The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

In cooperation with

M. BRAINARD, Frankfurt • R. BRUZINA, Kentucky A. MICKUNAS, Ohio • T. SEEBOHM, Bonn T. SHEEHAN, Stanford

edited by

BURT HOPKINS STEVEN CROWELL

m - 2003 The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

General Editors Burt Hopkins, Seattle University Steven Crowell,Rice University Contributing Editors Marcus Brainard, Frankfurt/Main, Germany Ronald Bruzina, University o f Kentucky Algis Mickunas, Ohio University Thomas Seebohm, Bonn, Germany Thomas Sheehan, Stanford University Consulting Editors Pierre Adler, New York, New York Patrick Burke,Seattle University Damian Byers, Sydney, Australia Richard Cobb-Stevens,Boston College Natalie Depraz, University o f Paris IV (Sorbonne) John Drabinski, Grand Valley State University John J. Drummond, Fordham University R. O. Elveton, Carleton College Parvis Emad,La Crosse, Wisconsin Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University Kathleen Haney, University o f Houston, D owntown James G. Hart, Indiana University Patrick Heelan, S.J., Georgetown University Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea Christian Lotz, University o f Kansas James Mensch, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada Dermot Moran, University College, Dublin, Ireland Harry Reeder, University o f Texas, Arlington James Risser, Seattle University Hans Ruin, Sodertom University College, Sweden Karl Schuhmannt, University o f Utrecht, Netherlands Marylou Sena, Seattle University Olav K.Wiegand, University o f Mainz, Germany Edith Wyschogrod, Rice University Dan Zahavi, Copenhagen, Denmark

Copyright ®2003 by Taylor & Francis ISSN 1533-7472 ISBN 13: 978-0-9701679-3-4 (pbk) All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any infor mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Aim and Scope:The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological will providePhilosophy an an nual international forum for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy in the spirit of Edmund Husserl’s groundbreaking work and the extension thereof in the phenomenological tradition broadly con ceived. The editors welcome the submission of manuscripts containing original research in phenomenolo gy and phenomenological philosophy, contributions to contemporary issues and controversies, critical and interpretative studies of major phenomenological figures, investigations on the relation of phenomenolo gy and phenomenological philosophy to the natural and human sciences, and historical studies and docu ments pertaining to phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. Translations of classic and contemporary phenomenological texts are also welcome, though translators should make arrangements with the editors in advance.

First published 2003 by Noesis Press Published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Page Intentionally Left Blank Contents

I. Essays

David R. C erbone Distance and Proximity in Phenomenology: Husserl and Heidegger 1

Wayne Martin The Judgment Stroke and the Truth-Predicate: Frege, Heidegger, and the Logical Representation of Judgment 27

J ames G. H art Wisdom, Knowledge, and Reflective Joy: Aristotle and Husserl 53

Raúl Gutiérrez “The Logic of Decadence”: On the Deficient Forms of Government in Plato’s Republic 73

J acques Derrida Phenomenology and the Closure of Metaphysics: Introduction to the Thought of Husserl (1966) 103

H erbert Boeder Derrida’s Endgame 121

C arl Friedrich Gethmann Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Logical Intuitionism: On Oskar Becker’s Mathematical Existence 143

H ans Rainer Sepp On the Border: Cultural Difference in and beyond Jan Patocka’s Philosophy of History 161

v Essays in Honor ofHeribert Boeder on his 75th Birthday

D ennis J. Schmidt On Counting, Stars, and Music 179

C laus-Artur Scheier Die Dialektik der Asymmetrie und die Instanz des Dritten. Probleme der Lévinasschen Ethik 191

Burt C. Hopkins The “Origin” of Metaphysical Thinking and the so-called “Metaphysics of Presence”: Boeder’s Contest with Heidegger 225

Klaus Erich Kaehler History of Philosophy as Philosophical Task 241

Wilhelm Metz God and the State: On the Descartes-Hobbes Analogy 255

Martín Zubiría AATNATON, AAOFON, ATOnON: On Boeder’s Discovery of the Middle Epoch of Philosophy 265

Javier Giordano AAKINQ 276

Franco Volpi “We Homeless Ones”: Heidegger and the “Homelessness” of Modern Man 277

II. Texts and Documents

Edmund Husserl The Idea of a Philosophical Culture: Its First Germination in Greek Philosophy (1923) 285

J acob Klein On Aristotle (I) 295

III. Discussions - Reviews - Notices

J ohn J. Drummond On Welton on Husserl 315

vi Robin Rollinger Obituary: Karl Schuhmann (1941-2003) 333

Mark van Atten Author’s Notice: On Brouwer 335

N otes on Contributors 337

vìi Page Intentionally Left Blank

Distance and Proximity in Phenomenology: Husserl and Heidegger

David R. Cerbone West Virginia University

This book may need more than one preface, and in the end there would still remain room for doubt whether anyone who had never lived through similar experiences could be brought closer to the experience of this book by means of prefaces. – Nietzsche, The Gay Science1 Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts. – Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus2 We do not philosophize in order to become philosophers, no more than to fashion for ourselves and others a salutary world-view that could be procured like a coat and hat. The goal of philosophy is not a system of interesting information, nor a sentimental edi- fication for faltering souls. Only he can philosophize who is already resolved to grant free dignity to Dasein in its radical and universal-essential possibilities, which alone makes it suitable for withstanding the remaining uncertainty and gaping discord, while at the same time remaining untouched by all the idle talk of the day. There is, in fact, a philosophical world-view, but it is not the result of philosophy and not affixed to it as a practical recipe for life. It resides rather in the philosophizing itself. Nor is it, therefore, ever to be read off from what the philosopher may say expressly about ethical problems, but it becomes manifest in what the philosophical work is as a whole. – Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic3

§ 1. The Phenomenological Imperative The founding imperative of phenomenology—“To the things themselves!”—immediately suggests that those to whom it is addressed are current- —————— 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), § 373. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 3. 3. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloom- ington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984), 17–18.

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy III (2003): 1–26 ISSN 1533–7472 • ISBN 0-9701679-3-8 2 DAVID R. CERBONE ly at some distance from them, enduring a state of detachment or separation.4 There is perhaps little that is new in this suggestion, taken at a sufficiently high level of generality: it is not uncommon for a movement, philosophical or otherwise, to begin by imploring its audience to diminish the distance between itself and what matters most, be it the Forms, the Kingdom of God, Nature, or simply one another. In some cases, the desired proximity is depicted as the recovering of something once had but now lost, in others, as finding something completely new. Phenomenology, as exemplified in Husserl and Heideg- ger, incorporates both of these depictions: in Husserl, the transcendental-phenomenological reduction affords access to an entirely “new field of experience,”5 heretofore unglimpsed in the history of mankind, and yet what is grasped for the first time are precisely those operations which have been working all along, the sense-constituting processes of “absolute” consciousness; in Heidegger, the etymological connotations of “reduction” (re + ducere) are ex- ploited,6 so that one is led back to something long forgotten or covered over, the meaning of being, but which has yet to receive its proper interpretation. The founding slogan, in urging us toward this renewed or newfound intima- cy, carries with it the promise of transfiguration, of what Heidegger calls “authenticity,” and what Husserl calls, variously, “autonomy,” “self-responsibility,” and even “an ultimately true life.”7 My interest in this paper lies in exploring this theme of distance or separation and its eventual overcoming, as it emerges in some aspects of Husserl and Heidegger. In particular, I would like to consider the question of the relation between the achievement of the ideal way of life envisioned by phenom- —————— 4. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 252 for the source of this imperative. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 50 and 58 for this particular formulation. Henceforth cited as BT with page reference. 5. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), in his Preface to the English edition. 6. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University, 1982), 21. Also see p. 11 below. 7. Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is a central theme of Being and Time. The first two terms ascribed to Husserl can be found throughout Cartesian Meditations, as passages cited below will illustrate. The source of the third is Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion (The Hague: Nijhoff, 166), cited in Ludwig Landgrebe, “The Problem of the Beginning of Philosophy in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in L. E. Embree, ed., Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aaron Gurwitsch (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1972), 33–53, here 43. The ethical significance of Husserlian phenomenology is discussed in Richard Zaner, “On the Sense of Method in Phenome- nology,” in E. Pivcevic, ed., Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1975), 125–41. I am greatly indebted to Zaner’s discussion, both for his treatment of specific questions concerning phenomenology which are likewise at issue here, and for drawing my attention to further texts. I should emphasize, however, that Zaner is concerned almost exclusively with Husserlian phenomenology. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 3 enology and the very practice of phenomenology itself: phenomenology both contains an imperative for a more authentic mode of existence and, it might seem, a promise of its fulfillment. That is, the call to self-responsibility and authenticity is a moment within phenomenological investigation, but that very mode of investigation might seem to present itself as the means for achieving that end. This is, I would suggest, clearly the case in Husserlian phenomenology: the practice and the achievement go hand in hand, its methods inform, and so lead to the realization of, its vision of the ideal human life. Heidegger’s reconception of both phenomenology and the ideal of authenticity renders their interrelation less straightforward and more problematic, so much so that careful readers of Heidegger’s Being and Time go so far as to suggest a more or less complete disconnect between the two. While not adhering to the model set forth by Husserlian phenomenology, wherein phenomenological practice and its accompanying vision of a more authentic mode of existence are internally related to one another, nonetheless I want to argue that Heidegger’s reconception does not effect their complete separation. Rather, for Heidegger, the two notions stand in more complex, mutually reinforcing relations. This kind of entanglement of the two notions, rather than a straight relation of dependence of one upon the other, is less surprising when we remind ourselves of Heidegger’s hermeneutical method. I will proceed as follows: in the next section, I will briefly sketch out the relation in Husserl between the practice of phenomenology and the achievement of its accompanying ideal of self-responsibility. Doing so will yield a model against which to measure Heidegger and thereby track the fate of these ideas and their possible interrelations when Husserl’s ideal of autonomy becomes Heidegger’s ideal of authenticity, and when transcendental phenomenology is transformed into an inquiry into the meaning of being. Documenting these interrelations will be the principal task of this paper.

§ 2. Husserl’s “Beginning Philosopher” At the opening of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl casts a backward glance at what he sees as most revolutionary in Descartes’s original program: “anyone who intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ with- draw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”8 Descartes’s Medita- tions, by calling for such a withdrawal, “draw the prototype for any beginning philosopher’s necessary meditations, the meditations out of which alone a philosophy can grow originally” (CM, 2). To the paragraph containing these remarks, Husserl appends further comments, which turn aside an objection —————— 8. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972). Henceforth cited as CM with page reference. 4 DAVID R. CERBONE to this prototype, an objection framed in terms of the “cooperative labor of the scientific community.” While not denying the cooperative efforts by which progress in the sciences is made, and hence acknowledging an individual’s indebtedness to a broader community, there remains for Husserl the ideal of the individual’s full responsibility for the justification of whatever he or she accepts: “what [others] accept as true, what they offer me as allegedly established by their insight, is for me at first only something they claim. If I am to accept it, I must justify it by a perfect insight on my own part. Therein consists my autonomy—mine and that of every genuine scientist” (CM, 2). What Husserl sees as most admirable in the Cartesian project lies in its awakening in the “beginning philosopher” a heightened sense of responsibility for his judgments. Implicit in this is that until this awakening, the would- be beginning philosopher has not yet taken responsibility, and so his judgments are being made at some remove, at a distance, from what it is the judgments concern. Distance is conceived of here in terms of the absence of insight on the part of the one who judges: insofar as I make judgments and assertions which rely upon the judgments of others, or, more generally, involve unex- amined assumptions, prejudices, and presuppositions, then my judgments are being made at some remove from whatever it is I am judging about. As a consequence of this distance, I fail to be a fully autonomous, self-responsible subject; I fail to judge and speak entirely for myself. Philosophy, as Husserl sees it, seeks to remedy this situation, so that one who undertakes such an endeav- or ideally judges “on the basis of absolute insights, insights behind which one cannot go back any farther.” In striving for this ideal, the “beginning philosopher” must always go it alone: “Philosophy—wisdom—is the philosopher’s quite personal affair. It must arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insight” (CM, 2). For Husserl, this goal of “absolute insight,” of “complete and ultimate grounding,” is not simply one philosophical project among others, but is the very essence of philosophy: Must not the demand for a philosophy aiming at the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual autonomy according to ultimate evidences it has itself produced, and therefore absolutely self- responsible—must not this demand, instead of being excessive, be part of the fundamental sense of genuine philosophy? (CM, 6) But how does the imperative to practice philosophy in “the fundamental sense” become the imperative to practice phenomenology? For Husserl, the answer to this question flows out of the ideal of “absolute insight” already hinted at in Descartes’s conception of first philosophy. Striving after such an ideal requires “that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we have been accepting up to now, including all of our sciences” (CM, 7). All such DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 5 convictions are ones which fail to be grounded in the manner philosophy demands; all such convictions, in other words, are ones which I, prior to “beginning philosophically,” hold without possessing a full justification for them. Were I to examine what I judge to be true, I would find that in so judging, I am ultimately relying on presuppositions and prejudices which I have accepted without examination, which I have taken for granted or taken on someone else’s authority. To the extent that this is so, then I am not as yet judging or speaking fully for myself: the justification for what I say, the full and adequate insight, will either be someone else’s possession or absent entirely. Proceeding philosophically requires, Husserl maintains, the suspension of all such convictions until I have traced them back to their beginnings. As Dorion Cairns puts it, what he calls “the fundamental principle of phenomenology” can be formulated as: No opinion is to be accepted as philosophical knowledge unless it is seen to be adequately established by observation of what is seen as itself given “in person.” Any belief seen to be incompatible with what is seen to be itself given is to be rejected. Toward opinions that fall in neither class— whether they be one’s own or another’s—one is to adopt an ‘official’ philosophical attitude of neutrality.9 Cairns’s appeal here to the idea of something’s being “seen as itself given ‘in person’” alludes to Husserl’s notion of evidence. As Husserl explains it in Cartesian Meditations, an evident judgment is one where “the complex (or state) of affairs, instead of being merely meant ‘from afar,’ is present as the affair ‘itself,’ the affair-complex or state-of-affairs ‘itself’; the judger accordingly possesses it itself” (CM, 10). Shortly thereafter, Husserl again explains: “Evi- dence is, in an extremely broad sense, an ‘experiencing’ of something that is, and is thus; it is precisely a mental seeing of something itself” (CM, 12). The possession of judgments derived from evidence, as judgments where the subject matter of the judgment is present rather than absent in the sense of being experienced “in person,” is the goal of philosophical practice: It is plain that I, as someone beginning philosophically, since I am striving toward the presumptive end, genuine science, must neither make nor go on accepting any judgment as scientific that I have not derived from evidence, from “experiences” in which the affairs and affair-complexes in question are present to me as “they themselves.” (CM, 13) Such practice takes the form of phenomenology because only judgments whose—————— intentional contents are phenomena count as evident in the relevant 9. Dorion Cairns, “An Approach to Husserlian Phenomenology,” in Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, eds., Phenomenology and Existentialism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 31–46, here 32. Cairns is here reformulating Husserl’s “principle of all principles,” set forth in Ideas I. See Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), § 24. Henceforth cited as Ideas I with page reference. 6 DAVID R. CERBONE sense. To explain: Consider an ordinary “straightforward” perceptual experience, along with the attending “straightforward” or first-order judgments derived from that experience. Any such first-order judgments will always be imperfectly evident, and in many respects. First, the content of the experience will involve “unfulfilled” components: since the perceiving of an object is always aspectual in nature, other aspects will be referred or alluded to in the experience, without actually being present in it. Since, furthermore, it is at least conceivable that the unfulfilled components may not be fulfilled in the manner anticipated by the current experience, any first-order judgment about what is being experienced lacks the requisite certainty or grounding demand- ed by the philosophical investigator. Second, any such judgment will be medi- ated, in the sense that it can be seen to have presuppositions, ultimately, the presupposition that there is a world “external to” conscious experience. Third, the very meaning of the judgment is that it involves an object which “tran- scends” consciousness, and so it cannot—that is, can never—be fully present to consciousness.10 But what of the experience itself, as opposed to the thing or situation experienced? If we consider a reflective judgment, whose content is the “straightforward” perceptual experience, then the situation with respect to evidence changes dramatically.11 Since the content of the reflective judgment is itself an experience, what is judged is present “in person” in the reflective judgment: both the reflective judgment and the straightforward experience which is its content are “immanent” to the sphere of conscious experience. Further, worries about adequacy which arose in the case of first-order judgments, due to the aspectual nature of object-perception, do not arise here: the distinction between seeming and being collapses in the case of conscious phenomena, and so it is inconceivable that my judgment be something other than it appears. While I may be wrong about, for example, whether there is a chair in front of me, I cannot be wrong that my experience has the content, “There is a chair in front of me.” Thus, by suspending any commitment to the existence of what is experienced, and attending instead to those experiences themselves, the investigator thereby gains a stock of eminently evident judgments. In this reflective turn, the existence of “the whole stream of my experienced life” is retained, a life, Husserl notes, which is “continually there for me” (CM, —————— 10. For Husserl, this is not merely a limitation on us, but part of what it means for any experience to be of a material object. He declares the view a “countersense,” which holds that “God, the subject possessing an absolutely perfect knowledge, and therefore possessing every possible adequate perception, naturally has that adequate perception of the very physical thing itself which is denied to us finite beings” (Ideas I, 92). 11. This shift is discussed by Husserl in considerable detail, as are the consequences briefly sketched in the remainder of this paragraph, in Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” trans. Marcus Brainard, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phe- nomenological Philosophy II (2002), 249–95. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 7

19). This move is, of course, none other than Husserl’s famous phenomenological reduction, what he also calls “epoché” and “parenthesizing”: this “phenomenological epoché” and “parenthesizing” of the Objective world . . . does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary we gain possession of something by it; and what we (or, to speak more precisely, what I, the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them: the universe of “phenomena” in the (particular and also the wider) phenomenological sense. (CM, 20–21) Considerable care is needed, Husserl insists, in fully articulating the nature of the phenomenological reduction, since it must not be understood as a retreat to the “psychological sphere.” If we consider again the reflective judgment whose content is the straightforward experience, ‘There is a chair in front of me,’ in considering that experience ‘purely as meant,’ commitment is suspended not only to the existence of the chair, but also to the ‘I’ taken as an empirical, worldly subject. The phenomenological reduction thus reveals, according to Husserl, my transcendental existence: “By phenomenological epo- ché I reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic life—the realm of my psychological self-experience—to my transcendental-phenomenological Ego, the realm of transcendental-phenomenological self-experience” (CM, 26). Having afforded access to this “realm” of self-experience, the reduction thereby allows access to what is primary in the order of being: “Natural being is a realm whose existential status is secondary; it continually presupposes the realm of transcendental being” (CM, 21). I have tried to sketch thus far a line of reasoning articulated by Husserl which begins with a felt lack of grounding in everyday life, a sense of distance from “the things themselves,” and ends, at least initially, with the performance of the phenomenological reduction as a necessary step in overcoming that distance, in achieving the ideal of self-responsibility in judging. Though I have followed Husserl in casting the motivation for the reduction and its initial achievements largely in cognitive or theoretical terms, that is, in terms of the “beginning philosopher” who heeds the call for self-responsibility in judging, Husserl sees the significance of the reduction as extending well beyond these immediate aims. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the importance Husserl attaches to the reduction, both for individual and for fulfilling the “spiritual need of our time,” which has, he claims, become “unbearable.” The “absolutely clear beginnings” afforded by the reduction allows for the recognition of “absolute norms” as part of “an all-inclusive praxis of reason.”12 Phenomenology strives “in the direction of the idea (lying in infinity) of a hu- ——————manness which in action and throughout would live and move in truth and 12. Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology” (Article for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica), in P. McCormick and F. Elliston, eds., Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univer- sity of Notre Dame, 1981), 21–35, here 33. 8 DAVID R. CERBONE genuineness.”13 Husserl does not shy away from the religious overtones of his talk of “transcendental spirituality,” and the effect its revelation has upon the individual to whom access is afforded via the reduction: Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.14 What this last dramatic passage makes clear is the internal relation between the “personal transformation” envisioned by phenomenology and the practice of phenomenology: only by performing the reduction oneself can one come to possess the kind of “insight” necessary to possessing the “ground” of judgment. In other words, only by performing the reduction does one gain the envisioned proximity, where what is judged is present ‘in person’ in the judgments. As he puts it in Cartesian Meditations, if I were simply to accept, say, Husserl’s testimony regarding his fundamental insights, his testimony would still be “for me at first only something” he claims (CM, 2); with respect to that insight, I would lack the “freedom to reactualize such a truth, with awareness of it as one and the same (CM, 10). It would thus fail to “an abiding acquisition or possession” (ibid.) on my part. Thus, the necessity of performing the reduction for oneself entails that any text of phenomenology, such as Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which reports the results of phenomenological inquiry, can be of only limited use to the reader in his or her attempt to achieve autonomy. As Cairns points out: In their communicative function, phenomenological statements are intended to help the person addressed to bring to self-givenness for himself, to grasp, explicate, and compare the very matters in question, to attach to the words a signification deriving solely from his own observa- tions, and to see the statements as evidently confirmed (or cancelled) by the matters themselves.15 Rather than a body of doctrine, then, phenomenology functions as essentially a practice or exercise, requiring that its audience travel the same route as that described by its principal authors. It is not enough that I learn about, and come to appreciate, Husserl’s conversion experience: doing so certainly does not con- vert me. I can only “find religion” by retracing the same steps, by demanding in my own case that I only accept judgments “derived from evidence” and pro- —————— 13. Husserl, “Phenomenology,” 33. 14. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1970), 137. 15. Cairns, “An Approach to Husserlian Phenomenology,” 35. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 9 ceeding from there. Only in that way can what is revealed through the practice of phenomenology be binding on me, not as blind deference to an external force but in recognition of its genuine cognitive and ethical authority. Thus, Husserl’s ideal of autonomy or self-responsibility is not simply articulated by phenomenology, but requires the practice of phenomenology to be attained. As noted, a consequence of this internality is the inadequacy of simply reading texts in phenomenology in reaching such an ideal: someone else cannot practice phenomenology for me if I am to be autonomous and self- responsible.16 A further, and I think more radical consequence, is that texts in phenomenology cannot even be (fully) understood by those who have not traveled the route recounted by the authors. This more radical consequence is one which has been emphasized in Fink’s reconstruction of the Husserlian project. Thus, Fink asserts that “in a very real sense, the presentation of the reduction . . . is an appeal for its actual performance.”17 Moreover, Husserl’s presentation of the reduction (Fink is commenting on the first book of Ideas) is, in a certain sense, ineliminably false: [Husserl] could be satisfied with this first and provisional account of the reduction in trusting that the actual carrying out of the given analyses (and not simply their being read) would create the disposition to set authentically the phenomenological reduction in motion. We must stress that even today this is account is not false in the sense of being “incor- rect,” but only that it possesses that unavoidable “falsity” which is the property of every first exposition of the reduction, that is, it appeals to an act the performance of which is to transcend it.18 Fink’s point here is that any descriptions of the reduction (and its results) are, when directed to a worldly audience, always only provisional: if the audience is spurred to perform the reduction for themselves, as the author of the description desires, the description will be, as Fink puts it, “transcended.” Only by transcending such provisional descriptions will the audience fully understand what the author is getting at, by actually sharing in the kind of “transcendental experience” being gestured at within the text. If this reading of phenomenology is correct, then the connection between autonomy and the practice of phenomenology is internal in a twofold sense: first, the practice of phenomenology is essential to the achievement of autonomy, and second, the very ideal envisioned is only fully intelligible from “within” the practice of phenomenology. —————— 16. The idea of phenomenology as a practice, and the difficulties this idea engenders for talking about phenomenology, is a principal concern of Zaner. 17. Eugen Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Con- temporary Criticism,” in ed. R. O. Elveton, ed. and trans., The Phenomenology of Ed- mund Husserl: Selected Critical Readings (Seattle: Noesis Press, 2d ed., 2000), 70–139, here 101. 18. Ibid. 10 DAVID R. CERBONE

I have started with Husserl both because of his historical primacy, but also because his conception of autonomy as internal to phenomenology is clear and forthright, and so provides a point of comparison for examining the relation between authenticity and phenomenology in Heidegger’s Being and Time. In the transition from transcendental to existential phenomenology, the connection between authenticity and the practice of phenomenology becomes, at the very least, more complicated, if not more problematic.

§ 3. From Transcendental Ego to Worldly Dasein: Practical Proximity In the previous section, I tried to show first that Husserl’s conception of distance is to be understood in terms of the absence of insight into the ground of judgment on the part of the one who judges; and second that proximity, understood as the acquisition of evidence in Husserl’s technical sense, requires the specific procedures of phenomenology in order to be achieved. As a consequence, Husserl’s envisioned ideal of autonomy or self-responsibility, requires transcendental phenomenology. Heidegger’s reconception of the nature of phenomenological investigation brings with it a reconception of the relevant notions of distance and proximity, as well as a reconception of what it means to be authentic: how this affects the relations among these concepts is what I now want to consider. We might begin to understand the relations among these concepts by first attending to a formal similarity between Husserl and Heidegger, which, when filled in, reveals a significant rupture between the two. Formally put, both are interested in what we might call the “constitution of sense.”19 In both cases, this interest translates into a demand for a kind of transcendental investigation, that is, an inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of our having mean- ingful engagement with the world. In the case of Husserl, the interest and the demand together motivate the performance of the reduction, since the investigator must get back behind the natural attitude, which, while the locus of sense, cannot explain its possibility (any attempt to do so leads to what is, from Husserl’s perspective, a variety of equally unpalatable forms of naturalism).20 The transition from the natural attitude to the attitude inhabited via the performance of the reduction affords insight into the workings of absolute consciousness, that is, insight into the noetic-noematic structures and processes by means of which consciousness becomes directed toward objects: —————— 19. See Dagfinn Føllesdal, “Husserl and Heidegger on the Role of Actions in the Constitution of the World,” in E. Saarinen, R. Hilpinen, I. Niiniluoto, and M. P. Hintikka, eds., Essays in Honour of Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), 365–78, for an illuminating discussion of Husserl and Heidegger on the notion of constitution. 20. “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” is a particularly vivid example of Husserl’s anti-naturalism. See also Logical Investigations, especially the Prolegomena to Pure Logic. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 11

with his reflective regard, [the phenomenologist] penetrates the anonymous “cogitative” life, he uncovers the definite synthetic courses of mani- fold modes of consciousness and, further back, the modes of Ego com- portment, which make understandable the objective affair’s simple meantness for the Ego, its intuitive or non-intuitive meantness. Or, stated more precisely, they make it understandable how, in itself and by virtue of its current intentional structure, consciousness makes possible and necessary the fact that such an “existing” and “thus determined” Object is intended in it, occurs in it as such a sense. (CM, 47) Now, one of the significant points of departure from Husserl in Heidegger’s phenomenology is the absence in Heidegger of the phenomenological reduction. That is correct, if the reduction is understood in the specific manner Hus- serl describes. Nonetheless, one can find in Heidegger a claim to a revamped form of the reduction: For Husserl, phenomenological reduction, which he worked out for the first time expressly in the Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomeno- logical Philosophy (1913), is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as cor- relates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).21 In explaining his departure from Husserl, Heidegger’s locution “whatever may be the character of that apprehension” is of particular import: the “apprehension of a being” is not, for Heidegger, specifically or even primarily an achievement of consciousness, but rather a characteristic of our practical dealings in the world. Dasein, as being-in-the-world, concernfully engages with its world, and this is manifest in its activity. This activity, what Heidegger calls circumspective concern, very often involves little of interest in the way of conscious states while still being fully intentional in nature. If phenomenology is to make manifest the structure of these intentional comportments, it cannot begin with Husserl’s famous epoché, as that, Heidegger thinks, will “bracket” precisely what is of concern. In bringing into view Dasein’s worldly, practical intentionality, Heideg- ger thereby reorients and multiplies the senses of distance and proximity, and considerable care is needed in keeping track of them all. The following sche- matization is still, I fear, fairly rough and no doubt incomplete, but it will help us to answer our guiding questions concerning phenomenology and authenticity. To begin to sort out the various notions of distance and proximity in Heidegger’s phenomenology, we can employ a scheme with two axes, one of ——————which corresponds roughly to the distinction in subject-matter in Division I 21. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 21. 12 DAVID R. CERBONE and Division II, which I dub the practical and the existential, respectively; the second axis employs the distinction between the ontical and the ontological. Deploying these two axes in tandem yields four distinct notions of proximity: ontical-practical, ontological-practical, ontical-existential, and ontological-existential proximity, along with corresponding notions of distance in each case.22 These notions can be understood as standing in the following relations: ontical-practical proximity stands in contrast with ontical-practical distance; if the structures implicit in ontical-practical proximity are made explicit, one has thereby achieved ontological-practical proximity with respect to those structures; the same relations hold mutatis mutandis for the corresponding existential modes. Ultimately, the question I want to consider concerns the relation between the ontical-existential and ontological-existential modes of proximity: can one achieve ontical-existential proximity (i.e. be authentic) without achieving ontological-existential proximity? As we shall see, in keeping with the circular structure of Heidegger’s mode of inquiry, this question cannot be answered in simple yes-or-no manner. Before I try to explain, let alone justify, this last claim, I want to begin, as Heidegger does, in the realm of the practical, the description of which occu- pies the opening chapters of Division I. Such description focuses upon “the kind of dealing which is closest to us,” which, Heidegger asserts, is “not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use” (BT, 95; my emphasis). Thus, ontical-practical proximity is a matter of what Dreyfus has called “absorbed coping”: to be close to something in this sense is a matter of skillful understanding and manipulation.23 Further, entities are encountered most genuinely when they are made proximate in this sense, as Heidegger’s account of hammering exemplifies: the less we just stare at the hammer-thing and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific “manipulability” of the hammer. (BT, 98) Ontical-practical distance, by contrast, can be understood in terms of a lack of understanding, where the lack can either be a matter of simple absence or second-hand, derivative understanding. Now, a peculiar feature of ontical-practical proximity, understood as absorbed coping, is that its very nature tends to promote ontological-practical distance. By this I mean that there is a tendency to misunderstand the struc- —————— 22. A table summarizing these terms appears below on p. 15, after they have been further explained. 23. See Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1991), esp. Ch. 3. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 13 tures implicit in everyday circumspective concern, owing to the very transparency of Dasein’s skillful activity. We might call this the paradox of proximity, as it is the very nearness of our skillful coping which is responsible for our misreading its nature: very often, attempts to grasp these structures reflec- tively produce distortions, as the one who reflects “reads back” the features of reflection into the structure of non-reflective activity. The result is the various subject-object, substance-and-accident models, centered upon presence-at-hand, which are characteristic of traditional philosophical inquiry. Thus, Heideg- ger’s phenomenological explication of everyday skillful coping is not merely illuminating with respect to its structure, but serves as a philosophical correc- tive to much that has been said by way of attempting to understand it. If this is right, then the achievement of ontological-practical proximity is secured by means of phenomenology, and this achievement in turn serves to obviate ontological-practical distance by eliminating the various distortions and misunderstandings to which philosophy in particular has been prone. But we can also see that when it comes to ontical-practical and ontological-practical proximity, the two are related to one another in an entirely external fashion in the sense that absorbed coping runs independently of any attempts to detail its structure accurately. Moreover, an ability to describe the implicit ontological structure does not enable one to cope any better with respect to particular activities: the phenomenologist comes no closer to mastering a particular skill simply by describing it, no matter how painstakingly he does so, just as the veteran sportscaster is no closer to being a professional athlete by dint of calling games year after year than is the cub reporter. At best, one can say only that some degree of ontical-practical proximity is necessary on the part of one who attempts to achieve ontological-practical proximity, in the sense that such activity cannot be understood entirely from the outside (indeed, that is one of the results of careful phenomenological description, namely that skillful coping cannot be codified in terms of context-free entities and procedures).24 Those who display no interest in phenomenology in this domain are not in the least hampered in terms of their practical activity: the one who hammers need not have any explicit grip on the ontological structures implicit in her hammering. This last point can be further illustrated if we consider the discursive manifestation of ontical-distance, namely idle talk. Dasein’s talk about practical matters and entities idles to the extent it has only a second-hand, derivative understanding of whatever it is that is being talked about. In such cases, idle talk serves to obscure entities from view: Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s being and has a share in constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of be- —————— 24. See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, esp. Ch. 6. 14 DAVID R. CERBONE

coming idle talk. And when it does so, it serves not so much to keep being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding as rather to close it off, and cover up the entities within-the-world. (BT, 213) Where practical matters are concerned, the concealment of entities by idle talk stands in contrast to the “unveiled” encounters afforded by practical mastery: recall Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of the hammerer’s relation to the hammerer when hammering. But if this is so, the practice of phenomenology can be seen to have little to do with overcoming idle talk: I overcome idle talk insofar as I expend the effort necessary to acquire “hands on,” skillful mastery of whatever it is that I was inclined to blather on about until then. In doing so, I diminish the distance between myself and the subject matter of my discourse, and in that way, my talk about it likewise diminishes in terms of idleness. In all of this, however, the practice of phenomenology appears to play little or no role. Whether this is so when the emphasis shifts from practical to existential matters remains to be seen.

§ 4. From Dispersal to Resoluteness: Existential Proximity Near the beginning of the second Introduction, Heidegger remarks: “Ontically, of course, Dasein is not only close to us—even that which is closest: we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest” (BT, 36). The kind of ontical proximity Heidegger speaks of here is simply another formulation of the assertion that Dasein is in each case mine, but despite this proximity, indeed because of it, there is another sense in which Dasein is remote from itself. By linking together ontical proximity and ontological distance, such that the former is the cause of the latter, Heidegger appears here to be articulating what I referred to previously as the paradox of proximity: we tend to miss what is of the most importance due to its very proximity, not its distance. The difficulties involved in arriving at a proper account of Dasein’s practical activity as absorbed coping is a case in point: our very absorption in our day-to-day activities is responsible for our tendency to misdescribe its character. When it comes to Dasein’s ontological distance from itself, however, ontical proximity does not seem to be the only culprit. Heidegger’s diagnosis here includes more than the idea that we tend to overlook what is right in front of us, including ourselves, but rather that the very structure of everyday activity involves a kind of dispersal of Dasein’s “mineness,” such that everyday Dasein is lost in the anonymous public world of das Man, and so lost to itself: The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the “they”, and must first find itself. This dispersal characterizes the “sub- DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 15

ject” of that kind of being which we know as concernful absorption in the world which we encounter as closest to us. (BT, 167) With Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s dispersal, along with the possibility of its overcoming it, we arrive at the contrast between inauthenticity and authenticity, a contrast Heidegger at some points characterizes in terms of distance and proximity: Proximally Dasein is “they,” and for the most part remains so. If Dasein discovers the world in its own way and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic being, then this discovery of the “world” [sic] and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing-away of con- cealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way. (BT, 167; my emphasis) Despite Heidegger’s talk of Dasein’s ontical proximity to itself in the In- troduction, its proximal condition as dispersed, that is, as a they-self, still con- notes a kind of distance from itself as an ontical or existentiell condition. At the risk of terminological confusion, I want to label this condition “ontical- existential distance,” which refers to Dasein’s condition of inauthenticity in any particular, concrete case; correspondingly, “ontical-existential proximity” refers to Dasein’s achievement of authenticity in any particular case. Ontolog- ical-existential proximity is a matter of having gained systematic, interpretive insight into the structures informing any Dasein’s achievement of authenticity, while ontological-existential distance consists of systematic distortions or misunderstandings of such structures: any systematic account which renders the human subject in present-at-hand terms falls into this category. The table below summarizes the terminology so far introduced:

ONTICAL ONTOLOGICAL

PRACTICAL Absorbed Division I PROXIMITY coping phenomenological descriptions

PRACTICAL Idle talk as second- Traditional DISTANCE hand, derivative philosophical inquiry understanding (subject-object model)

EXISTENTIAL Living authentically, Division II PROXIMITY resolute projection phenomenological descriptions

EXISTENTIAL Living inauthentically, Traditional DISTANCE i.e. as a they-self philosophical inquiry

Idle talk as tranquiliz- (human beings as ing and uprooting soul-substance) 16 DAVID R. CERBONE

As we have seen, ontical-practical distance manifests itself in Dasein’s tendency toward idle talk, that is, in its expressing and passing along a second- hand, derivative understanding of whatever it is it is talking about. Already in practical matters this tendency is responsible for concealing entities, but if con- fined to practical matters, it can often be relatively harmless, and can even be regarded as indispensable. By this last claim, I mean that everyone at some times has the need to talk about more than what he or she has achieved skillful mastery over: in this regard, what externalists call “the division of linguis- tic labor” corresponds to the division of labor found in any developed society.25 That we can talk about something “without previously making the thing one’s own” (BT, 213) can thus be readily seen as a “positive phenomenon which constitutes the kind of being of everyday Dasein’s understanding and interpretation” (BT, 211). When it comes to self-understanding, however, idle talk is far less benign, since what Dasein has in this case failed to “make its own” is precisely itself. A principal example of this far from harmless dimension of idle talk is discussed at length by Heidegger in § 51 of Being and Time, wherein he describes the way in which death is treated in everydayness. There, Heidegger asserts, “death gets passed off as always something ‘actual’; its character as a possibility gets con- cealed, and so are the other two items that belong to it—the fact that it is non- relational and that it is not to be outstripped” (BT, 297). This hazy, tranquiliz- ing, “leveled off” understanding of death serves as an impediment to Dasein’s achievement of an authentic self-understanding: “By such ambiguity, Dasein puts itself in the position of losing itself in the ‘they’ as regards a distinctive potentiality-for-being which belongs to Dasein’s ownmost Self. The ‘they’ gives its approval and aggravates the temptation to cover up from oneself one’s ownmost being-towards-death” (BT, 297). By concealing from Dasein its death as a possibility, which is “non-relational” and “not to be outstripped,” everyday idle talk serves to conceal Dasein from itself, to prevent it from making itself its own, and so be authentic. But how are these concealing tendencies and temptations of everydayness to be overcome? I will confine myself here to a sketch of Heidegger’s account, with attention only to anxiety, the call of conscience, and resoluteness. An- xiety, as a “fundamental attunement,” serves as the linchpin for the transition: it is within the experience of anxiety that death as Dasein’s ownmost possibility is confronted, that the call of conscience summoning Dasein to itself is (possibly) heard; finally, it is in response to anxiety that Dasein either is, or fails to be, resolute in “taking over the ground” of its being. —————— 25. The phrase is from Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1975), 215–71, here 227. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 17

With respect to anxiety, Heidegger writes: Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-being—that is, its being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself. Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its being free for . . . the authenticity of its being, and for this authenticity as a possibility which it always is. (BT, 232) In his commentary, Dreyfus characterizes anxiety as “Heidegger’s existential equivalent of Husserl’s transcendental reduction.”26 What I take this to mean is that both involve a kind of suspension, of one’s doxastic commitments in the case of Husserl, of one’s engagement in and with the world in the case of Heidegger. Both, furthermore, serve to disclose something primordial or fundamental with respect to the constitution of sense. This is clear in the case of Husserl: as we have seen, the performance of the transcendental reduction reveals the synthetic-horizonal processes whereby objects of all kinds are constituted as the contents of conscious intentional states. Matters are not so clear when it comes to Heidegger. To continue with Dreyfus’s comparison of Husserl and Heidegger on the significance of their respective versions of the reduction, he differentiates between them in the following manner: what is revealed in anxiety is precisely the opposite of what is revealed in Husserl’s transcendental reduction. While both reductions isolate Dasein as a “solus ipse,” and both reveal to the natural attitude that takes intelligibility for granted that intelligibility must be produced, Husserl’s reduction reveals the transcendental ego as the absolute source of all intelligibility, while anxiety reveals Dasein as dependent upon a public system of significances that it did not produce.27 There is an immediate tension in the second sentence of this passage, since on Dreyfus’s rendering of the Heideggerian account, anxiety reveals to Dasein both that, contrary to appearances, “intelligibility must be produced,” and (si- multaneously?) that it is beholden to “a public system of significances that it did not produce.” It is not clear to me how these two claims are to be recon- ciled, since the first is meant to disrupt Dasein’s complacency about intelligibility, while the second only seems to reinforce it. That is, the latter claim appears to amount to the idea that, as far as any individual Dasein is concerned, intelligibility need not be produced, at least certainly not by it. This initial tension is only the beginning of the problems that beset Dreyfus’s reading here. Dreyfus continues by rendering the revelation effect- ed by anxiety in the following terms: Dasein “has to accept the fact that in order to make sense of itself, it must already dwell in the meanings given by the one [das Man].”28 But “the meanings given by the one,” on Heidegger’s ac- —————— 26. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 177. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 18 DAVID R. CERBONE count, are, for the most part, leveled down, concealing, that is, idle, meanings, and so it is not clear to me exactly what it is that Dasein has to accept here. Following the sentence just cited, Dreyfus himself cites Heidegger for sup- port: “Dasein is not itself the basis of its being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection” (BT, 330–31). While Dreyfus seems to read this remark as simply ruling out the idea that Dasein is the basis of its being, I would suggest that what Heidegger is doing is only qualifying the sense in which it is. The passage from which the remark comes reads as follows: [Dasein] has been released from its basis, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this basis. Dasein is not itself the basis of its being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection; rather, as being-its-self, it is the being of its basis. This basis is never anything but the basis for an entity whose being has to take over being-a-basis. (BT, 330–31) As I read this passage, Heidegger is acknowledging Dasein’s thrownness, while asserting that it has been thrown in such a way that what it is, that is, what meaning its life is to have, has not been settled by that thrownness, but rather is something that it must determine for itself. Dasein can, of course, continue to pretend that the meaning of its life has been determined (e.g. by a “public system of significances”), but in so pretending, it remains mired in inauthenticity.29 Anxiety, as bringing Dasein “face to face with itself,” fosters a kind of proximity otherwise absent from its existence. Through anxiety, Dasein becomes “self-aware,” not in the Cartesian sense of grasping its own, peculiar substantial nature, but rather in acknowledging its own particularity and finitude. In this way, anxiety can be seen to be intimately bound up with an authentic understanding of death, insofar as the revelation of “particularity and finitude” are underwritten by the fact that death is, for each Dasein, its “ownmost” and “non-relational” possibility. Brought face to face with itself in anxiety, Dasein is thereby prepared to hear what Heidegger refers to as “the call of conscience,” which serves to summon Dasein from its lostness in das Man. The call does not come from without: “the caller is Dasein, which, in its thrownness (in its being-already-in), is anxious about its potentiality-for-being” (BT, 322). The call of conscience is that whereby Dasein wordlessly calls itself to itself, precisely as a being who must “take over” the ground of its existence. —————— 29. I should note here that since writing his commentary, Dreyfus has acknowledged the limitations of his approach within it, viz. that he for the most part elides Heidegger’s warnings regarding the preliminary status of Division I of Being and Time with respect to intelligibility. See Hubert Dreyfus, “Could Anything Be More Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility?” in J. Faulconer and M. Wrathall, eds., Appropriating Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000), 155–74 for an elaboration of his current position. For a critical perspective on Dreyfus’s rendition of Heideggerian authenticity, see Randall Havas, “The Significance of Authenticity,” in M. Wrathall and J. Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2000), 29–42. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 19

The call, Heidegger maintains, attests with certainty to Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-being, thereby arming it against the invidious pull of das Man. This moment in Heidegger’s phenomenology, the call of conscience which summons anxious Dasein from itself to itself, further illuminates the structural analogue noted by Dreyfus between the transcendental reduction and anxiety: the very certainty attested to by the call, a certainty whose im- mediacy cannot be explicated in ways that can make its justification available to anyone and everyone, parallels the cognitive certainty gained by the beginning philosopher. In Heidegger’s case, what is gained is the existential certainty of a resolute practical agent. We can extend the analogy further by recalling Fink’s discussion of the reduction, wherein it can only be grasped “from the inside”: the content and character of the call is not readily communicable, and indeed, Heidegger insists that das Man will always seek to distort its character: Only in reticence . . . is this silent discourse understood appropriately in wanting to have a conscience. It takes the words away from the common- sense idle talk of das Man. . . . The fact that das Man, who hear and understand nothing but loud idle talk, cannot “report” any call, is held against the conscience on the subterfuge that it is “dumb” and manifestly not present-at-hand. With this kind of interpretation das Man merely covers up its own failure to hear the call and the fact that its “hearing” does not reach very far. (BT, 343) The inaccessibility of the call to das Man, to, we might say, just anyone, does not make the call incommunicable as such. Rather, its communicability depends on a shared first-hand acquaintance with what it is that is being com- municated, in more or less the same manner as the results of the reduction can be shared only among those who have performed it. Despite these analogies, there are aspects of Heidegger’s recounting of Da- sein’s progress toward authenticity which suggest the opposite answer to our guiding question than was given in the case of Husserl. That is, the kind of certainty and autonomy achieved by Husserl’s beginning philosopher is reached by means of the practice of phenomenology, whereas Heidegger’s practice of phenomenology appears to describe something that may very well happen without it. (Indeed, the very notion of anxiety, as something which besets Dasein, stands in marked contrast to the procedures of the transcendental reduction, which one can deliberately and methodically undertake.) Ontolog- ical-existential distance thus appears to be separable from ontical-existential distance: as in the practical context, the latter runs independently of the former. We might label this “the peasant problem”: since, it appears, a Schwarz- wald peasant can achieve authenticity, and since, furthermore, such a peasant does not practice phenomenology, phenomenology is not necessary for the 30 ——————achievement of authenticity. Thus, whereas Husserl presents phenomenolo- 30. Dreyfus raised this objection, more or less in this form, in correspondence with the author. 20 DAVID R. CERBONE gy itself as authenticity, Heidegger only gives us a phenomenology of authenticity. The disanalogy may be further reinforced by citing a further problem.31 This second problem is that, while Husserlian authenticity presupposes the practice of phenomenology for its achievement, for Heidegger, it is the other way around: the practice of phenomenology presupposes the achievement of authenticity. Only by way of the achievement of authenticity does one have the requisite “access” to the phenomena, and so only then is one suitably posi- tioned to provide systematic and illuminating descriptions: ontological proximity supervenes, so to speak, on ontical proximity. In the remainder of this paper, I’m not going to try to “solve” these two problems. Rather, my aim is to show that they are not so much problems as indications of the complexity of the relationship between authenticity and phenomenology in a Heideggerian context. In other words, my response to each problem will be something along the lines of “Well yes, but . . .” in the sense that the bluntness of the formulations conceals further nuance. In response to these problems, my own conjecture is as follows: while, in contrast with Husserl, authenticity as Heidegger describes it may not require phenomenology full-stop, neither is the practice of phenomenology merely a neutral observer or recorder with respect to the possibility of Dasein’s becoming authentic, and in two respects. First, for the practitioner of phenomenology, the practice of describing and interpreting the phenomena thereby develops or cultivates them: philosophy, in this respect, does not leave everything as it is; but in so developing or cultivating the phenomena through the practice of interpretive description (i.e. hermeneutics), the practitioner is himself thereby transformed, since it is ultimately his understanding which is being cultivated and developed. We might call this “the practice makes perfect(ionist)” response. Second, the practice of phenomenology can serve to foster or cultivate the impulse to authenticity in its audience. Heidegger notes at one point that “when Dasein is resolute, it can become the ‘conscience’ of Others” (BT, 344). Being and Time itself, I want to suggest, exemplifies this 32 remark;—————— I will refer to this as “Heidegger’s altruism.” Such altruism does not 31. For this problem, I am indebted to Steven Crowell, who raised it to me in correspondence, and who discusses the issue with particular emphasis on Heidegger’s lectures prior to Being and Time in “Question, Reflection, and Philosophical Method in Heideg- ger’s Early Freiburg Lectures,” in Burt C. Hopkins, ed., Phenomenology: Japanese and American (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 201–30. See also Charles Guignon, “Philosophy and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Search for a Ground for Philosophizing,” in Wrathall and Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, 79–101, for an illuminating discussion of the relation for Heidegger between authenticity and the practice of philosophy. Guignon likewise emphasizes the idea that for Heidegger, in order to do philosophy, one must first be authentic. 32. What I am calling here “Heidegger’s altruism” is suggested by Stephen Mulhall, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and “Being and Time” (London: Routledge, DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 21 simply bestow authenticity on its audience, however, but serves to make the members of that audience more open and receptive to the phenomena, and so ultimately to their own “essence.” Such openness and receptivity include the practice of describing and interpreting, that is, they include, even if in a less than fully systematic manner, the practice of phenomenology. In short, what I want to suggest is that ontological-existential and ontical-existential proximity do not stand in a neat one-prior-to-the-other relation; they are, rather intertwined through patterns of reinforcement (the first response) and propagation (the second response). Let me now try to amplify this suggestion.

§ 5. Description, Interpretation, and Cultivation In the second Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger’s methodologi- cal introduction, he explains at one point that “the expression ‘descriptive phenomenology’ . . . is at bottom tautological” (BT, 59). Phenomenology aims to “grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly” (BT, 59). Heidegger continues, however, by making two further points, which render more complex this initial characterization of phenomenology as descriptive: first, what phenomenology seeks to describe may in fact lie hidden, by being covered up or in some way disguised, and second, that phenomenology is hermeneutic or interpretive. In this section, I want to suggest that these latter points about Heidegger’s phenomenological method point toward a more “instrumental” relation between the practice of phenomenology and the achievement of authenticity: in short, the fostering of attentive interpretive-descriptive activity cultivates one’s self-understanding, bringing into view what is otherwise hidden or obscured (namely, the very possibility of self-understanding, as opposed to the anonymous drift of everydayness). I begin with two remarks of Heidegger’s on interpretation from Division I: first, that interpretation is a “development of the understanding,” and, second, that “in interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself” (BT, 188). Now, it is the peculiarity of the latter remark in particular that I would like to concentrate on. The idea that in inter- —————— 1996). Mulhall writes, e.g., that Heidegger’s achievement in Being and Time “will not ben- efit him alone; for what he then offers to his readers in his existential analytic is at once the means to diagnose their own inauthenticity and the means to overcome it” (33) and later that Being and Time “is designed to disrupt the inauthentic self-understandings and modes of existence of its readers, to remind them that they too are capable of authenticity, and thereby to serve as a fulcrum upon which they might shift their own lives from lostness to re-orientation, from constancy to the not-self of the ‘they’ to constancy to themselves and to a life that is genuine their own” (143). I am indebted to Mulhall’s discussion, as it emphasizes (correctly, on my view) the relation between Heidegger’s philosophical practice and the achievement of authenticity. Working through Mulhall’s commentary has spurred me to develop many of the ideas presented here. 22 DAVID R. CERBONE pretation understanding “becomes itself” suggests a kind of transformation, but one where something latent is brought out into the open. This idea is cap- tured by Heidegger’s talk of “development” since it is not as though one thing is becoming some second thing, but that one thing is becoming more fully what it is. In this way, talk of development carries with it the connotation of maturation: the child “becomes itself” in adulthood, insofar as its development is a realization of its potentials and abilities. Throughout Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that Dasein has, or just is, a “potentiality-for-being-its-Self,” that it has itself to win or lose: Dasein can either “become what it is” or fail to do so, and its success or failure appears to depend on the extent to which it has engaged itself interpretively, on the extent to which it has interpreted itself. Consider two crucial moments in Heidegger’s documentation of Dasein’s transition to authenticity: anxiety and the call of conscience. Now, I have already suggested that there is a radical disanalogy between these “events” and Husserl’s notion of the reduction: the latter has a deliberative, methodical character lacking in the former. One can decide, on a particular day, to perform the reduction, and undertaking to do so already presupposes a certain amount of philosophical sophistication.33 Anxiety and the call, however, have a much more involuntary character to them: they come when they come (“Anxiety can arise in the most innocuous Situations” [BT, 234]), and it seems that they are as likely to beset a young woodcutter toiling in the forest, as the urban intellectual, sipping espresso and studying the great works of philosophy. Neither of these phenomena, however, should be understood as merely static, always-the-same events: in particular, each is prone to misunderstandings and mischaracterizations which crucially affect their transformative potential. That is, only when properly interpreted, which first and foremost means freed from the misinterpretations and misunderstandings to which they are prone, by those who undergo such experiences do they “become what they are,” that is, anxiety as a fundamental attunement, and the call of conscience as a call to resoluteness. In characterizing the call of conscience, Heidegger at one point writes: The authentic understanding which “follows” the call is not a mere addition which attaches itself to the phenomenon of conscience by a process which may or may not be forthcoming. Only from an understanding of the appeal and together with such an understanding does the full Experi- ence of conscience let itself be grasped. (BT, 324) —————— 33. See, however, Fink’s discussion cited above, which contends that there can be no possible motivation for the performance of the reduction from within the natural attitude; see, e.g., 96 and 100. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 102–3 for a discussion of the question of motivation, with particular reference to Fink. DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 23

I take this passage to be illustrative of the point I am trying to make: the call only is the call, “the full Experience,” insofar as it is authentically understood: only in terms of that authentic understanding does the experience come to have that “content.” Notice particularly the phrase “does the full Experience of conscience let itself be grasped,” as it carries the same connotations as Heidegger’s remark about the understanding’s becoming itself: the “addition” of interpretive understanding develops what it interpretively understands, thereby changing it only in the sense of letting it be what it is. In the previous section, I suggested that Dreyfus, despite his correctly noting the analogy between anxiety and the phenomenological reduction, went astray in how he characterized the disanalogies between the two. While Husserl envisioned the reduction as revelatory of the subject’s meaning-constituting activity, on Dreyfus’s reading, anxiety reveals to Dasein its inelim- inable passivity with respect to meaning, as beholden to “the meanings given by [das Man].” It is unsurprising that on this reading what I have called “the peasant problem” would arise: if authenticity were merely a matter of “accepting” already-constituted public meanings, then indeed little in the way of phenomenology would be required. If, however, I am right about the way in which interpretation, for Heidegger, cultivates the understanding, such that the experiences of anxiety and the call of conscience only become what they are when attended to and interpreted by the one whose experiences they are, then we can see more clearly both what is mistaken about Dreyfus’s overly passive reading of resoluteness and, at the same time, what is misleading about the “peasant problem” which naturally arises from such a reading. What Dreyfus fails to notice is Heidegger’s insistence that “because Da- sein has falling as its kind of being, the way Dasein gets interpreted is for the most part inauthentically ‘oriented’ and does not reach the ‘essence’; for Da- sein the primordially appropriate ontological way of formulating questions remains alien” (BT, 326). This remark suggests that formulating questions in an ontologically appropriate manner facilitates a more authentic orientation, that achieving a certain degree of ontological-existential proximity is instrumental in achieving ontical-existential proximity. I do not want to try to oversell my case here and claim that a “resolute” response to anxiety requires that one become a practicing phenomenologist, dedicated to developing a systematic ontology. Indeed, Heidegger himself says that the latter may be neither necessary nor sufficient for the attainment of authenticity. This may appear to concede what I have been calling the “peasant problem,” but note the qualification at the end of the passage: Just as little as existence is necessarily and directly impaired by an ontologically inadequate way of understanding the conscience, so little does an existentially appropriate Interpretation of the conscience guarantee that one has understood the call in an existentiell manner. It is no less possible to be serious when one experiences the conscience in the ordi- 24 DAVID R. CERBONE

nary way than not to be serious when one’s understanding of it is more primordial. Nevertheless, the Interpretation which is more primordial existentially, also discloses possibilities for a more primordial existentiell understanding, as long as our ontological conceptualization does not let itself get cut off from our ontical experience. (BT, 341) The end of this passage suggests a kind of interplay between what I have been calling ontical-existential and ontological-existential proximity: while lacking in any straightforward means-end relation, ontological proximity in this context serves to deepen its ontical counterpart, opening up a deeper level of understanding and disclosing new possibilities. Such an interplay is precisely what we should expect, given the circular structure of understanding Heidegger deploys throughout Being and Time.

§ 6. The Altruism of Being and Time At two junctures of Being and Time, Heidegger offers a brief but intriguing characterization of the way in which authenticity transforms one’s relations to others. In the first instance, Heidegger proceeds by dis- tinguishing between what he calls two “extreme possibilities” of solicitude, which correspond to inauthentic and authentic modes in their purest form. With respect to the former, he writes: [Solicitude] can, as it were, take away “care” from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him. This kind of solicitude takes over for the Other that with which he is to concern himself. . . . In such solicitude the Other can become on who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him. (BT, 158) The authentic mode, while free of such dominating tendencies, still allows the possibility of the authentically solicitous one’s doing something for the other, which Heidegger characterizes as “leaping ahead” of the other: In contrast to this, there is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not so much leap in for the Other as leap ahead of him in his existentiell potentiality-for-being, not in order to take away his “care” but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time. This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care—that is, to the existence of the Other, not to a “what” with which he is concerned; it helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it. (BT, 158–59) This latter passage is echoed in another remark, which appears roughly two hundred pages later; there, Heidegger writes: In the light of the “for-the-sake-of-which” of one’s self-chosen potentiality- for-being, resolute Dasein frees itself for its world. Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to the let the Others who are with it “be” in their ownmost potentiality-for-being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates. (BT, 344) DISTANCE AND PROXIMITY IN PHENOMENOLOGY 25

What Heidegger is describing in these last two passages is the possibility of a kind of relationship opened up by authenticity, wherein one who has attained to a certain level of authenticity, who has become “transparent to himself,” can facilitate another’s doing so as well. The authentic individual becomes concerned for the other in such a way as to encourage the other to realize his or her own authenticity as well (it is not just misery, then, which loves compa- ny). The first does not simply do it for the second, nor does the first demand allegiance or imitation or submission. Rather, the first provides an example and a kind of guidance for the second in his or her own struggles in achieving self-understanding. What will eventually be achieved is his or her own self- understanding, his or her “ownmost potentiality-for-being.” The latter of the two passages describing authentic solicitude immediately precedes Heidegger’s remark that ‘when Dasein is resolute, it can become the “conscience” of Others’ (BT, 344), and this remark, I want to suggest, can be applied to Heidegger’s own work. That is, Being and Time can be seen as exemplary of this kind of solicitude. In composing this monumental work of phenomenology, Heidegger has “leapt ahead,” making various structures transparent (“not just any accidental structures, but essential ones” [BT, 38]) and providing illuminating interpretations of fundamental, primordial experiences (indeed, interpretations which render such experiences fundamental and primordial). In this way the text is offered as a manifestation of Heideg- ger’s own authenticity and resoluteness. As Steven Crowell, Charles Guignon, and Stephen Mulhall have all emphasized in their readings of Heidegger, one certainly must be authentic to write Being and Time. But this still allows room for the idea that authenticity presupposes the practice of phenomenology: first, Heidegger’s own authenticity only becomes what it is through his particular mode of philosophizing; second, his practice of phenomenology is meant to be exemplary for his readers, and thus serves as a kind of goad to rouse them from their complacent, conformist tendencies. But this awakening can only happen if the text “latches on” to something already present in the readers; it can happen only if his readers are able, however dimly, to recognize themselves in the descriptions Heidegger provides. Such recognition, however, is only the beginning, since what is demand- ed from the reader is a certain kind of reflection, which is different from simply absorbing a theory or learning a set of facts. The reader must him or herself go to “the things themselves” in order to become transparent, in order to overcome the distance from themselves which constitutes their initial condition. That such transparency is always an individual achievement marks the limits of Heidegger’s altruism: he can always only be the “conscience” of oth- 34 ers,—————— but never the conscience. That there are, finally, such limits to his altru- 34. Interestingly, Mulhall’s citation of this line (see his Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and “Being and Time”, 133) omits the scare-quotes around “conscience.” Their 26 DAVID R. CERBONE ism marks a point of commonality with Husserlian phenomenology: authenticity, to borrow from Husserl’s conception of the beginning philosopher, is always the individual’s “quite personal affair.”35

—————— omission makes the passage more amenable to the “modification” to Heidegger’s account of the call of conscience Mulhall wants to recommend, one which helps to solve what he calls the “bootstrapping problem.” While no doubt a serious a problem for understanding fully what Heidegger is up to here, the “voice of a friend” which serves to solve the problem can, for Heidegger, only do so much work: eventually, each human being must take on the project of living authentically for him or herself, and so the call of conscience must ultimately come from “within.” 35. The thoughts which led to this paper initially emerged in conversation with Matt Haas, who was at the time a student in my course on phenomenology. A version of this paper was presented at the 2000 meeting of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies. I would like to thank my fellow participants for their comments and suggestions, especially William Blattner, Sean Kelly, Ted Schatzki, and Mark Wrathall. Special thanks are due to Steven Crowell and Hubert Dreyfus for helpful comments and criticisms at the early stages of writing this paper, and to Alexander Nehamas for encouragement to complete it. Thanks also to Steven Affeldt, Wayne Martin, and Joe Schear for comments on previous drafts. Finally, and most importantly, I would like here to acknowledge my indebtedness to Randall Havas, with whom I have had countless fruitful conversations, and whose writings on both Nietzsche and Heidegger have influenced me considerably. Financial sup- port for the research which led to this paper was provided in part by a Riggle Fellowship in the Humanities from West Virginia University. References

“The Logic of Decadence”: On the Deficient Forms of Government in Plato’s Republic

38. I would like to thank Mark Ryan for translating this paper.