Makeshift: Heidegger and
the Phenomenology of Original Temporality
James Luchte
When questions
are raised about principles, the network of exchange that they have opened
becomes confused, and the order that they have founded declines. A principle
has its rise, its period of reign, and its ruin. Its death usually takes disproportionately
more time than its reign.[i]
a. Prologue: Toward an Understanding of Heidegger’s “Sein und Zeit” Project
One
of the primary statements in the published fragment of Being and Time is that any honest (eigentlich)
phenomenological investigation must have an ontic fundament. This claim not only concerns the “founding
condition” for a self-interpretation of the being for whom being is an issue,
but also intimates the irreducible facticity and embeddedness of any
philosophical inquiry amidst the world.
In other words, the notion that thought can extricate itself from
be-ing, temporality, existential spatiality, etc. – in a word finitude - is for Heidegger, a severed
illusion “founded” upon a non-original conception of existence and being. As Nietzsche scolds Plato in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, such an Other-worldly hypothesis, if it were
true, would deny perspective and life itself.
An honest phenomenology cannot take refuge in these numinous
ontologies of Plato, Descartes, Kant, without forsaking the significance of
phenomenology as a desire for the truth of things themselves. Dishonesty would entail a retreat from
the phenomenon into a simulacrum of radical transcendence, an escape
into an eternity without temporality.
It
is in this light that we must approach Heidegger’s own attempts to articulate a
fundamental ontology - or a radical phenomenology - in the 1920’s and
perhaps beyond. As Kisiel has written in
The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, it had been nearly
impossible to approach an understanding of this period of inquiry due to the
fact that the crucial texts concerned were simply not available. In this way, when Being and Time appeared, a great astonishment arose in light of the
un-prepared-ness of the reading public at the time. No one but his students had any scent or
taste of the brew Heidegger had been cooking up for so long. Indeed, he had published nothing since his Habilitation work on Duns Scotus in
1915. After nearly twelve years of
public “silence”, Being and Time came
as quite a surprise to not only the philosophical community, but also to his
students (and perhaps to Heidegger himself).
As Kisiel traces the genealogy of this work, we can see many variations
of its themes and radical changes in its articulation even during run-up to its
composition - a writing which comprised three drafts, in a rough sketch, “The
Dilthey Draft: The Concept of Time”, the “Ontoeroteric Draft: History of the
Concept of Time”, and “The Final Draft: Toward a Kairology of Being” - the
so-called existentialist draft –
written in about a month. Heidegger’s
variations upon theme and experimentation, attempts, with respect to
expression and nomenclature underscores the contention that Being and Time
must also be considered, along with his lectures and published works of the
period to be one concretion of the original projection of a “Sein und
Zeit” project. The fact that “Sein und
Zeit” never saw the light of day - in a formally published manner - underlines
not only the makeshift, thrown, character of philosophical inquiry, but
also the destructive character of academos upon
philosophical creativity. It is common
knowledge that Heidegger was not yet ready to hand in “Sein und Zeit”, but had
to, if he was to continue teaching.
Thus, in a rough and ready way, we have Being and Time, a written
makeshift which indicates its perhaps illusory hope of more time to
eventually finish the work. Yet, even
amidst this makeshift, we can still think and exist and can enter into
the questions asked by the “Sein und Zeit” project. But, for such an untimely exploration,
Heidegger’s lecture courses must come into play, not to supplant the
“masterpiece”, but to retrieve, set free, and augment the same questioning that
Being and Time also incites.
That
which has changed for our era of readers of Being
and Time is the availability of the lectures courses prior, simultaneous,
and posterior to Being and Time. There is also documentary and biographical
material surrounding this period which cannot help but to cast into relief
these makeshifts, this topoV of
Heidegger’s world. In this way, the
horizons of astonishment in the face of Being and Time are slowly being
transformed - but not eliminated – as these do not ultimately depend upon
One
of the deficiencies of work on the 1920’s phenomenology has been the hegemonic
position given to Being and Time. Kisiel for instance gives us the impression
that all of Heidegger’s work of the period is meant merely to lead up to Being and Time – in some kind of philological [teleology]. In this way, he ends his otherwise great book
before any consideration of Basic
Problems of Phenomenology and Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics. Such
non-treatment of important lecture courses and a third published work of
the period gives the impression that these are dispensable, that they are
merely commentaries on the main work or serve only to unpack what is already
there in Being and Time (and indeed
they need not be read to understand being
and time).
In
fact, many of the lecture courses both before and after Being and Time not only go beyond the “content” of Being and Time (with respect to the
larger “Being and Time project”), but many also seek to criticise or revise
various claims or constructions in Being
and Time itself. While I am not in
any way seeking to diminish the importance of Being and Time, it would be a vast hermeneutical error to disregard
unpublished and published works as mere supplements, when in fact, these seek
to “go all the way to the end” of this project – rhetoric which Heidegger
deployed in his lecture courses. The
centrality given to Being and Time
leads us to the unfortunate circumstance in which [Being and Time] is
re-mystified, de-contextualized, or as Heidegger says in his early lectures
un-worlded. In other words, that which
Kisiel has applauded as our ability to finally understand this work is
eliminated in a repetition of an artificial astonishment in the face of a magnum opus. Indeed, it should be claimed that Heidegger’s
great work was never written, that it remained in a state of incompletion, in fragments like the
pre-socratics. And it could be noted
that in light of the irreducible facticity of honest philosophical
inquiry that this, as Bataille writes in Theory
of Religion, is quite appropriate.
Otherwise we are left with treatments of Being and Time and aspects
of this work, such as Being in the
World by Dreyfus, which merely considers the first part of a published
fragment and hence gives neither an adequate interpretation of the work as
published nor of its place amid the larger project of a radical
phenomenology. This is not to criticise
texts for the first time reader of Being
and Time which may aid in a comprehension of this difficult work. However, it would be radically misleading to
not invoke the questions and perspectives of the “Sein und Zeit” project,
which, it could be claimed, point beyond the 1920’s to the so-called turn (Kehre)
and to Heidegger’s later writings, not to mention merely Division Two of
Being and Time.
In
this Introduction, I will lay out a rough sketch of the pathways which can be
taken to enter into the myriad intricasies and ultimate simplicity of
Heidegger’s 1920’s phenomenology – the “Sein and Zeit” project. Initially, in keeping with the methodology of
formal indication in his project of a radical phenomenology, I will thematise
the indication of a “makeshift” so as to cast the “Sein und Zeit” project into
relief as an attempt at the disclosure of the radical temporalization of
thought. I will next lay out a genealogy
of the texts which cast into relief the topoV of
the 1920’s phenomenological investigations.
Finally, I will set forth the morphology of Heidegger’s radical
phenomenology – “Sein und Zeit” project, as described in Basic Problems of Phenomenology as a prelude to a description of the
chapters of this study.
b. The Indication of “Makeshift” in an
Interpretation of Heidegger’s Radical Phenomenology
A
'makeshift' (Behelf) is a temporal
improvisation - to make shift with 'what' one has - also a shift-ing of
one thing into another, change of character, transition, transfer to a
differing 'state', ‘place’ – it is a dwelling for the time being. It is also a fore-seeing (pro-visio), project (Entwurf), an
orientation, a formal indication for departure and be-ing. It concerns factical existence, yet, and this
is 'where' the difference between Heidegger and Kant becomes most evident, it
is not practical, in Kant's sense, in that the being of Dasein is
disclosed as Care. And, the meaning of
Care is Temporality.[ii] Kant, fresh from his revisions
of the Critique of Pure Reason in its
second edition, clearly eliminates imagination (i.e., temporality), from any
fundamental role in the Critique of
Practical Reason.[iii] Throughout his persistent
criticism of a sensuous 'ethics of happiness', whether of Aristotle, Epicurus
et al., Kant warns his reader that any contamination of morality with interest,
temporality, imagination, or sense, will undermine the 'necessity' and
'universality' of the moral law, and thus, will render [his own] categorical
imperative - impossible. For
Kant, the noumenon, ding an sich,
although it must exist, it cannot be known, just as one’s maxim will forever
remain a secret from even oneself. But,
this does not seem to have prohibited Kant from embracing a “practical”
morality. Heidegger, in his turn, seeks
to place temporality (transcendental imagination) and existential openness
amidst the heart of a phenomenology of factical, lived existence, be-ing –
indeed, into the heart of philosophy itself.
Such a 'placing' is intimated in Heidegger's indication of the meaning
of Being in its own self-projection upon a horizon of ecstatic, original
temporality (ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit,
or Temporalität). The radical character of Heidegger’s
phenomenology is also revealed in his statement which began this study that any
ontological-existential thinking – radical phenomenology - as an understanding
of Being, will have an 'ontic' fundament, that of existence (Dasein). Temporality itself will thus be finite, and
thought will necessarily be "makeshift".
Kant
writes in the Introduction to the Critique of Practical Reason, one of the sources for the title of
this study, that one ought to tell a young man to be industrious and thrifty,
so that when he is older, he will be able to provide for himself. Indeed, Kant declares that such a
recommendation is not only 'reasonable', but is in fact a precept of pure, practical reason - an imperative issued
from 'reason' itself. It is questionable
however whether such comportments of industry and thrift, of this poihsiV of the phenomenal world, could have any direct interface with the
noumenal ends of reason. Yet, if we have
no knowledge of the noumenal or of the invisible realm of the maxim, then how are
we to prioritize one course of life in distinction from any other way of life –
as long as it appears not to violate the moral law – indeed this law itself is
a subject of longstanding contestation?
Why for instance, in his Religion Within The Limits of Reason Alone,
is Christian faith placed over all in Kant, as the exemplar of the numen,
of the sacred? He himself admits in
passing that the pagan religions and Islam, as these fostered an aesthetic and
discipline of the moral law, are also acceptable to reason.
Indeed,
Kant does suggest another existential
possibility, but only in contrast, and one which we are lead to believe he does
not judge to fit into his 'practical precepts of reason.' He writes that some young man may expect he
could 'make shift with little,' get about with 'what' gives itself, get on upon
his 'wits,' 'luck' - surely not upon these timeless ingredients for practical
and theoretical 'reasons'.[iv] It is more of an improvisation –
it is provisional, temporal. Yet, it is
not only possible, but is uncannily indicative for Heidegger of an ecstatic
open-ness toward a myriad of singular temporal meanings of existence.[v] Such a 'makeshift', for Heidegger, would
indicate a provisional (thrown) projection of self-understanding amidst being-in-the-world. In this way, a 'makeshift' would intimate, in
a pre-philosophical manner and in the spirit of Heidegger’s early phenomenology
of formal indication - thought with temporality at its core. Heidegger describes this as first philosophy in his 1928 lecture
course, The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic, the “science sought after, the science that can never become a fixed
possession and that, as such, would just have to be passed on. It is rather the knowledge that can be
obtained only if it is each time sought anew.”[vi]
This
portrayal of thinking as 'makeshift' is an obvious challenge to Kant's own
description of his own architectonic as having only to be 'passed on.'[vii] Heidegger himself expresses this indication
at least twice. In a letter to Karl
Jaspers in 1936[viii], he expresses his despair that his thinking in comparison to the
'Greats'[ix]
will only remain a 'makeshift.' A second
reference occurs in his post-war essay, 'Letter on Humanism,'[x]
where he refers to the 'makeshift' character of moral ties, as having relevance
for only the present day. However, in
that he is also seeking to disclose the truth of being via a thinking which
'lets being be,' Heidegger embraces the finitude of a thought which holds
itself in this abyss of original temporality - not seeking evasions, salvation,
or escape from this τoπoς of lived existence. Yet, even this self-expression of the
phenomenon, as a thinking of be-ing, can be fathomed only in light of its
ecstatic temporality and finitude, articulated already in Division Two of Being and Time. This is where Schürmann’s suggestion of reading
Heidegger backwards becomes most pertinent.
The “experience of durability” to which Heidegger alludes in his Letter on Humanism is not that of thought
but of being. In this way,
thinking will be makeshift. Yet, in
light of the insurmountable horizons of temporality, even this Being must be conceived
as finite. In this light, Husserl's pregnant reference to 'makeshifts' in his
1905 lectures, edited in fact by Heidegger and published in 1928 as The Phenomenology of Internal
Time-Consciousness, is pertinent not only to Husserl's neo-Cartesian -
'a-temporal' – [consciousness], but also to the question of the temporal
character of what Sherover has called a 'hermeneutic structure of
resoluteness', in “Dasein and Temporality”.
Husserl, speaking about the modes of time, memory and expectation,
contends he can conceive of a 'prophetic consciousness' where 'each character
of the expectation' is 'before our eyes.'
Or, he says, where a plan is intentionally disclosed to such an extent
that one already accepts it as 'future reality', as pure spontaneity. Yet, he adds, there will also need to be
those other 'unimportant things', those ‘makeshifts', which fill out a
concrete image, and can, in that they are,
be other than they are (my
emphasis). Husserl states that such a
'character' is that of 'being open.'[xi] As we will see, it is this
'openness' which discloses this temporal meaning of Being (Sein).
That
this makeshift character of finite understanding also pertains to the
project of radical phenomenology - what we will designate as the ‘Sein und
Zeit” project - will be the central thrust of this study. While the most radical insights into the
makeshift character of thinking are clearly evident in Being and Time, the latter work, in its incompletion, fails to
fully disclose the radical temporality of thought and existence. The “extreme model” of Being and Time, a criticism from The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic must destroy its own language of transcendental structure so as to
set free more fluid, flexible – or post-structuralist – articulations. Such expression is housed in the archives and
translations of his many improvised lectures of the period – and by the
differing languages or houses of being in his later writings. It is in this way that we can seek to
comprehend the radicality of Heidegger’s first
philosophy and may better appreciate the temporal character of his later turns
and ways. It is here where his later
works emerge for an understanding of the ‘Sein und Zeit” project – the “Being
and Time project”. For while Heidegger
seeks an experience of the [durable] in the Letter
on Humanism, such an experience takes place upon a topoV of piety and humility, of a thought which lets
being be – or as the dedicated submission to the phenomenon in his early
1920’s lectures. In other words, such a
thought not only seeks to destroy the history of ontology, but also seeks to
de-construct itself. It is open to transfiguration
– it is makeshift.
g. Heidegger’s “Being and Time Project” – Genealogy of the Texts
In a
summary of the Davos Disputation with
Ernst Cassirer, and in his lecture on Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger is documented as announcing the
deaths of the principles of 'reason', logoV, and 'spirit' as adequate "grounds" for a
finite thinking rooted in existence. He
rings the alarm bells - the “foundations of Western thinking" are in
"crisis" - and are threatened with utter collapse. Heidegger makes these statements amidst the
horizons of his own temporal existence and problematic, that of his radical
temporalization of thought and of the exposure of these traditional grounds to
their 'tragic' origin as aspirations of finitude. Cassirer contests Heidegger's radical,
temporal interpretation to Kant – any thought worth its salt must be open to
the eternal. Despite his comments
elsewhere that defer to the spirit of Cassirer's criticism, Heidegger intimates
possible readings of or engagements with the Kantian text which moves beyond
"philology" or "scholarship" in the usual sense of
cultivating or advocating a "school of thought" – or any attempt to
identify the will as a ding an sich.
Heidegger’s attempt to disclose an "unsaid", to de-construct
texts so as to retrieve the original temporality of the question, concerns not
only Kant but, in light of the “Being and Time project”, other thinkers, such
as Leibniz and Husserl, who are significant for his expression of a radical
phenomenology – for his temporalist thinking.
In
many ways, these many names are place-names, topoi, for the
investigation of the historicity of thought in its significant statements,
junctures, reversals, transitions, convergences, transgressions. And, there is a marked similarity in the
treatment of these many thinkers as each is appropriated in the context of
Heidegger's "makeshift". As
suggested, he does not seek to be a "good scholar", but a philosopher
and radical phenomenologist, who desires the truth and investigates various topoi of thought with
respect to their disclosure of "matters themselves", in their
accentuation of the phenomenon of original temporality. In his activity of squatting these various topoi, Heidegger is
in a destruktive comportment with the
"history of ontology", but in a way which seeks to learn from the errancy of the thesis that truth resides
in the proposition and that the measure of truth is ultimately
"logic". Often in the
unpublished lectures, we find unexpected formulations and previously unknown –
unchartered - investigations, such as Heidegger's extended discussion of sexual
difference in The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic. In the same
lecture, he depicts his own Being and
Time as an example of an "extreme model" with respect to its
explication of Eigenlichkeit. These lectures are accentuated in the present
work due to their rather neglected status in the literature to date. While a few have focussed on Heidegger's work
in this period, it is safe to say that the majority neglects the 1927-1928
lecture courses in favour of Being and
Time and often very minute sections of Heidegger's so-called "magnum
opus". Moreover, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is
rarely discussed in conjunction with Being
and Time (even in the sense of the 'Being and Time project' projected in
Heidegger's outline of Being and Time),
but has been co-opted in order to evoke the sterile debate of whether
"Heidegger's Kant" is the “real” Kant. In light of this reticence to "go all
the way to the end", Heidegger's work lies in ruins, despite a few who
have attempted to understand "matters themselves".
We
must attempt to redress this omission - and begin to deal with the relevant
extant texts in the context of an investigation of Heidegger's radical
temporalization of thought, of his temporal problematic and its
implications. Such an attempt is not a
'cutting and pasting' the fragments of a project in ruins - instead, we must
seek to enter into the questions raised by these texts, published and
unpublished. Yet, we must not get lost
in philological discussions of the relations between texts (or of the relative
weight of published and unpublished works), but must seek after that toward
which each points, and in this mosaic of indications, to see these various
texts as disclosive of being-in-the-world as the finite existence of the self
amid its world. In other words, one must
attempt to understand these texts as an expression, logoV, which is
regulated by the desire to exceed towards or be open to "things
themselves". To understand a
radical, makeshift phenomenology, of original temporality, each must enter into
a questioning of existence so as to illuminate this overwhelming topoV for oneself.
Heidegger's
radical or “
There is no need to set out however an absolute
beginning to Heidegger's 1920's phenomenology.
It may well be argued that it all begins with his 1921-22 lectures on
Aristotle’s theory of time. In fact, it
is in these lectures that he begins to suspect the existence of a more
primordial temporality standing in the background of Aristotle’s substantialist
conception of time as an identity in the difference of a succession of
“nows”. Indeed, we will hear many echoes
of this concept of “common time” throughout Heidegger 1920’s work, culminating in Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Yet, the Aristotle lecture remains in a
merely critical and suggestive comportment, and thus cannot be considered the
sole origin of Heidegger’s radical phenomenology. Indeed, it could be just as reasonably argued
that his work on Duns Scotus, Paul or his intimations of “primitive dasein”
speak directly to the concerns of his phenomenology. As he will be the first to say, as a
historical being, it is impossible to get rid of that which has been. This is not to argue against the search for
origins, but to disclose that the original field of existence is a tapestry of
many strands, voices and genealogies.
In
this way, the topoV, if not the origin, of
Heidegger’s 1920’s radical phenomenology is more plausibly located with a specification
of the phenomenon of original temporality of the self, of existence (Dasein),
in his The Concept of Time.[xiii] In this short lecture, given to the Marburg
Theological Society, Heidegger seeks to displace the linear model of clock-time
in order to excavate the temporality of finite existence. As he moves through the lecture, Heidegger
calls on his audience to detach itself from the interpretation of time which
sets an external standard, whether from the clock setting upon the wall, that
mechanical device, which executes a repetition of the same, or finally from the
fluctuations of night and day in the cycles of nature. We are invited to retrace, de-sever, the root
of these expressions of time to the singularity of the temporality of one’s own
existence and its indigenous expression of the meaning of one’s being. As we move further away from the
superficiality of Aristotelian time, we begin to name and express the contours
and pathways to an original disclosure of our own ecstatic temporality. It was in this lecture to the Marburg
Theological Society where Heidegger first publicly articulated the existentials of care, being-toward-death
and the call of conscience.
These
preliminary and schematic indications acquire increasing power and breadth in
the confrontation with Husserl in his 1925 lecture course History of the Concept of Time.
Heidegger charges that phenomenology, despite its rhetoric of the
phenomena, has been co-opted and suppressed by traditional conceptualities,
such as "reason", "consciousness", taken wholesale from the
Cartesian orthodoxy, and a "common time" transplanted from
mathematics, as the mathesis universalis. These heavily laden conceptualities and
geometries obscure the original trajectory and purported intention of the phenomenological
movement - "to the things themselves". Amidst the "network of exchange",
phneomonelogy succumbs to the history of ontology, to a "logic" of
discrete, linear identity. Husserl, in
his Phenomenology of Internal
Time-Consciousness is interested in the myriad phenomena of
time-consciousness, but not in the temporality of [consciousness] itself. He suppresses that which he designates as
merely the “anthropological” dimension of existence in a quest for [pure
consciousness] - even though he confesses that any attempt to fulfil the
intention of any infinite would, after a time, break down. Such
suppressions of temporality and existence entail tacit theoretical and
practical – and ontological - commitments.
In the light of these affiliations, phenomenology is exposed as
un-phenomenological.
Heidegger
seeks to disclose the being of the being that we are via destruktion of a tradition, a language, a house of being, which
shrouds access to a formal indication of this phenomenon which seeks to express
itself. He insists upon an original
'unity' of intimate self-interpretation that is an expression of singular
temporal existence. Heidegger rejects
that which he indicates as a "mythology of consciousness" with its
logic of severance in its assertion, in the manner of Rickert, Brentano and
Husserl, of the extremes of the psychic and physical. He asks after the be-ing of these extreme
positions. In a coup d' grace, Heidegger
points out an exception, that within the antithetical framework of consciousness,
there is no way to tell if a hallucination is "real". Phenomenologically, a hallucination erupts
amidst an intentional relation, of which the distinction between the physical
and psychical is posited as elements of an interpretation. Yet, in the neo-Kantian framework, a
hallucination is merely another “objective” representation. There is no means of allowing one to step
outside the representational envelop in order to posit the actuality of the
entity itself. Moreover, it is no answer
to merely retreat, as Husserl (or Hegel, in his own way) has done, into a
reduced immanence in which the phenomenon is merely treated as an idea of pure
consciousness. Such a rejection of
transcendence provokes, for Heidegger, the question of being. There is no clarification of the being of the
acts of consciousness, despite the implicit positing of a tacit ontology of
consciousness.
For
Heidegger, dasein is not consciousness, nor is it a subjective immanence, which
sets apart from the object or the transcendent.
Indeed, the self is always already amidst its world, transcending
towards beings – dasein is this transcending, this ecstasis. This phenomenon of world, as a projection of
the binding commitments of a resolute self, is disclosed in the mood of anxiety
amidst the event of being-toward-death.
The phenomenon whose being is to be and whose being is at issue is
existence, da-sein, itself. Such a topoV of
self-interpretation displaces the severance of [consciousness] and
temporality. Heidegger insists that this
severance is a detour and evasion of the "matters themselves". The “matters themselves” is the existence of
an ecstatic, temporal self, a phenomenon which seeks to express the meaning of
its own be-ing.
In Being and Time, Heidegger continues on
his way in the clearing of this topoV for a
hermeneutics of existence. Through the temporal disclosure of existence,
dasein, Heidegger allows the phenomenon to express itself via the myriad of
existentials, for instance, being-in-the-world, Care, being-toward-death,
conscience, and guilt et al. Ultimately
each of these expressions find there root in the many events of disclosure in
anticipatory resoluteness as finite characters or disseminations of one's own
singular be-ing, amidst this projection of oneself upon the horizons of one's
own indigenous historicity. These
characters of being give expression (Ausdruck)
to the specificity of the be-ing of existence as a [condition], prior to the
modes of theoretical or practical [reason].
In the language of Being and Time,
these characters indicate the existence of the self, of this overwhelming
moment of finitude, prior to the technical severance of vorhanden and zuhanden. The emphasis upon the self-expression of existence
entails a deconstruction of the severance, which is merely a repetition of the
representational or epistemological models of truth – each of which flees in
the face of an archeology of knowledge.
That toward which Heidegger is pointing is the specific being of human
existence - dasein - as indicated in the existentiale
- makeshifts, as they can be other than they are - outside technical and
theoretical interpretations and conceptualities – as an intimate hermeneutic of
existence.
Such
an existential disclosure of being-in-the-world finds further expression amid
another topoV, in the deconstruction of
the Monadology of Leibniz in the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. In this lecture course, the last given at
As a
further amplification of this trajectory of thinking, Heidegger makes, in his
little known lecture Phenomenological
Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1928), a crucial
distinction betwixt the "subsumptive" model posited by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (a model which
is forced to take its conceptuality from a "logic" that is
ready-to-hand), and a radical phenomenology which discloses an expressive
explanation for the emergence of an indigenous conceptuality. For Kant, reason must always remain
sequestered from temporality and its theoretical surrogate, the transcendental
imagination. It is this distantiation of
reason from temporality that in the end necessitates the architectonic of
subsumptive judgment. In this model, it
is only violence and unquestioned “authority of reason” which can account for
the "unity" of knowledge. The
expressive interpretation of the origin of the concepts necessitates the
disclosure of a pure, sensuous reason.
In the end, this hybrid cannot in the end be distinguished from the
transcendental imagination, or from ecstatic temporality. In light of the transfigured scenario of the
expressive model, it becomes possible to lay out a situation of original
temporality amid which existence can articulate the temporal and worldly
character of its ecstatic self, as a pure turning-towards that which is given from itself, as
pre-theoretical 'object relatedness. “Conceptuality” becomes the self-expression
of the phenomenon of existence, of being-in-the-world in its yearning for
finite transcendence and meaning.
The destruktion of the severance of
existence and expression intimates Heidegger's engagement with Kant in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, in
which sensibility and the concept are excavated, traced back to a "common
rooting" in the transcendental power of imagination (Einbildungskraft), which, in a qualified way, is synonymous with
original temporality. If a makeshift
phenomenology seeks to disclose the phenomenon of original temporality, via a
reminder of its original desire, it also seeks to unearth the schematism of
transcendental imagination (ecstatic temporality) as the source of
conceptuality in Kant. The ostensible commitment
of Kant to an a-temporal, non-sensuous (“spontaneous”) reason has already been
shaken through Heidegger's tracing of the stems of understanding and
sensibility to a common root of imagination, and more explicitly, his locating
of the [origin], and hence, [legitimacy] of a philosophical conceptuality in
the expressive articulation of the schematism of pure imagination. Temporality here is pure self-affection and
self-expression. For Heidegger, the very
presence of a transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason indicates a derivative interpretation of
conceptuality. More problematic for
Heidegger is the explicit suppression of imagination not only in the Second
Edition of the First Critique, but
also in the two following Critiques. Even in the Critique of Judgement, Reason will deploy the free-floating
imagination for its own ends. Beauty
(and the Sublime) serve practical (moral) reason – and nothing besides.
The
infrastructure of Kant's segregation of reason or apperception from any
immediate contact with temporality or imagination had already been indicated in
Basic Problems as "Kant's Thesis
of Being". This phrase does not
merely indicate a "position" taken on a well accepted path of
questioning, but is an excavation of Kant's interpretation of being as
position, as an object posited by consciousness. For Kant, the subject as apperception is that
"ground" upon which all objects and experience achieve their unity.
An a-temporal subject does not touch time - it posits beings that are 'in
time'. In the wake of Heidegger's destruktion of this a-temporal subject,
however, be-ing withdraws from the possibility of being a mere positing of
consciousness. Existence, on the
contrary, expresses its own intimate self-interpretation, of an understanding of
being - prior to the opposition of consciousness and temporality. Heidegger underscores his destructive intent
through an excavation of common time – a projection which suppresses, covers up
the desires of myriad ecstatic temporalities.
Indeed, it is such a common time, which allows Kant the pretence that he
can merely posit being, consciousness and its segregated “unity”. For Heidegger, beyond the domesticated time
of a vanquished sublime, there lies an original temporality upon which
being and existence are projected, as are all thoughts about beings. In a moment of anticipatory resoluteness,
existence not only expresses its own self-interpretation, but also expresses
its own temporality and historicity.
Such a gesture indicates a radical
temporalization of thinking.
This topoV of ecstatic
self-expression and of the temporal horizons for the meaning of being is most
radically fulfilled by Heidegger in the closing pages of Basic Problems. While this
lecture pertains to a great extent to the task of a destruction of the history
of ontology, it also to an even greater extent attempts to fulfil the original
question in the published fragment of Being
and Time as to the temporal horizon for the articulation of the question of
being. It is in this lecture, as we have
seen, that Heidegger circles around again to his initial deconstruction of
common time to original temporality. For
while the published portion of Being and
Time enacted the hard labour of clearing a ground for an articulation of the
ontological difference between being and beings, between the topoV of existence
and the technical domains of the everyday, it is Basic Problems which most clearly begins to disclose the temporal
horizons upon which (Woraufhin)
being is ecstatically projected in the attainment of its own meaning. Heidegger begins to answer the questions he
posed in the published portion of Being
and Time:
If Dasein harbors the
understanding of being within itself, and if temporality makes possible Dasein
in its ontological constitution, then temporality
must also be the condition of the
possibility of the understanding of
being and hence of the projection of
being upon time.[xiv]
The intimacy of
self-interpretation is an affective self-finding, an understanding of being, an
a priori light that illuminates
“what” it encounters. This is also to be
understood in the light of the temporal horizon upon which one's understanding
of being is projected. That which is
'beyond' being is that upon which being is to be projected. Understanding, projecting upon, envisages its
horizonal schema upon that which it is projected, the background of its sense
or meaning. In each
of the projections, being as the horizon, removes itself, projected as the
horizon, to clear a playspace for this arrival of these entities which we
encounter in everyday being-in-the-world.
In this way, being is 'prius', whose expression is made possible by
original temporality, while this latter is enigmatically given by being.
Of course, it could well
be argued that such an ecstatic projection is at least implicit in the moment
of anticipatory resoluteness in which a meaning of being is disclosed in the
singular answer of dasein to its own call of conscience back to itself. Yet, Basic
Problems is unique in its disclosure of not only the explicit understanding
of being with respect to temporality, but also the excavation of existence and
of its existential characters as the self-expression of temporality. In this way, Heidegger sketches a makeshift answer to the question of ‘being and
time: '... we understand being from the original horizonal schema of the
ecstases of temporality.'[xv] The horizonal schema are not 'outside',
detachable from the ecstasies of temporality.
The latter projects these schema along with the ecstasies, the 'unity'
of which allows for this 'there' of openness, and for this possibility of
understanding. Moreover, it is
in this circle of being and time, in the ecstasies of temporality, and their
own native horizons upon which these are projected, that thought finds its
“unity” in the ecstatic-horizonal unity of these ecstasies in the
self-remembrance of the self as temporality.
This
finite or makeshift thinking throws the traditional principle of reason into
question. In such a raising of the
question of the principle of reason, a 'network of exchange' which this
principle originally opened becomes confused, broken, a wrench thrown in the works disrupts 'business as
usual'. However, even if the principle
of reason has already undergone its rise and its reign, its death may take, as
Schürmann intimates, with senses of irony and tragedy, even longer than its
reign. In this way, Heidegger's indication of a pure, sensible reason is such
an eruption of confusion and absurdity in its "networks of exchange",
and perhaps a first step in the unknotting and ruin of its 'order'. Such a counter-ruination would be the setting
free of the temporal self to express itself amidst its own indigenous
existence. Yet, amidst the hegemony of a
"common time", a decadent reason persists in its function of
suppressing an expression of being-in-the-world. As Schürmann lays out in his posthumous work Broken Hegemonies, these
"makeshifts" of ousia, arce, logos, eidoV, ratio, substance, cogito, which set decaying in the dust may, in the end, intimate
the possibility of a different future - for no reason other than that each is
broken – and will have inevitably broken.
δ. The Morphology of Radical Phenomenology
Heidegger's 'Being and time project' (radical phenomenology)
has three originally linked components, as stated in the Basic Problems: reduction, destruction, and construction.[xvi] Reduction
concerns an uncovering, finding the phenomenon of an original temporality of
da-sein, as a self- interpretation of the being of existence in its general and
singular temporal senses or meanings amidst being-in-the-world. Since finite knowing is rooted in ontic
being, this self-interpretation will not be a Kantian self-examination of an
immovable 'Subject', but a finite knowing of the self gained amidst a 'moment
of vision' (Augenblick) in which the
self comes 'face to face' with its temporal be-ing without evasion. Amidst anticipatory resoluteness, there is a
radical singularization of the self, which discloses a sense of its own being,
and of its 'interest' in this being (which is its most pressing issue). In this light, a 'fundamental ontology' is
not an 'ontology' in the traditional sense, but a de-substantialization of a ‘what’
and ‘how’ essence into a 'that' of a radical singularity, a disclosure of
existent being, not via real or idealist
predication, but in this instant of self expression. A moment
of vision, in this way, is a primitive sense of 'theory', qeorein, a disclosure amid a
lived temporality, neither an ancient beholding of nouV (mind), nor as a modernist theoretical
objectification.
The
questions bound up with a “reduction to” or “retrieval of” the phenomenon and
an understanding of its being are not those of 'positive' science, as if one
could research a 'reduction'. This
latter is questioning that must have already been undertaken. In that one cannot simply 'decide' to undergo
such a questioning, and as there seems to be no 'natural incentive' to exit
this 'world' of absorbed familiarity, of average everydayness, we take heed the
comments made by Heidegger, that it is 'surprise', the unexpectant, breach, an
'event', death, catastrophe, or a work of art discloses that which is 'there' -
if only provisionally. A reduction is
not something that one can choose, just as one cannot choose an
earthquake. It is an 'event' of being
thrown into 'nothing'.[xvii] Such a 'moment of vision', as
with anxiety and that 'call' of conscience, breaks in as 'strange',
conspicuous, amidst an average circumspection of everydayness, as disturbance,
disruption of familiar expectancy, questioning which tears us out of our
absorption, beyond the merely unfamiliar into that 'uncanny'.
A
destruktion, with respect to Heidegger's 'task of destroying the history of
ontology' is a project of re-worlding, of asking the question of the temporal
'origin' of the 'categories', a procedure akin to Nietzsche's genealogical
destruction of worn-out metaphors, which live by hiding their 'all-too-humble
origins.'[xviii] Destruktion seeks to dismantle
normalizing conceptualities, which suppress and overpower this phenomenon of
existence and its self-expression. At
the same time, a project of re-worlding is a cultivating of an originary
dimension of self-questioning, which is an exploration of one's existence, 'set
free' from the regimentation and imposture of a discipline of a formalist and
logical 'reason'.
Construction
concerns the self-expression of existence, as a 'forming' of 'concepts' amidst
a pre-theoretical and pre-practical λoγoς. Being
and Time expresses this fragility of finite knowing, as it shows a sense of
the being of one's self amidst its being-toward-death, and a chance to 'seize
hold' of this sense of one's being in resolute anticipation, a disclosure which
breaks in as unexpected disturbance, which is the occasion for questioning the
unexamined interpretations of one's being.
But in light of his lectures, this 'hermeneutics of existence' must be
seen as a provisional, revisable sense of one's own being, intimating a 'beyond'
to cooked interpretations of the 'Anyone' and a return to the raw temporality
of a self-interpretation of being-in-the-world which uncovers one's lived
temporality. Heidegger evokes a
‘crisis’, in which we are thrown amid the falling of ruination, suppression,
erasure, oblivion. He insists that a
return to the phenomenon must be a 'counter-ruination', a cultivation of a
fragile ground of meaning, self-expression, or as Dilthey sought, an independent
ground for the cultivation of philosophy in all of its diversity. Radical phenomenology seeks to overcome an
‘ousiology’ that conjures 'in our minds' an image of a being, of an ontic thing
or substance, which produces the world and its attributes from out of itself. Such an ‘ousiology’ suppresses the temporality
of being-there, of the intimate playspace of the self and other selves – which
is already a condition in which we fathom the existence and the other 'through
a glass darkly'. Yet, although we are
wed to falsity, illusion, concealment, there is a self-reflexive ‘openness’ to
this be-ing of this existence - τoπoς, this place of dis-closure
where be-ing shines and is sensed amidst our being-in-the-world and against the
background of our own insurmountable finitude.
In
Part I, 'The Phenomenon of Original Temporality,' I will lay out a provisional
place for that which is referred to as a “reduction” in Basic Problems. This will be a “thematization” of the
phenomenon of original temporality as the topoV for a hermeneutics of existence.
In Chapter 1, 'Indications of Original
Temporality,' after an initial indication of the sense of “truth” for
Heidegger, I will begin a sketch of a hermeneutic situation of 'original
temporality', which exists and can be distinguished from a time that is
'ordinary', 'common' or “linear”. The
exemplar for this latter “mathematical” interpretation of time is exhibited,
for Heidegger, by Husserl, in his lecture course, Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. This sketch will take place in tandem with a
reading of Heidegger's lecture course, Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, with respect to the comportment between original
temporality and “general” time. Original
temporality is a singular temporalization of the self amidst its
world. It is not common, ordinary or
clock time, but a lived 'phenomenological' temporality which pervades, gives
rise to, and is covered up via a homogenized time. In Chapter 2, 'An Indigenous
Conceptuality of Dasein', I will set forth Heidegger's destruction of
Husserlian phenomenology in its rhetoric and performance of “going to the
things themselves”. Amidst this destruktion
emerges the possibility of an expression of the “things themselves” which is
not burdened with the ontological baggage of other traditional conceptualities.
For Heidegger, existence (Dasein) is the topoV where
the phenomenon is disclosed in a dedicated submission which “reads off”
(listens) indications, existentiale, from the phenomenon. In Chapter 3, 'Temporal Expressions of Being
in the World,' I will lay out a prospective “rought sketch” of the
conceptuality of temporal existence traced in Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time, as a 'first approximation' of an understanding-of-being, a
'hermeneutic of existence'. In Chapter
4, 'Ecstatic Temporality and the Meaning of Being,' in a retrocursive answer to
the prospective 'rough sketch' of Chapter 3, I will trace this
understanding-of-being and its “conceptuality” to its grounding/founding in
original temporality. In this way, the existentiale,
or characters of being-in-the-world, are disclosed as projections of ecstatic
or original[xix] temporality. In Chapter 5,
'Kant's Thesis about Being and Existence,' I will set out a reading of
Heidegger's longstanding investigation of 'Kant's thesis about Being'. I will consider the question of concept
formation and the limitations of “real” and “ideal” predications. For Heidegger, the implication that arises
from Kant's thesis is that being is not susceptible to logical, conceptual, or
mathematical predication. In this way,
the ontological difference 'necessitates' differing modalities of expression, a
'plurivocity' in which this middle-world of being here-there can find honest
expression.
In Part 2,
'The Destruktion of Original Temporality,' I will exhibit Heidegger's
phenomenological engagement with Kant through a detailed analysis and
explication of his third published work, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
supplemented by specific references to his lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
(1928). In Chapter 6, 'The Retrieval of
Original Temporality', I will discuss the possibility of a pre-theoretical and
pre-practical topoV of indigenous expression, a place and “conceptuality”
of existence, with respect to the ambiguous status of the transcendental
imagination in the first two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. In Chapter 7, 'The Excavation of Original
Temporality', I will trace Heidegger's own version of “Kant” in his genealogy
of the 'stems' of intuition and concept, each of which is traced to a 'common
root' in pure imagination, or, a rooting of thinking in a 'power of imaginative
integration'.[xx] In Chapter 8, 'The Articulation of Finite Knowing,' I will set forth
Heidegger's 're-writing' of transcendental philosophy, a phantasy he muses upon
in Phenomenological Intepretation, in
which the transcendental imagination is the 'formative center of ontological
knowledge,' a root of the theoretical, practical and aesthetical
'dimensions.' Indeed, at the climax of
this lecture, in the last few pages, Heidegger reveals transcendental
imagination as reason itself – a pure, sensuous reason. In Chapter 9, I will look at the many
parallels between transcendental imagination and ecstatic-horizonal
temporality. I will lay out the
resemblances between Kant's three syntheses of pure imagination in light of the
three ecstases of original temporality, casting into relief striking parallels
and a 'translatability' of imagination and temporality
with respect to the analogy between temporality as self-affection (KPM)
and ecstatic self-projection (BT).
In
Part 3, 'The topos of Original Temporality,' I will sketch out the topos for
an indigenous expression of intimate phenomenon of temporal existence. In Chapter 10, “The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic”, I will respond to Heidegger's call that a phenomenological
logic be grounded in the 'matters themselves', through a reading of his
de-construction of Leibnizian monadology.
In a discussion which was only hinted at in Being and Time,
Heidegger engages in a destruktion of the doctrines of judgment
and substance, in which he uncovers logoV and being as distinct comportments of existence,
where the latter has priority with respect to the meaning of
phenomenology. In Chapter 11, “The
“Unity” of Ecstatic Temporality”, continuing my examination of Metaphysical Foundations, I will sketch
out, in contrast to Henrich’s “Unity of
Reason”, a 'unity' of ecstatic temporality, a topoV
for the self-expression of the phenomenon which abides the “recollection” of
the temporal horizons of existence. In
Chapter 12, 'The Building Site of Care and Temporality', I will lay out the
existential of Care, a territory of thrown projection, which is disclosed
in the disposition of anxiety (Angst), as indicated in Division One of Being and Time. In Chapter 13, 'Temporality as the
Ontological Meaning of Care', I will examine the 'unity' and temporal sense of
this being of existence (Dasein) in its ecstatic
self-transcendence. I will explore the
disclosive characters of conscience, guilt and resoluteness in Division Two of Being
and Time. The makeshift, or
temporalist, character of this 'moment of vision' (Augenblick), as a temporality of an anticipatory resoluteness, is
laid out in tandem with a reading of the Anaximander fragment on temporality
and guilt so as to indicate the radical temporality of all characters of
be-ing. Ultimately, one listens, one is
silent – so as to listen, be – and perhaps, to speak. In closing, in 'The Circle of Finitude', I
will reiterate the task of radical phenomenology as an exploration of the
ultimate possibilities of a world which one carries amid lived existence. In this light, anticipatory resoluteness,
Krell has pointed out, turns into metontology which situates one's own self
interpretation within the intimate horizons of those of others. In this way, the topoV for a hermeneutics of existence, is, amidst the
horizons of a radical temporalization of thought, broadened to include poetry,
art, mythology, et al. as indications of the phenomenon of existence (Dasein). Such a gesture is indicated in Being and
Time in the “Myth of Cura”, in which Heidegger intimates the meaning of the
being of existence via a pagan myth. One
may wish to pass over this myth as a literary curiosity. Yet, this would be to miss the radical
significance of phenomenology and of the potential strategies of its
“methodology”. The “Myth of Cura”
intimates the turn from a fundamental ontology to a metontology. But we must get there first and this entails
excavating the genealogy of this fluidity of expression. While not being a mere nominalism, this sketchy
patchwork seeks to indicate the radical temporality of existence – or from another
perspective, to allow this phenomenon to speak for itself. This sketching is our tenuous attempt to
build a makeshift world - in-between - in which we can and do dwell and
act for a while.