Seminar IV: Heidegger. Facticity and Transcendence

Professor Dermot Moran

Chinese University of Hong Kong

July 2010

Heidegger on transcendence

• Term ‘transcendence’ is uncommon in Being and Time.

• Appears in ‘Vom Wesen des Grundes’ (1929)• Was ist Metaphysik? (1929)• Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929)• § 25: ‘ontological knowledge forms

transcendence’• ‘transcendence is finitude itself’• § 24: ‘transcendence is ecstatic-horizonal’• Finite transcendence (sensibility)

Husserl on transcendence (Ideas I)

• The physical thing is said to be, in itself, unqualifiedly transcendent.

• (Ideas I § 42, p. 90; Hua III/1: 77)

• ‘immanent transcendence’ (CM V, § 47):

• Within this “original sphere” (the sphere of original self-explication) we find also a “transcendent world”…

• (CM § 47, pp. 104-5; Hua I 135).

First and Second Transcendence

• First transcendence – physical objects, the world• Second transcendence—persons, others• “Transcendence in every form is a within-the-

ego self-constituting being-sense. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being.”

• (CM IV, p. 83-84; Hua I: 117, trans modified).

Heidegger Being and Time (1927)

• Section 69: ‘The temporality of being-in-the-world and the the problem of the transcendence of the world (Transzendenz der Welt)

• Section 7: Die Transzendenz des Seins des Daseins ist eine ausgezeichnete,sofern in ihr die Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der radikalsten Individuation liegt. (SZ, p. 51)

• Later Note: Transzendenz als das Ekstatische - Zeitlichkeit - Temporalitat; aber ,Horizont`! Seyn hat Seyendes, überdacht'. Transzendenz aber von Wahrheit des Seyns her: das Ereignis. (SZ 51n)

Idea of transcendence

• SZ Section 10: transcendence of humanity is a Christian notion (uniqueness vis-à-vis other beings in relation to God)

• SZ Section 69: Die ekstatische Zeitlichkeit lichtet das Da ursprünglich.

• Being of Dasein is grounded in temporality which makes transcendence possible

• Exstatic character of Dasein’s being-in

Transcendence and Ekstasis

• Das »Transzendenzproblem« kann nicht auf die Frage gebracht werden: wie kommt ein Subjekt hinaus zu einem Objekt, wobei die Gesamtheit der Objekte mit der Idee der Welt identifiziert wird. Zu fragen ist: was ermöglicht es ontologisch, daß Seiendes innerweltlich begegnen und als begegnendes objektiviert werden kann? Der Rückgang auf die ekstatischhorizontal fundierte Transzendenz der Welt gibt die Antwort. (SZ § 70, p. 484)

Influences on Heidegger

• Husserl

• Aristotle

• Dilthey

• Scheler (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928)

• Jaspers

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

• German psychiatrist• Lecturer in

psychology at Heidelberg

• Conversion to philosophy

• Transcendence =permanent non-objective

Karl Jaspers on transcendence

• Just as I do not exist without the world, I am not myself without transcendence. … I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal things but speaks to me as possible – speaks to me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being. The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth.[i]

•[i] Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Volume 2, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 45.

Jaspers on Existenz

• Existence (Existenz) is the self-being that relates to itself and thereby also to transcendence from which it knows that it has been given to itself and upon which it is grounded.[i]

•[i] Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 21.

Existence and Transcendence

• Only through historicity do I become aware of the authentic being of transcendence –and only through transcendence does our ephemeral existence acquire historical substance.(Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 74).

• Existenz is not a self-contained unity. If there is unity it only is in transcendence. (Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 76).

Transcendence • ‘There is transcendence only by virtue of the reality of my unconditionality’.

(K. Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, p. 632, quoted in Jean Wahl, ‘Notes on Some Relations of Jaspers to Kierkegaard and Heidegger,’ Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, p. 396).

• ‘Existenz is either in relation to transcendence or not at all’. (K. Jaspers, Philosophie III, p. 6, Philosophy, Volume 3, trans. E. B Ashton (Chicago: U. of Chicago Pr., 1971), p. 7.)

• ‘I am existentially myself in the act of apprehending transcendence.’• (Jaspers, Philosophie III, p. 6, Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, p. 504.)

• I experience myself as given to myself not by myself but by something other, by transcendence.

• (K. Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. R. Manheim (NY: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 17.)

• the ‘place of transcendence is neither in this world or beyond, but it is the boundary—the boundary at which I confront transcendence whenever I am my true self.’[ [K. Jaspers, Philosophie III, p. 13; Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, p. 510.

The Encompassing (das Umgreifende)

• But the encompassing (Umgreifende) is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon. The encompassing always merely announces itself—in present objects and within the horizons—but it never becomes an object. Never appearing to us itself, it is that wherein everything else appears.[i]

•[i] K. Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, p. 18.

Early Heidegger on Religious Life

• Lectures on facticity and ‘factical life’• Heidegger: hermeneutics of facticity• “On account of its inclination towards

falling, factical life lives for the most part in what is inauthentic, i.e. in what is handed down, in what is reported to it, in that which it appropriates in its averageness.” (Aristotle text, Natorp Bericht, 1922, p. 369)

Factical Life

• Philosophy has the task of preserving the facticity of life and strengthening the facticity of existence (Die Philosophie hat die Aufgabe, die Faktizität des Lebens zu erhalten und die Faktizität des Daseins zu stärken).[i]

• [i] M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung (Sommersemester 1920), hrsg. Claudius Strube, GA 59 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993), p. 174.

Factical Life as Basic Phenomenon

• ‘Factical life’: ‘life’ expresses a basic phenomenological category; it signifies a basic phenomenon (Grundphänomen).[i]

•[i] M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Wintersemester 1921/22), hrsg. W. Bröcker & K. Bröcker-Oltmanns, GA 61 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2nd rev. ed.1994), p. 80 trans. R. Rojcewicz, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. Initiation into Phenomenological Research (Bloomkington: Indiana U. P., 2001), p. 61.

Authentic Life• In being futural in running ahead, the Dasein, that on average is,

becomes itself; in running ahead it becomes visible as this one singular uniqueness of its singular fate in the possibility of its singular past.

• (M. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, (1924), p. 21/21E.)

• …one must in principle keep in view the fact that the term zoé, vita, means a basic phenomenon, upon which the Greek, the Old Testament, the New Testament-Christian, and the Greek-Christian interpretations of human Dasein are centred.[i]

•[i] M. Heidegger, ‘Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation),’ Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6 (1989), pp. 228-74, see especially p. 240, translated by Michael Baur as ‘Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,’ Man and World 25 (1992), 358-93, see especially p. 361.

Heidegger (1923) on phenomenology

• Phenomenological research, which was supposed to provide a basis for scientific work, has sunk to the level of wishi-washiness, thoughtlessness, and summariness, to the level of the philosophical noise of the day, to the level of a public scandal of philosophy.[i]

•[i] M. Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, GA 63 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988), §14, pp. 73-74; trans. by John van Buren as Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1999), p. 58.

Heidegger on Husserl in Being and Time (1927)

• The following investigation would not have been possible if the ground had not been prepared by Edmund Husserl, with whose Logical Investigations phenomenology first emerged. Our comments on the preliminary conception of phenomenology have shown that what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical movement. Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility. (BT 62-3; SZ 38)

Heidegger to Richardson

• “phenomenology” in Husserl’s sense was elaborated into a distinctive philosophical position according to a pattern set by Descartes, Kant and Fichte. The historicity of thought remained completely foreign to such a position … The Being-question, unfolded in Being and Time, parted company with this philosophical position, and that on the basis of what to this day I still consider a more faithful adherence (Festhaltens) to the principle of phenomenology (Heidegger, Letter to Richardson, From Phenomenology to Thought, p. xiv-xv).

Heidegger on ‘Principle of Principles’ (1919)

• It [the principle of principles] is the primordial intention of genuine life, the primordial bearing of life-experience and life as such, the absolute sympathy with life that is identical with life-experience. (Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie GA 56/57 § 20, 110; Sadler, p. 92)

• If by a principle one were to understand a theoretical proposition, this designation would not be fitting. However, that Husserl speaks of a principle of principles, of something that precedes all principles, in regard to which no theory can lead us astray, already shows (although Husserl does not explicitly say so) that it does not have a theoretical character.[i] [i] M. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie GA 56/57 § 20, p. 110; trans. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 92.

Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl

• Consciousness (Cartesian legacy)• Intentionality• No explicit reduction (but destruction)• No transcendental ego• No reference to noetic-noematic correlation• Critique of primacy of theoretical• the slogan of phenomenology should be

“Freigabe des Daseins!”; ‘set Dasein free!’.

The Philosophy of ‘Consciousness’

• : the term has a ‘sad history’ (GA 59 60); it is the name for a ‘region’ of entities, specifically lived experiences (Erlebnisse).

• How is it possible that a specific region of being (consciousness) becomes the theme for the fundamental science of phenomenology?, (1923/1924 Introduction to Phenomenological Research lectures, GA 17 § 4),

• consciousness must be grounded in specific possibilities of life.

Critique of subjectivity

• Kant lacked ‘a preliminary ontological analysis of the subjectivity of the subject’ (BT § 6, p. 45; SZ 24).

• Heidegger letter to Rudolf Bultmann (1927): “The fundament of [my work] is developed by starting from the ‘subject’, properly understood as the human Dasein, so that with the radicalization of this approach the true motives of German idealism may likewise come into their own…”

Phenomenology is disclosure

• What occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of consciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena is thought more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and existence as aletheia, as the unconcealedness of what is present, its being revealed, its showing itself. (Heidegger, On Time and Being, p. 79)

World is what is lived

• Heidegger:

• The phenomenological category ‘world’ immediately names—and this is crucial—what is lived, the content aimed at in living, that which life holds to.[i] [i] Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, p. 65; GA 61: 86.

Heidegger on intentionality

• Heidegger’s Being and Time, contains only two brief references to intentionality:

• a critical remark regarding the inadequacy of Scheler’s analysis of the person as the performer of intentional acts (SZ § 10, 73; 48); and

• a single footnote on intentionality as ‘grounded in the temporal transcendence of Dasein’

Heidegger: the being of the intentional

• ‘the question of the being of the intentional’ (die Frage nach dem Sein des Intentionalen)

• The intentional relation must be founded on the ‘being-with’ or ‘being-by’ (Sein-bei, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic § 9 134; GA 26 168) of Dasein,

• intentionality is a form of ‘ontic’ transcendence which can only be understood if Dasein’s more basic ‘ontological’ transcendence is understood (MFL § 9, 135; GA 26 170).

Heidegger intentionality is transcendence (1927)

• ‘Intentionality is the ratio cognoscendi of transcendence. Transcendence is the ratio essendi of intentionality in its diverse modes’ (Basic Problems of Phenomenology § 9, p. 65; GA 24 91).

• ‘To be a subject means to transcend’, Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic § 11, p. 165; GA 26 211).

• Compare: • Husserl: intentionality involves transcendence

(e.g., FTL § 62).

Dasein’s self-understanding

• Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence — in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself or got itself into them, or grown up in them already (BT §4, p. 33; SZ 12).

Anxiety (Angst)

• Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards it ownmost potentiality-for-Being — that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself. (BT § 40, p. 232; SZ 188).

• By looking at the world theoretically, we have already dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely present-at-hand… (SZ § 29, p. 177; German 138).

• Fearing discloses something threatening, and it does so by way of everyday circumspection. A subject which merely beholds would never be able to discover anything of that sort (SZ, § 68, p. 391; German 341)

Transcendence in FTL (Husserl)• Es ist die allgemeine Idealität aller intentionalen Einheiten gegenüber den

sie konstituierenden Man n i g f alt i g k e i t e n. Darin besteht die "T ranszendenz" aller Arten von Gegenständlichkeiten gegenüber dem Bewußtsein von ihnen (und in entsprechend geänderter, aber zugehöriger Weise des jeweiligen Bewußtseins-Ich, verstanden als Subjektpol des Bewußtseins. Wenn wir darum doch im man e n te von t r ans zen den t e n G e gen s t ä n den s c h eid e n, so kann das also nur eine Scheidung in n er hai b dieses weitesten Transzendenzbegriffes besagen. Aber das ändert nichts daran, daß auch die Transzendenz des Realen und in höchster Stufe des intersubjektiven Realen (des Objektiven in einem ausgezeichneten Sinne) sich ausschließlich in der immanenten Sphäre, der der Bewußtseinsmannigfaltigkeiten, nach Sein und Sinn konstituiert, und daß seine T r ans zen den z als R e ale sei ne be s 0 n der e Ge s tal t der ,,IdeaIität" ist oder besser einer p s y chi s c h e n Irr e a I i t ä t, eines in der rein phänomenologischen Bewußtseinssphäre selbst Auftretenden oder möglicherweise Auftretenden mit allem, was ihm eigenwesentlich zugehört, und doch so, daß es evidenterweise kein r e e II e s S t ü c k oder Moment des Bewuß tseins, kein reelles psychisches Datum ist.

• (Formale und Transzendentale Logic § 62

Heidegger on Dasein as transcendence (1929)

• “Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing (Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts). Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call “transcendence” (Dieses Hinaussein über das Seiende nennen wir Transzendenz). If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without the original revelation of the nothing there could be no self-being (Selbstsein) and no freedom. (What is Metaphysics? 1929)

“On the Essence of Ground”

• Heidegger’s essay, Vom Wesen des Grundes, “On the Essence of Ground”, was his contribution to the Festschrift for Husserl’s seventieth birthday,

• It was published as a supplementary volume to the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1929

Dasein as transcendence

• If one characterizes every way of behaving towards being as intentional, then intentionality is possible only on the basis of transcendence. It is neither identical with transcendence nor that which makes transcendence possible. (Essence of Reasons, p. 29; German p. 28)

• The question about the essence of reasons becomes the problem of transcendence (ibid).

• ‘transcendental’ cannot be considered a standpoint

What does Dasein transcend towards?

• Dasein transcends towards the ‘world’

• Transcendence = being-in-the-world

• Transzendenz, transzendieren (‘to transcend’)

• Heidegger also uses übersteigen (‘to climb over, surmount, exceed, transcend’), and

• überschreiten, ‘to cross, exceed’