Being-in-one's-World

The definitive Phenomenological concept of lived experience is 'Being-in-the-World', pioneered by Heidegger, and adopted, with modifications, by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The main ambition of the concept is to challenge the traditions that conceive Subject and World either as essentially isolated, or as either one derived from the other, by presenting them as fundamentally connected. For all three, the subject of experience is 'in' the world as the focus of a concatenation of elements that constitute the world. However, for all three, this world is also revealed, which makes locating a subject 'in' what is revealed to it difficult. Consequently, each, in his own way, treats the revelation as an anonymous, or even a subjectless, event, within which some amorphous given, e. g. Being-in-itself, is polarized into subject and world. But such an adjustment does not touch upon a further problem with the original formulation. If worldhood is comprised of a concatenation of items with a subject as its focal point, and, if, as all three agree, a plurality of subjects exist, it follows that a plurality of worlds exist. Of the three, Sartre seems to be the only one troubled by the conclusion, but he has to abandon Phenomenology, in favor of Dialectical Reason, in order to demonstrate the possiblity of the unification of worlds. The need for such a re-orientation underscores that the concept 'Being-in-the-World is beyond the scope of Phenomenology, and that the more accurate formulation of its concept of lived experience is 'Being-in-one's-World.