2.43
Animals show us ways of being in the world.
Stones also show ways of being in the world.
‘But, surely, now, you’re stretching. While the point above may have been that we aren’t simply trying to give back to non-human animals a subjectivity, personhood, or perspectival centre, surely this is a big part of your argument: if non-human animals have worlds, it’s because they have meaningful relations, which seems to be how you’ve defined world. We could even grant the possibility to plants, which seem, in some limited sense, to have a ‘perspective’ and be open to their environment. But with a stone, you’ve gone too far! A stone has no access and no possibility of meaning: a stone has no openness to world! This should be clear!’
Yes, this is how we think. — Heidegger, in his comparative evaluation of world for stones, non-human animals, and humans, dismisses stones from consideration: “the stone is worldless”:[1] “No, we reply, we cannot transpose ourselves into a stone [….] It is impossible because the stone as such does not admit of this possibility at all […].”[2] And yet, he also says: “there are ways and means belonging to human Dasein in which man [sic] never simply regards purely material things, or indeed technical things, as such but rather ‘animates’ them, as we might somewhat misleadingly put it. […] What is at issue here is […] the distinction between quite different kinds of possible truth.”[3] But even with this remarkable aside, he nonetheless tosses the stone aside.
Let’s instead tarry with possibilities here. It doesn’t seem controversial to state that a stone has a particular way of being: that is, it displays how it is in the world (our world). We come upon a stone and see it, resting in the ditch. The stone is; it exists. That is, it is a being. The stone is, only as a stone. — Again, I don’t take any of this as controversial.
But, how is it for the stone? — We can ask this question. It isn’t nonsensical. We can investigate it; we can inquire into how the stone is what it is.
How is it for the stone? This stone sits in our world in a particular way. But it’s not ultimately dependent on us. Instead, the stone opens and holds open a space within which it can appear. It doesn’t just sit there, as a stone, but rather it’s in tension with a variety of forces it resists (and we need not posit consciousness for resistance) as it maintains itself. It ‘pushes out,’ so to speak, against an outside (i.e., it stands firm), which has the consequence of the stone maintaining a kind of integrity: a wholeness and distinctness.[4] (The fact that it gains or loses particles, or even chunks, isn’t an argument against my claim here, and I’ll bracket this concern for now.) We might even be inclined to think in terms of verbs: the stone stones. It ‘stands out’ from its surroundings. It is what it is because it maintains itself as such: it continues to be what it is. “Each thing in so far as it is in itself endeavours to persist in its own being.”[5]
In maintaining itself against an outside, and through a cohesion of an inside (§2.20), the stone exhibits the (fuzzy) boundary required for an enworlded being. Enworlded beings inhabit worlds, which are ways that all things are meaningful for them, i.e., all things are meaningfully related or relatable to them; a stone encounters other things on its own terms. This is meaningful not in the sense of meaningful for a subject, but in the fit between stone and others; its ability to encounter others (impact or be impacted by them) means it fits with them on terms set out between it and this other. It’s able to encounter others because it’s open in advance to others in its own, stony way. Its openness is always an openness to others, both particular others and in general, and thus shares the kind of structure of world-intentionality. The stone is with-others. It exhibits a persistent way of being on its own terms, but also, relationally.
Though I’ve only brushed the surface of this large question, to which I’ll return, we may glimpse why we shouldn’t be so quick to deny that stones have worlds.
‘But all things stand out from their surroundings!’
— In some sense, yes. Things stand out, stand forth, get subsumed or offer resistance. This is the basis that enables them to call to us (§2.20), to penetrate our attention, our realm of sensing.
Note, by the way, that this is not an argument for noumena. How so?[6] How am I not claiming that things exist outside all disclosures? – Because I’m arguing against thinking that disclosure must be connected with perceptual perspective. Disclosure is a being’s openness to other beings. Openness is being open to encounter or being impacted or influenced by the other. Beings precisely are as disclosed. Yes, they are, for us; but they also are, in or for themselves, i.e., in their worlds. They’re disclosed, with others, for themselves. Since disclosures happen in a world, there is a world for each being.
[1] Heidegger, FCM, p. 185.
[2] ibid, p. 204.
[3] ibid.
[4] Inspired loosely by Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 48–9, 64.
[5] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, ed. G.H.R. Parkinson and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson and Andrew Boyle (London: Guernsey Press Co. Ltd., 1989), Prop. VI, Part III, p. 91.
[6] For a different take on the noumena, see Eben Hensby, “Kant and Heidegger: The place of truth and the shrinking back of the noumena,” Philosophia 49 (2021): p. 1507–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00319-x.