Intro to Phenomenology, Heidegger & Sarte

Intro to Phenomenology, Heidegger & Sartre

Being and Negation

Phenomenology 

• Lived experience based on things that appear

• Describe reality in how it appears

• Existential phenomenology - puts emphasis on human significance on things

• Reality is a domain of human concern

• Questions raise - what the human is

  
  

Understanding of the human may adapt or change based on what phenomenology reveals to us

Habitual ways of viewing things aren’t always attentive to insights phenomenology shows to us.

Lived reality, lived experience.

What are phenomenological insights?

Heideggar and sartre - what’s the first thing that you do in the morning?

• The first thing you do in the morning usually has to do with others or on a social account

• We live in a world engaged in things broader than ourselves - heidegger ...live in place as taking care, or as concern

• The first thing we do is in regard to what we do or care for

• Reality that we live in

• Sartre - absorption… we’re absorbed in a world that’s broader than our immediate surroundings 

  
  

Pay attention to the difference between for us and the world

• Reality as it is (confronts us) and reality as it is for us

• Speaks to our engagement in it

  
  

Examine the world as it is

• Most basic lived experience of our engagement

• Being for itself - (world)

Heidegger, Existential spatiality

• Knowledge

• Page 59 - “for what is more obvious than the fact tht a “subject” is related to an “object” and the other way around? This “subject-object-relation” must be presupposed. But that is a presupposition which, although it is inviolate in its own facticity, is truly fatal, perhaps for that very reason, if its ontological necessity and especially its ontological meaning are left in obscurity….”

• “Being in the world” (sartre refers to too)

• Dasign (being in the world that each of us is) = “being” (sartre) - similar

• Dasign = existence...isn’t just a human thing, it’s apart of being (not going right to human)

• “Being in the world” and “knowing the world” - main distinctions of heidegger

• Distinction of subject and object - contronted by a reality that seems like it’s outside ourselves

• First question, how do i know that reality? How do i know my claims of that reality are true?

  
  

Representational model - subject and object, knower and known

• Raises questions of knowledge

• World outside of me (it’s not me) - compelled to say things about that world but not sure if it’s true 

• I don’t really know if i have access to reality (philosopher) - there’s an idea of reality in my mind, but not sure if it corresponds to how they really are.

  
  

In framing experience as a relation as subject and object (distinct entities/positions) - initial contact with reality has been overlooked and disqualified in the name of knowledge

A gap between you and the world, between knowledge and reality

• “How do i know if my ideas are the same as reality”

• Subject encounters and object

  
  

Stop assuming the gap between subject and object

• The representational approach

• Stage one - don’t have to answer questions about knowing the world when you get up in the morning, you’re already there (confronted with the responsibilities of the day) 

• Begin with original contact with reality (subjects engaged with the world already)

• Epistemological questions - not where philosophy should start

  
  

Phenomenonolgy sets up our lived contact with reality - instead of “how do i know it’s real” (epistimeological questions) describe what it’s like to be in the world

• Shift from not knowing the world to being back in the world

• Being in the world - helps understand who we are

• Most familiar ways ...are liable to be turned when we make this phenomenological shift

• Properly attending the way things are

  
  

“Being in” - prioritizing being in the world (heidegger) - what does “being” actually mean?

We think of “being in” like water in a glass - discrete thing in a container of some sort (not right)

• NOT the same being in of Dasein - it’s a derivative (secondary way of presupposing something else)

• Dasein itself is not a thing --- being in ….existential 

• Better to think of being in to Dasein “dwelling near” or “being familiar with”

• Being absorbed in the world

• We are already dwelling in our responsibilities (parent) - not confronted with kids, then negotiate that reality, we’re thrown into that and absorbed in that

  
  

55-56 page - Heidegger

“As an existential, being together with the world (Daseign is not inserted with, but being with)...”

• The kind of being in that we attribute to things - not the same as the kind we live as Dasein

• The kind of being in that we attribute to things presupposes the kind of being that is Dasein

• Familiar way of organizing things in space (cup is beside the fork) - objective ways in orienting things in space (Heidegger - categorical organization) - presupposes “existential spatiality”

• Cup and fork are completely different from each other (inatimate objects) - no bearing or relationship to one another --- though they appear as things in space...more basic being in that is our perspective on things

• Describing two things as touching one another - only makes sense to yourself...being true that they are in your world

• Relativity as lived, concerned, beings

• Space isn’t the neutral, empty domain where things happen (not the total compilation of all things) - space is your perspective

  
  

The primary thing in our reality as we experience it - concern orientation --- taking care (pg 57) - being in the world is the fundamental structure of our experience

• We are concern fully engaged - that any objective relations make sense

  
  

We are not a thing in space, we are what space is..

Sartre - channels heidegger insights

• Similar points to heidegger

What it means for us to be free

Our experience of other people

Sartre - touching one another

• Things have power by virtue of our engagement with them

• Recognize relationship with them

• Not something imposed

  
  

Subject and object are two sides pf the synthesis being in the world is

• Synthesis = sartre ...intentionality 

• Consciousness is always the consciousness of something

• We’re aware of some-thing

• We inhabit or live positional consciousness of the world

• I → that of which we are conscious

• Intentionality…. How those things are related

• Page 34 - synthetic relations

• We are in contact with whats outside of us

• We are in the real 

  
  

Sartre

• Absolute = Authenticity, freedom, living according to ones concerns 

• Intentionality - explicitly self consciousness

• Consciousness - being occupied with what’s outside of you

• Begun in the wrong spot if you begin with self-sustaining “I” that’s cut off from everything else (13) cartesian

• Reflective act - premised with reflective or non distinction between the “I” that you are or tne non “I” - pay more attention to that basic non-reflective

• Contact between “I” and “not I”

• Cartesian way of thinking….truths of reflection are first truths

• Undermine the representational way of thinking

  
  

• Intentionality  - towards what we’re not (engaged with what we’re not)

• Being in the world - being in what we’re not

• Fundamental relation to what we’re not

• Conscious and aware - irreducible not-ness to what we are

• Don’t model ourselves off of being - rather, as constantly relating to the “not”

• We are fundamentally interwoven with what we are not

• We are essentially what we’re not

• Our being is to be what we’re not

• Sartre's main object: recognize reality of negation (being of non-being)

• Being in relation to nothingness as irreducible fact of not being

  
  

  The question:

• We are oriented to something

• We don’t exist in a neutral, meaningless space

• Expecting something from the world - or orienting yourself toward the world as possibility - implies the possibility of a negative reply (the world might not answer our expectations in the way we want)

• Objective existence of a non-being - implies negation (not being confirmed in your expectation) 

• Negative reply is not a fixation - or a lack of an answer...but the reality of a negative answer

• There is a kind of reality to nothingness - positive existence in negation

• We are oriented to the world --- when that expectation is not responded to in the way we expect its not nothing

• Negativity - not the result of us making judgements between realities, but more basic than that --- nothingness that makes that kind of judgement possible

  
  

Discerning in the world some sort of positive negation

Nehilation

• World yields paradoxical being and not-being

• We are being in the world...