Sartre digestive philosophy;
Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things in consciousness. You see this tree, to be sure [not a representation, not an idea, you are perceiving things]. But you see it just where it is [in a particular context]: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat; eight miles from the Mediterranean coast.
Both are irreducible - they are in (cor)relation with each other. When we perceive, it’s not that we have a perceptual image, we see the thing out there.
We are not only in touch with representations that somehow stand between the mind and the world, but with the things themselves.
Things are irreducible. When we experience, we do not somehow abstract things into representations, we experience them in their context, never independently from us (that’s the idea of the correlation), but we are also always in relation to them.
For Sartre, we are nothing but our relations.
Sartre was very clear that phenomenology overcomes that old, classical distinction of realism vs. idealism. Nothing is real without consciousness being involved. In that sense, he is an idealist; but he is a realist in the sense that things are really real.
That reality stands in relation to consciousness does not make it any less real.
But Husserl was not a realist: this tree on its bit of parched earth is not an absolute which would subsequently enter into communication with us. Consciousness and the world are given at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness the world is nevertheless essentially relative to consciousness. Husserl sees consciousness as an irreducible fact which no physical image can account for. Except perhaps the quick, obscure image of a burst.
To know is to “burst toward”, to tear oneself out of the moist gastric intimacy, veering out there beyond oneself, out there near the tree and yet beyond it, for the tree escapes me and repulses me, and I can no more lose myself in the tree than it can dissolve itself in me. I’m beyond it: it’s beyond me.
Do you recognize in this description your own circumstances and your own impressions? You certainly knew that the tree was not you, that you could not make it enter your dark stomach and that knowledge could not, without dishonesty, be compared to possession. All at once consciousness is purified, it is clear as a strong wind. There is nothing in it but a movement of fleeing itself, a sliding beyond itself. If, impossible though it be, you could enter “into” a consciousness you would be seized by a whirlwind and thrown back outside, in the thick of the dust near the tree, for consciousness has no “inside”. It is just this being beyond itself; this absolute flight, this refusal to be a substance which makes it a consciousness.
Sartre thinks we must get away from a reduction of knowledge to possession, marking out of territory, setting boundaries, and ultimately controlling whatever it is we’re trying to know.
From Sartre’s perspective it is no weirder to talk about consciousness as a wind, than of the mind as a substance.
The idea of thrown-ness reappears in Heidegger; the notion of being vulnerable to - these are very different relations to the world than the relation between a subject and an object.
Consciousness has no inside - it is a relating, it is a process, it is an activity. It is its refusal to be a substance which makes it a consciousness: this is (a notion from the?) transcendence of the ego, the book he was writing at the time, it is the transcending.
… for Husserl and the phenomenologists our consciousness of things is by no means limited to knowledge of them. Knowledge, or pure “representation”, is only one of the possible forms of my consciousness “of” this tree; I can also love it, fear it, hate it, and this surpassing of consciousness by itself that is called “intentionality” finds itself again in fear, hatred, and love. Hating another is just a way of bursting forth toward him; it is finding oneself suddenly confronted by a stranger in whom one lives, in whom one suffers from the very first, the objective ‘quality’ “hateful”.
Herein we are exposed to, confronted with, challenged by (and also (see Levinas), the idea that the encounter with the Other is not just a symmetrical relation between two subjects, but that there is something about being exposed to the Other that immediately brings a question of ethics).
So it is that all at once hatred, love, fear, sympathy - all these famous ‘subjective’ reactions which were floating in the malodorous brine of the mind - are pulled out. They are merely ways of discovering the world. It is things which abruptly unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, lovable. Being dreadful is a property of this Japanese mask, an inexhaustible and irreducible property which constitutes its very nature - and not the ∑ of our subjective reactions to a piece of sculptured wood.
It is not our internal feelings towards the object; but there is something in the object which is scary, horrific or whatever; a property that exists in relation to me, rather than independently from me as in the case of extension or whatnot.
There are no abstract objects (also in Husserl). To talk about merely perceptual objects in Investigations for the purposes of specific analyses is useful, but it is always an abstraction; when we encounter things in the world we are always already valuing them, relating to them somehow. No such thing as a value-less object.
Being dreadful is a property of that mask.
Heidegger
Awareness always comes with self-awareness.
We are ourselves the entities to be analysed. The Being of any such entity is in each case mine. These entities, in their Being, comport themselves towards their Being. As entities with such Being, they are delivered over to their own Being. Being is that which is an issue for every such entity.
Sein-zum-Tode, an aspect of the Dasein whereby you live with an awareness of your own death.
It is part of our Being as Daseins, our mineness allows us to focus on Being as an issue.
When we try not to think of our Being, we get:
As modes of Being, authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) and inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) … are both characterized by mineness. But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any ‘less’ Being or any ‘lower’ degree of Being. Rather it is the case that even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity - when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment.
Inauthenticity is about how you live; Heidegger would have contradicted himself if he were to tell one how to be authentic [logically]. It’s not that some activities are authentic, and some are not; if you’re scrolling specifically to avoid thinking, it becomes inauthentic.
There isn’t really anything that you can say for sure is authentic. But this is part of what it means for one to exist, that these questions bother us (not all the time, but), there’s nobody else who can figure it out for us. These questions remain as nagging thoughts, as itches, as conscience.
“Am I living the right way for the right reasons?” ← we are condemned to think about this as minded beings.
When we use the general ‘one’ (or man, in German), we try to avoid mineness.
The ‘essence’ [“Wesen”] of this entity lies in its “to be” [Zu-sein]. Its Being-what-it-is [Was-sein] (essentia) must, so far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in terms of its Being (existentia).
“Existence precedes essence!”
We cannot resolve to being authentic in every moment; our Fallenness persists in life, and, in principle, at some point in our life we will be confronted with something that puts Being into issue.
Furthermore, in each case Dasein is mine to be in one way or another [One mustbe, and it is for one to be in one way or another]. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine [je meines] 1. That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as its ownmost possibility [again, strong idea of my own possibility. Amplified sense of uniqueness or singularity]. In each case Dasein is its possibility, and it ‘has’ this possibility, but not just as a property, as something present-at-hand would 2. And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, ‘choose’ itself and win itself 3; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or only ‘seem’ to do so. But only in so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic - that is, something of its own - can it have lost itself and not yet won itself.
Hannah Arendt tries to say that the very idea of Being-towards-death bad; why not talk about natality? We aren’t only going to die, we were all born, and that you can’t do by yourself.
Footnotes
-
However you’re living now, living in that way, even if you don’t reflect on it, you made the choice to live like that. Even if you think you don’t have a choice regarding that, you still made the choice to think that. ↩
-
Whatever way one lives today, they take up one possibility of living. “I am now being my possibility” ← which indicates again that it’s not just “the way I am”, it’s “my possibility that I live, which means there are other possibilities” ↩
-
there is this possibility for resolution, a kind of choice, a kind of decision, you can think that in a small way that there are perhaps many such choices per day in different situations, what you say, who you support, what you do at a certain moment, but often people have taken this in a much more exceptionalist sense, that there are special situations when one can take over their own possibility. This comes back to the uniqueness question again, that there is something like a grand choice, which leads to perhaps more problematic readings of this, politically more problematic readings of this for example. There can also come a kind of decision-ist moment, ‘what I decide is right’. Many problems connected with it, but one of prof’s hearts beats for this idea that “nobody else can live it” ↩