On meaning #2: In the world like lovers in love
Two senses of the word "in"
In the first essay, I framed the question of being, and talked about what has become our default consensus: we are thinking animals, separate from the world. Here I’ll articulate another way of seeing how we are in the world.
The two senses of the word “in”
It is helpful to distinguish between two ways that we use the word “in”. There is the physical ‘in’: Charlie is in the swimming pool, the dog is in the car. But there’s also what we might call the existential ‘in’: being in love, stuck in the middle of a task. This distinction is important for understanding how we are in the world.
The physical in is easier to articulate. It has to do with inclusion, being a part of a physical whole1.
The existential in is more subtle. It has to do with familiarity, with intimacy. Like dwelling in a home, as opposed to living in a domicile. When we are in love, we are intimately acquainted with aspects of our lover. Their needs, appearances, desires, are foregrounded to us. When we are “in the middle“ of a task, the task is what we are most familiar with in that instance of time.
We might also describe the existential in as presence. When I’m thinking about what to make for dinner as my partner is talking to me, she might tell me I’m not really there. When we are less existentially in the world, others may register it as distraction, or distance.
We are existentially immersed in the world
Now I can make the main point: all of us people have a background presence in the world2. We may have moments where we are more or less immersed in the world, but there’s this thread of connective awareness that is always there. It’s what allows us to act at all.
Say you’re setting up a tent and the sun has just set, leaving you in darkness. Fumbling around with the tent pegs, you can’t see anything. More importantly, you can’t set up your tent. The equipment, which might have been so familiar to you moments ago, is now far away, inaccessible.
Our being-in the world is similar. Just as you need light in order to fix your tent poles, we need a background awareness with the world, a being-in, in order to act and make sense. Losing this immersion is akin to losing not just all your sight, touch, and hearing, but all awareness.
It is impossible to operate without any of the senses that give you familiarity with the world, that act as a gate into the world. In looking, seeing, and touching, we are existentially immersed in the world.
Is the existential in ‘real’?
It’s tempting to point to the existential in as “less real” than the physical in. In this materialist view, only physical things ‘really’ exist. Everything else is made up. I’ll ask instead: let’s say you have a moment of disconnection as your friend is distracted by their phone. Is this feeling of disconnection ‘real’? Why or why not? I plan to address this in more detail later on, but for now I’ll just briefly point out that if you think the United States of America is real, or you think that family is real, then already you have left the materialist worldview.
We are in-the-world like two lovers in love. And our way of being-in-the-world is no less real than than the glass of the screen that you are looking at.
You may feel somewhat unsatisfied by my description here. What is it precisely to be in love? To be in the world? Upon first reading of Being and Time, I was annoyed with the absence of logical steps. It felt like dense horrible word soup that left my mind spinning. What I realized later was that I was reading the text in the wrong mode. That it started to make more sense if I treated it like poetry rather than set theory. If my explanations do end up revealing anything, I suggest that taking a similar stance will be helpful.
One example of a rigorous definition of inclusion: “In mathematics, a set A is a subset of a set B if all elements of A are also elements of B; B is then a superset of A. It is possible for A and B to be equal; if they are unequal, then A is a proper subset of B. The relationship of one set being a subset of another is called inclusion (or sometimes containment)”
Heidegger calls this the existential mode of being-in