Let me remind you that at the end of the last session we were getting ready to consider from the point of view of the origin of historicity and from the point of view of peoples said to be without history, from the point of view of a hypothetical zero degree of historicity, a Husserlian intention that I said was analogous to that of Hegel, such as we identified it especially on the basis of the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. An analogous intention—that is, a different one within one and the same system of relations, within one and the same structure. This confrontation, I was saying, had to give a place, give place to a certain “destructive” rupture by Heidegger, a rupture with the Hegelian-Husserlian metaphysics of history, a spiritualist metaphysics, a metaphysics of Geist and Ratio determining historicity still too rapidly on the basis of knowledge and self-knowledge, of science and consciousness, letting itself be dictated to by the categorial difference, held to be originary and irreducible, between nature and culture. That difference has, however, supervened as an event in metaphysics, and Heidegger intends to go back behind it when he interrogates the historicity of Dasein at a depth of originality at which it has not yet been determined as spirit or reason, subject or consciousness (nor conversely, which comes to the same thing—although these notions have meaning only through their properly metaphysical differences and oppositions—body or affect, object or unconscious). But as temporality, this temporality being in Sein und Zeit, as we saw, the only transcendental horizon prescribed to the question of being.
[164] Before speaking—very rapidly, as I have just been doing, for the Hegeliano-Husserlian metaphysics of history—it is necessary to recall that in Husserl’s mind, every time phenomenology encounters history and makes it a theme, it is not a matter of metaphysics and a fortiori not Hegelian metaphysics. Of course, Husserl intends to break with all metaphysics—“We are the true positivists”! . . . . 1 He intends that phenomenology be at least the delaying reduction of metaphysics. Metaphysics, every metaphysical proposition, will be deferred until phenomenology has accorded it its rights. This reduction of metaphysics—on which I do not wish to dwell here—takes aim especially at Hegel. Hegelianism is for Husserl—who did not know Hegelianism well, it has to be said, but that is nothing original—the very type of speculative thought, of dialectics running wild as it breaks with the description of experience and of the things themselves, right from the Phenomenology of Spirit itself. The reduction of metaphysics by phenomenology takes aim especially at Hegel and still more especially at Hegel’s metaphysics of history. For him, Hegel is responsible for that awakening of dogmatic metaphysical idealism that covered with its heavy and powerful systems the Kantian transcendental question: dogmatic re-slumber. And what he reproaches him with more specifically is a sort of historicism. By tying the movement of truth to the historical figures of spirit, he supposedly reduced truth-value to a Weltanschauung, an expression indeed used by Hegel to designate the figures of spirit in the phenomenology, and taken up in the sense with which you are familiar by Dilthey, precisely. When Husserl criticizes the historicism or the relativism of Dilthey in Philosophy as Rigorous Science, he reproaches him precisely with not knowing the meaning of truth, the meaning of truth-value which properly, which intrinsically implies a claim to an infinite and unconditioned universality, with no grounding link to [165] a place or a time.2 Philosophy as rigorous science belongs to a moment in Husserl’s itinerary when the point is above all to show the independence of truth-value, of normativity, with respect to any empirically determined moment in history, even if that means later making explicit the original and non-empirical historicity of truth. Now, in Husserl’s view, if Hegel manages to avoid at least the appearance of relativism, this is thanks to a metaphysical speculation that comes in alongside the empirical description and that, instead of describing the things themselves, supposedly involves an act of faith within the teleology of Reason and Spirit which allows for the recognition of universal truth marching toward itself in the labor of history. But precisely when faith in this metaphysics of history was lost, after Hegel, by all the post-Hegelians, all that remained was the historicism that was the very nucleus of Hegelianism.
So it is—of course—out of the question to make Husserl purely and simply an inheritor of the Hegelian metaphysics of history.
Nevertheless, when around the time of the Krisis historicity becomes a theme for phenomenology, the teleology of Reason reappears and with it some very Hegelian accents. I do not want to go here into the heart of this problem, and repeat everything that has been said about the Krisis and about history in Husserl. I would simply like, as I have done for Hegel, to broach the problem of historical science and of people said to be without history, always placing as an epigraph to these considerations the sentence from Heidegger that I read last time, asserting that the absence of Historie (of historical science or consciousness), far from proving the absence of Geschichtlichkeit, is but a mode—a deficient mode, to be sure—of the Geschichtlichkeit of Dasein.
In the Krisis, as you know, Husserl begins by asserting that the peoples [166] and civilizations in which the idea of science or philosophy has not emerged have only an empirical historicity. Why empirical historicity? And what does that mean? It means that so long as the idea of science as idea of an infinite tradition, of an infinite opening of the horizon in the acquisition and transmission of truth (i.e., universal validity)—so long as this Idea or this task has not emerged, a community cannot think of itself as historical. It cannot think of itself as historical because it does not form the project of a tradition, of a pure, univocal, transparent transmission, as ideally speaking a scientific transmission must be. There is no pure historicity without consciousness of that pure historicity—that is, without the conscious ideal of this pure traditionality which can be nothing other than the traditionality of truth, since truth in its being-meaning [sens d’être] implies unconditional and infinite universality. Now, so long as a society is not inhabited by this project—a project that has determined the Greco-European eidos—it is merely an empirical aggregate. This is what Husserl says of China and India, for example. It is merely an empirical aggregate because it does not think its unity on the basis of the idea of a universal project and on the basis of a pure (i.e., infinite) historicity. It still thinks its unity as an accidental, fortuitous, natural unity (remember the passage from Hegel I read last time), a geographical, political, social unity, and so on. Naturally all the peoples touched by the European idea of science and philosophy are also finite empirical unities, but their spiritual essence has been marked in its interiority by the idea of science as infinite task, and Europe thinks itself in the horizon of a historicity without limit, in the ideal of a pure historicity and traditionality. Conversely, once this idea of the infinite task—which is not European in the empirical sense but which is universal—is opened to so-called non-European peoples, they gain access to this ideal of pure historicity.
The empirical historicity I have just been talking about is also designated by Husserl, notably in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl (1935) as non-historicity (Geschichtslosigkeit). In it, he speaks of so-called primitive societies with which ethnology [167] was then concerned. Non-historicity meant here: finite historicity, made finite by closed off horizons, says Husserl.
In other words, and this is the first point I wanted to emphasize here, the possibility of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) depends on the possibility of science or philosophy [three illegible interlinear words], and these latter are themselves possible only if the idea of the infinite has appeared, the idea of the infinite as indefinite opening. There is no pure historicity before Reason and the ideal possibility of the infinite transmissibility of meaning. There is no pure historicity; that means that there is no properly historical (geschichtlich) becoming and no properly historical (historisch) object for a science of history.
[Cf. Hegel but culture more than nature]
In other words, reason and the infinite are here on the side of history. As in Hegel and, it would seem, against the great pre-Hegelian metaphysics, for which there was no historicity other than empirical and for which the movement of truth, if there were one, was anything but historical. So that, be it said in passing, if, against these great rationalisms and great infinitisms of the historicity of meaning that Hegel and Husserl still are, one wished to re-affirm the finitude of meaning in order to free oneself from the theologico-metaphysical horizon that still remains that of Hegel and Husserl, one would, very curiously, have to reinstate, at a certain level and in a certain sense, a certain foundational a-historicity of meaning. I say “very curiously” because one might seem thus to be going back to a-historicisms of a classical type—those of the seventeenth century—at the very moment one was supposedly shaking in this way the very foundation of metaphysics. The ahistoricity in question, then, would then no longer be an eternal theological foundation, but a certain silent permanence of non-meaning, or rather an absence of meaning that precedes the opposition between meaning and non-meaning, an origin of meaning and history that would precede any alternative between Reason and unreason, between a truth and an untruth, and without which these alternatives could not emerge, no more than could [168] any historicity. I close this parenthesis here. Perhaps we will need to reopen it on another occasion.
It is not necessary to dwell for long on Husserl’s teleology to perceive its Hegelian resonance. This resonance would appear still more clearly if one were to note that, like Hegel and like Heidegger later, Husserl refuses (1) historicism—that is, the reduction of meaning and truth to their empirical becoming—<and> (2) the historian any privilege in determining the meaning of historicity and the origin of the historical truth about which he is speaking. I do not want to get too close to Hegel here—these are texts we’ll be commenting on in the second-semester seminar on Hegel.3 But I shall show how these two gestures come together in Husserl, on the one hand his refusal of historicism, and on the other his withdrawing from the historian the right to define the origin of historicity and historical truth.
Historicism—in its essential schema—consists in saying that every epoch, every community, in its originality and its irreplaceability and its historical irreversibility, has its truth, its logic, its norms, and so on. So there is no universal meaning, and so forth. I shall not insist.
To which Husserl retorts that of course all that is true and that it would be absurd to deny it. But that very affirmation, precisely because one takes it seriously, presupposes the following.
(1) That in truth, historico-empirical, ethnologico-empirical facts can, precisely, be legitimately invoked only if they are determined by a science that establishes them in truth. Which supposes that a science of these historical facts is possible. Historicism is an attribute of the historian who believes in the possibility of his science and therefore in the opening and the horizon of a historical truth.
[169] This historical truth must itself escape from the historicist reduction for historicism itself to be possible and at a certain level legitimate. Thus there is a layer of truth that it cannot contest without contradicting itself. We have a scientific project that is called history or ethnology, and so forth, which presupposes that different epochs and communities can open themselves to the truth of other epochs and other historical or ethnic communities.
(2) This presupposes, then, secondly, that the historian or the ethnologist has some a priori certainty concerning the possibility of this truth and the universality of the structures of historicity or culture or being in community that allows him to define his own field and undertake his enquiries. He already knows what history means, just as he knows what human community means, what language and historical fact mean, when he enters into contact with other epochs or communities, however different they may be from his own. Without the apodictic and unconditional unity of this a priori field and of these universal structures, he could not even point out the differences and the relativity in the name of which he is taking an empiricist and historicist position. By definition, this field and these universal structures of historicity, this origin or this essence of historicity, cannot be the object of a historical science or of the historian’s work. First because they are in no case objects, and then because this essence and this origin are always already presupposed by the historian. So Husserl can say in the Krisis that he does not even need to seek to oppose historical facts to the facts invoked by the historicist historian: the very assertion of the facticity of these facts by the historicist historian proves the historical a priori Husserl is talking about. Given this, one can say both that historicism, as an unconditional systematic proposition, as claiming to be an unconditional systematic proposition, is thus untenable, and at the same time that the historian and historical science cannot, as such, determine the meaning and the origin of historicity.
These affirmations are common to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Rather than develop banalities about this, I prefer to determine the point where a [170] decisive break already takes place between Hegel and Husserl. Heidegger’s break with both of them will be all the more decisive.
We saw last time that, for Hegel, a society without historical science was purely and simply a society without history. Now Husserl, in particular in one of the texts appended to the Krisis (1934, Beilage 26, [German] p. 502–3), a text entitled, precisely, “Stufen der Geschichtlichkeit. Erste Geschichtlichkeit,”4 tries to distinguish between several levels of historicity. And this distinction is going to allow him to recognize a historicity in cultures to which the idea of science and notably the idea of historical project have yet remained foreign.
The lowest level is that of the historicity common to every society, every speaking community (i.e., every one that has a culture)—in that case, the simple bond of the generations, community activity, the unity of the surroundings as informed by culture and empirical techniques, the transmission of tools, the oral traditions of important events, all that ensures that there is a certain historical signification to community life. Historicity is here synonymous with community of culture and humanity.
Historicity in this most universal sense, says Husserl, has always already begun, it is a universal that belongs to the menschlichen Dasein. It is the unity of a personal becoming and, as Umwelt, what can be considered as the unity of an “organism.” Naturally, as Husserl makes clear, insofar as humans participate only in this first level of historicity, they do not yet have the idea or the project of a historicity that goes beyond the finitude of their group or of a certain finite number of generations, and so forth. But without this first level or this first stage, the idea of the infinite task itself could not emerge. Now, the lower limit toward which this first historicity as finitude of meaning tends [171] is the non-historicity of which Husserl speaks in his letter to Lévy-Bruhl.
The second level is marked by the emergence of philosophy or science and of the humanity capable of the idea of philosophy or science, and thus of the project of the infinite task. There, Reason as power of universality has emerged, but it could not have emerged if it were not already slumbering in inferior historicity and even in non-historicity, in nocturnal obscurity, as he says elsewhere. In “Philosophy as Mankind’s Self-Reflection: The Self-Realization of Reason,” he writes,
Thus philosophy is nothing other than [rationalism], through and through, but it is rationalism differentiated within itself according to the different stages of the movement of intention and fulfillment; it is ratio in the constant movement of self-elucidation, begun with the first breakthrough of philosophy into mankind, whose innate reason was previously in a state of concealment, of nocturnal obscurity.5
You can see where the difference between Hegel and Husserl is situated, against the same background of rationalist teleologism. Husserl recognizes that there is a historicity in communities in which universal Reason and the project of the infinite task is still sleeping, has not yet happened, in which it is still only a possibility.
At the first level, there is historicity without rationality or any project of scientific rationality. Whereas for Hegel, so long as rationality is only a possibility, there is not yet any history worthy of the name. On [French] p. 61 of the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, he writes,
The only fitting and worthy mode of philosophical reflection is to take up [172] history at the point where rationality [Vernünftigkeit] begins to appear in worldly existence—not where it is first merely an implicit possibility [ . . . ]. (Philosophy of History, 114)
So you see that from the first to the second level there is indeed a rupture, the irruption of something radically new and the appearance of another type of historicity, and a historicity that is more historical, closer to its full essence, since it includes the idea of an infinite growth, and therefore the transmission of meaning as truth. It is the culture of truth that appears, whereas before there was only culture without universal truth. And in another Beilage (Beilage 27, [German] p. 507, Husserl writes,
Human life is, in the broadest way and as cultural life, necessarily historical in the strictest sense. But scientific life, life as life of scientists in a community of scientists, signifies a new kind of historicity.6
And in the Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy, Husserl also speaks [173] of a “revolution at the heart of historicity.”7 But precisely, the originality of this revolution, that in no way moreover contradicts its revolutionary and irruptive character, is the fact that it merely unfolds, makes explicit, brings up to date a reason and an intention, a telos hidden in the earlier stage.
This is what happens when the third stage appears. The third stage is obviously marked by the moment when philosophy as science, as it has been lived and practiced since its Greek origin, understands its own project, makes it explicit and thinks it as such (i.e., converts itself into phenomenology). I’ll translate the last lines of this very short fragment (1.5 pages).
Die dritte Stufe [the third step or the third stage: it can be translated as “step” or “stage” since it is both a structural and a genetic description] is the Umwandlung, the mutation, the conversion of philosophy into phenomenology, with humanity’s scientific consciousness in its Historizität [Husserl often says interchangeably Historizität and Geschichtlichkeit] and the function of converting itself into a humanity allowing itself to be guided by philosophy as phenomenology. (Krisis, Beilage 26, p. 503.)
That is a new rupture as explication. Naturally, these three Stufen are at once steps [étapes] and stages [étages]—that is, phases [stades] that are both structured and genetic, strata that are not de facto mutually exclusive. So that the lowest stratum is always present in the societies that have gained access to the two higher strata, and the second stratum is still present in any society that has gained access to phenomenology.
In any case, you see that by the determination of the first stratum, the lowest stratum as an already historical stratum, even though scientific reason has not yet appeared in it, Husserl takes his distance from Hegel and looks forward to Heidegger who will say, as you remember, that the absence of Historie, of science and of historical consciousness, is not the sign of non-historicity [174] (Geschichtslosigkeit) but only of a deficient mode of historicity. And we shall have to ask ourselves whether, speaking of a deficient mode, Heidegger does not also imply a teleology, all the while denying it.
To tell the truth, my language is improper: the texts on which I have just been relying to talk about Husserl and to show that they supposedly look forward to Heidegger by taking their distance from Hegel—these texts all date from later than 1934, and thus significantly later than Sein und Zeit. Without wishing to decide the question of a possible retro-influence of Heidegger on Husserl (in the Krisis), and without denying, any more than does Heidegger himself, the impetus that Husserl gives to Heidegger’s thought, here in any case it is on the theme of historicity that Heidegger owes least to Husserl.
This is what I need to show now. I need to show in what way the point of departure of Heidegger’s reflection on historicity, at the precise place where we are at this moment, is radically discontinuous with Hegelianism and Husserlianism and entails their prior destruction.
This will not be easy to show. I am going to insist primarily on the relation to Husserl, (1) because the destruction of the Husserlian metaphysics of history will imply a fortiori the destruction of Hegelian metaphysics for the reasons I was just giving; (2) because, quite simply, I intend to return at another time to the relationship of Heidegger to Hegel around the introduction to the Phenomenology and Heidegger’s text entitled “Hegel’s Concept of Experience.”8
By what right, then, first of all, and in spite of Husserl’s precautions with respect to metaphysics, can one speak of a Husserlian metaphysics of historicity, and how does it lend itself to a destruction in the Heideggerian sense? To reply to this question I shall try to tie into a bundle five themes, it being understood that their unity, what allows them to be gathered into a bundle, is not an external ligature but a common origin.
[175] (1)9 Husserlian teleology is a transcendental idealism. That means it presupposes, it gives itself notions, significations, forms of egoity and subjectivity as its ultimate foundation. Even if in some fragments, in meticulous, ambitious and difficult analyses, in more or less completed projects, Husserl promises himself that he will go back down before the ego or the subject to have us see its genesis and its history, that is not a fundamental and systematic theme of phenomenology. Of course Husserl, as I pointed out at one of our Saturday sessions, does not avoid, as Heidegger reproaches Kant with doing, the problem of the link between temporality and the I think (contradictory affirmation). But even when—in the last texts—he follows through to the end his respect for historicity, even when he rediscovers historicity in the depths of meaning, his final affirmation consists in recognizing that subjectivity is historical, and historical through and through. For example, in a letter of 1930, he writes this: “For, with the transcendental reduction, I attained, I am convinced, concrete and real subjectivity in the ultimate sense in all the fullness of its being and life, and in this subjectivity, universal constituting life (and not simply theoretical [comment] constituting life): absolute subjectivity in its historicity.”10
Radical historicity is thus that of subjectivity—transcendental subjectivity it is true. Now you know—I have already said so and many texts by Heidegger develop this theme—that for Heidegger this notion of subjectivity remains a metaphysical notion, designating not the being of beings in general, but the being of a highly determinate being: the subject is a type of being that is determinate. Of course when Husserl speaks of transcendental subjectivity, he does intend to designate by that not a determined being in the world, but the absolute origin of the appearing of the meaning or the being of every being in general. The dimension of transcendental subjectivity [176] designates that without which no meaning of being in general, no being of beings, could appear, could phenomenalize itself and give rise to a discourse. Every meaning of being in general, must, if one wishes to speak of it, appear, and this appearing is appearing to, appearing for, and that is what Husserl calls consciousness.
Nevertheless, in spite of this gesture and in spite of all the gestures through which one could show how transcendental subjectivity offers the last and strongest resistance to the Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, nevertheless, this origin of meaning and of the world (Fink) is nonetheless determined by Husserl as consciousness and as subjectivity. And the choice or acceptance of these traditional notions of metaphysics is not fortuitous; these words are not algebraic Xs. In claiming to designate the absolute origin of the meaning of being in general, they designate at the same time at least by metaphorical adherence a determined form of being: namely, substantiality. And the history of meaning that links the phenomenological notion of subjectivity to Hegelian subjectivity, to Cartesian substantiality, to Aristotle’s hupokeimenon, is, precisely, never interrogated by Husserl. You know that in many texts Heidegger brings out the fact that the notion of subjective substantiality as ground responds to a project of security or certainty (Sicherheit) that was first made explicit by Descartes and brought to its full accomplishment by Hegel, but which inhabits, animates, the whole of Western philosophy that determines being as a being-pre-sent, as a being before me, subsisting in its firm stability, lending itself to a mastery, remaining the same, like the Platonic eidos or the Aristotelian hupokeimenon as a thing at my disposal, as zuhanden, handy, and vorhanden, objectively present. The notion of Vorhandenheit is justifiably translated as “subsistence” by Boehm and de Waelhens. The hupokeimenon, subsistence, what holds steady under the becoming of accidents and attributes, is not first of all the subject, the subjectum as self or as man, but it is precisely the sense of the Cartesiano-Hegeliano-Husserlian gesture to transform substantiality into subjectum, this transformation keeping within itself, in spite of the protestations that have gone along with it, [177] something of the hupokeimenon as thing in front of me, as subsistence and Vorhandenheit, as object. The complicity between the notions of subjectivity and objectivity is irreducible. We are going to pause a little on this point but, before that, I am going to read a few lines from the 1938 text called “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” collected in Holzwege. During a characterization of what he calls modern times, Heidegger writes this ([French] pp. 79–80):
Of the essence here is the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism. But precisely this reciprocal conditioning of the one by the other refers us back to deeper processes.
What is decisive is not that humanity frees itself from previous bonds but, rather, that the essence of humanity altogether transforms itself in that man becomes the subject. To be sure, this word “subject” must be understood as the translation of the Greek hupokeimenon. The word names that-which-lies-before (das Vor-Liegende), that which, as ground [which is under, hupo] (Grund), gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of the subject has, in the first instance, no special relationship to man, and none at all to the I.
When, however, man becomes the primary and genuine subjectum, this means that he becomes that being upon which every being, in its way of being and its truth, is founded. Man becomes the referential center of beings as such. (Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, 66–67)
This would be the fundamental gesture of modern metaphysics since Descartes, a modern metaphysics linked to the essence of technology that one can understand only via the project of Sicherheit.
Instead of following the analysis of this project as it appears in so many texts of Heidegger’s, I prefer to show, staying close to this Husserlian idea of [178] the historicity of subjectivity, how this “destruction” of subjectivity is articulated upon the notion of the historicity of Da-sein in Sein und Zeit.
It would obviously be more than frivolous to say that the transformation of Da-sein into Vorhandensein, into an object before me or into a hupokeimenon, a subsistent being, that this metaphysical transformation—which followed the reduction of the meaning of being, of ousia into hupokeimenon, was due to a regrettable accident, a fault of philosophy, which could have avoided it. The threat of transforming Da-sein (the ek-sistence of Dasein) into substance on the model of objects available in the world, and of Vorhandenheit — this threat is not extrinsic to Dasein. It belongs to the very structure of Dasein. The inauthentic understanding of its being does not befall Dasein like an accident; it is a possibility and even an essential necessity inscribed in the very heart of its being. It is not even a decline into something low, in the moral sense. I refer you for this to §9 of Being and Time, [German] p. 43: “[ . . . ] the inauthenticity [I do not know why the [French] translators have here translated Uneigentlichkeit as “alienation” when two lines earlier they translated it as “inauthenticity”] of Dasein does not signify a “lesser” being or a “lower” degree of being (Seinsgrad)” (Being and Time, 42). Which explains that metaphysics, which is essentially substantialist (in the sense of hupokeimenon or in the sense of subjectivity), is not a fault or a sin of which one should rid oneself, of which one could purify oneself by “overcoming” metaphysics. Metaphysics, like inauthenticity, cannot be overcome.
Let’s approach an important passage from Sein und Zeit (§25) where precisely this question of the subjectum is broached in relation with the structure of Dasein and its everyday inauthenticity. I’m choosing this §25 because Husserl is visibly targeted, if not by name.
The question that orients this paragraph is the point of departure of the “existential” question [comment]: who is being-there? (Frage nach dem Wer [179] des Daseins)? In §9 the being of being-there [l’étant-là] was determined as mine (je meines):
The being which this being is concerned about in its being is always my own (je meines). Thus, Dasein is never to be understood ontologically as a case (Fall) and instance of a genus of beings Vorhandenem (subsisting before me). To something objectively present (Vorhandenem) its being is “gleichgültig” (indifferent), more precisely, this being (Vorhandenem) “is” in such a way that its being can neither be indifferent nor non-indifferent to it. In accordance with the character of always-mineness (Jemeinigkeit), when we speak of Dasein, we must always use the personal pronoun along with whatever we say: “I am,” “you are.” (Being and Time, 42)
This Jemeinigkeit of Dasein is not yet determined—this is important—as subjectivity. And the problem of knowing whether this Jemeinigkeit ought or not be determined as subjectivity is, precisely, posed in §25 that I wanted to broach. So the question is that of the who of Dasein, the who of Jemeinigkeit. It must be noted that the determination of this who, as subjectum, will appear in the analytic of Dasein’s everydayness (Alltäglichkeit). It is in seeking for what everyday and inauthentic being-there is that we will encounter the theme of the subjectum. It will be brought out then that the inauthenticity of everydayness consists in understanding Dasein on the model of Vorhanden-sein, in understanding the origin of the world—the transcendence of ek-sistence of Dasein which makes the world world—in understanding this origin of the world, then, on the model of the things that are in the world and that offer themselves, in everyday life, to my activity as subsistent things and causes. Which, once again, is not a sin but a structural necessity of Dasein as being-in-the-world, a necessity that pushes it to act in the world and to transpose illegitimately the model of the beings it deals with in its labor. And Heidegger is concerned to show that in spite of the deep protests of all the philosophers of subjectivity who, from Descartes to Husserl, obstinately try to mark the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, obstinately try [180] to avoid any thingification of consciousness and so forth, any naturalization of lived experience, in spite of that, the very idea of subjectivity remains in its principle contaminated by the schema of Vorhandenheit.
And indeed to the question: who is this being named Dasein, the I itself replies, the subject, the self (Selbst). Heidegger says,
The who is answered in terms of the I itself, the “subject,” the “self” (Selbst). The who is what maintains itself as an identity throughout changes in behavior and experiences, and in this way relates itself to this multiplicity. (Being and Time, 112)
(Remember what we were saying the other time about the Husserlian ego as transcendence in immanence.) Let me pursue my translation.
Ontologically, we understand it as what is always already constantly present (Vorhandene) in a closed region. (Being and Time, 112)
(Even if, one might say here contra Heidegger, we are dealing with consciousness as Ur-Region, and here closure does not signify non-intentionality but the specificity and the untransgressable originality of the region. This obviously supposes that Heidegger is neglecting the noeme—that is, the meaning that, as we have seen, Husserl says does not really belong to consciousness. But if Heidegger can neglect this explosive affirmation—explosive because the an-archy of the noeme that is recognized in it blows open the closure of the region, i.e., what makes it a region—if Heidegger can, then, neglect this explosive affirmation that wrests the appearing of meaning from the closure of subjective consciousness, this is because Husserl himself did not consider it to be explosive and introduced it into his description as an inoffensive and discreet affirmation that did not disturb the regionalist themes of phenomenology). [181] So, let me take up my translation again:
Ontologically we understand the Selbst as something subsistent (Vorhandene), as what is always already constantly present in a closed region as that which lies at its basis (zum Grunde liegende) in an eminent sense, as the subjectum. As something self-same (Selbiges) in manifold otherness (Andersheit), this subject has the character of the Selbst. (Being and Time, 112)
And here are the allusions to the protestations of the subjectivists against substantiality:
Even if one rejects a substantial soul, the thingliness of consciousness, and the objectivity of the person, ontologically one still posits something whose being retains the meaning of Vorhandenheit [substantiality], whether explicitly or not. Substantiality [Substanzialität, here] is the ontological clue for the determination of beings in terms of which the question of the who is answered. Dasein is tacitly conceived in advance as Vorhandenes. In any case, the indeterminacy of its being always implies this meaning of being. However, Vorhandenheit is the mode of being of beings which are not daseinsmäßig. (Being and Time, 112)
It will be protested that this identity of the subjectum is not a metaphysical thesis and that, by referring to it, one is merely describing what is given. That’s what Heidegger is trying to do: describe what is given as it is given. And Heidegger addresses to himself for a whole paragraph a Husserlian-type objection to which he wishes to respond. Here is the Husserlian-type objection: I’ll read it quickly in the Boehm-Waelhens translation:
But does it not go against the rules of a sound method when the approach to a problematic does not stick to the givens that are evident within the thematic realm? And what is less dubious than the givenness of the I? And, for the purpose of working this givenness out in a primordial way, does it [this very [182] manner of being given] (Gegebenheit) not direct us to abstract from everything else that is “given,” not only from an existing “world,” [transcendental reduction] but also from the being of other “I”s? [Solipsistic hypothesis that accompanies the transcendental reduction at the beginning of the Cartesian Meditations.] Perhaps what this kind of giving gives—this simple, formal, reflective perception of the I—is indeed evident. This insight even opens access to an independent phenomenological problematic which has its fundamental significance in the framework known as “formal phenomenology of consciousness” [in quotes]. (Being and Time, 112–13)
Such would be the objection. To which Heidegger replies that the Gegebenheit is perhaps here the Verführung itself, that the being-given is perhaps the ruse, the seduction that se-duces, that leads off the path (Verführung), that seduces (i.e., that separates one from the right path, that dupes me); the so-called self-evidence of what is given is perhaps here the dissimulation and the evasion itself. An essential evasion that has its basis precisely in the being of Dasein as the power to hide or alienate itself, to say “I” even and perhaps especially when it is not the “I” that has itself in its sights or is speaking itself.
Let’s translate:
In the present context of an existential analytic of factical Dasein, the question arises whether the I’s mode of givenness (Gebung) which we mentioned discloses Dasein in its everydayness, if it discloses it at all. Is it then apriori self-evident that the access to Dasein must be a simple perceiving reflection [vernehmende = translated as “spéculation” by Boehm and de Waelhens. It means a reflection in theory, that looks or listens or attends . . .] of the I of acts [das Ich von Akten = as the pole or actor of its acts]? What if this kind of Selbstgebung [of givenness of self: a Husserlian notion] of Dasein were to be a Verführung of the existential analytic [a seduction, a tempting distraction for the existential analytic, and in truth a transcendental seduction] and to [183] do so in a way grounded in the being of Dasein itself? Perhaps when Dasein addresses (Ansprechen) itself in the way which is nearest to itself, it always says “I am it” (ich bin es), and finally says this most loudly when it is “not” this being. What if the fact that Dasein is so constituted that it is in each case mine [its Jemeinigkeit] were the reason for the fact that Dasein, initially and for the most part, is not itself? What if, with the approach mentioned above, the existential analytic fell into the trap, so to speak, of starting with the Gegebenheit of the I for Dasein itself and its obvious self-interpretation? What if it should turn out that the ontological horizon for the determination of what is accessible in simple giving should remain fundamentally undetermined? We can probably always correctly say ontically of this being that “I” am it. However, the ontological analytic which makes use of such statements must have fundamental reservations about them. The “I” must be understood only in the sense of a noncommittal [unverbindlichen: non-binding, neutral] formal indication of something which perhaps reveals itself in the actual phenomenal context of being as that being’s “opposite” [i.e., as the opposite of the very thing it gave itself or said itself to be]. Then “not I” [the opposite] by no means signifies something like a being which is essentially lacking “I-hood”(Ichheit), but means a definite mode of being of the “I” itself; for example, having lost itself (Selbstverlorenheit). (Being and Time, 113)
Two brief remarks about this important passage.
(1) What is remarkable about it is that the Jemeinigkeit itself, far from leading to the security of I-hood, is shown to be the very thing that makes possible the Verführung and that, saying “I” when the I is given to me in self-evidence, I should have in my sights a non-I that would not be a non-I-hood (a thing of nature), but an other-me and that, even as I shout “I am” and “I am me,” I should be in Selbstverlorenheit. [“Hume” added in the margin.]
(2) It is quite clear that this is the precise place of the precise question that what is called psychoanalytic theory must pose to the whole of classical [184] metaphysics in its most modern and highest form: namely, transcendental phenomenology, if at least psychoanalytic theory wishes to or must dialogue with philosophical thought at long last.
I’ll break off here the reading of this passage after which Heidegger shows that the reduction to the pure ego and to the solipsistic sphere of the mine, in the sense that Husserl—who is still not named—understands it, is forbidden by the very structure of Dasein, that an ego without world and without others is never given to us, and that my relation to the other is not established by an Einfühlung bridging two subjectivities but has always already come about. These are difficult problems that perhaps presuppose a simplification of Husserl’s intentions and especially of the methodological meaning of the reduction and of the non-worldliness of the ego. But I cannot and do not wish to get into that here. Moreover I spoke about this at some length two years ago in the course on the fifth Cartesian Meditation,11 and last year around a presentation on Mitsein.
What I wish to hold onto for the moment, while inviting you to read the whole of §25 at least, is only this: the notion of subjectivity is still thought on the model of substance (Vorhandenheit). As regards Husserl, this means that Heidegger reproaches him as it were with things that are only apparently contradictory. He reproaches him for the method of transcendental reduction and the transcendental idealism that supports it, since the Reduction claims to give access to an egological lived experience that is absolutely independent, in its essence, from the existence of the world (cf. §49 of Ideen). This absolute independence of subjectivity, says Heidegger, is never given. On the one hand. On the other hand it leads, like it or not, to an ahistorical concept of the ego. Whence all the difficulties that Husserl indeed has in doing anything more [185] than affirming the historicity of the ego. An ahistorical concept of the ego, and even an a-temporal concept of the ego. And although Husserl recognizes very rapidly that the ego is temporal, that pure subjectity is pure temporality (≠ Kant: I think), he has the greatest difficulty in thinking the unity of cosmic time and lived time in the problematic of the reduction. Whence the admirable but so very awkward efforts in texts most often later than Sein und Zeit to describe the temporal Ur-constitution of the ego. Ego: eternal and temporal, intemporal and temporal. First reproach, then: an ego uprooted from the world, therefore not historical. Non-historical because abstract.
But at the same time, an apparently contradictory reproach: the transcendental reduction is not radical enough, not transcendental enough. Why? Because the lived experience which is claimed to be not of the world but origin of the world is still determined as subjectal—that is, as substantially substantial, as a substrate, as Vorhandenheit (i.e., we saw this earlier, as an object in the world, an object available in my Umwelt). Given this, the transcendental sphere of lived experience, instead of being faithfully described and made explicit, is determined by the speculative concept of subjectum that skews the description of the transcendental and subjects it to a worldly model. A perfectly radical reduction—the one Heidegger is claiming to be doing, without the now equivocal name “reduction”—ought also to place in brackets the subjective and egological dimension of lived experience, which is not absolutely originary, which is constituted on the basis of a transcendence more originary than that of an intentional egological consciousness and that is the transcendence of the Da of Dasein. There is something of this gesture (mutatis mutandis! . . .) in the text by Sartre I was talking about the other Saturday, in which he makes of the ego a transcendental object in the world, constituted on the basis of a transcendental field that is originally without subject.12
In thus radicalizing the transcendental reduction, Heidegger is claiming [186] to reduce even what Husserl calls the irreducible: namely, the egological form of experience, the form of the living present and everything that I have on occasion called transcendental archi-facticity. Comment.
Once phenomenology determines a transcendental source supposedly outside the world according to an intra-worldly model, it cannot rigorously think transcendental historicity. Vorhandenheit pure and simple can no more have a history than can a being foreign to the world. Neither the intra-worldly nor the extra-worldly can have a history. History is situated in that in-the-world, that In-der-Welt-sein of Dasein, an In-der-Welt that is not an immanence of the Vorhandenheit type.
Of course, these reproaches addressed to Husserl can affect only Husserl’s explicitly and systematically elaborated project in the broad phases and great treatises, those that precisely make subjectity and egoity unassailable. But we know that in many unpublished fragments, Husserl tries, via radical and non-systematic descriptions, to get back to that pre-egological and anonymous stratum of lived experience where temporality is constituted and constitutes the ego.
So I have shown—schematically—why Heidegger did not feel able simply to be satisfied with the Husserlian description of historicity, insofar as it remained governed, I would say oppressed, by the metaphysical ancestry of the concept of the subjectum. This was the first of the five themes I announced. I’ll be briefer with the four others, which are in profound solidarity with it.
Second, Husserl’s teleology of history is not merely a subjectivism; it is a humanism. Although Husserl is forewarned and is the first to forewarn us about a confusion between the transcendental ego and anthropology, every time he moves from transcendental phenomenological description to a sort of teleological interpretation of becoming, the notion of man reappears, and even man as animal rationale. It is precisely every time that Husserl must abandon the description of the given to interpret it that metaphysical presuppositions [187] that have resisted the reduction appear, as though, once the reduction is lifted, one had to forget what it showed us—for example, something that was not what one blithely calls by the name “man,” and which was anterior—because it gives it its meaning—to what is called man (i.e., a being in the world, an animal being endowed with this strange power called reason).
Of course, the point is not to reduce the whole of Husserlianism to this gesture, but this gesture exists and it always intervenes at the moment when historicity is to be interpreted. This gesture presupposes on the one hand a radically original essence of man, from the Papuan to the phenomenologist, which means that even the revolutions introduced into the heart of historicity by the irruption of philosophy as infinite task, then by that of phenomenology as another understanding of philosophy—these revolutions take place within the unitary field of the same humanity, and the same history of the same humanity.
But just as man and even the Papuan represent a new stage of animal nature, i.e., as opposed to the beast, so philosophical reason represents a new stage of human nature and its reason. (Crisis, 290)
And earlier he had said,
Reason is a broad title. According to the old familiar definition, man is das vernünftige Lebewesen, the rational animal, and in this broad sense even the Papuan is a man and not a beast. He has his ends and he acts reflectively, considering the practical possibilities. The works and methods that grow out of this go to make up a tradition, being understandable again by others in virtue of their rationality. (Crisis, 290)
Thus, the move from the finitude to the infinity of the task is understood [188] within an essence of man as animal endowed with reason.
“Do we not,” says Husserl in Beilage 3,
stand here before the great and profound problem-horizon of reason, the same reason that functions in every man, the animal rationale, no matter how primitive he is?13
We have seen how Heidegger was trying to get back behind a metaphysics that is always in his eyes not merely an onto-theology but a humanism. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” he shows precisely that the link between metaphysics and humanism is an essential, and not accidental, link. We have seen the necessity that Heidegger claimed to be obeying by not setting off from a definition—even one that was selbstverständlich—of man. He would oppose all these reasons to Husserl here, showing that a history that would be only a history of humanity (i.e., not of the meaning of being but of a determinate type of being), would not be a history or would in the end be merely an empirical history and not a history of truth. On the other hand, can one speak of historicity when the becoming described is merely the unfolding and explication of an essence of humanity as rational animality?
Third. The content, and not the form, of this teleology is evidently recognized on the basis of a guiding thread that is science. Philosophy is traditionally determined as episteme and it is by the possibility of science that man is defined, and by the revolutions of science that the stages and ruptures within humanity are recognized.
Historicity is determined on the basis of scientificity and—and here we are back with Hegel—historicity is determined in its teleology on the basis of scientificity, which means two things in one.
It means, first, as I have just noted, that the history of science, its origin [189] and its ends, are the indices of historicity in general. And it means, secondly, that only science or scientific humanity, the scientific community, has a pure historicity. The model and the telos of historicity, what allows its eidos to be defined, is the history of the sciences, the history of science as a history of objectivity. What does that mean?
According to Husserl—and his concept here again is extremely classical—there is no history without community, of course, but first and above all without transmissibility, without traditionality. Now only the scientific object is able to ensure a pure, unique, transparent tradition; only the language of scientific objectivity—of which mathematics and the exact sciences in general have given us the model. Only the exactitude of the object—of the ideal object, of course, for only the ideal object can be exact—ensures the univocity of expression, as Husserl assures us in Ideen I. Therefore it alone ensures a purity of historicity, a purity of the historical ethos, a transparency of the historical tradition and therefore of historicity. The serious consequence is that everything in science that is not exactitude can give rise only to a dubious historicity. What in science in general is not exactitude is, of course, on the one hand the empirical scientificity of the vague sciences of nature and spirit, but it is also the scientificity of rigorous science which is not exact science; the concepts of phenomenology are not, cannot and must not in their essence be exact concepts [illegible word in parentheses14] but primarily and only rigorous. I am supposing that you are aware of this distinction (Ideen I, §§74–75). It follows that the language of phenomenology will never be perfectly univocal like that of mathematics. And the question of the historicity of phenomenology, of the transmission of its discourse, will be posed, in such a way that this [illegible word] at the heart of historicity will no longer be sure of arriving, like [illegible word] at a taking-possession of the meaning of history by history itself. A classical thought, I was saying. Yes and no. Yes, to the extent of the privilege of mathematical scientificity. [190] No, to the extent that the existence of mathematics is conceived no longer, as in classical metaphysics, as the locus or the example of an eternal truth, but indeed as the purest historicity of truth. In both cases obviously it is empirical history that is, precisely, reduced.
History is therefore the transmission of ideal objects, the only ones that can be transmitted with their meaning, as such, without alteration as the same, and this to infinity; without essential limitation of any sort (free and not bound ideal objects). Historicity is thus objectivity and scientificity themselves, and the purity and progress of all three go together and increase at the same time.15
Of course, here too one must be extremely prudent and avoid schematizing too quickly. Although history is always guaranteed by the objectivity of objects, Husserl did worry about the origin of these objects and the subjective acts that constituted them. And he did take pains to root and ground scientificity in a pre-scientific life-ground that was itself historical. The whole thematic of the Lebenswelt which, qua systematic thematics is, moreover, later than Sein und Zeit, indeed concerns a stratum of language-community life and therefore of historicity prior to that of scientific life and supporting it. The only thing is, it turns out to be teleologically inferior, less purely historical, enclosed in the finitude of ends and horizons, and in any case the description of it, whatever its richness and powerful novelty, still remains guided by the subject-object correlation and the metaphysics of the animal rationale. The sphere of the Lebenswelt is the sphere of what Husserl calls the relative-subjective which does not yet create pure and purely objective idealities, that stratum of the relative-subjective having moreover universal structures that can and must be described as such by phenomenology. This [191] is what Husserl explains in particular in a short passage from the Cartesian Meditations that I will read because it appears to allude to Heidegger’s analyses of In-der-Welt-sein in order to show their dependency and filiation with regard to Husserlian phenomenology. It is in §59 (Cartesian Meditations, 29)16 (Sein und Zeit, 27):
One consequence of the beginning phase of phenomenology was that its method of pure but at the same time eidetic intuition led to attempts at a new ontology [ . . . ]. As regards this, nothing prevents starting at first quite concretely with the human life-Umwelt around us, and with man himself as essentially related to this our Umwelt, and exploring, indeed purely intuitively, the extremely copious and never-discovered Apriori of any such surrounding world [ . . . ]17