Heidegger’s ‘World’

In Being and Time, Heidegger attempted to overcome the subject-object, and thus the self-world, dichotomy, developing an existential conception of the world that is neither objective nor subjective in the familiar sense, and thereby analyzed the phenomenon of the world that the philosophical tradition “has skipped over since Parmenides” in a completely new light. Ultimately, being-in-the-world constitutes the essential being-character of Dasein, existing between thrownness and death. Accordingly, only Dasein has a world, and increasingly, Dasein is its world.

In this masterpiece, Heidegger adamantly insisted that the world and Dasein inherently present a unified structure, contrary to the philosophical tradition that tends to treat them as two separate entities. Indeed, his formulation of being-in-the-world depicted Dasein, as a human being, not as an entity opposed to the world, as in a Cartesian conception, but rather as an entity immersed in and intertwined with it.

Heidegger's 'World' aims to highlight and interpret certain analyses in Being and Time that focus on the concept of world and thus the meaning of being-in-the-world, thereby penetrating Heidegger's 'world.' This work, offering a comprehensive and detailed commentary on the section from § 14 to § 27 in Being and Time, can also be read as a kind of introduction to this masterpiece, considering the central place and importance of the concept of world and related issues in Dasein's analytics.