Disclosure is a showing. In Husserl and Heidegger phenomena is what shows itself without imputing theoria, specific ways of seeing, in an extraneous manner, in a way that changes, covers over or hides the showing. Error is induced by not seeing what shows itself in the phenomena. Thus if science understands space as ether we hide the showing of space as semblance, we re-present phenomena to ourselves with additional, extra-phenomenal appearance. Heidegger wants to think space without imputing his own ideas but by analyzing various ways in which space shows itself such as space as extension (historically abstract), space as lived (experientially), space as sorge (temporal ecstasies).
When Heidegger refers to the thingness of a thing, he wants to ask us what informs us that such and such is a thing. Is ‘thing’ a word that is self-evident and as such need not be thought further? Heidegger thinks that in the showing of the thingness of a thing something else also shows itself, a history. A ‘thing’ is really a hermeneutic, an interpretation that shows us more about who we are than what ‘it’ is. He thinks that there is a long history since the Greeks that mistakes and reduces presence to what really is. So, if we take a ‘thing’ as simply what is there in its ‘pure presence’ what we are really mistaking is our own historicality, as uniquely human, for what is showing itself. When we see a thing, the presence of phenomena is taken hold of, pre-understood as neutral, as separate and not a subject; an object. The whole ontology, the historical thinking of being as substance, separate from me, the subject, is already understood in seeing a “thing”. The phenomenality of a ‘thing’ inseparably brings with it our theoria, our way of seeing as historical beings.
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Hopkins criticizes Heidegger as misunderstanding Husserl because,
“if the ‘phenomena’ of phenomenology lose their phenomenal status as the ‘exhibitive manifestation’ of the matter or matters themselves, and are understood, thereby, to be structurally coincident with that which, prior to their phenomenal (reflective) exhibition, manifest themselves as having been ‘reflexionlos (without reflection).’ This state of affairs can only be understood, from the Husserlian prerogative, in terms of the ‘ontologizing’ of the transcendental Sinn of the essence of intentionality, which misunderstands Sinn to be equivalent with the pre-transcendental, factically determined exemplars that serve as the phenomenal field for the exhibitive manifestation of transcendental Sinn.”1
Thus Hopkins thinks Heidegger transcendentally reifies Being in order to ground his analysis.2
However, Heidegger might suggest that Hopkins makes the opposite mistake, he takes particular beings as the same ‘kind’ as beings as a whole. This was the fallacy of Antiphon that Aristotle pointed out. It is a fallacy of equivocation.
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We can look at the argument above as a symmetrical argument that works in either direction? Could both arguments be true but traverse from opposite directions? In my discussion here, http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/02/aristotle-and-modern-sciences/, I bring up Dr. Brogan’s discussion of Being and beings, Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, wherein beings show themselves simultaneously as one and many. To take the one, Being, as a universal, immutable, static whole in the tradition of Parmenides or the Ideas of Plato is to assign a priority to the pre-given, apriori. On the other hand, to take transcendental intuition as a phenomenological reduction from facticity is to assign a priority to a particular hermeneutic of ontology. Aristotle wants to think the one and the many, being and beings, as a co-arising, an essential, interdependent dynamic of their isness.
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Values as third person, as rules given, are given precedence by virtue of their neutrality. The neutral is “scientific”, apodictic, impartial, omniscient and thus, modernity’s god. The step away from responsibility as he or she, towards the totalization of an ‘it’, is a step into a transcendental sameness, a valueless objectivity, narcissism In Nietzsche’s words “that the highest values devalue themselves.”[iii]
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Neutrality masks what is by what is not. Neutrality is a forgotten metaphysics in the present. In the present it is submerged but interprets what shows itself. Thus, it gives what we see by what is not seen, viz. the history of metaphysics. Truth as aletheia is inseparable from semblance. As for Hegel, the ‘not’ is already assumed in any positive idea. The production of perception is made possible by contrast, opposition and separation. Polemos, the god of war, is the Sisyphean perpetuity of Being to wrest truth from semblance. The aristeia of existence is the marriage of triumph and tragedy, the ‘is’ and not, Being and nothingness. Grace; to hold together the absolute contradiction of existence, the god-man, the call without voice…the voice of god is the Ethics of other.
1 Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993) p. 201.
2 In Praise of Fire: Responsibility, Manifestation, Polemos, Circumspection, Ian Angus, Department of Humanities
Simon Fraser University, Submitted to The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. 4 – 2004. Edited by Burt Hopkins and Steven Crowell.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968) p. 9. Translation slightly altered.