The subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Being-in

Again, existentialists reject the standpoint of detachment and objectivity because it invariably overlooks the situated needs and commitments that matter to me as an individual. As Kierkegaard writes, “What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy … to construct a world in which I do not live but only hold it up for the view of others?” (1959, 78). The aim of rational detachment is to achieve the ‘perspective of eternity,’ but this results in the abandonment of the concrete meanings that shape our lives. To address this problem, existentialists often begin their projects with accounts of life as it is lived in ordinary contexts. What is revealed in these accounts is that we are already ‘being-in,’ that is, embedded and involved in a shared world. Understood this way, being-in is not a reference of spatial inclusion, of an object or thing that is inside a container (e.g., ‘The chicken is in the pot’). It is a reference to how we are concretely involved in the world in a particular way (e.g., ‘The professor is in class’). The latter example refers to how one is engaged in the practices of the academic world that constitute what it means to be a professor – lecturing to students, grading papers, holding office hours, replying to emails, etc. (see Dreyfus 1991, 40–43). ‘Being-in,’ then, is not an accidental property that we may or may not have; it is essential to and constitutive of what it means to be human. And ‘world’ is not to be understood in the usual sense as a spatial container or the sum total of objects. The world, rather, is that “wherein [we] live” (Heidegger 1962, 83). It is the meaningful public setting of our lives.

Insofar as it is constitutive of human existence, ‘being-in’ suggests that we are not disinterested minds looking down on the world. We are already caught up in a concrete situation as we handle various tools, try to accomplish certain tasks, and engage in the lives of others. This not only means that we encounter things from a limited physical perspective and orientation; it also implies that we are always woven into the meanings and values of our sociohistorical context, and this shapes the way we make sense of things, including ourselves. Interpreting existence from this standpoint allows existentialists to dismantle a number of dualisms that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition. To illustrate this, we can turn to the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who offer the most robust and influential accounts of being-in-the-world.

Undoing dualisms

By giving primacy to being-in-the-world, existentialists challenge the subject-object model that characterizes much of modern philosophy. This model, expressed most famously in the work of Descartes, regards humans as self-contained subjects of experience trapped in their own minds and who are trying to discover whether or not their ‘inner’ perceptions and ideas accurately represent ‘outer’ objects in the world. This representational view creates skepticism or doubt about whether or not anything in the world – that is, outside the ‘I’ or consciousness – can be known with any certainty. The result is an explicit separation between mental and physical phenomena and creates two competing accounts in the modern epistemological tradition, ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ On the realist view, the world and material things are said to exist externally or independently of our minds; on the idealist view, the only things we know that exist are the ideas in our own minds. Underlying these two accounts is the problem of proving the existence of a mind-independent world if the only thing we can claim to know with any certainly is the contents of our own mind. After all, how could I possibly doubt that I perceive, desire, or feel something? The problem is whether or not what I perceive, desire, or feel actually represents or corresponds to things that exist in the world. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) will famously refer to the fact that modern philosophers have still not proven whether or not an external world exists as a ‘scandal.’ Existentialists will go further than Kant by arguing that the whole ‘inner/outer’ question is nothing more than a tired pseudo-problem that has bogged down philosophers for three hundred years. As Heidegger says, what is truly “scandalous” is not that philosophers have failed to adequately demonstrate the existence of an external or mind-independent world, “but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (1962, 249).

Existentialists reject both realist and idealist accounts by arguing that in our ordinary experiences there is no separation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ between self and world. On their view, these accounts distort the fact that we are, first and foremost, “already out there,” already engaged in the world and “opened toward beings” (Heidegger 1992, 167). Indeed, interpreting existence in terms of being-in-the-world suggests that the debate between realism and idealism is not even worthy of philosophical consideration (e.g., Guignon 1983). This is because the whole problem is based on an error that assumes human beings are basically self-enclosed minds who are trying to get clear about their beliefs of mind-independent objects. Against this view, existentialists argue that we are already enmeshed in the world in our everyday practices and that we already understand things in terms of their practical uses and purposes. I do not, for instance, first stare at the computer and reflect on its objective properties before I use it. As a professor involved in the acts and practices of the academic world, I already inhabit an understanding of the computer in terms of its practical function and use. My hands simply begin to press the keys, with my eyes leveled at the screen and my elbows resting on the desk. This kind of oriented and purposive activity is performed pre-reflectively, without the accompaniment of mental representation.

Interpreting existence in terms of situated understanding also allows existentialists to challenge the ‘fact–value’ dualism central to modern philosophy. On this view, there is a fundamental distinction drawn between what is objective or real in the physical universe versus what is subjective or existing only in our own minds. The aim of the philosopher or scientist is to bracket out ‘values,’ that is, the subjective colorings that we impose on things based on our own idiosyncratic tastes, cultural backgrounds, and sensory apparatuses in order to discover mind-independent ‘facts.’ What is factual or true, as we saw earlier, is usually interpreted in terms of what is quantifiable, pertaining to the measurable qualities of mass, weight, movement, and spatial-temporal location. The upshot of the fact-value dichotomy is that there can be no such thing as a ‘moral fact’ and that the meaning, significance, and purpose of things comes to be regarded as merely subjective or a sociocultural projection rather than qualities that adhere to the things themselves. Existentialists reject this picture by arguing that in our everyday dealings we never encounter quantifiable objects in isolation. Rather, the things we encounter are already bound up in contexts of meaning, and their significance is disclosed not through inner acts of consciousness but through our purposive involvements within this context. “[We] do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand,” says Heidegger, “we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world” (1962, 190–191).

In other words, although it may be an objective fact that my computer weighs a certain number of pounds, this is not how I encounter it in everyday life. It is not a brute object ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden); it is ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden), an available and functional tool that already means something to me because it is bound up with the purposive activities, projects, and equipment that constitute my identity as a professor. The computer matters to me, in this case, because I use it to communicate with students, to do research, to contact journal and book editors, and to compose manuscripts that I hope will be published one day, and these activities are ultimately performed in an effort to fill out my self-interpretation as a responsible, hard-working professor. What this reveals is that the fact–value distinction is itself derived from a more basic way of being in which we are bound up in shared contexts of meaning, and in these contexts fact and value are inseparable. We can unpack this account in more detail by turning to Heidegger's famous account of the ‘work-world’ (Werkwelt) in Being and Time.

The work-world

In section 15 of Being and Time, Heidegger offers an example of hammering in the workshop to show that the hammer makes sense only in relation to other things, to nails, boards, gloves, and to purposive human activities such as building a cabinet or framing a door. This means that the equipment that we use in ordinary situations is never understood in isolation. “Taken strictly,” says Heidegger, “there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (1962, 97). Equipment is meaningful only in relation to a practical context, and it is because we are already familiar with the context as a whole that the hammer can reveal itself to me as a hammer. With the workshop analogy, Heidegger is suggesting that when we use things in ordinary situations, we already embody an understanding of equipment, and this understanding is constituted not by staring at it from a standpoint of detachment, but by “seizing hold of it” (98), that is, by manipulating, handling, and using it. Indeed, in these kinds of situations mental reflection actually gets in the way of how we use and handle things. It is for this reason that Heidegger uses the word ‘comportment’ (Verhalten) to refer to ordinary human practices, because the word does not carry with it any mentalistic undertones (Dreyfus 1991, 50–51).

I do not, for instance, first reflect on the physical properties of the doorknob before I open the door. In the flow of my daily life, I simply reach out and open the door. In doing so, the objective, thing-like properties of the door “withdraw” or disappear (Heidegger 1962, 99). In fact, it is usually only when there is a breakdown in the flow of my workaday activities – when, for instance, the door does not open when I turn the knob – that the door becomes ‘unworldly’ (enweltlich), that is, it is pulled out of its relational context and obtrudes as an object. In these experiences of breakdown, the unusable door “just sits there; it shows itself as an equipmental thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand” (103). To think, then, that the mind is forever mediating our ordinary dealings with things is, for Heidegger, “an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are” (1982, 64). When things are functioning smoothly, we are not explicitly conscious or aware of the equipment we are using because we are already absorbed in the activity and in the meaningful context as a whole, and it is through this activity that our understanding of equipment is revealed. The act of opening the door, then, requires a pre-reflective understanding of a whole ‘referential totality,’ the purposive interconnection of hallways, lights, knobs, stairs, and so on that allows the door to reveal itself as a door. The upshot of this view is that intra-worldly things are organized and structured by the ways in which they relate to other things, and it is our involvement in this context that reveals how they make sense and matter to us in the ways that they do.

Here we can see how Heidegger's interpretation of the world as a unified context of meanings not only challenges the scientific view of the world as a spatiotemporal container or the sum total of objects; it also undermines the naturalistic assumption that the value of things is merely the subjective projection of our own individual tastes. For Heidegger, things already matter to us because they are expressions of the shared meanings we are engaged in. When I sit down at the table, for example, I do not initially encounter a flat, rectangular, or box-shaped object, I encounter something that matters to me and is already embedded in a web of social meanings. It is “a writing table, a dining table ... [The table where] the boys like to busy themselves … [The table where] that decision was made with a friend that time, where that work was written that time, where that holiday was celebrated that time” (Heidegger 1999a, 69). Merleau-Ponty will develop Heidegger's account of engaged and situated meaning, but instead of the equipmental relations of the work-world, he begins from the perceptions of the lived body.

The perceptual world

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes his project as a “return to the world of actual experience that is prior to the objective world” (1962, 45). Like Heidegger, he is critical of the standpoint of theoretical detachment because it tends to reduce the world to a spatiotemporal container and regards things not in terms of their mutual interdependence but as “partes extra partes” (73), as objects in a purely mechanical and external relationship with other objects. The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a geometric space or the sum total of objects. It is, rather, a “phenomenal field” (57), understood as the concrete background or setting in which we exist. The use of the word ‘field’ is important because it conveys the sense of the region or space of concern that we are involved in – like the field that we play soccer on – rather than something that is spread out below us (Langer 1989, 19). For Merleau-Ponty, it is the primacy of our situated perceptual involvements that makes it possible for us to adopt a scientific view of things in the first place. This is why he refers to being-in-the-world as a return to that world “which precedes [scientific] knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language” (1962, ix).

Where Merleau-Ponty differs from Heidegger is in the way he accesses the phenomenon of being-in-the-world. Heidegger focuses largely on ‘handiness’ and the relational projects of the work-world, whereas Merleau-Ponty focuses on the world of perception as the unified background that situates and orients our projects (Wrathall 2009, 38). This is why there is a ‘primacy of perception,’ for Merleau-Ponty, because what we first experience and what underlies all theoretical reflection is the world – as it is perceived. He refers to the perceived world “as the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (1964a, 13). Here the word ‘perception’ is obviously not being used in the way that it is ordinarily understood. It is not an atomistic collection of sensations that are constituted or linked together by some mental process. What we perceive, rather, is a structured and unified whole, where “the perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’ ” (1962, 4). This means that there is no such thing as an isolated or ‘pure impression.’ Sensations make sense only insofar as they relate to other sensations in this unified whole.

Here we see Merleau-Ponty's critique of perception from the perspective of the realism vs. idealism debate. The realists generally take the mind-independent world as given, which then causally stimulates the sense organs of the perceiver. The idealists generally take the mind as given and the rules and concepts therein constitute and organize the world of perception. For Merleau-Ponty, both views not only assume that perceptions are initially made up of discrete sensations, they also both adhere to the same detached scientific view of the world as a geometrical space composed of objects in causal interaction. It is because both views interpret experience through these ready-made frameworks that they are incapable of grasping what Merleau-Ponty calls “the living nucleus of perception” (1962, 38), which is always prior to any theoretical assumptions about the mechanisms of experience.

This is why Merleau-Ponty's project begins from one's own living perceptions, where I am “first of all surrounded by my body, involved in the world, [and] situated here and now” (37). Our limited perceptual orientation provides us with different aspects of a unified background or whole, which is the “horizon of horizons” (330) that underlies all of my experiences and, through my engagement with it, allows me to make sense of the things that I perceive. And this unity is not constituted or mediated by the mind or intellect. It is given in the immediacy of sense perception – in seeing, hearing, touching – itself. Thus, “I do not have one perception, then another, and between them a link brought about by the [mind].” Rather, “each perspective merges into the other” against this unified background (329–330; see Wrathall 2009, 38). On this account, things acquire meaning because they are internally related to each other and are perceived from a particular perspective within this unified context. The tree I see from my office window, for instance, immediately presents itself from a particular embodied perspective that is itself only one aspect of a structured and coherent whole. What I see is that particular oak tree I sit under for shade on warm days when I want to read outside. The meaning of the tree depends upon where it stands in a complex interrelation to other things, to the office window, the sidewalk, the seasons, the campus lawn, and my own situated identity as a middle-aged college professor.

Meaning, then, is not an idea or mental representation. The meaning or significance of things emerges spontaneously through our situated and involved perceptions, through how we are oriented in public space, and by using, manipulating, and holding things from within this fleshly orientation. Merleau-Ponty offers the example of a smoker using an ashtray to illustrate this point. The meaning or significance of the ashtray is not the idea of the ashtray in the smoker's mind, an idea that is accessible only to the intellect. The meaning, rather, is given “in person” or “in the flesh” (319–323), in the smooth bodily familiarity that the smoker exhibits as he or she skillfully uses, holds, and handles the ashtray. Against the traditional view, then, meaning is not the result of some causal ‘psycho-physiological mechanism’ that produces discrete sensations. It is, rather, already bound up in the structured and unified weave of body, consciousness, and world. The things we perceive and comport ourselves with every day are meaningful or significant to us because of their place in a referential context and the situated ways in which we use and handle things within this context.

The human being, then, cannot be understood as a combination of two substances, mind and body. It is a unitary phenomenon. Any conceptual relationship we have with things is itself grounded in and made possible by the seamless dialectical synergy between incarnate consciousness and the world. Merleau-Ponty will refer to this synergy in terms of a “bodily schema” (schéma corporel) (1964a, 5), a reference to the pre-reflective sensory motor grip that we have on the world. This is why Merleau-Ponty refers to his project as a ‘phenomenology of origins.’ It is one that returns us to the pre-conceptual experiences that underlie objective thought and brings to light the complex web of relations that endows things with the meanings that they have. The world, on this view, is not something separate from me. It is the ambiguous, pre-objective field that I am already woven into in my everyday perceptual acts; it is “where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xx).

This conception of being-in-the-world has helped to undercut one of the more dominant paradigms in contemporary Anglo­phone philosophy, the paradigm of ‘naturalism.’ Due to tremendous advances in the empirical sciences in the nineteenth-century in areas such as zoology, physiology, and evolutionary theory, and, more recently, in the emerging field of neuroscience, naturalism has become more or less a default setting in contemporary philosophy. This view generally entails two assumptions, one epistemological and one metaphysical. The epistemological assumption contends that the detached theoretical standpoint and the procedures of empirical science constitute the best way to gain knowledge of intra-worldly things, including ourselves. The metaphysical assumption contends that the world – including our own thoughts, beliefs, and desires – is constituted by physical objects in causal interaction (Ratcliffe 2009, 330). On this account, as the German scientist Karl Vogt proclaimed at the end of the end of the nineteenth century, “Thoughts stand in roughly the same relation to the brain as gall to the liver or urine to the kidneys” (cited in Guignon 1983, 41). But this naturalistic interpretation uncritically assumes the standpoint of theoretical detachment. As a result, it overlooks the experiential world that we are engaged in every day. In this world of practical involvements, we do not encounter objects in a neutral or impartial way. Indeed, we do not encounter ‘objects’ at all because the term itself entails a view of entities as being separate and distinct from us (as ‘subjects’). As a being-in-the-world we are already involved with things that make sense, that are already rich with meaning, and this meaning is disclosed not through theoretical or conceptual analysis but in how we pre-reflectively handle, use, and manipulate things in our everyday practices.

In this way, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show that the primary relationship we have with things is not one of detachment and objectivity but of situated and skillful involvement in a referential context of meanings, and it is a contextual involvement that can never be made theoretically explicit. This is why Heidegger will refer to the standpoint of naturalism as one that is “unworlded” (1992, 217) because it abstracts out the situated and purposive meanings of being-in-the-world. But this does not mean that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are anti-science. In fact, Merleau-Ponty draws extensively on empirical science and neurological case studies in developing his own account of perception and embodied agency. What they are critiquing, rather, is the uncritical privileging of methodological detachment and objectivity, a view that has been largely uncontested in modern philosophy since Descartes. As Heidegger says, “What is messing up the real problematic is not just naturalism as some people think, but the overall dominance and primacy of the theoretical” (cited in Sheehan 2006, 78). Such a standpoint invariably overlooks and takes for granted our embodied familiarity with things and the situated meanings of the experiential world that underlie all scientific thought. Merleau-Ponty makes this point explicit when he claims scientific thinking “must return to the ‘there is’ which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body … that actual body I call mine” (1964a, 160–161; cited in Langer 1989, xi).

Aspects of alterity

One of the more significant contributions of the existentialist account of being-in-the-world is that it makes it possible to engage perspectives that have been historically marginalized in the Western tradition. If, as the existentialist argue, we can make sense of things only from within a situated and embodied orientation, then this orientation must also be shaped by aspects of alterity or ‘otherness’ such as madness, racial and sexual difference, and physical disability. These aspects not only inform our embodied ways of being but they can also disrupt the seamless weave between self and world. Psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), for instance, drew on his own experiences of racism as a black man born and raised in the French colony of Martinique to expand on and critique Merleau-Ponty's conception of being-in-the-world. He argued that the ‘bodily schema,’ the pre-conscious sensory-motor grip on the world that we normally take for granted, is not present in the same way for colonized people (see Weate 2001). Fanon introduces what he calls the “historical-racial schema” that captures the black experience of confusion and alienation, a result of being forcibly “woven out” (1967, 111) of the shared meanings and practices that constitute the white European world. Because he does not belong to the European world, the colonized black man does not share the same pre-objective understanding that the European has. For Fanon, then, Merleau-Ponty's account of the bodily schema does not map onto the particularities of “the being of the black man” (110).

Fanon goes on to suggest that there is a deeper layer of alien­ation that he calls the “racial epidermal schema” (112). Drawing on Sartre's conception of ‘the look’ (le regard), Fanon describes how the black man's connection with the world can be disrupted when he is transformed into a brute object or thing by the judgmental gaze of the white European. In these situations, the black man feels immobilized and incapacitated, finding it difficult to stretch into the world, to handle equipment, and participate in public activities. The smooth, pre-conscious synergy that characterizes the European's existence is out of reach. He becomes imprisoned in a sphere of immanence, where his physical motility and sense of self are constrained by his skin color. He feels completely “dislocated [and] unable to be abroad with the other” (112). The result is a very different way of moving through the world and inhabiting lived space. The black man is inhibited; he embodies shame in the way he walks and carries his shoulders, in his lowered head and reluctance to make eye contact, and in his deferential way of speaking. Fanon refers to a feeling of “nausea” (116) to convey the sense of being trapped in the racial-epidermal schema that emerges from internalizing the objectifying and dehumanizing judgments of the European. He offers a personal example of how the racial-epidermal schema emerges in the simple statement of a white child pointing at him on a train and saying to his mother, “Look a Negro” (114). For Fanon, this statement already contains a host of sociocultural assumptions that transform him into an object, into a hostile, even bestial, thing. Fanon is suggesting that the bodily schema of those who are colonized is penetrated by a sense of alienation and objectification that culminates in the paralyzing experience of being “walled in” (117) by the color of their own skin.

The feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young (1949–2006), drawing on the work of Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, makes an analogous point regarding a woman's motility and sense of spatial orientation. Young argues that “there is a particular style of bodily comportment that is typical of feminine existence” that is often overlooked (2005, 31). These differences in comportment are not the result of any essential differences between man and woman in terms of biology or anatomy. Rather, they emerge from the oppressions of living in a patriarchal world, where the feminine is “defined as Other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence” (34). In such a world, men inhabit physical space with ease, confidently stretching into the world and reaching out to confront and overcome obstacles. Women, on the other hand, “often approach a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy” (34). For Young, this means that the unified and purposive flow that characterizes everyday being-in-the-world is embodied differently for women because they often experience themselves not as active expressions of existence but as “fragile things” or objects (39). Young makes her case by describing of how men and women inhabit space differently on the basis of physical movement and orientations.

The insights of Fanon and Young enrich the existentialist account of being-in-the-world in their attentiveness to how it can be disrupted or transformed by forms of social and political oppression related to race and gender. And their work has paved the way for other projects that have broadened and deepened our understanding of being-in-the-world. Philosophers such as Richard Zaner (1981), Drew Leder (1990), Fredrik Svenaeus (2001), and Kay Toombs (1992) have all addressed the breakdowns of being-in-the-world and the contraction of lived space from the perspectives of illness and physical disability. Judith Butler (1990), Henry Rubin (1998), and Jay Prosser (1998) have expanded on the work of Beauvoir and Young by developing accounts of how identity, embodiment, and performativity are shaped by a life-world that inhibits queer and transsexual ways of being. And the recent work of Thomas Fuchs (2005), Matthew Radcliffe (2009), and Kristen Jacobson (2006) have drawn on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to explore how mental disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, and anorexia nervosa can disrupt our sense of spatial orientation and motility and dim the affective meanings that we normally have when we are seamlessly enmeshed in the world.

From this discussion we can draw some general conclusions about what being-in-the-world means for existentialists. First, it is a reference to our concrete and situated existence that is always prior to detached theorizing. Against the disembodied ‘view from nowhere,’ existentialists argue that philosophy always begins from ‘somewhere,’ from within the particular embodied situation that we inhabit. Given this account, the world is not a geometrical space or the sum total of objects; it is the unified setting of our lives that we are already involved in. “We are [already] caught up in the world,” as Merleau-Ponty writes, “and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world” (1962, 5).

Second, the meaning of things is not generated by means of cognitive associations but through their relations to other things in the structured and unified whole that we are already engaged in. The reason things matter to us in the ways that they do is because of the way we understand and actively inhabit this web of relations. This means we never encounter things in isolation. Things make sense to us only in terms of their connections to other things and to our practical projects in general. Meaning, then, is not like the fixed and determinate properties of an empirical object. It is ‘ambiguous’ to the extent that it is shaped by what we do and where we are in the contextual interweaving of body, consciousness, and world.

Finally, insofar as we are caught up in the world, we embody a pre-reflective understanding that enables us to handle things and move through the world in a smooth and seamless way. This means that in the flow of everyday life, our actions are usually unaccompanied by mental intentions. Any reflective awareness of our perceptions and actions always presupposes a non-reflective, non-self-referential way of being-in-the-world (Dreyfus 1991, 54–59). Existentialists are not denying that deliberate, self-referential actions take place; they are simply making it clear that every day and for the most part they do not. In our ordinary activities we are not thinking about what we are doing because we already embody an understanding of the relational context that we are involved in.

Here, it is important to note the impact existentialist accounts of being-in-the-world have had on recent research in cognitive science. Philosophers have long assumed that human behavior must somehow be represented or mirrored in the mind or brain, but existentialists have shown that our everyday practices are usually performed without mental representation. Beginning with the groundbreaking work of Hubert Dreyfus (1972) and continuing in the current research of philosophers such as Sean Gallagher (2005) and Michael Wheeler (2005), existentialism is experiencing a renaissance in contemporary philosophy by showing how traditional accounts of human behavior are unable to explain how we can be skillfully engaged in the world in a way that we are not thematically conscious of. The core insight of being-in-the-world is that much of our ordinary activity can be described and understood without appealing to a self-referential mind or consciousness. Indeed, it reveals that it is largely through these embodied, pre-reflective acts that our projects, roles, identities, and equipment make sense to us. If this is the case, then the standard account of the human being as a self-enclosed mind set over and against objects is mistaken because we are, first and foremost, a situated way of being that is already engaged in contexts of meaning, and it is this fluid engagement that allows things to matter to us in the ways that they do. What this shows is that existentialism is not only alive and well as a significant force in current debates in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, but, as an intellectual movement, it was also well ahead of its time.

Suggested reading

Dreyfus, H. (1991). Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Guignon, C. B. (1983). Heidegger and the problem of knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Weate, J. (2001). Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and the difference of phenomenology. In R. Bernasconi (ed.), Race (pp. 169–183). Oxford: Blackwell.

Wrathall, M. (2009). Existential phenomenology. In H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), A companion to phenomenology and existentialism (pp. 31–41). Oxford: Blackwell.