(…) Mas o que quer Heidegger dizer com “projeção”? “No seu caráter projetivo, a compreensão constitui existencialmente aquilo a que chamamos a visão do Dasein” (SZ:146; tradução modificada). Como uma espécie de “visão”, isto é, um modo de acesso a entidades, a projeção deve ser entendida na sua diferenciação de outras formas de visão, em particular tanto a introspecção como aquilo a que Heidegger por vezes chama “percepção pura” ou “apreensão pura”. A apreensão pura é a percepção despojada de todas as avaliações ou objetivos que são peculiares ao perceptor. É uma visão que termina no objeto e revela os seus objetos “como em si mesmos já ocorridos, como encontrados por si mesmos por sua própria conta” (GA24:167, tradução modificada). A compreensão como projeção “priva a intuição pura da sua prioridade” (147; tradução modificada). A “projeção”, ao contrário da percepção pura, não termina num objeto, mas “desvela sem tornar o que é desvelado como tal num objeto de contemplação” (GA24: 398). “O que é mais próprio desta atividade e desta ocorrência”, isto é, da projeção, “é o que se exprime linguisticamente no prefixo ‘pro-‘, a saber, que ao projetar, esta ocorrência de projeção leva o projetante para fora e para longe de si mesmo de uma certa maneira” (GA29-30:527). E ao ir para fora, a projeção transporta-nos para além do “objeto” da percepção e para a sua interação com outras coisas. Pensemos num projetor de cinema. Vemos um filme projetado, não olhando para o filme, mas precisamente desviando o olhar dele para o padrão que faz quando é iluminado e lançado sobre outra coisa.
(…) But what does Heidegger mean by “projection”? “In its projective character, understanding makes up existentially what we call the sight of Dasein” (146; translation modified). As a kind of “sight,” that is, a mode of access to entities, projection is to be understood in its differentiation from other forms of sight, in particular both introspection and what Heidegger sometimes calls “pure perception” or “pure apprehension.” Pure apprehension is perception stripped of all evaluations or goals that are peculiar to the perceiver. It is a sight that terminates in the object, and discloses its objects “as in themselves already occurrent, as encountered of themselves on their own account” (GA24: 167, translation modified). Understanding as projection “deprives pure intuition of its priority” (147; translation modified). “Projection,” unlike pure perception, does not terminate on an object, but “unveils without making what is unveiled as such into an object of contemplation” (GA24: 398). “What is most proper to this activity and occurrence,” that is, to projection, “is what comes to expression linguistically in the prefix ‘pro-’, namely that in projecting, this occurrence of projection carries the projecting one out and away from itself in a certain way” (GA29-30: 527). And in going outward, projection carries us past the “object” of perception and to its interaction with other things. Think of a film projector. One sees a film projected, not by looking at the film, but precisely by looking away from it to the pattern it makes when it is illuminated and thrown onto something else.
Projecting in Heidegger’s sense, then, is “apprehending x by looking at y.” The “x” is the particular entity or event that we understand. The “y,” Heidegger tells us, is a possibility. To be specific, the y-term of projection is the pattern of possibilities in terms of which the projector can incorporate the x into the world, thus making sense of it. For projection, the world shows up as a possibility space: “the world, qua world, is disclosed as possible significance … The totality of affordances is revealed as the categorial whole of a possible interconnection of the ready to hand” (144, translation modified).
In projecting, we grasp a thing not in terms of its present, self-contained, occurrent properties but in terms of “what it becomes or respectively doesn’t become” (145; translation modified). Heidegger also describes projection in terms of transparency — we understand things to the degree they are transparent, meaning we understand them better as we can see through to more and more of the possibilities that they afford (146).
(191) Projection has a recursive structure, meaning that to understand the y-term, it must itself be projected onto something else. The “stratification” or “layers” (Schichtung) of projection, Heidegger argues, are interwoven (see GA24:398). For example, we understand a baseball bat by projecting it onto the rules of baseball, which govern the possibilities that determine what can and cannot be done with the bat during the game. But we only understand the rules of baseball by projecting them in turn onto (among other things) bats and balls and bases and pitches and swings. And ultimately, Heidegger argues, the possibilities must be projected onto time. The game of baseball affords a certain patterning of the temporal structure of life.
Of course, in each case, there is some particular, factical me who is projecting something onto its possibilities:
We shall now attempt to clarify the structure of the understanding that is constitutive of existence. To understand means, more precisely, to project oneself upon a possibility, in this projection to keep oneself at all times in a possibility. An ability to be, a possibility as possibility, is there only in projection, in projecting oneself upon that ability to be. (GA24:392; translation modified)
The possibilities that the thing affords depend on the disposedness (Befindlichkeit) of the one doing the projecting — his or her skills, tastes, preferences, dispositions, aims, goals, ideals, and so on. A baseball bat affords a very different set of possibilities for Albert Pujols, for instance, than it does for me. Thus Heidegger explains that “projection is essentially a thrown projection” (GA9:357/257):
In every case Dasein, as essentially disposed, has already got itself into definite possibilities … But this means that Dasein is being-possible which has been delivered over to itself — thrown possibility through and through. (144; translation modified)
I understand my own thrown disposedness by projecting myself out into the world, thereby discovering what kind of pattern of possibilities shows up for such a being as me:
If the Dasein projects itself upon a possibility, it is projecting itself in the sense that it is unveiling itself as this ability to be, in this specific being. If the Dasein projects itself upon a possibility and understands itself in that possibility, this understanding, this becoming manifest of the self, is not a self-contemplation in the sense that the ego would become the object of some cognition or other; rather, the projection is the way in which I am the possibility; it is the way in which I exist freely … Understanding as the Dasein’s self-projection is the Dasein’s fundamental mode of happening. As we may also say, it is the authentic meaning of action. (GA24:392-3; translation modified)
(192), Dasein projects itself “both upon its ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ and upon significance, as the worldhood of its particular world” (145) — my possibilities open up simultaneously in terms of what the world affords me given both the facticity into which I am thrown, and who I have chosen to be.
The possibilities into which I project — the patterns of affordances in terms of which I understand anything at all — afford me a leeway only because I am always projecting any particular thing (including myself) onto a plurality of different possibilities. Projection “lets the possibility stand as a possibility” (GA20: 439), and “when one is diverted into (Sichverlegen in) one of these basic possibilities of understanding, the other is not laid aside (legt … nicht ab)” (146). To be in a possibility is to be oriented to a possibility space that is broader than any particular commitment to a course of action. As we shall see below, interpretation (Auslegung) is a “diversion into” (Sichverlegen in) a possibility that develops and appropriates the possibility as one’s own. But one reason understanding is not reducible to interpretation is that we continue to hold open, and see in terms of, possibilities we have not diverted ourselves into.
The possibilities are not held open, however, in and through an act of cognition: “Understanding is not a mode of cognition but the basic determination of existing” (GA24:392; translation modified). Projecting is not a mental state, but rather a way of being oriented to the significances in the world:
When I am completely engrossed in dealing with something and make use of some equipment in this activity, I am just not directed toward the equipment as such, say, toward the tool. And I am just as little directed toward the work itself. Instead, in my occupation I move in the affordance relations as such. In understanding them I dwell with the equipmental contexture that is handy. I stand neither with the one nor with the other but move in the in-order-to. (GA24:415; translation modified)
This is true even of cognitive acts of understanding. Even in developing a philosophical theory or designing a scientific experiment or describing an event or cashing out a metaphor, I am moving in an open field of relations. I project each word or concept onto a field of possibilities that I know my way around, that immediately offers me affordances for thought: “All ontical experience of entities — both circumspective calculation of the available, and positive scientific cognition of the occurrent — is based upon projections of the being of the corresponding entities — projections which in every case are more or less transparent” (324).