consciousness

Bewusstsein  

How does it become understandable that something like CONSCIOUSNESS is philosophy’s theme? This question becomes fundamental for us the moment we remind ourselves that the Greeks are unacquainted with CONSCIOUSNESS or anything like CONSCIOUSNESS. In Greek philosophy there is no concept of CONSCIOUSNESS. At the same time, to be sure, it must be said that what, among other things, is conceived under today’s specific, phenomenological concepts of CONSCIOUSNESS is already found precisely among the Greeks. In the course of the analysis of perceiving, for example, Aristotle   saw that we co-perceive a seeing itself as being [Seiendes  ], We have an αἴσθησις [perception] of seeing.[Aristotle, De anima  , Gamma 2, 425b12ff.] He asks himself what kind of perceiving it is that we perceive the seeing and the like with. So, too, in the case of νόησις  , the question arises: Does the thinking [Vermeinen  ] that thinks the perceiving have the same character of being? Both questions are left undecided. From the standpoint of the specific facts of the matter of research today, we can call this a much more fundamental insight into this context than the rash decision underlying the orientation of modern psychology, namely, that the perception of seeing, that of thinking, and so forth are a matter of one and the same thing, the inner perception. However one intends to decide these things, perceiving how one conducts oneself has become a theme of the examination. What is perceived here should not   be interpreted as an experience or mental existence in the modern sense. In spite of this fact, later Greek philosophy displays an acquaintance with what is today designated “CONSCIOUSNESS” or “self-CONSCIOUSNESS” – an acquaintance not on the path of philosophical reflection, but drawn instead from the natural experience of what we today call “conscience” (συνειδεσις) in a very accentuated sense. Thus, it enters into the Christian CONSCIOUSNESS of life and it undergoes a further explication in theology. But what was so designated is in no way an object of consideration. That something like CONSCIOUSNESS would become a theme of an investigation is out of the question for the Greek and Christian CONSCIOUSNESS. [GA17  :48-49; GA17DD:36-37]

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At first sight, this seems to be a strange sort of an approach, or in any case a detour. But it loses its strangeness as soon as we recall, even quite superficially, that both historical reality and natural reality are continuities that run their course in time and are traditionally understood as such. In natural science, especially in its basic science of physics, the measurement of time plays a fundamental role in defining its objects. The investigation of historical reality is completely incomprehensible without a chronology, an ordination of time. Viewed simply from the outside, history and nature are temporal  . To the totality of temporal reality we tend to juxtapose the extratemporal constituents which, for example, are the topic of research in mathematics. In addition to these extratemporal constituents in mathematics we are familiar with supratemporal constituents in metaphysics or theology, understood as eternity. In a very schematic and crude way, time already announces itself as one ‘index’ for the differentiation and delimitation of domains of being as such. The concept of time discloses particulars about type and reality for such a demarcation of the universal realm of entities. It becomes, according to the particular stage of its development as a concept, a guide for the question of the being of entities and their potential regions. This occurs without an expressly fundamental CONSCIOUSNESS of such a role, which is thus fulfilled in a correspondingly crude way, without bringing to the fore the possibilities which are implied in such an orientation. The concept of time is therefore not an arbitrarily posited concept but is linked to the basic question of philosophy, if indeed this asks about the being of entities, the actuality of the actual, the reality of the real. GA20EN   §2

We must first get a clear sense of the history of phenomenological research as it emerged from the historical situation   of philosophy in the last   decades of the 19th century. This situation in turn is determined by the transformation of the scientific CONSCIOUSNESS in the 19th century which took place after the collapse of the idealistic systems, a transformation which affects not only philosophy but all sciences. This transformation allows us to understand the way in which a fresh attempt was made in the course of the second half of the 19th century to bring scientific philosophy into its own. This attempt came about in the tendency to grant the particular sciences their independent right and at the same time to secure for philosophy its own field in relation to these sciences. This leads to a philosophy which has the essential character of a theory of science, a logic of the sciences. This is the first distinctive feature of the philosophical renewal in the second half of the 19th century. GA20EN §4

The natural sciences of that time were defined by the great tradition   of Galileo and Newton  . Most notably, the domain of the natural sciences was expanding into the physiological and biological sphere. Thus, on the heels of the physiological, psychic life entered into the horizon   of inquiry of the natural sciences. It entered first through those areas most closely associated with the physiological, through life as it expresses itself in the sense organs. To the extent that psychic life is explored by means of the methods of natural science, such an exploration is a psychology of the senses, sensation, and perception, and is intimately associated with physiology. Psychology became physiological psychology, as Wundt’s major work shows. Here domains were found in which even psychic life, mind, could be disclosed by the investigative means of natural science. One should also keep in mind that the task of psychology then, under the influence of British empiricism (and going back to Descartes  ) was conceived as a science of CONSCIOUSNESS. In the middle ages and in Greek philosophy, the whole man was still seen; inner psychic life, what we now so readily call CONSCIOUSNESS, was apprehended in a natural experience which was not regarded as an inner perception and so set off from an outer one. Since Descartes the concept of psychology, in general the science of the psychic, is altered in a characteristic manner. The science of the mental, of reason, is a science of CONSCIOUSNESS, a science which arrives at its object in what is called inner experience. Even for physiological psychology the approach to the theme of psychology is from the start taken for granted. Its conception was given a purely external formulation by way of a contrast: not a science of the soul as a substance but of the psychic manifestations of that which gives itself in inner experience. Characteristically, the natural sciences, in their methodological import, here entered into a domain which was traditionally reserved for philosophy. The tendency of a scientific psychology is to transpose itself into the domain of philosophy itself, indeed even to become, in the course of further development, the basic science of philosophy itself. GA20EN §4

The rediscovery of Kant  , with a very pronounced bias toward philosophy of science, was first concentrated upon a positivistic interpretation   of Kantian philosophy. This work was done by Hermann Cohen, the founder of the so-called Marburg School, in his Kant’s Theory of Experience. One can see from the title just how Kant is fundamentally regarded: theory of experience, experience understood as scientific experience as it was concretely realized in mathematical physics, thus a theory of the positivism of the sciences oriented along Kantian lines. To be more exact, this philosophy of science is carried out as the investigation of the structure of knowledge wholly within the Kantian horizon, working out the constitutive moments of knowledge in the form of a science of CONSCIOUSNESS. Thus, even here, in the philosophy of science, there is a return to CONSCIOUSNESS, in line with the trend in psychology. Even though CONSCIOUSNESS became a theme in scientific psychology and in epistemology in completely different ways, it nevertheless remained and until now has remained the tacit thematic field of consideration. It is the sphere which Descartes, in his pursuit of very particular objectives, made into the basic sphere of philosophical reflection. GA20EN §4

In the Sixth Book of his Logic, “On the Logic of the Moral   Sciences,” J. S. Mill sought to carry the method of the natural sciences over into the human sciences. From his early years, Dilthey   saw the impossibility of such a transposition as well as the necessity of a positive   theory of the sciences drawn from the sciences themselves. He saw that the task of understanding the historical disciplines philosophically can succeed only if we reflect upon the object, the reality which is the actual theme in these sciences, and manage to lay open the basic structure of this reality, which he called life. It was in this way, from this positively novel and independently formulated task, that he came to the necessity of a psychology, a science of CONSCIOUSNESS. But this was not to be a psychology fashioned after a natural science nor one invested with an epistemological task. Its task is rather to regard ‘life’ itself in its structures, as the basic reality of history. The decisive element in Dilthey’s inquiry is not the theory of the sciences of history but the tendency to bring the reality of the historical into view and to make clear from this the manner and possibility of its interpretation. To be sure, he did not formulate the question so radically. He continued to operate in the interrogative ambience of his contemporaries. Accordingly, along with the question of the reality of the historiological sciences, he also discussed the question of the structure of knowledge itself. This line of inquiry was for a time predominant, and the text  , Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), is essentially oriented toward a philosophy of science. GA20EN §4

3. Because it seeks to give a foundation to the various disciplines which are directed toward CONSCIOUSNESS through an original science of CONSCIOUSNESS itself, a psychology. GA20EN §4

Neo-Kantianism has, it is true, launched a very strong opposition to psychology regarded as a natural science. That has not prevented the elevation of psychology to the basic science of philosophy both by the natural sciences themselves (Helmholtz) as well as through philosophy. If knowledge is an act of CONSCIOUSNESS, then there is a theory of knowing only if psychic life, CONSCIOUSNESS, is first given and has been investigated ‘scientifically,’ which means by the methods of natural science. GA20EN §4

At the end of the 19th century, ‘scientific’ philosophy in all of its directions was pervaded by the theme of CONSCIOUSNESS. It has an explicit awareness of its connection with Descartes, who was the first to identify CONSCIOUSNESS, res cogitans  , as the basic theme of philosophy. It is difficult to see through this philosophy of the turn of the century to all of its particulars. This is not the place to pursue the particular connections; it is irrelevant for our inquiry. Let us note only that since 1840 an Aristotelian tradition has been an active force within this movement. It was founded by Trendelenburg. It arose from the opposition to Hegel   and began as a way of assimilating the historical research by Schleiermacher   and Böckh into the field of Greek philosophy. Dilthey and Brentano   are students of Trendelenburg. GA20EN §4

The way out of the tradition was traced for him by Descartes. Brentano’s work thus reveals a unique blend of Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophizing and modern Cartesian inquiry. He makes the philosophical goal of a science of CONSCIOUSNESS his own. But the decisive move is to be found in Brentano’s Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint (1874). Here for the first time he detaches himself from the tendency to transpose the methods of natural science and physiology into the exploration of psychic life. Characteristic for the direction of his thought is the thesis   of his inaugural dissertation (1866): Vera methodus philosophiae non alia est nisi scientiae naturalis (“The true philosophical method is none other than that of the natural sciences”). It would be wrong to interpret this thesis as a call to transpose the methods of natural science into philosophy. The thesis rather means that philosophy has to proceed in its field exactly as the natural sciences do in theirs, namely, it has to draw its concepts from its own matters. This thesis is not a proclamation in favor of a brute transfer of scientific methodology into philosophy but the opposite: the exclusion of the methodology of natural science and the call to proceed in philosophy as the natural sciences do in their field—with a fundamental regard for the character of the subject matters in question. GA20EN §4

Brentano thus tried to provide the foundations for the science of CONSCIOUSNESS, of lived experiences, of the psychic in the broadest sense, by accepting the actual elements just as they are given in this field. He did not begin with theories about the psychic, about the soul itself, about the connection of the psychic with the physiological and biological. Instead, he first clarified what it is that is given when one speaks of the psychic, of lived experiences. His major work, Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint (1874), is divided into two books. The first book discusses psychology as a science and the second addresses psychic phenomena in general. ‘Empirical’ here does not mean inductive in the sense given to it by the natural sciences, but rather drawn from the subject matter, without constructions. The first thing, therefore, is to characterize the psychic phenomena themselves, to order their multiplicity according to basic structures; hence the task of a ‘classification.’ ‘Classification’ means dividing and ordering actual elements which are already given. Ordering is always done from a point of view, as everyone says. Point of view is that toward which I look, with regard to which I make certain distinctions in a domain of subject matter. This regard or point of view can vary in kind. I can order a given manifold of objects with regard to a devised scheme; I can imagine that there are very general processes which run from within to without and others which proceed from without to within, and order the psychic phenomena from this point of view. Second, the point of view can be taken from the objective context which bears a connection with that which is itself to be ordered, in the manner that I order psychic processes with regard to physiological relationships. The attempt was accordingly made to define even thinking and willing in terms of phenomena of neural kinetics. Third, the point of view can itself be drawn from the actual elements to be ordered. No principle is superimposed upon them; it is rather drawn from the actual elements themselves. This is the real maxim which Brentano follows in his classification: “The order of lived experiences must be natural.” An experience must be assigned to a class to which it belongs in accordance with its nature. ‘Nature’ here means that which is what it is, as seen from itself. When it is genuine, a classification can be made only “from a prior familiarity with the objects,” “from the study of the objects.” I must have prior familiarity with the objects, their basic structures, if I am to order them properly, in accord with the subject matter or object. The question therefore arises, what is the nature of psychic phenomena compared with the physical? This is the question posed by Brentano in the first book on psychology. He says that psychic phenomena differ from all physical phenomena by nothing so much as by the indwelling in them of something objective. Accordingly, if there are to be distinctions within the field of psychic phenomena, they must be distinctions with respect to the basic structure of this indwelling, distinctions in the way in which something is objective in these lived experiences. These differences in how something is objective in the various lived experiences, the represented in representing, the judged in judging, the willed in willing, accordingly form the principal distinctions of classes among the psychic phenomena. This basic structure of the psychic, whereby something objective inheres in each lived experience, is called intentional   inexistence by Brentano. GA20EN §4

Thus a completely new movement was initiated in psychology and philosophy, a movement which already had an effect upon the American psychology of that time, upon William James, who gained influence in Germany and all of Europe, and from James back upon Henri Bergson  , whose theory of the immediate data of CONSCIOUSNESS (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889) accordingly goes back to the ideas of Brentano’s psychology. His idea   of a descriptive psychology had a profound impact upon Dilthey. In his Academy essay of 1894, “Ideas toward a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” Dilthey sought to make such a psychology the basic science among the human sciences. The truly decisive aspect of the development of Brentano’s way of questioning is to be seen in the fact that Brentano became the teacher of Husserl  , the subsequent founder of phenomenological research. GA20EN §4

But by what right do we then still speak of the discovery of intentionality by phenomenology? Because there is a difference between the rough and ready acquaintance with a structure and the understanding of its inherent sense and its implications, from which we derive the possibilities and horizons of an investigation directed toward it in a sure way. From a rough acquaintance and an application aimed at classification to a fundamental understanding and thematic elaboration is a very long road calling for novel considerations and radical transpositions. On this point Husserl writes: “Nevertheless, from an initial apprehension of a distinction in CONSCIOUSNESS to its correct, phenomenologically pure determination and concrete appreciation there is a mighty step—and it is just this step, crucial for a consistent and fruitful phenomenology, which was not taken.” GA20EN §5

A crude interpretation tends to depict the perception of the chair in this way: a specific psychic event occurs within me; to this psychic occurrence ‘inside,’ ‘in CONSCIOUSNESS,’ there corresponds a physically real thing ‘outside.’ A coordination thus arises between the reality of CONSCIOUSNESS (the subject) and a reality outside of CONSCIOUSNESS (the object). The psychic event enters into a relationship with something else, outside of it. But in itself it is not necessary for this relationship to occur, since this perception can be an illusion  , a hallucination. It is a psychological fact that psychic processes occur in which something is perceived—presumably—which does not even exist. It is possible for my psychic process to be beset by a hallucination such that I now perceive an automobile being driven through the room over your heads. In this case, no real object corresponds to the psychic process in the subject. Here we have a perceiving without the occurrence of a relationship to something outside of it. Or consider the case of a deceptive perception: I am walking in a dark forest and see a man coming toward me; but upon closer inspection it turns out to be a tree. Here also the object supposedly perceived in this deceptive perception is absent. In view of these indisputable facts which show that the real object can in fact be missing in perception, it can not be said that every perception is the perception of something. In other words, intentionality, directing itself toward something, is not a necessary mark of every perception. And even if some physical object should correspond to every psychic event which I call a perception, it would still be a dogmatic assertion; for it is by no means established that I ever get to a reality beyond my CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §5

Since Descartes, everyone knows and every critical philosophy maintains that I actually only apprehend ‘contents of CONSCIOUSNESS.’ Accordingly, the application of the concept of intentionality to the comportment of perception, for example, already implies a double presupposition. First, there is the metaphysical presupposition that the psychic comes out of itself toward something physical. With Descartes, as everyone knows, this became a forbidden presupposition. Second, there is in intentionality the presupposition that a real object always corresponds to a psychic process. The facts of deceptive perception and hallucination speak against this. This is what Rickert maintains and many others, when they say that the concept of intentionality harbors latent metaphysical dogmas. And yet, with this interpretation of perception as hallucination and deceptive perception, do we really have intentionality in our sights? Are we talking about what phenomenology means by this term? In no way! So little, in fact, that use of the interpretation just given as a basis for a discussion of intentionality would hopelessly block access to what the term really means phenomenologically. Let us therefore clear the air by going through the interpretation once again and regarding it more pointedly. For its ostensible triviality is not at all comprehensible without further effort. But first, the base triviality of spurious but common epistemological questions must be laid to rest. GA20EN §5

In the reception of intentionality as well as in the way in which Brentano was interpreted and developed, everyone saw not so much the exposition of this composition of the structure of lived experience as what they suspected in Brentano: metaphysical dogmas. The decisive thing about Husserl was that he did not look to the dogmas and presuppositions, so far as these were there, but to the phenomenon itself, that perceiving is a directing-itself-toward. But now this structure cannot be disregarded in the other forms of comportment as well. Rickert makes this the basis of his argument and disputes seeing such a thing in these comportments. He reserves intentionality for the comportment relating to judgment but drops it for representing. He says representing is not knowing. He comes to this because he is trapped in dogmas, in this case the dogma that my representing involves no transcendence, that it does not get out to the object. Descartes in fact said that representing (perceptio) remains in the CONSCIOUSNESS. And Rickert thinks that the transcendence of judging, whose object he specifies as a value, is less puzzling than the transcendence which is in representing, understood as getting out to a real thing. He comes to this view because he thinks that in judgment something is acknowledged which has the character of value and so does not exist in reality. He identifies it with the mental which CONSCIOUSNESS itself is, and thinks that value is something immanent. When I acknowledge a value, I do not go outside of CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §5

Hence Rickert arrived at this theory not from a study of the matters themselves but by an unfounded deduction fraught with dogmatic judgments. The last vestige of the composition of this matter is solely what Rickert took from Brentano. But even here it is questionable whether it is brought to bear upon the full composition of judgment. “When we characterize judgment as a comportment which is not like representation, this does not mean that, with Brentano, we see in it another kind of relation of CONSCIOUSNESS to its objects than the kind involved in representation. This claim is for us far too full of presuppositions.” Here Rickert rejects intentionality, in Brentano’s sense, as a criterion distinguishing the comportments of representation and judgment. What does he put in its place? How does he define and ground the distinction? GA20EN §5

We are investigating in what genus of psychic processes the complete judgment belongs when we generally distinguish those states in which we comport ourselves impassively and contemplatively from those in which we take an interest in the content of our CONSCIOUSNESS, as a content of value to us. . . . We thus simply wish to establish a fact which even a pure sensualistic theory cannot dispute. GA20EN §5

One would have to be blind not to see that this is word for word the position of Brentano, who wanted nothing other than to subdivide the genus of psychic processes according to the mode of our comportment, whether we contemplate them impassively or take an active interest in them. Rickert first takes his theory from a basis which is exposed by Brentano’s description but does not see that he lays claim to intentionality as the foundation of his theory of judgment and knowledge. The proof for this is that while he lays claim to this descriptive distinction Rickert at the same time employs a concept of representation which runs counter to that which he uses as a basis for securing the definition   of judgment, here impassive directing-itself-toward—accordingly representing as the manner of representing—and there representation as the represented, where the represented is in fact the content of CONSCIOUSNESS. Wherever Rickert refutes the idealism of representation and wants to prove that knowing is not representing, he does not restrict himself to the direct and simple sense of representing but bases himself upon a mythical concept. Rickert says that as long as the representations are only represented, they come and go. Representing is now not direct representational comportment; the representations now get represented. “A knowing that represents needs a reality independent of the knowing subject because with representations we are capable of apprehending something independent of the knowing subject only by their being images or signs of a reality.” In such a concept of representation it can of course be shown that representing is not a knowing if the directing-itself-toward can tend only toward signs. GA20EN §5

He is prevented from seeing the primary cognitive character of representation because he presupposes a mythical concept of representing from the philosophy of natural science and so comes to the formulation that in representing the representations get represented. But in the case of a representation on the level of simple perception a representation is not represented; I simply see the chair. This is implied in the very sense of representing. When I look, I am not intent upon seeing a representation of something, but the chair. Take for example mere envisaging or bringing to mind, which is also characterized as a representation of something which is not on hand  , as when I now envisage my writing table. Even in such a case of merely thinking of something, what is represented is not a representation, not a content of CONSCIOUSNESS, but the matter itself. The same applies to the recollective representation of, for example, a sailboat trip. I do not remember representations but the boat and the trip itself. The most primitive matters of fact which are in the structures themselves are overlooked simply for the sake of a theory. Knowing cannot be representing, for only then is the theory justified that the object of knowledge is and must be a value, because there must be a philosophy of value. GA20EN §5

When it comes to comportments, we must keep a steady eye solely upon the structure of directing-itself-toward in them. All theories about the psychic, CONSCIOUSNESS, person  , and the like must be held   in abeyance. GA20EN §5

What we have learned about intentionality so far is, to put it formally, empty. But one thing is already clear: before anything else, its structural coherence must be envisaged freely, without the background presence of any realistic or idealistic theories of CONSCIOUSNESS. We must learn to see the data as such and to see that relations between comportments, between lived experiences, are themselves not complexions of things but in turn are of an intentional character. We must thus come to see that all the relations of life are intrinsically defined by this structure. In the process we shall see that there are persistent difficulties here which cannot be easily dispelled. But in order to see this, we must first take a look at intentionality itself. From this point on we can also fix our terminology in order to come to understand an expression which is often used in phenomenology and is just as often misunderstood, namely, the concept of act. The comportments of life are also called acts: perception, judgment, love, hate. . . . What does act mean here? Not activity, process, or some kind of power. No, act simply means intentional relation. Acts refer to those lived experiences which have the character of intentionality. We must adhere to this concept of act and not confuse it with others. GA20EN §5

Another type of representing in the broadest sense is the perception of a picture. If we analyze a perception of a picture, we see clearly how what is perceived in the CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture has a totally different structure from what is perceived in simple perception or what is represented in simple envisaging. I can look at a picture postcard of the Weidenhauser bridge. Here we have a new type of representing. What is now bodily given is the postcard itself. This card itself is a thing, an object, just as much as the bridge or a tree or the like. But it is not a simple thing like the bridge. As we have said, it is a picture-thing. In perceiving it, I see through it what is pictured, the bridge. In perceiving a picture, I do not thematically apprehend the picture-thing. Rather, when I see a picture postcard, I see—in the natural attitude—what is pictured on it, the bridge, [which is now seen as] what is pictured on the card. In this case, the bridge is not emptily presumed or merely envisaged or originarily perceived, but apprehended in this characteristic layered structure of the portrayal of something. The bridge itself is now the represented in the sense of being represented by way of being depicted through something. This apprehension of a picture, the apprehension of something as something pictured through a picture-thing, has a structure totally different from that of a direct perception. This must be brought home quite forcefully because of the efforts once made, and once again being made today, to take the apprehension of a picture as the paradigm by means of which, it is believed, any perception of any object can be illuminated. In the CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture, there is the picture-thing and the pictured. The picture-thing can be a concrete thing—the blackboard on the wall—but the picture-thing is not merely a thing like a natural thing or another environmental thing. For it shows something, what is pictured itself. In simple perception, by contrast, in the simple apprehension of an object, nothing like a CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture can be found. It goes against all the plain and simple findings about the simple apprehension of an object to interpret them as if I first perceive a picture in my CONSCIOUSNESS when I see that house there, as if a picture-thing were first given and thereupon apprehended as picturing that house out there. There would thus be a subjective picture within and that which is pictured outside, transcendent. Nothing of the sort is to be found. Rather, in the simple sense of perception I see the house itself. Even aside from the fact that this transposition of the CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture, which is constituted in a totally different way, onto the simple apprehension of an object explains nothing and leads to untenable theories, we must keep in mind the real reason for rejecting this transposition: it does not correspond to the simple phenomenological findings. There is also the following difficulty, which we shall only mention without exploring. If knowledge in general is an apprehension of an object-picture as an immanent picture of a transcendent thing outside, how then is the transcendent object itself to be apprehended? If every apprehension of an object is a CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture, then for the immanent picture I once again need a picture-thing which depicts the immanent picture for me etc. etc. This is a secondary factor which argues against this theory. But the main thing is this: not only is there nothing of the pictorial and picturing in the course of simple apprehension; there is in particular nothing like a CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture in the very act of apprehending an object. It is not because we fall   into an infinite regress, and so explain nothing, that the infrastructure of the CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture for the apprehension of an object is to be rejected. It is not because we arrive at no genuine and tenable theory with this infrastructure. It is rather because this is already contrary to every phenomenological finding. It is a theory without phenomenology. Hence perceiving must be considered totally distinct from the CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture. CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture is possible at all first only as perceiving, but only in such a way that the picture-thing is actually apprehended beginning with what is pictured on it. GA20EN §5

How is this analysis of intentionality different from Brentano’s? In intentionality Brentano saw the intentio, noesis  , and the diversity of its modes, but not the noema, the intentum. He remained uncertain in his analysis of what he called “intentional object.” The four meanings of the object of perception—the perceived—already indicate that the sense of ‘something’ in the representation of something is not transparently obvious. Brentano wavers in two directions. On the one hand, he takes the “intentional object” to be the entity itself in its being. Then again it is taken as the how of its being-apprehended unseparated from the entity. Brentano never clearly brings out and highlights the how of being-intended. In short, he never brings into relief intentionality as such, as a structural totality. But this further implies that intentionality, defined as a character of a certain entity, is at one with the entity; intentionality is identified with the psychic. Brentano also left undiscussed just what intentionality is to be the structure of, since his theory of the psychic assumed its traditional sense of the immanently perceptible, the immanently conscious along the lines of Descartes’s theory. The character of the psychic itself was left undetermined, so that that of which intentionality is the structure was not brought out in the original manner demanded by intentionality. This is a phase which phenomenology has not yet overcome. Even today intentionality is taken simply as a structure of CONSCIOUSNESS or of acts, of the person, in which these two realities of which intentionality is supposed to be the structure are again assumed in a traditional way. Phenomenology—Husserl along with Scheler  —tries to get beyond the psychic restriction and psychic character of intentionality in two very different directions. Husserl conceives intentionality as the universal structure of reason (where reason is not understood as the psychic but as differentiated from the psychic). Scheler conceives intentionality as the structure of the spirit or the person, again differentiated from the psychic. But we shall see that what is meant by reason, spirit, anima does not overcome the approach operative in these theories. I point this out because we shall see how phenomenology, with this analysis of intentionality, calls for a more radical internal development. To refute phenomenological intentionality, one cannot simply criticize Brentano! One thus loses touch with the issue from the very beginning. GA20EN §5

It is not intentionality as such that is metaphysically dogmatic but what is built under its structure, or is left at this level because of a traditional tendency not to question that of which it is presumably the structure, and what this sense of structure itself means. Yet the methodological rule for the initial apprehension of intentionality is really not to be concerned with interpretations but only to keep strictly to that which shows itself, regardless of how meager it may be. Only in this way will it be possible to see, in intentionality itself and through it directly into the heart of the matter, that of which it is the structure and how it is that structure. Intentionality is not an ultimate explanation of the psychic but an initial approach toward overcoming the uncritical application of traditionally defined realities such as the psychic, CONSCIOUSNESS, continuity of lived experience, reason. But if such a task is implicit in this basic concept of phenomenology, then “intentionality” is the very last word to be used as a phenomenological slogan. Quite the contrary, it identifies that whose disclosure would allow phenomenology to find itself in its possibilities. It must therefore be flatly stated that what the belonging of the intentum to the intentio implies is obscure. How the being-intended of an entity is related to that entity remains puzzling. It is even questionable whether one may question in this way at all. But we cannot inquire into these puzzles as long as we cover up their puzzling character with theories for and against intentionality. Our understanding of intentionality is therefore not advanced by our speculations about it. We shall advance only by following intentionality in its concretion. An occasion for this is to be found in our effort to clarify the second discovery of phenomenology, the discovery of categorial intuition. GA20EN §5

We said that color can be seen, but being-colored cannot. Color is something sensory and real. Being, however, is nothing of the sort, for it is not sensory or real. While the real is regarded as the objective, as a structure and moment of the object, the non-sensory is equated with the mental in the subject, the immanent. The real is given from the side of the object, the rest is thought into it by the subject. But the subject is given in inner perception. Will I find ‘being,’ ‘unity,’ ‘plurality,’ ‘and,’ ‘or’ in inner perception? The origin of these non-sensory moments lies in immanent perception, in the reflection upon CONSCIOUSNESS. This is the argument of British empiricism since Locke. This argumentation has its roots in Descartes, and it is in principle still present in Kant and German idealism, though with essential modification. Today we are in a position to move against idealism precisely on this front only because phenomenology has demonstrated that the non-sensory and ideal   cannot without further ado be identified with the immanent, conscious, subjective. This is not only negatively stated but positively shown; and this constitutes the true sense of the discovery of categorial intuition, which we now want to bring out more precisely. GA20EN §6

Because the ‘is,’ ‘being,’ ‘unity,’ ‘thisness’ and the like refer to the non-sensory, and the non-sensory is not real, not objective, hence is something subjective, we must look to the subject, to CONSCIOUSNESS. But when we consider the CONSCIOUSNESS, then, as long as its intentionality is not taken into account—and this was the typical way of considering it before—, what we find are acts of CONSCIOUSNESS understood as psychic processes. If I study the CONSCIOUSNESS, I always find only judging, wishing, representing, perceiving, remembering, in short, immanent psychic events or, to put it in Kant’s terms, that which becomes present to me through the inner sense. Phenomenological consistency dictates that even those concepts which are demonstrated through the inner sense are basically sensory concepts accessible through the inner sense. When I examine the immanence of CONSCIOUSNESS, I always find only the sensory and objective, which I must take as an “immanently real” [reelles] component of the psychic process, but I never find anything like ‘being,’ ‘this,’ ‘and.’ Husserl therefore says: It is not in the reflection upon judgments nor even upon fulfillments of judgments but rather in these fulfillments themselves that we find the true source of the concepts ‘state of affairs’ and ‘being’ (in the copulative sense). It is not in these acts as objects but in the objects of these acts that we find the abstractive basis for the realization of the concepts in question. The category “being,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘this,’ ‘one,’ ‘several,’ ‘then’ are nothing like CONSCIOUSNESS, but are correlates of certain acts. GA20EN §6

If I want to form the concept of aggregate, I find this phenomenon of aggregate not by reflecting upon the psychic process of bringing together a + b + c + d . . . but by referring to what is presumed in this act of assembling, not in the direction of the act but of what the act gives. Likewise, I find the categorial of identity not in the reflection upon CONSCIOUSNESS and the subject as a process of ideating comportment, but in reference to what is intended in this comportment as such. GA20EN §6

‘Allness,’ ‘and,’ ‘but’ . . . are nothing like CONSCIOUSNESS, nothing psychic, but a special kind of objectivity. Here it is a matter of acts which aim to give something in itself, something which does not have the character of a real sensory thinglike object or a part or moment of such an object. These moments are not demonstrable through sense perception. But they are demonstrable by way of an essentially similar type of fulfillment, namely, an originary self-giving in corresponding dator acts. Since ‘allness,’ ‘number,’ ‘subject,’ ‘predicate,’ ‘state of affairs,’ ‘something’ are objects, we will correspondingly have to understand as intuitions the acts which originarily demonstrate them, if only we adhere to our initial sense of intuition. The moments in the full assertion which did not find fulfillment in sense perception receive it through non-sensory perception—through categorial intuition. The categorial are the moments of the full assertion whose mode of fulfillment has not yet been clarified. GA20EN §6

In a narrower context, this discovery has pointed the way to a real understanding of abstraction (ideation), of the apprehension of the idea. A provisional answer is thus provided to an old dispute, the problem of the universals, of the being of universal concepts. The middle ages from the time of Boethius posed the question of whether a universal is a res or a mere flatus vocis, what in the 19th century was called a mere viewpoint, a universal CONSCIOUSNESS to which nothing objective corresponds. But the justified denial of the reality of universals in the same sense as the reality of a chair also led to the denial of the objectivity of the universal and so obstructed the path to the understanding of universal objects and of the being of the ideal. This spell was broken by the discovery of categorial intuition, in particular ideation. As a result of this discovery, philosophical research is now in a position to conceive the apriori   more rigorously and to prepare for the characterization of the sense of its being. GA20EN §6

In conjunction with this Kantian concept of the apriori, the attempt is now also being made to interpret the apriori in Plato   in the same way. For Plato speaks of how the true being of entities is known when the soul speaks to itself in the logos   psyches pros auten (Sophist 263e). The identification of psyche in the Greek sense with CONSCIOUSNESS and the subject now supports the view that already in Plato, the discoverer of the apriori, apriori knowledge means immanent knowledge. This interpretation of Plato is absurd. It has no basis in the matters at issue, as we shall now show more precisely. GA20EN §7

Also in this period, Bergson gradually became known in Germany. This was basically due to Scheler, who recognized Bergson and his significance quite early, and then was influenced by him in return. Scheler was instrumental in having Bergson translated into German. This recognition of Bergson also brought, within Husserl’s work, the investigations of internal time CONSCIOUSNESS, which are in part published in his later works. GA20EN §10

Then the influence of Dilthey made itself felt, manifesting his inner kinship with the tendencies of phenomenology. This led to a transposition of Husserl’s orientation in the philosophy of science, taken in the broadest sense, from one-sided work on problems relating to the natural sciences to a broader reflection on the specific objectivity of the human sciences. A final essential direction channeling these efforts came from the confrontation with the Marburg School, above all with Natorp  ’s Introduction to Psychology. The confrontation with this psychology was naturally nothing other than the dispute over the direction of the question of the structure of CONSCIOUSNESS, of the region in which the totality of comportments, and so all the states of intentionality, are ordered. This period in the development of phenomenology thus saw its work being drawn into the horizon of contemporary philosophy, a tendency which has not remained without influence upon the subsequent inquiries of phenomenology. GA20EN §10

The question therefore is: How do comportments in which the structure of intentionality is to be read become accessible? How is something like intentionality, the structure of lived experience, lived experience itself, first given? “First given” here means given for a so-called natural attitude. In what way, as what are lived experiences, comportments, the various modes of the CONSCIOUSNESS of something, found in the natural attitude? What is to be seen and traced is how the ‘new scientific domain’ of phenomenology arises from what is given in the natural attitude. Hence the aim is to discover a new scientific domain. This new region is called the region of pure lived experiences, of pure CONSCIOUSNESS with its pure correlates, the region of the pure ego  . This region is a new domain of objects and—as Husserl puts it—a region of being which is in principle special, the specifically phenomenological region. Husserl himself characterizes the manner of proceeding in this way: GA20EN §10

We first proceed by way of direct exhibition, and since the being to be exhibited is nothing other than what we, for essential reasons, shall call ‘pure lived experiences,’ ‘pure CONSCIOUSNESS’ with its pure ‘correlates of CONSCIOUSNESS’ and on the other side with its ‘pure ego,’ we first proceed from the ego, from the CONSCIOUSNESS, the lived experiences which are given to us in the natural attitude. . . . GA20EN §10

We shall persist in this natural attitude in which we find such objects and direct our gaze upon the experiential continuity, and in fact upon our own as it takes its course realiter. This self-directedness toward our own experiential continuity is a new act which is called reflection. In such acts of reflection we find something objective which itself has the character of acts, of lived experiences, of modes of CONSCIOUSNESS of something. In this reflection in which we follow acts, we can describe them as we did earlier in the analysis of representation, of the CONSCIOUSNESS of a picture and of empty intending. When we live in acts of reflection, we ourselves are directed toward acts. The peculiar feature of reflection is already evident here, namely, that the object of the reflection, acts, belongs to the same sphere of being as the contemplation of the object. Reflection and reflected object both belong to one and the same sphere of being. The object, the contemplated, and the contemplation are really [reell] included in one another. The object and the way of apprehending it belong to the same stream of experience. This real inclusion of the apprehended object in the apprehension itself, in the unity of the same reality, is called immanence. Immanence here has the sense of the real togetherness of the reflected and the reflection. It characterizes a particular multiplicity of an entity, namely, that of the being of lived experiences and acts. “CONSCIOUSNESS and its object (reflection and act as object of reflection) form an individual unity produced purely through lived experiences.” GA20EN §10

The state of affairs in so-called transcendent perceptions, the perceptions of things, is obviously totally different. The perception of the chair as thing does not as lived experience really contain the chair within itself, in such a way that as a thing it would, so to speak, swim in and with the stream of experience. As Husserl also puts it, the perception exists “apart from any and all (properly) essential unity with the thing.” A lived experience can “only be joined with lived experiences into a whole whose total essence comprises the particular essences of these experiences and is founded in them.” The wholeness of CONSCIOUSNESS, the wholeness of the stream of experience is such that it can only be founded in lived experiences as such. The unity of this wholeness, the continuity of experience, is determined purely by the particular essences of the lived experiences. The unity of a whole is after all only one by way of the particular essence of its parts. This wholeness of the stream of experience as a self-contained totality excludes every thing, that is, every real object, beginning with the entire material world. Over against the region of lived experiences, the material world is alien, other. This is apparent in any analysis of a simple perception. GA20EN §10

At the same time, however, it already became evident at the beginning of this consideration that the stream of experience understood as a real occurrence is conjoined with the real world, with the bodies. For example, it is attached to a concrete unity in the unity of psychophysical animal things. CONSCIOUSNESS, as a name for the experiential totality, is therefore involved in the real structure in a double manner. First, CONSCIOUSNESS is always a CONSCIOUSNESS in a man or animal. It makes up the psychophysical unity of an animal which occurs as a given real object. “The psychic is not a world for itself, it is given as an ego or ego-experience . . . , and this turns out to be empirically tied to certain physical things called organisms.” GA20EN §10

“Every psychological determination is eo ipso psychophysical, which is to say in the broadest sense . . . that it has a never-absent physical connotation. Even where psychology—the empirical science—concerns itself with the determination of bare occurrences of CONSCIOUSNESS and not with dependences that are psychophysical in the usual narrower sense, those occurrences are still thought of as belonging to nature, that is, as belonging to human and animal CONSCIOUSNESS which in turn have an obvious and coapprehended connection with human and animal organisms.” GA20EN §10

This CONSCIOUSNESS as a component part of the animal unity is at the same time CONSCIOUSNESS of this real nature, in reality one with the nature in the concretion of every factual living being (man); but at the same time CONSCIOUSNESS is also separated from it by an absolute gulf, as every perception of a thing shows in the distinction of immanence and transcendence. Now this separation into two spheres of being is remarkable precisely because the sphere of immanence, the sphere of lived experience, establishes the possibility within which the transcendent world, separated from it by a gulf, can become objective at all. It is now a question of envisaging this double involvement, first in the real unity of concretion of the animal and then in the involvement stemming from the relation of immanence and transcendence despite the real gulf. How can it still be said that CONSCIOUSNESS has its ‘own essence,’ an essence particular to it? That it is a self-contained continuity? How is the drawing out and highlighting of CONSCIOUSNESS as an independent region of lived experiences, as an independent region of being, still at all possible? GA20EN §10

Such an epoche   can now be performed in principle upon all possible comportments of CONSCIOUSNESS, so that I now envisage CONSCIOUSNESS in such a way that, in the individual acts of perceiving, deliberating, etc., I do not go along with what their object is but perform the epoche uniformly throughout the whole sphere of acts. I thus envisage the acts and their objects in terms of how they are presumed in the acts. This securing of the sphere of acts and its objects in the uniformity of a specific sphere is called reduction. GA20EN §10

This reduction in the sense of not going along with any transcendent thesis is the first stage within the process of phenomenological reductions. When I reduce the concrete experiential continuity of my life in this way, after the reduction I still have the same concrete experiential continuity. It is still my continuity. But now I do not have it in such a way that I am engrossed in the world, following the natural direction of the acts themselves. Now I have the acts themselves present in their full structure. Even after this so-called transcendental   reduction, the reduced field is the field of a unique singularity, that of my stream of CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §10

This singular field of my own stream of experience is then subjected to a second reduction, the eidetic reduction. The acts and their objects now are not studied as concrete individuations of my concrete being, as this stream of experience. Rather, this unity of the stream of experience is now regarded ideatively. Every moment which specifies this individual stream as individual is now suspended. What is now discerned in the concretely lived experiences is simply the structure belonging to a perception, representation, or judgment as such, regardless of whether this judging or perceiving is mine, regardless of whether it takes place in this moment either in this concrete constellation or in another. This double reduction (the transcendental and the eidetic) draws from the initially given concrete individuation of a stream of experience what is called the pure field of CONSCIOUSNESS, that is, a field which is no longer concrete and individual but pure. GA20EN §10

In demarcating the reality of the thing from the reality of the stream of experiences, it was already shown that the transcendent world-reality does not belong to the immanently real whole of the stream of experience. The chair is not a lived experience or an experiential thing. Its kind of being is totally different from that of lived experience. By contrast, everything objective in what is called immanent perception is defined by the same kind of being as immanent perception itself. This implies that the object of immanent perception is absolutely given. The stream of lived experience is therefore a region of being which constitutes a sphere of absolute position, as Husserl says. It is true that every transcendent perception apprehends what is perceived by it, the thing, in its bodily character, but there is always the possibility that what is perceived cannot be and is not. In immanent apprehension, however, lived experience is given in its absolute self. Immanent perception, the reflection upon the acts, gives entities whose existence cannot in principle be denied. Or as Husserl once put it: “Any bodily given thinglike entity can also not be, but a bodily given lived experience cannot also not be.” It thus becomes apparent that the sphere of immanence is distinguished by its mode of givenness, which is called absolute. Combining this with our earlier considerations, we now see that the sphere of pure CONSCIOUSNESS obtained by way of transcendental and eidetic reduction is distinguished by the character of being absolutely given. Pure CONSCIOUSNESS is thus for Husserl the sphere of absolute being. GA20EN §10

Nothing is altered in the absolute being of lived experiences by the contingency of the world of things. Indeed, these experiences are always presupposed for all of that. Phenomenological reflection here has come to a climax. “The essential contexts disclosed to us already include the most important premises for the conclusions we wish to draw about the fundamental detachability of the entire natural world from the domain of CONSCIOUSNESS, the sphere in which lived experiences have their being;”—detachability of its how with the help of the reductions. GA20EN §10

Already here, we can detect a kinship with Descartes. What is here elaborated at a higher level of phenomenological analysis as pure CONSCIOUSNESS is the field which Descartes glimpsed under the heading of res cogitans  , the entire field of cogitationes. The transcendent world, whose exemplary index for Husserl as well is to be found in the basic stratum of the material world of things, is what Descartes characterizes as res extensa. This kinship is not merely factual. Husserl himself, at the point where he observes that the reflection has come to a climax, refers explicitly to Descartes. He says that what comes to a head is simply what Descartes really sought in the Meditations, to be sure with another method and another philosophical goal. This connection with Descartes and the explicit formulation of this connection is important for the critical understanding of the ontological character of this region obtained by these so-called reductive considerations. GA20EN §10

We will have to pose a more precise question: How is it at all possible that this sphere of absolute position, pure CONSCIOUSNESS, which is supposed to be separated from every transcendence by an absolute gulf, is at the same time united with reality in the unity of a real human being, who himself occurs as a real object in the world? How is it possible that lived experiences constitute an absolute and pure region of being and at the same time occur in the transcendence of the world? This is the line of questioning motivating the elaboration of the phenomenological field of pure CONSCIOUSNESS in Husserl. GA20EN §10

Our question will be: Does this elaboration of the thematic field of phenomenology, the field of intentionality, raise the question of the being of this region, of the being of CONSCIOUSNESS? What does being really mean here when it is said that the sphere of CONSCIOUSNESS is a sphere and region of absolute being? What does absolute being mean here? What does being mean when we speak of the being of the transcendent world, of the reality of things? Is there somewhere in the dimension of this fundamental deliberation, in which the elaboration of the field of phenomenology is decided, in turn a clarification of the regard from which the separation of the two spheres of being is considered, namely, the sense of being, to which there is constant reference? Does phenomenology anywhere really arrive at the methodological ground enabling us to raise this question of the sense of being, which must precede any phenomenological deliberation and is implicit in it? GA20EN §11

We shall establish the basis for the critical consideration of the field of objects proper to phenomenology by investigating whether the being of the intentional as such is explored within the following three horizons of consideration: [1.] What is the basis upon which this field of objects is secured? [2.] What is the way of securing this thematic field? [3.] What are the determinations of this newly found field of objects, of what is called pure CONSCIOUSNESS? We shall start with the latter horizon, the determination of the being of the region ‘CONSCIOUSNESS.’ As the basic field of intentionality, is the region of pure CONSCIOUSNESS determined in its being, and how? GA20EN §11

The determination obviously aims at a determination of being. CONSCIOUSNESS is plainly identified as a region of absolute being. It is moreover that region from which all other entities (reality, the transcendent) are set off. In addition, this particular distinction is specified as the most radical distinction in being which can and must be made within the system   of categories. GA20EN §11

In view of these determinations regarding pure CONSCIOUSNESS, does our particular critical distinction, whereby we ask whether and to what extent the inquiry is directed toward being, still have any sense and basis? We shall discuss in detail the determinations of being which Husserl gives to pure CONSCIOUSNESS. There are four of them and they are peculiarly tied together, so that the same designation is often used for two different determinations. GA20EN §11

CONSCIOUSNESS is 1) immanent being; 2) the immanent is the absolutely given being. This absolute givenness is also called absolute being pure and simple. 3) This being, understood as absolute givenness, is also absolute in the sense that nulla re indiget ad existendum (thus the old definition of substance is adopted): “it needs no res in order to be.” Res is here understood in the narrower sense of reality, transcendent being, that is, any entity which is not CONSCIOUSNESS. 4) Absolute being in these two significations—absolutely given and needing no reality—is pure being, in the sense of being the essence, the ideal being of lived experiences. GA20EN §11

We shall ask the following about these four determinations of being: Are they determinations which arise from a regard for the subject matter itself? Are they determinations of being which are drawn from the CONSCIOUSNESS and from the very entity intended by this term? GA20EN §11

Formally, immanence implies, first of all, to be in another. This property of immanence is said of the region of CONSCIOUSNESS, of lived experience, more precisely, in reference to the apprehending acts, to the acts of reflection which in their turn are directed toward acts, toward lived experiences. Immanence is asserted of a relation which is possible between lived experiences themselves, between the reflecting act and the reflected. Between the reflecting experience and the reflected, the objective element in the reflection, there is a relation of real inclusion in one another. Immanence, being in one another, is here asserted of lived experiences insofar as they are a possible object of an apprehension through reflection. Immanence is not a determination of the entity in itself with regard to its being, but a relation of two entities within the region of lived experience or CONSCIOUSNESS. This relation is characterized as a real in-one-another, but nothing is actually said about the being of this being-in-one-another, about the “immanent reality” [Reellität], about the entity for the whole of this region. A relationship of being between entities, and not the being as such, is determined here. Thus the first determination of being which Husserl gives for the region of pure CONSCIOUSNESS, either as an originary or a non-originary determination, is not carried out. GA20EN §11

How is it with the second character: CONSCIOUSNESS is absolute being in the sense of absolute givenness? The reflected experience which is the object in a reflection is originarily given in itself. In contrast to the transcendent, lived experiences are there in the absolute sense. That is, they do not display themselves indirectly, symbolically, but are apprehended in themselves. They are called absolute because of this absolute givenness. GA20EN §11

The third determination likewise characterizes CONSCIOUSNESS as absolute being, but “absolute” is now taken in a new sense. We can make this new sense clear to ourselves by referring back to the first determination of the region of lived experience, CONSCIOUSNESS as immanent being. While all lived experiences are immanently given, every other sort of being is such that it manifests itself in CONSCIOUSNESS. In principle, therefore, the possibility exists that the continuity of the flow of lived experiences, of the stream of CONSCIOUSNESS, possesses “a self-contained continuity of being,” a certain univocity, without having anything in reality correspond to what is presumed in this experiential continuity. In other words, in principle the possibility exists that CONSCIOUSNESS itself is “not affected in its own existence” by an “annihilation of the world of things”—a consideration which, as is well-known, Descartes had already employed. GA20EN §11

Real being can be otherwise or even not be at all, while CONSCIOUSNESS is capable of displaying in itself a closed continuity of being. This consideration means that CONSCIOUSNESS is absolute in the sense that it is the presupposition of being on the basis of which reality can manifest itself at all. Transcendent being is always given in representation; indeed, it is represented precisely as the object of intentionality. GA20EN §11

CONSCIOUSNESS, immanent and absolutely given being, is that in which every other possible entity is constituted, in which it truly ‘is’ what it is. Constituting being is absolute. All other being, as reality, is only in relation to CONSCIOUSNESS, that is, relative to it. “The common way of talking about being is thus reversed. The being which for us is the first is in itself the second, that is, it is what it is only in ‘relation’ to the first.” This first, which must be presupposed, which must already be there so that something real can manifest itself, this first being has the advantage of not needing reality. On the contrary, it is rather reality which has need of the first being. All CONSCIOUSNESS is therefore absolute compared to any and every reality. GA20EN §11

This determination—absolute—is now obtained with regard to the particular role which CONSCIOUSNESS has as constituting CONSCIOUSNESS. This means that the character of absolute being is now attributed to CONSCIOUSNESS insofar as it is regarded in the horizon of a theory of reason, in terms of the question of the possible demonstration of reality in rational CONSCIOUSNESS. The character ‘absolute’ is now attributed to CONSCIOUSNESS to the extent that it is regarded in its potential function as an object-constituting CONSCIOUSNESS. And in this sense CONSCIOUSNESS is that sort of being which for its part is not constituted once again in another CONSCIOUSNESS but which, in constituting itself, itself constitutes every possible reality. Absolute being accordingly means not being dependent upon another specifically in regard to constitution; it is the first, that which must already be there in order that what is presumed can be at all. There is something presumed, in the widest sense, only insofar as a presuming, that is, a CONSCIOUSNESS, is. CONSCIOUSNESS is the earlier, the apriori in Descartes’s and Kant’s sense. GA20EN §11

CONSCIOUSNESS in this sense of the absolute means the priority of subjectivity over every objectivity. This third determination—absolute being—once again does not determine the entity itself in its being but rather sets the region of CONSCIOUSNESS within the order of constitution and assigns to it in this order a formal   role of being earlier than anything objective. This determination and conception of CONSCIOUSNESS is likewise the place where idealism and idealistic inquiry, more precisely idealism in the form of neo-Kantianism, enter into phenomenology. Thus this determination of being is also not an original one. GA20EN §11

The fourth determination of being, which regards CONSCIOUSNESS as pure being, is even less than the other three a characterization of the being of the intentional, that is, of the entity which is defined by the structure of intentionality. CONSCIOUSNESS is called pure CONSCIOUSNESS to the extent that it, as this region, is no longer regarded in its concrete individuation and its tie to a living being. It is not CONSCIOUSNESS to the extent that it is hic et nunc real and mine, but instead purely in its essential content. At issue is not the particular individuation of a concrete intentional relation but the intentional structure as such, not the concretion of lived experiences but their essential structure, not the real being of lived experience but the ideal essential being of CONSCIOUSNESS itself, the apriori of lived experiences in the sense of the generic universal which in each case defines a class of lived experience or its structural contexture. In other words, CONSCIOUSNESS is called pure to the extent that every reality and realization in it is disregarded. This being is pure because it is defined as ideal, that is, not real being. GA20EN §11

This character of being, CONSCIOUSNESS as pure, shows especially clearly that what matters here is not the ontological characters of the intentional but the determination of the being of intentionality, not the determination of the being of the entity which has the structure intentionality, but the determination of the being of the structure itself as intrinsically detached. GA20EN §11

All four determinations of the being of the phenomenological region: immanent being, absolute being in the sense of absolute givenness, absolute being in the sense of the apriori in constitution, and pure being, are in no way drawn from the entity itself. Rather, to the extent that they are brought out as determinations of the being of CONSCIOUSNESS, they immediately qualify as obstacles in the path of asking about the being of this entity and so also about the clearer elaboration of this entity itself. The determinations of being are not derived by considering the intentional in its very being, but to the extent that it is placed under scrutiny as apprehended, given, constituting and ideating taken as an essence. It is from such perspectives, which in the first instance are alien to CONSCIOUSNESS, that these determinations of being are derived. It would however be premature, from the absence of the determination of the being of CONSCIOUSNESS, from the neglect of the question of being in characterizing CONSCIOUSNESS as a region, to jump to the conclusion that the question of being is as such being neglected. Perhaps here, we merely need to determine CONSCIOUSNESS as a region, the way in which it is a field for a particular consideration, but not the being of the entity itself, which can [also] be set apart as a possible field for consideration. GA20EN §11

Husserl’s primary question is simply not concerned with the character of the being of CONSCIOUSNESS. Rather, he is guided by the following concern: How can CONSCIOUSNESS become the possible object of an absolute science? The primary concern which guides him is the idea of an absolute science. This idea, that CONSCIOUSNESS is to be the region of an absolute science, is not simply invented; it is the idea which has occupied modern philosophy ever since Descartes. The elaboration of pure CONSCIOUSNESS as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically by going back to the matters themselves but by going back to a traditional idea of philosophy. Thus none of the characters which emerge as determinations of the being of lived experiences is an original character. We cannot go into more detail here into the motivation for this entire line of inquiry and into its way of posing problems. To begin with, it is enough for us to see that the four characters of being which are given for CONSCIOUSNESS are not derived from CONSCIOUSNESS itself. GA20EN §11

With that, we have gone through only the first stage of our critical reflection. The second is to ask whether, on the way taken to elaborate pure CONSCIOUSNESS, we shall not perhaps still come to a genuine determination of the being of lived experience. But if not here, then surely we find it in the starting point of the entire reflection, that is, in securing and preparing the exemplary field, where it is said that phenomenological reflection must start from the natural attitude, from the entity as it first gives itself. With this, we also get a preview of the determination of the being of the entity in which CONSCIOUSNESS and reason are concrete, in the determination of the being of the concrete entity called man. GA20EN §11

If we recall the determinations which Husserl himself gives to pure CONSCIOUSNESS as the phenomenological region, it becomes apparent that these four determinations—being as immanent being, being as absolute being in the sense of absolute givenness, being as absolute being in the sense of constituting being over against everything transcendent, and being as pure being over against every individuation—are not drawn from the entity itself but are attributed to it insofar as this CONSCIOUSNESS as pure CONSCIOUSNESS is placed in certain perspectives. If CONSCIOUSNESS is regarded as apprehended, then it can be said to be immanent. If it is regarded with respect to the manner of its givenness, it can be said to be absolutely given. With regard to its role as constituting being, as that in which every reality manifests itself, it is absolute being in the sense of nulla re indiget ad existendum. Regarded in its essence, its what, it is ideal being, which means that it posits no real individuation in the content of its structure. If these determinations are not originary determinations of being, then on the positive side it must be said that they only determine the region as region but not the being of CONSCIOUSNESS itself, of intentional comportments as such; they are concerned solely with the being of the region CONSCIOUSNESS, the being of the field within which CONSCIOUSNESS can be considered. This consideration is in fact possible. To make this clear with an example, the mathematician can circumscribe the mathematical field, the entire realm of that which is the object of mathematical consideration and inquiry. He can provide a certain definition of the object of mathematics without ever necessarily posing the question of the mode of being of mathematical objects. Precisely in the same way, it can at first be granted with some justification that here the region of phenomenology can simply be circumscribed by these four aspects without thereby necessarily inquiring into the being of that which belongs in this region. Perhaps the being of CONSCIOUSNESS should not be inquired into at all. In any case, the final critical position cannot be based upon this initial critical consideration. Moreover, what must be asked and studied more closely in the whole of this elaboration of CONSCIOUSNESS is whether being is explored within it, whether perhaps en route to the reduction, to the securing and bringing into relief of this region called CONSCIOUSNESS, the question of being is after all raised, whether perhaps right on the way which leads from what is given in the natural attitude to what the reduction offers, the question of being is after all under consideration. GA20EN §12

Let us recall the sense and methodological task of the phenomenological reduction. It seeks to arrive at the pure CONSCIOUSNESS starting from the factual real CONSCIOUSNESS given in the natural attitude. This is done by disregarding what is really posited, by withdrawing from every real positing. In the reduction we disregard precisely the reality of the CONSCIOUSNESS given in the natural attitude in the factual human being. The real experience is suspended as real in order to arrive at the pure absolute experience (epoche). The sense of the reduction is precisely to make no use of the reality of the intentional; it is not posited and experienced as real. We start from the real CONSCIOUSNESS in the factually existing human, but this takes place only in order finally to disregard it and to dismiss the reality of CONSCIOUSNESS as such. In its methodological sense as a disregarding, then, the reduction is in principle inappropriate for determining the being of CONSCIOUSNESS positively. The sense of the reduction involves precisely giving up the ground upon which alone the question of the being of the intentional could be based (admittedly with the aim of then determining the sense of this reality from the region now secured). But the sole question here is whether reduction as such brings out something for the determination of the being of the intentional. Of course, one must be careful here, inasmuch as Husserl here would reply: The sense of the reduction is at first precisely to disregard reality in order then to be able to consider it precisely as reality as this manifests itself in pure CONSCIOUSNESS, which I secure through the reduction. In reply we would again ask whether this can be sufficient for the question of the being of the intentional. GA20EN §12

In ideation (eidetic reduction), when we discern the essential content of the acts, only the structure of that content is regarded. The essence of the being of lived experiences is not also taken up ideatively into the essential contexture of pure CONSCIOUSNESS. An example may serve to make this clear, although the objects here are completely different. When I seek to distinguish the essence of color from that of sound, this distinction can be made without my asking about the manner of being of these two objects. When I determine the essentia  , the essence of color and sound, I disregard their existentia  , their particular individuation, whether the color is the color of a thing, in this or that illumination. I look only at what pertains to every color as color, regardless of whether it exists or not. I disregard its existence, and so all the more the essence of its existence. GA20EN §12

Likewise, in the consideration and elaboration of pure CONSCIOUSNESS, merely the what-content is brought to the fore, without any inquiry into the being of the acts in the sense of their existence. Not only is this question not raised in the reductions, the transcendental as well as the eidetic; it gets lost precisely through them. From the what I never experience anything about the sense and the manner of the that—at any rate, only that an entity of this what-content (extensio, for example) can have a certain manner of being. What this manner of being is, is not thereby made clear. Merely looking at the what-content means seeing the what as apprehended, given, constituted. The critical discussion of the reductions in terms of what they do to pose the question of being turns out to be negative, so much so that it shows that the determinations of being discussed in § 11 cannot be genuine. But above all, this conception of ideation as disregard of real individuation lives in the belief that the what of any entity is to be defined by disregarding its existence. But if there were an entity whose what is precisely to be and nothing but to be, then this ideative regard of such an entity would be the most fundamental of misunderstandings. It will become apparent that this misunderstanding is prevalent in phenomenology, and dominates it in turn because of the dominance of the tradition. GA20EN §12

Since the formation of the region of pure CONSCIOUSNESS is undertaken for the purposes of theoretical reason, the elaboration of the various ways in which the various realms of entities are constituted in CONSCIOUSNESS seeks to determine each particular reality and objectivity. Anything real manifests itself in CONSCIOUSNESS as a possible object of a directing-itself-toward-it. Reality is to be specified in each case in view of this self-manifesting aspect as such. Also subject to specification is thus the particular reality at issue for us: the animalia, the psychic in its factual actuality. In other words, the reduction and the development of the regions, these ways of being, have no other sense than to provide the scientific basis for specifying the reality of something real. The actuality of the intentional is likewise constituted as a reality in CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §12

‘Psychological CONSCIOUSNESS,’ that is, the CONSCIOUSNESS of something, the intentional as it is an object of psychology understood as a science of the real, must itself still be understood as a correlate of pure CONSCIOUSNESS. Standing over against “. . . empirical (psychic) lived experience, as a presupposition of its sense, is absolute lived experience.” Persons—“psychic personalities” are “empirical unities”; just “like realities of any kind and level, they are mere unities of intentional ‘constitution’—. . . .” Thus they can be experienced as truly being and so are “scientifically determinable.” “All empirical unities (person, animal ego) . . . are indicators of absolute experiential contexts with a distinctive essential formation, in addition to which still other formations are conceivable; all empirical unities are transcendent in the same sense, merely relative, contingent.” “To take them as being in the absolute sense is therefore absurd.” Only pure CONSCIOUSNESS is the “sphere of being of absolute origins.” “To ascribe reality as well” to this pure CONSCIOUSNESS is absurd. GA20EN §12

By way of summary then: . . . the whole spatio-temporal world, which includes the human being and the human ego as subordinate individual realities, (is) in accord with its own sense mere intentional being (being manifesting itself in acts), thus a being which has the mere secondary and relative sense of a being for a CONSCIOUSNESS. . . . It is a being which CONSCIOUSNESS posits in its experiences, a being which in principle can be intuited and defined merely as the identical element of harmoniously motivated experiential manifolds—over and above this, however, it is nothing. GA20EN §12

But it has thus become quite clear that the being of the psychic, the intentional, is first suspended in order to allow the pure region of CONSCIOUSNESS to be reached. On the basis of this pure region it now first becomes possible to define the suspended being, reality. The question of being is thus raised, it is even answered. We have to do solely with the genuinely scientific way of answering it, which attempts to define the sense of the reality of something real insofar as it manifests itself in CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §12

What then was the point of our critical question? Was it merely precipitous on our part that we discussed the question of being and even established a neglect, in view of the determinations of being which are attributed to pure CONSCIOUSNESS? Still, this entire consideration stands under a ‘but.’ In fact, this difficulty does not concern the determination of the region as such, the characterization of pure CONSCIOUSNESS. As we have already suggested, the basic difficulty with this determination of the reality of acts lies already in the starting position. What becomes fixed here as the datum of a natural attitude, namely, that man is given as a living being, as a zoological object, is this very attitude which is called natural. For man’s way of experience vis-à-vis the other and himself, is it his natural mode of reflection to experience himself as zoon  , as a living being, in this broadest sense as an object of nature which occurs in the world? In the natural way of experience, does man experience himself, to put it curtly, zoologically? Is this attitude a natural attitude or is it not? GA20EN §12

This then is the result of our deliberations: in elaborating intentionality as the thematic field of phenomenology, the question of the being of the intentional is left undiscussed. It is not raised in the field thus secured, pure CONSCIOUSNESS; indeed, it is flatly rejected as nonsensical. In the course of securing this field, in the reduction, it is expressly deferred. And where the determinations of being are brought into play, as in the starting position of the reduction, it is likewise not originally raised. Instead, the being of acts is in advance theoretically and dogmatically defined by the sense of being which is taken from the reality of nature. The question of being itself is left undiscussed. GA20EN §12

The first thing to be said is that this exposition of the thematic field of phenomenology, of pure CONSCIOUSNESS, itself aims precisely at drawing a distinction among entities, fixing the fundamental distinction among entities, and this basically involves an answer to the question of being. Husserl says: GA20EN §13

The system of categories most emphatically must start from this most radical of all distinctions of being—being as CONSCIOUSNESS and being as ‘transcendent’ being ‘manifesting’ itself in CONSCIOUSNESS. It is clear that this distinction can be drawn in all of its purity and appreciated only through the method of phenomenological reduction. GA20EN §13

It is not merely that the basic distinction in entities is to be found with the securing of pure CONSCIOUSNESS, but that the reduction itself has no other task than to fix and to demonstrate this fundamental distinction of being. But now we note something remarkable: here it is being claimed that the most radical distinction of being is drawn without actually inquiring into the being of the entities that enter into the distinction. This, moreover, involves a discussion of being, a distinguishing of extant regions; in other words, it is maintained that a distinction is made in regard to being. If we press further and ask what being means here, in regard to which absolute being is distinguished from reality, we search in vain for an answer and still more for an explicit articulation of the very question. In drawing this fundamental distinction of being, not once is a question raised regarding the kind of being which the distinguished members have, or the kind of being which CONSCIOUSNESS has, and more basically, regarding what it is which directs the entire process of making this distinction of being, in short, what the sense of being is. From this it becomes clear that the question of being is not an optional and merely possible question, but the most urgent question inherent in the very sense of phenomenology itself—urgent in a still more radical sense in relation to the intentional than we have so far discussed. GA20EN §13

It has already been pointed out that Dilthey brought with him an original understanding of phenomenology, and that he himself influenced it in the direction of the question which concerns us. Dilthey’s scientific work sought to secure that way of regarding man which, contrary to scientific psychology, does not take him for its object as a thing of nature, explaining and construing him by means of other universal laws of ‘events,’ but instead understands him as a living person actively involved in history and describes and analyzes him in this understanding. Here we find a recognizable trend toward a new psychology, a personalistic one. I have already pointed out that, after the appearance of Logical Investigations (1900–1901), as Husserl sought to develop his position further, Dilthey exerted a special influence upon him precisely in the direction of arriving at a new psychology. But in the horizon of our question there is also the attempt to determine the being of acts themselves strictly out of themselves, and to get away from the purely naturalistic objectifying regard of the acts and of the psychic. In view of the actual theme of phenomenology, this means that we need a reflection on the definition of the starting position in the further development of phenomenology, namely, the definition of the being of CONSCIOUSNESS with regard to the way it is given in the natural attitude. This primary kind of experience, which provides the basis for every further characterization of CONSCIOUSNESS, turns out to be a theoretical kind of experience and not a genuinely natural one, in which what is experienced could give itself in its original sense. Instead, the manner in which what is experienced gives itself here is defined by the feature of an objectivity for a theoretical consideration of nature, and nothing else. It thus follows that the starting point for the elaboration of pure CONSCIOUSNESS is a theoretical one. At first, naturally, this in itself would not be an objection or a misfortune, but surely it is afterwards, when, on the basis of the pure CONSCIOUSNESS derived from this theoretical basis, it is claimed that the entire field of comportments may also be determined, especially the practical. In the further course of development of phenomenology, of course, the influence of the new tendency we have mentioned comes into play, seeking to go beyond the specifically naturalistic attitude and to bring a personalistic attitude into its own. GA20EN §13

The best way to make this clear is to ask: How is the sense of the phenomenological theme, of pure CONSCIOUSNESS, defined here? In contrast to the transcendent, the physical in nature, the psychic is the immanently given. It is, as Husserl says here, “the counterthrust of nature.” In view of this immanent psychic character we must now ask, what in it do we investigate as its being? This question, what do we investigate in CONSCIOUSNESS as its being, is also formulated by Husserl in this way: what in it can we grasp and define, and fix as objective unities? Being for Husserl means nothing other than true being, objectivity, true for a theoretical scientific knowing. The question of the specific being of CONSCIOUSNESS, of lived experiences, is not raised here. What is raised is the question of a distinctive way of being an object for an objective science of CONSCIOUSNESS. How must I take the experiential context so that universally valid assertions can be made about it, in order to define the being of CONSCIOUSNESS in them? The answer is: if the phenomena are psychic, and so not of nature, then they have an essence which can be grasped, and adequately grasped, in immediate beholding. By going from the individual description of the psychic to a contemplation of its essence, I arrive at a being of CONSCIOUSNESS which is objectively definable. What is primary in the characterization of CONSCIOUSNESS in its being is the sense of a possible scientific objectivity and not its specifically inherent being, which precedes any possible scientific treatment and has its own sense. It is in this horizon that we should understand what Husserl now says which points in the direction of a personal determination of CONSCIOUSNESS: GA20EN §13

Not without misgivings, it is true, does one consider psychology, the science of the ‘psychical,’ merely as a science of ‘psychical phenomena’ and of their connections with the body. But in fact psychology is everywhere governed by those inborn and inevitable objectivations whose correlates are the empirical unities man and animal, and, on the other hand, soul, personality, or character, i.e., disposition of personality. Still, for our purposes it is not necessary to pursue the analysis of the essence of these unity formations nor the problem of how they by themselves determine the task of psychology. After all, it immediately becomes sufficiently clear that these unities are of a kind that is in principle different from the things of nature, realities which according to their essence are such as to be given through adumbrating appearances, whereas this in no way applies to the unities in question. Only the founding substrate ‘human body,’ and not man himself, is a unity of real thinglike appearance; and above all, personality, character, etc. are not such unities. With all such unities we are evidently referred back to the immanent vital unity of the respective ‘CONSCIOUSNESS flow’ and to morphological peculiarities that distinguish the various immanent unities of this sort. Consequently, all psychological knowledge, too, even where it is related primarily to human individualities, characters, and dispositions, finds itself referred back to those unities of CONSCIOUSNESS, and thereby to the study of the phenomena themselves and of their interconnections. GA20EN §13

Here it is clear that the “unity formations” understood as those formations of experiential interrelations which we take to be a person or a personality are in principle different in kind from the thinglike realities of nature, that in fact man is now to be approached for consideration as not-nature. Of course, if we ask what the positive sense of this personal being is, we are again referred back to the immanent structure of CONSCIOUSNESS with which we are already familiar under the name of pure CONSCIOUSNESS. At bottom, we are being led back to the same basis, to the immanent reflection of acts and lived experiences, without these acts on their part being actually defined. GA20EN §13

In transmitting the manuscripts of the second part of the Ideas, Husserl in the winter wrote to me: “Ever since I began in Freiburg, however, I have made such essential advances precisely in the questions of nature and spirit that I had to elaborate a completely new exposition with a content which was in part completely altered” (letter of February 7, 1925). Accordingly, the account which was first presented here is in some ways already antiquated. One characteristic of the approach to this personalistic psychology is the context in which it is placed. The first part of the Ideas makes the question of pure CONSCIOUSNESS the basis for the constitution of every reality. The second part now brings us the constitutional studies themselves: 1. The Constitution of Material Nature. 2. The Constitution of Animal Nature. 3. The Constitution of the Human Spiritual World, with the title The Personalistic Attitude in Contrast to the Naturalistic. GA20EN §13

The priority and the understanding of the personalistic attitude is in theory clearly articulated here. But when we look more closely at how the definition of the person given in personal experience is carried out, we are referred once again to what is already familiar to us. The personalistic attitude and experience is characterized as inspectio sui, as an inner inspection of itself as the ego of intentionality, that is, the ego taken as subject of cogitationes. The very expression here already reminds us quite clearly of Descartes. Every such ego at once has its nature side as the underground of subjectivity. Mind is not an abstract ego but the full personality. Ego, man, subject as persons cannot dissolve into nature, for then what gives sense to nature would be missing. “For if we eliminate all minds from the world, there is no longer a nature. But if we eliminate nature, the ‘true’ objectively intersubjective existence, there is always still something left: mind as individual mind. It has merely lost the possibility of sociality, the possibility of a comprehension which presupposes a certain intersubjectivity of the body.” “In the mind’s stream of CONSCIOUSNESS, however, what manifests itself in each case is its unity, its individuality.” Unlike things, the mind has its individuality in itself. “Minds are not really unities of appearances but unities of absolute contextures of CONSCIOUSNESS,”—the immanently given. “Nature is the X and in principle nothing but an X defined by universal determinations. Mind, however, is not an X, but that which is itself given in the experience of mind.” GA20EN §13

This is the same reflection that relates to pure CONSCIOUSNESS as the residue of the annihilation of the world. Husserl here merely returns again to his primal separation of being under another name. Everything remains ontologically the same. The considerations of the concluding sections of this third part are typical: [§61] The Spiritual Ego and its ‘Substratum’; [§62] Interplay of the Personalistic and the Naturalistic Attitude (the relationship of mind, soul, body, physical nature); [§63] Psychophysical Parallelism and Interaction; [§64] Relativity of Nature—Absoluteness of Spirit. This affords a clear glimpse into how this analysis has recourse again to the person and how it is ultimately oriented toward Descartes. The determinations of the person and its constitution end in typical considerations, in the question of the interplay of the personalistic and the naturalistic attitude, then in the question of the relationship of soul and body, spiritual and physical nature. Also raised here is the old problem of psychophysical parallelism, much discussed in the 19th century. The section concludes with the determination of the relativity of nature and the absoluteness of spirit. GA20EN §13

The answer to the question of how far this consideration of the person in the personalistic attitude has led to an intrinsic determination of the being of acts and of life itself must again prove to be relative. The fact that Husserl makes allowances for the personalistic attitude does not force us to recant and revise our critique. On the contrary, we shall see that the personalistic attitude itself serves to obstruct the question of the actual being of the acts, of the being of the intentional—a thesis which applies to Dilthey’s position as well. Accordingly, once again we are fundamentally on the same basis as we were with the critique of the determinations of the being of pure CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §13

[2.] The matter instead remains in the reflection on acts, in the inspectio sui. Only now the theme is not the pure CONSCIOUSNESS and pure ego but instead the isolated individual CONSCIOUSNESS and ego. But the isolation is always conditioned by the body. Of course, it is explicitly stated that the experiential context has its intrinsic individuation, it is always the context of a particular ego-subject, but the kind of being of acts is left undetermined. Acts are performed; the ego is the pole of the acts, the self-persisting subject. This is certainly not the last step taken by Husserl in the elucidation of the unity of the stream of lived experience. We shall discuss this more appropriately first in the analysis of time under the caption “Stream of Lived Experience and Absolute Time-Consciousness.” GA20EN §13

Now, this division of man and the ordination of acts, of the intentional, into such a context: the physical, body, soul, spirit—that is, the personalistic attitude—merely introduces anew the kind of consideration by which the elaboration of pure CONSCIOUSNESS was also guided: the traditional definition of man as animal rationale  , in which ratio is understood in terms of the rational person. The position already characterized is maintained despite or even because of the personalistic attitude. It certainly does not take man as a reality of nature, but he is still a reality of the world which constitutes itself as transcendence in absolute CONSCIOUSNESS. GA20EN §13

The consideration of the possibility of the personalistic attitude has led us to a correct insight: in the background of all questions about the intentional, the psychic, about CONSCIOUSNESS, lived experience, life, man, reason, spirit, person, ego, subject, there stands the old definition of man as animal rationale. But is this definition drawn from experiences which aim at a primary experience of the being of man? Or does it not come from the experience of man as an extant thing of the world—animal—which has reason—rationale—as an intrinsic property? This experience does not necessarily have to be naturalistic in an extreme sense; as we shall see, it has a certain justification not merely for a zoological and physiological consideration of man. The latent or patent prevalence of this definition provides the clue for the question of reality insofar as it is directed toward acts, whether the question is posed naturalistically or personalistically. GA20EN §13

What Scheler says of the person, he says even more expressly of the acts themselves. “Never, however, is an act also an object; for it belongs to the essence of the being of acts (here the question of the being of acts is explicitly raised) to be experienced only in their very performance and given in reflection”—not in perception. Acts are themselves something non-psychic, belonging to the essence of the person, and the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, so that it essentially cannot be an object. The being of the first act consists rather in its performance. Precisely in this it is absolutely—not relatively—distinct from the concept of object. This performance can occur in a straightforward way and with “reflection.” This reflection is not an objectification, not a “perception.” Reflection is nothing but the accompaniment of a totally non-qualified CONSCIOUSNESS of “reflections” which ‘floats’ with the acts being performed. Reflection does not bear upon the “inner,” upon objects, but upon the being of the person; it seeks to comprehend the wholeness of the being of man. GA20EN §13

The critical reflection shows that even phenomenological research stands under the contraints of an old tradition, especially when it comes to the most primordial determination of the theme most proper to it, intentionality. Contrary to its most proper principle, therefore, phenomenology defines its most proper thematic matter not out of the matters themselves but instead out of a traditional prejudgment of it, albeit one which has become quite self-evident. The very sense of this prejudgment serves to deny the original leap to the entity which is thematically intended. In the basic task of determining its ownmost field, therefore, phenomenology is unphenomenological!—that is to say, purportedly phenomenological! But it is all this in a sense which is even more fundamental. Not only is the being of the intentional, hence the being of a particular entity, left undetermined, but categorially primal separations in the entity (CONSCIOUSNESS and reality) are presented without clarifying or even questioning the guiding regard, that according to which they are distinguished, which is precisely being in its sense. GA20EN §13

In these preliminary considerations it is becoming clear to us that even if we are not falsely educated by philosophical prejudices and theories about the subject and CONSCIOUSNESS, even if we approach these phenomena to some extent without encumbrances, there are still difficulties in actually seeing what must be seen. The natural approach, even though it is not philosophically reflected and conceptually defined, does not really move in the direction of seeing the Dasein   as such. Instead, inasmuch as it is a mode of being of this very Dasein, it tends to live away from itself. Even the way in which it knows itself is determined by this peculiarity of Dasein to live away from itself. In order to have a preliminary orientation at all on the sense in which all the characters of this being are to be taken, we offer the pointer that this entity is the very entity which we ourselves are. GA20EN §18

In directing-itself-toward and apprehending, Dasein does not first get out of itself, out of its inner sphere in which it is encapsulated. Rather, its very sense is to be always already ‘outside’ in the world, in the rightly understood sense of ‘outside’ as in-being and dwelling with the world, which in each instance is already uncovered in some way. Dwelling with the matter to be known does not involve abandonment of the inner sphere, as if Dasein leaps out of its sphere and is no longer in it but still is found only at the object. Dasein in this ‘being outside’ with the object is also ‘inside,’ rightly understood; for it is as being-in-the-world that Dasein itself knows the entity. [And in turn,] the apprehending of what is known is not like returning from an expedition of plunder with its acquired booty back into the ‘housing’ of CONSCIOUSNESS, of immanence; for in the very apprehending as well and in having, preserving, and retaining what is apprehended, the knowing Dasein remains ‘outside.’ In knowing about a context of being of the world, even in merely thinking of it, in merely representing it without originally experiencing it, I am no less with the entities outside in the world, and I am not in the least with myself on the inside. If I merely represent the Freiburg Cathedral to myself, this does not mean that it is only immanently present in the representing; rather, this mere representing is in the genuine and best sense precisely with the entities themselves. Even the forgetting of something, in which the relationship of being to what is known is apparently obliterated, is nothing but a particular modification of being-involved-with. Only on this basis is forgetting possible. All delusion and all error, in which in a way no relationship of being to the entity is secured but is instead falsified, are once again only modes of being-involved-with. GA20EN §20

We may compare the subject and its inner sphere to a snail in its shell. Let it be expressly noted that we do not presume that the theories which speak of the immanence of CONSCIOUSNESS and of the subject conceive of CONSCIOUSNESS precisely in this sense of a snail-shell. But as long as the sense of the ‘within’ and immanence is left undefined, so that we never learn what sense this ‘in’ has and what relation of being this ‘in’ of the subject has to the world, it is at any rate in a negative way equivalent to our analogy. GA20EN §20

Now, the two sorts of entities of which it can still in a certain sense be said that they are substances are in any case substantiae creatae, created substances, entities which in a certain sense are in no need of the being of God, provided that we disregard the principal indigence of being produced and being sustained in their existence and presence as such. If I disregard this indigence of the created being as created, there are still some things in the realm of the created which in a certain way can be designated as having no need of another, substantia   corporea and substantia cogitans creata sive mens  , on the one hand the corporeal world, in short the world, and on the other hand mens  , mind, spirit, ‘CONSCIOUSNESS.’ These two entities are such quae solo Dei   concursu egent ad existendum [that they need only the concurrence of God in order to exist]. If they are at all in need of being, in one respect they need only the copresence of God, otherwise they are in no need of any other entity, which means that they are substances in a certain way, that is, they are finite substances, while God is the substantia infinita. GA20EN §22

Putting it in a very extreme form, we can say that Descartes derives his basic determinations of the being of the world, here of nature, from God. This continues in the philosophers who follow, including even Kant. God here is to be understood as an ontological concept in its specific categorial function: His being represents the sense of being which is then applied in a derivative way throughout to the different regions of being. This nexus of relations is especially clear in Descartes in the orientation of the two substances, res cogitans and res extensa, in regard to authentic substance, substantia infinita, Deus. Descartes in fact says that the authentic basic determination of God is precisely perfectio, specifically the perfectio entis, which is the most authentic being as such. On the other hand, however, he also emphasizes that we are not really capable of experiencing this being in itself primarily, that therefore infinite substance, just like finite substance, is accessible to us through the attributes. Quin et facilius intelligimus substantiam extensam, vel substantiam cogitantem, quam substantiam solam, . . . “Indeed we even recognize extended substance or thinking substance, the substance laden with CONSCIOUSNESS, more easily than substance alone, . . .” omisso eo quod cogitet vel sit extensa, “without regard to whether it thinks or is extended.” Here he emphasizes anew that we recognize the substantiality of substance only with difficulty, since substantiality differs from substance ratione tantum, “only in the way it is regarded” [“by reason alone”], and that substantiality cannot in reality be separated from substance. The two substances are thus given through the attribute or proprietas. The paramount property of the world as corpus   is extensio; in it are grounded all the other determinations of the world, figura, motus  , shape and movement. By conceiving these attributes as modes [of extension], we can account for the fact that one and the same body can vary its dimensional proportions while its total quantity, its total extension, remains the same. Atque unum et idem corpus, retinendo suam eandem quantitatem, pluribus diversis modis potest extendi: nunc scilicet magis secundum longitudinem, minusque secundum latitudinem vel profunditatem, ac paulo post e contra magis secundum latitudinem, et minus secundum longitudinem. “And a body, while retaining one and the same quantity, can be extended in various ways: it can now be greater in length and less in breadth and depth, and later greater in breadth and less in length.” In these modifications of dimensions and dimensional quantities, the total quantity still remains the same. It is clear what Descartes means here: Even in modifications of the shape of the body, its sameness is maintained. And because, according to the ancient concept of being, that truly is which always is, and because extensio always remains in every total change, extension is therefore the true and authentic being in the body. GA20EN §22

Satis erit, si advertamus sensuum perceptiones non referri, nisi ad istam corporis humani cum mente conjunctionem, et nobis quidem ordinarie ex-hibere, quid   ad illam externa corpora prodesse possint aut nocere; . . . [It is sufficient for us to observe that the perceptions of the senses are related simply to the union of the human body with the mind, and that they indeed ordinarily show us what in external bodies can profit or hurt this union . . . ]. It is, says Descartes, sufficient for the apprehension of nature in its authentic being if we observe that the perceptiones of the senses, that is, the kind of experience which the senses vouchsafe for us, are related to man only insofar as he is a conjunctio corporis cum mente, insofar as he is a conjunction of CONSCIOUSNESS with corporeality; and if we observe that the senses ordinarie, according to their most proper sense, ‘according to the usual order,’ tell us nothing about what the world is but solely what use or harm the externa corpora, the world, the corporeal things out there, have for us, prodesse possint aut nocere. He says that the senses basically do not even have the function of knowledge or the communication of information  , but that they are oriented specifically toward the preservation of corporeality or of the whole man as an organic being. We cannot really say “organic” here since, as everyone knows, Descartes regards the human body as a machine, and carries his extreme concept of nature over into the organic, to biological being. . . . ; non autem . . . nos docere, qualia in seipsis existant; “the senses do not teach us how the bodies are in themselves.” Ita enim sensuum praejudicia facile deponemus, et solo intellectu, ad ideas sibi a natura inditas diligenter attendente, hic utemur [Therefore, we shall readily set aside the prejudices of the senses and rely here solely upon the intellect, attending carefully to the ideas implanted therein by nature]. Once we have recognized that the senses basically have no cognitive function at all, we can easily dismiss them and their prejudices and rely solely on the intellectio, on pure intellectual knowledge. Here it is clearly articulated that the only possible kind of access to the true being of the world lies in the intellectio (in the logos). GA20EN §22

But if we for once refrain from all discussion of this theory, it becomes clear that nothing exists in our relationship to the world which provides a basis for the phenomenon of belief in the world. I have not yet been able to find this phenomenon of belief. Rather, the peculiar thing is just that the world is ‘there’ before all belief. The world is never experienced as something which is believed any more than it is guaranteed by knowledge. Inherent in the being of the world is that its existence needs no guarantee in regard to a subject. What is needed, if this question comes up at all, is that the Dasein should experience itself in its most elementary constitution of being, as being-in-the-world itself. This experience of itself—unspoiled by any sort of epistemology—eliminates the ground for any question of the reality of the world. That it is real stands in opposition to any move to prove it. And even any purported belief in it is a theoretically motivated misunderstanding. This is not a convenient evasion of a problem. The question rather is whether this so-called problem which is ostensibly being evaded is really a problem at all. I ‘know’ that the world is real only insofar as I am. It is not cogito sum which formulates a primary finding but rather sum cogito. And this sum is not taken in the ontological indifference in which Descartes and his successors took it, as the extantness of a thinking thing. Sum here is the assertion of the basic constitution of my being: I-am-in-a-world and therefore I am capable of thinking it. But this Cartesian proposition has been taken in the opposite way, and rightly so, since Descartes himself wanted it thus understood, such that the sum was not questioned at all. Instead CONSCIOUSNESS as the inner was thought to be given absolutely as an absolute starting point, from which all the puzzles of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ then arise. GA20EN §24

The second question of the reality of the real, the question of the being of the worldhood of the world, cannot mean an investigation into how the world now actually manages to be. To begin with, such a question, if it is to be scientifically useful, presupposes that we understand what is meant by ‘being’ if we wish to explain how the entity brings it about, that it is. But this understanding of ‘being,’ to be acquired in advance, then no longer even lets us get to the point of asking in this way. For this question involves taking being as its own entity, it tries to explain being in terms of an entity. When it becomes clear how absurd it is to expect, so to speak, a trick from being which it uses in order to be, and when a question of being thus understood is then referred back to the entity, this in no way means that nothing can be made of ‘being-in-itself’ but always only of the entity insofar as it is something apprehended, something objective in a CONSCIOUSNESS. This would bring us to the familiar proposition that an entity always is only for a CONSCIOUSNESS. This proposition is known as the ‘principle of immanence,’ which keeps all epistemologies busy over its pros and cons. It has led directly to the problem of knowledge, without benefit of asking what might be meant by ‘immanence,’ what findings from the phenomena themselves are taken up in it, if it says anything at all, and what is basically meant by the proposition “An entity always is only for a CONSCIOUSNESS.” GA20EN §24

What the proposition basically means, what is seen in it, is not that an entity is dependent on CONSCIOUSNESS in its being nor that something transcendent is actually at the same time something immanent. The phenomenal finding in this proposition is rather that a world is encountered. The phenomenon itself thus directs us to interpret the structure of encounter, the activity of encountering. And the more we go about this without prejudice, the more authentically is the entity encountered ascertainable in its being. GA20EN §24

When we have seen that the elucidation of the reality of the real is based upon seeing Dasein itself in its basic constitution, then we also have the basic requirement for all attempts to decide between realism and idealism. In elucidating these positions it is not so much a matter of clearing them up or of finding one or the other to be the solution, but of seeing that both can exist only on the basis of a neglect: they presuppose a concept of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ without clarifying these basic concepts with respect to the basic composition of Dasein itself. But every serious idealism is in the right to the extent that it sees that being, reality, actuality can be clarified only when being, the real, is present and encountered. Whereas every realism is right to the extent that it attempts to retain Dasein’s natural CONSCIOUSNESS of the extantness of the world. But it immediately falls short in attempting to explain this reality by means of the real itself, in believing that it can clarify reality by means of a causal process. Regarded strictly in terms of scientific method, therefore, realism is always at a lower level than every idealism, even when that idealism goes to the extreme of solipsism. GA20EN §24

‘Its own being is the issue for Dasein’: This first presupposes that in this Dasein there is something like a being out for something. Dasein is out for its own being; it is out for its very being in order ‘to be’ its being. As such a being-about care is this being out for the being which this very being-out is. This must be understood in such a way that Dasein as it were anticipates itself there. If the being of Dasein is what is at issue for care, then Dasein has always already held its own being ahead of itself, even if not in the sense of a thematic CONSCIOUSNESS of it. The innermost structure of Dasein’s caring about its being can be conceived formally as Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself. But we must understand this being-ahead-of-itself of Dasein in the context of the structures which have hitherto already been exhibited. This being-ahead is not a kind of psychological process or a property of a subject, but rather an element of the entity which, in accord with its sense is in the world, that is, in accord with its original character of being, insofar as it is at all, is always already intimately involved in something, namely, in the world. We thus arrive at the overall structure of care in the formal sense: Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself in its always already being involved in something. This formal structure of care applies to every comportment. There are only different modalities of the individual structural moments of care, such that they can assume the kinds of being which urge and propensity have. We shall have to envisage these two phenomena in still greater detail in order to come to understand how the specific wholeness of the phenomenon of Dasein is now first of all integrated from this primal structure of the being of Dasein as care. The wholeness of Dasein cannot be combined from various ways of being and the coupling which then comes into play. On the contrary, with care we now find the phenomenon from which we can then understand the various ways of being as ways of being, that is, as care. GA20EN §31

Dasein is neither a combination of comportments nor a composite of body, soul, and spirit, so it is futile to search for the sense of the being of this unity of the composite. It is also not a subject or CONSCIOUSNESS, which only incidentally provides itself with a world. Nor is it a center from which acts spring, where neither the being of this center nor the being of the acts is defined. The structures which we have exhibited are themselves ways of being of this entity and as such are understandable only from the being always already intended with them, namely, from care. Dasein understands itself from itself as care. Care is accordingly the primary totality of the constitution of the being of Dasein, which as this totality always adopts this or that particular way of its can-be. This totality of being is as such totally present in every way of being of Dasein. What has thus been secured with the phenomenon of care as the being of Dasein is not a derived universal concept which, as a genus, would underlie every way to be. Still less is it the concept resulting from the interplay of various ways to be and conceived by drawing an abstract universal out of them. The interplay of the various ways of being is what it is only as the playing out and playing apart, so to speak, at any given time of the primary structures of the totality of Dasein itself. GA20EN §32

Not “time is” but “Dasein qua time temporalizes its being.” Time is not something which is found outside somewhere as a framework for world events. Time is even less something which whirs away inside in CONSCIOUSNESS. It is rather that which makes possible the being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-involved-in, that is, which makes possible the being of care. GA20EN §36