Abstract

After the reading of Ludwig Binswanger's essays, the Heraclitus' concepts of "idios kosmos" (private world) and "koinos kosmos" (shared world) became very important in Philip K. Dick writings. The new way in which Binswanger described the being-in-the-world of the schizophrenic gave Dick new tools to create the worlds in which his characters were lost or imprisoned; the plots build through the never ending creation of new conflicts between the private and the shared world of the characters; and the solitude of the everymen isolated by the power (political, economic, religious, etc.) in his own private world or in a fake shared world became the way in which Dick reflected on the ontological "status" of the human being (who is lacking his humanity) and of what we usually call "reality".