ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger regarded the impulse to demonstrate the reality of an external world a moot philosophical point. Arguments to establish the existence of consciousness were likewise discredited. To Heidegger, and the phenomenologists before him, the reciprocity of consciousness and world was a given. The task of philosophy, then, was to describe what is presented to consciousness. Heidegger’s analysis of existence in Being and Time was the first indication that any description of consciousness must include a world. In a manner of speaking, Heidegger painted a picture of the habitat of consciousness. Dasein, Heidegger’s peculiar rendering of human existence, is attached to an environment, an Umwelt as Heidegger called it. Moreover, that Dasein realizes its proximity to entities within this world through a disposition of concern and care dramatizes the inherent attachment with which consciousness is predisposed. Embodied in this way consciousness entails a spatial and historical determination. Heidegger’s resolve was to demonstrate that this special form of spatialization was explicitly temporal.
