Being-in-the-World Beyond Dreyfus: Bringing Hermeneutics to Embodied Cognition

In his work, Hubert L. Dreyfus identified Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world with skillful bodily adjustment, i.e. skillful coping. This interpretation has been very influential in the literature, especially for embodied and situated cognition. In this article we challenge such identification, as we think that it overlooks the hermeneutic dimension of Heidegger’s thought in which discursive capacities play a role in how we disclose a world. First, we reconstruct Dreyfus’ explanation of being-in-the-world, and we show how this interpretation of Heidegger has been received by other phenomenologically oriented philosophers working on embodied and situated cognition. Second, we offer an alternative reading of Being and Time that emphasizes how socialization and discourse (including the use of propositions) go hand in hand for Heidegger and how these dimensions play a transformative role because they shape how we are beings-in-the-world. Consequently, we are led to conclude, contra Dreyfus, that being-in-the-world cannot be simply identified with skillful bodily adjustment, because it is a unitary (continuous) phenomenon that includes Dasein’s agency as a whole, and not only parts of it. As a result of this discussion, we present here a non-Dreyfusian reading of Heidegger that aims to contribute to the contemporary work around the role of discursivity within embodied and situated approaches to cognition.