Being In and Toward the World

Merleau-Ponty's signature formulation of the human being's relation to world — the être au monde of Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald Landes as "being in and toward the world" to capture the directional-inhabiting complexity of the French preposition au. Not simply Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein ("being-in-the-world") translated into French; not "being-toward-the-world" either; but a preposition-level claim about what it means to exist as an embodied, engaged, motivated subject.

Key Points

  • The preposition is the doctrine: French au monde is halfway between dans le monde ("in the world") and vers le monde ("toward the world"). MP exploits the ambiguity: we are not merely in the world like objects are (the way a chair is in a room), and we are not pointing toward the world from outside it; we are engaged with the world from within it — inhabiting the world in a way that is also always reaching out toward it.
  • Not Heidegger's translation: Part Three is titled "Being-for-itself and being-in-the-world" (Être-pour-soi et être au monde). MP's au monde is distinct from Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein, though related. MP's version is more embodied and less hermeneutic than Heidegger's.
  • The canonical final-page formulation: "We are true right through; we carry with us — from the mere fact that we are in and toward the world [au monde] and not merely in the world [dans le monde], like things — all that is necessary for transcending ourselves" (PhP, p. 520). This is MP's most explicit contrast between the two prepositions.
  • Distributed across the whole book: au monde appears throughout PhP. It is the form of motor intentionality ("the body is not in space, it inhabits space"), the form of perceptual openness, the form of engagement with others, and the form of conditioned freedom. The concept is not named as a concept; it is carried by the preposition.
  • The difference from "dans le monde" is ontological: Things are dans the world; embodied subjects are au monde. The difference names the way existence is not a location but a posture — a being-toward that is also an inhabiting.

Details

The French Preposition

The French preposition au (contracted from à le) is genuinely ambiguous in a way that English "at," "to," "in," and "toward" cannot capture with any single preposition. Au café is "at the café." Aller au cinéma is "to go to the cinema." Au loin is "in the distance." Au milieu is "in the middle."

When MP writes être au monde, he is exploiting this range. The subject is "at" the world (present to it), "toward" the world (oriented to it), and "in the midst of" the world (engaged with it). English translations vary — Colin Smith's older translation gives "being-in-the-world" (which loses the directional element), Donald Landes's 2012 translation gives "being in and toward the world" (which tries to preserve both).

The Contrast with "Dans le monde"

The most explicit contrast MP draws is on the book's final page:

We are true right through; we carry with us — from the mere fact that we are in and toward the world [au monde] and not merely in the world [dans le monde], like things — all that is necessary for transcending ourselves. (PhP, p. 520)

Things are dans le monde — they are contained in it, located in it, subject to its causal structure. Humans are not. Humans are au monde — present to it, engaged with it, open toward it. The difference is not a difference of degree (humans are "more" in the world than rocks); it is a difference in the kind of relation "in" names. For rocks, "in" is containment. For humans, "in" is engagement.

This is the preposition version of the thesis that motor intentionality is a third term between mechanism and representation. A mechanistic subject would be dans le monde — located in space by physical coordinates. A Cartesian subject would be outside the world and look at it from a disembodied vantage point. Neither is au monde. Only an embodied, motivated, operative-intentional subject is au monde.

The Body Version

Part One Ch III articulates the concept at the level of the body: "the body is not in space, nor for that matter in time. It inhabits space and time" (p. 139). And a few pages later: "I am not in space and in time, nor do I think space and time; rather, I am of space and of time" (p. 141). The body is au space — present to it, oriented within it — not dans space like a thing that happens to occupy a region.

The au preposition is what allows MP to say that the body is neither an object in space nor a point of view outside space. The body is au space: it constitutes space through its own engagement and is constituted by the space it engages. This is the spatial register of being-au-monde.

The Temporal Version

Part Three Ch II on temporality gives the temporal register. "I am not in time and I do not think time" — I am au time, which is to say that I am temporal, that time is not a container I happen to be in nor a representation I happen to form. My temporality is my existence.

The canonical passage (Part Three Ch II.m, "Presence in the world"): "the present actualizes the mediation between the For-Itself and the For-Others, between individuality and generality. True reflection presents me to myself, not as an idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical to my presence in the world and to others" (Part Three Ch III.k, p. 564). The "presence in the world" (présence au monde) is the temporal version of être au monde. My present is not a location in time but an engagement with the world.

The Freedom Version

Part Three Ch III on freedom gives the practical register. The conditioned-freedom chapter does not use the phrase "au monde" more than a few times, but its entire argument rests on the distinction. A "total freedom" (Sartre) would be a freedom that is not au monde — a bare consciousness facing a brute in-itself. A "total determinism" (naturalism) would be a subject that is merely dans le monde. Neither is what we are. We are au monde — situated, motivated, engaged from within — and this is the condition of our freedom, not its opposite.

The book's final paragraph makes this explicit: "the only way I can fail to be free is if I attempt to transcend my natural and social situation by refusing to take it up at first, rather than meeting up with the natural and human world through it. Nothing determines me from the outside, not that nothing solicits me, but rather because I am immediately outside of myself and open to the world" (p. 520). To be au monde is to be already "outside myself and open to the world" — it is the structural condition of a being whose freedom is not inner-worldly nor outer-worldly but engagement.

Relation to Heidegger

Part Three's title ("Being-for-itself and being-in-the-world") acknowledges the Heideggerian resonance. Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein ("being-in-the-world") is the analogue concept from *Sein und Zeit* (1927) (especially §§ 12–13, the Grundverfassung analysis), and PhP's Preface explicitly reads Sein und Zeit as "nothing more than a making explicit of the... Lebenswelt" (PhP Preface, p. lxxi). For the Heideggerian register the wiki now anchors directly: see dasein, sorge, zeitlichkeit, and the source page heidegger-1927-sein-und-zeit.

But MP's être au monde is not quite Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein. Two differences are salient.

First: Heidegger's "being-in" is hermeneutic. The Dasein is in the world as an interpretive relation — "being-in" for Heidegger is structured by Verstehen, Befindlichkeit, Rede (understanding, state-of-mind, discourse). MP's au monde is embodied. The "in" of être au monde is the body's being-engaged, its motor-intentional reach, its praktognostic hold. MP is closer to Heidegger's reading of Dasein as "care" (Sorge) than to the interpretive framework of Sein und Zeit, but the embodiment is distinctively MP's.

Second: Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein does not exploit a preposition ambiguity the way MP's au monde does. German in is less ambiguous than French au. MP's preposition work is untranslatable into German without invention.

These differences are why MP does not simply borrow Heidegger's term. Être au monde is MP's own formulation, continuous with Heidegger but not equivalent. The MP-Heidegger relation is archivally thinner than secondary literature typically asserts — see claims#mp-heidegger-reception-archivally-thin (supported). MP's personal copy of SuZ is underlined only at §§ 1–14 (Seinsfrage and the Dasein-analytic foundations) and §§ 25–27 (Mitsein, das Man) — without annotations — and the In-der-Welt-sein analysis at §§ 12–13 falls within MP's underlined range while §§ 39–42 (the Sorge analysis proper) does not.

The Concept That Is Not a Concept

A peculiar feature of être au monde is that it is never theorized as a term. It has no definition, no introduction, no section. It is a preposition doing the work of an argument. The reader who tracks au monde through PhP discovers the concept through its repeated grammatical pressure on the book's claims — every chapter rests on it, no chapter explains it.

This is arguably how preposition-level concepts have to be. You cannot give a definition of "in" without using "in." You can only display what "in" does by putting it in different sentences and letting the reader feel the pressure. PhP's au monde is a preposition whose work can only be shown.

Connections

  • is the structural form of motor-intentionality — the "I can" is how the body is au monde
  • is the structural form of conditioned-freedom — the "by means of motivations" is how freedom is au monde
  • is the 1945 ancestor of the late ontology's doctrine of the flesh — the flesh is what "being au monde" becomes when raised to the level of ontological description
  • is related to but distinct from Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein — more embodied, exploits a different preposition, takes up the Lebenswelt differently
  • informs body-schema — the schema's "inhabiting" of space is the body's being au space
  • informs intentional-arc — the arc is the structured form of being au monde
  • is enacted by "presence in the world" (présence au monde) — Part Three Ch II on temporality
  • is the doctrinal ground of PhP's closing claim that "we are true right through" — our truth is our being-au-monde

Open Questions

  • Can the concept be translated without loss? English "being in and toward the world" (Landes) preserves both prepositions but sounds awkward; "being-in-the-world" (Smith, following Heidegger) loses the directional element. Is the preposition-level work of the concept untranslatable?
  • Does au monde survive into the late ontology, or is it replaced by "flesh"? MP does not explicitly mark a retirement of the phrase, but it becomes less central as the late ontology develops a more explicitly ontological vocabulary.
  • Is au monde doing argument work or just rhetorical work? MP never theorizes it. A skeptical reader could argue that the preposition is window-dressing on a more conventional embodiment claim. The reply would be that you cannot have the claim without the preposition — which is itself a claim about how philosophy must proceed at the preposition level.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — the concept is distributed across the whole book. Key sites: the Preface's "we are... a subject destined to the world" (p. lxxiv); Part One Ch III.l's "the body is not in space, it inhabits space" (p. 139) and "I am of space and of time" (p. 141); Part Two Ch IV.d on intersubjectivity as being-au-monde; Part Three Ch II.m on "presence in the world"; Part Three Ch III.o's "we are in and toward the world [au monde] and not merely in the world [dans le monde], like things" (p. 520) — the book's closing formulation. Part Three's title ("Being-for-itself and being-in-the-world") makes the concept explicit.