Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology by Ondrej Svec Jakub Capek

Author:Ondrej Svec,Jakub Capek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Furthermore, to demonstrate that the picture of an unconscious emergence of world that Dreyfus is presenting is not exactly Heidegger’s view, Heidegger never says that things would not be “present” to us when showing themselves to us primarily and for the most part: “Sitting here in the auditorium we do not in fact apprehend walls—not unless we are getting bored. Nevertheless, the walls are already present even before we think them as objects” (Heidegger 1988, 163).

Would this lead to thinking now that Heidegger is also a cognitivist because he emphasizes is that there is a “simple presence” of the auditorium walls, which is a conscious presence and not an unconscious coping? Does it mean that he operates with tacit rules and a “holistic network of intentional states” (Dreyfus 1991, 5), just because he emphasizes that the object “becomes expressly visible precisely in what it is […] through this new objectivity of the accentuated state of affairs [in categorial intuition]” (Heidegger 1985, 63)? I obviously do not think that this is a necessary implication, just as it is not so with Husserl. And I think that Heidegger is quite right with granting an implicit complexity to simple perception that can be accentuated and explicated categorically. Moreover, we should not forget that for Heidegger, Husserl’s categorial intuition was one of the keys to posing the question of Being, which is why he calls it one of the “fundamental discoveries”: It targets a fundamental form of understanding that goes beyond the perception of realities and grasps their “ideal” (i.e., non-real, non-perceptual) relations of Being (Heidegger 1985, 63).

Let us now shortly return again to Husserl and to the genetic version of a transition from the pre-predicative to the predicative level. In genetic phenomenology, which Husserl starts to develop around 1918, the “passive sphere” plays an important role. The thematization of the realm of passivity does justice to the fact that conscious life does not only consist of “acts” like thinking, singing or willing. Just as much, we are “affected” by and”drawn to” something, and associations “carry us” to certain apprehensions instead of us willingly aiming at them. But all of this does not mean that we would thereby suddenly enter the sphere of the “unconscious” or subconscious. Passivity is just something we do not actively “do,” but still, we experience it. Consider, for example, inner time-consciousness that is the most basic passive accomplishment and that is certainly experienced in the flow of “living through” (or simply, be hearing a melody), even though it is not focused or reflected on, and certainly not actively intended. Complementarily, the “pre-givenness” (Vorgegebenheit) of the world is “there” for us without “making” it, but is still built up in its sense by passive accomplishments. This is the main theme of Experience and Judgment: How is a field of pre-givenness experienced (i.e., intentionally “given”), and how do the predicative activities of consciousness rest on these pre-predicative accomplishments?

It is important to note that the spheres of “passivity” and “activity” do not coincide with the “pre-predicative” and the “predicative” sphere.

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