The theme we are to analyze is man in the world. The first thing to do is to define this object in a purely descriptive way, as an objective guideline. If we start from man as a fundamental term of the relation and take him objectively as part of nature, as a living creature in his manifold reactions, what belongs to him essentially, with no doubt whatsoever, is a corporeality which (as for all animals) is at his disposal and through which he is in continual interaction with the things of his environment. In the idea of embodiment we encounter one of the essential limits of the possible variation of our concept of man; I can lend him a fantastic corporeality, as has been done, in the way of a possible variation, by authors of fantasy, from Lucian to Swift and Wells; but I cannot think a human being without embodiment and bodily communication with the surrounding world. And there is still more to my consciousness of man. The body as something at our disposal is inherent in the essence of the animal in general; in our consciousness of man, however, this aspect is a mere component. It is a fundamental component of human finitude, since it is on the basis of his corporeality that man stands in causal interaction (broadly speaking, leaving aside philosophical theories) with the things of his environment that limit him. The things of the human environment are, however, not only causal agencies which limit man, they are also understood by man as independent causal agencies, i.e., as things; man is not merely a thing among other things, as can still be said of animals (except perhaps for the highest primates); man is above all aware of his situation, he understands his own finitude. Finitude grounded in interaction is a set situation, though its actual face keeps changing; man as man cannot step out of it. This constant situation can be further determined as a consciousness of our dependence on things and an interest in things. Things themselves are originally perceptibilities on the paths of our interests or of our acts guided by interests. Their being for us is not, however, exhausted by this function in our lives. They do not cease to exist, their function once performed, but remain in their independent being at the disposal both of our own and of others’ repeated acts, as long as they are not eliminated through change or consumption. In addition, their being for us is not something hanging in the void: things refer to other and yet other connections, which can be connections of origin, of purpose, of mere contiguity, or of temporal succession. When I turn from one thing to another, what is is not lost for me—it does not become unavailable; on the contrary, there remains a fundamental connection within which all things find their place, and which “is there” even if I take no notice of it and explicate nothing from it. This connection, which is nothing determinate, no real thing, is nonetheless always present and operative in life: if not for it, we could have singular impressions, perceptions, thoughts, memories, but there would not be the so to say automatic linkage which binds them into a unified whole. If not for this unitary, unique whole, the phantasms of dreams, the representations of fantasy, and so on, would not be distinguishable from carefully observed realities, nor would we have the possibility of ordering and unifying the different phases of life. In short, we would not have that which makes us say that both we ourselves and other things are in the world: we would have individual things, but we would not have the world.
We are faced here with a peculiar fact. In our attempt at a descriptive analysis of the relation of man and world, we have started from one term of the relation and come to the conclusion that it can be characterized proprio modo only on the basis of the other: man is not only a finite being, part of the world, but also a being which has the world, which has knowledge of the world. On the other hand, the world we encounter here is not simply the totality of existing things but first of all something pertaining to the very essence of humanity, to the form of our existence among things: a function which makes it possible for us to have such a growing reality in our consciousness. This is the function which first allows us to possess a unitary reality, the universe of all that is. Does not this function, encompassing the possibility of the universe, deserve, then, to be called “the world” in the most original sense?
Man can now be characterized anew as a being having the world, a being who is at the same time bodily contained in the world and lives in contact, through his corporeality, with other objects of this world. He lives in the world primarily with other subjects, first of all with his fellow men and those closest to him. Man is not characterized solely by the above-mentioned features but also, especially, by his ability to understand other living beings as well and to be fully conscious of this understanding. This trait of conscious co-living with others has been traditionally emphasized as a distinguishing feature, essential for humanitas. Human life is not a life lived in and for itself; it is a living with others and with regard to them. At the same time the world of our actual lived-experiencing is common to us all, it is, if not the milieu of every activity of human life in particular, then a milieu actually accessible to various individuals to a varying extent and, in principle, intersubjectively, equally accessible to all. But here we must shift over to a more concrete analysis.
It is important to observe that the world, in this original sense of the term, announces itself in a whole series of concrete phenomena, that it is not an abstract unifying function, functioning in the same way in all cases and for all subjects. The unity of the original world is the unity of a style of experience, of a familiar “and so on” in the manifold of impressions, a style indicated by that with regard to which things are understood, i.e., by our interests; and since these interests are not purely individual, but rather take the form of the various communities we belong to, our world, as a concrete phenomenon, is the world of the life-community of which we are a part. The world of the townsman is different from that of the countryman, the world of the primitive different from that of the civilized, the world of the coastal dweller different from that of the inlander. Despite this basic changefulness of the world as a concrete phenomenon, it should be emphasized that it does not change in the same way as empirical objects; the world is relatively constant, and its changes cannot be directly observed like those of individual things. Changes in our world take place unthematically, without our conscious active participation; the eye of reflection alone is in a position to grasp and comprehend them in recollection. For that matter, the grasping of the changes of the world itself, which take place, for instance, in moving on from one age of life to the next, is a complex phenomenological problem, which re-poses, in a particularly difficult form, the whole complex of questions having to do with remembrance.
As concerns the now following description, let it be stressed once again that it is not to be viewed as if it were describing determinate, existing things in our environment, nor as a description of their essential thing-structure, but rather as a description of the specific phenomenon of being-in-the-world, which, for common-sense reflection, is at first hopelessly concealed by individual things and the objective structure peculiar to them. One could almost say that the description of this essential “within” is a description of the perspective of the universe, if the notion of perspective were not suggestive of an excessive “subjectivity,” a non-originarity of the phenomenon. being-in-the-world is a perspective, but of a kind which first makes it possible for things to be what they are—a perspective, too, which extends beyond things and prior to them.
The structure of the world has also something else in common with perspective, inasmuch as it runs outward from a determinate center into indeterminate depth. It is part of the essence of our world to have as its central core the region with which we are most familiar, where we feel safe and there is no need for any discoveries, where every expectation has already been or can always be fulfilled in a typical way; we call this part of the world home. Home is not merely our individual home; it includes community as well, with a variety of typical structures based on the various and variously intermeshed interests of the social groups that partake in it: the narrow family home with its life-functions of everyday close contact and order, the broader home of looser social relations which one feels more or less tied to and understands on the basis of traditions and of one’s own personal interests. This more broadly conceived home is then differentiated into the domains or worlds of various professional occupations in which everyone is also, in various ways, “at home,” and out of which he looks upon the others; yet, in a sense, all these human occupations, whose function we become accustomed to within our community, belong to our broader home. The shading of the home-world, running from family to locality, community, region, nation, state, etc., recedes into the indeterminate in a mixture of known and unknown, near and far.
Yet home is not (as the analogy with perspective might wrongly suggest) a center determined by my momentary position. Home is not where I happen to be; on the contrary, I can myself be far from home; home is a refuge, a place where I belong more than anywhere else; it is impossible to experience more than one home at the same time with the same intensity. Home is the part of the universe which is the most pervaded with humanity; things are here, so to say, the organs of our life, they are pragmata, which we always know roughly what to do with, or at least what it is that others do with them, or that they do do something with them; within this comprehension, they are unsurprising and inconspicuous. Inconspicuousness is a specific feature of home, toward which it tends as toward its (albeit infrequently achieved) telos. At the very center of home, there is not nature, which makes itself known here merely as “that out of which” and “that in which” (phenomena such as night and day, the four seasons, etc., have their place here). Nature, in its proper and original sense as physis, is thus not the universe of what is but rather a certain layer, a stratum, which is not central, and which allows for shading and gradations of various sorts: the nearest environment, a so to say homely nature, the nature of one’s particular region, and so on . . .
The boundaries of the more remote home extend indefinitely and vanish in the undomesticated and the alien, in the distance. The distant and alien also admits of gradations and has its own specific modalities. In order to avoid the impression of a false opposition, it should, however, be stated straightaway that distance does not have a character of absolute unfamiliarity; rather, it is a specific mode of oriented comprehension, in contrast with home. The world is a whole from which no phenomenon escapes completely and which admits nowhere of radical incomprehensibility. The distant and alien (the two go together essentially) are such that surprise is possible at every step, objects and people behave or can at every step behave differently from what we are used to at home.
There are two principal modes of the alien-distant: the human and the extrahuman, and, within the extrahuman, the living and the lifeless. The human alien has to do, for instance, with the comprehension of an exotic community as human, although its relationships to the things of its environment and to its fellow men are incomprehensible to us: we cannot ourselves experience these relationships, and the type of action within the community is unfamiliar, its occupations and, consequently, its articulation of the objects of general use are not those we know; it can be that the overall relationship to life and reality is different, surprising, unexpected. This is how we stand toward exotic peoples, however high or low their cultural differentiation: we understand them only from without, intellectually; and yet this “incomprehensibility” is a contrastive kind of comprehension, an understanding capable of systematic organization without ceasing to be understanding of the alien. We may be able to feel with these people and live their life in certain very general respects, but never taken as a whole—unless we alienate or estrange ourselves from our own former way of life.—As a matter of fact, human strangeness as a possible foil is always somewhere on the outskirts of our home-world—e.g., the strangeness of fantasy, the strangeness of fabled worlds, situated somewhere far away, with a style of experience different from that of home. The fantastic exists here by virtue of a gradual modification of the style of our experience of reality within one and the same world; it represents a sort of “peripheral world”—possible, unknown, unexplored. Let us add immediately that the overall situation of purely fantastic worlds, forming spheres of their own, is entirely different; the relation of such fictional worlds to the one fundamental world of reality is a specific, complex problem.
A heightened strangeness prevails in our relationship to living nature, unless its creatures are counted among the purely domesticated, pragmatically understood components of home (but even in this case there can be outbreaks of strangeness). Animals, with their life-relations, are not just perceived things, nor are they simple citizens of our human world. Animals impose on us their own animal relationship to us—a relationship of attack and defense; it is within this narrow frame that we encounter them (speaking of non-domesticated animals), only here and in a few fundamental organic functions that we originally understand them. And nature goes beyond the sphere of life in general—a purely alien, uncomprehending, ruthless, so to say formless and threatening nature; no longer nature as a domain fashioned to our needs, a storehouse, or a homeland, but rather something uncontrollable, infinitely strong and chaotic, which threatens life with disaster: the boundless indifference and force of matter which is the ultimate terminus ad quem of our world in its opening out from home into the alien.
This first dimension of the world, as outlined in the foregoing in its tension between home and alien, is, however, but one of several; there are, in addition, yet other world-dimensions—first and foremost, the temporal dimension, very richly differentiated in our consciousness, especially in connection with the home-world. Time is for us the unified domain of what is gone by, what is just now, and what is to come, in each of which regions certain articulations can be distinguished. Past, present, and future encompass and set the rhythm of the whole of our life-functions and occupations. Each life-function, every stage of our activity has its time; temporal phrasing co-determines our style of life, while the whole of this articulation rests on the periodical course of natural time with its regular succession of day and night, the seasons, etc. Not only our day is then articulated, by the regular course of life, into a time for rest, for work, for food, for fun, etc., but the same principle applies to the different periods of life: youth, maturity, and old age are defined according to the principle of a time for . . .
Uniformly and unchangingly articulated time gives us the present in a broad sense, the boundaries of which are variously subject to shifting: we speak of the present from a personal standpoint, meaning thereby the regular shaping of our actual life, but also as concerns the community and its great functions, e.g., the present-day Czechoslovak national economy or the present state of Czech literature. As far as we are concerned, the past world no longer shows complete unity of style with the present: we feel it in contrast, passing gradually, though with some breaks, into indeterminacy. Among the most important places of passage is the connection between generations; we do not take over entirely the world of our fathers, which for us always belongs to the past. There are, however, certain common tasks that subsist in the succession of generations and continue to phrase time—henceforth in a historical way. Our home-world is a world of traditions and impulses passed and carried on. The historical dimension has a fantastic ultimate edge in myth, which is thus part of the inventory of the naive world, pushed into the background only by scientific consciousness.
Natural time has a much poorer structure; just as animal life is feebly articulated in comparison with human life, the same goes for animal time, though it does have the same character of a time for something; purely objectively natural time is not of this type, but is a simple one-dimensional succession.
And there is yet another dimension that forms a necessary and essential part of our being-in-the-world and should at least be mentioned if we wish to concretize somewhat the development of this problematic. It is a dimension that could be called subjective, since it has to do with our general life-feeling in a given state of affairs. The whole of being appears to us, always, in a certain mood-coloring; though the mood is in fact always our own inner “state,” it colors surrounding things at the same time, so that our objective environment, too, seems to partake of it. As we have already seen, there are entire regions of the world that have a characteristic mood-coloring, and certain moods come on us at the sight of certain things, particularly those laden with memories.
Moods and “states” are dynamic: it is part of their essence to be from something and for something; every mood is a mood for a certain activity, be it idleness. The possibility of our activities lies in our moods and “states” (in “how we are,” or “how we are doing”). Each and every life is then characterized by a scale of moods, of which some alternate and periodically supplant one another in evident connection with our organic needs, while others have to do rather with the overall course of our life. Affective, or “mood” life has always a rich structure, it is never simple; one should speak rather of a dominant than of an exclusive mood—even deepest grief has its ups and downs, even here life goes through moments of satisfaction, and conversely every joy is surrounded by a horizon of pain and sorrow.
There are moods in which we are practically incapable of normal life-functions, moods that rob us of our life; there are indifferent and everyday moods in which life can function mechanically; finally, there are moods that open up a distinctive possibility of life to us. In grasping these, we seek to organize our entire life in accordance, we subordinate our life to an essential passion as determining telos. These are the moods in which the most essential human activities are born, from which creative life emerges; in them we relate to the whole of life and of the world, they maintain alive our marveling at the whole, a sort of pre-thematic comprehension of the fact of being-in-the-world.