This schema must be avoided: What exists are subjects and objects, conscious- ness and being - being is the object of knowledge- being in the authentic sense is the being of nature - consciousness is an “I think,” thus an ego, ego-pole, center of acts, person- egos (persons) have standing opposite them: beings, objects, natural things, things of value, goods. The relation between subject and object needs to be explained and is a problem for epistemology.
This problem forms the basis of all those possibilities which are tried out over and over again and let loose on each other in endless discussions: the object is dependent on the subject, or the subject on the object, or both on each other in a correlative manner. This constructivistic forehaving, almost ineradicable on account of the pertinacity of a sedimented tradition, fundamentally and forever obstructs access to that which we have indicated with the term “factical life” (“Dasein”). No modification of this schema would be able to do away with its inappropriateness. The schema itself has developed historically within the tradition from different constructions of each of its components (subject and object) which proceeded in isolation from one another and were then integrated in various ways. The disastrous infiltration of this schema into phenomenological research was already underscored in the description of the historical situation out of which phenomenology arose. The dominance of this epistemological problem (and corresponding ones in other disciplines) is characteristic of a widely observed kind of activity through which aca- demic disciplines, especially philosophy, gain a foothold in life and preserve themselves. 90% of the literature is preoccupied with ensuring that such wrongheaded problems not disappear and are confounded still more and in ever new ways. Such literature dominates the industry-everyone sees and gauges the progress and vitality of academic disciplines with it. Unnoticed in the midst of all this are those who quietly put a stranglehold on such pseudo-problems (Husserl’s Logical Investigations!) and see to it for those who have understood something of all this that they no longer investigate such things. Such negative influences are the most decisive ones and for just this reason impervious to all chatter in the public realm.
I’m aware that consciousness is usually reified, and that most of “Team Heidegger” is allergic to the word.
As I see it, signs are “qualitative lifeworld events” that are “ideal manifolds” of their “faces.” The speaking of a word, like every empirical event, is a “center-less system of aspects.”
Joe’s aphorism on consciousness, spoken or engraved, like his smile that morning, is only ever “from-a-point-of-view,” which is suggested by the “mine-ness” of “existence” or “being-there” or “being-in-the-world.” Consciousness is not a stuff or a thing in the world but a synonym for “being” or “quality.”
The “presence” in its “quality” of Joe’s smile, with its “from-a-point-of-view-ness” “expressed in the object itself” is “consciousness.” Consciousness of Joe’s smile is just the partial passing presence ( and also absence or imcompleteness or unfinishedness ) of Joe’s smile, and that this presence is partial is implicit in that smile’s “transcendence” of this moment and of each of its adumbrations.
But this is a “formal indication” ( a finger pointing, which is itself, as an empirical event, a system of aspects, showing itself differently to different witnesses) and nothing to just look up in God’s Dictionary.
Another option is that there is no “inside” of me. What many call a re-presentation is instead just a presentation or “showing up” of the tree itself. If we think around the assumption of an “inside,” then we also don’t have an “outside” tree to worry about.
“When we view the table, we view it from some particular side… Yet the table has still other sides” (p. 40). “It is clear that a non-intuitive pointing beyond or indicating is what characterizes the side actually seen as a mere side” (p. 41). “In every moment of perceiving, the perceived is what it is in its mode of appearance [as] a system of referential implications… And it calls out to us, as it were, in these referential implications: ‘There is still more to see here, turn me so you can see all my sides, let your gaze run through me, draw closer to me, divide me up; keep on looking at me over again and again…’” (ibid).
“These indications are at the same time tendencies that push us toward the appearances not given… They are pointers into an emptiness since the non-actualized appearances are neither consciously intended nor presentified. In other words, everything that genuinely appears is an appearing thing only by virtue of being intertwined and permeated with an intentional empty horizon, that is, by virtue of being surrounded by a halo of emptiness with respect to appearance. It is an emptiness that is not a nothingness, but an emptiness to be filled-out; it is a determinable indeterminacy” (p. 42).
As I see it, what we tend to call the “outside-ness” of the “real” tree is just our sense that the tree is also-for-others and enduring beyond this moment.
What the tree shows to us in or “as” a particular moment is not all of the tree, but it’s also not not the tree. It’s an “aspect” or “moment” of the tree. And consciousness is just the presence of a tree, for instance, in terms of its moments or aspects. Time plays a crucial role here. The tree is never “fully” present and yet the tree itself, and not a surrogate, is partially present. This is how we can step in the same river twice, though no moment is repeatable.
……with one caveat, which is that in order for you to see a tree, you must already know it as such. In other words, you’re not constructing a representation at this time; you’re using the representation you already constructed, at the first occurrence of the thing you’ll cognize and judge thereafter according to its conception (in this case “tree”), and is for you a particular standing experience.
Point being twofold: on the one hand, the full scale of your intelligence is not required in order to recall something you already know as opposed to learning something you don’t, and on the other, those antecedent therefore a priori representations constructed beforehand by your intelligence are just that which constitutes the empirical content of your consciousness.
This is a good way of putting what is essential to the concept of consciousness for Heidegger. It depends on the notion of subject as a self gathering or self-affecting ‘I’ which posits the object. Heidegger analyzes this structure in Nietzsche, whose work he considers to be the culmination of Western metaphysics.
“The essence of value lies in its being a point-of-view. Value means that upon which the eye is fixed. Value means that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say, reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else. Value stands in intimate relation to a so-much, to quantity and number. Hence values are related to a “numerical and mensural scale” (Will to Power, Aph. 710, 1888
Through the characterization of value as a point-of-view there results the one consideration that is for Nietzsche’s concept of value essential : as a point-of-view, value is posited at any given time by a seeing and for a seeing. This seeing is of such a kind that it sees inasmuch as it has seen, and that it has seen inasmuch as it has set before itself and thus posited what is sighted, as a particular something.
It is only through this positing which is a representing that the point that is necessary for directing the gaze toward something, and that in this way guides the path of sight, becomes the aim in view-i.e., becomes that which matters in all seeing and in all action guided by sight…All being whatever is a putting forward or setting forth.(The Word of Nietzsche: "God Is Dead)
Heidegger’s and Derrida’s deconstructions of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ link subjectivity and consciousness with the idea of a presence which is present to itself.
Your description privileges the appearing of the smile as the primary horizon of meaning, even while attempting to complicate that presence through partiality, incompleteness, and transcendence. The issue for Heidegger would not be whether the smile is fully present or only partially given. Rather, the problem is that the being of the smile is still interpreted in terms of presence-at-hand, as something whose essence lies in appearing before consciousness, even if only through adumbrations.
The language of “consciousness of Joe’s smile” already signals the lingering dominance of the subject-object schema inherited from phenomenology and metaphysics. The smile becomes an object whose being is understood through modes of givenness to consciousness. Even the qualification that the smile transcends each adumbration still leaves transcendence functioning as the horizon of a more complete presence that is never fully reached but nevertheless governs the structure of appearance. In Heidegger’s terms, absence here still serves presence dialectically. The absent whole is what organizes the partial appearances.
Heidegger displaces this entire framework by asking not how objects become present to consciousness, but how beings are disclosed within the temporality of Dasein. Presence is no longer primordial. The more originary structure is temporality, especially the ecstatic unity of past, present, and future. Thus Joe’s smile would not primarily be a partially given object for consciousness, but something encountered within a world of significance already structured by care, mood, projection, and being-with others.
Heidegger later argues that Western metaphysics consistently privileges the “now” as the model of being. Your passage tries to avoid this by emphasizing incompleteness and transcendence, but Heidegger would likely say it still relies on a modified form of presence, a presence stretched across absences. The smile remains something whose being is understood as self-showing, even if never exhaustively.
I confess to emphasizing “quality” and “presence,” because the “empirical object” that never “offers quality” never offers anything, never shows up at all.
But to suggest that I merely “complicate presence” is missing the point. The “between us” “unity” of the object is a temporal synthesis. My cat is “present now” as a brown blur on the other side of the room, but my cat is primarily “absent” in the sense that my cat is not in the least reducible to this blur. Even this blur, already a “public object” is not reducible to its presence now for me. Even this blur is a temporal-logical-interpersonal synthesis, an “ideal manifold” that is never finalized.
On the second point, “appearing before consciousness,” I can only reiterate that consciousness does not exist. To put it in an aphorism, “there is only world.” But I’d add that there is only world “from point of view.” But the “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is “there in the object” as the coin showing heads rather than tails just now. I don’t believe in consciousness as a magical stuff that “causes” or “contains” “representations” of objects elsewhere. We might say instead that the object is always elsewhen or also-for-others.
I prefer “moment” to “aspect” precisely because this more general terms emphasizes the “tension” between being and time. We don’t just have aspects/moments of a spatial object. We have the moments of the melody of a bird that I hear through an open window, as the breeze also comes through.
You can of course make of Heidegger what you will, and maybe I’ll bother to dig for quotes that support my interpretation. But to me all of this academic gossip is secondary. I’m looking for the best explication or foregrounding of our situation. I’d rather you just express your own views, on the issues themselves, and make a case for them directly.
the task is to gain, through an illumination of transcendence, one possibility for what is meant by ‘subject’ and ‘subjective’. In the end, the concept of world must indeed be conceived in such a way that world is indeed subjective, i.e., belongs to Dasein, but precisely on this account does not fall, as a being, into the inner sphere of a ‘subjective’ subject.
Or:
What do we learn from the clock about time? Time is something in which a now-point may be arbitrarily fixed, such that, with respect to two different time- points, one is earlier and the other later. And yet no now-point of time is privileged over any other. As ‘now’, any now-point of time is the possible earlier of a later; as ‘later’, it is the later of an earlier. This time is thoroughly uniform, homogeneous. Only in so far as time is constituted as homogeneous is it measurable. Time is thus an unfurling whose stages stand in a relation of earlier and later to one another. Each earlier and later can be determined in terms of a now which, however, is itself arbitrary. If we approach an event with a clock, then the clock makes the event explicit, but more with respect to its unfolding in the now than with respect to the how-much of its duration. What primarily the clock does in each case is not to indicate the how- long or how-much of time in its present flowing, but to determine the specific fixing of the now. If I take out my watch, then the first thing I say is: ‘Now it is nine o’clock; thirty minutes since that occurred. In three hours it will be twelve.’ What is this now, the time now as I look at my watch? Now, as I do this; now, as the light here goes out, for instance. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other person the now? Then time would indeed be I myself, and every other person would be time. And in our being with one another we would be time - everyone and no one. Am I the now, or only the one who is saying this? With or without any explicit clock? Now, in the evenings, in the mornings, tonight, today: Here we hit upon a clock that human existence has always assumed, the natural clock of the alternation of day and night. What is involved in the fact that human existence has already procured a clock prior to all pocket-watches and sundials? Do I dispose over the Being of time, and do I also mean myself in the now? Am I myself the now and my existence time? Or is it ultimately time itself that procures for itself the clock in us?
Later in the lecture, we get:
In order to speak in keeping with the ontological character of our theme here, we must talk temporally about time. We wish to repeat temporally the question of what time is. Time is the ‘how’. If we inquire into what time is, then one may not cling prematurely to an answer (time is such and such), for this always means a ‘what’. Let us disregard the answer and repeat the question. What happened to the question? It has transformed itself. What is time? became the question: Who is time? More closely: are we ourselves time? Or closer still: am I my time? In this way I come closest to it, and if I understand the question correctly, it is then taken completely seriously.
I wish I had a pdf of Basic Problems, because Heidegger comments there on monads in a way that suggest that his own vision was an update of Leibniz.
All I can say here is “of course !” Frankly I find that you are aiming your lance as a projection, as if you can’t recognize paraphrases as such.
If we are nitpicking, the word “encountering” could sound “subjectivistic.” Who or what is doing the encountering, some updated version of consciousness ? No. I think we agree here. I’m frustrated that you don’t see the issue that the “aspect/moment” approach resolves.
To understand the object as a temporal synthesis of aspect/moments is to “do justice” to “subjectivity” without reducing the empirical world to “representations in consciousness stuff.” And emphasizing the object as a temporal synthesis of “aspects” is not “metaphysics of presence” but an understanding that “time only shows by concealing.” Each aspect occludes all others. The object as “system of faces,” but “only one at a time” only emphasizes “presence” in the solid and reasonable sense of “noticing quality.” If I remember something from 10 years ago, that memory has a “quality” “now.” Or we might say that the “past event” is showing another “face” to me “now.”
The smile is rather understood as self-showing and simultaneously self-hiding. Each aspect occludes all others. Showing is always also hiding. As time shows only one side of a coin at a time, hiding the other, time is itself a coin with two sides.
A lot of comments have been added since I last looked at this post. One point that I saw come up was about conscious experience being non-physical. We may not be able to measure “experience” with currently known approaches, but I’m not sure we have good reason to conclude that qualia are non-physical given that everything else which appears to exist is material in nature, including not just matter but also fields, as well as things like dark matter and dark energy which can act in a measurable way on objects. It seems strange that only experiential properties like colour and sound should be non-physical in nature.
Also, it’s hard not to think of objects as objectively having colour, form, and texture, and that conscious organisms simply translate these properties by having the right receptors. Though one interesting point to keep in mind is that humans do not capture every possible property that an object has. Bees, for instance, can see in the UV range. I believe the mantis shrimp has something like 11 different photo-receptors while sharks may “experience” both electromagnetic fields and vibrations in water. If the properties of objects that we experience as qualia are, in fact, equivalent to the properties those objects objectively have, then we must consider not only how we percieve the object but also what different beings could potentially percieve in that object. This could be potentially infinite, to the point where objective form would start to lose meaning. At the very least, it implies that external reality is eldritch-ian in nature.
Consciousness itself has little meaning, and so do the cells, brains and neurons on their own. They are just parts of the living biological beings in the bodies working together with the other biological organs and parts allowing the conscious beings’ living, working and surviving while evolving and dying in the world.
None of the parts above can do anything useful or intelligent on its own without being placed in the biological bodies rightly from their birth and gone through the natural development learning and evolving.
It is always the full natural living biological conscious beings which can do intelligible things, perceive reality, be alert, communicate and interact with the nature and other conscious beings.
Consciousness must be viewed as a mental quality of a full person or other biological beings in the world living, growing, surviving and getting old.