2.13
Acknowledging that one is surrounded by this multitude of interlocking, interweaving worlds—by nature divergent—can be unsettling. The simple thought that the world is not held together or oriented around ‘the human’ can be disconcerting, and entails a shift in one’s understanding and in one’s self, for one’s sense of self is intimately bound up with one’s world and one’s sense of others.
The self is not an extensionless point—an agent, actor, or will—confronting the plethora of things over and against a subject: the idea of an actor who deliberates and then enters the world is based on a misconception of a separation between self and world. The self is embedded, bodied, and contextual: the world and things to which one is related already impinge upon oneself.
Just as the world cannot be without a self or self-like concrescence (i.e., a world is a relational totality that orients towards a for-the-sake-of-which—§2.4—and there is no view from nowhere), so self or self-like concrescences cannot be without a world (i.e., intentionality). The self is intentional and responsive: it’s directed and directs itself.
And thus, since our world is such that it makes room for other worlds—life, plant, non-human animal, and other human worlds—the self, too, is changed. For the self isn’t the centre, the arche, the telos, nor the source for criteria. The self is, instead, a responsiveness to its situation — which is now, as always, the situation of overlapping enworlded beings striving within worlds. One’s self is thus intimate with countless other beings and ways that things are taken up.
And so, to be aware of other worlds changes our world and changes how we experience our self as a responsiveness to others, for the self is negotiating fluidity, an intentionality, intentional beyond its own intentions.