Understanding the World Holistically: Heidegger’s Practical Philosophy and the Rethinking of Transcendentality

Abstract

Abstract: For Heidegger, world is constitutively bound up with human being’s way of being. Yet after Being and Time he criticizes an excessively one-sided pragmatic reading of his concept of world, insisting that world is more than a referential totality of use involvements, tools, or existential projections. This article examines how Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis should be understood to promote both a practical orientation as well as a more transcendental dimension. The centrality of praxis in Heidegger’s work will not be contested. What will be explored is whether what Heidegger calls “worldliness” or the “phenomenon of world” can be reduced to contexts of use relations or social practices and projects. The argument is made that world, for Heidegger, should be understood as an open space of meaning emergence through which diverse activities, some of which are practical, first become accessible to the human being. The claim will be advanced that world is more than the human being’s disclosive understanding and that an overly pragmatic interpretation circumvents the surpassive dimension of world.