OK Chaps, what on earth is "Being in the World." What exactly does Being mean to Plato, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre.
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it square-on, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life -and only then will I be free to become myself." - Martin Heidegger.
First thing to know about 'Being-in-the-world' it's hyphenated because Heidegger saw the word meanings as all belonging to one word. The second thing to know is that over the years 'Being' has had several meanings. From Parmenides and Plato to Sartre. Plato's 'Being' was so perfect and in everyway perfect that it existed Beyond the Heavens. That Perfect Being, whether it was justice or a spoon, was a problem for Saint Augustine of Hippo and a source of humor for some Greeks when the Christians started talking about the Perfect Being sending an only son into the world to experience the vicissitudes of fleshy life. Someone called Celus, I think, thought it absolute lunacy. No Perfect Being in its right mind would reasonably do such a thing.
When 'Being' got to Kant, Kant concluded that the pure 'Being' was a pure category of understanding. It was a piece of mental software and when you say "the cat exists" what you are doing is telling everyone that rules in your mind have come up with a new category of experience - the category of Cat. Kant's 'Being' was here on earth, in the mind, it was subject to the rules of your mind's structure. 'Being' was not in a land faraway.
For Mr. Phenomenology Edmund Husserl, 'Being' wasn't in an abstract mental realm like Plato's 'Being', nor was it a mental rule like Kant's 'Being.' No, 'Being' for Husserl was how things show up in consciousness. The word he used was 'intentionality' to describe the meeting between an object and a conscious subject. The 'Being' of a cup is how that cup presents itself to your sense, your eyes, your feelings and so on. The other thing to remember about Husserl's thoughts on this matter, he had a conscious observer, an ego, looking at this cup or that cup analyzing how this or that cup, or Elephant, presents its 'Being'.
Heidegger's point was this: Plato, Kant, Husserl and others had all made a mistake. In the exchange between Human and world they had all treated Human Beings as passive, chin-stroking observers. They had overlooked the fact the we people were there in the world. We people had our 'Being' in the world. Heidegger's Dasein, his person, means "Being There." And he argued that our main way of 'Being' wasn't thinking, it was "Doing, Using and Caring."
Worth remembering, it was after the second world war Heidegger wrote his short book on thinking which put a perspective on "Doing, Using and Caring" that added what he called poesy to the dimesnions of his Being-There. Poesy was creative. Meanwhile 'Being-in-the-World' for Heidegger, you're not "a floating mind dropped into a physical room; you are inherently woven into a context of habits, culture, tools, and relationships." For Heidegger, 'Being-in-the-World,' if it had a fundamental structure, that structure would be Care what he called Sorge. "We are always already involved in a world that matters to us, facing a future, and dealing with our mortality."
Tomorrow, if I've not been visited by 'Blessed Release' we'll talk about Sartre and his 'In-Itself' and 'For-Itself'.
