is not a being. Strictly speaking, it is not at all something to which Dasein could comport itself—and yet we speak of a relation to world. How and what is world here?
a) The concept of world in ancient philosophy and in early Christianity
In the decisive beginnings of ancient philosophy something essential already shows itself.11 Κόσμος refers not so much to the beings themselves that press upon us and surround us, nor to all these beings taken together, but signifies, rather, the “state,” that is, the how in which beings are, and indeed as a whole.
Κόσμος οὗτος thus designates not this region of beings as delimited from another but rather this “world” of beings as distinct from another “world” of the same beings.12 The world already underlies every possible fragmenting of beings; such fragmenting does not destroy the world; that which is ἐν τῷ ἑνὶ κόσμῳ13 was not first thrust together into a region but rather is pervasively determined in advance by world as a whole. Finally, a further essential feature of the κόσμος shows itself in Heraclitus: ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι, τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι.14 “To those who are awake there belongs a world that is one and common, each who is sleeping, however, is turned to his own world.” Here world is placed in relation to fundamental ways in which Dasein exists. When we are awake, beings show themselves in a thoroughgoing uniformity that is accessible to everyone in an average way. In sleep, the world of beings is one that is exclusively individuated with respect to each Dasein at the time.
From these brief indications several things already become visible: 1. World means more a how of the being of beings rather than beings themselves. 2. This how determines beings as a whole in each instance. 3. This determining is in a certain way always antecedent. 4. That which antecedently determines beings as a whole in their how is relative to fundamental ways of existence of human Dasein. World belongs to Dasein in some way, even though it embraces all beings in their entirety.
Certain though it is that this understanding of what is referred to by κόσμος—an understanding that is not very explicit as yet and more dawning—can indeed be compressed into the said meanings, it is equally indisputable that the word at the same time always functions as a naming of the beings themselves that are experienced in such a how (in the way that “flow,” for example, names the
11. Karl Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1916), 174f. and 216n.
12. Cf. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Griechisch und Deutsch, 4th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922), vol. 1, 151, Parmenides, fragment 2; 187ff., Melissus, fragment 7.
13. Ibid., 402f., Anaxagoras, fragment 8.
14. Ibid., 95, Heraclitus, fragment 89.