonymous authority that refers to everyone and anyone, but they are populated by others. This is something Heidegger emphasizes from the start: His es weltet encompasses not just various bits of equipment and distinctive locales, but various people, some of whom play particular roles (he mentions a caretaker, for example). In the BPP lectures, where the idea of a with-world is introduced, Heidegger discusses the communal dimension at length, noting how “every human being carries within himself a reserve of intelligibilities and immediate accessibility” (Reference GanderGA58: 34). What these reserves contain vary across times and cultures – and sometimes in various ways even across town! – but the important thing is that they are shared. We also saw earlier in this section how Heidegger emphasizes speech and language in the Aristotle lectures: Speaking is generally a speaking-with and speaking-to using a language that is by and large shared.

What Heidegger earlier called the with-world is absorbed into an aspect of Dasein’s way of being. He calls this aspect of Dasein’s constitution being-with. One important dimension of this designation is that it signals a fundamental difference in the way Dasein understands others as compared with items of equipment. Heidegger refers to our ways of engaging with equipment forms of concern, ways of taking up and taking care of things, although we have to remember that being neglectful, careless, and irresponsible are modes of concern (the latter are what Heidegger refers to as deficient modes of concern). His name for our ways of engaging with one another he refers to instead as solicitude. Greeting one another is one form solicitude takes, but so is snubbing, ignoring, and offending. Even if someone’s attitude toward others is largely strategic and manipulative, what is involved in manipulating another person – and what forms of censure that might elicit – is fundamentally different from the forms manipulating equipment might take.

2.5 Aspects of Being-In

As we saw in Section 2.2, Heidegger begins his explication of being-in-the-world by emphasizing the distinctive sense of “in” at work in the expression so as to ward off the idea that it primarily denotes spatial containment. The “in” instead denotes involvement and familiarity: Insofar as Dasein is, it has a world (or worlds) with which it is familiar. In Chapter Five of Division One, Heidegger circles back to this distinctive sense of “in,” this time in tandem with the preceding “being,” to investigate in greater detail the structural dimensions of Dasein’s familiarity with the world. In the chapter, Heidegger covers a great deal of ground. Among the topics are moods, thrownness, understanding, interpretation, assertion, language, idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity, and falling. Rather than try to take all of this on, I will focus on the three most fundamental aspects of being-in – Befindlichkeit (why I leave it untranslated will be explained); understanding; and discourse – plus one more – falling – whose status is less clear. Not only are these the most fundamental aspects of Heidegger’s account in this chapter, they also connect most readily with what we have examined so far.

Let’s start, as Heidegger does, with Befindlichkeit. The term poses extra challenges for translation, as it is Heidegger’s coinage, and so what meaning it has lies in what he does with it in his account. The term does incorporate standard German, however, as it plays off of an everyday question (indeed, it is one of the first questions one learns in an elementary German class): “Wie befinden Sie sich?” which is most naturally translated as, “How are you doing?” Heidegger, however, is drawing on the finden bit of the question, as his term emphasizes a sense of our finding ourselves as already situated and disposed in a particular way. Macquarrie and Robinson translate the term as state-of-mind, which conveys some of what Heidegger is after, but also sounds overly mentalistic. Other translations have been hazarded: predisposedness; so-found-ness; even where-you’re-at-ness. Predisposedness is perhaps the most felicitous, as it conveys a sense of one’s orientation toward things as being already shaped in some way or other. Very roughly, we can think of this predisposedness as having both proximal and distal aspects to it. Proximally, predisposedness is evidenced by moods (the German here is Stimmungen, which can also be translated as attunements). We always find ourselves in some mood or another, and what mood we find ourselves to be in is not a matter of our choosing or deciding. Some mornings, I wake up eager to get going with whatever it is I’m up to that day; other mornings, all I can manage is just to get out of bed. In neither case did I choose to be in the one mood or the other. I might, on reflection, be able to explain why my mood is as it is: perhaps I got a good night’s sleep on the morning I woke up ready to roll; perhaps I’m reluctant to get out of bed because none of what I have to do that day is especially appealing. Formulating such explanations can sometimes alter our moods and we can often do things deliberately to affect our moods (I know, for example, that on mornings when I wake up despondent that a walk with the dogs will generally cheer me up). That Dasein is always in a mood calls attention to the way our ways of being oriented toward the world are affectively conditioned. We are never not in a mood, although some moods are more dramatic and noticeable than others. Although moods are often understood as purely subjective states, they are world-oriented and world-revealing: Things show up as mattering in various – and different – ways depending on my mood, and a particular mood may just as easily draw my attention to a genuine and important feature of the world (an exciting opportunity, for example) as it may block my view. That we are always in moods emphasizes how, for Heidegger, we are not primarily detached observers (although a mood of cool detachment is possible); rather, the world matters to us in various ways and this is registered and modulated by our moods.

I said before that there is a more distal sense of Befindlichkeit or predisposedness. This other sense was already operative in the deliberately pedestrian example I used above of my heading to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. There, I noted that when I go into the kitchen, I do not there and then decide anything in terms of what things count as coffee cups (or kitchens, for that matter), and at no point in the past did I make any decisions along those lines, either in terms of what things that surround me count as coffee cups or, since I grew up in an English-speaking environment, that they are called “coffee cups.” Pedestrian as they are, coffee cups and the label or term “coffee cups” are part of the everyday world that I experience as “always already” having been there. Coffee cups and “coffee cups” are, so to speak, part of my inheritance of a world that was carved up and sorted before I came along. No one ever asked me what to call the things that hold coffee and I only could have been asked had I already mastered a language that both I and the inquirer understood. Learning one’s first language – which one does in conjunction with learning one’s way around a particular environment in tandem with grownups who already speak that language and navigate that environment – is not a matter of making choices or decisions, as those would require already having a way of understanding of the kind that having a language facilitates.

Both the proximal and varying moods that I find myself in from day to day and the more distal ways in which my sensibilities have been pre-delineated and shaped prior to any kind of conscious decisions (as such pre-delineating and shaping are needed in order to formulate and execute decisions in the first place) point to what Heidegger calls thrownness. The term is meant to express our having been cast into a world whose contours and categories have already been largely determined; moreover, thrownness conveys how we find not just the world but ourselves already shaped by the time we are aware of ourselves at all. That is, none of us chooses who we are from the ground up, so to speak. We did not choose our bodily makeup or particular bodily features – having this body rather than that one – nor did we choose our temperament, basic dispositions, aptitudes, and proclivities. As we grow more self-aware, we can come to understand that we have a particular temperament, and we can get a sense of what our aptitudes and proclivities are; we can even, sometimes with great effort, change some of those things about ourselves. In no case, however, can we go back and make everything different from the get-go.Footnote ³² Heidegger emphasizes that there is no getting back behind one’s thrownness, which is why I can both sense that had I been born into, say, a family in China, I would be a completely different person, while also recognizing that such thoughts are entirely a matter of idle speculation. Even if I now, at this point in my life, immerse myself in Chinese culture and never speak so much as a word of English again, I will still never be who I would have been had I grown up in China in a Chinese family from the start. Thrownness captures the unsettling thought that who I am is purely contingent, but also irrevocable.

Not surprisingly, Heidegger says that Befindlichkeit “always has its understanding, even if it merely keeps it suppressed” (SZ: 142–143). I say this is unsurprising for two reasons: First, in delineating these different aspects of being-in, we should fully expect the characterization of any one aspect to end up invoking the others. If we reflect further on what Heidegger means by Befindlichkeit, that we are always affectively oriented toward things in a particular way, both locally in terms of mood and distally in terms of a more fundamental thrownness, that this is an orientation toward things already suggests some way of understanding what we are thereby oriented toward. If I am in a fearful mood, for instance, things show up to me as threatening in various ways and I show up to myself as especially vulnerable or fragile, but this means that various things and I myself are showing up and so understood as being what they are: I can only be affectively stirred by the sound of distant thunder or a rustling in the leaves if I hear those things and understand them as the sound of distant thunder or rustling leaves. Second, that understanding is a fundamental aspect of Dasein’s being-in-the-world has been evident from the very beginning of SZ, before Heidegger even mentions his hyphenated formulation: What is distinctive about Dasein is that it has a pre-ontological understanding of being. This is echoed in the current chapter when Heidegger offers the following characterization of how he understands understanding:

Dasein always displays some kind of competence over existing. This does not mean, however, that each of us always has a worked-out philosophical understanding of either our own way of being or the being of other kinds of things. As pre-ontological, we are sensitive to, and register things, as being this or that, and, further, as belonging to different categories. Even though no one prior to reading Heidegger has the vocabulary of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, we all get it that things such as hammers and screwdrivers are made to our measure, as reflected in our talk about them as designed and manufactured, whereas other kinds of things, such as asteroids and marsupials, more readily invite the idea of discovery. This is not to say that we have a worked-out theory of how to divide the world into the made and the found – and worked-out theories of such matters might vary considerably – but if someone begins talking about the invention of marsupials, such talk is going to require a lot more explaining than what is needed when it comes to the invention of the steam engine.

Heidegger’s interest here though is primarily Dasein’s having an understanding of its own being: Dasein always has a sense of what it’s up to, which is governed by variously broader forms of self-understanding. For example, when my alarm goes off on a Tuesday morning in October, my ensuing activity reflects my understanding that I need to get ready to leave for a full day of teaching. I understand some things as needing-to-be-done because it is a Tuesday (and not a day where I work at home): I need to get the dogs out early, pack a lunch, eat breakfast by a certain time, shower and dress in clothes that are appropriate for a college-level teacher, and so on. I am managing all these small routines and tasks in ways that reflect not just my understanding of what I have to do that day, but why it is that I have to do what I am doing on that day; that is, I understand that I am a professor, that I have a roster of courses that are my responsibility to teach, that I have a schedule for my classes to which I try to adhere (especially if I care about being a responsible professor), and so on. That things appear to me as to-be-done indicates that I am oriented not just toward what is present to me – what I find arrayed in my room when I wake up, for example – but toward possibilities. When I get up on a Tuesday, being in the classroom on campus is not yet an actuality. I don’t then just sit idly and wait to see if it becomes actual. Rather, it is my possibility, which means that it is incumbent upon me to make it happen that I be in my appointed classroom on campus at the correct time; in understanding that it is incumbent upon me, I also understand that other things that are, strictly speaking, possible are nonetheless ruled out. I could just go back to sleep or pack my camera bag and set out with the dogs on a three-hour adventure or start a day-long cooking project or what have you. These are all possibilities, but mostly they do not even occur to me because I am so bent on getting ready for work. Indeed, that they do not occur is one indication of my general competence when it comes to being a professor.Footnote ³³

Heidegger refers to Dasein’s relation to possibilities as one of projection. When I get up on that Tuesday morning, I project the possibility of being in the appropriate classroom by 9:30 am – my being in the classroom in a couple of hours lies ahead of me – and my projecting that possibility is subservient to my more generally projecting the possibility of teaching that course, which in turn … all the way to my projecting the possibility – projecting into – being a professor. While I am here and now a professor – whereas on that Tuesday morning when I first wake up, I am not then and there in the classroom – my being a professor is something that I nonetheless have to sustain precisely by continuing to project into all the myriad possibilities that make up academic life.

Heidegger says that “discourse is existentially equiprimordial with Befindlichkeit and understanding” (SZ: 161). As such, its placement in Chapter Five of Division One appears somewhat belated. Prior to attending to discourse, Heidegger develops his account of understanding to encompass the idea of interpretation, which in various ways makes explicit, and so develops, what is already understood. The account of interpretation is then followed by a discussion of assertion, a linguistic act that expresses what is interpretively apprehended. Assertions have a predicative structure; they are a matter of saying something of something (Heidegger’s example is, “The picture on the wall is askew”), whereas understanding can be pre-predicative. One essential aspect of assertions is their being communicative: We make assertions to bring to others’ attention various aspects of the world, such as the crooked picture. So by the time Heidegger gets around to discourse, he has already introduced aspects of Dasein’s being-in that quite clearly involve linguistic elements. An account of language very much seems called for: “The fact that language now becomes our theme for the first time will indicate that this phenomenon has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein’s disclosedness” (SZ: 160).

The “roots” Heidegger refers to is what he means by discourse: “The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse [Rede]” (SZ: 160). What Heidegger means by roots and foundation admits of interpretations that differ in significant ways. One way of hearing what Heidegger is claiming here is to see him as pointing to something pre-linguistic that serves as the basis for language, for what is properly linguistic. Understood this way, Heidegger is here calling attention to the way Dasein’s world is a structure of significance, a referential totality wherein items of equipment, tasks, and projects are interwoven with one another. What makes up the workshop, for example, are items with salient differences among them that someone who is at home in the workshop is familiar with and adept at navigating. While I might note that an array of tools all look different from one another, sometimes those differences are slight despite the important differences in their use: pruning clippers, tin snips, and wire cutters don’t look all that different, but they should not be mixed and matched. Sensitivity to these differences – and being adept at navigating them – is not primarily a function of knowing the names of all these tools, but that they are relevant differences attracts, we might say, different names. As Heidegger notes, “the totality-of-significations is put into words” and to “significations words accrue” (SZ: 161). He immediately cautions, however, that “word things do not get supplied with significations” (SZ: 161). What I take this last remark to indicate is that our grasp of language is not a matter of first having an uninterpreted set of symbols to which we then assign meanings. We learn language by learning words and phrases in tandem with learning how to use the things they name. Still, Heidegger’s talk here of accrual suggests that significations run deeper than meaningful words and there certainly seems to be something right about this. Not every salient difference is marked with a word or words to register that difference and even where there is, I can be sensitive to that difference even without knowing those words (consider our sensitivity to variations in shades of color without having a special name for each variation). I can tell that two tools are different and I can even be adept at using them in ways that register those differences without having names for the tools. This kind of telling is in this way prior to telling in the verbal sense of relaying something to someone by speaking.Footnote ³⁴ We can see the same pattern of inflections if we consider another favored term: articulation. We can think of articulation as a structural concept – something has an articulated structure when it consists of variously individuated parts or segments (think of a skeleton) – but in another sense, articulation refers to speaking. When Heidegger says, “The intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is an appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility” (SZ: 161), that prior structural articulation seems to be what is indicated.

However, Rede can just mean speech or talk, which indicates something already linguistic. Insofar as there is a distinction to be marked, it is not one between the pre-linguistic and the linguistic, but rather the ontological and ontical levels of language. We’ve seen this difference already, in our discussion in Section 2.3 of language and languages as illustrative of the difference between worldhood and world. In marking out these two levels, Heidegger is not primarily indicating a kind of pre-linguistic phenomenon so much as noting that there is nothing essential about any particular language. Dasein does not essentially speak any particular language, but speaking-a-language,Footnote ³⁵ we might say, belongs to its constitutive structure. There is, on this reading of Heidegger’s talk of roots and foundations, no point in speculating on whether there could be Dasein without a language, a being with Dasein’s form of understanding that never reached the interpretive level marked out by words and phrases, including assertions. That Heidegger emphasizes the intimacy of the relations among understanding, interpretation, and assertion prior to discussing discourse seems to me to tell against such an idea.Footnote ³⁶

We have now considered the three aspects of being-in that Heidegger covers in Part A of Chapter Five of Division One. Part B attends to how being-in is expressed specifically in Dasein’s everyday way of being-in-the-world. I will note here only one aspect of that discussion, which calls attention to an aspect of everyday existence that perhaps belongs with those aspects discussed in the first part. I mean here Heidegger’s notion of falling. Heidegger’s discussion of falling seems to call attention to a constitutive structural feature of Dasein, although that constitutive idea is obscured by Heidegger’s rather condemnatory tone. (This intermingling of the constitutive and the condemnatory plagues Heidegger’s prior discussion of das Man.) Most neutrally, falling refers to Dasein’s absorption in its present activity: Dasein is always up to something and within the “flow” of what it is up to, there is a present dimension in tandem with a dimension that points toward the past (Befindlichkeit) and ahead toward the future (understanding). That falling in this sense features alongside these other two aspects is signaled by Heidegger’s summary of the ground he has covered in Division One in the final chapter by means of the care-structure. Dasein’s way of being – as being-in-the-world – is at the same time care. (We have been primed for this by the earlier lectures, with their emphasis on mattering, but also throughout Division One. The German for care is Sorge, which gibes with his earlier talk of the kind of concern (Besorge) we have for our tasks and projects and the solicitude (Fürsorge) we show toward others.) In summarizing the care-structure, Heidegger says that “the being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This being fills in the signification of care” ((SZ): 192). The three designated aspects would appear to correspond to understanding, followed by Befindlichkeit, and then falling. Notice that discourse does not appear here, but instead would pertain to the whole of it.

Heidegger complicates this neutral characterization of falling by citing it as a principal culprit in Dasein’s inauthenticity: By becoming absorbed in and by everyday life, Dasein falls away from the issue of its own existence.Footnote ³⁷ Everyday Dasein is “busy being busy” and this absorption in its day-to-day tasks and projects obscures a broader concern for the shape and character of its existence. Heidegger even characterizes everyday Dasein as fleeing from the issue of its own existence, which gives to falling an even more pernicious character. Untangling these different senses of falling is important for understanding the distinction between inauthenticity and authenticity. Rather than address that topic, which requires an Element of its own, we will turn instead to some of the philosophical implications of Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world.

3.1 Against Epistemology

In the preliminary considerations – § 6 specifically – of SZ, Heidegger characterizes one of his tasks as “destroying the history of ontology.” This kind of critical-destructive stance with respect to traditional philosophy is hardly new to SZ, as presentiments of the ideas expressed there in considerable detail are already in evidence as far back as the 1919 lectures discussed in Section 1.2. § 16 of those lectures is entitled, “The Epistemological Question of the Reality of the External World. Standpoints of Critical Realism and Idealism.” In § 16 and subsequent sections, Heidegger neither tries to answer the question he names, nor does he align himself with either of the two “critical positions.” Heidegger’s criticisms of traditional philosophical problems goes far beyond offering novel answers to enduring questions or reconfiguring old -isms in enlightening ways. Rather, in keeping with the destructive ambitions Heidegger harbors, the net effect of Heidegger’s phenomenological practice is to change our orientation toward such problems and positions, such that they are not so much problems in need of solutions or rival positions in need of adjudication as they are the distorted and misguided products of more fundamental philosophical confusions (the framing of epistemological problems is rarely ontologically neutral).

The bearing of Heidegger’s philosophy on such traditional problematics – especially his attempts to subvert epistemology – will be the focus of this section. Central to our discussion will be (of course) his notion of being-in-the-world. Before turning to SZ and more proximate lecture material, let us consider first his treatment of the question of the external world, along with realism and idealism, in the early IOP lectures, as his treatment there lays down a pattern that will persist into his later writing and lecturing even as some of the details vary. He begins by reciting the cluster of questions that make up the problem of the external world:

Epistemology is here presented as providing insights absent from – and meant to overcome – the naïve “slumber” of everyday life. Rather than “clinging to immediate life-experiences,” epistemology offers instead a critical standpoint that discerns problems where everyday sensibilities had not noticed any. The epistemologist has discovered something that brings the question of the external world to the fore. The discovery concerns the “data” that are genuinely available via experiential processes, in contrast to the conception of the world those data found. Returning to his example of the lectern, Heidegger describes the common starting point for both realism and idealism:

The divergence from this point of agreement is evident in the questions each side then poses. “Critical realism asks, how do I get out of the ‘subjective sphere’ of sense data to knowledge of the external world?” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 80), whereas “critical transcendental idealism poses the problem: how, remaining within the ‘subjective sphere’, do I arrive at objective knowledge?” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 80). For Heidegger, the “point of agreement” prior to these questions is the real problem: “The common point of departure of both theories is sense data, whose explanation decides everything” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 84).Footnote ³⁸ To see what has gone wrong here, Heidegger returns to the “environmental experience” of the lecture that he first laid out early on in Part II of the lecture course (and which we examined in Section 1.2). Is anything like the epistemologist’s sense data really what are “given?” We do not need to review in great detail Heidegger’s prior description of seeing the lectern. The main idea that bears upon the present considerations is that there is nothing that is in some way less than the lectern that is experientially prior to seeing the lectern: “The lectern is given to me immediately in the lived experience of it. I see it as such, I do not see sensations and sense data. I am not conscious of sensations at all” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 85). Heidegger notes that I can, with considerable effort, isolate and concentrate on something answering to the epistemologist’s sensations. I might squint and dim down my visual field to try to take in only the lectern’s color, for example, thereby inducing a sensation of just brown. In doing so, I subtract from my initial and immediate experience. Crucially, with this pared down form of experience, there is no longer the “it worlds” that was evident in the seeing of the lectern: “Do I experience this datum ‘brown’ as a moment of sensation in the same way that I do the lectern? Does it ‘world’ in the brown as such, apprehended as a datum? Does my historical ‘I’ resonate in this apprehension? Evidently not” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 85).

Rather than a discovery, the critical epistemologist has invented a problem where there wasn’t one by removing everything meaningful about the experience and, once left with a meaningless collection of sensory elements, asks how to get from that back to the meaningful experience of the lectern. The “meaningful phenomena of environmental experience cannot be explained by destroying their essential character, by denying their real meaning in order to advance a theory. Explanation through dismemberment, i.e. destruction: one wants to explain something which one no longer has as such” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 86). There is, however, nothing obligatory in the critical epistemologist’s explanatory ambitions: If meaningless sensory data are not what is immediately present in environmental experience, then determining how to get from such data to “it worlds” is a completely artificial challenge. It is also a hopeless challenge: “When I attempt to explain the environing world theoretically, it collapses upon itself. It does not signify an intensification of experience, or any superior knowledge of the environment, when I attempt its dissolution and subject it to totally unclarified theories and explanations” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 86). Only someone already in the grip of a theory according to which only that kind of sensory data can count as given will be driven to embark on such an explanatory misadventure. Instead, “the genuine solution to the problem of the reality of the external world consists in the insight that this is no problem at all, but rather an absurdity” (Reference HeimbüchelGA56/57: 92).

3.2 The Scandal of Philosophy

Consider G. E. Moore’s famous response to the problem of the external world, whose persistence Kant had even more famously labeled as “a scandal of philosophy.”Footnote ³⁹ Moore’s response is remarkably straightforward and concise, as it consists of an argument with only two premises and whose conclusion follows with no intermediate steps. All that is needed are gestures toward what Moore characterizes as things “to be met with in space,” that is, things residing outside the mind. Mental images, occurrent thoughts, and so on will not suffice, nor will after-images that, even though in some sense appearing in space (hovering in the interval between my face and the far wall, for example), cannot be met with in the right sense. But it is not difficult to find things of the kind Moore has in mind: He needs to look no further than his own two hands (although numerous other “things” would also do the trick). Hence the argument:

1. i. Here is one hand

2. ii. Here is another hand

3. iii. Therefore, there is a world of things external to the mind

The skeptic has been refuted, the problem has been solved, and Kant’s scandal has been tidily put to rest.

Clear and concise though Moore’s argument is, its effectiveness against skepticism is open to question. From an already-skeptical perspective, Moore cannot just help himself to the kinds of premises he uses to launch the argument. In order to be assured of the reality of his two hands, and so be entitled to use them as premises in his argument, Moore must already be assured that there is an external world, a space or realm “outside” the mind within which things like hands can be met. From the skeptic’s point of view, the argument will appear thoroughly question-begging. Insistence on the legitimacy of the argument’s premises – claiming, for example, that they are obviously true – makes Moore’s response to skepticism appear either dogmatic – the skeptic just cannot be right – or, perhaps worse, obtuse in that Moore has not recognized the problem that skepticism poses.Footnote ⁴⁰

There are moments in Heidegger’s explication of being-in-the-world that lend themselves to a Moore-like confrontation with skepticism. Heidegger’s assertion that the lectern is “immediately given” in “environmental experience,” for example, is apt to sound like one of Moore’s premises; the hammer that figures so prominently in Division One of SZ is also a suitable candidate to start Moore’s argument. Since I can say, “Here is a lectern” and “Here is a hammer,” I can take myself to have thereby demonstrated the reality of the very environing world in which the lectern and hammer can be found. Were this Heidegger’s mode of engagement with traditional philosophy, he would be as equally open to the charge of dogmatism or obtuseness as Moore. Heidegger’s engagement with skepticism, however, is more subtle and complex than the kind of “defense of common sense” offered by Moore. This is not to say that Heidegger is not occasionally brusque in his handling of challenges to prove the existence of the external world: “The question of whether there is a world at all and whether its being can be proved, makes no sense if it is raised by Dasein as being-in-the-world; and who else would raise it?” (SZ: 202). What we need to try to understand is how his saying things along the lines of “world in its most proper sense is just that which is already on hand for any questioning” ((Reference JaegerGA20): 294) does not saddle Heidegger with the charge of dogmatism.

Although Heidegger’s saying that world is “already on hand” might sound like a Moore-like assertion, carefully considered, it can be understood as a rebuke to both Moore and the skeptic. Start with Moore. Heidegger says that world “is already on hand for any questioning.” What holds for questioning holds for arguing as well. This suggests a certain kind of belatedness in Moore’s attempt at a proof, as the very meaningfulness of the premises of the argument render the argument superfluous. Heidegger is not saying here that the premises to Moore’s argument are indeed true (although he has no particular reason to doubt them) and that therefore the conclusion to the argument follows. Rather, the argument is, in a sense, upside-down, as it presents the presence of the world as a consequence of there being particular entities. The world is prior to entities as a space of meaningfulness from out of which particular entities can be understood. Heidegger is not dogmatically asserting the existence of particular entities. He is instead asserting only the meaningfulness of the premises, which even the skeptic must grant in order to challenge the argument as question-begging. But if meaning is granted all around, then any debates over the merits of Moore’s argument are beside the point. “If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it” (SZ: 205). What Dasein “already is” is being-in-the-world.

Heidegger’s appeal to the primacy of world-as-meaningfulness registers what he thinks is an unclarity in the very framing of the problem of the external world: “The world as the ‘wherein’ of being-in, and the ‘world’ as entities within-the-world (that in which one is concernfully absorbed) either have been confused or are not distinguished at all” (SZ: 203). Both Moore and the skeptic fixate on the reality of entities – paradigmatically material entities – as the proving ground for the reality of the world. As noted, the inference is from (material) entities to world. The world is here being conceived of as a kind of all-encompassing spatial receptacle. As we have seen throughout our discussion, world in the sense that interests Heidegger is the world of involvement rather than containment. This is not to say that Heidegger denies the legitimacy of a containing sense of world – it is marked as the first among his four senses of world and he never denies its cogency – but only the primacy of it. Our understanding of a containing-sense of world is derivative in relation to – and so parasitic upon – our understanding of world as “the ‘wherein’ of being-in.” We understand the former via the latter and Heidegger sees nothing inherently problematic about any such derivation: “But the world is disclosed essentially along with the being of Dasein; with the disclosedness of the world, the ‘world’ has in each case been discovered too” (SZ: 203). There is, in other words, no general problem about “world” in light of Dasein’s disclosure of the world.Footnote ⁴¹

Kant’s Refutation of IdealismFootnote ⁴² – his own attempt to put to an end the scandal of philosophy – accedes to the skeptic’s terms and on that basis alone, tries to show that the skeptic can be refuted. What I mean here by the skeptic’s terms is that Kant allows the skeptic free use, so to speak, of “inner experiences” – of changes registered as “in me.” Kant’s argument is that one’s ability to order those experiences, so that they stand in temporal relations of earlier than, later than, and simultaneous presupposes something permanent – an objective temporal order – that Kant reasons must be outer. In this way the inner presupposes the outer and the skeptic cannot therefore deny the reality of something external to his experience. In assessing Kant’s argument, Heidegger notes at one point that what Kant proves – if we allow that the argument is correct – “is that entities which are changing and entities which are permanent are necessarily present-at-hand together” ((SZ): 204). About this, he remarks that “when two things which are present-at-hand are thus put on the same level, this does not as yet mean that subject and object are present-at-hand together.” Kant’s error here – his overly generous concession to the skeptic – is to equate an inner process with experience, but more needs to be said about any such “process” in order to understand it as illustrating the workings of subjectivity. Such an inner process must not just be arrangeable into a temporal order, but it must – as constituting experience – involve some kind of meaning. An ordering of experiences would be something along the lines of, “I saw the table and then I noticed the bird through the window behind the table and that reminded me to fill the bird feeders.” Heidegger’s challenge – which Kant allows the skeptic to evade – is how any of that is possible without understanding it as founded on – and sustained by – worldly involvement. If Heidegger is right that worldly involvement is prior to – and so founds – meaningful experiences (including any experiences we are wont to characterize as inner), then Kant’s argument is both unnecessary and misleading: unnecessary because, as noted, Dasein “already is” what proofs deem necessary to demonstrate (involved in a world) and misleading insofar as it depicts our subjectivity as reducible to a meaningless inner process.

Notice here the emergence of the kind of pattern we saw laid down in Heidegger’s very early IOP lectures. Heidegger’s strategy there was to illustrate the artificiality of the problem of the external world. What generates the appearance of a problem is the characterization of what is immediately present in experience as sense data, such that the challenge is to show how to get from that to something more robust (such as tables, windows, birds, and bird feeders). In SZ, Heidegger registers a similar complaint: “After the primordial phenomenon of being-in-the-world has been shattered, the isolated subject is all that remains, and this becomes the basis on which it gets joined together with a ‘world’” (SZ: 206). We might, however, see him as going further here in the sense that even the idea that we are possessed of sense data is more than the skeptic should be allowed, since identifying a datum as brown, for example, or as rectangular, already avails itself of worldly sense. Contrary to what he says in the lectures, even bare sensations, if they are meaningfully identified in any way at all, also “world.”

3.3 Realism and Idealism

As we saw, in the early IOP lectures, Heidegger traces the problems that beset critical realism and idealism back to a common cause: Their inattention to lived experience in favor of a conception of the “immediately given”Footnote ⁴³ determined by antecedent theoretical commitments. Both the realist and the idealist start from the idea that what is given are sense data, discrete sensations that do not initially pertain to anything worldly like lecterns or hammers. Although sense data specifically do not figure much into Heidegger’s later discussions of realism and idealism, the idea that prior theoretical commitments lead to a kind of philosophical negligence persists. In The History of the Concept of Time lectures, Heidegger emphasizes the need “to extricate the question of the world understood as meaningfulness from a perverse horizon oriented to some theory or other of the reality of the external world or even to an ontology of actuality” (Reference JaegerGA20: 293). What fuels epistemology – what lends it a sense of primacy and urgency – is a phenomenologically inadequate ontology. The idea that experience consists of sensations is an especially vivid example of such inadequacy, but it is only one example. The kind of neglect Heidegger has in mind runs both wider and deeper:

While I, following Heidegger’s lead, have emphasized the confusions and distortions to which he sees epistemology and epistemology-driven theories as prone, this passage does acknowledge basic – and basically sound – intuitions that lends both realism and idealism their initial attraction and plausibility. Heidegger, however, is careful to acknowledge those intuitions in a way that registers just what each side neglects.Footnote ⁴⁴ Consider first what he sees as right about realism:

Realism is right insofar as our natural way of being oriented toward much of what populates the world involves the idea of those things being in various ways independent of us. We talk readily of discovery when it comes to things such as planets, species of beetles, and subatomic particles, and part of what’s built into the idea of discovery is our understanding of such things as being as they are prior to discovering them and regardless of our ever having discovered them. Our discovering them makes them manifest, which is not the same as bringing them into existence. Even those items that are not independent of Dasein’s projects and purposes – items of equipment such as hammers, screwdrivers, and outboard engines – are not for all that purely subjective in the sense of being dependent on being perceived or the like: I don’t think of my study – or the house in which it is located – as ceasing to exist when I’m the last person to leave in the morning (and this is not because I’ve left the dogs home to keep an eye on things).

What I’ve placed in brackets registers what Heidegger thinks realism neglects. Realism fixates on what is manifest – in particular, naturally occurring things and processes – while neglecting their manifestation. That is not one more naturally occurring process among others, even if it is in some way a naturally occurring process in the sense of being ontical. Dasein is ontically distinct from other entities in its being ontological, that is, as having an understanding of being. Insofar as it attends to Dasein’s understanding at all, as the sequel to this passage makes clear, realism goes entirely wrong in thinking that Dasein’s understanding can be construed as a kind of causal process: Realism “falls short in attempting to explain this reality in terms of the real itself, in believing that it can clarify reality by means of a causal process” (Reference JaegerGA20: 306). To delineate some things as causal processes and to determine how they work is already to be out amid entities in the worldFootnote ⁴⁵ – to have some kind of grip on reality – and so to then try to understand that being amid as itself one more causal process among others is to put the ontical cart before the ontological horse, to understand the understanding of being as one more entity to be understood.

What about the intuition that drives idealism? Heidegger characterizes the right-headed intuition as follows:

Idealism rightly calls attention to what realism neglects – our natural consciousness – and in that way underscores how the realist relies on his awareness of things – on things being manifest to him – while focusing only on the things so manifest. Idealism rightly sees that understanding constitutes a distinct category whose structure and conditions require a correspondingly distinct sort of account. However, its mistake lies in thinking that that sort of clarification can be accomplished in the absence of what I’ve placed in brackets above. In other words, it neglects that Dasein’s way of being is being-in-the-world, and so that understanding can only be clarified insofar as Dasein is not understood as a pure and potentially worldless subject, but as already involved with an environing world. With his phenomenology of everydayness, Heidegger’s investigation starts with “that understanding of being which belongs already to Dasein and which ‘comes alive’ in any of its dealing with entities” (SZ: 67). Dasein’s “dealing with entities” cannot be bracketed if we want to get this kind of understanding properly into view.

Heidegger’s parallel nods – and correctives – toward realism and idealism are not exactly parallel, as he accords a greater insight to idealism than to realism. Realism is fixated entirely on entities, along with causal processes and mechanisms, and so is entirely blindFootnote ⁴⁶ to anything such as consciousness, awareness, meaningfulness, and understanding. In The History of the Concept of Time, after criticizing realism’s fixation on causal processes, he notes about idealism: “Regarded strictly in terms of scientific method, therefore, realism is always at a lower level than every idealism, even when that idealism goes to the extreme of solipsism” (Reference JaegerGA20: 306). That even solipsism has the upper hand in relation to realism is a pretty stinging rebuke. In the discussion of these matters in SZ, Heidegger again registers a kind of “doxographic” agreement with realism insofar as he has no wish to “deny that entities within-the-world are present-at-hand” (SZ: 207), but he again laments realism’s “lack of ontological understanding,” noting that it “tries to explain reality ontically by real connections of interaction between things that are real.” Idealism thus “has an advantage in principle over realism.”

Heidegger’s attempts both to correct and retain elements of realism and idealism find expression in the following passage, which again calls attention to the importance of distinguishing the ontical from the ontological:

The first sentence of this passage anticipates his “doxographic” agreement with realism later in the chapter, while the second points toward the virtues he sees in idealism. The difficulty this passage poses is how to hold the two ideas Heidegger expresses in the first two sentences together. Why there is a difficulty here can be seen by attending to the first emphasized occurrence of are. Heidegger’s stress here is meant to underscore the sense of independence he goes on to assert. However, if “being ‘is’ only in the understanding” of Dasein, just how independent are these entities after all? After all, “are” is a form of the verb “to be,” and so bound up with the idea of being. Doesn’t that mean that entities can only be what they are insofar as Dasein exists? How can an entity be without being in some way or another? That the sense of independence is attenuated can be seen in a later passage, after Heidegger has remarked on the merits and shortcomings of realism and idealism:

Read in the light of this passage, the realistic sounding assertions of independence in the prior passage are qualified considerably, as even the idea of an entity being independent – being as it is regardless of what we make of it – still depends on there being Dasein. There thus appears to be a kind of meta-dependence that takes back the initial claim to independence. Some readers of SZ have tried to wave away this appearance. Taylor Carman ascribes to Heidegger an “ontical realism,” whose central commitment is to the idea that present-at-hand “entities exist and have a determinate structure in the absence of any and all views, period” (Carman Reference Carman2003: 167). Despite the case-closed tone of Carman’s characterization, if the absence of “any and all views” is another way of describing the absence of Dasein, then it would appear that the case needs to be reopened: Having a determinate structure – even an “independent” determinate structure – still depends upon Dasein. In other words, Carman’s ontic realism runs afoul of what Heidegger says about the “in such a case” of there being no Dasein: If it can neither be said that entities are, nor that they are not in such a case, in what sense can entities have a “determinate structure” if there is no Dasein? Entities can have a determinate structure only if they are, but that’s among the things that Heidegger says cannot be said. Other readersFootnote ⁴⁷ have opted for a more modest minimal realism that foregoes the idea of determinate structure, leaving only the notion of a bare something – call it THE REAL – that is independent of Dasein (and which is accessible to Dasein through moody, noncognitive affective episodes). Paring back does not really seem to help matters: Being undifferentiated is still a way for something to be, and so would still seem to depend on Dasein; moreover, what philosophers want when they are attracted to realism is generally something more robust and informative than a bare and barren sense of THE REAL.

The problem here is that what Heidegger says at the ontical level – what leads Carman to characterize his view as ontical realism – appears threatened rather than bolstered at the ontological level. The way Heidegger characterizes these two levels and their interplay would appear to transpose into his ontical-ontological idiom Kant’s prior distinction between empirical realism and transcendental idealism. For Kant, we can with some right consider objects as existing independently of us, as existing “out there” in space and time; however, since space and time themselves are the a priori forms of intuition and so must be understood as features of our minds rather than as real in and of themselves, those independently existing objects are mind-dependent after all.Footnote ⁴⁸ They are, one and all, appearances, while knowledge of what Kant calls things-in-themselves is impossible. William Blattner has, more than any other contemporary reader of SZ, emphasized the Kantian legacy in Heidegger’s handling of realism and idealism. While Blattner allows that Heidegger may be some kind of ontical realist, he is an ontological idealist – an idealist about beingFootnote ⁴⁹ – which again undermines the air of finality in Carman’s statement of ontical realism.

It would be too much to try to adjudicate these disputes here.Footnote ⁵⁰ An underlying problem with these arguments is that they do not take seriously – or seriously enough – Heidegger’s ambition of breaking free from – or overcoming – both realism and idealism. To marshal passages that lend credence to the idea that he is a realist or the opposite only suggests that we have not yet taken to heart the radicality of Heidegger’s stance with respect to traditional philosophy. Either that, or that we ultimately think that Heidegger was not nearly as radical as he sought to be, as his views can still be located in a familiar constellation of possible positions. To see how and why we might refrain from doing so, consider again Heidegger’s accordance of the upper hand to idealism. In his 1927 Basic Problems of Phenomenology lectures, he notes that his insistence on the primacy of world, understood in terms of meaningfulness, is apt to be understood as introducing a subjective element, thereby inviting the charge of idealism. Remarking on this, he notes that “we have to ask what this idealism – which today is feared almost like the foul fiend incarnate – really is searching for” (Reference von HerrmannGA24: 238). What idealism is searching for is what Heidegger takes himself to have found in the interrelation between Dasein and world: Dasein is worldly through and through, but what is worldly reflects Dasein’s modes of understanding. The latter bit of this should appease the idealist, given its emphasis on understanding. But, is the former bit enough to appease the realist?

Consider again Carman’s appeal to “determinate structure” in his characterization of ontical realism. I remarked before that his case-closed tone was markedly premature in light of Heidegger’s remarks about the way the dependence of being on Dasein qualifies considerably his assertion that entities are “quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed,” and so on. To open the case further, we might ask here just what determinate structure the ontical realist has in mind here. Moreover, we might ask just how those determinations were made. Did this determinate structure simply impress itself upon Dasein’s understanding, as though it could not but arrive at things having just that structure? Again, this begins to veer close to understanding understanding as the outcome of a kind of causal process: The way the world – or here, really, ‘world’ – is structured (in-itself ) causes Dasein to understand the world as being so-structured. The force behind Heidegger’s condemnation of “blind realism” (Reference von HerrmannGA24: 249) should be evident here, as what realism is blind to is the kind of work that had to be done to determine any of this determinative structure. It is not as though we just open our eyes – or open our minds – and the material world stamps its structure upon them. What structure we take the material world to have reflects the ways in which we have investigated it, the interests that have guided those investigations, the skills and techniques brought to bear, the models and theories we have drawn up and tested. At the same time, of course, all of this activity is not the work of an isolated, worldless subject, but of a being always already at grips with its world, and, by extension, the ‘world.’ This is – or should be – realistic enough to appease all but the blindest realist without throwing in with the “foul fiend.”

4.1 Pathways

Despite its status and stature – both within Heidegger’s overall corpus and for twentieth-century philosophy more generally – SZ was never advertised as complete or definitive. Its two published divisions were to be followed by a third, and these three together were only to have been Part One of a two-part work (the second part was likewise to consist of three divisions). Although Heidegger’s promissory notes were partially cashed in his writings and lectures in the late 1920s, the work was never finished in the way Heidegger initially envisioned. Moreover, had the work been completed, it would have only further underscored the role Division One of Part One was always described as playing, namely, that it was to serve as a preparatory analysis. As preparatory, Heidegger’s characterizations there of Dasein’s being-in-the-world should not be considered the final word on the matter. Heidegger is clear about this in work immediately following the publication of SZ in 1927, especially in his essay On the Essence of Ground (OEG) and his lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. In both works, he revisits what he refers to as the problem of world. In doing so, he situates the account of being-in-the-world developed in SZ in a manner that reinforces its preliminary status.

At the outset of the second part of the FCM lectures, Heidegger takes up the question, “What is world?” and delineates three “paths” to approaching the question (he cautions that these are not the only three). His numbering of the paths does not align with the order of their appearance in his writings, as he cites as first a path he follows in OEG. This is a “historical path” where “we pay close attention to the word and pursue the history of the word ‘world’ and the historical development of the concept it contains” (Reference von HerrmannGA29/30: 261). We will return to this historical approach shortly. The path laid down in SZ does not attend at all to the history of the word “world” (indeed, Heidegger does little to motivate the fourfold taxonomy he offers). Instead, looking back, he describes himself as having “attempted in Being and Time to provide a preliminary characterization of the phenomenon of world by interpreting the way in which we at first and for the most part move about in our everyday world” (Reference von HerrmannGA29/30: 262). Although Heidegger in OEG and the FCM lectures does not disown his prior account of Dasein in its everydayness, in both works he nonetheless flags that account as being potentially misleading. What is misleading about it is that it encourages a conception of world as equivalent to the kinds of referential totalities he describes in Division One via examples of workshops and the like. These certainly appear to be worlds in his third sense of the four he offers in SZ. As we noted in Section 2.3, however, worlds in this sense, as taking the indefinite article (a world) and allowing pluralization, threaten to obscure from view any notion of the world, as well as the idea that Dasein’s transcendence is toward world in that richer sense: “If indeed one identifies the ontic contexture of items of utility, or equipment, with world and interprets being-in-the-world as dealing with items of utility, then there is certainly no prospect of any understanding of transcendence as being-in-the-world in the sense of the ‘fundamental constitution of Dasein’” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 155, Note 55). Staying local misses the point entirely: “In and through this initial characterization of the phenomenon of world the task is to press on and point out the phenomenon of world as a problem. It never occurred to me, however, to try and claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram” (Reference von HerrmannGA29/30: 263). This is not to say that Heidegger had not started to “press on” already in SZ to “the phenomenon of the world as a problem.” Indeed in § 69c – toward the end of Division Two – he takes up the problem of transcendence, asking the question of “how anything like the world in its unity with Dasein is ontologically possible” (SZ: 364). Heidegger’s discussion here is brief – roughly three pages – and he vacillates between talk of a world and the world: Dasein is an entity for whom “something like a world … has been disclosed” (SZ: 365) and “Dasein is essentially ‘in a world’” (SZ: 365), but also that “the [NB: not a] world is, as it were, already ‘further outside’ than any object can ever be” (SZ: 366). This appeal to the world as being “further outside” points toward the idea of transcendence. It is not surprising, then, that transcendence figures prominently in both of the post-SZ paths Heidegger follows. Indeed, in OEG, Heidegger declares transcendence to be definitive of being-in-the-world: “We name world that toward which Dasein as such transcends, and shall now determine transcendence as being-in-the-world” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 139).Footnote ⁵¹

In this final section, we will examine more closely this appeal to transcendence, both as it figures in the historical path traced in OEG, as well as the third path he follows in the FCM lectures. That third path – described as a “comparative analysis” – revisits and qualifies considerably ideas broached in his Aristotle lectures of 1924 concerning how to understand the manner in – and extent to – which animals have a world and how that sense of having differs fundamentally from Dasein’s having of world.

4.2 Transcendence and World

Before embarking on his historical investigation of the concept of world in OEG, Heidegger first notes how, pre-philosophically, the idea of the world simply equates to the idea of all there is. When we talk about the whole world, we simply mean everything. However, if being-in-the-world were keyed to this notion of world, it would only mean that Dasein – as being-in-the-world – is in the midst of entities. Heidegger observes that “this is in the end the emptiest and most trivial thing that can be said” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 140). Moreover, it does nothing to pick out anything distinctive about human existence, as anything that is – insofar as it is – can be found amid everything else that is. Being-in-the-world, on this construal, picks out nothing essential about Dasein. Every entity is in some way amid other entities, but most entities are not oriented toward other entities in the sense of those entities being manifest to them. The desk in my study is there alongside the chair I use to sit at it, as well as bookcases, a rug, and so on, but my desk is in no way aware of the chair that I use nor of anything else. All of these things are, however, manifest to me, which means that I understand them and comport myself toward them in meaningful ways (meaningfulness is again the key idea: my desk means something to me, but nothing means anything to the desk). Moreover, my understanding – my awareness of things – is not limited to my study and what populates it; rather, my understanding extends indefinitely outward. This is not to say that I understand everything there is – there’s lots I don’t understand – but I understand even those things that I don’t understand as among everything there is. Dasein is thus not just among other beings, but is oriented toward other beings as belonging to a totality. That form of orientation gives us a glimmer of what Heidegger means by transcendence: “Human Dasein – a being that finds itself situated in the midst of beings, comporting itself toward beings – in doing so exists in such a way that beings are always manifest as a whole” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 156). As he is careful to note, “This wholeness is understood without the whole of those beings that are manifest being explicitly grasped or indeed ‘completely’ investigated in their specific connections, domains, and layers” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 156).

Dasein’s transcendence is a matter of its distinctive form of understanding (what is distinctive about it will be more clearly delineated by contrasting it with animalistic forms of understanding – this is the topic of the comparative analysis of the FCM lectures). “Yet the understanding of this wholeness, an understanding that in each case reaches ahead and embraces it, is a surpassing in the direction of world” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 156). As surpassing, this form of understanding is not oriented toward something outside of – or not of – the world, but should be thought of as reaching round and taking in the world as a whole. Heidegger’s “necessarily fragmented” investigation of the concept of world, which begins with Heraclitus and ends with Kant, presents that history as groping toward this understanding of transcendence and world. “In the case of such elementary concepts, the ordinary meaning is usually not the originary and essential one. The latter is repeatedly covered over, and attains its conceptual articulation only rarely and with difficulty” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 142). Nonetheless, glimpses of this “constantly hidden” meaning can be had. I will not try here to recount the several historical fragments Heidegger pieces together. I will note only the first two particular but especially important links in that historical chain that already involve a twofold sense of “world” that gestures toward transcendence.

Heidegger begins his historical account with the pre-Socratic Greeks, among them Heraclitus, whose Fragment # 89 – “The wakeful have one single cosmos that is common to all, while in sleep each man turns away from this world into his own” – illustrates the complex sense of world. Present already in the Greek notion of kosmos is an understanding of world as more than a mere aggregate or collection of everything that happens to exist. “World” refers to the how – the manner – of things existing, as belonging to the world – this world – and not another (possible) world. Moreover, Heraclitus’ fragment already signals something distinctively human: The wakeful have a common world and understand that world as held in common. Even for the ancient Greeks, Heidegger claims, the world “belongs precisely to human Dasein, even though it embraces in its whole all beings, including Dasein” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 143). With the emergence of Christianity, “the relation between kosmos and human Dasein” becomes “sharper and clearer” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 143). In one sense, “world” refers again to all that is, now understood as God’s Creation, but “world” takes on a further meaning keyed to human existence to mark out a sinful worldliness in contrast to being oriented toward God. As fallen, human existence is of the world in the sense of loving the world rather than what is divine. (Other creatures belong to the world in the first sense, but they are not worldly in the second sense.) In the Gospel of John, for example, “world designates the fundamental form of human Dasein removed from God, the character of being human pure and simple” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 144).

The problem of world can be understood as the problem of the interplay of these two dimensions: Worldliness is a human phenomenon that takes account of beings as a whole. World in the more pedestrian sense of all that exists is not in any way a defective concept, but it does not capture their being manifest – and how they are manifest – to human understanding. Human worlds – in the plural – are ways of making sense of everything there is. Unlike workshops and executive suites – the world of carpentry and the business world – that are, we might say, bounded totalities,Footnote ⁵² worldliness in the sense that Heidegger is after is unbounded. Being-in-the-world refers to this orientation toward this unbounded form of understanding. In being so oriented, Heidegger says that Dasein “forms” the world:

A human world is something formed, not in the sense of something deliberately made, but as tied to the way things are understood by Dasein. What is formed is an original view or a model that encompasses, however implicitly, all that there is. A human world is a way of making sense of everything – no world leaves anything out – even while being only one world among other possible worlds. The Christian world, for example, provides a view on everything there is, as God’s Creation, as reflecting God’s goodness, but as lesser in relation to what is divine. That world, which Heidegger associates with Medieval Christianity, is no longer up and running in the way it was in the Middle Ages. That view of things has waned as new worlds have been formed. Notice that we are here still availing ourselves of the indefinite article – the Christian world is a world – and the plural – there have been, and will be, numerous human worlds – while nonetheless including a sense of the world: What makes these worlds worlds – what their worlding consists in – is their orientation toward the totality of what is, what Heidegger in the FCM lectures refers to as “beings as such and as a whole.” Heidegger talks there too of world-formation in unfolding his comparative analysis. To those lectures we now turn.

4.3 Animality and World-Formation

Recall that in his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger notes that “an animal is not simply moving down the road, pushed along by some mechanism. It is in the world in the sense of having it” (Reference MichalskiGA18: 18). Unlike water that flows in a river or a rock that breaks loose from the side of a cliff, the animal moves itself and its movements are purposive in that we describe the animal as, variously, seeking shelter, hunting for prey, hiding from predators, and so on. Heidegger’s remarks on animality in his FCM lectures five years later preserve some of what he marked out previously as distinctive of animals. The animal is not to be understood as worldless like a stone, but Heidegger’s later understanding of the animal as having a world is far more qualified and restricted. Within his threefold comparative analysis, whereas the stone is worldless and human beings are world-forming, the animal is poor in world. In the 1924 lectures, Heidegger had marked a sharp distinction between human and animal forms of being-in-the-world, since only the human way of being-in-the-world involved language. Something quite like that marker carries over into the later lectures, but the ramifications of the animal’s lack of language – its lacking logos – are now more severe in terms of attenuating the animal’s form of having, so much so that being-in-the-world is not applicable to animals.

Consider the following passage from the FCM lectures:

Notice in particular Heidegger’s appeals to encirclement and captivation in describing the life of the animal. To say that the animal is “encircled by its own specific ring,” which involves a “range of captivation” does not mean that the animal is held captive in the same manner as when it is kept in a cage. The animals Heidegger here describes move freely, but their movements, activities, and sensory capacities operate within a predetermined range in accordance with the kinds of animal they are. Animal activity and perception involves an often very complicated array of inhibitors and disinhibitors, what we might loosely think of as triggers that incite and extinguish in the animal various kinds of response. The squirrel that startles the woodpecker, for example, spends a great deal of its time gathering acorns: acorns trigger gathering – as well as eating and storing – on the part of the squirrel, which is as much as to say that acorns are food for the squirrel. Acorns trigger a food response from the squirrel, whereas the woodworm that the woodpecker seeks does not. While from a purely objective point of view, the woodworm is a part of the squirrel’s surroundings, it is not within the squirrel’s encirclement. Nothing about woodworms triggers any kind of response from the squirrel. Various animals have various kinds of often exquisitely tuned triggers. An owl, for example, might be triggered to fly in a particular direction by the very faint sound of a rodent scurrying through the leaves, while wolves and other predators can locate prey by scents that barely register – if at all – to the human sense of smell. Despite having such exquisitely attuned mechanisms, different kinds of animals will often not be triggered at all by sounds and smells that are abundantly present in the sense of being at a volume or intensity well within the range of what that animal can in some circumstances pick up. My dogs, for example, whose range of hearing is far greater than mine, do not react at all to loud music in the kitchen when they are keeping me company as I clean up (by contrast, they react excitedly to plates put down on the floor to “pre-wash”). Unless a stretch of the music includes dogs barking or resembles footsteps on gravel or knocks on a door, the music does not register for my dogs. They seem not to hear it at all, unless or until a sound like one that has significance in their canine circle happens to sound.

What I’ve described thus far is apt to trigger a response of its own: Aren’t human beings also animals with sensory capacities that are only operative in a particular range? Don’t we have a “circle” of our own that captivates us just as the squirrel is captivated by its circle and so on? While it is true that human beings enjoy only a limited sensory range – some sounds are beyond the reach of human ears and the same goes for sights and smells – we are not confined to our sensory range in the manner of the animal: The animal hears what it hears in that it is attuned to – and triggered by – some sounds but not others, but nothing else is manifest to the animal as a possible sound or possible sight. Consider again the example of food: The acorn triggers a food response in the squirrel, while the woodworm does not. The squirrel responds foodishly, so to speak, to the acorns but not to the woodworm. In so responding, it does not see or otherwise register the woodworm as not food for squirrels, nor does it see or otherwise register the woodworm as possibly food for other kinds of creatures. The squirrel is captivated by its “encircling ring” in that it has no sense – no conception – of there being anything beyond the array of what triggers its activity. The squirrel does not – and cannot – conceive of what it responds to as only possible responses that could be otherwise. Whereas notice what I’ve done in the preceding paragraphs: I’ve picked out – however roughly – what is edible for a squirrel in contrast to what is edible for a woodpecker, what is audible to an owl, and what is smellable by a wolf. This is not just to say that the woodpecker, owl, and wolf figure into my “circle,” but that my understanding transcends any kind of encirclement. I am not confined to what I can hear or see or smell, as I can understand the possibility of sounds that I cannot hear and things that I cannot see. Human beings can also build instruments to bring those things within the range of our sensory capacities: cameras with infrared sensors, microphones, amplifiers, and so on. That kind of activity would make no sense if we were not open to the possibility of sounds and images beyond the range of our unaided hearing and seeing.

It’s not just that a squirrel, upon seeing a woodworm, is not able to think, “I bet that woodpecker over there would like to eat this,” but that there’s a very real sense in which the squirrel does not register the presence of the woodworm at all, at least certainly not as a woodworm. I don’t eat woodworms. I don’t know if they even count as edible for human beings. But I still might take note of a woodworm, on a hike for example. I can look at the woodworm without its “triggering” any particular response from me. I can look at the woodworm just to look at it, to note its wriggling and the structure of its body. I can see it as distinctively marked by ringed segments. I can, as noted, see it as food for the woodpecker whose nearby pecking I hear, and not as food for the squirrel that just scampered away. I can also see it as the creature that’s responsible for these marks on the oak tree where I first spotted it. In seeing it that way, I can also see it as responsible for the blight that’s affecting oak trees in my region, and so as something I should consider killing rather than putting back onto the tree where I found it. I can see it as wiggling and wriggling in a way that reminds me of twirling spaghetti onto a fork. And so on. The availability of the as is central to Heidegger’s reflections on the question, “What is world?” In keeping with his earlier remarks on transcendence, the as that is the mark of world is the “as” in as such and in as a whole: “World is not the totality of beings, is not the accessibility of beings as such, not the manifestness of beings as such that lies at the basis of this accessibility – world is rather the manifestness of beings as such as a whole” (Reference von HerrmannGA29/30: 412). The various uses of as noted earlier in my examining the woodworm indicate what he refers to here as the “accessibility of beings as such,” and so points the way toward the grounding sense of manifestness. Human beings are world-forming in that beings are manifest: to be manifest as such as a whole is to appear against a horizon of possibilities, rather than rigidly determined in one particular way. Such rigidity is the mark of the animal’s captivation, its being triggered by the presence of things rather than open to them just as what they are and can be.

Trivial though the example of looking at a worm may be, that I can see freely in myriad different ways is grounded in transcendence. Heidegger explicitly connects freedom and transcendence. Transcendence “consists in freedom” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 164), and more emphatically: “Freedom alone can let a world prevail and let it world for Dasein. World never is, but worlds” (Reference von HerrmannGA9: 164). Call it beginner’s luck or consider it one full revolution of the hermeneutic circle: Either way, Heidegger was clearly already on to something all the way back in 1919.