Umwelt and Welt

Although this state of Being is one of which use has made in biology, especially since K. von Baer, one must not conclude that its philosophical use implies ‘biologism’. For the environment is a structure which even biology as a positive science can never find and can never define, but must presuppose and constantly employ. Yet, even as an a priori condition for the objects which biology takes for its theme, this structure itself can be explained philosophically only if it has been conceived beforehand as a structure of Dasein. Only in terms of an orientation towards the ontological structure thus conceived can ‘life’ as a state of Being be defined a priori, and this must be done in a privative manner.(1) Ontically as well as ontologically, the priority belongs to Being-in-the world as concern.   -- Being and Time, Heidegger

Heidegger has been defining Dasein "privatively".   He disassociates the study of being per se from ethnology, biology, and other sciences because (if I understand correctly) these things are concerned with the physical properties of man, and he is concerned with the "world" of Dasein, the being there.

At the same time he recognizes that physical and social sciences may help round out the picture, if one does not rely on them reductively.   He says that biology, even as a positive science, can never define or find environment (umwelt?) but must presuppose and constantly employ it.   This seems to me, incidentally, to put the problem with scientism in a nutshell. 

I found this article called Heidegger and the Question of Biology which, though I haven't read it, seems to connect Heidegger to Aristotle.     Right after that, I found this Heidegger quote

Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.

This reminds me of Aristotle's:

the soul is in a way all existing things

 A gloss by Aquinas:

This is the perfection of a knower insofar as he knows; for something is known by a knower by reason of the fact that the thing known is, in some fashion, in the possession of the knower. Hence it is said in The Soul that the soul is "in some manner, all things," since its nature is such that it can know all things.

Aquinas also says:

Intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent beings in that the latter possess only their own form; whereas the intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower. ( ST I, 14, 1.)

What Heidegger said about biology reminded me of what I read in Pieper a long time ago...

"Relationship, in the true sense, joins the inside with the outside; relationship can only exist where there is an "inside", a dynamic center, from which all operation has its source and to which all that is received, all that is experienced, is brought."

 Pieper mentions Uexkull's concept of "umwelt"  vs "welt" where Heidegger mentioned Karl von Baer ....  a few comments on "worldhood" here , and there is a review of a book on Heidegger, Uexkull, Merleau-Ponty and other's animal environments here.   And here is another document on The Biological and Philosophical Implications of Jakob von Uexküll's Time-plans which mentions Husserl, Bergson, etc. 

This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”.

In the question of the meaning of Being there is no ‘circular reasoning’ but rather a remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ which what we are asking about (Being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of an entity. Here what is asked about has an essential pertinence to the inquiry itself, and this belongs to the ownmost meaning [eigensten Sinn] of the question of Being. This only means, however, that there is a way—perhaps even a very special one—in which entities with the character of Dasein are related to the question of Being. But have we not thus demonstrated that a certain kind of entity has a priority with regard to its Being?

Physical objects are "worldless" -- animals have an umwelt or environment -- people have a world, but not in a solipsistic sense (or at least, it seems so far to be different from being locked into one's own subjective universe -- it's actually sort of the opposite, because a lot of what he seems to be saying is specifically opposed to Cartesian dualism).

As an existentiale, ‘Being alongside’ the world never means anything like the Being-present-at-hand-together of Things that occur. There is no such thing as the ‘side-by-side-ness’ of an entity called ‘Dasein’ with another entity called ‘world’. Of course when two things are present-at-hand together alongside one another,(1) we are accustomed to express this occasionally by something like ‘The table stands “by” [“bei”] the door’ or ‘The chair “touches” [“berührt”] the wall’. Taken strictly, ‘touching’ is never what we are talking about in such cases, not because accurate reexamination will always eventually establish that there is a space between the chair and the wall, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them should be equal to zero. If the chair could touch the wall, this would presuppose that the wall is the sort of thing ‘for’ which a chair would be encounterable.(2) 

An entity present-at-hand within the world can be touched by another entity only if by its very nature the latter entity has Being-in as its own kind of Being—only if, with its Being-there [Da-sein], something like the world is already revealed to it, so that from out of that world another entity can manifest itself in touching, and thus become accessible in its Being-present-at-hand. When two entities are present-at-hand within the world, and furthermore are worldless in themselves, they can never ‘touch’ each other, nor can either of them ‘be’ ‘alongside’ the other.

I am understanding probably about 30% of what I am reading (at best!) but it's still like a bit of a light.  For so long I've tried to steer the way between classical/medieval realism and Cartesian dualism.   I never really could get my mind around "the soul is in a certain way all things."  Sure, I understood how I can in a certain way perceive something like a super-galaxy that is almost infinitely bigger than me, but still small enough to fit conceptually into my mind.  But it seems there is way more to it than that.  This seems like a possible way through, though I am just at the beginning of the maze. 

Heidegger talks about "concern" as a dispersal of Dasein. 

Dasein’s facticity is such that its Being-in-the-world has always dispersed [zerstreut] itself or even split itself up into definite ways of Being-in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following examples: having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining... All these ways of Being-in have concern(1) as their kind of Being—a kind of Being which we have yet to characterize in detail. Leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing, taking a rest—these too are ways of concern; but these are all deficient modes, in which the possibilities of concern are kept to a ‘bare minimum’.(2) 

 This seems rather to go back to what Pieper said about relationship, and makes me wonder if Charlotte Mason (in her "Education is a science of relations"  read Bergson (Heidegger came later, though Husserl was a contemporary of CM's).   I know she read William James, who was influenced by Bergson.     Oh, it looks like she did. 

M. Bergson makes the happy distinction between word memory and mind memory, which, once the force of it is realised, should bring about sweeping changes in our methods of education.

I wonder if some of CM's thoughts on atmosphere or environment were philosophically oriented, as well.  A question for another time.