This is more preliminary commentary and analysis as our seminar group moves toward the February session in existential phenomenology. We need to emphasize how important Husserl’s phenomenological attitude is for Heidegger study. This means that we must focus initially on our everyday experience of the world in a way that is unadulterated by theory and concept. The goal is that by avoiding these distortions caused by learning and by knowledge, we can see the world as it is in itself. When I look at things in the world, I always see them in terms of an intentionality (a concept we covered in our Brentano studies, which was an idea he took from the Scholastics). What this means for us, however, is that when we look at something, we always see it as something; it means something for us in terms of the place it occupies within a constellation of meanings. This notion, which Heidegger follows, allows him to develop further one of his basic, anti-Cartesian positions that consciousness is always outside itself, in the world. This is the very important idea that my consciousness is always embedded in relationships to the world, to others, to ideas, and so forth, from the ground up. It is, in fact, one of the fundamental tenets of existential psychotherapy and existential analysis. Thus, consciousness is never just conscious. In contrast, it is always conscious of something. Furthermore, the world is never something qualitatively different from consciousness–out there–as Descartes would have us believe. Instead, consciousness is always its world: they go together as conceptual poles of an intrinsic quality to being human and not separate.
It might also then be helpful to consider Heidegger’s early History of the Concept of Time because there are some passages in it that explain phenomenology. We must consider how we relate to the concept of intentionality. In the natural attitude, which Heidegger exposes for collapsing the ontological within the ontic, we think of ourselves as any other object (one can also see here the strong influence of Kierkegaard in this way of thinking). Nevertheless, Heidegger utilizes phenomenology to show that we humans are not the same as other things. For example, even though we humans relate to the furniture of the world, we can also take a point of view on that relation. Thus, when I reflect on any relation I have to an object in the world, the object is immanent in consciousness–to that reflection– and not transcendent to it as it is in my basic relational stance to my world of things. In the transcendent mode, the material world is alien (and full of nausea, for Sartre). Thus, I am both a part of the world and separate from it. What is interesting is that the recognition of this split between me and the world leads to objectivity. More interesting is that it arises from the immanent reflection upon a transcendent perception. That is, without transcendent perceptions there would not be the experience of objectivity. For example, my intentional experience of a car comes from an immanent reflection on my transcendent relation/perception of car in the world.
In the phenomenological reduction, we focus attention not so much on the object of perception but on the act of perceiving as we reflect on the (transcendent object) in perception. This allows the objectivity of the transcendent object to appear in consciousness. Thus, in the Husserlian epoche–the bracketing of the world–we focus on thinking about the act of perceiving as something immanent to reflection. We don’t focus on the object as external/transcendent. This is where phenomenological analysis starts, for Heidegger. It is also the basic stance for an existentially oriented psychotherapist or an existential psychoanalyst in the dyadic encounter with patient or client. It dialectically opposes the natural attitude of positive science, and of Descartes.
As William Large points out, a real object, i.e., a car, is external to consciousness. The objective car, in contrast, is internal to consciousness. For Husserl, there is an absolute split between the world and consciousness. In contrast, Heidegger parts company with Husserl here by questioning how this split is possible when the concrete living beings who have this split in consciousness are also a part of the world. The problem that Heidegger sees is that we have not investigated the Being of consciousness with the same rigor as we have investigated those objects that are immanent within consciousness. For Heidegger, even Husserl did not get beyond the Cartesian position of a substance ontology. This leads Heidegger to the question about the being of the being who relates to the world intentionally.
Pushing this issue further, Heidegger realized that traditional phenomenology, including that of Husserl, operated in such a way to make the inquiry into subjectivity vanish as a problem as we prioritized objectivity through knowledge. In short, the phenomenological under-structure to modern, Western philosophy takes knowledge to be the primary way of relating to the world; the understanding of consciousness is based on this prioritization. In stark contrast, Heidegger questions whether there is not a more fundamental way of relating to the world than through the (immanent) subject-object split that occurs through the prioritization of knowledge (as way of being). Instead of being ensnared in this prioritization, Heidegger sought to un-conceal a more fundamental ontological basis for epistemological inquiry. Thus, Heidegger’s approach to the question of being is phenomenological. Let’s pursue what he means by this, as well as its relation to ontology. Then, let’s focus on the question of being itself.
For Heidegger, laying bare Husserl’s implicit ontology means that this question can only be approached through the question of what it means to be a human being. We will see that this is so because what differentiates humans from other objects is that its life matters to it; the meaning of its life–as projected possibility–matters to it. In Being and Time, section 7 of the introduction, Heidegger explores what he means by phenomenology. It involves the attempt to reach the “things themselves,” (and thereby overcome Kant’s position that we cannot access the noumenal realm). Heidegger urges us not to presuppose the same metaphysics that Husserl did. He believes that we can uncover new possibilities within our past by going back all the way to the ancient Greeks who had an original experience of the world that has been distorted by substance metaphysics through time. More specifically, he argues that phenomenon as appearance (object of consciousness) is not opposed to an underlying thing in itself. That is, we have come to believe [think Plato's theory of the forms] that appearance is deceptive and that it is somehow unrelated to an underlying thing in itself. However, in Heidegger’s etymological search he discovers that there is a more primordial meaning to phenomenon than appearance and that is that which can be brought into the light, that which shows itself. There are objects of consciousness, therefore, only because there are things made visible by the light. Furthermore, by investigating underneath our traditional metaphysics with all its conceptual and theoretical categories, we can return to a more fundamental level and mode of experience that occurs in our everyday lives. It is descriptive phenomenology that can accomplish this task. Logos thus implies a making clear of things in our everyday life. Thus, to speak the truth means foundationally to clarify and bring to the light, and only derivatively to assert a true judgment. Heidegger believes that this unconcealment is based on the ancient Greek notion of aletheia. This unconcealing process occurs by description rather than by argument. It is the attempt to allow beings to reveal themselves as they are and not in terms of theoretical or conceptual categories or explanations that distort and make hidden. For Heidegger, this phenomenological method leads to fundamental ontology by examining the meaning of the Being of phenomena. For him, it is Dasein that can ask these questions about meaning and therefore approach the meaning of Being in general.
Let’s now make a few comments about being. These comments are few, at this point, and preliminary, so we will attempt to refine them over time by future sections on these points. It can be said that Heidegger tries to think Being (and essence) as a creative occurrence of the new rather than as a “noetic and teleologically predetermined order” [as occurs in Aristotle], according to Kisiel’s introduction to Werner Marx’s excellent text on Heidegger. For Heidegger, we must replace thinking the essence of man as substance with the a notion of essence as occurrence. This implies the temporal rather than the analytic, static interpretation of human existence. We must work hard to challenge tradition when it becomes “dormant” (or in therapeutic terms, sedimented), re-awakening primordial and re-vitalizing experiences within it. This requires us to overcome a passive stance in our orientation toward being and instead, adopt a more assertive, proactive questioning of the natural attitude. It is work. Thus, we follow Nietzsche in his admonition that the Apollinian outweighs the Dionysian, and therefore we must engage in a deconstruction of the structures that have become accepted and hardened–implicit in all experience–and thereby revitalize the new which is always hidden in the old. By returning to the Greek beginnings of our Western culture, we may radically start from primordial experience that is unadulterated by the centuries of traditional belief and value structures that have only served to conceal. He [Heidegger] assumes that these originary experiences still exist though hidden in our current cultural framework and that by “thinking against ourselves” (as Von Will would say) or by reconsidering the meaning of Being, we can reveal the creative power of those early experience sin our civilization. This, in turn, would open up new epistemological possibilities, set within new frameworks of value. I will continue these sorts of questions at my next sitting.
KCB
Writing for the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute of Seattle
