Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism Flashcards
As soon as we analyse our conscious awareness we discover that it always is, and can only be, awareness of something.
Husserl points out that there can be no doubt whatsoever that the objects of our consciousness do exist as objects of consciousness for us, whatever other existential status they may have or lack.
Husserl launched a whole new school of philosophy called Phenomenology: the systematic analysis of consciousness and its objects. (Analysis of whatever it is that is experienced).
Direct experience includes not only material objects but a great many sorts of abstract entity; not only thoughts, pains emotions, memories, but music, mathematics and a host of other things. With all of them the question of their independent existential status is bracketed.
Martin Heidegger (one of Husserl’s followers) struck out on his own with a book called Being and Time.
We have a clearcut line of philosophical development, passing from Husserl to Heidegger and from Heidegger to Sartre.
Husserl noted that directedness was a feature unique to the mind. The mind and nothing else int he Universe has a directedness towards something outside itself.
No one could experience anything - music, other people, galaxies - except by virtue of directed mental content. Self-contained conscious subjects are directed towards objects.
This was a fundamental conception that Heidegger reacted against. He was driven to ask whether the subject-object relation really was an adequate description of our relation to things. He felt that awareness and consciousness did not play a necessary role at all e.g. we don’t have to ‘think’ about hammering.
We just have a ‘primordial understanding’.
Heidegger said that humans are not subjects, spectators, observers separated by an invisible plate-glass window from the world of objects in which we find ourselves, and trying to relate to it. On the contrary, we are part and parcel of it. We are amongst it all, being in it, coping in it.
We are not detached from some external reality which is out there. We are part of it.
In consequence, we are not in any primary sense ‘observing subjects’ or ‘knowing beings’ in the traditional way philosophers have regarded us. Rather, we are beings in amongst and inseparable from a world of being.
Heidegger’s examples show that most characteristic human activity is not guided by conscious choices, and not accompanied by aware states of mind.
He didn’t want to deny that there is a place for contemplation and consciously directed action, but first and foremost we are coping beings already involved in the world.
Most characteristic human activity is not guided by conscious choices.
The world can never be something I infer, still less something I need to infer. I start with it, in it, of it.
Philosophers since Descartes had been trying to prove the existence of the external world. Kant said that it was a scandal that no one had successfully done it. Heidegger in Being and Time retorts: The scandal is that philosophers keep trying to prove the existence of the external world, as if we were stuck with some internal world and could not get out.
Heidegger uses the word ‘Dasein’ meaning ‘existence’ but also meaning ‘being-there’.
Another word Heidegger uses for human beings as an openness to things in a situation is ‘clearing’.
It has a 3-fold structure:
1/ Being already in a mood so things matter i.e. crowds have moods, companies have cultures, whole ages have sensibilities. Moods are not essentially private mental states.
2/ Using things so as to articulate their capacities i.e. the world is already always articulated. Everything is always laid out as a context of functional relations. Pieces of equipment must interrelate if I am to use any particular piece.
3/ Pressing into new possibilities e.g. I am hammering a nail in order to build a house.
Conformity to public norms is constitutive of Dasein
Dasein, according to Heidegger, is always dimly aware that the world is ungrounded. There is no reason one has to do things that way one does.
God has not ordered us to do things this way, nor does human nature require it.
We do what one does and talk as one talks, but we use the norms to flee unsettledness. We become conformists.
However, we can own up to what it is to be Dasein. We can hold on to anxiety rather than flee it.
You can go on doing the same thing you did, but how you did it changes radically.
You no longer expect to get any deep, final meaning out of life or find any rational grounding for anything.
‘You are able to stick with things without getting stuck with them’.
There is still space for authenticity, namely, doing the sort of thing that one does in a way that allows a response to the unique situation without concern for respectability and conformity.
That kind of life, not trying to get absolute meaning and responding to the current situation, makes you an individual and no longer zombie-like. It’s an existential liberation philosophy. There is no deep truth in the individual subject.
Accepting the unsettling groundlessness of Dasein is what is liberating.
The latter Heidegger shifted from individual to cultural concerns. He began to think ‘historically’.
You cannot have saints in Ancient Greece. They would just have been weak people.
You could not have Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages. They would have been prideful sinners who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God.
Heidegger no longer takes anxiety to be a universal structure. The early Greeks and the Christians didn’t experience anxiety in the face of meaningless.
We don’t even seek truth any more but simply efficiency. We are we so concerned with this? To what end? Heidegger says there are no guidelines any more, no goals.
We must appreciate non-efficient practices - what he calls the saving power of insignificant things e.g. friendship, backpacking into the wilderness, running and so on.
Overcoming nihilism is a possibility for Heidegger precisely because it means getting over our technological understanding of being, not our technology.
Being and Time is a work of considerable length (437 pages in the German original) and legendary difficulty. The difficulty is caused by the fact that Heidegger sets himself the task of what he calls a “destruction” of the philosophical tradition.
Heidegger has the audacity to go back to the drawing board and invent a new philosophical vocabulary.
Heidegger’s name for the human being is Dasein, a term which can be variously translated, but which is usually rendered as “being-there”.
The basic and very simple idea is that the human being is first and foremost not an isolated subject, cut off from a realm of objects that it wishes to know about.
We are rather beings who are always already in the world, outside and alongside a world from which, for the most part, we do not distinguish ourselves.
The basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time.
That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death.
Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls “being-towards-death”.
For Heidegger, the question of God’s existence or non- existence has no philosophical relevance. The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude.
What sort of thing is human existence? It is obviously defined by time: we are creatures with a past, who move through a present and who have available to them a series of possibilities, what Heidegger calls “ways to be”.
Heidegger’s point here is wonderfully simple: the human being is not definable by a “what”, like a table or a chair, but by a “who” that is shaped by existence in time. What it means to be human is to exist with a certain past, a personal and cultural history, and by an open series of possibilities that I can seize hold of or not.
For Heidegger, there are two dominant modes of being human: authenticity and inauthenticity. Furthermore, we have a choice to make between these two modes: the choice is whether to be oneself or not to be oneself, to be author of oneself and self-authorising or not.
“Philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description – what Heidegger calls “phenomenology” – of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.”
What Heidegger seeks to destroy in particular is a certain picture of the relation between human beings and the world that is widespread in modern philosophy and whose source is Descartes
Heidegger does not deny the importance of knowledge, he simply denies its primacy. Prior to this dualistic picture of the relation between human beings and the world lies a deeper unity that he tries to capture in the formula “Dasein is being-in-the-world”.
If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. That is to say, I am not a free-floating self or ego facing a world of objects that stands over against me. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world.
Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience.
The problem with most philosophy after Descartes is that it conceives of the world theoretically and thus imagines, like Descartes, that I can doubt the existence of the external world and even the reality of the persons that fill it – who knows, they might be robots!
For Heidegger, by contrast, who we are as human beings is inextricably bound up and bound together with the complex web of social practices that make up my world. The world is part of who I am.
Heidegger asked whether the subject-object distinction was an adequate description of our relation to things.
In Being and Time, he tries to destruct the philosophical tradition whose source is Descartes. The human being is not an isolated subject.
Being is time and time is finite. Human existence is defined by time. To be an authentic human being, we must constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death.
What is means to be a human is to exist with a certain past, a personal and cultural history and by an open series of possibilities which I can seize hold of or not.
Humans are not subjects separated from a world of objects. We are not detached from some external reality. We are beings in and amongst an inseparable world of being.
Primarily, we are coping beings in the world. Directed conscious thought is secondary.
He does not deny the importance of knowledge. He simply denies its primacy.
Dasein is always dimly aware that the world is ungrounded.
There is no deep truth in the individual subject.
Heidegger does not take anxiety to be a universal structure. The early Greeks and Christians didn’t experience anxiety in the face of meaningless.
Bad faith is the condition that people suffer when they deny themselves that they are radically free, when they think their past determines their future.
Such people are making a metaphysical mistake, turning themselves into inert objects, rather than free beings condemned to having to make their own choices.
Bad faith is an existential condition and is self-deceptive.
