3 Being-in-the-world and hermeneutics

In Being and Time Heidegger spells out not only the reasons why, but also the ways in which, things are meaningfully present to human being.

Being-in-the-world. In contrast to theories of human being as a self-contained theoretical ego, Heidegger understands human being as always ‘outside’ any supposed immanence, absorbed in social intercourse, practical tasks and its own interests. Evidence for this absorption, he argues, is that human being always finds itself caught up in a mood – that is, ‘tuned in’ to a given set of concerns. The field of such concerns and interests Heidegger calls the ‘world’; and the engagement with those needs and purposes and the things that might fulfil them he calls ‘being-in-the-world’ (or equally ‘care’).

Heidegger’s term ‘world’ does not mean planet earth, or the vast expanse of space and time, or the sum total of things in existence. Rather, ‘world’ means a dynamic set of relations, ultimately ordered to human possibilities, which lends meaning or significance to the things that one deals with – as in the phrase ‘the world of the artist’ or ‘the world of the carpenter’. A human being lives in many such worlds, and they often overlap, but what constitutes their essence – what Heidegger calls the worldhood of all such worlds – is the significance that accrues to things by their relatedness to human interests and possibilities. Although being-in and world can be distinguished, they never occur separately. Any set of meaning-giving relations (world) comes about and remains effective only in so far as human being is engaged with the apposite possibilities (being-in). Being-in holds open and sustains the world.

In Being and Time Heidegger studies the world that he considers closest to human beings: the world of everyday activity. The defining moment of such a world is practical purposes ordered to human concerns – for example, the need to build a house for the sake of shelter. A group of things then gets its significance from the direct or indirect relation of those things to that goal. For example, these specific tools get their significance from their usefulness for clearing the ground, those trees get their significance from being suitable for lumber, these plants from their serviceability as thatch. A dynamic set of such relations (such as ‘useful to’, ‘suitable as’, ‘needed for’), all of which refer things to a human task and ultimately to a human possibility, constitutes a ‘world’ and defines the current significance that certain things (for example, tools, trees and reeds) might have.

The significance of things changes according to the interplay of human interests, the relations that they generate, and the availability of material. For example, given the lack of a mallet, the significance of a stone might be its utility for pounding in a tent peg. The stone gets its current significance as a utensil from the world of the camper: the desire for shelter, the need of something to hammer with, and the availability of only a stone. (When the camper finds a mallet, the stone may well lose its former significance.)

Hermeneutical understanding. Heidegger argues that the world of practical experience is the original locus of the understanding of the being of entities. Understanding entails awareness of certain relations: for example, the awareness of this as that, or of this as for that. The ‘as’ articulates the significance of the thing. In using an implement, one has a practical understanding of the implement’s relation to a task (X as useful for Y). This in turn evidences a practical understanding of the being of the implement: one knows the stone as being useful for pounding in a tent peg. In other words, prior to predicative knowledge, which is expressed in sentences of the type ‘S is P’, human beings already have a pre-theoretical or ‘pre-ontological’ understanding of the being of things (this as being for that).

Since the ‘as’ articulates how something is understood, and since the Greek verb hermeneuein means ‘to make something understandable’, Heidegger calls the ‘as’ that renders things intelligible in practical understanding the ‘hermeneutical as’. This ‘hermeneutical as’ is made possible because human being is a ‘thrown project’, necessarily thrust into possibilities (thrownness) and thereby holding the world open (project).

Hermeneutical understanding – that is, pre-predicatively understanding the ‘hermeneutical as’ by being a thrown project – is the kind of cognition that most befits being-in-the-world. It is the primary way in which humans know the being of things. By contrast, the more detached and objective ‘apophantic’ knowledge that expresses itself in declarative sentences (‘S is P’) is evidence, for Heidegger, of a derivative and flattened-out understanding of being.

Summary. As long as one lives, one is engaged in mortal becoming. This becoming entails having purposes and possibilities. Living into purposes and possibilities is how one has things meaningfully present. The ability to have things meaningfully present by living into possibilities is called being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is structured as a thrown project: holding open the possibility of significance (project) by ineluctably living into possibilities (thrownness). This issues in a pre-predicative, hermeneutical understanding of the being of things. Thus mortal becoming qua being-in-the-world engenders and sustains all possible significance. In another formulation: temporality determines all the ways that things can have meaningful presence. Time is the meaning of all forms of being.