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Earlier I mentioned that Heidegger saw the need for the destruction of traditional ontology. Heidegger had planned to write a second volume to counter Descartes and the tradition. It was never written. But he wrote enough in the first published volume to paint a vivid picture. At the risk of oversimplifying, let me summarize the differences between the Cartesian and Heideggerian worldview to lay the groundwork for Heidegger’s idea of being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein].
Heidegger writes that “Descartes sees the fundamental ontological determination of the world as extensio” (89). That is to say, the world is physical in three-dimensional space. Descartes also made a distinction between mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa). Our being is composed of mind and matter. Our mind is an immaterial substance that has no extension in space while our body is a material substance that does extend into space. For Descartes, when the mind wants to do something – “I want to pick up the hammer” – it passes instructions to the body for it to act. This is known as Cartesian dualism.
In a series of letters between the two, Elisabeth, the Princess of Bohemia, challenged Descartes to explain exactly how an immaterial mind could communicate with a material body. She reasoned that the mind would have to extend into space in order to give instructions to the body. Descartes was unable to provide a sufficient answer. He speculated that maybe the pineal gland was a conduit between the two. In the end, their correspondence ended with his death in 1650. Had philosophers paid more attention to her a lot of hand wringing might have been saved. Instead, the metaphysical game went on, and philosophers continued to struggle for several hundred more years with the pseudo problem of dualism.
Gilbert Ryle, in his plain-spoken book The Concept of Mind (1949) famously criticized Cartesian dualism as a “ghost in the machine.” Heidegger anticipates Ryle’s objections in his own opaque way:
“Dasein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but rather, in its primary kind of being, it is already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Dasein is ‘inside,’ correctly understood; that is, it itself is as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it…. in knowing, Dasein gains a new perspective of being toward the world always already discovered in Dasein” (62).
By thinking of ourselves as a mental substance removed from the world it was easy to question whether the “outside” world was real or rather some kind of illusion. We wondered if we could know anything at all. Kant provided a solution that explained how we can justify our experience of an external world. For his part, Heidegger rejects the idea that we need to justify anything. For him, it is a given for us. He argues that the real scandal isn’t that there are no good arguments for a real world outside of consciousness, but that such proofs are “expected and attempted again and again” (205).
We do not live as “thinking subjects” gazing passively out at a world of objects. I don’t have an essence (a mind or soul) that is in a body. Instead, my whole being is part and parcel of the world.
“The kind of being we are is being-in-the-world” (53).
“The compound expression ‘being-in-the-world’ indicates, in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unified phenomenon” (53). I am a unified whole, in the world, which is to say, alongside other beings in my world. And as I mentioned in the previous post, Dasein is thrown into this world. This is why the world is “always already discovered.” It is there prior to and in parallel with my realization of it.
This phenomenon of being-in-the-world has a threefold structure: being, being in, and in-the-world.
The first part of being can be us (Dasein) or other beings in our world which Heidegger calls innerworldly [innerweltlich] beings. An innerworldly being is Heidegger’s technical term for anything with which we interact, a phenomenon he calls an “encounter” with beings. We encounter things like cars, people, tools, telephones, weather, and hundreds of other beings as we move through our daily lives.
As for being in, Heidegger distinguishes two meanings of the preposition “in.” The first one he calls “categorial” and it refers to the ontic fact that objects have location in space. The water is in the glass. The dress is in the closet. But there is a second more important meaning, an ontological one, and this belongs to Dasein alone. In this meaning, we are together with the world “in the sense of being absorbed in the world” (54). For Heidegger, “being-in” is an existential designating our “essential constitution” of being in the world. To illustrate this subtle distinction between the two uses of the preposition “in” Heidegger considers the sentence “the chair touches the wall”:
“Strictly speaking, we can never talk about ‘touching’, not because in the last analysis we can always find a space between the chair and the wall by examining it more closely, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them amounted to nothing. The presupposition for this would be that the wall could be encountered ‘by’ the chair” (55).
This is a difficult passage to grasp. What Heidegger means here is that “being-in” is not mere physical contact between objects in space. It is instead an existential that designates our “essential constitution” of being in a world of meaning and context. Only we can encounter the world. We interact with it and our interactions are prior to any logical or epistemological statements we might make. We are not subjects in the world the way water is in the glass. Our being-in the world is not a statement about extension in space. Rather, our existence is such that in the act of living our lives we immerse ourselves deeply into tasks and projects going on for us in the world. This is what Heidegger calls being “absorbed” in the world.
The third part of the threefold structure (in-the-world) refers to the world in which we exist. I need to distinguish between two uses of “world” to avoid confusion. The first is the common sense idea of “mere objective presence” [Vorhandenheit]. This is what we mean when we think of the totality of objects in physical space. Often we say “universe” or “cosmos” when thinking of the world in this way. In this sense of “world” objects exist whether we’re there to interact with them or not. This is the physical domain of science. When we study things under the microscope, or a photograph of the light spectrum of a distant star, the object becomes what Heidegger calls present-at-hand [vorhanden]. This is when we regard only the surface properties of particular objects and bracket out any kind of ontological significance. We frequently look at the world in this way, especially when doing science, but Heidegger feels that it is an impoverished view if that’s all we do.
The second sense Heidegger calls “worldhood” or “worldliness” [Weltlichkeit]. In this sense the world is the totality, not of objects around us, but of our interactions and relationships we form with beings in our surroundings. These beings we encounter, Heidegger refers to as “innerworldly beings.” We become absorbed in them over the course of our daily activities as we seek to get things done. We are at home in our world and move fluidly through it. Think of worldliness not as a physical stage on which the players strut, but as the contexts, meanings, and relationships between the players themselves. This way of looking at the world has ontological significance.
We are surrounded by a “totality of useful things” like pens, papers, tools, doorknobs, and furniture. The being of these useful things typically does not manifest themselves purely as physical entities, but rather it is in their use, our interaction with them, and being absorbed in them through our daily lives, that their being reveals itself. When “opening the door, I use the doorknob” (67). I don’t first think of the doorknob as a metal cylinder of such-and-such a circumference. I don’t form an idea in my mind and then issue an order to my hand. If I think of it at all it is only as something useful I can grab in order to open the door. Heidegger uses the phrase “ready-to-hand” [zuhanden] to describe the being of tools and objects that remain handy but largely unnoticed in our world. The hammer is Heidegger’s famous example:
“The less we just stare at the thing called hammer, the more we take hold of it and use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered as what it is, as a useful thing. The act of hammering itself discovers the specific ‘handiness’ of the hammer…. No matter how keenly we just look at the ‘outward appearance’ of things constituted in one way or another, we cannot discover handiness” (69).
When a tool is useful, it shrinks into the background of my world and becomes absent. But suppose the doorknob falls off into my hand. Or the wooden handle comes loose and separates from the hammer’s head. In these cases, the thing becomes conspicuous. It is “unhandy” so that “what is at hand enters the mode of obtrusiveness” (73).
Heidegger defines a technical term he calls reference, which is a pointer of sorts that connects an action with the motivation for doing the action. I pick up the hammer for the sake of driving a nail into a board. Our world is an interconnected “totality of references” that reveal why we do the things we do. Richard Polt has a clear description of this part of Heidegger’s thought:
“Our understanding [of the things we do for the sake of ends that meet our needs] discloses references…. We ‘signify’ our own possibilities for Being and the involvements of the things we use…. The totality of references, the totality of involvements, and the totality of signifying are just subtly different perspectives on a single phenomenon, worldhood. In non-Heideggerian terminology, a world is a system of purposes and meanings that organizes our activities and our identity, and within which entities can make sense to us” (Polt, p. 54).
Worldliness is where our lived experiences take on ontological significance for us. When Heidegger talks about being-in-the-world, he means worldliness – this holistic context of “purposes and meanings” that we care about, and which ultimately define us and our being in relation to ourselves and others in the world.
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