“Heidegger knew that we are always outside, weathering the storms”:
[W]e inhabit [the world] as that in and through which our lives take place and make sense. The world is not a container but the meaningful context in which we dwell. We are in the world in the way that someone is in love or in business.
It is in order to deny our facticity and its associated vulnerability that we want to think of ourselves as indoors. A sovereign, self-enclosed substance is not tied to the destiny of anything else. It does not depend on anything in order to be but exists all by itself. Thinking of ourselves in this way is a self-protective strategy. It purports to make us invulnerable: Deus Invictus, God invincible and unbound.
We are not and cannot be Deus Invictus but must be – if I may put it this way – Homo Implexus, the human being entwined and entangled. The truth is that we are vulnerable beings who live outdoors, amidst other things and at stake in them. To pretend otherwise is to deny the sober truth of your essential finitude as being-in-the-world.
So, if we try to pretend that we dwell indoors, we may win a faux feeling of invincibility. But we lose something more important: our openness to being moved. As Franz Kafka put it: ‘You can withhold yourself from the sufferings of the world; … but perhaps this very act of withholding is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.’
We can now see how being-in-the-world is like being in love. Not only is being in love a way of inhabiting a context of meaning, it is a way of allowing my life to become entangled in what is not up to me.