Being-in-the-World
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Being and Time, Part 3: Being-in-the-World
By Simon Critchley
How Heidegger turned Descartes upside down, so that we are, and only therefore think
I talked in my first blog entry about Heidegger's attempt to destroy our standard, traditional philosophical vocabulary and replace it with something new. What Heidegger seeks to destroy in particular is a certain picture of the relation between human beings and the world that is widespread in modern philosophy and whose source is Descartes (indeed Descartes is the philosopher who stands most accused in Being and Time). Roughly and readily, this is the idea that there are two sorts of substances in the world: thinking things like us and extended things, like tables, chairs and indeed the entire fabric of space and time.
The relation between thinking things and extended things is one of knowledge and the philosophical and indeed scientific task consists in ensuring that what a later tradition called "subject" might have access to a world of objects. This is what we might call the epistemological construal of the relation between human beings and the world, where epistemology means "theory of knowledge". Heidegger does not deny the importance of knowledge, he simply denies its primacy. Prior to this dualistic picture of the relation between human beings and the world lies a deeper unity that he tries to capture in the formula "Dasein is being-in-the-world". What might that mean?
If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. That is to say, I am not a free-floating self or ego facing a world of objects that stands over against me. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world. The world is part and parcel of my being, of the fabric of my existence. We might capture the sense of Heidegger's thought here by thinking of Dasein not as a subject distinct from a world of objects, but as an experience of openedness where my being and that of the world are not distinguished for the most part. I am completely fascinated and absorbed by my world, not cut off from it in some sort of "mind" or what Heidegger calls "the cabinet of consciousness".
Heidegger's major claim in his discussion of world in Being and Time is that the world announces itself most closely and mostly as a handy or useful world, the world of common, average everyday experience. My proximal encounter with the table on which I am writing these words is not as an object made of a certain definable substance (wood and iron, say) existing in a geometrically ordered space-time continuum. Rather, this is just the table that I use to write and which is useful for arranging my papers, my laptop and my coffee cup. Heidegger insists that we have to "thrust aside our interpretative tendencies" which cover over our everyday experience of the world and attend much more closely to that which shows itself.
The world is full of handy things that hang together as a whole and which are meaningful to me. In even more basic terms, the world is a whole load of stuff that is related together: my laptop sits on my desk, my spectacles sit on my nose, the desk sits on the floor, and I can look over to the window at the garden and hear the quiet hum of traffic and police sirens that make up life in this city. This is what Heidegger calls "environment" (Umwelt), where he is trying to describe the world that surrounds the human being and in which it is completely immersed for the most part.
Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience. To translate this into another idiom, we might say that Heidegger is inverting the usual distinction between theory and practice. My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical; it is not the experience of some spectator gazing out at a world stripped of value. Rather, I first apprehend the world practically as a world of things which are useful and handy and which are imbued with human significance and value. The theoretical or scientific vision of things that find in a thinker like Descartes is founded on a practical insight that is fascinated and concerned with things.
Heidegger introduces a distinction between two ways of approaching the world: the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) and the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Present-at-hand refers to our theoretical apprehension of a world made up of objects. It is the conception of the world from which science begins. The ready-to-hand describes our practical relation to things that are handy or useful. Heidegger's basic claim is that practice precedes theory, and that the ready-to-hand is prior to the present-at-hand. The problem with most philosophy after Descartes is that it conceives of the world theoretically and thus imagines, like Descartes, that I can doubt the existence of the external world and even the reality of the persons that fill it – who knows, they might be robots! For Heidegger, by contrast, who we are as human beings is inextricably bound up and bound together with the complex web of social practices that make up my world. The world is part of who I am. For Heidegger, to cut oneself off from the world, like Descartes, is to miss the point entirely: the fabric of our openedness to the world is one piece. And that piece should not be cut up. Furthermore, the world is not simply full of handy, familiar meaningful things. It is also full of persons. If I am fundamentally with my world, then that world is a common world that experienced together with others. This is what Heidegger calls "being-with" (Mitsein).
An excerpt from Heidegger’s Map
by Daniel Bonevic
Understanding Dasein requires understanding what it is to be in a world, and that requires some understanding of what a world is, as well as an understanding of the beings that might populate such a world. It appears to follow that worlds and the objects we might find in them are prior to Dasein, at least in the order of understanding. Aristotle, for example, would think they are prior in the order of being as well; consciousness must be consciousness of something--a sensation, for instance, is always a sensation of something, and that something must be prior to and independent of the sensation. But Heidegger sees it differently. He asks about the worldliness of a world--what a world is, or what it is to be a world--and concludes that a world is the kind of thing that Dasein can be in. The essence of a world, in other words, is its ability to relate to Dasein. This turns Aristotle's picture on its head; what consciousness is consciousness of depends on consciousness, not the other way around.
So far, we seem to have a Hegelian idealism, in which the world itself emerges as dependent on the mind--in this case, on Dasein. A world is a characteristic of Dasein. But Heidegger changes the usual philosophical understanding of the relationship between us and the world. He thinks of it not primarily as a relation of perceiving or knowing but instead as a relation of caring. Dasein's relation to the world is essentially one of taking care of things. Things thus present themselves to us not primarily as objects of perception or knowledge but as useful or valuable, as things we can use. Our basic relation to the world is not epistemic, but pragmatic. Things--his favorite example is a hammer--are handy, and their handiness is not something revealed to us theoretically through reflection but pre-theoretically by action. This means that our chief relation to things is teleological. The hammer is for driving nails. The shoes are for wearing on the feet. The clock is for telling time. Their being consists in their handiness, their Zuhandenheit, "being ready-to-hand." This departs from the traditional understanding, according to which things are what they are, and their usability is an extrinsic property of them, a matter of their relation to us and our various purposes. For Heidegger, handiness defines things in the world as they are in themselves. Objects come already related to us. And we are essentially absorbed in the world.
One might object to this, even given Heidegger's idealistic starting point. We have to figure out what things are for. The baby in the nursery does not immediately recognize the shoes as for wearing and the hammer as for hammering; their handiness has to be learned. The same is true collectively: people had to learn what things could be used as tools or eaten. Things did not immediately present themselves as useful. To some degree, they had to be classified and understood before being perceived as useful. But that would give reflection priority over action, and being present priority over being ready-to-hand.
There is another important difference between Heidegger's idealism and idealism as it is often understood. His method is phenomenology, which he summarizes in the Husserlian slogan, "To the things themselves!" Things in the world make themselves manifest; they present themselves. They are not "appearances," to use Kant's favored term, for that suggests that they are appearances of something else--things-in-themselves, in Kant, or collections of entities of the scientific image, in Sellars. Heidegger rejects the terminology because he rejects the underlying implication. Things in the world--objects of the manifest image, as Sellars, following Heidegger, calls them--are not appearances of something else, but are what they are. They are the primary constituents of the world. Things that do not present themselves to us as usable, or at all, are secondary, defined in terms of the manifest, ready-to-hand objects. The world of our experience is the world, in the primary sense, and its objects are the fundamental objects, irreducible to anything else. (Whether we can make sense of the scientific image on this ground remains an open question. Heidegger has little to say about science or the objects it postulates in Being and Time.)
That doesn't mean we cannot be wrong, suffer illusions, and so on. The navy blue pants can look black in poor lighting. But that is because the true character of objects can be obscured; we can seek to uncover, or discover, their true nature. That is how Heidegger understands truth: the uncovering or disclosure of what had been concealed. This leads him to a distinctive method, interpretation or hermeneutics, dedicated to such uncovering.
Secondary Sources
What Heidegger means by Being-in-the-World
“It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”
