The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

12 It Worlds for Me

12 It Worlds for Me THE PRESENT CHAPTER sketches how the young Heidegger's kinetic-personalist thoughtpath explored the demythologized content-sense of the being-question as an "it worlds" and described its relational sense in personalist terms as the "Dasein of personal life." Though it was only in his lecture course of KNS 1919 that he actually spoke of these intentional senses as an "it worlds for me," I show that this notion of worlding-for-me was also operative throughout his early Freiburg period. I begin with his treatment of the it-worlds and its regional categories of the environing world, withworld, and selfworld. I then survey his descriptions of the basic categories of personal relational sense, namely, care, understanding, mood, language, and interpretation. I illustrate these categories through Heidegger's own phenomenological "exercises" of describing such everyday phenomena as the lectern at which he is speaking and the seats in which his students are sitting, the sunrises experienced by hikers and by Theban elders in Holderlin's translation of Sophocles's Antigone, the table in his own home at which his family has its evening meal together, and the toys of his childhood. Phenomenological Kindergarten In WS 1921-22, Heidegger defined the content-sense of intentional comportment in the following way: "The relation of comportment is a relation to something; the comportment to ... holds itself at something.... The uponwhich and to-which [Worauf und Wozu] of the relation is the content. ... Every object has its specific content-sense." To get at the primal sense of this content, as well as of the other intentional moments, he entered into a lingustic analysis of "the verb 'to live' " as the basic sense of comportment. "The intransitive -verbal meaning of 'to live' explicates itself ... always as living 'in' something, living 'out of' something, living 'for' something, living 'with' something, living 'against,' living 'towards' something, living 'from' something . We define the 'something' ... with the term 'world.' " Thus "with the phenomenological category of 'world' we speak of ... what is lived, that by which life is held, that at which it holds itself.... [W]orld is the basic category 25° It Worlds for Me 25I of what has content-sense in the phenomenon of life." My previously expressed suspicion that in 1921 Heidegger already used the term Dasein in the sense of a site of being (as in the formula "life =Dasein, being-here, in and through life 'being' ") is also confirmed by the fact that in the same year and especially in 1923 Heidegger clarified that" 'Dasein' designates equally the being of the world as the being of human life." The world and each worldly thing in it are a topological Da (here) of being, such that Heidegger talked about the "Dasein of the world," the "Dasein of this table," of a "broken toy," "a pair of old skis standing in a corner of the basement," a "book," or a "library ." Thus, if we want to get at the content-sense of world, "the basic task that is posed [is] to grasp ontologically-categorially the immediate closeness of beings which are here [Daseiendes]" in the world (G61 53, 85-86, 91; G63 86-99). Here Heidegger took up and fulfilled the first "requirement" for rethinking the categories of being that he had expresssed in the conclusion of his qualifying dissertation, namely, displacing categorial sense from the realm of valid logical sense into the depth-dimension of historical worldview as this is exemplified especially in medieval mysticism. The phenomenological analyses pursued in his youthful lecture courses exercised a quaint and magical power of conjuring up the phenomena before the eyes of his students. As the numerous anecdotal reports by his early students attest, Husserl's "phenomenological child" had a real knack for philosophizing with "things," inviting the students into his wondrous "phenomenological kindergarten" (G15 288) of colorful examples, exercises, thoughtpaths, and outings into die Sachen selbst, which they were supposed to learn to see as if for the first time. His courses display a style of thinking and lecturing that he himself in 1921 called "questioning kairological-critically," that is, philosophizing in the kairos, the critical moment, the "here and now ... in this place, in this lecture hall. You before me, I before you, we with each other." These courses are themselves performative illustrations of the indexical meaning of Da-sein, here-being!, insofar as they point to being in and through "my lectern ," "your seats," the "janitor" over there, the "toy" in...