What is it that we human beings are? What is it that we do? The reduction of these questions to biology doesn't do justice to how we think and act, nor do traditional philosophical approaches satisfy our intuitions. Fortunately, it's not in our nature to give up. While minds and bodies, subjects and objects, do play a role, to focus here is to miss the mark. Underlying each of these is something more fundamentally human. Martin Heidegger thinks of this as (...) being, Virginia Woolf thinks of this as a purple triangle. Together, Heidegger and Woolf may succeed in unveiling the disguises which we, perhaps unwittingly, have imposed on our own being-in-the-world. (shrink)