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BEING-IN-THE-WORLD AS FOLLOWING-THE-HORIZONS

Abstract
According to Dreyfus, the depth of Heidegger’s difference from Husserl lies in their divergent approaches to the thematization of being-in-the-world. Dreyfus portrays Husserl as a proponent of cognitivism, for whom the subject’s relation to the world is mediated by mental content, and contrasts this with Heidegger’s thematization of everyday absorbed coping. Dreyfus’ position has faced significant critique in contemporary debates. However, this paper suggests that scholars may overlook one of his possible insights. Despite the appeal to the sphere of passivity and pre-objective affections, Husserl’s phenomenological language remains bound to describing being-in-the-world as being-directed-towards-objects, while Heidegger avoids the object-centeredness in his thematization. This paper aims to clarify this point of tension between them, as revealed by Dreyfus, by employing a different criterion — specifically, their treatment of the distinction between the visible and the invisible. It argues that the rigidity with which the boundary between the visible and the invisible is postulated determines how object-centered the language of phenomenological description becomes. To emphasize this point, the paper examines four figures of being-in-the-world: Husserl’s “being-directed-towards-the-object”, Heidegger’s “dealing-with-something”, Gadamer’s “being-situated”, and the figure of “following-the-horizons”, which emerges from them. With each subsequent figure, the demarcation boundary between the visible and the invisible becomes increasingly blurred, leading to the transition from the language of objects to the language of fused horizons. As a result, this paper attempts to introduce a phenomenological thematization of being-in-the-world that places the concept of the horizon at its center and employs the language of horizonal interwovenness. This kind of phenomenological thematization is referred to as horizonal phenomenology.

Keywords
being-in-the-world, horizon, phenomenology, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Dreyfus.

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