2.4
Philosophy and the transformation always pertain to the world. The world. We speak of the world as though there’s just one, a totality. As though, if we counted all the facts, we’d have a picture of the world. As though it’s one thing, one spacetime container, that contains all objects.
But we don’t sit inside the world like water in a cup.[1] Rather, our being is such that we are, in Heidegger’s term, being-in-the-world: that is, put simply, world is the set of our relations. Because I’m largely drawing on Heidegger’s concept of world throughout the text, we need to spend time with this concept.
In our everyday way of being, we’re immersed in our world, engaged with things, and we don’t, for the most part, thematize our surroundings. For example, I ride my bike to get to where I’m going; I’m absorbed in the world of my concern, engaged with the task at hand.
Things with which we’re engaged are ready-to-hand.[2] Ready for engagement, ready to be taken up, not as isolated things, but as part of a totality of things.[3] The bike light fits with the bike and its interactions with traffic laws, routes at night, and batteries. To isolate a thing is artificial, for things are always within networks comprised of assignments/references,[4] where each thing refers to/is assigned to other things. In our example, the bike light is assigned to and involved with the project of bicycling, and so referential networks are made of involvements.[5]
Each involvement has the structure of ‘in-order-to’: for example, a bike light is ‘in-order-to’ bike at night, ‘in-order-to’ commute from A to B, and so on. If we inquire continuously into the network of involvements and follow the lines of the referential structure, we reach what Heidegger calls the for-the-sake-of-which: Dasein.[6] Dasein, German for ‘there-being,’ is the term coined for the kind of being of a human. For Heidegger, Dasein is what lets the ready-to-hand be as such;[7] it engages itself within these totalities by assigning itself to projects. In assigning ourselves, we engage with the totality of involvements: this totality of involvements is the occurrence of world.[8] Thus, world is not understood spatially, but is instead this totality of involvements wherein Dasein is.[9]
In our engagement with the totality of involvements, we encounter the world as familiar.[10] We can never not seize upon possibilities, for we’re always involved and our being cannot be without world. Furthermore, this structure of involvements is characterized by meaning: when we take up projects within the horizon of world, we do so within a horizon that makes, or has the possibility to make, sense: e.g., the meaning of the bike light is found in how it relates to the totality. We’re always engaged with things and projects that are meaningful for us. Because we encounter things, the world, and involvements before us, and find ourselves immersed in and thrown into fields of sense, we say we’re characterized by thrownness.
We always have, even if implicitly, an understanding of things and their involvements. We’re attuned to things and encounter the world meaningfully and as understandable. The bike light, for example, is understandable prior to anyone approaching it. Our world is this meaningful set of involvements wherein we find ourselves always already engaged with things and possibilities afforded by them.
But, since we’re first and foremost immersed with things in our world, how is it possible for us to ‘emerge’ from this immersion and grasp the world: i.e., to be able to perceive and discuss the concept of world at all?
When a thing becomes conspicuous,[11] our absorption is interrupted: the thing’s unsuitable for the task. When the bike light stops working, we’re taken aback. The thing’s readiness-to-hand may recede and the thing, in retaining its readiness-to-hand, announces what’s called presence-at-hand;[12] its readiness recedes and the thing conspicuously protrudes as a thing that’s present-at-hand.[13] Because ready-to-hand is our primary mode of engagement, to encounter a being as a thing is based on a disruption of our engagement.[14]
When the bike light stops working, this thing and its context stand out and become noticeable. We become aware of the thing in question and survey our surroundings to think through possible solutions. The bike light is just there, and yet, it doesn’t lose its readiness-to-hand, as our problem-solving mode reveals: we check the batteries; we give it a shake. If nothing works, what was absorbed in the world now stands out. Nonetheless, we’ve glimpsed its worldliness in catching sight of the item’s ‘in-order-to,’ even if only in a subtle or implicit way. This glimpse is enough to start a wedge that becomes a gap essential for theorizing, thematizing, and philosophy.
— However, if world is the set of relations—the set of meaningful involvements—that depend on our involvement with this set, i.e., that we ourselves are implicated in world—that we ourselves partake and enable the structure of worldhood[15]—then, I claim, there isn’t just one world. There are different worlds for different peoples: both historically and contemporaneously. For example, the ancient Greek world isn’t the same as our contemporary one because the totality of relationships and involvements have changed. Nor is our world the same as the contemporary world lived by indigenous Amazonian peoples, for the same reasons. The horizons of meaning—how things make sense—and hence possibilities are different.
Worlds enable an understanding of how they fit together and what things are, and this means that another world comes with a different understanding of how they fit together and what things are. A thing is how it fits together with other things, for this is what it is. A world is an ontology: i.e., a way that things are. In saying there are different worlds, I’m saying there are different ontologies.
It could be countered that divergent understanding or different worlds are about what or how subjects know or believe (i.e., epistemology) or arbitrary convention (i.e., practicalities), and not what or how things are (i.e., ontology). However, Heidegger helps us see that ontology must precede epistemology and every epistemology must be grounded in an ontology, because the question is about how beings are before it’s about how we know them.[16] Beings can appear epistemologically (e.g., as uncertain-entities, or as entities invested with cultural and subjective interpretation), but this is still a mode of how they appear as beings (i.e., ontologically). Every epistemology has already made ontological assumptions about oneself (e.g., as a doubtful subject, or as a cultural subject), others, and relations between them: epistemology requires an ontology within which it makes sense. To engage with something practically or as an object of knowledge, the thing must already appear as it is (i.e., as a being involved with other beings).
To adopt the position that other worlds are beliefs or epistemologies is to take one’s own position as fundamental, objective, and ontological.[17] But then the question arises how one knows one’s own position or that one’s position is fundamental, and also how one knows one’s own position is ontological and not just another epistemology. But can we have epistemologies without ontologies? Of course not, for epistemologies rely on ontologies. We are primordially open to engagement with things in our world.
An ’understanding’ of being more fundamentally emerges from an encounter and immuration withing being: it derives from how being appears to us.
InIn being gripped by different ontologies—i.e., different metaphysics, different takes on Being, different worlds—beings reveal themselves to us differently as reflected in practical orientation. Therefore, radically different understandings of beings, which can be displayed practically—i.e., the display of fundamentally different totalities of meaningful involvements—reveal different ontologies.[18]
What this means is that there are different ways that things hang together, different ways that beings are and can be disclosed.[19] Perhaps, in a transformative experience, it’s even possible for the horizon of meaning to change now, within our world, for us. Perhaps this is the possibility of ‘two worlds in one.’ – On the hinge of what is common between worlds, our world can be transformed.
[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Toronto: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 2008), Sect. 12, 53–4/79–80, 56/82. (Note: when I use “B&T” I’m referring to this version.)
[2] ibid, 69/98.
[3] ibid, 68/97.
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid, 84/115.
[6] ibid, 84/116–7.
[7] ibid, 84–5/117.
[8] ibid, 86/119.
[9] Ibid, 64–5/93.
[10] Ibid, 86/119.
[11] ibid, 73–4/102–4.
[12] ibid, 73/103.
[13] ibid, 71/101.
[14] ibid, 61/88.
[15] ibid, 65/93, 86/119.
[16] ibid, 59–62/86–90, 202–3/246–7, 218–9/261, 220–2/263–4. For a related approach that shows that, in Heidegger, any project (pragmatic or epistemological) must be grounded in being-in-the world and temporality, and thus grounded in how Dasein discloses beings (i.e., in ontology), see John Richardson, Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 90–113; see also Charles B. Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 147–94. Richardson shows that, for Heidegger, epistemology is a founded mode of interpretation, based on an unthought reliance on the temporal mode of presence (i.e., entities as present-at-hand). A position that would try to interpret different dispositional modes (i.e., worlds) as ‘epistemologies,’ even if we understand ‘epistemologies’ to mean ‘bodied/practiced epistemologies’ or ‘pragmatics,’ requires a particular present-at-hand ontology. But theorizing that takes entities as present-at-hand emerges from a ready-to-hand context (see also Richardson, p. 90–113).
[17] For a similar point from a different angle, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): p. 478.
[18] For other approaches to this problem, see Jarrad Reddekop, “Against Ontological Capture: Drawing Lessons from Amazonian Kichwa Relationality,” Review of International Studies 48.5 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210521000486 (2022): p. 858, 859–62; Reddekop, “Thinking Across Worlds,” p. 27–37 (where Reddekop uses the “world” terminology); Mario Blaser, “Political Ontology,” Cultural Studies 23.5 (2009): p. 877.
[19] Eben Hensby, “The Metaphoricity of Being and the Question of Sameness: Heidegger and Zwicky,” Dialogue 61.1 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217321000111 (2022): 177–96.