[Heidegger] says “Being” is closer to us than beings, for example, which I take to mean that our immediately lived experience is more real and more concrete than things or objects. The Cartesian subject, traditionally conceived as a mental being set over and against an external world, is rejected and replaced by Da-sein or being-in-the-world. The Platonic notion of seeing reality clearly – as opposed to seeing through a glass darkly or seeing only shadows on the cave wall – is dropped in favor of “World disclosure“. These kinds of changes add up to create a radically different picture wherein the world is not an object of knowledge existing outside of us but the whole background of intelligible meanings in which we are always, already situated.