Worldless (weltlos), 55, 110-111, 188, 192, 206, 211, 316, 366, 388 (BT)
As an existentiale, ‘Being alongside’ the world never means anything like the Being-present-at-hand-together of Things that occur. There is no such thing as the ‘side-by-side-ness’ of an entity called ‘Dasein’ with another entity called ‘world’. Of course when two things are present-at-hand together alongside one another, we are accustomed to express this occasionally by something like ‘The table stands “by” [’bei’] the door’ or ‘The chair “touches” [’berührt’] the wall’. Taken strictly, ‘touching’ is never what we are talking about in such cases, not because accurate reexamination will always eventually establish that there is a space between the chair and the wall, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them should be equal to zero. If the chair could touch the wall, this would presuppose that the wall is the sort of thing ‘for’ which a chair would be encounterable. An entity present-at-hand within the world can be touched by another entity only if by its very nature the latter entity has Being-in as its own kind of Being – only if, with its Being-there [Da-sein], something like the world is already revealed to it, so that from out of that world another entity can manifest itself in touching, and thus become accessible in its Being-present-at-hand. When two entities are present-at-hand within the world, and furthermore are WORLDLESS in themselves, they can never ‘touch’ each other, nor can either of them ‘be’ ‘alongside’ the other. The clause ‘furthermore are WORLDLESS’ must not be left out; for even entities which are not WORLDLESS – Dasein itself, for example – are present-at-hand ‘in’ the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand. To do this, one must completely disregard or just not see the existential state of Being-in. But the fact that ‘Dasein’ can be taken as something which is present-at-hand and just present-at-hand, is not to be confused with a certain way of ‘presence-at-hand’ which is Dasein’s own. This latter kind of presence-at-hand becomes accessible not by disregarding Dasein’s specific structures but only by understanding them in advance. Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain ‘factual Being-present-at-hand’. And yet the ‘factuality’ of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity”. This is a definite way of Being [Seinsbestimmtheit], and it has a complicated structure which cannot even be grasped as a problem until Dasein’s basic existential states have been worked out. The concept of “facticity” implies that an entity ‘within-the-world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world. [SZ:56] BTMR §12
Suppose I step into a room which is familiar to me but dark, and which has been rearranged [umgeräumt] during my absence so that everything which used to be at my right is now at my left. If I am to orient myself the ‘mere feeling of the difference’ between my two sides will be of no help at all as long as I fail to apprehend some definite object. ‘whose position’, as Kant remarks casually, ‘I have in mind’. But what does this signify except that whenever this happens I necessarily orient myself both in and from my being already alongside a world which is ‘familiar’? The equipment-context of a world must have been presented to Dasein. That I am already in a world is no less constitutive for the possibility of orientation than is the feeling for right and left. While this state of Dasein’s Being is an obvious one, we are not thereby justified in suppressing the ontologically constitutive role which it plays. Even Kant does not suppress it, any more than any other Interpretation of Dasein. Yet the fact that this is a state of which we constantly make use, does not exempt us from providing a suitable ontological explication, but rather demands one. The psychological Interpretation according to which the “I” has something ‘in the memory’ [“im Gedächtnis”] is at bottom a way of alluding to the existentially constitutive state of Being-in-the-world. Since Kant fails to see this structure, he also fails to recognize all the interconnections which the Constitution of any possible orientation implies. Directedness with regard to right and left is based upon the essential directionality of Dasein in general, and this directionality in turn is essentially co-determined by Being-in-the-world. Even Kant, of course, has not taken orientation as a theme for Interpretation. He merely wants to show that every orientation requires a ‘subjective principle’. Here ‘subjective’ is meant to signify that this principle is apriori. Nevertheless, the apriori character of directedness with regard to right and left is based upon the ‘subjective’ a priori of Being-in-the-world, Which has nothing to do with any determinate character restricted beforehand to a WORLDLESS subject. [SZ:110] BTMR §23
Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the world in so far as space has been disclosed by that Being-in-the-world which is constitutive for Dasein. Space is not to be found in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world ‘as if’ that world were in a space; but the ‘subject’ (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial. And because Dasein is spatial in the way we have described, space shows itself as a priori. This term does not mean anything like previously belonging to a subject which is proximally still WORLDLESS and which emits a space out of itself. Here “aprioriy” means the previousness with which space has been encountered (as a region) whenever the ready-to-hand is encountered environmentally. BTMR §24
That about which anxiety is anxious reveals itself as that in the face of which it is anxious – namely, Being-in-the-world. The selfsameness of that in the face of which and that about which one has anxiety, extends even to anxiousness [Sichängsten] itself. For, as a state-of-mind, anxiousness is a basic kind of Being-in-the-world. Here the disclosure and the disclosed are existentially selfsame in such a way that in the latter the world has been disclosed as world, and Being-in has been disclosed as a potentiality-for-Being which is individualized, pure, and thrown; this makes it plain that with the phenomenon of anxiety a distinctive state-of-mind has become a theme for Interpretation. Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’. But this existential ‘solipsism’ is so far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a WORLDLESS occurring, that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world. BTMR §40
But this structure pertains to the whole of Dasein’s constitution. “Being-ahead-of-itself” does not signify ‘anything like an isolated tendency in a WORLDLESS ‘subject’, but characterizes Being-in-the-world. To Being-in-the-world, however, belongs the fact that it has been delivered over to itself – that it has in each case already been thrown into a world. The abandonment of Dasein to itself is shown with primordial concreteness in anxiety. “Being-ahead-of-itself” means, if we grasp it more fully, “ahead-of-itselfin-already-being-in-a-world”. As soon as this essentially unitary structure is seen as a phenomenon, what we have set forth earlier in our analysis of worldhood also becomes plain. The upshot of that analysis was that the referential totality of significance (which as such is constitutive for worldhood) has been ‘tied up’ with a “for-the-sake-of-which”. The fact that this referential totality of the manifold relations of the ‘in-order-to’ has been bound up with that which is an issue for Dasein, does not signify that a ‘world’ of Objects which is present-at-hand has been welded together with a subject. It is rather the phenomenal expression of the fact that the constitution of Dasein, whose totality is now brought out explicitly as aheadof-itself-in-Being-already-in …, is primordially a whole. To put it otherwise, existing is always factical. Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity. BTMR §41
To have faith in the Reality of the ‘external world’, whether rightly or wrongly; to “prove” this Reality for it, whether adequately or inadequately; to presuppose it, whether explicitly or not – attempts such as these which have not mastered their own basis with full transparency, presuppose a subject which is proximally WORLDLESS or unsure of its world, and which must, at bottom, first assure itself of a world. Thus from the very beginning, Being-in-a-world is disposed to “take things” in some way [Auffassen], to suppose, to be certain, to have faith – a way of behaving which itself is always a founded mode of Being-in-the-world. BTMR §43
If the ‘cogito sum’ is to serve as the point of departure for the existential analytic of Dasein, then it needs to be turned around, and furthermore its content needs new ontologico-phenomenal confirmation. The ‘sum’ is then asserted first, and indeed in the sense that “I am in a world”. As such an entity, ‘I am’ in the possibility of Being towards various ways of comporting myself – namely, cogitationes – as ways of Being alongside entities within-the-world. Descartes, on the contrary, says that cogitationes are present-at-hand, and that in these an ego is present-at-hand too as a WORLDLESS res cogitans. BTMR §43
When one talks of the ‘circle’ in understanding, one expresses a failure to recognize two things: (1) that understanding as such makes up a basic kind of Dasein’s Being, and (2) that this Being is constituted as care. To deny the circle, to make a secret of it, or even to want to overcome it, means finally to reinforce this failure. We must rather endeavour to leap into the ‘circle’, primordially and wholly, so that even at the start of the analysis of Dasein we make sure that we have a full view of Dasein’s circular Being. If, in the ontology of Dasein, we ‘take our departure’ from a WORLDLESS “I” in order to provide this “I” with an Object and an ontologically baseless relation to that Object, then we have ‘presupposed’ not too much, but too little. If we make a problem of ‘life’, and then just occasionally have regard for death too, our view is too short-sighted. The object we have taken as our theme is artificially and dogmatically curtailed if ‘in the [SZ:316] first instance’ we restrict ourselves to a ‘theoretical subject’, in order that we may then round it out ‘on the practical side’ by tacking on an ‘ethic’. BTMR §63
Thus the significance-relationships which determine the structure of the world are not a network of forms which a WORLDLESS subject has laid over some kind of material. What is rather the case is that factical Dasein, understanding itself and its world ecstatically in the unity of the “there”, comes back from these horizons to the entities encountered within them. Coming back to these entities understandingly is the existential meaning of letting them be encountered by making them present; that is why we call them entities “within-the-world”. The world is, as it were, already ‘further outside’ than any Object can ever be. The ‘problem of transcendence’ cannot be brought round to the question of how a subject comes out to an Object, where the aggregate of Objects is identified with the idea of the world. Rather we must ask: what makes it ontologically possible for entities to be encountered within-the-world and Objectified as so encountered? This can be answered by recourse to the transcendence of the world – a transcendence with an ecstatico-horizonal foundation. BTMR §69
Indeed history is ‘neither the connectedness of motions in the alterations of Objects, nor a free-floating sequence of Experiences which ‘subjects’ have had. Does the historizing of history then pertain to the way subject and Object are ‘linked together’? Even if one assigns [zuweist] historizing to the subject-Object relation, we then have to ask what kind of Being belongs to this linkage as such, if this is what basically ‘historizes’. The thesis of Dasein’s historicality does not say that the WORLDLESS subject is historical, but that what is historical is the entity that exists as Being-in-the-world. The historizing of history is the historizing of Being-in-the-world. Dasein’s historicality is essentially the historicality of the world, which, on the basis of ecstatico-horizontal temporality, belongs to the temporalizing of that temporality. In so far as Dasein exists factically, it already encounters that which has been discovered within-the-world. With the existence of historical Being-in-the-world, what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand have already, in every case, been incorporated into the history of the world. Equipment and work – for instance, books – have their fates’; buildings and institutions have their history. And even Nature is historical. It is not historical, to be sure, in so far as we speak of ‘natural history’; but Nature is historical as a countryside, as an area that has been colonized or exploited, as a battlefield, or as the site of a cult. These entities within-the-world are historical as such, and their history does not signify something ‘external’ which merely accompanies the ‘inner’ history of the ‘soul’. We call such entities “the world-historical”. Here we must notice that the expression ‘world-history’ which we have chosen and which is here understood ontologically, has a double signification. The expression signifies, for one thing, the historizing of the world in its essential existent unity with Dasein. At the same time, we have here in view the ‘historizing’ [SZ:389] within-the-world of what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, in so far as entities within-the-world are, in every case, discovered with the factically existent world. The historical world is factical only as the world of entities within-the-world. That which ‘happens’ with equipment and work as such has its own character of movement, and this character has been completely obscure up till now. When, for instance, a ring gets ‘handed over’ to someone and ‘worn’, this is a kind of Being in which it does not simply suffer changes of location. The movement of historizing in which something ‘happens to something’ is not to be grasped in terms of motion as change of location. This holds for all worldhistorical ‘processes’, and events, and even, in a certain manner, for ‘natural catastrophes’. Quite apart from the fact that if we were to follow up the problem of the ontological structure of world-historical historizing, we would necessarily be transgressing the limits of our theme, we can refrain from this all the more because the very aim of this exposition is to lead us face to face with the ontological enigma of the movement of historizing in general. BTMR §75