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.
There is a specific positive style of feminine body comportment and movement, which is learned as the girl comes to understand that she is a girl. The young girl acquires many subject habits of feminine body comportment — walking like a girl, tilting her head like a girl, standing and sitting like a girl, and so on. … The more a girl assumes her status as feminine, the more she takes herself to be fragile and immobile and the more she actively enacts her own body inhibition. (43)
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.
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.