Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis

1. Being in the World: A Moving Feast

15 1. Being in the World A Moving Feast All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions. —Chang Tsai, Western Inscription Our age of globalization conjures up a host of challenging problems, mostly of a cultural, economic, and political nature. A steadily expanding literature deals with these problems. What is not often noticed is that globalization also harbors terminological and semantic quandaries . We know at least since Copernicus and Galileo that our Earth is a “globe” and not a flattened landscape. Given this knowledge, what does it mean that our habitat is “globalized” in our time? Surely, its physical “global” shape is not modified. In aggravated form, similar semantic problems beset other terms often used as equivalents: like world or earth. Can it be that the world, in our time of globalization, is becoming more “worldly” or simply a bigger world? Or that the Earth acquires a more “earthly” character? In addition to having descriptive referents, the two latter terms are additionally weighted down by metaphysical and theological connotations. Thus, world often is used to designate “this” world in opposition to another “transcendent” world, while the adjective worldly frequently serves as a synonym for “secular” or “temporal” in opposition to “spiritual” and “transtemporal ” (or eternal). In a similar way, earth and earthly often stand as monickers for a domain of flux and imperfection, in opposition to “heaven” or a “heavenly” domain marked by permanence and perfection . Using these synonyms, is it possible to describe globalization as a process of steady “secularization” and a turn to merely temporal and earthly concerns? 16 Being in the World In the following, I aspire to take some steps in the direction of a clarification of these issues. I use as my point of departure an initiative famously undertaken by the philosopher Martin Heidegger when he defined human beings as “beings-in-the-world” (an integral term strung together with hyphens). With this definition, Heidegger distanced himself from a number of traditional conceptions that portrayed human existence as a haphazard composite of disparate elements : like animal plus reason (animal rationale), creature plus soul, or body plus mind. Moreover, in his usage, the phrase “being-in-theworld ” was held together not only by hyphens (a relatively artificial device) but by a mutual openness and close engagement of its constitutive ingredients: a relationality that he captured in the term “care” (Sorge). Taking seriously this philosophical initiative, one can ask: How is “being-in-the-world” related to some of the problems referred to before—like globalization, secularization, and temporalization? Can one even build a bridge from the phrase to such notions as “cosmos ” and “cosmopolitanism”? I shall proceed in three steps. First of all, I shall examine in some detail Heidegger’s discussion of “being-inthe -world” and in particular the meaning he ascribes to “world”—and subsidiarily to “earth.” To forestall the impression that this discussion results in a static structure or “system” of world relations, I turn in a second step to the crucial temporal dimension of Heidegger’s perspective , where all the constitutive terms must be read as verbs with an active or processual character. In a final step, I shall explore the implications of his thought for such processes as globalization, secularization , and “cosmopolitanization” or cosmo-genesis. Human Existence and the World As is commonly known, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) offers a sustained “deconstruction” of traditional Western metaphysics and philosophy; far from being fashionably “post-modern,” however, his work also involves a constructive or radically reconstructive enterprise. What renders the former necessary is the tendency of “tradition” to obscure salient questions or to render their meaning self-evident; in modern Western thought, this tendency is aggravated by the habit of treating terms as separate “entities” whose complex relationship is precisely at issue. As Heidegger states, tradition (in the sense of tradi- Being in the World: A Moving Feast 17 tionalism) shields from view the very conditions whose grasp permits a “productive appropriation” of the past. The modern tradition, which his book above all seeks to deconstruct, is the mind-body problem deriving from Descartes: the radical separation or juxtaposition of two disparate entities, thought and extension, cogito and external matter or nature. “With the ‘cogito sum,’” we read, “Descartes claimed to put philosophy on a new and firm grounding. But what he left completely open or undetermined was the mode of being of the...