Thrown into being Heidegger: to world versus welten
Thrown into being Heidegger: to world versus welten
ontological thickets
I do not have enough German to read Heidegger. This is a blessing, as one should read these peeps in the original. I’ll use secondary literature.
Heidegger is an unashamed ontologist, delving into the minutia of the verb “to be” as he maps his life into philosophy, like one of those mechanical inventions artists use to scale, while claiming to unconceal the truth we have forgotten. See he says, look, how big it is is now! See!
das Welten
I’ll crib from elsewhere Heidegger’’s use of this word:
Dasein, in being applied to the phenomenon of human existence, describes a world that is a world of thrownness and engagement, and temporalised in both its transience and its endurance. As factical, Dasein is being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein); through Dasein, the world is what Heidegger calls “worlding” (das Welten), a phenomenon which happens in and through time. As the world “worlds”, it brings Dasein into this happening, an Ereignis that opens up Dasein‘s own possibilities in its ecstatic-horizonal projection upon the horizon of the question of being (Seinsfrage), which Dasein itself always is. For Dasein itself is a question, never a final answer – that is the meaning of the temporalisation of being.
So for Heidegger it is the world that worlds.
Worlding
I use ‘to world’ from the point of view of the person or persons selfing or grouping. As such it is not the world worlding, but each of us alone and together, as far as we allow.
We body, we self, we world.
To live covers all of that and no doubt more.
In the pivot or hinge of consciousness we each inhabit, we live the world as much as we en-soul our bodies. This view is drawn from notions of the extended phenotype, and how we weave a social cocoon about us in our negotiations when we discuss and decide things.
Whether we are thrown into it depends on our age, our agency and agreeableness. I have no sense of a ideal world (that the world worlds and we are thrown into) that we unconceal by refusing to be thrown-off by our forgetting.
Stuff that.
Evolution as a theory of natural selection in an ecology
Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology doesn’t care about evolution, his being is prior. With this priority, history is a study of how being is concealed in our forgetting of it in different epoches.
Others have picked up the pantograph with this in mind however, and played with it. All that embodied stuff, occasionally they also look at the en-worlded body.
This is a follow up from Worlding Indexing & goose