Being-in-the-world / always already

Dasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to.

Put simply Heidegger: we are never detached observers. We are always already "in the world": doing things, caring about things, living among others, with nowhere outside to step back to.

The subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists.

Put simply Heidegger: the old puzzle of how a mind reaches the world assumes we could stand outside the world and look at it. We cannot. We are already inside, so there is no gap to bridge and the puzzle disappears.

In his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it.

Put simply In an early work, Sartre rejects Husserl's method of setting aside our belief that the world is real. Following Heidegger, he says we cannot: we are always already caught up in the world.

In the text In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37; Williams and Kirkpatrick translation), Sartre applies Husserl's reduction to the ego itself: "the transcendent I must fall before the stroke of phenomenological reduction".

Following Heidegger, Kojève replaces talk of nature or the world with le donné, the given: we are always already caught up in it, so no uninvolved standpoint exists.

Put simply Kojève, following Heidegger, speaks of "the given" instead of "nature" or "the world". We are always already caught up in it, so nobody can stand outside it as an uninvolved observer.

Nobody is thrown into an empty world. For Heidegger, other people belong to Dasein's situation from the outset, so existing in the world already means existing alongside others.

Put simply Heidegger: you never start out alone. From the moment you exist, other people are already part of your world.

For Shore, making sense of the twentieth century requires history, and Heidegger supplies it: an account of historicity built on different lines from Hegel's.

Put simply Shore: to make sense of the twentieth century we need a way of thinking about history, and Heidegger offers one: an account of how humans exist within history ("historicity"), built differently from Hegel's.

To be in the world from the outset is to be responsible for it from the outset; that responsibility goes everywhere with Dasein, an ontological trait, not a contingent tie.

Put simply Patočka: because we find ourselves in the world from the start, we are responsible for it from the start. That responsibility goes everywhere with us; it is part of what a human being is, not a chance tie.