Britannica Sources used in this answer

How did Martin Heidegger describe human beings as beings-in-the-world?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Fragment of a Roman fresco showing Socrates seated and draped in a white robe, with Greek text above, on a red background with visible cracks. — Philosophical anthropology Socrates, Roman fresco, 1st century bce; in the Ephesus Museum, Selçuk, Turkey.

In his seminal work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger rejected the traditional Cartesian view of the human individual as a "thinking subject" or "mind" isolated from the material world. Instead, he proposed that human beings are fundamentally Dasein—a term literally meaning "being-there"—which he characterized as "being-in-the-world".1234

Heidegger described being-in-the-world as a state of already being caught up in, involved with, and committed to other individuals and things. This concept suggests that human existence is not defined by internal mental states or representations of the world, but by an active, disclosive engagement with it. As Dasein, the human individual serves as the "locus" of Being, the metaphorical place where entities are uncovered and show themselves as they are.213

Furthermore, Heidegger emphasized that this unitary conception of the human being avoids sequestering human functions into a "mind" or "body-cum-soul" compound. Instead, he viewed Dasein as being "out ahead of itself," characterized by an anticipatory temporality and a practical involvement that is ontologically more basic than abstract reasoning.132