(This is part three in the “What’s in a Name” series. Please feel to start with part one before proceeding).
Few activities could capture the young boy’s attention quite like this.
With a box full of colored pencils and markers, he sits at his desk. An 8.5 by 11-inch piece of paper lies on the surface. Pulling out each color with intentionality, the boy begins to sketch on the paper.
Brown reflects the roads, delicately traversing the terrain. Fields of hay are drawn with bright yellow. Gray mountains peak over the landscape. Brown and green are used to create dark and looming forests. The blue waterways, oceans, and lakes also provide important topographical detail.
He draws, of course, cities and outposts too — reflections of human settlements, mastery over the earth, and explorations into the daunting, mysterious, and dangerous wilderness.
Before he knows it, his mind is swept along. He is lost in this world now.
Most of us are living a rather disembodied existence.
Like the young boy, lost in his own world of dreams and imagination, we easily are lost in a world outside of the one that is actually around us: a physical, embodied existence. We can thank the internet-in-our-pocket for this, drawing us out of this existence into a digital existence.
What separates the young boy’s coloring from an average life in the digital age is not the means — or method — of the disconnection with the world. This would, I agree, be a tempting conclusion: that it matters not how we dissociate from our physical reality.
What actually separates life in the digital age is that we believe we have created a new reality.
A reality that is not fantasy. Not a dream. Not a even a temporary reality.
In the twenty-first century, more than ever, it is possible to exist in two halves — at all times.
The author of the popular 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, reminded readers that smartphone users receive an average of 192 alerts to their phone per day [1]. And that is just considering notifications related to communication! We are constantly pulled, through such diabolical techniques as push notifications, into the reality that is not this one.
And, for many of us, we cannot even live in this reality without the awareness of the digital reality in our pocket. Even when our phones are in our pockets, our minds drift into this digital reality. We stew over that comment that did not sit well with us. We wonder how many likes, hearts, or comments we might have gotten on that last post. We feel the urge to check and respond — even if, in responding, we have no idea if we are responding to a real person, a troll, or a bot. Even to try to exist fully in this real world, at times, feels to be an impossibility.
This is, among many points Jonathan Haidt makes in his viral book.
As I have argued already, however, our disembodied existence goes beyond distraction. The issue is larger than wandering, distracted, interrupted minds — if this were the case, there would be no reason to discuss our digital existence in particular.
Besides the constant interruptions and continual gravitational forces pulling us into the digital space, the fundamental problem of contemporary disembodiment is that we believe we are actually being pulled into a different reality.
We even have named it: virtual reality (VR).
Sure, contemporary VR technology [2] is more distinct than the online life which many of us are familiar with. To truly participate in virtual realities often involves users wearing odd-shaped headsets or goggles which allow a person into a virtual reality — a kind of simulated physical reality of sorts.
It must be made clear, though, that such virtual realities cannot be reality — at least in actuality.
Whether we are dealing with virtual reality, social media, or any other online/virtual space, however, most digital spaces lack the markers of our real existence. For example: In the digital world, Haidt points out, we lose any sense of age — a twelve-year-old and a seventy-year-old interacted in the same environments, with the same rules, with no sense of distinction. There is no sunset, no marking of time or space either.
Perhaps most sinister of all: In this new digital reality, we can decide who we are and who we want to be regardless of the nature of our actual, physical, embodied existence.
Introducing the internet persona. The influencer.
Modern disembodiment is not problematic simply because we are distracted or interrupted. A child coloring can be drawn into an imaginary world just as well as they can be drawn into the digital world. The core difference is in that we treat one of these worlds as a kind of real, often even preferring to live the bulk of our existence in this disembodied space.
There is, perhaps, no better contrast to this disembodied spirit of our age than that of the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger, who spoke about Dasein and “Being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein) [3][4].
However, for those less initiated and (likely) intimidated by the idea of both philosophy and the German words casually thrown out, allow me to introduce Martin Heidegger.
To understand why Heidegger stands in such opposition to our disembodied life, we have to first understand René Descartes. Before panicking further, let me reassure you.
You likely already know something about Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
This is Descartes’s famous idea, also known as Descartes’s Cogito. It was the final result of a process of radical skepticism embarked by Descartes: a process in which Descartes questioned literally everything. How do I know what is real? Why can I trust my senses? How do I know I am not hallucinating instead or possessed by a demon? How do I even know I exist?
The famous Cartesian line — “I think, therefore I am “— is nothing more than the final conclusion of this radical questioning, even questioning the surety of his own existence: I must know I exist, he concluded, because I think and am aware of my own thinking.
Thanks to Descartes’s ideas, we also inherited the idea of the subjective and objective: the thing that knows (res cogitans) and the thing that can be known (res extensa).
This famously introduced a bifurcation of the human experience which the Western world has both immensely benefited from and also desperately sought to recover from: subject and objective; mind and body; knower and known; individual and the world.
Enter, stage left, Martin Heidegger. Well, kind of.
As a product of the philosophical field of phenomenology begun by Edmund Husserl [5], Heidegger came to question many predominant philosophical foundations of the twentieth century, including questioning the Cartesian dualism we have already introduced.
Phenomenology, as a philosophical field, took a rather distinct and radical approach in relation to the search for truth. Questioning traditional ways of knowing (epistemology) in philosophy, Husserl is perhaps best known for his epoche — or “bracketing.”
To bracket, according to Husserl, is to suspend what he calls the natural attitude. See, Husserl believed that we often make many, many assumptions about our world and experiences without much thought about them. These beliefs — the lenses through which we view experiences — describe the natural attitude. To suspend the natural attitude, to question our assumptions from the start, allows the truth of our phenomenological experiences to emerge.
Some describe phenomenology as trying to understand the objective truth underlying all sorts of human experiences: a science of the subjective experiences.
This is the radical philosophical turn introduced by phenomenology: to examine the lens itself —the person and their assumptions —and in the process discover the underlying structures of reality.
With phenomenology came the deconstruction of the subjective-objective dualism of Descartes — at least in questioning the subject itself and the natural attitude (unexamined beliefs influencing perception).
Heidegger, however, felt Husserl had not gone far enough: Husserl had been too Cartesian [6]. In other words, Heidegger felt he had clung to the old subjective-objective model.
The critique and analysis of the subjective lens itself had not gone far enough.
For René Descartes, the subject — the cogitans, the ego or the I, the soul, or the thinking substance — was distinct from the objective — the world itself and, in its extreme form, even one’s own body [7].
"… for Descartes, the subject is simply the 'I', 'soul', or the 'thinking substance' which is what it is even without the body and the world." — A. Kadir Çüçen
While, within the phenomenological frame of Husserl, the questioning of the subject’s lens was a step forward in deconstructing this Cartesian bifurcation, Heidegger felt this re-examination of the lens had not gone far enough.
How so?
Well, Heidegger’s critique was that even the Cartesian framework of the subjective-object, knower and known, the res cogitans and res extensa, person and world, itself had gone unquestioned in philosophy.
Is this framework accurate?
Heidegger’s conclusion is that Descartes — and really, traditional philosophy/epistemology itself — had long assumed the bifurcation’s truth when in reality it was a false assumption (perhaps a part of the natural attitude, in Husserlian terms).
Perhaps, he thought, the separation of subject — the person — from the world is an impossibility. Perhaps, to continue using Cartesian terms, the subjective and object are inseparably related.
Could this insight heal the bifurcation of the human experience? Might this be the solution to even our disembodiment?
Heidegger’s famous move, with this insight established, relates to the coining of the term Dasein: combining the German word da (“there”) with the verb Sein (“to be”).
The term is, in English translations, almost always left in German due to the almost un-translatable nature of the word. Roughly, though, Dasein captures the idea of “being-there.”
To be a human, Heidegger asserts, is to be a Dasein: a sort of being-there-one.
Furthermore, to be a Dasein, then, implies a concrete there — a body, a world, a context.
The whole philosophical endeavor, the endeavor of knowing, has gone off the tracks when philosophy — and perhaps humanity itself — assumed the bifurcation was right. That is at least what Heidegger suggests.
What was needed, Heidegger asserted, is a more pure phenomenological understanding, pushing phenomenology farther than even Husserl had dared.
Cartesian dualism had to die.
To speak of a subject and object was an illusion from a Heideggerian perspective. There is truly no subject without object — they, in fact, are inseparable [8].
There is no sense of an ego (an “I”) without environment, a world, or even location in time and history.
To know, to see, to hear, or experience is intricately connected with individuality (what has been called the subjective), the particular nature of the world that the person finds themselves (what has been called the objective). Heidegger even asserts the importance of the historical or temporal: a person is always bound to a particular space and time in the world [9].
Any attempt to locate certainty, truth, or objective meaning from the bifurcated, cartesian subjective frame of reference only naively rejects or ignores the interconnectivity between subject and object.
This is, in fact, the great lie of western philosophy. There is no subjective and objective: no res cogitans and res extensa. And the bifurcation of the human being into body and mind (or body and soul) does injustice to our anthropology — our understanding of ourselves.
Humans are, instead, Dasein. We are, if we can speak of the individual, always knowing ourselves in relationship to the world and others, bound by space, time, and location. Furthermore, we are always-in-our-body (embodied). Without the body in this world, we have lost our existence. Another way to state this quality of a Dasein is, in Heideggerian terms, Being-in-the-world [10]!
We are always “in the world.”
This is to say, as I have put it in the naming of this project: we are always Between.
I have set out in this series to articulate What’s in a Name? More concretely, what’s in this project’s name: Between and Becoming?
To speak of being Between, I am speaking to the way we know ourselves:
In the world.
In relationship.
With others.
With ourselves.
In relation to God.
In relation to a higher purpose or calling.
In time.
In space.
In culture.
In history.
In our past.
In our present.
In our future.
In our mind.
In our body.
In our soul.
In all of us.
In dialogue.
In questioning.
In curiosity.
In all of the mysterious nature of existence.
In Being-in-the-world.
The following articles are meant to more fully explore this topic. Read the next part here or explore other pieces in this series below:
[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness(Penguin Press, 2024).
[2] "Virtual Reality," Encyclopædia Britannica, accessed 2026, https://www.britannica.com/technology/virtual-reality.
[3] Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000).
[4] Summarizing the ideas of the great philosophical giants is a daunting task for anyone. I rely primarily on Moran’s summary of phenomenology cited above alongside other scholarly sources in my descriptions of Heidegger's philosophy.
[5] Stephen West, "Episode #100 - Transcript," Philosophize This!, accessed 2026, https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-100-transcript. Host of this popular podcast on philosophy, Stephen West, describes Husserl with “certainty” — objective truth. Husserl’s radical move in phenomenology, though, was to focus on the phenomena: things as they appear to us as “subjects” rather than trying to analyze things as they “actually are.” Podcast host Stephen West describes the work of phenomenology as analyzing the subjective lens itself which seeks truth, rather than leaving the lens unanalyzed.
[6] Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000). See page 13 for this particular claim.
[7] A. Kadir Çüçen, "Heidegger's Reading of Descartes' Dualism: The Relation of Subject and Object," Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, accessed 2026, https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContCuce.htm.
[8] Ibid. In particular, readers may review chapter 7, entitled “Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
[9] The title of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, is in part indicative of the importance that Heidegger places on the temporal and historical location of a Dasein.
[10] Being-in-the-world is a term hyphenated intentionally in order to (even linguistically) communicate the inseparable relationship between the human being and the world in which they are.