Reflections on Being and Time 2: There’s the World, and then there’s the World

Certain words have such broad ranges of connotations that they can inspire entirely different stories depending on who uses them.? Ask an environmentalist and an evangelical about “the world,” and you’ll get two very different answers, both of which will differ from the answer you’ll get if you ask an evangelical who’s also an environmentalist.

Heidegger’s first big project in Being and Time begins with an investigation of what it means to live in a world.? To begin with, he says that there is not merely one sort of being, thing-ness, but that in human experience there are three orders of being, namely being-ready-to-hand, being-present-at-hand, and being-there, each kind related to the last one, the human kind of being, that Macquarrie leaves transliterated as Dasein.? (I realize that my lack of German stunts this somewhat, so if anyone can correct these Macquarrie phrases, go right ahead.)

Ready-to-hand being has to do with standing in relationship to a system or totality of equipment, so that a hammer (Heidegger’s favorite thought experiment) is what it is because it stands alongside nails, wood, houses, and the rest of the system within which hammering makes sense.? Houses are equipment-for-abiding.? Bridges are equipment-for-crossing-rivers.? Ready-to-hand entities are in normal circumstances unobtrusive, each being for the sake of some intelligible activity in the world and working along with all the other entities in that system in manners that do not require theoretical thought about what the entities are so much as practical know-how (also not always at the fore of the consciousness) to do things within the system.? So to negate Descartes (which Heidegger is doing with his philosophy), a carpenter does not apprehend a thing extended in space and then note that it has a certain heaviness, a certain color, a certain shape, and so forth–the carpenter rather knows that there’s a house to build and builds it, exhibiting a know-how towards houses.

Present-at-hand being is the sort of extended-in-space being from which Descartes started.? It’s the sort of thing that high school science classes deal with: a certain mass of a substance will have a certain height, length, and depth; a certain mass and density and corresponding weight in particular gravitational fields; and other properties such as smell, color, shape, and so forth.? Heidegger very carefully does not deny that such properties are valid; instead he notes rightly that people usually do not journey about in the world thinking about extension and weight so much as about the task at hand and that those properties really only disclose themselves in relatively marginal moments: if a hammer is too heavy for me to use for a given job, I suddenly become aware of its heaviness.? (I know, back to hammers.)? If a traffic light switches not from red to green but from red to nothing, I become aware of brightness.? And if a door opens so easily that, despite its weight, it feels light, I’m aware of smooth motion.? Because being-there is capable of interpretive relations with present-at-hand entities, we are certainly capable of devising scientific systems of naming and relating those entities, but before we ever get there, we being-there beings (Heidegger does invent terminology with abandon) live in the world that they constitute as ready-to-hand.

“There” in being-there is not the opposite of “here” (Macquarrie generally uses “yonder” to translate the opposite of “here”) but the sort of “there” in statements such as the following:

• There are worse things that could happen.
• There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.
• There’s a person named Nate Gilmour who writes a blog.

None of these sentences, unless one gets absurdly deictic (Look!? She’s buying the stairway!? Right there!), connotes any directional pointing.? Instead, and perhaps as an outgrowth of Heidegger’s and other existentialists’ philosophy, folks generally call this the “existential there.”? In other words, the sort of being that exists is ours.

As you certainly have picked up by now, the terminology in Heidegger (not differently from German philosophers in general) gets thick.? Here “to exist” is a particular subset of “to be,” and the upshot for Heidegger is that human beings (a phrase that he avoids for the sake of precision, but I’m not German) are not simply things-that-think as Descartes would have it but uniquely exist in the world.? Thus the world for Heidegger has to do with existent beings operating in systems of equipment that, in moments of rupture and sometimes as a result of systematized interpretation, become entities to be beheld rather than dealt with in terms of equipment.? That complex of entities and their systematic relationships Heidegger calls “world.”

The implications for Christian thought take a bit of cogitation, but revisiting the New Testament (which I will do in all three parts of the actual examination of Heidegger), one can see uses of “world” that make a good deal of sense in Heidegger’s way of speaking.? Before I proceed I should note that Heidegger, like me (this is certainly one reason I’ve enjoyed him so much) is intensely interested in word origins, especially those words that come down to modernity from Latin and Greek, so I don’t think I’m necessarily imposing modern meaning on ancient texts so much as learning from a philosopher who’s also a philologist.

That said, various parts of the New Testament deal differently with forms of verb kosmein, to put in order: 1 Timothy 3 holds that the overseer of the Church must be kosmion, orderly in behavior.? On the other hand, Titus teaches that the spirit of God helps us to overcome kosmikas passions, those belonging to a fallen order.? Hebrews uses the adjective kosmikon simply to distinguish the earthly temple from its heavenly counterpart, while Ephesians says that Christians’ struggle is against the kosmokratoras, the rulers of the world’s order.? And that’s before one gets to the gospels.? In Matthew, one should not gain the kosmon if it costs one one’s psychen, but those to whom Jesus speaks in his sermon on the Mount are the light of the kosmou.? And in John, the most famous world-book of the New Testament, the kosmos hates Jesus, but God so loved the kosmon that he sent his only begotten son.

I won’t presume to do an intensive study of world in Heidegger or the New Testament here but will note that Heidegger grasps the complexity of the world in ways that Descartes and his scientific/mathematical heirs did not: the world of physical laws and inert matter is not the most basic kind of “world” but ultimately becomes visible only in an ideological matrix, just as an early Christian’s world, inhabited as it is by demons and angels, becomes disclosed in an all-encompassing way of life and interpretation.? As William Blake knew through his poetry and the biblical Apocalypse (that’s Revelation for us post-King-James readers) reveals (hence the name), someone has to teach us to see the world in certain ways, be that someone a master craftsman or a science teacher or God.? The totality of relationships determines what things “really” are, not simple mass and extension, and although those ways of seeing disclose realities and not simple wishes about objects (more about that in a couple days), their mode is always disclosing-for-us, not the establishment of something super-human.? When Jesus comes to save the world, that world has its own complex and multi-storied reality, and we mortals are not privy to all of those stories.? That’s why any single connotation of “world” will ultimately fall short of all of the complexity of the New Testament, much less the complexity of the whole of Christian existence.

I will note at this point that Heidegger, towards the end of division one, holds the doctrine of analogical being, the medieval Christian teaching that God’s being relates to but is not of the same sort as being-there, is an error from Christian theology that philosophy proper has not fully extruded.? (If I misunderstood this dense paragraph on 272 of the Macquarrie paperback, I’d be glad to read corrections.)? Heidegger, I repeat, is himself no Christian and has no stake in articulating a Christian theology.? That said, his return to the depth of being over against science’s occasional flattening of the same does open up space for Christian theology to operate once more, allowing that being is always disclosed in-the-world and that the world is always ready-to-hand systematically before it is atomized into present-at-hand objects.? That space alone should give Christians some room to breathe, intellectually speaking, where before the ideology of the world-as-object had previously ended all discussions of meaning where the brain stops and the world starts.? And for that, I could imagine worse responses than a Lenten prayer of thanksgiving.