You the Person are not You the Phenomenological Fact of Awareness, and Thinking They're Same Makes Everyone Miserable
This is an essay I wrote in my last year of university. I have every intent of turning it into reader-friendly content, but for now, I just need this here so I can link to it in The Peace Course (link also coming soon).
All quotes have been taken from: Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. The Continental Philosophy Reader. New York: Routledge. 1996 (pp. 23-52).
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger points to the blind spots of philosophies that privilege consciousness. Such consciousness-privileged philosophies are incomplete because they do not inspect the lived experience of being – their perspective is only a single, cross-sectional, theoretical angle on the meaning of Being[2]. He does this because he thinks that consciousness is an auxiliary feature of our understanding of ourselves, rather than the bedrock of that understanding.
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger points to the blind spots of consciousness-privileged philosophies: they do not inspect the lived experience of being – their perspective is only a single, cross-sectional, theoretical angle of Being. Consciousness, says Heidegger, is an auxiliary feature of our understanding of ourselves, rather than the bedrock of that understanding.
I agree. Consciousness, though a highly efficient navigator of spacetime, needn’t be fundamental to our understanding of self because consciousness is the animating force of humans as a movement of the universe, from the perspective of here and now. Consciousness is the process, the method, and the vehicle that brings phenomenal experience to the Being. It is a quality of being in spacetime, just as being brittle is quality of sedimentary rock. Consciousness is not itself phenomenal experience. And since we are fundamentally Beings experiencing phenomenologically, we cannot be consciousness (the means of being aware) – “we” must be awareness.
In this examination, I will present Heidegger’s take on consciousness-as-periphery by unpacking his phenomenology, how phenomenological personhood interacts with the methodology of phenomenology, and the role of consciousness in that model. I agree with his conclusion that consciousness is not fundamental in understanding who we are[3] because consciousness is the animating force of humans in space and time. Consciousness is the process, the method, and the vehicle that brings phenomenal experience to the Being – it is not itself a phenomenal experience. And since we are fundamentally Beings experiencing phenomenologically, we cannot be the means towards that end – we must be that end.
Heidegger stresses the importance of replacing our instinctual way of relating to the world with a phenomenological method:
“The way in which Being and its structures are encountered in the mode of phenomenon is one which must first of all be wrested from the objects of phenomenology. Thus the very point of departure for our analysis requires that it be secured by the proper method, just as much as does our access to the phenomenon, or our passage through whatever is prevalently covering it up. The idea of grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is ‘original’ and ‘intuitive’ is directly opposed to the naivete of a haphazard, ‘immediate’, and unreflective ‘beholding’.”
- Heidegger: 45
Heidegger makes several points in the above passage which are best developed one by one: (1) he suggests separating phenomenologically encountered objects from the objects of phenomenological inquiry. Why? Because the object of phenomenological inquiry is not phenomenologically encountered objects, but the method of phenomenological encountering. This distinction is Heidegger’s “point of departure” (Heidegger: 45) for establishing the ready-to-hand/present-at-hand distinction.
From Heidegger’s dichotomization follows a clash between an, “original and intuitive way [of perceiving and interacting with the world],” and, “a haphazard, ‘immediate’, and unreflective ‘beholding,’” (Heidegger: 45) of phenomena. This disjunction is akin to the difference between mind-ful-ness and mind-less-ness. To do something mindfully is to be wholly present with one’s immediate experience, whereas to do something mindlessly is to be absent from that experience. In other words, when one is mindful, one ‘flows’ through the world and engages with phenomenal objects in an original (idiosyncratic) and intuitive (mindful) way. However, when one is mindless, one haphazardly bumbles through a world filled with phenomenologically jarring objects.
Confusing these two modes of being leads to a conflation of the objects of phenomenology with the phenomenological method. In other words, missing Heidegger’s proposed differentiation (between objects which are phenomenologically encountered and the objects of phenomenological inquiry) inevitably takes for granted the difference between an object being ready-to-hand and being present-at-hand – the same difference as being mindful versus being mindless.
In the section of Being and Time used for this examination, Heidegger never explicitly states the difference between an object being ready-to-hand or present-at-hand, so I shall take a moment to do so for him:
Ready-to-hand refers to an intuitive ‘knowing’ of how to operate a mechanism. By analogy, the use of one’s hands and fingers in day-to-day life is automatic. For example, when you grasp a pen, the action of unfurling your fingers to the pen and wrapping your fingers around it requires no conscious thought.
Conversely, present-at-hand refers to a consciousness of an object as an object (as opposed to as a mechanism) that arises out of the sublimation of one’s expectations regarding its functioning. By the same analogy, upon waking up after sleeping on your hand, you try to grasp a pen, only to find that your fingers fail to follow your intuitive, subconscious instruction. You become conscious of the way your hands and fingers are moving and must focus on manipulating them to pick the pen up – a result you may not see in the first minutes of your endeavour.
Looking back to Heidegger’s original passage, the difference between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand – between mindfulness and mindlessness[4] – is the opposition between engaging phenomena originally and intuitively, and haphazardly and unreflectively. However, this only describes Heidegger’s phenomenology; it does not tell us why consciousness is not fundamental to understanding who we are. To understand the why we must first identify the what.
Dasein
Heidegger uses the term, “Dasein,” to avoid the philosophical baggage behind the word, “person,” while still referring to the being Being with an open-ended future who engages in the uniquely human activity of reflecting upon one’s own existence. From German, “Dasein” translates literally to, “being-there.” He chooses this term because, to him, what is fundamental about human existence is not consciousness, awareness, or knowledge of being, but simply Being itself.
Heidegger describes Dasein’s Being: “The kind of Being which belongs to Dasein is rather such that, in understanding its own Being, it has a tendency to do so in terms of that entity towards which it comports itself proximally and in a way which is essentially constant – in terms of the ‘world’” (Heidegger: 36). In other words, human people tend to understand themselves as part of a relationship with all the space and time around them. However, people are not apart from the world, and so, cannot be objectified in the same way as one would do to a tree. People are as much a part of the world as any tree, and separating oneself from the interconnectedness of the world is to see only a single perspective of the meaning of Dasein’s Being.
Heidegger discusses the fragmented ontology that results from a disciplinary (as opposed to a holistic) take on Dasein’s existence:
“Dasein’s ways of behaviour, […], have been studied with varying extent in philosophical psychology, [and other humanitarian fields], each in a different fashion. But the question remains whether these interpretations of Dasein have been carried through with a primordial existentiality comparable to whatever existentiell primordiality they may have possessed. Neither of these excludes the other but they do not necessarily go together.”
- Heidegger: 36
The problem with the disciplinary approach is that it does not actually reveal Dasein’s ready-to-hand nature, it merely points to the objects of Dasein’s phenomenology. To objectify Dasein’s Being in this present-at-hand fashion is to fall back into the conflation between phenomenologically encountered objects and the objects of phenomenological inquiry[5]. Trying to understand Dasein in dualistic terms as an object (as opposed to a method) is to turn the ready-to-hand experience of being Dasein into a present-at-hand ontology of Beings. And this possibility is what Heidegger questions: to what extent do fields of study reflect the fundamental experience of being Dasein?
This examination will leave that question unanswered as any answer other than, “wholly” will not bridge the gap between experiencer and object. Dasein experiences phenomenologically because consciousness makes experience possible. But inspecting consciousness will yield results that are nothing like the experience of consciousness. Because we are fundamentally Beings experiencing phenomenologically, we cannot be the means towards that end – we must be that end.
[1] All quotes have been taken from: Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. The Continental Philosophy Reader. New York: Routledge. 1996 (pp. 23-52).
[2] Heidegger uses the word, “being,” as both a noun and a verb, with capital-b “Being” designating the usage as a noun (a Being), and little-b “being” designating its use as verb (i.e. a Being who is being a Being).
[3] Though that is not to say that consciousness is wholly irrelevant to who we are.
[4] I use “mindfulness” and “mindlessness” outside of their usual context, using them to refer to a phenomenologically encountered object instead of referring to the phenomenological encounterer, Dasein.
[5] “the way the world is understood is, […], reflected back ontologically upon the way in which Dasein itself gets interpreted” (Heidegger: 36).