Philosophy notes38

The Phenomenological Critique of Representationalism: Husserl's and Heidegger's Arguments for a Qualified Realism

by John Davenport Ph.D. Candidate Department of Philosophy University of Notre Dame February, 1997 821 West Angela South Bend, IN 46617 John.J.Davenport.5@nd.edu ABSTRACT This paper begins by tracing the Hobbesian roots of `representationalism:' the thesis that reality is accessible to mind only through representations, images, signs or appearances that indicate a reality lying `behind' them (e.g. as unperceived causes of perceptions). This is linked to two kinds of absolute realism: the `naive' scientific realism of British empiricism, which provoked Berkeley's idealist reaction, and the noumenal realism of Kant. I argue that Husserl defined his position against both Berkeleyian idealism and these forms of absolute realism by way of two arguments: a pragmatic argument against skepticism about the external world (as described by Karl Ameriks) and a distinctively phenomenological argument against the representationalism implied by absolute realism.

In the Second Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger reformulates these arguments, giving them a more rigorous form and tracing their implications for the nature of Being. In section 7,

he provides a transcendental argument that the nature of appearance or representation itself shows that the mind must have a more direct form of contact with Being `as it is in itself,' which he calls `phenomena' in the original sense. I explain the relevance of Heidegger's position for evaluating contemporary theories of representation such as Fred Dretske's, and for establishing an `intermediate' conception of the mind's relation to the world which falls between absolute scientific realism and the common antirealism in analytic philosophy today.

Though Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology developed in Being and Time does not propose an idealist epistemology, as is sometimes thought, it is part of Heidegger's project to overcome a kind of `extreme realism' evident in early twenthieth-century neoKantian attachments to the idea of a "noumenal" world and positivist correspondence theories of truth. To avoid extreme realism, Heidegger requires a proof that relations of representation and signification are not the most primordial access to reality possible for persons. In a justly famous section of the Second Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger gives a transcendental argument to show that realities must make themselves directly accessible to mind in `showing themselves' without mediation, and representations of reality are derivative from this kind of primary encounter with phenomena. In this argument, Heidegger aims to retrieve what he thinks was right in the ancient Aristotelean conception of phenomena and the mind's relation to the world. This key argument also clarifies Heidegger's motivation for making the `meaning of Being' the central theme of his work --a move which may otherwise seem mystical or at best obscurantist to contemporary analytic audiences.

My goal in this paper is to analyze Heidegger's transcendental argument against `representationalist' theories of phenomena, and to show its relevance to contemporary theories of representation

and mind, such as Fred Dretske's. This case study will show not only that Heidegger undoubtably has serious arguments (which is sometimes denied by those for whom it is easiest just to dismiss `continental philosophy' in toto as unrigorous play), but also that --whether or not his arguments ultimately persuade us-- they raise important issues which are overlooked by contemporary analytic approaches to the same questions today.

As we will see, Heidegger's argument is a direct development of the central idea of intentionality in Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. The idea that mental states intend not mere appearances or representations but real objects themselves --the idea that in its contents, consciousness reaches beyond itself towards the world `outside' consciousness-- follows from Husserl's own response to the commonplace scientific realism which regards the Real as the noumenal being that causes the appearances and judgments through which alone the mind can gain knowledge. As Kent Bach recently wrote of this view, "If actually seeing things were like seeing things in pictures and films, the connection between things in the world and our experience would be merely causal."(1) In rejecting this view, writers like John Searle(2) are following a line of thought that begins with Husserl and culminates in Heidegger's transcendental deduction of phenomena.

In section I, I explain the historical context for the development of this phenomenological theme, which provides the background for Heidegger's position. Section II then explicates Heidegger's transcendental argument and explains its role in Being and Time.

Finally, in section III, I show that Heidegger's theory raises difficulties for contemporary theories of representation such as Fred Dretske's model, and I try to anticipate possible objections against Heidegger's position.

I. Husserl's Phenomenological Argument Against Hobbesian Representationalism Descartes is generally credited with first popularizing the notion that even the basic `components' of our thoughts --primary

qualities of "corporeal nature" such as "its extension," "shape," "quantity," "number," "time," and "place"(3)-- might themselves be illusions, inaccurate reflections of things `as they really are.'(4) But it was Hobbes who first clearly developed a `psychologistic' theory of phenomena as `appearances' which represent the object outside our mind, yet differ from what they represent because they are caused by a physical process which is not itself perceived.

Hobbes introduces this theory of the `unreality of consciousness' at the very beginning of Leviathan, since it is foundational for the rest of his empiricism. The thoughts of man are "every one aRepresentation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us."(5) Consciousness arises as a reaction to stimuli from external bodies,(6) and thus our sensation is what he calls "fancy," meaning that what it presents is not the same as the qualities actually present in the objects outside our minds. As Hobbes puts it, "All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly" and thus "their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming."(7) Since colors and sounds cannot be in the bodies themselves, as physics has shown us, phenomena are all images, appearances restricted to a psychological realm: And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seems invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet the still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another.(8) Similarly, understanding is not the apprehension of any form actually in the object which makes it what it is and intelligible as such; rather, understanding is a kind of imagination --a recombination of appearances derived initially from sensory representations-- that is evoked "by words, or other voluntary signs."(9) Thus understanding also operates strictly through representations.

This doctrine is clearly intended by Hobbes to replace Aristotle's theory, given in his De Anima and elsewhere, that in sensation, the

sensible form of the object we perceive, or its "species" as Hobbes calls this copy of the form,(10) directly enters our mind, just as in understanding, "the thing Understood sendeth forth intelligible species" into the mind.(11) As an early positivist, Hobbes declares this Aristotelian doctrine meaningless, and openly hints that teaching it will be outlawed when the universities are ruled by his Leviathan.(12) As I indicated, part of Hobbes's motive for this radical departure from the classical conception of phenomena is the same scientific one that later leads Locke to agree that secondary qualities exist only in the mind. As Hobbes says in another work on Human Nature, "the introduction of species visible and intelligible" moving between real objects and minds is "worse than any paradox," because observable phenomena such as reflection, doubling, refraction, the effects of concussions, and so on show "that image and color is but an apparition unto us of that motion, agitation, or alteration which the object worketh in the brain or spirits, or some internal substance in the head."(13) Reality in this account becomes what Bertrand Russell later called the "unperceived cause of percepts."(14) Yet Hobbes clearly does not anticipate the further steps by which the implications of his critique will lead Berkeley to idealism, or the conclusion that the very being of phenomena consists simply in their being phenomena, present to some mind. The reason he cannot anticipate this development is that, as vehemently opposed to Aristotle's phenomenology as it is, Hobbes's account (like Locke's after him) still rests on a naive realism which it would never occur to him to question: namely, that we know after all that there is a realm of material entities that our phenomena `represent' because our phenomena are caused by these real objects outside the mind. The experiments with a glass of water(15) which he describes presuppose this, as does his certainty that when the new physics reveals primary qualities of the corpuscles, we are thereby getting access to the material entities themselves beyond the mind. It never occurs to Hobbes that the experimental phenomena he cites are

themselves appearances, and thus ideal or unreal in his account, or that their regularity can be explained just as logically by regularities of the perceiving mind as by the causal assumptions of his naive realism. Hobbes's confidence betrays no awareness that if our consciousness were as completely `unreal' as his theory says, then we would have no certain access to anything `behind' consciousness which might cause it. In Hobbes's satisfaction with unperceived causes of phenomena, there is no trace of the doubts which Hume would later raise with his argument that since phenomena are representations, we can have no proof in the phenomena (individually or collectively) that there is any causation at all as scientific realism understood the concept.

Twentieth-century analytic philosophy has revisited in great scholarly detail every turn of this long road from Hobbes through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to Kant and beyond. Similarly, almost every aspect of the debate between realism and idealism (or antirealism, as it is sometimes called) which this history set in its well-known terms has been reconsidered in light of different contemporary philosophies of language. But throughout, the interlocutors have generally accepted without question the basic Hobbesian premise that phenomena --and more generally, `units' of meaning in language and thought-- are representational, i.e. that they are appearances that indicate something about something else (such as linguistic senses, referents, or states of affairs) to which they are related in various ways. It remains largely unremarked that, as we observed in Hobbes's writings, a representational account of phenomena that would still tie phenomena to an `independent' reality in defiance of idealism unwittingly implies the possibility of a different, unmediated and hence nonrepresentational access to this reality --which is precisely what an account of phenomena as mere appearances simultaneously denies.

From its inception, phenomenology is distinguished as a method precisely by its rejection of this Hobbesian conception of phenomena or mental experiences. This is clear in Husserl's

arguments against "psychologism" in the Logical Investigations, which turn on the idea that the intentionality of consciousness consists in a transcendence of mind towards the object itself, i.e. that consciousness is by nature `about' reality beyond consciousness. As Lyotard explains, "perceiving this pipe on the table is not, as the associationists thought, having a reproduction of this pipe in miniature in the mind, but to intend the object pipe itself."(16) For consciousness, therefore, the "world is posited as really existing," but the paradox is that it is posited as "transcendent" in this sense by the ego, whose unity is not derived from the Being which is external to it.(17) Thus, as Burt Hopkins points out in a recent study, since the conscious experience is an intention of reality beyond experience, reflection on conscious acts is not "some kind of observation of inner sensuous data."(18) This rejection of Hobbes's view of phenomena as appearances remains clear in Husserl's Ideas I, despite the apparently idealistic implications of his "transcendental reduction" or bracketing of "any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence."(19) Revising his earlier analysis, Husserl argues that in reflective or "immanently related" intentional experiences, "perception and perceived essentially constitute an unmediated unity," whereas conscious intentions of things in the natural world, other minds, and essences all remain transcendent;(20) in these cases, the "intuition and the intuited" are "in principle and of necessity not really and essentially one and united."(21) This separation of conscious act from its objective content allows Husserl, for example, to avoid Berkelean idealism by holding that we perceive the physical thing only through "the `perspective' manifestations of all its determinate qualities"(22) which never give it to us adequately or completely. Yet he can still deny (through the epochĂŠ) the opposite position of extreme realism, which would imply that the "perceived thing" is "mere appearance" while the real thing is the object of natural science whose spatial extension is characterized purely mathematically.(23) The problem with the extreme realist position is its implication that "The `true

Being' would therefore be entirely and fundamentally something that is defined otherwise than as that which is given in perception as corporeal reality..."(24) In Sellar's terms, by conceiving the `scientific image' as utterly heterogeneous with the `manifest image' or phenomenal contents of lived experience, this realist approach self-defeatingly implies that no empirical process could take us towards the scientific in-itself either.(25) As one Kantian scholar recently put it, extreme realism thus defines noumenal Being in a way that actually entails skepticism; it makes the impossibility of knowledge tautological, since it defines `reality' as essentially inimical to any cognitive access to reality.(26) In this light, we can see that Husserl's hope is precisely to negotiate a way between, one the one hand, `psychologistic idealism' that simply equates Being itself with conscious experience of Being and ignores the way in which realities in presenting themselves transcend the conscious states that access them,(27) and on the other hand, naive realism which makes all phenomena mere appearances, signs, or representations of noumena. As Lyotard puts it, despite the realist separation of transcendence, the relation is described in terms of noesis and noema precisely to indicate that the relationship of consciousness to its object is not that of two exterior and independent realities. For on the one hand, the object is a Gegenstand, a phenomenon, leading back to the consciousness to which it appears; while on the other hand, consciousness is consciousness of this phenomenon. It is because the inclusion is intentional that it is possible to ground the transcendent in the immanent without detracting from it.(28) Husserl clarifies his opposition to any extreme realism which makes conscious phenomena and things-in-themselves independent realities in a famous section of the Ideas, which tells us that it is a "fundamental error to suppose that perception (and every other type of intuition of things, each after its own manner), fails to come in contact with the thing itself."(29) Husserl gives a brief, two-part argument against this view that phenomena are only representations of reality, rather than the mind's direct contact with such reality itself.

First, he says that the idea that there is another (e.g. divine) intuition of things-in-themselves which occurs "without any mediation through appearances," whereas finite beings grasp only representative appearances, would imply that "there is no essential difference between transcendent and immanent," as if as spatial thing itself could be wholly immanent in God's consciousness, or could be pure experience and yet still be physical.(30) Second, Husserl maintains that this `fundamental error' derives from the assumption that "the transcendence of the thing is that of an image or sign," which suggests the misdiagnosis that finite minds can only grasp such representations.(31) Rather, transcendence is not a symptom of the finitude of consciousness, nor are the phenomena intended by finite minds mere representations: despite its transcendence to consciousness, it is the spatial thing itself of which we are consciously aware in its embodied form: "We are not given an image or a sign in its place."(32) Representations, such as images, signs, or propositional meanings, are instead a special class of phenomena: With these types of presentation we intuit something, in the consciousness that it copies something else or indicates its [sentential] meaning; and though we already have the one in the field of intuition, we are not directly towards it, but through the medium of a secondary apprehension are directed towards the other, that which is copied or indicated.(33) This is the argument against the representational theory of phenomena which Heidegger subsequently develops and extends in Being and Time. To Heidegger, however, Husserl's formulation of the argument remains inadequate in several important respects.

First, it does not make sufficiently clear why we cannot suppose that all phenomena are representations even when they do not appear as such to us, and then reinterpret the distinction between transcendence and immanence in an anti-realist fashion as the difference between two interconnected systems of signs. Despite his precautions, Husserl remains too close to empiricist or `positivist' views of science which take its only aim to be the

description and prediction of the structure of experience, ignoring unobservable entities that might underlie this structure. These views have anti-realist consequences because, as Peter GodfreySmith recently put it, they forget that "conceptions of how theory relates to experience are associated with theories of the world itself."(34) This is an instance of Heidegger's more general recognition that how we conceive knowledge and the relation of its content to `reality' depends on how we conceive the meaning of Being itself: in accordance with the `hermeneutic standpoint' described above, there is no pure epistemology prior to all ontological presuppositions, since knowledge itself is part of Being.

Second, although for Husserl the original phenomena through which consciousness first `encounters' realities are not representational, as noema they both present the character they have indubitably, and are structured according to the different thetic modes of judgment. Being in this sense remains for Husserl the correlate of the cognitive structure of our consciousness.

Consciousness exists only as intending transcendent reality, and this reality offers itself to mind as phenomenon both undeceptively and with cognitive sense: it is meaningful only within a horizon of phenomenal possibilities that determines what `validity' or necessity truth means for judgments involving the phenomenon.

Since Heidegger believes that the meaning or `phenomena' in which we originally encounter the Real are prior to propositional meaning, these primitive meanings cannot be limited by the ideal validity conditions of discursive understanding nor divided by the different illocutionary types of judgments with their different modal significances. For Heidegger, in this respect Husserl remains too close to contemporary theories which equate meaning with truth-conditions.

Yet in theories of meaning, we find a reflection of the same dilemma between customary forms of realism and anti-realism that we meet in interpreting `phenomena.' Truth-condition approaches aim to express the insight that meaning must be shareable and

therefore refer to something real (or suitably objective(35)), which they interpret as something about which one can be wrong or right, independently of opinion (assuming that reality necessarily supports bivalence).(36) So these approaches focus too narrowly on meaning-that as the paradigm of all meaning.(37)Alternatively, approaches equating meaning with use (e.g. the later Wittgenstein) aim to express the `structuralist' insight that no element of meaning has significance outside a system of contrasts, similarities, and relations --a web of interconnections with other meanings. But since this insight is most easily grasped with respect to language --gestures, symbols, and spoken words-- use-condition approaches tend to take the signifieds of signs, whose use is determined pragmatically by mutually controlling practices or `languagegames,' as the paradigm cases of meanings. Thus they reduce the meaning-relation to representation again, with the inevitable antirealist implication that meaning is at least culture-relative, or more radically, relativized to a system of differencesbetween signs which always exceed cognitive grasp or complete expression. Then meaning can never be the expression of anything `real' in the sense of transcending the network of signs.(38)Like Hobbesian representations, meanings become inherently idealist.

As we will see, Heidegger's conception of originary phenomena, which follows Husserl in rejecting the representationalist view but does not start with cognitive or discursive truth-conditions, also leads to a conception of originary meaning that is supposed to avoid the dilemma I have just outlined. The meaning found in originary phenomena will precede and join the (more realist) sense of propositional import and the (more anti-realist) structural background conditions of practices and mutual comportment.

Originary meaning both makes propositional meaning and the very idea of truth-conditions possible through its non-representational encounter with the Real, and yet this level of meaning forms its own interlocking structure or `web' of significance (or "world," in Heidegger's terminology) which underlies and makes possible the use-meanings implicit in practices. Both these aspects of originary

meaning arise, on Heidegger's analysis, from the basic structure of Dasein as a being that `discloses' or encounters the Real, but encounters it as a world, an actuality extended by all sorts of possibilities, unified through fundamental forms of `expectation' grounded in the being of persons.

[This part is still not complete] Husserl's 45, 52, and 55 of Ideas.

Contrast Schlick, pp.88-89 As John Drummond explains, Husserl's concept of intentionality is thus supposed to resist the `subjectivizing' tendency of modern philosophy: Husserl claims that all conscious experience is directed to objectivities, and these objectivities are not real contents of an empirical consciousness as are Descartes' esse objectivum, Humean impressions, and Kantian representations. Rather, Husserl claims that the objectivity to which consciousness is directed is an intentional moment of transcendental consciousness, inseperable from the experience and its real components but not reducible to them. By virtue of this doctrine, Husserl recovers features of the premodern conception of intelligibility as belonging to the things themselves and as being truthfully present to us in our evident apprehension of them...(39) ++++

II. Heidegger's Transcendental Deduction of the Possibility of Phenomena as Primordial Manifestations of Being as it is in itself.

Heidegger presents his own argument in the long and justly famous Âś7 on "The Phenomenological Method of Investigation" in the Second Introduction to Being and Time. Heidegger begins this section by saying that overall theme of his investigation, the

meaning of Being or "the Being of entities" (p.49) can only be investigated phenomenologically, i.e. in the method that is itself ontologically "rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves" (p.50). To understand the "kind of `self-evidence'" phenomenology aims at, we must consider the meaning of two concepts, `phenomenon' and `logos.'

Heidegger begins by distinguishing three senses of the phenomenon. The first is indicated by the derivation of the Greek word from the verb phainesthai, which is a "middle-voiced form" forshowing itself or "to bring into the light of day" (p.51). Thus, first and foremost, "the expression `phenomenon' signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest" (p.51). The key idea behind this first definition is that it is part of the very reality of entities to make themselves accessible, and thus their meaningfulness or possible epistemological significance is itself originally ontological, rather than conferred by mind. As Thomas Sheehan explains in a very valuable essay on Heidegger, this radical phenomenological claim was a renewal of the Greek idea of truth asalethia, a self-`uncovering' in which entities "disclose" themselves: Heidegger's intense rereading of Greek philosophy in general and of Metaphysics IX 10 in particular led him to the major if implicit tenet of Greek thinking, namely, that entities, to the degree that they are `natural' (physei on), are intrinsically self-presentative, that is accessible and intelligible -- on hos alethes(40) -- even if that accessibility and intelligibility is always shot through with finitude.(41) This is similar to the point Jonathan Lear makes, in commenting on Metaphysics VII, that Aristotle's ontology requires that "the world is ultimately intelligible."(42) Yet for Aristotle, this intelligibility requires that reality be founded on substances, which are both ontologically basic because they are logically independent, and at the same time fully cognizable, because they are determined by an essential form that makes a particular "what-it-is," or "a being

thoroughly definable."(43) By contrast, Heidegger's primordial concept of the phenomenon only carries the implication that Being is intelligible from itself, or self-opening. So Heidegger understood himself to not only as retrieving the Aristotelian conception of the phenomenon, but as foregrounding the full and radical alethiac core of that conception, which had so degenerated by Hobbes's time that its point could no longer be understood. This core, which Heidegger believes is common to all the major Greek philosophers from Heraclitus to Aristotle, does not commit us to the additional distinctively Aristotelian claims that the intelligibility which is (as it were) `built-into the Real,' is primarily cognitive or consists of abstractable forms that fit into discursive understanding, let alone that it is the cognitive intelligibility of substances or primary ousia.

The `phenomenon' in Heidegger's primary sense is simply that which shows itself in some way, without extra cognitive specifications (or `validity conditions') on the manner in which it shows itself.

Thus as Heidegger says, "It is even possible for an entity to show itself as something which in itself it is not." This gives us the second sense of phenomenon, which Heidegger calls "seeming" [Schein] or "semblance" (p.51). Since a phenomenon in this second sense seems to refer to an illusion, we might at first assume that Heidegger means a false representation, one that signifies something which does not correspond to actuality. But he is careful to clarify that this is not what he means by a "`phenomenon' as semblance." Rather, the semblance is a nonrepresentationalmanifesting, an instance of primordial phenomenality, but a "privative" instance because the phenomenon is deficient in its way of showing itself. Thus the semblance is "structurally interconnected" with the primary sense of `phenomenon:' as Heidegger says, Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself--that is, of being a phenomenon [in the primordial sense]--can it show itself as something which it is not;only then can it `merely look like so-and-so.' (p.51).

The second sense of phenomenon includes and is founded on the first. Hence, if it is possible for any actual phenomenon of our experience to be a `semblance' in Heidegger's sense, this entails that it is possible for us to experience phenomena in the primordial sense as revelations of entities-in-themselves,(44) in however limited or partial a way this may be. In this sense, the semblance is just a limiting case of the primordial phenomenon, namely a case in which the self-showing is maximally limited or distortive. The opposite limiting case would be a primordial phenomenon whose self-showing is absolute, totally unreserved, unlimited in clarity and distinctness, or as Heidegger would put it, completely unhidden (p.56), holding nothing back from us.(45) But since human beings or Dasein exist as finitude, for us there are no phenomena like this: the "unconcealing" of primordial phenomena is always to some extent also a "concealing;" this is what Heidegger later called "the lethe at the heart of alethia."(46) The transcendental argument for the possibility of `phenomena' in Heidegger's primordial sense (and thus for the possibility of scheinen or semblances as well) only gets going when Heidegger distinguishes both these from a third sense of `phenomenon' which (following Hobbes), he calls appearance [Erscheinung].(47) `Appearance' is a "reference-relationship which is in an entity itself" (p.54), a representational structure (exhibited most familiarly by linguistic signification) that announces rather than showing that of which it is the appearance. For example, a symptom is the appearance of a disease, because certain bodily occurrences, "in showing themselves as thus showing themselves, (48) `indicate' something which does not show itself," namely, the disease (p.52). Thus representation in its true sense is quite different than primordial phenomenality, in which an entity's making-itself-intelligible through showing its being is itself part of that very being. By contrast, ...appearance, as the appearance `of something,' does not mean showing-itself; it means rather the announcing-itself by something

[else] which does not show itself, but which announces itself through something which does show itself (p.52).

Thus as Heidegger's translators Macquarrie and Robinson help explain in an analytic footnote to this difficult section of the text, the general structure of `appearance' for Heidegger is like this: Y, in showing itself, indicates X, which does not show itself, but rather announces itself through Y's manifestation.(49) It is interesting to note that although this formula gives us only the most basic notion of representation, without any subdivision of types of representation or analysis of how indication is achieved, it is not incompatible with contemporary analytic models of representation. Consider, for example, Fred Dretske's model: By a representational system (RS) I shall mean any system whose function it is to indicate how things stand with respect to some other object, condition, or magnitude.(50) The only immediately apparent difference between these models is that Dretske's does not emphasize that the `representational system' Y must itself be apprehended phenomenally.

For his purposes here, Heidegger does not need a taxonomy of types of appearance or any more detailed account of how representation works. The important thing is that "All indications, presentations, symptoms, and symbols have this basic formal structure of appearing" (p.52), or being `announcers of Xs that do not show themselves.' It is clear that Hobbes's phenomenon as mental fancy is meant to be a particular paradigmatic kind of `appearance' in this sense: namely, one in which the sign or image announces the object(s) or physical processes which caused it. But if Heidegger's analysis of the structure of appearance or representation is right, it now becomes clear that all phenomena cannot be appearances, because the `appearance of something' itself involves an indicator or announcer that is not merely represented by the mind in another appearance. That which serves as the appearance or representation of something else must itself be a real phenomenon. Of course, representations or appearances

themselves can be represented in other appearances: for example, we can have a sign that stands for or refers to other signs. But since there can be no infinite regression, at the bottom of the representational lattice we must have signs that are not merely signified by other signs but which actually show themselves.(51) In Heidegger's words, "what does the referring (or the announcing) can fulfil its function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus a `phenomenon'" in the original, quasi-Aristotelian sense (p.54). The very character of the referring signifier, or the structure of representation in general, betrays its essentially derivative status as dependent on phenomenal meaningfulness: as Heidegger declares, "appearing is possible only by reason of a showing-itself" that does not itself merely `appear' (p.53). Representationalism, as the thesis that all phenomena are appearances, is thus refuted: "If one defines `phenomenon' with the aid of a conception of `appearance' which is still unclear, then everything is stood on its head" (p.53).

To make this argument rigorous, however, we must also take into account the relation between appearances and semblances.

Heidegger's interpretation of representation helps make clear the difference between Y as an appearance of X and Y as a semblance, because it allows us to see that Y can represent X either with or without also being a semblance. Being a semblance is thusindependent of being the appearance or indication of something else. An arrow marked on the tree points to the right trail to follow, but similarly, the bear leaves a scratch on the tree and we mistake it for an arrow that indicates the way. A photograph pictures our friend, or similarly, we see what we think is a picture of our friend and take it for a representation of her, when in fact it is not. Something can thus `show itself' deceptively (or `seemingly') as a sign or appearance of something else. The illusion of the indicator light in the cockpit would be a semblancephenomenon that in deceptively showing itself seems to be the sign of some state of affairs in the plane's machinery --which certainly does not show itself. The light which the pilot thought she saw would tell her that the landing gear is down: although the gear may

or may not in fact be down, the indicator was a semblance, a pseudosymptom. The falsehood of the representation does not depend on the representive element's being a semblance, nor does the truth of the signification we apprehend through the sign require that we saw the sign correctly. For instance, we may take our dream-image for a Polaroid picture, but it still does represent our friend. Thus Heidegger's definition of the appearance does not say that what shows itself or serves as the `sign' of the announced `signified' must show itself primordially, as it really is in itself; it must simply show what it is in some way, which can even be deceptive . As he says, ...appearance too can become mere semblance. In a certain kind of lighting, someone can look as if his cheeks were flushed with red; and this redness which shows itself [i.e. deceptively] can be taken as the announcement of the Being-present-at-hand of a fever, which in turn indicates some disturbance in the organism (p.54) However, since any semblance also depends for its sense on the possibility of primordial self-manifesting, an appearance that involves a semblance is still connected with showing-itself in itself. Thus "Both appearance and semblance are founded upon the phenomenon, although in different ways" (p.54).

With this relation clarified, we are in a position to summarize Heidegger's argument. Formally, this argument may be seen as a transcendental deduction of phenomena in the primordial sense as the ground of possibility for the fact that some appearances, referring signs, or representations are accessible to us or apprehendable by our minds.

(1) There are appearances, such as images, signs, or occurences that indicate or refer to something else = (def.) a referential relationship occuring between something Y that refers, or signals, and or `announces,' and something else X which is represented by Y but does not show itself at all (either deficiently as a semblance or as it is in itself) [premise].

(2) For an appearance or indication-relation to be accessible to us,

we must have access to the Y which represents X, and we must be able to apprehend Y as an appearance that announces something else (X) [premise].

(3) In every case of appearance, the Y which represents X is accessible only because it is either (A) the referent of something else Z which the mind can apprehend as an appearance of Y, or (B)capable of manifesting itself directly to the mind. [premise: the mind can intuit new data only through `acquaintance' or representational `report'].

(4) (A) If the Y which represents X is apprehendable by mind through its own self-showing, it is a phenomenon = (def.) either a Semblance that shows itself deceptively or a phenomenon in he primordial sense of showing itself as it is in itself.

(5) (B) If the Y which represents X can be apprehended as the referent of another appearance through Z, then Z can be apprehended by the mind only as referent or phenomenon [premise 3 applied to Z]. In the latter case, there will be some Z* apprehended by the mind as phenomenon which is the appearance of Z' which is the appearance of (...) Z [by 3, recursion, and the assumption that only finite orders of representation can be apprehended by the mind].

(6) If there is some accessible appearance of X through Y, then either (A) Y is a phenomenon apprehendable directly by the mind or (B) there is some Z* which is a phenomenon apprehendable directly by the mind [conjunction of 4 and 5].

(7) If there is some accessible appearance of X through Y, then there is some which is a phenomenon apprehendable directly by the mind. [from 6 by generalization].

(8) If there is some which is a phenomenon apprehendable by the mind, then is either a semblance or a primordial phenomenon showing itself as it is in itself [by def. of phenomenon from 4] (9) (A) If is primordial phenomenon, then primordial phenomena are possible. [actuality entails possibility] (B) If is a semblance, then primordial phenomena are possible [from the analysis of semblance]

(10) If there is some accessible appearance of X through Y, then primordial phenomena are possible [by chain of conditional implication from 7, 8, and 9] (11) Primordial phenomena are possible [by 1, 10, detachment].

In other words, appearances or representation-relations are ultimately accessible only through our direct access to phenomena which are not representations or appearances. Even if they are accessible only as semblances, they imply at least the possibility of primordial phenomena, in which we would apprehend something as it shows itself from what it is in itself. There is thus a kind of `apprehension' or access which is not representational, for representional access itself presupposes it. At the price of extra length needed for meticulousness, this summary restates Heidegger's deduction in a more rigorous (albeit more tedious) form than he provided, but does not add anything essentially new to his own more informal version of the argument.

This transcendental result provides the basis for Heidegger's further thesis that the essence of human existence is precisely to disclose primordial phenomenality, or to be the intelligence which apprehends the intelligibility built-into different kinds of Being (including its own): "Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein's Being" (p.32). The person is an entity whose essence is to be `there' (Da-sein) in the ontological meaningfulness of Being, existing as openness to an indefinite modal range of primordial phenomena (both actual and merely possible). Heidegger says at the end of his First Introduction that this result is a development of what Aristotle saw more obscurely in the De Anima when he argued that "Man's soul" is like a mirror of all things: "it discovers all entities, both in the fact that they are, and in their Being as they are, that is, always in their Being" (p.34).

Thus, as Thomas Sheehan explains, Heidegger conjugated this `altheiological' insight of the Greeks with the phenomenological insights he had learned from Husserl and Aristotle: entities are self-disclosive (alethes) only insofar as they are in correlation with the various modes of human co-

performance of disclosure (aletheuein), primarily the practical ones... This `event' of intelligibility in its facticity became, for Heidegger, the `thing itself' that philosophy had to interrogate. It was, he thought, the ultimate a priori, the `first' of everything about the human world, and thus (for those with the sensitivity for it) the most obvious fact of all... the `happening' of this correlation -- the always-already operative empowering of the essential togetherness of disclosive human comportment and of the entitiesqua accesible -- is what Heidegger, both tentatively in his earlier courses and boldly in his final writings, called Ereignis.(52) III. Analytic and Aristotelean Objections Answered However, before considering further how this concept of primordial phenomenality orients Heidegger's project as a whole, we should briefly consider some likely objections. The first objection would say that by adding Dasein to his analysis, Heidegger risks returning to idealism. For more detailed analyses of representation, such as Dretske's, show that indication requires a realcounterfactual dependency between the Y and the X it announces, which is usually a causal or "a lawful dependency between the indicator and the indicated."(53) And although (in what Dretske calls "Type I" systems) this dependency can be conferred on an arbitrary system of signs by the care of their human manipulators,(54) it can also arise from natural relations which can exist completely independent of their apprehension by minds: Some people think that all indication is indication for or to someone. ...This view, I submit, is merely a special version of the more general and even more implausible idea [i.e. Idealism] that nothing is true unless it is true for someone, unless someone knows (or at least believes) it. I do not intend to quarrel about this matter.

I shall simply assume that if one mistakes a perfectly reliable and properly functioning boiler-pressure gauge for something else, thinks that it is broken, completely ignores it, or never even sees it ...it nonetheless still indicates what the boiler pressure is.(55)

It is important to realize that Heidegger need not deny that natural processes and causal connections can contain "information" in this sense of "an objective, mind-independent, indicator relation."(56) As his discussion of "symptoms" shows, he can accept this without also accepting that "objective" reality is completely independent of mind in the naive realist sense, because reality'sinherent accessibility does not lie in its `appearance' to any mind. His concern is rather with how apprehension of reality first becomes possible: when it occurs through accurate discernment of `natural information,' it has an objective referent for the reasons Dretske brings out, but our apprehension of any such information through representations depends on a phenomenal manifestation of what Dretske calls the "expressive elements of an RS."(57) And this `showing' of the expressive elements when they are apprehended cannot be a mere indication of them.

Heidegger could also accept Dretske's useful insight that what a system "represents" to human beings is usually only one of the things that its expressive elements "indicate or mean" in the sense of its natural correlations. In what he calls "Type II" systems, this apprehended significance is determined subjectively: e.g., the fuel gauge is causally correlated with the value of many physical variables in the car's machinery, but we "take a special interest in and give it the function of indicating" a particular one of these natural indicating relations, and callibrate it accordingly.(58) In what Dretske calls Type III or "Natural Systems of Representation," this selection of functional role is also naturally determined: in biological organisms, of the many things that the state of sensory organs may naturally indicate, one or a few are intrinsically important to the organism because its reactions are keyed to them.(59) Dretske argues that it is this difference between indication relations (which either hold or fail to hold independently of our beliefs) and representational functions assigned either by choice or intrinsically, which first makes misrepresentation possible: misrepresentation occurs when the signs that serve a system "as its representational

elements fail to indicate something they aresupposed to indicate" according to their function.(60) But in light of Heidegger's analysis, we cannot accept Dretske's next step to the conclusion that the "intentionality" distinctive of mind in general is a result of the capacity to "misrepresent" (in this propositional sense) built into Type III systems.(61) In order for representation of any of the three kinds Dretske distinguishes to be apprehended intentionally, there must be a prior kind awareness, which Schlick would call `acquaintance-intentionality,' that apprehends primordial phenomena as what they show themselves to be. This is not an indication relation, nor is it `natural' in Dretske's sense, since it can misapprehend in the case of semblances, but in either case, the `truth' or `deception' realized in primordial acquaintance with phenomena is not propositional. To be primordially acquainted with a phenomenon P that `shows itself' or is apprehended as manifest is not to `say' or `judge' that P, but to connect directly with something's being in the P way.

This crucial point forestalls another type of argument that would resist Heidegger's claims. The view that there are `primordial phenomena' says that in one sense at least, we are at home in the world: elements of reality, as well as its horizons, are accessible to us in a non-accidental manner. In a recent paper titled "Cognitive Homelessness," Timothy Williamson argues instead that aside from trivial cases, such as contradictions and tautologies, nothing is "luminous" in the sense of being "inherently accessible" to our knowledge.(62) But Williamson bases his argument on the assumption that such "luminous" phenomena would be defined in terms of our being "in a position to know that P" in relevant contexts where P obtained.(63) For example, "Pain is often conceived as a luminous condition, in the sense that, if one is in pain, then one is in a position to know that one is in pain."(64) But the knowledge available from primordial phenomena is not propositional knowledge at all: my feeling is an immediate acquaintance, and my knowing how this feels is fully immanent to me in Husserl's sense, whereas the judgmental application of a

concept like "painful" (or more precise adjectives) to this feeling is reflective and uncertain.(65) Moreover, Williamson's paradigmargument to show that we do not have luminous knowledge in any non-trivial case exploits these very problems of conceptapplication. By reductio, he argues against the supposition "that the condition that one feels hot is luminous."(66) In a fashion resembling a sorites argument, he imagines a person sitting outside from dawn until noon, who definitely feels cold in the morning, and is unequivocally certain that he feels hot by the end, but must inevitably pass through intermediate stages where he will give "neutral answers" to the question of whether he feels hot.(67) Since knowing that one feels hot at any time t must involve reliably based confidence in the judgment, which must be almost equal at the previous moment t-1, and hence one must actually feel hot at t1. Given this principle, if feeling hot were luminous, we would be able to work back to the false conclusion that one felt hot at dawn, so feeling hot must not be luminous. There are times when one feels hot but "is not in a position to know that one feels hot."(68) The problem is that the concept "hot," arguably like all concepts employed in judgments, is not fine-grained enough to capture the immediacy of the experience. Even when their application is certain, we do not have luminous propositional knowledge that concept C applies in this circumstance. What Williamson misses is that `feeling something,' sometimes hesistantly described as hot, sometimes more confidently, is itself a state of `knowledge' in another sense from knowing that we feel so-and-so. The `luminosity' of primordial phenomenality can occur at this level precisely because it is pre-conceptual.

For this reason, however, an Aristotelean might be tempted to object that Heidegger is treating `sensible phantasms' as phenomena rather than appearances, and treating as unmanifested signifieds represented in appearances what are actually the intelligible forms grasped directly by nous rather than through perception and imagination. But this would be misleading. As the rest of his book makes abundantly clear, Heidegger thinks that the

paradigm cases of primordial phenomena are essential structures of different sorts of beings that are grasped only by the mind, after much interpretative clarification allows them to `show themselves.'

Pre-conceptual primordial phenomenality is certainly not limited to `raw feels' as in Williamson's examples, but includes cases where the phenomenon is intentionally `over-against' us as it is not in feelings, and cases where the phenomenon is a horizon of such intentionality. Thus Heidegger specifically warns against resting simply with his "formal conception of `phenomenon'," which includes Kantian empirical intuition, and urges that the substantively "phenomenological conception" of the phenomenon focuses on those primordial `phenomena' which are basic manifestations of Being that must `show themselves' primordially because they open the way of access for whole classes of ordinary appearances. Thus in Kant's system, for example, the "forms of intuition" are paradigm "phenomena" in the specifically phenomenological sense (p.54-5). Thus for Heidegger at least, it is the eid or regional `essences' which in Husserl's system are disclosed in the eidetic reduction that are the real `phenomena' of phenomenology as such. Similarly, in Heidegger's own work, it is intelligible forms that can be "thematized" in an interpretative logos --like the existential structures of Dasein-- that constitute the basic phenomena to be uncovered. As Heidegger says in §C of œ7, Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible. In the phenomenological conception of the "phenomenon," what one has in mind as that which shows itself is the Being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives...`Behind' the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else; on the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden.

And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology (p.60).

Thus the specifically phenomeno-logical concept of the `phenomenon' is the kind of ontologically basic primordial phenomenon that can be apprehended only through thinking. Not

only the formal concept of the phenomenon as such, but also Heidegger's hermeneutic conception of logos, go together to determine the sense of `phenomenon' appropriate for a logos of phenomena. Thus although his understanding of nous is hermeneutic, unlike Aristotle's, Heideggerian phenomenology focuses on what Aristoteleans would call the `intelligible species.'

The significance of this hermeneutic aspect of Heideggerian phenomenology becomes apparent if we ask how we know when we have found a phenomenon that is `primordial,' or complete in showing itself in itself. This issue is central to all of the main phenomenological analyses in the rest of Being and Time, but Heidegger denies that there can be any criterion for primordiality known in advance. Since phenomena can be covered up in various ways, history gives us phenomena that seem primordial but on investigation turn out to be semblances. In some cases, investigation is also easily fooled, because it is not historical accident but the very nature of the phenomenon at stake which makes it conceal itself in semblances, resisting becoming a primordial phenomenon (p.60). Thus hermeneutic phenomenology must be critical, and "The idea of grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is `original' and `intuitive' is directly opposed to thenaivetĂŠ of a haphazard, `immediate,' and unreflective `beholding'" (p.61). In short, those phenomena are most likely to be primordial which figure centrally in the best interpretive account we can give within an explanation of the history of concepts themselves, extending to the horizons. In the hands of many contemporary thinkers, however, such a hermeneutic theory of knowledge implies a `historicism' in which interpretation is a closed system, and reality, truth and meaning cannot transcend our most coherent interpretation. With Heidegger, hermeneutics is essential for the interpretation which discerns and uncovers primordial phenomena, but these phenomena themselves are the revelation of a reality with its own meaningfulness over against human systems.

In conclusion, although neither would like the comparison, it

seems to me that Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology stands on the realism-antirealism continuum about where Hilary Putnam's own "realism with a human face" means to stand.(69) Heidegger rejects what Putnam calls "metaphysical realism," or [the] picture in which there is some fixed set of "languageindependent" objects (some of which are abstract and other are concrete) and fixed "relation" between terms and their extensions.

(70) This view, or "Realism" with a big "R" as Putnam says,(71) equates reality with something that can be defined independently of all mental and linguistic access to reality. But this view has absurd consequences: Putnam concentrates on those evident in quantum mechanics and contemporary theories of truth, while Heidegger focuses on those which arise from trying to take representation as the most basic form of such access. They approach the issue from opposite angles, but arrive at much the same conclusion. Though reality involves `access to reality,'(72) and therefore there isn't even in principle such a thing as a sum of the real --or a `total view' of it from a completely `external' perspective (in Nagel's sense)(73)-- this does not mean that reality is simply conventional or something our minds produce.(74) `Access' remains access to something which does not itself have the "disclosive" character of Dasein, as Heidegger says, but this something is entirely independent of disclosive access: Being has the character of giving itself to mind, or offering access to itself, while simultaneously concealing itself and withdrawing from being a Totality, so that there is `room' for mind to exist, time for disclosure to open to reality at all.(75) 1. Kent Bach, "Searle Against the World: how can experiences find their objects?," presented at a colloquium on Searle's work (University of Notre Dame, April 1997), mss. p.1.

2. See Searle, Intentionality: An essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

3. See Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Donald

A. Cress (Hackett, 1979), First Meditation, p.15. Descartes's selection of primary qualities clearly points back to Aristotle'sCategories and forward to Kant's table of categories and pure intuitions.

4. Admittedly, for Descartes, this was a case of hyperbolic doubt, nevertheless its possibility was among those encompassed by the evil demon hypothesis.

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Penguin Classics, 1985), Part I, ch.1, p.85.

6. ibid: from the sense-organs, the stimuli travels through the nerves and membranes to the "Brain and Heart," and "causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour, because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without" (p.85-85). As crude as this account is, contemporary physicalist explanations of consciousness such as Dennett's seem only to have elaborated rather than fundamentally altered this reaction-model.

7. ibid, p.86.

8. ibid, p.86.

9. Ibid, p.93.

10. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.86.

11. ibid, p.87. Hobbes gives a very compressed summary of Aristotle's theory a few pages later: "Some say the Senses receive the Species of things, and deliver them to the Common-sense; and the Common Sense delivers them over to the Fancy, and the Fancy to the Memory, and the Memory to the Judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood" (p.93).

12. ibid: "I say not this, as disapproving the use of Universities: but because I am to speak hereafter of their office in a Commonwealth, I must let you see on all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst which the frequency of insignificant Speech is one" (p.87).

13. See Thomas Hobbes, Metaphysical Writings, ed. Mary Whiton Calkins (Open Court, 1989), "Human Nature," ch.II, p.158.

14. See Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1945), ch.XX, "Kant," p.717.

15. Ibid, p.158-159.

16. Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology, tr. Brian Beakley, int.

Gayle Ormiston (SUNY Press, 1991), p.54.

17. ibid, p.53-54.

18. From Ronald Bruzina's review in Husserl Studies, 12.3 (1995), p.228: see Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of the Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 11 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).

19. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (Collier Books, 1962), §32, p.100.

20. ibid, §38, p.112.

21. ibid, §41, p.117.

22. ibid, §42, p.121.

23. ibid, §40, p.116.

24. ibid, §40, p.116.

25. As Husserl remarks, if all phenomena are mere appearances or symbols standing in for the thing itself, we have an aporia, since "that which is given in perception serves in the rigorous method of natural science for the valid determination, open to anyone to carry out and to verify through his own insight, of that transcendent being whose `symbol' it is" (p.116).

26. Reference needed.

27. While these conscious states themselves, as Husserl always urges, remain completely unperspectival and lacking in transcendence, and thus do not "present" themselves to reflective consciousness of experience but are completely given in the immanence of reflection, and hence distinguished in their essential character from things-in-themselves (see, for example, §44, p.126).

Thus we may regard Husserl's basic distinction between transcendence and immanence as an attempt to distinguish Being and Access-to-Being from one another phenomenologically (i.e.

through access to each in turn). Seen this way, however, the remaining inadequacy of this approach from Heidegger's standpoint becomes clearer: Access or experience itself is part of Being, and so Husserl's phenomenological account leaves us with two unmediable kinds of Being, with no way to clarify the univocal character of Being that holds them both together and explains why Being divides itself this way, and gives itself (though only partially) to consciousness.

28. Lyotard, p.55.

29. Husserl, ยง43, p.122.

30. ibid, ยง43, p.123, omitting Husserl's italics. The problem is that the very extension essential to a physical thing is constituted in part by its transcendence to consciousness, which is lost if it becomes as perfectly given as any part of the stream of consciousness is to the reflective act which is part of the same stream.

31. ibid, ยง43, p.123. In other words, by misinterpreting the transcendence of the Real to consciousness as the independence of the signified from its signifier or representation, this view misdiagnosis the transcendence of things themselves as a result of the finitude of our minds, implying that an infinite mind without this disability would grasp them without any intervening representations, and thus without any transcendence.

32. ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Quine and a Dogma of Empiricism," talk delivered at the University of Notre Dame, October 11, 1996.

At the end of his paper, Godfrey-Smith recognizes Thomas Kuhn as his main source for this point that "Theories of the world carry with them their own standards for the proper relation between theory and experience" (mss. p.6). But he does not acknowledge the earlier pedigree of this insight in Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition, to whom Kuhn was indebted.

35. Habermas, for example, relies on communicative conditions implicit in the illocutionary mode of moral assertions to get from his theory of meaning to the basic standard for norms. But while he

thinks that moral claims have an objective content whose meaning is dependent on such validity conditions, he does not want to equate `validity' with factual truth, as if there were literally a realm of moral facts as `moral realism' holds.

However unclear this intermediate status remains, Habermas's theory is an attempt to mediate the dilemma I am noting between truth-condition and use theories through the idea of"transcendental-pragmatic" conditions for meaning, which are supposed to have an objectivity analogous to realist truth and yet to be invested in (and read off from) our communicative practices, albeit not as group-relative but as universal to all humanity.

36. Michael Dummett, for example, uses a positivist version of this (naive) realist approach meaning --equating meaning with empirically identifiable truth-conditions-- to argue for the antirealist status of discourse in domains where such conditions cannot be found for a completely bivalent separation of truth from falsehood.

37. We will see this again in the discussion of Dretske's theory of representation in section V below.

38. This, of course, is the Sausurrean basis for Derrida's theory of meaning, which falls within the anti-realist spectrum, broadly understood.

39. John Drummond, "Edmund Husserl's Reformation of Philosophy: Premodern, Modern, or Postmodern?" in Edmund Husserl, ed. John Drummond, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,Vol. 66.2 (Spring 1992), 135-154, p.146.

40. For the same idea governs the notion of truth as alethia, or selfdirected uncovering of the entity itself by itself, which is a frequent theme in Heidegger's later writings.

41. Thomas Sheehan, "Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times," in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70-96, p.81.

42. See Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.273. Note also that Heidegger refers to Aristotle's Metaphysics VII, chapter 4, right at the end of Âś7 (p.63).

43. Ibid.

44. I avoid the word "thing" in this context, because Heidegger uses "dinge" for entities that primordially show themselves in the particular character of presentness-at-hand in the environment. He uses "entities" (ta onta) for the universal class of beings that show themselves in any way (p.51), or anything towards which we can be comported.

45. Note that this would be a status of ultimate adequatio even more pure than that which Husserl claims for the transparency of his immanent phenomena.

46. Thomas Seehan, p.83. However, note that Heidegger believes that we are capable of what he calls noein (p.57), in which the phenomenon is disclosed through discourse in exactly the way that it shows itself. To properly `interpret' the phenomenon in this noetic fashion is the ideal and meaning of "phenomenology" (p.58).

47. There is a further category which he calls "mere appearance" or blosse Erscheinung, which can be conveniently ignored here for the sake of avoiding further complexity.

48. I believe Heidegger means: in showing themselves in the particular way that they are showing.

49. This formulation is not quite the same as any of the ones the translators offer (p.52), but represents my own version of their formula 1a.

50. Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (MIT Press, 1991, Bradford Books series), ch.3, p.52.

51. Nor, we should note against Derrida, can the signs or appearances support themselves through their own interdependent relations of difference. Even granting that logically, the ultimate differences between signs in a finite system of signs must logically be themselves `unrepresentable' or unsignifiable in that system of signs, for us to have access to these signs qua signs at all requires that they show themselves in a way distinct from signification and thus not bound by the system of differences that allows signs their representational significance. Thus the meaningfulness of signs

cannot arise, as Sausurre and other structuralists thought, solely from their difference from one another. Heidegger's transcendental argument is as decisive against Derridean neostructuralism as it is against Hobbesian representationalism. This should not be surprising, since both Hobbes's and Derrida's analyses imply forms of anti-realism that miss the third way between realism and idealism which phenomenology opens. [Perhaps Derrida could respond by just deconstructing the terms `phenomenon' and `appearance.' But this carries the danger of suggesting that the `iron cage' of difference automatically extends to enclose whatever tries to escape it (as part of its definition)! If so, deconstruction would become trivially unfalsifiable, and then as inconsequential as any irrefutable absolute skepticism].

52. Sheehan, p.82. Ereignis, for example as discussed in Heidegger's lecture on "Time and Being," is usually translated as `Appropriation,' because it refers to the disclosive taking-up in time of Being that is given as intelligible in its very being, or let-be as meaningful.

53. Dretske, p.56.

54. Dretske's example is someone using coins on a table to represent players in a basketball play. In this case, the correlation of the coins-moves with the actual players-moves is maintained only by the human agent who is using the coins to represent the game (p.52-53). In this case, both what Dretske calls the indicating relation (i.e. the correlation) and its use to perform some representational function are conventionally conferred. In Type II systems, the indicating relation is `natural' because the correlation is causally fixed, but the selection of this correlation (out of the many in which the indicator) as its representational function is conventional or conferred. In Type III systems, both the indication and its relevance are naturally determined, as I explain below.

55. Dretske, p.55. As Dretske points out, this kind of indicative relation, which arises from causally assured correlations between positions or magnitudes in one object and others, gives rise to what Paul Grice called the natural sense of meaning, in which for Y to

mean X entails that X is actually the case (p.55).

56. Dretske, p.58.

57. Dretske, p.52.

58. Dretske, p.59.

59. Dretske, p.62.

60. Dretske, p.66-7.

61. Dretske, p.67.

62. Timothy Williamson, "Cognitive Homelessness," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 93.11 (Nov. 1996), 554-573, p.554.

63. ibid, p.555, my italics.

64. ibid, p.556.

65. Williamson acknowledges (p.556) that "more primitive creatures are sometimes in pain without possessing any concepts at all," and therefore says that we might have to make the possession of concepts or language use part of the relevant contexts. But this is just to miss the lesson taught by the "primitive creature:" namely that the relevant sense of knowledge is not knowledge-that.One might of course deny that this constitutes knowledge at all, as is sometimes done, for example, in response to Frank Jackson's `Blind Mary' argument against physicalism. But whether we call it knowledge or not, such non-propositional familiarity or direct acquaintance with phenomena is presupposed by representational knowledge, as Heidegger's argument shows.

66. ibid, p.557.

67. ibid, p.558.

68. ibid, p.559.

69. See his lecture "Realism with a Human Face," in Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Harvard University Press, 1990).

70. Ibid, p.27. Putnam takes the term "metaphysical realism" from Hartry Field (see p.30).

71. Ibid, p.28.

72. As Putnam says: "elements of what we call `language' or `mind' penetrate so deeply into what we call `reality' that the very project of representing ourselves as being `mappers' of something

`language-independent' is fatally compromised from the start" (Realism with a Human Face, p.28, italics omitted).

73. See Putnam, p.11: "a great dream is given up--the dream of a description of physical reality as it is apart from observers, a description which is objective in the sense of being `from no particular point of view.'"

74. Ibid, p.28.

75. See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Harper Torchbooks, 1972): "To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment" (p.6); the "Appropriation" (Ereignis) which gives Being and time is "a giving in which the sending source keeps itself back and, thus, withdraws from unconcealment" (p.22); "The fundamental experience of Being and Time is thus that of the oblivion of Being. But oblivion means here in the Greek sense: concealment and self-concealing" (p.29). The inspiration for this conception of Being comes ultimately from Schelling's conception of God as self-limiting so as to make room for man's freedom. .......... • Navigation Categories • Phenomenology Phenomenology is, in its founder Edmund Husserl's formulation, the study of experience and the ways in which things present themselves in and through experience. Taking its starting point

from the first-person perspective, phenomenology attempts to describe the essential features or structures of a given experience or any experience in general. One of the central structures of any experience is its intentionality, or its being directed toward some object or state of affairs. The theory of intentionality, the central theme of phenomenology, maintains that all experience necessarily has this object-relatedness and thus one of the catch phrases of phenomenology is “all consciousness is consciousness of.” In short, in our experiences we are always already related to the world and to overlook this fact is to commit one of the cardinal sins of phenomenology: abstraction.

This emphasis on the intentional structure of experience makes phenomenology distinctive from other modern epistemologicalapproaches that have a strong separation between the experiencing subject and the object experienced. Starting with Rene Descartes, this subject/object distinction produced the traditions of rationalism and empiricism which focuses on one of these aspects of experience at the expense of the other.

Phenomenology seeks to offer a corrective to these traditions by providing an account of how the experiencing subject and object experienced are not externally related, but internally unified. This unified relation between the subject and object is the “phenomena” that phenomenology takes as the starting point of its descriptive analysis.

Contents 1 Husserl - The Father of Phenomenology o 1.1 Precursors and influences o 1.2 The Early Husserl of Logical Investigations o 1.3 Transcendental phenomenology o 1.4 Genetic Phenomenology • 2 Realist phenomenology 3 Existential phenomenology o 3.1 Heidegger and German Existential Phenomenology o 3.2 Sartre and French Existential Phenomenology • 4 Criticisms of phenomenology

• 5 Currents influenced by phenomenology • 6 Further reading • 7 Journals 8 External links o 8.1 General Philosophy Sources 9 Credits The discipline of phenomenology as a historical movement originates with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). He is considered the “father” of phenomenology and worked copiously to establish it as a rigorous science. It continued to develop in twentieth-century European philosophy through the works of Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice MerleauPonty, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion. Given its continual development and appropriation in various other disciplines (most notably - ontology, sociology, psychology, ecology, ethics, theology, philosophy of mind) it is considered to be one of the most significant philosophical movements in the twentieth century.

Husserl - The Father of Phenomenology Main article: Edmund Husserl Edmund Husserl was born on April 8, 1859, into a Jewish family living in the Austrian Empire. He began his academic career as a mathematician, defending his doctoral dissertation in Vienna in 1882. While in Vienna, he attended lectures by the prominent psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano, who was exercise a considerable influence on Husserl in the years to come. In 1886 Husserl converted to Protestantism and the following year he defended his Habilitation on the concept of number at the university in Halle, where he was to spend the next fourteen years as Privatdozent. During this period, his deepening study of mathematics led him to consider several foundational problems in epistemology and theory of science. These interests resulted in his first major work, Logical Investigations (1900-1901), which is considered to be the founding text of phenomenology. From 1901-

1916 Husserl was a professor at the university in GÜttingen where he published his next major work Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Volume One (1913). This text marked his development from the descriptive phenomenology of his earlier work to transcendental phenomenology. In 1916 Husserl went to Freiburg and became the chair in philosophy and took on several assistants, most notably Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger, who were the editors of Husserl’s (in)famous Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1928). Husserl also retired in 1928 and was succeeded by Martin Heidegger as the chair of the department in Freiburg. During the last five years of his life, Husserl fell prey to the anti-Semitism of the rising Nazi party in Germany. In 1933 he was taken off the list of university professors and denied access to the university library. Amidst his marginalization from the university milieu in Germany during the 1930s, Husserl was invited to given lectures in Vienna and Prague in 1935. These lectures were developed to comprise his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1952).

Most of the books that Husserl himself published during his life were in essence programmatic introductions to phenomenology.

But they constitute only a small portion of his vast writing.

Because Husserl was in the habit of writing down his phenomenological reflections each day, he also left behind approximately 45,000 research manuscripts. When these manuscripts were deemed to be in jeopardy during the Second World War, they were smuggled to a monastery in Belgium.

Eventually, these manuscripts (along with other unpublished lectures, articles, and papers) were organized to create the HusserlArchives, founded at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven where they remain to this day. The Husserl-Archives continue to be published in a critical edition called Husserliana and continue to be a major source of phenomenological research.# Precursors and influences

There are several precedents to Husserl’s formulation of the discipline of phenomenology. Even in ancient philosophy, one can find the distinction between phainomenon (Greek for appearance) and “reality,” a distinction that can be found in Plato’s allegory of the cave orAristotle’s appearance syllogisms, for instance. The etymology of the term “phenomenology” comes from the compound of the Greek words phainomenon and logos, literally meaning a rational account (logos) of the various ways in which things appear. One of aspirations and advantages of phenomenology is its desire and unique ability to retrieve many of the decisive aspects of classical philosophy.

In the eighteenth century, “phenomenology” was associated with the theory of appearances found in the analysis of sense perception of empirical knowledge. The term was employed by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a student of Christian Wolff. It was subsequently appropriated by Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano (1838-1970) used the term to identify his “descriptive psychology.” Central to Brentano’s formulation of his descriptive psychology was the theory ofintentionality, a concept that he revived from scholasticism to identify the character of psychic phenomenon. Husserl, along with Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Kasimir Twardowski, and Anton Marty, were students of Brentano in Vienna and their charismatic teacher exerted significant influence on them. Due to the centrality of the theory of intentionality in Husserl’s work, Brentano is considered to be the main forerunner of phenomenology.

See also: • Skepticism (for the concept of the epoché) • Rene Descartes (Methodological doubt, ego cogito) • British empiricism (Husserl had an special affinity for the works of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill) • Immanuel Kant and neo-Kantianism (one of Husserl's main opponents who nevertheless influenced his transcendental turn) • Franz Brentano (for the concept of intentionality and the

method of descriptive psychology) • Carl Stumpf (psychological analysis, influenced Husserl's early works) • William James (his Principles of Psychology (1891) greatly impressed Husserl and his "radical empiricism" bears a striking resemblance to phenomenology) The Early Husserl of Logical Investigations While Logical Investigations was not Husserl’s first published work, he considered it to be the first “breakthrough” of phenomenology. It is not only the founding text of phenomenology, but also one of the most important texts in 20th century philosophy. It is comprised of a debate between psychologism and logicism, a debate which forms the background to Husserl’s initial formulation of intentionality. Psychologism maintains that psychology should provide the theoretical foundation for epistemology. Because of the nature of perceiving,believing, and judging are psychic phenomenon, empirical investigations of psychology is the proper domain in which these forms of knowing ought to be investigated. According to psychologism, this applies to all scientific and logical reasoning. For Husserl, this position overlooks the fundamental difference between the domain of logic and psychology. Logic is concerned with ideal objects and the laws that govern them and cannot be reduced to a subjective psychical process. Husserl argues that the ideal objects of logic and mathematics do not suffer the temporal change of psychic acts but remain trans-temporal and objective across multiple acts of various subjects. For example, 2 + 3 = 5 no matter how many times it is repeated or the various different people perform the operation.

Thus, the fundamental error of psychologism is that it does not distinguish between the object of knowledge and the act of knowing. Logicism, on the other hand, is the view that these ideal objects and their laws constitute the foundation of knowing and remain totally autonomous from empirical conditions. Thus, the domain of logic is sui generis and does not need to trace back the structures of thinking back to pre-predicative experience of

concrete objects in the world. Logicism fails, according to Husserl, because it does not take into account the ways in which subjective acts function in structuring ideal objectivity.

In order to account for the subjective processes of psychology and the ideal objectivity of logic, Husserl developed his theory of intentionality. Through it he tried to account for both acts of consciousness and the structure of ideal objects without reducing one to the other. By focusing on the relation or correlation between acts of consciousness and their objects, Husserl wanted to describe the a prioristructure of these acts. In so doing, he suspended the metaphysical status of these objects of experience. More specifically, through this process of bracketing metaphysical questions he attempted to carve out an epistemological position that was neither a metaphysical realism nor a metaphysical idealism, but metaphysically neutral.

Transcendental phenomenology As Husserl’s phenomenological investigations deepened, he began to develop the descriptive phenomenology of his earlier work into a transcendental phenomenology. This “transcendental turn” was accompanied by two methodological clarifications through the concepts of the epoché and the reduction. The epoché is a methodological shift in one’s attitude from naively accepting a certain dogmatic beliefs about the world to “bracketing” or suspending those beliefs in order to discover their true sense. It is analogous to the mathematical procedure of taking the absolute value of a certain number, e.g., taking the number 2 and indexing it - [2]. When one brackets the natural attitude, they are, in essence, bracketing its common place validity in order to discover its meaning. The reduction, on the other hand, is the term Husserl eventually used to describe the thematization of the relation between subjectivity and the world. In its literal sense, to re-duce one’s natural experience is “to lead back” one’s attention to the universal and necessary conditions of that experience. Both the epoché and the reduction are important features in freeing oneself from naturalistic dogmaticism in order to illuminate the

contribution that subjectivity plays in the constitution of meaning.

For this reason, transcendental phenomenology is also often called constitutivephenomenology.

The transcendental turn in phenomenology is perhaps the most controversial and contested aspect of the discipline. Husserl first developed it in Ideas I, which remains one of his most criticized works. It has most notably been critiqued by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur who saw it as a reversion to a kind of idealism along the lines of Kant or Fichte.

Others have argued that Husserl’s idealism during this period of his research does not forego the epistemological realism of his early work.

Genetic Phenomenology Husserl’s later work can be characterized by what he called genetic phenomenology, which was a further broadening of the scope of phenomenological analysis. Genetic phenomenology can best be described in contrast to static phenomenology, a distinction that Husserl made as early as 1917. Static phenomenology is the style of analysis that is found in the Logical Investigations and Ideas I, for instance, and primarily focuses on the fixed intentional relation between an act and an object. It is usually confined to a certain domain of experience (whether it be ideal objects or physical objects, etc.) and is static in that the objects of investigation are readily available and “frozen” in time. But Husserl eventually became concerned with the origin and history of these objects. The experience of various objects or state of affairs includes patterns of understanding which color these experiences, a process that Husserl calls sedimentation. This is the process in which previous experiences come to shape and condition others. Genetic phenomenology attempts to explore the origin and history of this process in any given set of experiences.

This phenomenological approach is most typified in the work that occupied Husserl in the years before his death, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1952). In it, along with other works from this period, can be found the

following concepts that occupy a central role in his genetic analysis: • Intersubjectivity • History • Life-world • Embodiment • Tradition Realist phenomenology After Husserl's publication of the Ideas I, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Members of the Munich group especially distanced themselves from his new "transcendental phenomenology" and preferred the earlier "realist phenomenology" of the first edition of the Logical Investigations.

Realistic phenomenology emphasizes the search for the essential structures of various concrete situations. Adolf Reinach extended phenomenology to the field of the philosophy of law; Max Scheler added ethics, religion, andphilosophical anthropology; Edith Stein focused on human sciences and gender; and Roman Ingarden expanded phenomenology to various themes in aesthetics. Other realist phenomenologists include: Alexander Pfänder, Johannnes Daubert, Nicolai Hartmann, Herbert Spiegelberg, Karl Schuhmann, and Barry Smith.

Existential phenomenology While existentialism has a precedent in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was not until Heidegger’s publication of Being and Time (1927) that many existential themes were incorporated into the phenomenological tradition. Existential phenomenology undergoes an investigation of meaning in the context of lived experience. Its central claim is that the proper site of phenomenological investigation is not a theoretical exercise focused on the cognitive features of knowledge. Rather the ultimate ground of meaning is found in what it means to be, which is a question that can only be posed in the context of the ordinary and everyday experience of one’s own existence. Because of its emphasis on the practical

concerns of everyday life, existential phenomenology has enjoyed much attention in literary and popular circles.

Heidegger and German Existential Phenomenology While Heidegger vehemently resisted the label of existentialism, his central work Being and Time (1927) is considered to be the central inspiration for subsequent articulations of existential phenomenology. As a student and eventual successor of Husserl, Heidegger had first hand exposure to the various dimensions of phenomenological investigation and he incorporated much of them in his own work. For example, Heidegger’s conception of being-inthe-world is considered to be an elaboration of Husserl’s theory of intentionality within a practical sphere. Heidegger, however, did not consider this practical dimension of intentionality to be just one among others. Rather he claimed that one’s “average everyday” comportment to the world is ultimate intentional relation upon which all others are grounded or rooted.

Heidegger also approached Husserl’s phenomenology with a particular question in mind. It was question that he began to ask after he read Brentano’s On The Manifold Meanings of Being in Aristotle in his high school years. Heidegger saw in phenomenology the potential to re-interpret one of the seminal issues of the metaphysical tradition in which Husserl had been so critical: ontology. Ontology is the study of being qua being (being as opposed to beings or things) and Heidegger’s reactivation of the question of being has become a watershed event in twentiethcentury philosophy. However, because the question of being had become concealed within the degenerative tradition of Western metaphysics, Heidegger had to provide a preparatory analysis in order to avoid the trappings of that tradition. This preparatory analysis is the task of Being and Time, which is an investigation of one particular but unique being—Dasein(German; literally, beingthere). Heidegger was well aware of the circular reasoning that often occurs when approaching ontology and thus he was forced to ask the question, “How can we appropriately inquire into the nature of being when our ontological pre-conceptions inevitably

pre-determine the investigation from the start?” In order to adequately approach the question of being with a transparent view of these pre-conceptions, Heidegger examined the way in which being becomes an issue in the first place. This is role of Dasein— the entity “that we ourselves are” when being becomes an issue.

Dasein is the one who inquires into the nature of being, the one for whom being is an issue.

Thus, Being and Time is an investigation of the mode in which Dasein has its being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s famous analysis ofDasein’s existence in the context of practical concerns, anxiety, temporality, and historicity influenced many existential phenomenologists in Germany. Most notable among them are Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt.

While Husserl attempted to explicate the essential characteristics and structures of each kind of experience, Heidegger averted his phenomenological studies from essentialist orientation of Husserl.

For Heidegger, understanding always involves element of interpretation. Heidegger characterized his phenomenology as “hermeneutic phenomenology.” In Being and Time, Heidegger tried to explicate the structures of how Dasein interprets its sense of being. Hans-Georg Gadamer pursued the idea of the universality of hermeneutics inherent in Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Sartre and French Existential Phenomenology During the Second World War, French philosophy became increasingly interested in solidifying the theoretical underpinnings of the dialectical materialism of Marxism. In order to do so they turned to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a text that exercised a considerable influence on Marx’s development of socialism. This new wave of Hegel scholarship (typified by Jean Wahl, Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite) incorporated many themes of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. In particular, Kojève’s famous lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939 (published in part in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel) were extremely influential in inaugurating an interest in phenomenology. Many of the attendants of these

lectures became the leading philosophers of the next generation, including: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and George Bataille. But the most influential of all was undoubtedly Jean-Paul Sartre whose Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology(1944) seemed to capture the sentiment of post-war France. For Sartre, ontology should be considered through a phenomenological description and classification of the ultimate origin and end of meaning in the lives of individuals and the universe as a whole. His descriptive method starts from the most general sense of meaning and ends with the most concrete forms that meaning takes. In this most general sense, Sartre analyzes two fundamental aspects of being: the in-itself (ensoi) and the for-itself (pour-soi), which many consider to be equivalent to the non-conscious and consciousness respectively.

Later in book, Sartre adds another aspect of being, the for-others (pour-autrui), which examines the social dimension of existence.

In 1944 Sartre gave a public lecture entitled “Existentialism is a Humanism” which is considered the manifesto of twentiethcenturyexistentialism. He was also the founder (along with Simone de Beauvoir) of the influential journal Les Temps Modernes, a monthly review of literature and politics. Other central figures who played a decisive role in introducing phenomenology to France were Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gabriel Marcel.

Criticisms of phenomenology Daniel Dennett has criticized phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach, going so far as to coin the term autophenomenology to emphasize this aspect and to contrast it with his own alternative, which he calls heterophenomenology.

Currents influenced by phenomenology • Phenomenology of religion • Hermeneutics • Structuralism • Poststructuralism

• Existentialism • Deconstruction • Philosophy of technology • Emergy • Personhood Theory Further reading • Edie, James M. (ed.). 1965. An Invitation to Phenomenology.

Chicago: Quadrangle Books. ISBN 0812960823 A collection of seminal phenomenological essays.

• Elveton, R. O. (ed.). 1970. The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings. Second reprint edition, 2003. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0970167903 Key essays about Husserl's phenomenology.

• Hammond, Michael, Jane Howarth, and Russell Kent. 1991.

Understanding Phenomenology. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 063113283X • Luijpen, William A., and Henry J. Koren. 1969. A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ISBN 0820701106 • Macann, Christopher. 1993. Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415073545 • Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Oxford: Routledge. ISBN 0415183731 Charting phenomenology from Brentano, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.

• Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521667925 An excellent non-historical introduction to phenomenology.

• Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1965. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Third edition, Springer. ISBN 9024725356 The most comprehensive and thorough source on the entire phenomenological movement. Unfortunately, it is expensive and

hard to find.

• Stewart, David and Algis Mickunas. 1974. Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and its Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990. ISBN 082140962X • Thévenaz, Pierre. 1962. What is Phenomenology? Chicago: Quadrangle Books. New edition, Times Books, 2000. ISBN 0812960009 • Zaner, Richard M. 1970. The Way of Phenomenology.

Indianapolis, IN: Pegasus.

• Zaner, Richard and Don Ihde (eds.). 1973. Phenomenology and Existentialism. New York: Putnam. ISBN 039910951X Contains many key essays in existential phenomenology.

Journals • Bulletin d'analyse phénoménologique • Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology • Research in Phenomenology • Studia Phaenomenologica • Newsletter of Phenomenology External links All links retrieved April 24, 2015.

• About Edmund Husserl • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry • Romanian Society for Phenomenology General Philosophy Sources • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • Paideia Project Online • The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy • Project Gutenberg Credits New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopediastandards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World

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Michael MARDER The Phenomenology of Ontico-Ontological Difference Article Document(s) associé(s) Annexes Texte complet en PDF/Full text in PDF: Vol. VIII, n°2 (124k) Résumé Le présent article interprète la lecture heideggerienne de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel comme une critique voilée de la phénoménologie de la conscience de Husserl. Je défends l'idée qu'en dernier ressort, Heidegger affirme l'insuffisance des deux phénoménologies, exclusivement préoccupées par l'être ou les

étants, et montre la voie pour une troisième phénoménologie, celle de la différence ontico-ontologique.

Abstract This paper focuses on Martin Heidegger’s reading of the Hegelian phenomenology of spirit as a veiled critique of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness. Ultimately, I argue, Heidegger will acknowledge the insufficiency of either phenomenology, concerned exclusively with Being or with beings, and will hint at the possibility of a third kind of phenomenology unfolding between the two—the phenomenology of ontico-ontological difference.

Table des matières I. Between Two Phenomenologies II. The Being of Consciousness III. The Being of Experience and Truth I. Between Two Phenomenologies Of phenomenology, can there be more than one? There are, of course, countless phenomenologies that refer to, intend, and are of something, be it perception or religious experience, the social world or landscape and place. There are, also, those most intimately associated with certain proper names (e.g., Max Scheler or Maurice Merleau-Ponty), around which philosophical movements and professional organizations accrete. But what happens in the phenomenological approaches to particular regions of being and in the fragmentation of phenomenology into “schools of thought” is far from putting into question the oneness and unity of phenomenology; in the regionalization, compartmentalization, and disciplinary shaping of phenomenological thought, we witness its formalization and an institutionalized division of intellectual labor.

It is against these deleterious trends that, in 1927, Heidegger resolutely insisted on a different kind of multiplicity: “There is no such thing asthe one phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical

technique. For implicit in the essential nature of all genuine method as a path toward the disclosure of objects is a tendency to order itself always toward that which it discloses.”1 The protomethodological slogan, “Back to the things themselves!” enjoins us to take our cues and our way from the phenomena themselves, from the many that are disclosed and that, in each case, themselves direct and, indeed, de-limit the movements of disclosure. If “[t]here is no such thing as the one phenomenology,” this is because there is not the one exemplary phenomenon that would prescribe the same method of approaching all the others, once and for all. It seems, consequently, that, when it comes to phenomenology, there must be more than one.

The difficulty with the unconditional endorsement of radical plurality lies in Heidegger’s own writings from the 1920s, especially The History of the Concept of Time, Being and Time, and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. His main concern in that period is to uncover the ontological bases of phenomenology and, indeed, to interpret phenomenology as “the method of ontology.”2 The ontological interpretation of phenomenology ranges from reflections on intentionality as the being of consciousness,3 to an investigation of how the being of entities shows itself in the self-presentation of phenomena,4 not to mention an attempt to set reduction to the work of transitioning from the ontic to the ontological, from the apprehension of beings to the understanding of their being.5 But what does it mean, within the parameters of Heidegger’s philosophy itself, that phenomenology is or ought to be executed as an ontology? Does the ontological principle not imply that we must practice it in the difference between beings and being and, therefore, situate it in the space or, better, the spacing of ontico-ontological difference? Returning to our initial question, we can now conjecture that, so understood, phenomenology will be both one and more than one, irreducible either to the beings that show themselves or to their being that gives itself and withdraws from the self-showing of phenomena.

Already in the early twenties, Heidegger was not convinced that

the phenomenology of his teacher, Edmund Husserl, held the ontological resources he had sought in it. This, perhaps, is the sense of the harsh remark Heidegger made in a letter to Karl Löwith on February 20, 1923: “…Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for a second of his life.”6 If to be a philosopher is to think ontologically, with respect to the being of beings, then, in Heidegger’s estimation, Husserl, who has not attained to the heights of ontological thought, is not a philosopher. Unfair as the epistolary assessment may be, it explains why, at the height of the confrontation with Husserl, in a 1930-1 course at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger turned to another phenomenology—which could well turn out to be the other of Husserl’s phenomenology— that of Hegel, which he previously deemed a sworn enemy of the “authentic fundamental tendency of phenomenology”: “When today the attempt is made to connect the authentic fundamental tendency of phenomenology with the dialectic, it is as if one wanted to mix fire and water.”7 My two-fold working hypothesis is, thus, the following: 1) everything Heidegger notes concerning the Hegelian phenomenology of spirit (and, especially, concerning its absolutizing, absolving, and absolved standpoint) is meant as a tacit rejoinder to or refutation of Husserlian phenomenology; and 2) “Husserl” and “Hegel” are, above all for Heidegger himself, incalculably more than two proper names associated with two schools of thought or currents in or of phenomenology; instead, they are the encryptions of what we might term “ontic” and “ontological” phenomenologies, respectively. The impossible, unsynthesizable, groundless position in the middle without mediations, in-between the two, will allow us to survey the spacing of ontico-ontological difference proper to phenomenology at once singular and plural, both one and more than one. In other words, despite the improbability of success in this endeavor, we are to mix dialectical fire and phenomenological water.

Whether tacit or explicit, Heidegger’s rejoinders to and criticisms of Husserl are not outright dismissals. They are, more precisely, the

obverse of the reproach to Hegel’s philosophy in toto, where “everything ontic is dissolved into the ontological…, without insight into the ground of possibility of ontology itself”8 and, therefore, without safeguarding the possibility—still alive in Husserl’s thought—of phenomenologically reducing the ontic to the ontological. It is not enough to opt either for a reconstructive construction of the world from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, or for the transcendental constitution of the object by pure consciousness. Between the two phenomenologies, suspended in the “no man’s land” of ontico-ontological difference, thinking will experience unrest well in excess of the dialectical “restlessness of the negative” and the negativity of phenomenological reduction.

The attempt to think in-between the two phenomenologies is complicated, in the first instance, by Heidegger’s adamant insistence that the one bears no relation to the other. “The Phenomenology [of Spirit],” he writes, “has nothing to do with [hat nichts zu tun…mit] a phenomenology of consciousness as currently understood in Husserl’s sense…A clear differentiation [klare Scheidung] is necessary in the interest of a real understanding of both [the Hegelian and Husserlian] phenomenologies—particularly today, when everything is called ‘phenomenology’.”9 (As an aside, we must note that negation is itself highly suspicious, if only because, according to psychoanalysis, it is one of the most potent defense mechanisms of the ego. “This is not my mother,” in Freud’s influential essay on negation, means the exact opposite of what it proclaims: the woman in the dream is my mother, but it would be too traumatic for me to admit it. The same goes for the statements that concern us here, namely, “This is not phenomenology” and also “Husserl is not a philosopher.”) The need for a “clear differentiation” between the two is neither a prescription for a dry scholarly comparison nor a methodological recommendation aiming, at any rate, to advance “understanding,” a form of consciousness confined to the relatively early stages of the Hegelian phenomenology. A “real understanding” of both phenomenologies signifies something else altogether: a critical

rehashing of the ontico-ontological difference in and through the “clear differentiation,” with the undertones of krinein, Heidegger has just evoked. This difference and this differentiation are so intense that they preclude the possibility of a relation between the two phenomenologies that have “nothing to do with” one another.

It is, then, a certain non-relation that we are dealing with, as Husserl confirmed in a handwritten note on the margins of his copy of Being and Time. In the sole remark penned in the section of the book on Hegel’s conception of time, he confessed, “I am able to learn nothing here, and seriously, is there anything here to learn at all?”10 Having come to the conclusion that he has nothing to learn from Hegel, from Heidegger’s treatment of Hegel, or—most likely— from both, Husserl has disengaged his own thinking from that other phenomenology, excusing and absolving himself from a dialogue with it. That no dialogue will articulate the two phenomenologies is partly attributable to the fact that they speak different conceptual languages, even when the same words (e.g., intention) comprise their vocabularies. But, more importantly, it is due to the incompatible claims each lays on the logos(or the being) of phenomena, as well as on the becoming-phenomenal of logos as such and as a whole. Instead of producing a split withinlogos, the two phenomenologies conjure up irreconcilable logoi unable to hear, let alone to understand or to learn from, each other, for instance through a Gadamerian “merging of horizons.” We should harbor no hopes for a philosophical meta-language capable of gathering together the two logoi that fall on the hither side of the dialectic of the one and the many. Their grafting onto Heidegger’s ontico-ontological difference forecloses, precisely, such gatheringtogether. Insofar as the relation between the two phenomenologies is conceivable, it will be a “relation without relation,” similar to the ethical bond of the I and the other in the philosophy of Levinas, where at least one of the terms—the other who stands in for the absolutizing or absolute—is absolved from the bonds of relationality. An infinity stretches between the two—the infinity to

be thought.

II. The Being of Consciousness As Heidegger clandestinely stages it, the relation or the nonrelation between the projects of Husserl and Hegel is an apposition of the relative phenomenology of beings and the absolute phenomenology of being: the philosophy of beings without being, on the one hand, and of being without beings, on the other. A mere glance at this apposition will suffice to realize that it is far from a simple contrast or a neat alignment. Although Hegel, too, presents his readers with the phenomenology of “relative” consciousness, this relativity is, for Heidegger, already reconstructed from the standpoint of the absolute. The phenomenology of spirit envelops and includes that of consciousness, assuming, as Heidegger does, that Hegel begins absolutely with the absolute, which “is other and so is not absolute, but relative. The not-absolute is not yet absolute.”11 Consciousness yields the most relative kind of knowledge,12 one where the absolute is at the furthest from itself and where it subsists in a negative modality of the “not-absolute,” while remaining itself. But, at the same time, consciousness, albeit purified by means of phenomenological reduction, is the horizon— the absolute horizon, perhaps—of Husserl’s phenomenology. Its being is the site where the relation without relation of Husserl and Hegel will unfold.

Before considering the two phenomenological ontologies of consciousness, a word on the absolutizing tendencies of Husserlian phenomenology is in order. All such tendencies point toward the practice of phenomenological reduction, through which Husserl hopes to reach the field of pure consciousness as that which is irreducible, that which survives the operations of bracketing, parenthesizing, setting aside. The outcome of reduction is absolute, in the sense that it is absolutely irreducible. Reduction is the absolvent movement of separation from the world of the natural attitude, from everything transcendent and given through adumbrations; it suspends natural consciousness that, equivalent to a limited ontic perspective, “finds everywhere and always only

beings, only phenomena, and judges all that meets it in accordance with the results of its findings.”13 This judgment is a deficient critique, so far as Heidegger is concerned, which is why it requires ontological criticism, thanks to which phenomenology would finally come into its own. Taking the place of reduction, Destruktion could conceivably play this role, provided that we grasped Destruktion in terms of “a critique of all ontology hitherto, with its roots in Greek philosophy, especially in Aristotle, whose ontology…lives as strongly in Kant and Hegel as in any medieval scholastic.”14 Hardly reliant on the absolute, this critique remains phenomenological, in that it seeks to gain access to “the thematic problems of the Greeks from the motives and the attitude of their way of access to the world,”15 through a repetition of their historical experience at the closure of metaphysics.

The absolutizing tendencies of reduction, in turn, are rather truncated. As soon as it chooses sides, eidetically looking only in the direction of non-adumbrated reality, Husserlian epochē falls short of the absolute that does not stand on one side or, indeed, on any side whatsoever: “Yet what is an absolute that stands on one side? What kind of absolute stands on any side at all? Whatever it is it is not absolute.”16 Husserl effects little more than an inversion of the natural attitude; having arrived at the non-phenomenal, nonadumbrated being of consciousness, he takes the side of this being, looks to one side, methodically and methodologically ignoring the relation between the intended as intended (noema) and beings simpliciter. To be sure, the bracketing of adumbrated reality dispenses with what is given relatively and incompletely, from one perspective or another, in favor of the absolute givenness of pure consciousness. But, in so doing, it takes the side of what has no sides, foregoes the difficulties of mediation, aborts the “dialogue between natural and real knowledge” and the critical “comparison between ontic/pre-ontological knowledge and ontological knowledge” that, in Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, constitutes consciousness quaconsciousness.17 Ontically absolute, the field of pure consciousness is ontologically relative because of its very

“purity,” the purified one-sidedness, distilled and separated from the world of the natural attitude.

The being of consciousness in the aftermath of phenomenological reduction is intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward something, its being, in each case, of something. Intentional consciousness is relative knowledge (and, hence, relative being) par excellence. Inherently relational, it is circumscribed by that of which it is conscious and, thus, hinges on the intended, even though it has been cut off from adumbrated reality as such. In this respect, it diverges from absolute knowledge that is no longer or not yet of something: “Is not knowledge as such a knowledge of something? This is precisely what Hegel denies and must deny when he claims that there is a knowledge which is qualitatively not relative, but absolute.”18 Still prior to its fulfillment in intuition, where noetic acts and their noematic targets belong together in strict correlations, intentionality is essentially a relatum. The ontic orientation of intentionality lies in its directedness toward the perceived, the remembered, the anticipated, and so forth, as opposed to the ontological trajectory of absolute knowledge that “must not remain bound but must liberate and ab-solve itself [sich losmacht, sich ab-löst] from what it knows and yet as so ab-solved, as absolute, [als ab-gelöstes—absolute] still be a knowledge.”19 The absolution of absolute knowledge from the known explodes noetic-nomatic correlations, freeing us, finally, from the “correspondence theory of truth”—truth as adequatio, not of rei et intellectus but of the intuiting and the intuited—which casts a long shadow over the entire field of pure consciousness. The true is not the fulfillment of empty intentionality in intuition or in the ontic presence of the intended; it is, rather, the whole, i.e., being or absolute knowledge itself. It is, more precisely, the whole capable of determining and delimiting itself, rather than externally circumscribed by its other.

Still, the dialectical self-determining whole poses difficulties of its own. The complaint Heidegger raised only several years before his first sustained engagement with Hegel against purely ontological,

absolute knowledge was that such knowledge dissolved the beings themselves and ignored “the original belonging together of comportment toward beings and understanding of being.”20 Implicitly, Heidegger extends the same rebuke to Husserl, who, in contrast to Hegel, privileged the intentional comportment toward beings over the understanding of being. Whereas relative phenomenology is dedicated to the appearing of phenomena in a knowing bound to the known (the name of this bond is intentionality, “consciousness of…”), absolute phenomenology is concerned with the phenomenal appearance of logos itself that gives itself form by negating and sublating its other. In this sense, “phenomenology is the absolute self-presentation of reason (ratio-Λόγος), whose essence and actuality Hegel finds in absolute spirit.”21 Only in the difference between, rather than in the synthesis of, the two phenomenologies, where at least as much disappears as appears, will we glimpse the “original belonging together” of the ontic and the ontological, of the phenomena and of logos.

Now, does the charge leveled against Hegel’s forgetting of beings hold, above all, in Heidegger’s own reading of Phenomenology of Spirit? In the reconstructive construction of the world from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, we—those who know absolutely—care for the truth of being and for the truth of beings, for knowing itself and for that which is known: “…we have in our knowledge two objects, or one object twice. This is the case necessarily and throughout the entire Phenomenology, because for us the object is basically and always knowing, which in itself and according to its formal essence already in its turn has its object, which it brings along with it.”22 So long as absolute knowledge, viewed from the vantage point of the absolute, is still more or less other to itself—so long as it is conditioned by the known—its intentionality is split, the noematic target doubled into the knowing and the object of this knowing. Our attention is, in turn, divided between the two objects or, alternatively, fissured in striving toward a double, spectral object (“one object twice”). In its critical

circumscription by two objects, in this hyper-delimitation, absolute knowing is de-limited, released from purely objective and subjective limits alike.

Let us already call these two objects or the double object, the one counted twice, by their names: the ontological and the ontic, the being of beings cast in terms of self-consciousness or, in the later text on Hegel, “experience,”23 and the known, experienced beings as they are known and experienced. The absolute is only absolute if it embraces these two modalities without necessarily reconciling them, if, that is, it holds them together in a tension approximating the intensity of ontico-ontological difference. Touched by the absolute, the object becomes excessive, turns into more than itself, overflows the limits of its identity, splits into two or becomes one and the same…twice (the dialectical and the ontological inflections of this “or” should be distinctly audible). And being? Isn’t it, too, more or less than itself, because we gain access to it through ontico-ontological difference, in which alone it appears and from which it withdraws (as nothing in being)? In light of this analogy —the ana-logos where redoubling (an-) abounds—we can appreciate the remark Dominique Janicaud made in passing in a text on the Hegel-Heidegger dialogue: “…the most secret proximity [of Heidegger] to Hegel…perhaps lies hidden in the friction with regard to phenomenology.”24 The dialectical splitting of the object of knowledge into the knowing and that which is known in it goes to the heart of what, for Hegel, constitutes the being of consciousness. As opposed to the Husserlian ontology of consciousness, encapsulated in the statement, “The being of consciousness is intentionality,” Hegel’s speculative definition proclaims, “The being of consciousness is self-consciousness.” What, in Husserl’s phenomenology, would have been the height of impoverished theoreticism, of a reflection on reflection that treats noetic acts as new noematic objects, is, in Hegel’s dialectics, the figure of richness and concreteness marking absolute knowledge that fleshes itself out by determining itself.

The ontic orientation of consciousness toward phenomena is, from

the standpoint of this knowledge, inseparable from its ontological directedness toward itself, in a movement of re-flection that does not come about as an after-thought, already uncoupled from lived actuality, but accompanies the reconstructive construction of experience from its absolute beginning. Hence, to know absolutely means “not to be absorbed in what is known, but to transmit it as such, as what is known to where it belongs as known and from where it stems.”25 It means, contra Husserl, that the life of consciousness does not have to be extinguished in the presence of the intuited and that the living intentionality, the dunamis of striving toward…, does not need to reach its end in the actuality of that toward which it strives.26 In the scenario where intentionality attains fulfillment, quelling the unrest of consciousness, the being of Dasein is patently conflated with the being of its intended targets, when in the operations of consciousness “knowing… forgets itself and is lost exclusively in the object.”27 The selfforgetting of knowing results in the automatic self-comprehension of Dasein as something present-at-hand, while its being “lost exclusively in the object” nullifies ontico-ontological difference.

The relativity of relative phenomenology signifies the determination of existence on the basis of and with reference to the ontology of the present-at-hand. The absoluteness of absolute phenomenology entails, on the contrary, the positive possibility of being lost in the object—the possibility of consciousness being lost in itself as its own object and, therefore, of re-finding itself in itself.

In defense of Husserl’s phenomenology, reduction has shown that consciousness itself does not appear and that, moreover, what defines the being-conscious of consciousness is its nonappearance, the non-adumbrated givenness, which sets it apart from transcendent reality and, therefore, from everything that is not-Dasein. Evidently, the ontology of pure consciousness is distinct from that of the present-at-hand. Conversely, in dialectics, the “appearing of phenomenal knowledge is the truth of knowledge,”28 not at all insulated from adumbrated reality. Much

depends, however, on the modes of objectivation or phenomenalization distinguishing the two phenomenologies. When logositself appears in relative knowledge, it does so as the sheer alienation and deadening of the subject, whose psychic life comes to an objective end in self-evidence. But when it arrives on the scene and makes its phenomenal appearance in the realm of the absolute, logos comes into its own and gains a new lease on life.

The consciousness of consciousness and the intentionality of intentionality bear no trace of the derivative and abstract character Husserl’s phenomenology has ascribed to them; they comprise the being of the absolute, which, in its separation or absolvent absolution from everything relative, is absolutely inseparable (inalienable) from us: “the absolute is from the start in and for itself with us and intends to be with us. This being-with-us (Parousia) is in itself already the mode in which the light of truth, the absolute itself beams [anstrahlt] upon us. To know the absolute is to stand in the ray [Strahl] of light, to give it back, to radiate [strahlt] it back, and thus to be itself in its essence the ray, not a mere medium through which the ray must first find its way.”29 The being-with-us of the absolute is its becoming-phenomenal, the becoming that is as superfluous as it is necessary in that it happens after the absolute has already become everything it is, from the very beginning. The shining of the absolute upon us does not illuminate us from the outside, setting itself up as an object over and against us. It radiates from within, with reflected or refracted light (“to give it back, to radiate it back”), with the ontological luminosity of consciousness as self-consciousness and, finally, as absolute spirit. Of course, our being-with the absolute deserves a patient deconstructive analysis. If the absolute is one with us, then it loses its identity as the absolute and is no longer one, because it is minimally separated from us, as much as from itself as a simple unity, by the nearness—the absolute nearness—of its presence. The separation of the absolute from itself is nothing but the expression of ontico-ontological difference allegedly forgotten in Hegel’s phenomenology.

The intentional ray of the transcendental ego in Husserl’s phenomenology does not shine from within but emits subjective light that shines upon its objects’ noematic surfaces. When it is with us, this ray is already outside of us, orchestrating the selftranscendence of consciousness as the consciousness of…. Its trajectory is unidirectional: consciousness intends something other, though not absolutely other, the transcendent. But the absolute, as Heidegger puts it, “intends to be with us” and therefore intends us, whenever we ourselves intend anything whatsoever. The loss of this other intentionality drastically impoverishes the phenomenological idea of constitution. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that Husserl’s constitutive subjectivity is purely active, for, besides the passive synthesis of temporality, it draws its specific sense from what it constitutes in the hylomorphic production of meaning. But, whereas, in the relative phenomenology of consciousness, the constituting is, to a certain extent, ontically constituted by the constituted, in the absolute phenomenology of spirit, the constituting is ontologically constituted by the absolute that intends it. In much of his own thought, Heidegger will elaborate on the inversion of intentionality, detectable in Hegel’s dialectics and imbued with ontological connotations. The “call of being” in Being and Time and, in a different sense, in “The Letter on Humanism,” as well as the call of thinking that flips around the question “What is called thinking?” are but two prominent examples of this ontological inversion that turns us into the objects of its critique.30 The ontological reversibility of intentionality is the reason why, in a rare explicit criticism of “current phenomenology,” contrasted to the phenomenology of spirit, Heidegger writes: “…it is crucial that once again we determine correctly what the genitive means in the expression ‘phenomenology of spirit.’ The genitive must not be interpreted as a genitivus objectivus. Easily misled by current phenomenology, one might take this genitive to be object-related, as though here we are dealing with phenomenological investigation

of spirit that is somehow distinguished from a phenomenology of nature or that of economics.”31 Spirit is not (at least, not exclusively) the object of phenomenology but also its subject; “phenomenology is…the manner in which spirit itself exists. The phenomenology of spirit is the genuine and total coming-out of spirit.”32 There is, in other words, no semantic equivalence between the seemingly parallel expressions—“phenomenology of consciousness” and “phenomenology of spirit”—unless we understand the former as a mode of appearance of the latter. In the contemporary phenomenology of consciousness, logos fades into the “study” of phenomena, even and especially when it seeks its method from the things themselves. This phenomenology is not of consciousness, in the sense of the subjective genitive, because consciousness itself does not appear or is not allowed to appear in it; phenomenology is not the manner whereby consciousness itself exists. So much so that, to extrapolate from Heidegger’s conclusions, consciousness, as the object of phenomenological study, ceases to exist, loses its existential determinations, and becomes indistinguishable from the domains of nature or economics. The razor-thin line of critical demarcation, traversing the genitive in “phenomenology of…,” is charged with the task of maintaining ontico-ontological difference, leveled down in Husserl’s thought. Of phenomenology, there is more than one in the one, not the least because the genitive form in “phenomenology of…” is necessarily equivocal.

III. The Being of Experience and Truth The transcendental objectification of consciousness in Husserlian phenomenology, as the phenomenology of consciousness but not one proper to consciousness, shapes the concepts of experience and truth. The ontic truth of experience is the veracity of the present-athand, the fulfillment and the confirmation of empty intentionality in intuition.33 The most crucial function of consciousness is verifying the appropriateness of the fit and the soundness of the relation between the experiencing and the experienced. In other words, its function pivots almost entirely on judging the accuracy

and measuring the degrees of proximity between the “merely” intended and the “really” intuited, in the sort of pre- or nonpredicative judgment and critique inherent in the acts of perception and undergirding all so-called abstract judgments.34 Experience, for Husserl, is judgment or—this amounts roughly to the same thing here—ontic critique. While consciousness feels the ontic unrest of shuttling between the two poles of comparison, it is bereft of the ontological restlessness one experiences when one dwells without abiding in the split between the ontic and the ontological, in the spacing of the ontico-ontological difference. Any residual unrest is subject to immediate pacification through a more stringent and exacting, though not necessarily exact, application of the acts of comparing, weighing, and judging. What is thus absent from the relative (or naïve) phenomenology of consciousness is the experience of experience that has nothing in common with theoretical consciousness, the being of experience that “means being this distinction” (“between the ontically true and the ontological truth”).35 And what is lost in every correlation established by consciousness, however precisely one has judged the belonging-together of its two elements, is the absolute ontological-existential truth of experience.

When in the seminars of the 1930s and 1940s Heidegger mines Hegel’s texts, he is searching for this very truth, so conspicuously lacking in Husserlian phenomenology. Truth as the truth of the absolute, if not the absolute truth, is neither pure objectivity nor subjectivity but experience in the ontological-existential signification of the term: “The will of the absolute to be with us, i.e., to appear for us as phenomena, prevails as experience.”36 In truth, the will of the absolute, which wills “to be with us,” absolute knowers, accomplishes the reversal of intentionality I have already invoked, so that we are not only the experiencing subjects but also the experienced objects of this will. From this dimensionless perspective of the absolute, the ontic experience of given phenomena, indeed of phenomenal givenness interpreted as the self-giving of the absolute, presents itself in a new light.

Experience is not a dispassionate judging comparison of the fit between intentionality and intuition, but the pathos of undergoing with…, consciousness’s being-transformed with the experienced, with itself, and with the absolute. As a result, Heidegger suggests that we interpret “experience as denoting, both negatively and positively, undergoing an experience withsomething.”37 The “with” of experience accommodates the most subtle inflections of existentiality: the being-with, Mitdasein, of consciousness comes to refer to the facticity of its unfolding alongside its objects, to its reflexive return to itself as self-consciousness, and to its being in absolute proximity (Parousiva) to the absolute. This small preposition “with” draws together the positive and the negative, the ontic and the ontological, the existential and the categorial, so that ontico-ontological difference could finally take its non-place. The first of the three meanings of “experience with” is the only one still resonating in the phenomenology of relative consciousness, which dilutes the rich existentiality of the “with” in the judged appropriateness and the co-belonging of the experiencing and the experienced, wherein intentionality is fulfilled and extinguished.

To experience with… is to suffer with… and to be mutually transfigured by that with which one experiences or suffers. The truth of the absolute and the absoluteness of the absolute do not preclude, but—perhaps paradoxically—necessitate dialectical alteration. Speculative verification, shuttling between the experiencing consciousness and the experienced content verifies and authenticates the truth of both in and through their becoming otherwise than they were: on the side of the experiencing, “[c]onsciousness verifies to itself what it really is,” so that “[i]n this verification,” it “loses its initial truth, what it at first thought of itself,”38 and, on the side of the experienced, “something is verified…as not being what it first seemed to be, but being truly otherwise [sondern in Wahrheit anders].”39 Verification does not only take time to be accomplished; it also takes time into account and, to a certain extent, it is time. Experiencing with… and suffering with… ultimately boil down to suffering the loss of the

initial self-identity of consciousness that has changed along with that of which it was conscious—something that remains unthinkable in the static determination of noetic acts (the intentional aiming at… that either hits or misses its target). In Husserl’s terms, this loss will have been explained with reference to a deficit of phenomenological critique, a lapse of judgment, including a lacuna within experience itself that has not yet succeeded in bringing the experienced firmly into its grasp. This is because the phenomenological idea of time, insofar as it pertains to the structure of noetic-noematic correlations, signifies a provisional emptiness of intentionality not yet or already not fulfilled and, therefore, a temporary deferral of the thing’s presence to intuition. Nothing fundamentally changes either in the intending or in the intended once the directedness-toward of consciousness finds actualization in that toward which it has been oriented ab initio.

Much different is the dialectical truth of experience germinating in the alteration of consciousness and of its double object. The beginning is already absolute, but, in this beginning, the absolute, standing or falling furthest from itself, is other to itself, with its otherness denoting the relativity of consciousness. In order to touch upon the truth of the absolute, verification must render this otherness truly other, in Wahrheit anders, without thereby negating the truth of the beginning and without repeating the mistake of ontic judgments that, in a gesture of facile criticism, dismiss the erroneousness of “what…first seemed to be.” Although, just as he has done in Being and Time, Heidegger accuses Hegel of contributing to the metaphysical neglect of the temporality of time —“…the pure concept annuls time. Hegelian philosophy expresses this disappearance of time by conceiving philosophy as the science or as absolute knowledge”40—and aligns this feature of dialectics with Husserl’s own insistence on the scientificity of phenomenology,41 the temporal character of truth in the phenomenology of the absolute contests these conclusions of the 1930-1 lecture course. In its broad outlines, the critique Heidegger

launches against Hegelian temporality is well known: the time of the dialectic passes over and covers over the ecstatic-existential temporality of Dasein, especially when it comes to the mediated “fall” of spirit into time.42 And yet, the thesis regarding truth as an alteration, mutually undergone by the experiencing and the experienced, makes it difficult to argue that Hegel has excluded temporality from his thinking of being. If “experience” is the name for “the being of beings,”43 then the essence of the being of beings is time, the time of experience and the experience of time. The crucible of experience is the crossing of the ontic and the ontological right in the midst of the phenomenology of spirit.

Logos is time itself, which means that the phenomena that “dissolve” in it disappear into their innermost ontological matrix.

Following my double working hypothesis on the shadow of Husserl that looms over and is, at the same time, conjured away in Heidegger’s readings of Hegel, the truth of sense-certainty and of perception—hence, of what has not yet been ontologically verified and, in being verified, altered—betokens the only truth contemporary phenomenology is familiar with. In sense-certainty, conceptual weight bears down upon “certainty,” which “means the entirety of the relation, in knowing, of a knower to what is known,”44 at the expense of sense and its data, so decisive for the practitioners of twentieth-century phenomenology.45 The certainty of sense-certainty is a moment of repose, when consciousness delights in the ostensible positivity of experience, when it no longer or not yet questions, with a dose of skepticism, what is known, its relation to what is known, and itself. The ostensible richness of sense-certainty is a symptom of the overstimulation and oversaturation of consciousness, overpowered by the infinite but empty variety of what appears before it and satisfied with not thinking through the mode, the how, of knowing that ties it to the known. We should habituate ourselves to hearing the echoes of this oversaturation and satisfaction in the phenomenological notion of truth as the fulfillment of empty intentionality in the presence—in flesh and blood—of that toward which it has tended.

But, if we limit ourselves to the ontic-existential level, where the manifold of sense-certainty predominates, is the fulfillment of intentionality really possible? Sense-certainty breaks down due to its non-fulfillment: “When we generally intend the thing, we find that “this” sends our intention away [von sich wegschickt]. It sends our intention away, not generally, but rather in a definite direction of something which has the character of a being this.”46 The internal breakdown of sense-certainty is another instant of the pulverization of intentionality, reflected by (not absorbed into) the intended, its branching-off in multiple directions. It is easy to recognize in this branching off Heidegger’s rethinking of the intentional comportment in terms of the practical and concernful dispersion of Dasein, the dispersion that expresses the definite modes of its being-in-the-world. Our intention is not fulfilled in the “this,” only referred to another “this” connected to it by webs of signification, from which our world is woven. This infinite deferral of fulfillment in the presence of the intuited, the elusiveness of that which we intend, frustrates some of the most basic tenets of Husserlian philosophy.

Aside from “hyletic phenomenology,” which, at the limits of sense, considers sense data before the hylomorphic production of meaning,47Husserl’s project is focused not so much on the pure “this,” as on the perceived as perceived, the remembered as remembered, or, more generally, on noematic unities, wherein sense data are already synthesized. Among noematic objects, Husserl singles out and absolutizes the perceived, given that the present of perception is the ground from which experience, memory, expectation arise and in which they are ultimately confirmed and consummated. All ontic critique of consciousness is to be undertaken from the vantage point of the experiential present, determining both past and future horizons. What Husserl forgets, however, is that the place of perception is in the middle and that, as Heidegger reminds us, “[t]hrough the mediation of perception, sense-certainty first reaches understanding and therein gets to its own ground as the true mode of consciousness.”48 Perception is

not the absolute but the path toward the absolute. Conflating it with the final destination, Husserl’s phenomenology foregoes mediations, erases the middle term, and paints a black-and-white, either/or, canvass of psychic life: either intentionality is empty, when it merely intends and represents the intended for itself, or it is full, when representations get their corroboration in the present of perception. That perceiving is an implicit hermeneutical act, whereby the perceiver non-thematically interprets (or else, nonpredicatively criticizes) the perceived X as X—that it is the act of pre-understanding on its way to an explicit interpretation—is a conclusion of Being and Time indebted, in the first place, to the Hegelian placement of perception in the middle, in the transitional form of consciousness, as opposed to its exaltation to the status of the ground and the end of psychic life in Husserl. Between the two phenomenologies, there are no mediations and no middle ground, if holding them together requires, for example, mediating the same object (and, for Husserl, perception itself is not an object) as, at the same time, the middle and the end.

The middle place of perception matches the speculative concept of appearance that “must be grasped as appearance, as a middle” between appearing and disappearing. “It is important to remember again,” Heidegger notes, “that Hegel does not take the essence of appearing only as self-showing, as becoming manifest, as manifestation. Rather, appearing also means a mere-showing and vanishing. There is in appearance a moment of negativity…”49 It is this moment of negativity and, therefore an immanent critique of appearance, that is absent from Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, where phenomenal presence is tantamount to pure positivity. Admittedly, adumbrated givenness means that in the appearing of phenomena something, including the appearing itself, does not appear, that several dimensions of the thing remain occluded, however temporarily, behind those that give themselves sight. Yet, the givenness of the noema, of the perceived as perceived, is complete and absolute, to the point of being translucent before the act of perceiving. There are no traces of

“vanishing” in the appearing noema and, thus, there is no need to resort to the operations of signification, so as to “fill in the blanks” by interposing the sign in the place of the absent thing or parts of a thing. While, for Hegel, “’to appear’ or ‘to be a phenomenon’” is “to become other in remaining self-identical [sich-anders-werden in der Selbstgleichheit],”50 for Husserl, to appear is to establish a positive identity between the perceiving and the perceived in the present of intuition. But Hegel, too, is not beyond reproach: in the absoluteness of the absolute, in the identity of knowledge and will, in the becoming-rational of the actual and the becoming-actual of the rational, the otherness of phenomena is subsumed, as appearance and essence become one and the same. It is the role of the phenomenology of the in-between, the phenomenology of ontico-ontological difference, to maintain alive the promise of appearances that give themselves, even as something withdraws from their givenness. Heidegger’s own concept of truth as aletheia, or the giving withdrawal of being, will be best understood in the context of this phenomenology of the in-between.

A close and often quite sympathetic reconstruction of Hegel’s thinking in Heidegger’s texts and seminars of the 1930s and 1940s51nevertheless leaves us with the conclusion that, taken separately, the two phenomenologies are inadequate when it comes to the entwined questions of beings and of being. This rather symmetrical accusation is, of course, at odds with the conclusions of the 1923 course on ontology and hermeneutics, where Heidegger identified the saving grace of Husserl’s philosophy with the kind of critique that is capable of cutting through the “sophistries” of the dialectic play with the form/content, finitude/infinity, and other distinctions. “It is,” Heidegger observed then, “what the critical stance of phenomenology ultimately struggles against.”52 A decade later, the “critical stance” migrates to the region between the thought of Husserl and that of Hegel.

Neither is fully adequate to the critical mission it claimed for itself: phenomenology of spirit makes phenomena dissipate in logos, while phenomenology of consciousness causes logos to melt into

phenomena. Hegel is indicted for betraying the question of beings, die Frage nach dem Seienden, for triggering its sublation (Aufhebung),53 not to mention the sublation of the beings themselves in being. Husserl stands accused of neglecting the question of being, bracketed or set aside in the course of phenomenological reduction that disengages pure consciousness from everything transcendent, all the while ontically relativizing the being of this consciousness. Phenomenology as an ontological (that is to say, an ontico-ontological) enterprise—in the role Heidegger allotted to it inBeing and Time—does not come about in the exclusive privileging of phenomena or of logos. When logos is absolutized, “[t]here is no introduction to phenomenology, because there can be no introduction to phenomenology”54; when phenomena are prioritized, there is nothing but an introduction to phenomenology, a “preliminary conception” or a Vorbegriff. Only in the suspended middle between the two (but are there only two?), in the space or spacing between the absence of introduction and relentless introduction, between logos and phenomena, between the one and the others, will the most basic question of ontology germinate.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.

Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Revised edition (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), 328.

2 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 328.

3 Martin Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in Off the Beaten Track. Trans. & Ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Heynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107.

4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962), 60.

5 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 21.

6 Quoted in Thomas Sheehan, “General Introduction: Husserl and Heidegger: The Making and Unmaking of a Relationship.” In Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931). Edmund Husserl’s

Collected Works, Vol. VI. Trans. and Eds. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dodrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1997), 17.

7 Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity.

Trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 33.

8 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 327.

9 Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans.

Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 28/40.

10 Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (19271931). Edmund Husserl’sCollected Works, Vol. VI. Trans. and Eds. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dodrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1997), 421.

11 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 33. This assumption was not in the background of Heidegger’s thought ten years before the course of Hegel, in the 1923 seminar, titled Ontology—the Hermeneutics of Facticity. There, Heidegger took the side of Husserlian phenomenology, accusing dialectics of a reactive work on readymade materials and, hence, of a reliance— uncharacteristic of the absolute—on the ontic world. [Martin Heidegger, Ontology—the Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans. John van Buren (Indiannapolis & Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 36] 12 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 34.

13 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 118.

14 Martin Heidegger, “Letter to Karl Jaspers, Freiburg, June 27, 1922” in The Heidegger—Jaspers Correspondence (1920-1963).

Eds. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (New York: Humanity Books, 2003), 34.

15 Heidegger, “Letter to Karl Jaspers,” 34.

16 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 101.

17 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 138.

18 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 14.

19 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 15/21.

20 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 327.

21 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 30.

22 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 48.

23 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 139.

24 Dominique Janicaud, “Heidegger-Hegel: An Impossible ‘Dialogue’?” in Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger. Eds. Rebecca Comay and John McCumber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 41.

25 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 47.

26 Emmanuel Levinas launches a parallel critique of Husserl, writing that “it is a question of descending from the entity illuminated in self-evidence toward the subject that is extinguished rather than announced in it.” [Discovering Existence with Husserl.

Trans. R. Cohen and M. B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 156] 27 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 129.

28 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 108.

29 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 98.

30 On “being called by Being,” see Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993),245. On “what is called thinking—and what does call for it?” see Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?

Trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York & Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1968), 21.

31 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 23-4.

32 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 24.

33 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 20.

34 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 64.

35 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 133.

36 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 143.

37 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 21.

38 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 22.

39 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 21/30.

40 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 12.

41 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 11.

42 Heidegger, Being and Time, 486.

43 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 135.

44 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 54.

45 “We do not learn anything about visual and auditory sensations, about the data of smell and touch (the very least that today’s phenomenologies would demand).” [Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 54] 46 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 58/82.

47 Cf. Paragraph 85 of Ideas I [Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Trans. F. Kersten (Dodrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983)], as well as Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology. Trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 7.

48 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 83.

49 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 109, 117.

50 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 75/107.

51 In addition to the two treated here, consult texts on negativity from 1938-9 and 1941-2, gathered in Volume 68 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, selections from Being and Truth, courses on Hegel’s Logic and on logic in Aristotle and Hegel, as well as the recently published engagement with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in volume 86 of Gesamtausgabe.

52 Heidegger, Ontology, 37.

53 Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 41/60.

54 Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” 154.

Pour citer cet article Michael MARDER, «The Phenomenology of Ontico-Ontological Difference», Bulletin d'Analyse Phénoménologique [En ligne], Volume 8 (2012), Numéro 2, URL : http://popups.ulg.ac.be/17822041/index.php?id=564.

A propos de : Michael Marder

Ikerbasque / University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz ...............