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Editorial Review Book Description
One of the most important philosophical works of our time -- a work that has had tremendous influence on philosophy, literature, and psychology, and has literally changed the intellectual map of the modern world. ... Read more Customer Reviews (46) 
A new perspective on the world
This is an excellent foundation to modern positions that provide an alternative to the objective-relative debate in philosophy.While terribly difficult and challenging to understanding without hours of work and dialogue with others, this is the best translated version.When you examine philosophy you must understand it through it's historical growth, and this book is a major branch in that evolution.
Heidegger Anticipated Blogosphere by 80 Years
This is not a dry, scholarly review.Like a lot of you, I was exposed to excerpts of Heidegger in high school.Or maybe it was undergrad.Regardless, these small bites of undigested Sein und Zeit stuck with me for years.So on a lazy summer afternoon in 1999 I got the great idea to have a real go at it.I even picked up a new translation:Being and Time: A Translation of Sein and Zeit (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) and the co-published and co-marketed A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) which I have to say was very helpful.Sometimes analysis is better than the source material, and this may be the case with these twin volumes.Six months later, it was Christmas and time for happier pursuits.I fell short of my goal, but feel well prepared to have another go at it -- if I feel the need.Anyway, it turns out that perhaps the best way to appreciate Heidegger is through what today we would call soundbites.Coherence often eludes great thinkers for a time, but the greatest eventually catch up with it.Not so with Heidegger, though understandably most people who take the time to get vested in a philosopher's corpus will object.Perhaps you object.Good for you.Really.My point is simply that blogs were made for people who think like Heidegger, though perhaps we are all fortunate that no one quite has since...nichtzuhausen indeed.
Need to learn german language.
I think that this is the most important work into XX century philosophy. But if you really want to understand "Sein und Zeit" is very important that you read the book in Heidegger's maternal language: german.
Disappointed with service.
Within minutes of entering the order, thinking I had not yet done so, I emailed the company asking to delete this order.I received no reply.Book itself is excellent; unfortunately I ordered it twice, and this agent failed even to respond to my request [I admit AFTER I mistakenly entered the order] to delete.
HEIDEGGER RADICALLY CHANGED THE WAY I CONCEIVE OF EXISTENCE
Heidegger's beautifully simple title introduces a notoriously difficult book, one of the most important of the twentieth century. BEING AND TIME is not so much a work as a "way." It teaches a method of approaching and accessing the structural basis of experience. Along the way, it analyzes how philosophy has dealt with the topic of existence through the ages. Heidegger points out where the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, (and others) fail to clarify it adequately. The conceptual framework traditionally employed (the idea of a consciousness [or subject] over against a world of objects) to explicate Being obscures as much as it clarifies the immediacy that is vital to our pretheoretical, primordial existence.
The core difficulty of the book arises from its central question: "What is the meaning of Being in general?" The "in general" means that Heidegger isn't asking about this or that specific being or realm of beings, but about Being itself as a whole, and its relation to time. For Heidegger, time arises from the experience of mortality as much as mortality arises from time. Because Heidegger believed that the meaning of Being can only be discovered in and out of our pretheoretical existence (science could never access what is properly mystical in a mystical EXPERIENCE, for instance), he laid the foundation for a whole new way of treating this most ancient ofphilosophical problems. Heidegger introduces an incessant stream of "existentialia" which easily bewilder first-time readers, but which lay the groundwork for disclosing the meaning of Being. BT also stumps people because Being at first seems like the emptiest thing to study, the most general and diffuse. And the topic begs for a certain degree of astonishment in the face of Being--awe that anything exists, that anything is there, that there is even a THERE at all. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why not nothing? To many people, such speculation seems unprofitable. If you aren't astounded by existence in general, then you might have a hard time accessing what motivates Heidegger's inquiry into what it means "to be."
Everyday life and thinking are immediately engaged with "things." Heidegger calls this immediate entanglement with the "thisness" of daily life "facticity." Hence, our attention is not normally turned toward "Being" but towards the things we encounter in our everyday world. The history of thinking, including science, has been determined by this immediate apprehension of "things," both man-made and natural, which, for very good and understandable reasons, has veiled not only the meaning of Being, but even the need or will to pose what is to Heidegger the most fundamental question of philosophy. What does it mean that something, that anything, "is"? Does existence have an intentional structure?
Where and how do we find Being? Heidegger employs the phenomenological method, which places philosophy back in the sphere of immediate experience. Heidegger always seeks the PREtheoretical situation, but that doesn't stop him from rigorously analyzing the theoretical context. The phenomenological method always starts with the most obvious, the nearest thing at hand, which in the case of Being would be our own immediate Being, our personal experience of "There-being" (Da-sein), situated in a concrete experience. Our own existence is the first thing that greets us phenomenologically. But for Heidegger, "being there" (da sein) is more basic than the already theoretical Cartesian formula, "I think, therefore I am" (or even than just the "I am").
What do we disclose in being there? We confront the people and things with which we have to do. But how? There is a there, a "there" exists, we know that we are there. The "there" makes existence possible. The very notion of a "there" turns out to be inescapably part of our own Being. The most fundamental criterion of existence is simply "Being-there." But HOW are things "there?" It turns out time has something to do with it, but time understood as lived experience in which our retention of the past and expectation of the future open up the present for being there, for "presencing." Heidegger realizes that the unity of Being and time can be explored by analyzing one's own Being.
What else can we say about this "being there," this "Dasein," this "opening" of the present? Since the most obvious and basic thing about it is that it is first of all just simply THERE, Heidegger explores the irrefutable "fact" of simply being there. How is a there even possible? What does it mean to be there "in" time? Heidegger finds that "to be there" basically means to be somewhere. But to be somewhere means to be in a meaningful context, which is the same as to be in a situation. This situation we are in, constituted by being there, is not merely an objective position in time and space, but is simultaneously a whole cultural, historical, and interpretive context in which we "are." Is this primordial "there" a universe? Can there be a universe without a more immediate meaningful context in and out of which a "cosmos" arises? A "universe" could never be there without this primordial context of the existential situation. For Heidegger, the initial state of simply being there in meaningful circumstances is the primordial factor out of which all phenomena arise. Being there means being there AS something, as whatever a thing is in itself. But what a thing IS is determined by first being situated in that context of meanings that gives significance to all things. Only out of this immediate situation can a world exist. The world is not a thing, a mere planet; it's a happening, an event, a circumstance in which things derive their first meaning and signficance, and thus their existence.
Heidegger calls the experience of existence "being-in-the-world." Being in a world, we find ourselves engaged in or "thrown" into a situation. For Heidegger, the world and our being in it are inseperable realities and simultaneous events. You cannot have the one without the other. To be, you must be THERE, somewhere, in a world, in the circumstances of existence. Conversely, for the world to be, there must be a being (such as ourselves) to which a world has been disclosed as being there. "Da-sein," a crucial word for Heidegger, literally means "T/here-being" (although Macquarrie and Robinson, and many translators, retain the German spelling). But this "Being-there" is to be thought of as the opening of meaningful existence. We are there in a very special sense, as distinct from inanimate objects which are not "there" in the same way we are. In fact, inanimate objects are not there at all in Heidegger's sense of the word. The "there" is a realm of meaning in which things gain their original significance from our own primal understanding of Being.
A mind or consciousness is not "added" to a pre-existing world, as if our existence and the world's were initially seperate realities and only needed to be combined to yield meaningful experience. For Heidegger, our being there and the world's being there are one and the same phenomenon. A phenomenon is an event, an appearance. For a world to exist, it must be disclosed to a being to which Being has been revealed AS world. Our experience of existence is an experience of being in a world, is it not? If Being initially discloses itself to us as world, then taking care of the world is always a means of taking care of ourselves, and vice-versa. We cannot take care of the one without taking care of the other. Thus, the hyphenated term "being-in-the-world" is always to be thought of as an indivisible whole that includes both us and the world simultaneously, although Heidegger takes each component individually in order to explain in what sense he means "world," "being-in," etc. Indeed, even the "in" proves to be a complex phenomenon once we attempt to really understand in what sense we are "in" the world. But, in any case, for Heidegger, what unites everything into a coherent whole is the "is" itself--Being.
Heidegger considers metaphysical any attempt to split the world apart from our being in it. For this reason, Heidegger treats physics as a species of metaphysics. Science is very much entrenched in the subject-object dichotomy, as is theoretical thinking in general. Science deals with beings, not with the Being of those beings. The subjective and objective are, from the standpoint of phenomenology, wrongfully treated as fundamentally distinct, bi-polar realms. The subject supposedly has his own "inwardness," an "in here" distinguished from the world "out there." But can a subject really exist without a world? Can a world really exist without a subject? Can an ego subsist without (and this must mean outside) of a world, and can the world exist in itself without the agency of an ego to give it unity and meaning, and therefore substance? Can there be an "outside" at all? In short, is the world inseperable from the immediate fact of our being in it?
Since metaphysics as well as science posit subject and object as distinct from the start, the problem of how to unite the two arises in theory. To yield experience, we must put this initially worldless subject together with a world that is conceived as a world of objects primordially lacking any subjectivity. But Heidegger puts thinking on a different path. In Heidegger, there is no need to bring a subject together with its object (with its world) because they are already together "a priori" (i.e., to begin with). It is not a question of putting two distinct things together to form one thing, for how can we bring together what is already an indivisible, a WHOLE phenomenon? For Heidegger, the world is not the object of a subject, and we are not a subject that merely perceives an external world. Being-there, the being and its there, is a whole phenomenon. This "whole" phenomenon is what Heidegger calls being-in-the-world. This is what Heidegger starts off with, as opposed to Descarte's distinction between an ego and an external world.
To understand what "world" means to Heidegger, we start by comprehending something called "phenomenology." Heidegger describes his method in BEING AND TIME as "phenomenological." Phenomenology is the explication(the "logos") of phenomena. The history of the "logos" lies in Dasein (in Being-there). Being-there directly refers us to the questioner himself, the being who cares about and has at least an initial (or, as Heidegger would say, "pre-ontological") understanding of Being. A rock or a wall, what we might call a "mere object," obviously has no understanding even of its OWN being or the being of anything, much less of the being of a world or of Being in general. The rock lacks "worldhood." By contrast, a being such as a human that understands Being, if only pre-ontologically, is a very special being because it not only has Being itself, but in a sense it gives Being to those entities that lack Being on their own.
Because Being-there cares about its being there, things are "significant" to it. Entities become significant when we care about them through caring for our own existence. We discover the world and what things are by caring about our own being. This significance that wordly things derive from our OWN being there makes up the "worldliness" of the world (its "worldhood"). All phenomena are inherently significant because things matter to us because we care about our own Being. But if we care about our own Being, that means that Being must in some sense already be revealed to us; we must have some idea already of what it is. But what is this pretheoretical knowledge that we already have of Being?
Phenomena are precisely whatever enters into relevance--i.e, into the significance of the questioner's own "referential context." Individual things emerge within the context of Dasein's whole experience, an experience unified by the "is" of Being. Phenomena, in Heidegger's sense, are NOT to be thought of as disparate objects, much less as merely perceived objects. Instead, what is revealed to us, the world itself, is a complex phenomenon experienced by us as a "there."
The world is not a world of objects. The disclosure of a mechanistic, natural universe depends on a prior disclosedness of one's meaningful context, which is alive and endowed with inherent significance. For any object to exist as an isolated thing, a mere object, it must FIRST be experienced as part of an existential situation. Science sees complexity and intelligence as something that evolves and comes "after." But for Heidegger, the origin of everything rests in the ecstatic openness of time that reveals existence as a coherent and meaningful experience. Existence lies in the revelation of a situation by being in it. But the revelation itself does not "appear"; it discloses beings, but hides itself.
The logos constitutes the worldhood of the world. Once we establish that the objectification of the world is not the phenomenologically primary phenomenon, we see that the supposed gulf between subject and object actually rests and depends on the prior revelation of beings within the wholeness of the referential context of one's existence. We are dealing here not with an objective chronology of existence, but with what is existentially prior and primordial: the situation of being-there in a world to begin with. The subject/object schema, to exist at all, must first be grounded in a primordial, meaning-bestowing wholeness that is already self-reflectively there to begin with revealing beings as being-there. For something to exist AS something, as this or that thing that it is, whatever it is in itself, it must always already be in a significant context. We differ from mere objects that have no understanding of their own being, much less of Being in general. A rock or tree is there as a phenomenon only because there is a distinctive being, which we ourselves are, TO WHICH it IS a "rock" or "tree," as part of our own existence. Things are there when we are.
In so far as the logos is historical, things become historical also. On this basis, the phenomenon of time (Dasein's experience of time) is explored by Heidegger along with the phenomenon of space. What are space and time existentially--what are they primordially? Space and time are certainly not revealed to us originally by geometry or by physics, or indeed by any kind of theory. A thing is never initially a mere object, devoid of all significance. For something to become a mere object it has to be STRIPPED of its primordial significance and taken out of the existential context of everyday life.
Heidegger's phenomenology begins with "everydayness." A scientist or philosopher who wants to explain human existence might start with a conception of man that is theoretical or categorial, such as man as zoological being or rational animal. The scientist thinks in terms of genus and species. But for Heidegger Being is not the genus under which different species of beings are to be ordered and classified. A phenomenologist, at least a Heideggerian one, starts with something that comes BEFORE such theoretical views of what a human being is or of what things are. In studying everydayness, Heidegger isn't exploring "primitive mindsets" the way an anthropologist would, or analyzing "the mind" the way a psychologist would. Heidegger is asking about what is basic both for primitive man and for the most sophisticated person in so far as both are Da-sein (both are "there" sharing the "Sameness" of Being). By "Being" Heidegger does not mean some supreme Being like God. He means the being OF beings, their "is-ness." There is an ontological distinction between a being thought in terms of "a thing" and Being thought as the Being OF those things. Not God but the Being of God is the issue.
In his analysis of everydayness, Heidegger explores real life situations, simple, basic things like hammering, driving a car, entering a room, viewing a work of art, running into a friend in public, experiencing phenomenological time on a road trip where different people experience the "length" or duration of the trip differently, and therefore time differently (for one person the trip seems to take forever, while for another it goes by relatively quickly), while a clock records the same length of "objective" time passing for all of them. This is an example of the difference between the way phenomenologists conceive of time and how scientists think about and measure it. We all experience how time "seems" to drag and at other times pass quickly. Heidegger gets rid of the "seems." Time does not merely seem to drag or go quickly, it IS dragging or going quickly depending on the existential situation in which it is experienced. That's what time FUNDAMENTALLY is. Only because time is first and foremost a lived experience can any objective conception of time arise. Only after time announces its existential significance to us, does it make itself available for objectification. The lived phenomenon of time is thus the basis of "objective time," which would otherwise not be discoverable at all.
Heidegger's apprehension of time involves past, present, and future simultaneously in an ecsatic unity. It is only because we retain the past and apprehend the future that the present opens up for the ecstatic opening of existence, the "there" in which things are. Only because this "there" is held open in time can nature then divide time into days and years, and based on that we develop clocks to measure and keep track of time.
Heidegger draws a similar distinction for space. He gives several examples. For instance, imagine that someone is intently looking at a painting, absorbed by it. The person is wearing glasses (today it might be contact lenses). The person completely forgets about the lenses. The person is simply absorbed in the painting. Phenomenologically speaking, the painting is nearer to the person than the lenses even though the painting hangs five feet away on a wall while the lenses are sitting right on the person's face, mere centimeters away. To a scientist, indeed to any ontic or objective thinker, this conception of space is nonsensical; a scientist will tell you that the lenses are closer to the subject and to prove it the scientist will measure the distance. But this calculating of exact distance comes (limping, as it were) AFTER the primordial experience in which an existential situation had already revealed itself. Objectivity, on which all calculation is based, is founded upon the priordial phenomenal structure of Da-sein's already being THERE to begin with. A world has always already been revealed. Here's another example of the phenomenological understanding of space: you are walking down the street and spot a friend striding towards you. At that moment, your friend is existentially closer to you than the pavement right under your feet, even though the pavement is objectively closer. (I like to give my own example based on Heidegger's: you're walking down a crowded city street. You spot somebody you know, standing twenty feet away. That person you spot who is twenty feet away is closer to you than a stranger walking right behind you whom you don't even notice. Remember, phenomenology deals with your immediate existence, not with "objective reality." Dasein is "in each case mine.")
Primordially, phenomenal entities don't occur individually as if, say, a chair or table existed in a complete vacuum all by itself. Rather, phenomena are always part of a whole context of relations. In HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF TIME, Heidegger defines this "referential context" as "basically correlations of meaning, meaningful contexts" (p. 203). This "referential context" constitutes an important concept in BEING AND TIME and should be thought of in terms of the phenomenal understanding of space and time we described. In everydayness, individual entities exist within and emerge from this meaningful context. The referential context doesn't exist "out there" in an objective sense, but is an intrinsic aspect of our being there in a world to begin with. For instance, signs refer to other things and, as being-in-the-world, we understand them because we already exist within the context of referential relations that makes existence meaningful and that make things what they are. Phenomenally, the "worldhood" of the world is made up not of objects but of these referential relations that allow things to have meaning AS whatever they ARE (table, rock, tree) a priori in our pre-reflective, pre-ontological involvement with them, an involvement that is possible only because of this initial circumspect discovery of whatever the specific phenomenon IS due to its being within the referential context, which incidentally is what endows language with meaning. Words depend on the prior disclosedness of the total referential context of unified experience.
Phenomenologically understood, the world is not primarily an assemblage of things; neither is it simply "nature." It isn't the realm of physics or biology. Physics and biology are secondary ways, "founded modes," of experiencing and understanding the world. While not thematically or explicitly obvious, everydayness is comprised of references that allow things to exist as phenomena--that is, as the phenomena they are as meaningful entities. For any part to exist, the whole must already be there for the part to exist in. Things are what they are only in relation to everything else, and ultimately in relation to unified experience. Existence isn't a matter of positing a hammer and then adding nails and shelves to the hammer to get a shelf, as if hammer + nails + shelves = bookcase. No. World isn't a mere manifold or conglomeration of physical things. Instead, it's the REFERENCES among things that gives things significance, and these references exist because there is a being, Dasein, which we ourselves are, for which the being of entities is a concern, and things are ultimately of concern because Dasein is concerned with its OWN existence. Hence CARE appears as an important constituent of world. Objects such as specimens isolated for scientific research are always already founded upon the referential context that we always already dwell in in everydayness and care. The scientific/theoretical attitude is not our primordial way of being; it's not phenomenologically primary. The scientific interpretation of reality, all mathematical calculation of exact measurement (e.g., the division of time into seconds, minutes, etc., or the precise measuring of distances) are derived from our more basic everyday encounter with phenomena, which at first is very different from the theoretical viewpoint of philosophy or the objective calculations of science. Our primordial way of determining distance and time is rather "rough and ready" and initially has nothing to do with quantitative precision.
Science deals with beings, but philosophy's job is to think about the Being of beings. According to Heidegger, however, philosophy, which gave birth to science, fell prey to the scientific worldview. Western philosophy, in accord with science, posits that bodily presence and/or physical extension in space constitutes what is primordial, what must exist for anything to be. But by Heidegger's time, this worldview had led to a "crisis" in thinking. Thinking didn't seem to be properly grounded in what was most basic to human existence. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Husserl had been trying to "ground" thinking, but it was Heidegger who finally laid bare that ground, combining Husserl's phenomenology with Kierkegaard's call to authentic existence. What is most basic and primordial is not a being's bodily presence or its extension in space but the BEING of that being, the BEING of anything in general. Heidegger doesn't deny or refute science. His aim is to "inquire into the ontological possibility of how the sciences have their source in Dasein's state of being." That is, how is it that science exists AT ALL as a possibility--as a way for us "to be"? How did science emerge out of our primordial being?
To get at what is primordial, Heidegger explores simple, nontheoretical, common ways of being, what we've called "everydayness." For instance, he discusses tools (equipment) because work (considered broadly so that even opening a door or getting into bed or any use of entities is understood as work) is the primary way we encounter and indeed discover the world. A hammer is primarily not a mere thing with bodily presence. In terms of the existence of this phenomenal entity called a "hammer," bodily presence is not the most basic thing about it. It is not primarily a substance, or a thing extended in space, as Descartes would have said. Rather, the primary being of the hammer as a phenomenal entity (i.e., in its significance as a hammer) lies in hammering. In the everyday work-world, the hammer exists as a meaningful phenomenon through its USE. Relative to the total referential totality, its phenomenal involvements (the "towards-which," "with-which," "for which") are what make a hammer what it is in its BEING. But it could never be free for Being without that being who uses the hammer, without Dasein (i.e., oneself), which has a "there" in which the hammer can be what it is. The hammer by itself has no "there" in which it can be. Everything that is "ready-to-hand" has meaning only from within the referential context of lived experience--the work itself and all the understanding assignments and connections it entails. If you are building a bookshelf, the hammer exists (i.e., has meaning) in relation to the nails and boards and indeed to your whole working environment, which is in turn oriented toward what you want to accomplish, a "what-for" and ultimately a "for-whom." It's the referential context--the worldhood of the world--and not any individual thing within that context, that is primary. Here we spot the problem that Heidegger had with Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, who often started his phenomenological reductions by isolating objects and therefore not acknowledging everydayness, the primary way that objects are encountered via our concern with them. Instead, Husserl starts from a theoretical standpoint that for Heidegger is simply not primordial, not basic, not "the ground" that phenomenology should lay bare. By so doing, Husserl passes over the worldhood of the world and thus also the primary phenomenological structure of existence. Bypassing the original structure, Husserl also passes over the possibility of encountering the Being of beings.
Heidegger studies beings as they exist in our everyday lives, in the most primordial way of encountering, discovering, and knowing things, because this primary encounter is what originally occludes Being. To approach the Being of beings we must first be able to see how it is that it gets obscured in the first place (in everydayness), and then further obscured by theory and science. For all the complexity of his writing, Heidegger's goal is to get you to see and think about very basic structures and modes of existence--things that are so close to us that we overlook them.
While it was Husserl who developed the phenomenological method of reduction, Heidegger believed that Husserl missed the opportunity for reawakening the fundamental question of being to which phenomenology provides a path. Phenomenology is a method, a way of approaching pure existence, requiring a special and systematic approach toward phenomena so that we gain access to the things themselves as they show themselves in themselves from themselves. Even if you could deny that the external world is really as you perceive it or that it exists at all, nobody can deny their own PERCEPTIONS, whether imaginary or otherwise, and it is this direct accessibility to the irrefutable phenomenal "world" of our own immediate experience that phenomenology explores. In this sense, even dreams, hallucinations, and things we imagine cannot be denied their existence; they are real and true as phenomena. Because phenomenology deals with immediate experience, it is "I myself" who have access to that experience. (Notice the implicit Cartesianism here, an aspect of Husserl's phenomenology that Heidegger spends time "destructing.") The phenomenological method lets us discover ontological structures so basic to our being that we live our lives totally overlooking them just as human beings have been overlooking them for all history.
Perception and reflection, says Husserl, are acts. I can think about (reflect upon), a chair or a table, or even upon an abstract idea or concept that is not part of the "external" world, so that every reflection has its object, whether real or ideal, about which the reflection is properly and intentionally a reflection. Phenomenology requires us to step back to grasp not merely the primary objects of everyday reflection but to catch reflection itself in the act of reflecting and to examine this act as well as its object in its existential structure so that the "object" of phenomenology is not merely this or that external entity or immanent idea but rather the phenomenon itself in its being as it emerges from the intentional act of reflection/experience, in order to see how it comes into being as what it is in pure givenness. But Heidegger takes issue with the subject/object dichotomy explicit in Husserlian phenomenology. He supersedes Husserlian phenomenology by locating something more fundamental: being-in-the-world. Heidegger wants you to see not merely the world, but the worldhood of the world. Not just THAT things are, but how a meaningful disclosure ofthem is even possible.
BT explores the Cartesian dichotomy that served as a foundation for Husserl's thinking and of modern metaphysical thinking in general: the distinction between inner and outer, the idea that consciousness is something immanent "inside" us while the world is "outside," and how the two come together in transcendence. As we saw, Heidegger argues that mind and body--our existence as opposed to the world's--aren't separate things to be put together since all things are together to begin with and it is only upon this primordial, unitary PHENOMENAL structure of existence that the Cartesian duality was founded. Heidegger does not so much refute Descartes as he grounds Cartesianism--and indeed all--philosophy in an underlying existential structure that is more basic than anything hitherto imagined by human thinking. Heidegger shows how this dichotomy between inner and outer is founded upon Da-sein, whose basic mode of existence has the ontological structure of being-in-the-world, which is the indivisible structure of existence, prior even to the Cartesian subject, prior even than empty space. This a priori unitary phenomenal structure (and what Heidegger ultimately means by "world" is phenomenal) underlies the concept of mind/body (subject/object; form/content) that tries to explain existence in terms of the metaphysical bifurcation that creates a gulf between immanent consciousness and external reality, between us and the world. For Heidegger, the world isn't "out there." World is the "there" itself that Being discloses. The phenomenon of everydayness is more original than metaphysics or science, and hence prior to the subject/object distinction, which, as theory, is possible only on the basis of this prior everyday existence. Our own existence constitutes the world because without the meaningful referential context of significance (of things that MATTER to us) there could be no world, at least not as a phenomenon. Through his brilliant dismantling of the philosophical tradition and his examination of everydayness, Heidegger reveals the recognizable structure inherent in existence.
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A must read for students of Heidegger, but not a good intro.
Disappointment