The world is the unfolding complex of actual and possible relationships that matter to human beings. In this complex of relationships, human beings essentially find and define themselves, others, and the things around them, while also being defined by the latter. The world is not to be confused with any entity or thing within it. Since taking something to be is typically construed as convertible with taking it to be an entity, Heidegger cautions against claiming that the world is. In order to ward off the possibility of construing the existence (the ontological status) of this complex with that of anything else (especially things, tools, objects within it as well as the subject-matters of any particular science), Heidegger early on coins the neologism “worlding” (welten), to which he frequently has recourse later (GA56/57:73; GA9:164/126; GA7:181/PLT 177; GA12:26/PLT 203; GA5:30f/22f; GA38:168/140). This verbalization of Welt is meant to indicate how the world distinctively moves or unfolds in a way that shapes and is shaped by the lived history of human existence. In Being and Time Heidegger introduces “being-in-the-world” as an operative metonym for “being-here” (Dasein) to capture this key understanding of the world.
In contrast to the kinds of physical occurrences investigated by natural scientists or the singular events chronicled by historians, the world is part and parcel of human existence as the underlying condition for those studies. For this very reason, the world’s unfolding cannot be adequately described in their terms. So, too, the world is not to be confused with nature or with any mere collection of particular entities (GA29/30:504f.). It is instead the way that human beings exist, i.e., meaningfully and historically. To exist or, as Heidegger also puts it, to be here (da) is for me (the respective me) to be always already in a world, disclosing it in two coinciding (but hardly coincidental) senses. To exist is to project a complex of relationships on the basis of that complex into which I have been thrown, the complex in which I find myself – more or less attuned – from the outset. Again, in this process, the world coincides with the “thrown projection” that makes up my human historical existence or, in Heidegger’s jargon, the being of Dasein. As such, the world is ground zero for the analysis of human existence.
The world is thus not something that in any sense happens independent of human existence. It is not some superordinate being that, like the heavens above us, goes about its business, dwarfing us but also quite oblivious to us. To the contrary, there is only a world inasmuch as human beings form worlds. Yet a world is neither exhausted by our projections nor merely a useful placeholder for actual and possible relationships. Like being itself, the world is not any particular entity. Instead, it is an ongoing source of the meaning and content of entities. While traditional ontology is oriented to the meaning of “being” found in nature (hence, metaphysics), Heidegger aims to provide a fundamental ontology oriented to the sense of “being” that is characteristic of Dasein. Given the worldly character of Dasein, the problem of appropriately determining the sense of “being” becomes the problem of interpretation of the world. Accordingly, in 1928–29 Heidegger observes that “the problem of being unfolds into the
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