Being-In-The-World: A philosophical and epistemic overview

[DocWatts]

Hello friends, and happy 2024! I thought I might share a bit more of what I've been working on lately for my philosophy book, '7 Provisional Truths', which aims to be a 'guided tour' to how we acquire valid knowledge about Reality, and provide an in-depth exploration of epistemology to non-specialists. I've also jokingly referred to it as a 'Field Guide' to construct awareness.

 While I'd normally post this in the 'Intellectual Stuff' section, I thought I might shake things up and post it here since it has everything to do with consciousness.  And namely, much of what I'll be exploring in the book is the centrality of nonconceptual, pre-reflective knowledge in our everyday life. 

In this section, I provide an overview of BEING-IN-THE-WORLD. The expression is meant to capture an important and often overlooked aspect of the human condition (overlook by traditional Western philosophy, at any rate). Namely, the lack of any absolute boundary between ourselves and the 'outside' world. Its basic significance is that what we understand 'a person' to be has huge ramifications for where our search to understand 'knowledge' begins. 

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Being-In-The-World

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Back in the introduction to this book, it was mentioned that dissecting the works of academic philosophers isn’t the ‘point’ of the guided tour we’re undertaking. While that still holds true, for this topic in particular, we’ll be loosening this precept just a bit, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is because any in-depth exploration of Being-In-The-World can’t help but be pulled towards the individual who not only coined the term, but used it as the cornerstone of a new approach to philosophy, upending 2000 years of established thinking on the subject.

That individual is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and he’s among the most important thinkers in all of Western philosophy. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s likely because his work has a reputation for being notoriously difficult, written with close to zero consideration for non-specialists. His most significant contribution to philosophy, ‘Being And Time’ (1927), is full of dense, technical language that can be indecipherable for someone who’s not already deeply versed in philosophical concepts. Indeed, anyone who’s put the time and effort into comprehending Heideggar’s writing might describe the experience as almost akin to learning a second language! Needless to say, delving into the intricacies of obtuse academic texts isn’t our focus, so we’ll confine ourselves to his notion of Being-In-The-World, since it’s directly relevant for our present purposes.

Recall that in our previous chapter, we defined ‘Being’ as a form of understanding. More specifically, it’s our most basic and primordial way of understanding people, places, and things as people, places, and things. It’s how we understand a cup as a cup, or a chair as a chair, in an immediate and intuitive way. When we say that something is a particular type of thing, we’re referring to its being.

What Being-In-The-World refers to, then, is the type of ‘being’ that people have, which is characterized by our concernful involvement with the everyday world. It’s a way of understanding ourselves that emphasizes the centrality of our embeddedness within the world for how we experience and comprehend Reality. Additionally, the expression also points to the conditions from which we attain the background of familiarity with the world that other forms of knowledge depend on. This latter dimension of Being-In-The-World is what we’re primarily interested in, as it’s directly tied to how we cope with everyday Reality.

The hyphenation of Being-In-The-World, which may feel a bit awkward for someone unused to philosophical neologisms, is actually there for a very good reason. A neologism refers to a newly coined term or expression that was created to fulfill a specific need, and has yet to be widely adopted into mainstream language. For our neologism of Being-In-The-World, the hyphens are meant to express that ‘being’, more specifically the type of ‘being’ that people have, and ‘the world’ are to be understood as a single, unified concept.

So, to sum up: the gist of Being-In-The-World is that we can’t understand the human condition in isolation from our absorption into the everyday world, because the two are fundamentally inseparable. This is because our interactions with a world of people, objects, environments, and culture forms the context for our very existence. Another name that could be used for our ‘concernful involvement’ with the everyday world is Care. With this in mind, what Being-In-The-World is attempting to capture is how Care is fundamental to what Reality is for us.

As to the practical implications of this, we can look at how Being-In-The-World recontextualizes what it means to have knowledge, because of how it breaks from the usual Western understanding of what it means to be an ‘individual’ in the world. When Heidegger coined the expression, he was using it to articulate a crucially important aspect of the human condition that had been overlooked and neglected by the Western philosophical tradition up until that point. To simplify for the sake of brevity, what Heideggar is pointing to is the lack of an absolute boundary between ourselves and the world. This is because our absorption into the world through everyday interactions and practices is inseparable from who and what we are. Interestingly, this emphasis on the lack of separation between ourselves and the world has much more in common with Eastern wisdom traditions such as Buddhism and Vedanta, than it does with how the Western philosophical tradition had tended to approach the human condition up until that point.

Our cultural understanding of what a person is is important for our present purposes because it heavily informs what our ‘starting point’ for where the beginnings of knowledge lie.

Edited January 3, 2024 by DocWatts