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 neo-
Kantian 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 epoch) 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 Godfrey-
Smith 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 `language-
games,' as the paradigm cases of meanings. Thus they reduce the
meaning-relation to representation again, with the inevitable anti-
realist 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
7 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 non-
representationalmanifesting, 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 semblance-
phenomenon 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 paradigm-
argument to show that we do not have luminous knowledge in any
non-trivial case exploits these very problems of concept-
application. 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 t-
1. 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 7,
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 thenaivet 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 "language-
independent" 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-Franois 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, 43, p.122.
30. ibid, 43, 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, 43, 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 anti-
realist 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 self-
directed 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 7 (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.
..........

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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 Merleau-
Ponty, 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 Gttingen 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
Husserls (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 Husserl-
Archives, 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 Husserls 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 Platos allegory of
the cave orAristotles 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 Brentanos 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 Husserls work, Brentano is considered to be the
main forerunner of phenomenology.
See also:
Skepticism (for the concept of the epoch)
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 Husserls 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 Husserls 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 Husserls 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 epoch and the reduction. The epoch is a
methodological shift in ones 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
ones natural experience is to lead back ones attention to the
universal and necessary conditions of that experience. Both the
epoch 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 Husserls idealism during this period of his
research does not forego the epistemological realism of his early
work.
Genetic Phenomenology
Husserls 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 Pfnder, Johannnes
Daubert, Nicolai Hartmann, Herbert Spiegelberg, Karl Schuhmann,
and Barry Smith.
Existential phenomenology
While existentialism has a precedent in the writings of Sren
Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was
not until Heideggers 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
ones 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, Heideggers conception of being-in-
the-world is considered to be an elaboration of Husserls 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 ones average everyday
comportment to the world is ultimate intentional relation upon
which all others are grounded or rooted.
Heidegger also approached Husserls phenomenology with a
particular question in mind. It was question that he began to ask
after he read Brentanos 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 Heideggers reactivation of the
question of being has become a watershed event in twentieth-
century 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 beingDasein(German; literally, being-
there). 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. Heideggers famous analysis
ofDaseins 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 Heideggers 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 Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, a text that exercised a
considerable influence on Marxs development of socialism. This
new wave of Hegel scholarship (typified by Jean Wahl, Alexandre
Koyr, Alexandre Kojve, Jean Hyppolite) incorporated many
themes of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. In
particular, Kojves famous lectures at the cole Pratique des
Hautes tudes 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 Lvi-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 (en-
soi) 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 twentieth-
centuryexistentialism. 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
Thvenaz, 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 phnomnologique
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
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Michael MARDER
The Phenomenology of Ontico-Ontological Difference
Article
Document(s) associ(s)
Annexes
Texte complet en PDF/Full text in PDF: Vol. VIII, n2 (124k)
Rsum
Le prsent article interprte la lecture heideggerienne de la
phnomnologie de l'esprit de Hegel comme une critique voile de
la phnomnologie de la conscience de Husserl. Je dfends l'ide
qu'en dernier ressort, Heidegger affirme l'insuffisance des deux
phnomnologies, exclusivement proccupes par l'tre ou les
tants, et montre la voie pour une troisime phnomnologie, celle
de la diffrence ontico-ontologique.
Abstract
This paper focuses on Martin Heideggers reading of the Hegelian
phenomenology of spirit as a veiled critique of Edmund Husserls
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 twothe phenomenology of ontico-ontological
difference.
Table des matires
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 proto-
methodological 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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
Lwith 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
Heideggers 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 phenomenologywhich
could well turn out to be the other of Husserls 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, Heideggers rejoinders to and criticisms
of Husserl are not outright dismissals. They are, more precisely, the
obverse of the reproach to Hegels philosophy in toto, where
everything ontic is dissolved into the ontological, without
insight into the ground of possibility of ontology itself8 and,
therefore, without safeguarding the possibilitystill alive in
Husserls thoughtof 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 mans 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 com-
plicated, in the first instance, by Heideggers 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 tunmit]
a phenomenology of consciousness as currently understood in
Husserls senseA clear differentiation [klare Scheidung] is
necessary in the interest of a real understanding of both [the
Hegelian and Husserlian] phenomenologiesparticularly 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 Freuds
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 Hegels 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 Heideggers treatment of Hegel, ormost 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 Heideggers
ontico-ontological difference forecloses, precisely, such gathering-
together. 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 termsthe other who stands in for the
absolutizing or absoluteis absolved from the bonds of
relationality. An infinity stretches between the twothe infinity to
be thought.
II. The Being of Consciousness
As Heidegger clandestinely stages it, the relation or the non-
relation 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, perhapsof Husserls phenomenology. Its
being is the site where the relation without relation of Husserl and
Hegel will unfold.
Before considering the two phenomenological ontologies of con-
sciousness, 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
ontologylives 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 epoch 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, non-
adumbrated 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 Heideggers 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-lst] from what it knows and yet as so ab-solved,
as absolute, [als ab-gelstesabsolute] 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 truthtruth as adequatio, not of rei et
intellectus but of the intuiting and the intuitedwhich 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--
), 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 Hegels forgetting of beings
hold, above all, in Heideggers own reading of Phenomenology of
Spirit? In the reconstructive construction of the world from the
standpoint of absolute knowledge, wethose who know
absolutelycare 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 itselfso long as it is conditioned by the knownits
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 sametwice (the dialectical and the ontological inflections
of this or should be distinctly audible). And being? Isnt 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-) aboundswe can
appreciate the remark Dominique Janicaud made in passing in a
text on the Hegel-Heidegger dialogue: the most secret
proximity [of Heidegger] to Hegelperhaps 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, Hegels
speculative definition proclaims, The being of consciousness is
self-consciousness. What, in Husserls phenomenology, would
have been the height of impoverished theoreticism, of a reflection
on reflection that treats noetic acts as new noematic objects, is, in
Hegels 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 self-
forgetting 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 objectthe possibility of consciousness being lost
in itself as its own object and, therefore, of re-finding itself in
itself.
In defense of Husserls phenomenology, reduction has shown that
consciousness itself does not appear and that, moreover, what
defines the being-conscious of consciousness is its non-
appearance, 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
Husserls 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 nearnessthe absolute nearnessof its presence. The
separation of the absolute from itself is nothing but the expression
of ontico-ontological difference allegedly forgotten in Hegels
phenomenology.
The intentional ray of the transcendental ego in Husserls
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 self-
transcendence 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 Husserls 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 phenomeno-
logy 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 Hegels 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 isthe 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 expressionsphenomenology of
consciousness and phenomenology of spiritunless 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 Heideggers
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
Husserls 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-at-
hand, 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 non-
predicative judgment and critique inherent in the acts of perception
and undergirding all so-called abstract judgments.34 Experience,
for Husserl, is judgment orthis amounts roughly to the same
thing hereontic 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 nave) 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
Hegels 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, consciousnesss 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, butperhaps paradoxicallynecessitate 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
verifiedas 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 conscioussomething that remains
unthinkable in the static determination of noetic acts (the
intentional aiming at that either hits or misses its target). In
Husserls 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 things 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 whatfirst 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 knowledge40and aligns this feature of dialectics
with Husserls 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
Heideggers readings of Hegel, the truth of sense-certainty and of
perceptionhence, of what has not yet been ontologically verified
and, in being verified, alteredbetokens 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 presencein
flesh and bloodof 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 Heideggers 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,47Husserls 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, Husserls 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, non-
predicatively criticizes) the perceived X as Xthat it is the act of
pre-understanding on its way to an explicit interpretationis 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 negativity49 It
is this moment of negativity and, therefore an immanent critique of
appearance, that is absent from Husserls 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. Heideggers 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 Hegels
thinking in Heideggers 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 Husserls 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) enterprisein the role
Heidegger allotted to it inBeing and Timedoes 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 phenomenology54; 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, Hegels 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 Husserls
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, Hegels 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 (1927-
1931). Edmund HusserlsCollected Works, Vol. VI. Trans. and Eds.
Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dodrecht, Boston, and
London: Kluwer, 1997), 421.
11 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 33. This
assumption was not in the background of Heideggers thought ten
years before the course of Hegel, in the 1923 seminar, titled
Ontologythe 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 absoluteon the ontic world. [Martin
Heidegger, Ontologythe Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans. John
van Buren (Indiannapolis & Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999), 36]
12 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 34.
13 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 118.
14 Martin Heidegger, Letter to Karl Jaspers, Freiburg, June 27,
1922 in The HeideggerJaspers Correspondence (1920-1963).
Eds. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (New York: Humanity Books,
2003), 34.
15 Heidegger, Letter to Karl Jaspers, 34.
16 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 101.
17 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 138.
18 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 14.
19 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 15/21.
20 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 327.
21 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 30.
22 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 48.
23 Heidegger, Hegels 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, Hegels 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, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 129.
28 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 108.
29 Heidegger, Hegels 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 thinkingand 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, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 23-4.
32 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 24.
33 Heidegger, Hegels 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, Hegels Concept of Experience, 133.
36 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 143.
37 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 21.
38 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 22.
39 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 21/30.
40 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 12.
41 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 11.
42 Heidegger, Being and Time, 486.
43 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 135.
44 Heidegger, Hegels 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 todays
phenomenologies would demand). [Heidegger, Hegels
Phenomenology of Spirit, 54]
46 Heidegger, Hegels 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, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 83.
49 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 109, 117.
50 Heidegger, Hegels 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
Hegels Logic and on logic in Aristotle and Hegel, as well as the
recently published engagement with Hegels Philosophy of Right
in volume 86 of Gesamtausgabe.
52 Heidegger, Ontology, 37.
53 Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, 41/60.
54 Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience, 154.
Pour citer cet article
Michael MARDER, The Phenomenology of Ontico-Ontological
Difference, Bulletin d'Analyse Phnomnologique [En ligne],
Volume 8 (2012), Numro 2, URL : http://popups.ulg.ac.be/1782-
2041/index.php?id=564.
A propos de : Michael Marder
Ikerbasque / University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz
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