For Heidegger, “the open” is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. “The open” is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a “world.” “The open” is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a “world,” greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of “the open” is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and what separates us from the animals. And this open moment lies at the origin of philosophy: the humbling—and potentially frightening—moment of wonder that spurred speculation into the finer and deeper reason for things. As was his wont, Heidegger introduces a special phrase to describe this experience of acceding to the open, “the world worlds,” “die Welt weltet” and in the very next sentence states that “the rock has no world. Plants and animals also have no world”. When the world, strangely enough, worlds, we find that world open before us; we are standing, to adopt Heideggerʼs terms, in a “clearing,” a step away from both trees and forest. The world is no longer too much with us, and we suddenly see trees, forest, and ourselves in an uneasy and changing relation to one another.

¶ 3:23 AM