Martin Heidegger and Being in the World
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger makes an argument for a
place-centered approach. He started his deliberations by pointing to what he
believed to be a false starting point in Cartesian arguments. From that
Cartesian position, the person is first and foremost an isolated thinker
employing reason to objectively derive knowledge. This is captured in
Descarte’s famous Latin motto, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).
In
contrast, Heidegger argues that we are “first and foremost a situated interpreter,
understander, or ‘sense maker’ engaged in everyday coping [and] as a situated
interpreter the person is irreducibly relational not individual, social not
psychological” (Being 23).
Following Kant, Heidegger recognizes the human
character of space and its role as a condition of experiences.
He claims that
the objectified space of world-space is not what space fundamentally is. For
Heidegger, world-space is space conceived as vorhanden (present-at-hand),
space of our common sense conception, generally understood as a “container”
for objects. An example can be found in Being and Time.
Heidegger writes,
“the bench is in the lecture-room, the lecture-room is in the university, the
university is in the city, and so on, until we can say the bench is in world
space” (Being 79).
Yet, unlike Kant, who defines space as an a priori feature
of our mind, Heidegger attributes it to our active being and our practical
involvement in the world. Heidegger’s theory of space is a theory of lived
space, which emphasizes the spatiality involved in one’s use of the body. He
would rather investigate our ordinary spatial activities without imposing on his
analysis the subject-object framework and the associated language.
He argues
that the kind of space that we are familiar with in this way is what must
ultimately be presupposed in our grasp of space. It is both subjective and
objective.
The primary human reality, as Heidegger argues, is Being in the
world—being engaged with others. The world is experienced through our
bodies, and we cannot separate our selves from this world. In other words,
the physical world is an integral part of our existence and the basis of our
perceptions.
The sort of space we deal with in our daily activity is
“functional” or zuhanden (ready-to-hand), and Heidegger’s term for it is
“region” (Gegend).
The places where we live and work—the living room, the
working place, the park, etc.—all have different regions that organize our
activities and determine the locations of available “equipment.” Regions differ
from space viewed as a “container” in that regions are the “referential” system
of our context of activities. This is to say that regions are essentially
indexical.
The indexical “here” does not identify a point in a neutral,
container-like space, but rather, our spatial activities determine a “here” with
respect to the things we deal with and the way we move.
Regions are
inherently organized by activities that emanate from a center of action. Put
another way, the perspective presupposed in world-space is a standpoint of an
infinite observer; whereas the perspective in a region is a finite perspective of
an acting agent. Heidegger’s purpose is to claim that referential functionality
is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a “human” characteristic
added to a container-like space.
“Regions” refer to our activities since they are established by our ways of
being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions.
Only through the region can our de-severance (Ent-fernung) and directionality
(Ausrichtung)—two features of Dasein’s spatiality—be established, since our
objects of concern always appear in a certain context, a certain place, and a
certain direction.
We always orient ourselves and organize our activities
within regions already given to us. To be sure, this orientation is relative to
the body and the world, developed as the body interacts with the world more
constantly and their spatial relationship grows stronger and stronger.