Chapter 1: Preliminary outlines

“Roughly speaking to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus

1.1 Introduction: The Questioning Being

The human being is not alone in resolutely engaging with its world. United

in their embodiment, all animals interact recursively with their environment. Like

humans, a variety of animals, in the sea and on land, use aspects of their

environment to manipulate other aspects, though perhaps to regard these aspects as

tools is to resort to anthropomorphism.

Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are known to sharpen wooden

stakes in order to hunt other primates for meat. Bottlenose dolphins have been

recorded carrying marine sponges in their beaks to stir ocean-bottom sand and

uncover prey. Sea otters use stones to knock abalone shells from sea rocks and crack

open the protective casings of prey. Wild gorillas are known to gather trunks as

makeshift bridges for crossing deep patches of swamp. Humans have in fact

learned from animals, methods and resources that they have rationalised as tools

for use.

The human being is however the being that questions its existence. The

human engages with its environment in similar fashion to animals but, critical of its

success or the success of others, will adapt its tools and amend its strategies when

obliged to do so. It can ask ‘Why does this no longer work as it did?’, or ‘What is the

secret of your success?’ Like animals we will engage with our environment, but

then uniquely perhaps, we evaluate through questioning ‘How best to proceed?’

The human being comports itself towards its existence, for existence is that which is

an issue for it.

1 In fact, for the human being all experience is ‘my experience’. As a result the world

of things is an extension of my experience and is concernfully interrogated, whether tacitly

or explicitly, in such a way that its entities emerge from the background of what is as ‘ready-

to-hand’ for me into my life’s concernful foreground. In this thesis I refer then to the human

being as the Questioning Being.

As Heidegger has shown most notably, our questions are not merely questions of

practicality but questions of existence. When the Questioning Being investigates its existence

it finds that it has a purposive capacity. It can intend in a functional way undertaking

extended projects thereby. This living towards future realisation in collaboration with others

is a human capacity for purpose of which the Questioning Being is uniquely aware. Of

course a pack of wolves may have a sense of common purpose and the individual’s role

within it, and the actions of an ant within a complex society may suggest an instinctual

purposeful collaboration. Claims for a unique human awareness of purposiveness, as

Heidegger has argued, is not to suppose that the Questioning Being’s ontological character,

or existence awareness, is necessarily a theoretically explicit one.2 Dasein understands itself

in its Being and does so with singular focus and yet this particular self-explication, this

‘question of existence’, ‘never gets straightened out except through existing itself’.3

As the Questioning Being turns its questioning upon its purposive capacity it asks,

‘What is this for?’; ‘What is the ultimate point of knowing how to do things?’; ‘Is there such a

value as learning for its own sake?’ The Questioning Being interrogates its purposive

capacity disclosing a desire for significance; ‘What significance does this purpose lend to my

life?’ For humans successful manipulation of the world is not enough… this success must

matter. ‘I do this for the children, for the money, for the party, for revenge, for a better

future, for God, for my community’ and so on.

My account here is not meant to imply that the Questioning Being finds this desire

for significance solely as a derivative of purposefulness; the desire for significance, like the

human capacity for purpose, is a primitive too. This human existentiell, the never-completed,

never-consummated, ‘self’-comprehension as purposive and desirous of significance,

consumes human living and encrypts much of human history. Consequently, when the

Questioning Being interrogates its desire for significance it asks ‘Am I just another thing that

functions?‘; ‘I exist but how then should I live?’; ‘How am I to become more than the things I

do?’ Even then purposiveness is present and the Questioning Being asks, ‘What is all this

meaning for?’

1 Heidegger, M. BT, 2006, Malden, Blackwell, 2006, §9, 67 2 Heidegger, ibid, §4, 32 3 Ibid, §4, 33

My contention in this thesis is that the human being is uniquely and essentially the

Questioning Being. This defining aspect of human ontology discloses, in a dialectic that is

elucidated in this thesis, that the distinguishing feature of identity in the Questioning Being

is the fact of, and the manner of, a purposive and concernful questioning of being. A human

person is essentially a human-animal-endowed-with-the-capacity-to-question-being. Thus I argue

that embodiment, intersubjectivity, intentionality and embeddedness in the world are

necessary but not sufficient features of human identity. The lived life of human experience

reveals that only the desire for significance and capacity for purpose are sufficient descriptors

of what is essential to identity, that which renders humans distinct from other animals and

renders every human singular. These descriptors are however themselves the subject of

questioning, for the Questioning Being is prompted to transcend and, in questioning, to

believe that it can transcend that which it discloses in interrogation as it finds a means to

proceed with life. One profound and recurring question that arises in the Questioning Being

is ‘Who am I?’

1.2 What is it that is sensed as identity?

“…a person is no more identical with the mind he has than he is identical with the body he has." Peter Hacker, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

It has been said that the standard theoretical conditions for personhood are

consciousness, rationality, personal attitude, complex communication, self-consciousness,

self-motivated activity, and freedom of the will.4 More contentiously included is moral

consciousness. If we are to establish that the person is necessarily an embodied human

person the considerations widen further. It is not my purpose here to determine whether or

not, collectively, these are necessary and sufficient conditions for human personhood or

whether, as such, they must be uninterrupted or uniformly developed. I am of the opinion

that human personhood is a coherent notion and will address the question in due course as

to what it is that personal identity adheres to. My interest in personal identity then is in the

first-person5 grasp one has of one’s personal singularity in the shared human world, that is,

4 Montes, M. J. A Response to Ronald G. Alexander's 'Personal Identity and Self-Constitution' and

Michael Goodman's 'A Sufficient Condition for Personhood', The Personalist Forum, Vol. 8, No. 1, Supplement: Studies in Personalist Philosophy. Proceedings of the Conference on Persons (Spring 1992), pp. 91-96 5 This first-person grasp supported by Dan Zahavi, in Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective, Massachusetts, the MIT Press, 2008 has its detractors, see for example Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, New York, Basic Books, 2010.

one’s ‘identity-sense’,6 and what consequently can be discerned as fundamental to identity

therein.

If a primordial desire for significance and capacity for purpose makes my identity

distinct, what in real terms does it make distinct? If I reflect on the question ‘What do I mean

by identity?’ my initial response is that ‘Identity is all that delineates my unique character

definitively’. But there is something extremely elusive here. The question assumes that one’s

character can be delineated with constancy, that the election of defining characteristics

proceeds according to agreed rules, that these ‘characterful’ elements in my lived life can be

harmonised, and that I am unique. What if I have a range of identities? Who has these

identities?

I can say that my name, a social convention in communication, represents identity

and confers identity upon me. There is after all a weighty literature on the identity-loss

experienced by people stripped of their names; the slaves exported from the African

continent; the victims of the Nazi Holocaust; the nameless, numbered by Cambodia’s

Citizen No. 1. Certainly my name signifies my having an identity, but it needs

supplementing with an extensive subtext, for many people share my name.

I can refer to the things I do, habitually or deliberately, and say that this agency

reveals my identity and confers identity upon me. The problem with this is twofold. At what

point is a summary of my activity ever definitive, and at what stage moreover, would I wish

to be reduced to such a list? I gather around me distinguishing features and simultaneously

fear being pinned down by them like a butterfly collector’s exhibit.

Perhaps I should seek identity in my historical and cultural context, the time and

place of my birth and the locale in which I live. These at least give context and distinction to

both my name and my actions, and indeed, to the linguistic conventions I employ in

describing them. I would of course be forced to recognise in doing so that many elements

pertinent to my ‘identity’ (that which makes me singularly identifiable and distinguishable

from others) are derived from factors beyond my control.

Should I include physical features? My gender, my health, my height, my gait, my

colouring, the age of my body or the way that I regard it? Though all these elements are vital

in delineating my personal identity, and I live through them in reaching out to others, none

are ontologically definitive for all.

6 For a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical burden the term ‘identity’ ‘bears, see Brubaker, R.

and Cooper, F., Beyond ‘Identity’, Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), 1-47 . This thesis holds in phenomenological ‘abeyance’ any assumption that there is a ‘self’ or that each ‘self’ has identity. It cannot regard itself as a strong or weak ‘understanding of identity’ therefore. Although their recommended terms ‘self-identification’ and ‘self-understanding’ have some currency, my interest lies in one’s ‘self’ awareness of connotations across the whole spectrum of signifiers associated with the term identity traditionally. For this reason I employ the open term ‘identity-sense’.

When I reflect again on the expansive list of ontic variables I can assemble in order to

demarcate my presence in the world from any other human being, I am struck by the fact

that my identity gains its particular texture from the accretion of meaning my life acquires

intersubjectively, whatsoever that meaning is. Whether accidently, collaboratively,

deliberately or retrospectively, my identity is an accretion of meaning whose appropriation I

nevertheless desire to transcend.7

1.3 The primacy of the Landscape of Being

“The worst thing in the world’, said O’Brian, ‘varies from individual to individual.” George Orwell, 1984

Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’, bestowed upon the West a

paradigmatic assumption that conscious personal thoughts conclusively verify distinctive

human existence. Moreover, ‘I am’ he says, ‘…a real thing and really exist; but what thing?

…a thing which thinks’. Later he muses, ‘What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which

doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels’; 8 in short,

a consciousness.

Accompanying Descartes’ retreat to the higher ground of indubitability, attained by

the Ego, a vantage point Husserl affirmed conditionally, is an assumption that it is only

consciousness that interrogates the world and experiences it. This I suggest is too simplistic;

though conscious intentionality makes meaning of the world, Merleau-Ponty has shown that

it is in embodied intentionality in fact that this exchange is grounded. I will explore the

implications of that contention in more detail in the next chapter.

According to Husserl, Descartes cleared away the untried assumption that the

‘external world’ is self-evident, establishing consciousness and with it the undeniable

presence of one’s own personal thoughts or ‘cogitationes’. Acknowledging his indebtedness,

Husserl nevertheless rejected Descartes ‘little tag end of the world’, seeking instead a

transcendental ‘self’, distinguished most decisively from that world. Whilst I share Husserl’s

rejection of Descartes’ rationalistic assurances that are independent of perception, I am not

able as Husserl does, to divorce sensation from the lived body, nor to regard the lived body

as merely a by-product of intersubjectivity. The early Husserl commits himself to the

primacy of consciousness in his refutation of Descartes, but this refuge places the

Questioning Being beyond all that is questionable; Husserl’s ‘beyond’ is a cul-de-sac of

content-less reflection.

7 In Chapter 6 I explore that accretion of meaning in more detail, and outline what it is that this meaning accrues to. 8 Descartes, Meditation II, in Atkins, K. Self and Subjectivity, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, 14-15

The later Husserl, as encountered in his unpublished manuscripts, can be seen to

move from an egological to a transcendental-sociological phenomenology.9 Here he

develops an analysis of intersubjectivity related to his notion of the Lifeworld.

Transcendental Intersubjectivity thus understood becomes the absolute ground of being

from which the meaning and validity of everything objectively existing originates.10 In the

Lifeworld my being encounters intersubjective meaning, or meaning-formations originating

in community and tradition and, more fundamentally, my perceptual experience is already

an experience of intersubjectively accessible being, that is being which does not exist for me

only but for everybody.11 According to Merleau-Ponty’s own reading, Husserl holds that the

world’s unity prior to the predication of science ‘is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already there’.12

This means that each person’s consciousness, which makes evident to them their own

singularity, is tethered to a pre-given existential terrain; the shared world as it is for them.

But, Merleau-Ponty insists, we need to recognise consciousness itself as a project of

the world which it ‘neither embraces nor possesses’, but towards which it is perpetually

directed – and the world as this ‘pre-objective individual whose imperious unity decrees

what knowledge shall take as its goal’.13 For Merleau-Ponty it is embodied perception that is

primary, not consciousness, indeed every perception takes place within a certain horizon

and ultimately in the world where it is experienced in action. ‘All consciousness is

perceptual, even consciousness of ourselves’14 he contends. The primacy of ready-to-hand

practical engagement with the world can be discerned in Heidegger too; once again Dasein is

not alone and Heidegger acknowledges this situatedness as Being-with-others. There is a

hint in Heidegger moreover, of the primacy of the shared world, for Being-with is Being-

there.

Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘what we ordinarily think of as mental states and

activities are constituted by bodily engagement with the world’;15 ‘the body is a form of

consciousness’ embedded in the Lifeworld.16 In a radical synthesis of these three

philosophers I conclude that the world’s meaning arises from embodied perception, our

primordial contact with the world and its recursive interaction with that world, but that this

9 Zahavi, D. Husserl’s Intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy. This is an online

version of an article originally published in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27/3, 1996, 228-245, accessed at http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavipublications/Husserl_s_20transformation_20of_20transcendental_20philosophy.pdf/. 21st September 2013, 15:58 10 Zahavi, Ibid, 1 11 Zahavi, ibid 12 PP, ibid, xix 13 Ibid. xx 14 Merleau-Ponty, M. ‘The Primacy of Perception’, in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics,(Trans.) James M. Edie, Northwestern University Press, 1964/1989, 13 15 Romdenh-Romluc, K. Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception, London, Routledge, 2011, 2 16 Romdenh-Romluc, ibid, 3

is not all. If embodied perception entails that the conscious subject carries out tasks against a

background of habitual skills sedimented in its body, and prior to these conscious acts the

body already has a grip on the world and itself in perception and sensory-motor skills, then

the subject is ‘at home in’ the world.17

By implication therefore, the world also is primordial. Consciousness is bodily

engagement with the world to which one is tethered, and so I conclude that in fact each

ontological aspect of the description ‘embodied intersubjective intentionality embedded in

the world’ is equiprimordial. Foundational to all identity in the Questioning Being is an

embodied recursively intersubjective embeddedness in a world that offers meaning and is

made meaningful.

One scholar has gone a considerable way towards this conclusion in saying; ‘It is not

possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere within an already established

ontology; rather, the three regions ‘self’, ‘others’, and ‘world’ belong together; they

reciprocally illuminate one another, and can only be understood in their interconnection’.18

This descriptive group, the Landscape of Being, describes the foundation of existence in the

Questioning Being and this, rather than consciousness, perception, or the world exclusively,

is primary.

Returning to Husserl, and his contention that the world gets its sense and verification

as a consequence of the Ego’s thinking, we are advised that because the only world one has

is that which derives sense and validity from consciousness, it is reasonable to suppose that

knowledge of the world, and the world’s meaning, originate in conscious experiences. The

early Husserl judges that the Ego and its cogitationes are prior to the world. An additional

substrata of this knowledge acquisition however may be inferred from Merleau-Ponty’s

analysis that recursively, the body’s movements combine with external phenomena to

accommodate the organs of perception, incorporating and assimilating automatically, the

motive for changes to any vista.19 This motivation represents an unconscious perpetuation of

significance or gestalt in our bodily orientation in the world. This means that the perceptual

situatedness of our bodies is the spontaneous, self-calibrating, precognitive background of

intentionality: ‘our body is not the object of an ‘I think’, but an ensemble of lived meanings

17 MP. PP 274/237 in Wai-Shun Hung, Perception and Self-Awareness in Merleau-Ponty: The

Problem of the Tacit Cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception, New Yearbook for Phenomenology & Phenomenological Philosophy, Volume 5, Number 1 / 2005, 2 18 Zahavi, D. Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity, in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 5–7, 2001, pp. 151–67 accessed online at http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/Zahavi_JCS_8_5-7.pdf/. A similar argument is found in Zahavi. D, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective, Massachusetts, the MIT Press, 2008, 176 19 Carmen, T. The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, in Philosophical Topics, VOL. 27, NO. 2, FALL

1999, 217

that finds its equilibrium’.20 Indeed, as the later Husserl concluded; the natural world is ‘the

background for my act-consciousness’.21 Taking this a step further I argue that each singular

identity is precisely a bivalent pre-thetic disposition to harmonise experience, driven by a

desire for significance and in order to fulfil a purposive capacity, within a pregiven

environment whose meaning is derived from this exchange. This harmonising disposition

reveals an intentionality which is not confined to conscious intention.

I conclude therefore that in fact, the shared Lifeworld is that which confers meaning

to consciousness in a recursive exchange with one’s embodied intentionality, an exchange

which necessarily incorporates the other intersubjectively. The natural realm to which we

find ourselves tethered, could not be the philosophical starting point for the early Husserl

that it was for Heidegger because of his Cartesian concession to the need for apocdicity. For

Merleau-Ponty however, what is perceived is by its very nature ambiguous at times and

determined by a context – or ‘field’ which gives it shape. It is a blind alley to reduce

perception to the sum of its sensations and to attempt to reconstruct experience out of

determinate qualities.22 The philosophical genesis of identity in the Questioning Being,

which craves significance, is intentional and intersubjective, it presupposes embodiment in

the physical world and a perspectival embeddedness in the nexus of human meaning,23 and

this admix, the cradle of identity, is necessarily primordial.

At this stage a circle emerges in my analysis.24 Having argued that the Landscape of

Being is primordial, and risking an aporia by doing so, I nevertheless maintain that the

desire for significance –capacity for purpose, which distinguishes the Questioning Being

ontologically from all other beings, and in its ontic expression distinguishes all Questioning

Beings from each other, is also primordial; how can that be? My case is this. Without

embodied intersubjective intentionality which is embedded in the Lifeworld neither Peter

nor any other Questioning Being could have the potential for significance. As Heidegger has

shown, the Subject is a potentiality not a property.25 The Landscape of Being is a potent

20 PP, 153, in Carmen, 218 21 Husserl, E. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy; 1st book. (Trans.) F. Kersten, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, 55; a new translation by Daniel Dahlstrom is cited in the bibliography. 22 Langer cites for example, variations in pitch which are derived from a sound’s intensity, the apparent inequality of lines we know to be objectively the same length, the shimmering silver line which forms a boundary between red and green and the decline of sight into a less differentiated structure on injury to it as phenomena which the reductionists’ direct anatomical path from stimulus to perceptual experience cannot account for. Langer, M. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, London, Macmillan Press, 1989, 5 23 I conclude that human identity is necessarily generated in embodied intersubjective intentionality embedded in the world. 24 See Steve Martinot Sartre’s Being-for-Heidegger; Heidegger’s Being-for-Sartre, for a discussion of his circular ontological account of Being, accessed online at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/hs-sh.htm, accessed, 22nd September, 2013, at 21:27. 25 For Heidegger ‘Selfhood’ can be identified existentially only in one's authentic potentiality-for-

Being-one's-Self. Here authentic potentiality-for-Being discloses the constancy of the ‘Self’ whereby it

dynamic which triggers the fundamental desire for significance –capacity for purpose.

However, the primordial desire for significance –capacity for purpose is equally that very

essence of the Questioning Being which is required for embodied ‘self’, others and the

Lifeworld, to coalesce into world-experience, or a gestalt, which may be appropriated and

interrogated for meaning as such. One’s desire for significance unearths, in its ubiquity, the

Landscape of Being; the Landscape of Being generates the desire for significance. Similarly,

one’s capacity for purpose requisitions the Landscape of Being; The Landscape of Being

gives form to the capacity for purpose.

I wish in the following section to develop further the distinction I make between

one’s identity, which is conferred, and identity-sense which is an audited appropriation of

that conferred meaning.

1.4 Identity and identity-sense

“My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing- rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow.”

Henri Bergson, in Creative Evolution

I have considered already whether consciousness is truly the definitive core of

human identity as Descartes contended. Heidegger’s particular charge against Descartes is

that ultimately his legacy provides no ontology; this ego cogito remains ‘uninterrogated’ as to

its Being.26 Descartes’ formal analysis of the ‘cogito sum’, taken over by Kant, addresses the

question of what I am, that is, I am human, but omits the existential subjectivity of who I am as

an individual. ‘While Descartes and Kant occupied themselves with the notion of cogito or

self-consciousness, existence escaped from their vision’.27 In contrast, Identity, the meaning

which transcends the entity I am, is the primary interest of this thesis.

My conscious waking life is in all its parts directed towards the world of meaning

that for me has always been already there; alternatively expressed, I am in toto, engaged

‘semantically’ with a ‘syntax’ into which I am thrown. As a singular instance of being, I am,

in non-pathological experience, a person with a sense of unified ‘self’-identity. This thesis

offers a tripartite eidetic explanatory description of this phenomenon; firstly a description of

has somehow become situated. ’ Self-constancy ‘signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness’, that is one’s dwelling in one’s purposive capacity to be oneself. Heidegger, M. Being and Time, (2006) Trans. J. Maquarrie & E. Robinson. Malden, Blackwell, 1962/2006, 369 26 Heidegger, M. Being and Time, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 1962/2006, 44 27 Yagi, Tsutomu B. Beyond Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Self and Heidegger’s Dasein, in Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy, accessed online at http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/perspectives/resources/TBen%20Yagi.pdf, accessed 22.00, 17th July, 2013

the manner in which that identity-sense is experienced with all one’s being; secondly a

description of that which is in fact disclosed in one’s identity-sense; thirdly a description of

that which, beneath all its diverse ontic possibilities, is essential to, or ontologically

descriptive of identity in the Questioning Being.

Whilst rejecting as untenable the Cartesian Self, I acknowledge nevertheless that the

Cartesian legacy bequeaths to me a certainty that I am conscious. I am furthermore a centre

of activity constituting intersubjectively the Lifeworld I share with others. Indeed, whilst I

am directed toward the world consciously -intentionally constituting and appropriating

meaning thereby- this is not all. I am also as an organism recursively appropriating the

world for my survival. This body [Korpor], an empirical reality, is however further infused

with meaning-acquisition in the form of a sensual living body [Leib] through which I have a

world of existence and without which I cannot be conscious. As Merleau-Ponty contends,

my being is a network of intentions,28 and time a network of intentionalities.29

My identity, associated both with the empirical and the intentional aspects of my

embodiment, is an accretion of meaning that is largely habituated and enacted. It must be

consciously appropriated and authentically owned if my identity-sense is to harmonise my

primordial desire for significance and capacity for purpose, and the Lifeworld in which I am

embedded, or as Heidegger would have it, ‘thrown’. Thus my consciousness in its

directedness is directed towards the world in a quest for appropriation of the world’s

meaning; an appropriation with which to clothe my naked hunger for significance. To have

intentionality is to have consciousness, and to have consciousness is to have ownness. But

this does not mean an idealist abandonment of the world for it cannot, I am embedded in the

world.

My identity I experience as an identity-sense, intentionality incarnated in a sensual

body which, in its entirety, is its own; as Husserl has shown, Descartes did not go far

enough in his reduction to consciousness, as Merleau-Ponty has shown, Husserl

underestimated embodied intentionality and its de-centering of consciousness. Descartes

conceded that one’s mind is tied to the body and does not merely reside within it. More

accurately however the mind is not tied to the body but rather as Merleau-Ponty has

contended, the mind pervades it.

Beneath the various meaning-clusters that give my waking life its unique appearance

then, is an embodied desire for significance and capacity for purpose, an embodied telos

intentionally directed towards the human world of meaning, the Lifeworld.

As contemporary scholarship has indicated, at every layer of conscious existence

28 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 2006, ibid, 140 29 MP, ibid, 484

Husserl discerns ‘the play of drives and instincts’.30 ‘All life is continuous striving’ and

instincts and drives guide and motivate all our intentional life. One might object even so that

many people dispute any sense of being driven to find significance or see in themselves a

reciprocal capacity for purpose. Lack of awareness however does not annul the role this

drive nevertheless plays. Indeed, in addition to primal intentionality which motivates the

directedness-to-objects we are familiar with, in one manuscript Husserl identifies a genetic

priority in instincts which entails ‘an intentional directedness to something that is not yet

constituted as an ‘object’’.31 The strivings and urges that motivate the socialite or the recluse,

that evoke philanthropy or nihilism, fascism, communism or piety, may commence with

goalless yearnings which can be satisfactorily understood as the tension between one’s

unsatisfied desire for significance and capacity for purpose.

One can instinctively search for significance whilst being unaware of what it might

look like or indeed that one is searching. This too is supported in Husserl. For example, our

apparently empty intentional acts are often satisfied by the object’s presence in intuition and

so fulfilled. Being instinctively directed to something entails that we are as yet unaware of the

goal of our inclination. ‘The instinct’ and its ‘target’ are as yet ‘undisclosed’ or ‘latent’. Only

when the instinctive drive is satisfied is the goal of the instinct ‘disclosed’, thereby becoming

‘manifest’ – a process analogous to fulfilment proper.32 Husserl’s illustration is that of the

baby at the breast; he envisages a ‘direction towards drinking’ awakened in the baby by the

smell of the mother’s milk and the sensation of its own lips moving. Only upon drinking,

when the drive is satisfied, is that drive ‘disclosed’ as the direction towards drinking.33

It is towards a primordial essence then, a desire for significance - capacity for

purpose, that an accretion of meaning derived from the ontic possibilities of the spatio-

temporal world is drawn. My identity-sense is therefore a holistic awareness of the

conscious and tacit appropriation of the Lifeworld my primordial desire for significance –

capacity for purpose cannot live without.

In my judgement Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, can be synthesised to

support the view that identity is sited in embodied intersubjective intentionality embedded

in the world, and I have referred to this primary ontology as the Landscape of Being. Within

this ubiquitous Landscape of Being, the identity of the Questioning Being is approximate to

30 ‘In the beginning’ Husserl writes ‘there is instinctive striving’ (Husserl, C 13 I, 6a) in Smith, A. D. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, London, Routledge, 2003, 149 31 Smith, ibid, 150, We encountered something of this issue in the last chapter in our consideration of fear and anxiety, and whether these were experienceable for the transcendental Ego which had parenthesized all objects in the world such as might be feared. 32 (Husserl, C 13 I, 6) in Smith, ibid 33 (Husserl, C 16, IV, 36b) in Smith, ibid

a matrix, or better still a web, a meeting place of consciousness and habituation34, of thought

and action, speech and language. This web of meaning is essentially, ontologically, an

accretion of meaning which must be appropriated for oneself and must be negotiated in

relation to the ubiquitous presence of the other which has always existed. Intersubjectivity

has its place in primary ontology therefore, as I have contended, for as Heidegger is at pains

to remind us ‘Dasein is essentially Being-with’, and this existential characteristic of Dasein

holds true ‘even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived’.35 My identity

then is all of me, sensed holistically, conceptualised and sublimated in my efforts at

harmonising my existence; in Wittgenstein’s terms perhaps, it is there and yet it isn’t.

I cannot, in a solipsistic manner, fashion my identity without recourse to others. My

world is a shared world, as Husserl concedes in his Cartesian Meditations, and my identity is

a part of it. Subjectively animated by me, nevertheless my identity is a thing in the world of

others. I explore the dynamic of this exchange as the chapter unfolds but close this section

with an introductory summary of these three strands of my phenomenological enquiry.

1.4.1 The experiencing of identity in identity-sense

In this thesis I contend firstly, that one’s identity-sense is an experience of one’s

singularly embodied intentional presence; experienced not merely in mental ‘self’-reflection, but

in every aspect of one’s embodiment. One’s comparative height for example will be

registered in one’s reach or one’s gait, in the relative height and shape of things, in the

speech of others and in one’s aptitude and preference for tasks. This identity-sense is

recursively acquired through one’s conscious and habitual interaction with others and the

world; though one conceptualises its significance mentally, one’s identity-sense is not solely

a mental phenomenon nor is it only registered as such. Consider for example, whether one’s

defining aversion to cauliflower or taste for chocolate is situated in the taste buds, the brain

or the mind. I might be attracted to another person because of the lilt in their voice; where is

my attraction and their attractiveness sited? One’s identity is both sensed and presenced

throughout one’s being.

1.4.2 The essential structure of identity-sense

Secondly, I argue that one’s identity-sense is in essence an existential measurement of

success, constantly updated, regarding the explicit and tacit harmonising one inevitably

attempts holistically. One’s identity-sense is an audit, sometimes tacit, of one’s meaningful

arbitration between a primordial desire for significance – capacity for purpose and the

34 For an interesting discussion of habituation or ‘habituses’ in the work of Bourdieu, as structuring

structured structures see Crossley, N. The Phenomenological Habitus and Its Construction, Theory and Society, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 84 35 Heidegger, 2006, ibid

Lifeworld. This primordial desire I define in an essentialist way, and the Lifeworld I hold to

be that interpreted foreground which transcends one’s constitution of meaning, of which the

empirical world, which transcends one’s perception, is the background. In this

intersubjectively negotiable form one’s identity-sense is of a singularly embodied harmonising

presence in the world.

Consider the examples above. When I am offered cauliflower and can avoid it, my

identity-sense and the Lifeworld are harmonised, when perhaps as a child however, I am

obliged to eat cauliflower because an adult insists, I must audit my sense of autonomy. The

meaning of my life finds unwanted significance in this reminder of my subservience to the

will of another and maybe meal-time battles ensue. More seriously, were I to choose a

partner on the basis of my attraction to them and find my attraction unrequited, or perhaps

forbidden by society, here too an aspect of my identity has stepped out from the background

of the world and acquired a disharmonious significance I must audit and resolve.

1.4.3 The ontological basis of identity

Finally, I argue that, that which in each instance constitutes and motivates the

singularity of each Questioning Being as such, and which lies beneath all its diverse ontic

possibilities and manifestations and their discernible eidetic texture, is a desire for

significance and capacity for purpose. This bivalent ontological drive or desire is

ontologically descriptive of identity. Identity in the Questioning Being, is essentially, an

appropriated accretion of meaning deriving from one's desire for significance and purposive capacity.

There is furthermore phenomenologically disclosed in lived experience an uncomfortable

tension between one’s primordial desire for significance and one’s capacity for purpose

which needs resolving.

Let me illustrate this tension further. It occurs to me as I drive to visit my elderly

mother, whose health is now quite poor, that my love for her is of a special kind; it

represents the special significance she has for me founded on the significance I have for her.

Touched as I am by this I want her to go on regarding me in this way. I also wish to be

useful to her; aiding her with things that need doing and channelling my purposiveness in a

manner that benefits her. Both my desire for significance and my capacity for purpose are

intentionally directed towards my mother. The tension arises in that I do not want to be

merely a son she dotes on, for that would seem unfruitful, selfish, or both. Equally I do not

want to be merely a son who is of use to her for that would seem demeaning or

impoverished, or both. I do not wish to exploit her love nor do I want her to exploit mine. As

I attempt to harmonise these aspects of my Lifeworld, my identity-sense reflects the extent

to which this tension is resolved in the life I identify as mine.36

36 In chapter six I will explore the way that this two-part drive gives rise to the phenomenologically

variant descriptions found in Hegel, Sartre and Buber, particularly Heidegger and perhaps in

1.5 Intersubjective Intentionality

“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

This thesis has embarked upon a phenomenological path which is a descriptive

enterprise. It aims to clarify eidetically what is experienced, in particular what is experienced

as identity-sense, thus revealing in the scrutiny of concrete acts of perception the essence of

identity itself.

Three topological features of the Landscape of Being have recommended themselves

in my consideration of identity as an appropriated accretion of meaning: a) embodiment, b)

intersubjective intentionality and c) embeddedness in the world. My identity as ‘Peter’ is

dependent on these essential features, for without them I cannot have singularity as a

person. Of themselves however, these features do not encapsulate that singularity which

makes me ‘me’, nor therefore do the variable ontic characteristics apparent in my life

derived from my physicality, relationships, culture and history, even though these may

render me distinct to others.

In order to explore the Landscape of Being closely, I begin with a feature developed

by Husserl; intentionality. My identity is inevitably directed-towards; directed-towards

myself, others and my environment, and this intentionality is singularly mine. All such

descriptions of Peter, such as ‘Peter likes’, ‘Peter is’ and Peter’s brother, illustrate this very

insight because Peter is an experience directed-towards things.

Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger each acknowledge directedness-towards as

central to the lived life but reach no consensus. I consider their perspectives on intentionality

here therefore, by sampling a lived context which illustrates the phenomena of intersubjective

intentionality and my synthesis of their insights.

In particular intentionality, as a fundament of identity, also warrants closer

investigation as I utilise it in avoidance of the term ‘consciousness’, with its distracting

Cartesian overtones, to enable my synthesis of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. To a

degree this synthesis necessitates a perspectivist approach for some aspects of their

phenomenology cannot be successfully reconciled.37

Derrida, regarding the presence of the subject and the objectifying purpose the other may attempt to reduce them to. 37 David Grünberg, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and the mind-body problem, in A-T. Tymieniecka (Ed), Analectica Husserlania XCIV, pp. 11-32, 2007. Whilst Grünberg’s advice is specifically related to the problem addressed in his essay, we may remember also Nietzsche’ similar injunction.

1.5.1 Husserlian Intentionality

Let us suppose, as an example of intentionality, that I, newly a teenager, encounter

my uncle at my grandma’s house and go to greet him with a kiss. ‘Ah Peter’ he says, ‘I must

shake your hand; I can kiss you no longer for you are now a young man’. Dutifully, with some

sense of loss and puzzlement, I shake his hand. I am it seems a ‘young man’ now. My

intentionality towards my uncle is that of love-and-respect-towards, but it has been arrested

in its threading-out towards its intended object by the intersubjective intention of another.

What is the ‘object’ I am intending towards? It is my uncle as Uncle.

Though he was a chartered accountant, I did not of course submit to him my

business finances for auditing; I bought him daft presents at Christmas and met him at

family reunions. Let us call the intention in one sense familial-love and the ideal reality

encountered, familial relationship. The wintery light entering the sash window or the faded

green upholstery on my grandma’s wing-back chair provided a background but were not

themselves intentional.

The meaning encountered here is that of familial-loving, the puzzling, the awakening,

the growing-up… each in a Husserlian sense has its instance in the particular intentional

acts present in my encounter. Awakening (to my sense of ownness) satisfies Husserl’s sense

of an intuitive presentation and so the ‘object’, which is my presence in the world, is constituted

in intentionality.

Remember that Husserl insists that ’the object never coincides with the meaning.

Both only pertain to an expression ‘in virtue of the mental acts which give it sense.’38 There

is always something surplus to the intentional act and this intentionality goes beyond any

act of the will alone; it includes the unexpected disruption of my ownness necessarily aligned

to, and measured against, another’s sense of ‘isness’.

There is a glimpse here of the temporality central to Husserl. My uncle altered my

perception of the ‘subject-object’ I am, and did so temporally. I became a young man, and in

these intentional moments grew older at a pace divergent from ‘objective’ time; I aged

according to the lived-time of intersubjectivity. Reflecting afterwards, in the ‘natural

attitude’, on that past familial moment (the reaching forward to kiss my uncle), my ever-

changing motility sometimes affirmed childlikeness, sometimes adolescence, thus offering

me conflicting clues; my grandma’s kiss; my physical stature compared with cousins; the

‘breaking’ of my voice. I did not yet know what a ‘young man’ was,39 nevertheless maturity

accrued to my identity.

38 Husserl, Logical Investigations Vol., I, (1970a) (Trans.) J. N. Findlay, New York, Humanities Press, in J. N. Mohanty, ‘Intentionality’, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ibid, 2009, 70 39 In a Heideggerian sense I began to live in the light of my future; ‘grown-upness’ became my new authenticity and I began to be a young man.

Husserl argues in Ideas I, that the primal experience from which all other

experiencing acts derive a major part of their grounding force is perception,40and later

endeavours to identify the relation between ‘judgements and the underlying ‘pre-linguistic’

experiences that make them possible’.41 The ‘primary contents’, otherwise known as hyletic

data, might be regarded as my uncle’s drawing back from my kiss, the firmness of his hand-

shake and the ‘kind’ but ‘condescending’ tone of his voice. The meanings conferred on these

‘primary contents’ I have described as a feature of the Lifeworld foreground in which they

necessarily occur; meanings such as ‘my family’s expectations have changed’ or ‘English

males, unlike the French, greet each other with a manly hand-shake and so should I’. The

thwarting of my intersubjective intentionality through my uncle’s unexpected reticence

disclosed to me my identity, in my conscious intentions, my pre-reflective intentionality and

my uncle’s alterity.

Critical then to Husserl’s contributory insight into the Landscape of Being is his

understanding of intentionality as that which ‘constitutes the object by conferring meaning

upon the non-intentional stuff or hyle’.42 Central to this is the observation that there is more

to any object than the perspective we see, for we somehow comprehend more than we see.43

Husserl’s pioneering analysis, which is a rebuttal of the empiricist theory of perception,

reappears and is developed in Merleau-Ponty.44

1.5.2 Merleau-Pontian Intentionality

Merleau-Ponty, in his discussion of ‘motor-intentionality’, argues that without

forethought, our motor-intentional preparedness for hidden aspects of an object, the handle

on the reverse side of my uncle’s tea-cup say, is positive but indeterminate.45 I will cope

inadequately with the cup furthermore if the handle does not correspond to the anticipatory

shaping of my body to engage with it.46

The pursing of my lips to kiss, the rising up onto my toes and leaning toward my

uncle, each illustrate this unconscious reflexivity. These unthought intentionalities toward

the indeterminate are learned but eventually habitual in character. Merleau-Ponty terms this

40 Husserl, in Sean D. Kelly, ‘Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology’, in The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, (Eds.) Robert C. Solomon and David Sherman, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 117 41 Husserl, Experience and Judgement, in Kelly, ibid 42 J. N. Mohanty, Intentionality, ibid, 73 43 This intuition supplies the distinction between a perspective as ‘the façade of a thing’, and as an adumbration, a perspective interpreted as one aspect of a transcendent object that goes beyond our perception. 44 Kelly, 2003, ibid, 119 45 Kelly, 2003, ibid, 135 46 One can see at this basic level a harmonisation of significance and purpose in such an act..

original lived experience of the world ‘operative intentionality’, a term found also in

Husserl’s Crisis.47 The primacy of operative intentionality implies that whatever drives

identity, it occurs in an intentionality both conscious and unconscious; nevertheless, and

importantly, there is but one ‘intentionality’ despite the various modes of its appearing.

As I have noted already, for Merleau-Ponty ‘the body-subject is not a thing’, it is

importantly, ‘an intentional movement directed towards the object’.48 Of significance is his

contention that this intentionality does not harness the body, it is not ‘a handmaid of

consciousness, transporting the body…’49 but it is rather the intentionality of motility itself

which confers upon the world the primary meaning it has. This intentionality too I contend,

is employed purposively in search of significance therefore.

When as a child I crossed the room to greet my uncle, I gave no speculative thought

to the technique of walking, the direction I must travel, nor indeed did I expect my uncle to

be a hologram or his seat to be made of cheese. In fact as Merleau-Ponty insists, the very

pathologies which necessitate such artificial forethought disclose to us the fundamentality of

this motor capacity.

There is fruitful agreement here with Husserl, for identity is also always more than is

perceived. Just as I perceived my uncle as tall and middle aged, I might also encounter in

my ‘uncle’, ‘diligent father’, ‘industrious businessman’ or ‘thoughtful lay-preacher’. In our

embodied intentionality ‘we are through and through compounded of relationships with the

world’50 though as Husserl would put it, these relationships too are adumbrated.

1.5.3 Heideggerian Intentionality

Initially Heidegger was captivated by Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and isolated the

concept of ‘intentionality’ for special attention.51 It is suggested that Heidegger’s reading led

him to attribute to Husserl an understanding of intentionality as comportment-towards.52

Heidegger, transforming as he reads of course, nevertheless reproached Husserl for being

side-tracked in his subsequent Ideas into a rehearsal of Platonic-Cartesian notions for the

sake of a scientific apocdicity.53

Heidegger asserted that Husserl had misinterpreted intentionality. It cannot be an

47 Husserl, Crisis, in Mohanty, ibid, 74 48 Mohanty, ibid 49 Merleau-Ponty, PP, ibid, 139, in Mohanty ibid 50 Merleau-Ponty, PP, ibid, in Mohanty, ibid, 76 51 Mohanty, ibid, 2009, 73 52 Pöggeler, O. Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, (Trans.) Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber, New York, Humanity Books, 1963/1991, 268 53 Ibid, the criticism from Heidegger occurs in his summer lectures 1925, published as Prologomena zur Geschicte des Zeitbegriffs

extant relation between two things extant, a psychological subject and a physical object.54

Because Heidegger particularises intentionality as a property immanent to the subject, he

must then explain how intentionality reaches to the object. He rejects the notion apparent in

Husserl that the objects of intentionality themselves must be immanent to the subject too.

Heidegger concludes that intentionality itself is neither objective nor subjective but prior to

either.55 If, as I argue, intentionality is essential to identity, then identity in the Questioning

Being also straddles subjectivity and objectivity and may be said therefore to be neither and

both.

Heidegger attempts to overcome Husserlian Intentionality and consequently adopts

a more radical perspective. How does the subject break out of its immanent constitution of a

world? His solution introduces intersubjective intentionality into the Landscape of Being. The

ontological constitution of the subject itself is intentionality; what is more, ‘It is the nature of

Dasein that it exists in such a way that it is ‘always already with other beings’.’56 Consequently,

the bridge to things in the world, which Husserl’s intentionality completes unconvincingly,

is enabled by the fact that for Heidegger Dasein’s nature is transcendence. Whereas Husserl

and Merleau-Ponty find a primacy in some form or other in intentionality, for Heidegger

intentionality is the by-product, the surface phenomenon of a deeper ontological structure.

Intentionality is intersubjective but what is more it discloses to us our absolute temporality.

1.6 Tetheredness and intentionality

“The intuition of essences, their recognition, and their phenomenological description, have been considered the most conspicuous, original, and productive contributions of phenomenology to philosophy…”

Fritz Kaufmann, in The Phenomenological approach to History

I have outlined above my understanding of an essential structure underpinning the

identity of the Questioning Being regardless of the particular meaning-clusters each

individual accrues.57 Identity is derivative of intentionality that both expresses, and attempts

to fulfil, a primordial desire for significance and capacity for purpose singular to each

individual Questioning Being. I have also noted that one’s identity-sense, registered

throughout one’s embodied being, is that of an existential audit, what might be expressed as

operative, both tacitly and explicitly, in a manner resonant with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘maximum

grip’. I, in my whole being, in an intersubjectively intentional engagement with the world,

54 Heidegger, BPP, 60, in Mohanty, ibid, 73 55 Mohanty, ibid 56 Heidegger, BPP, 157, in Mohanty, ibid, 73 57 Once that Intentionality is explicitly delineated as a necessarily embodied intentionality embedded in the human world which is rendered singular by the fact of, and the manner in which it fulfils, a desire for significance and capacity for purpose it will be seen to be the essential structure of identity.

seek to harmonise in order to maximise meaning, the shared human world with those

aspects of the Lifeworld I appropriate for myself.

In due course I explore in more detail the thwarting of an individual’s efforts to

achieve this optimal alliance with its own Lifeworld and the world of the Other, showing

that one’s identity is revealed most specifically in the human experiences of enforced-

waiting and of exploration. The thwarting of my intentionality towards the world, and its

consequent realignment, brings home to me who and what I am. Here however I wish to

consider in more detail the profound tetheredness to the world that the Questioning Being is

necessarily constrained by.

Being embedded in the world does not of course merely mean that the Questioning

Being is dependent on air to breathe or on the sun for warmth, though certainly our

physiology and the world’s physics combine to set the parameters of our lives. Fundamental

to the Landscape of Being is a mandatory human ‘thrownness’ which must nevertheless be

appropriated authentically for oneself. More than this the Questioning Being is tied to the

foreground Lifeworld, so calibrated to the world that even its questioning protests are

derivative of that world’s concepts and imperatives, and tied to its empirical background

because hurricanes and droughts are rarely mere ‘natural phenomena’ and far more often

‘natural disasters’.

Heidegger explores this human tetheredness as correlative to our concernful

dwelling and ‘Care’. We dwell in the world tethered to it in concernful moods that commit

us in some way to relationship with it. Like it or not, the Questioning Being, even as it

interrogates existence finds already that it has adopted a stance, pre-empted questioning,

and taken the plunge concernfully this way or that. ‘In having a mood, Dasein is always

disclosed moodwise as that entity to which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in

this way it has been delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be.’58 The world,

which it has not chosen nor constituted, does indeed matter to the Questioning Being

because of the ubiquitous ‘state-of-mind’ or affectedness59 which accompanies its every

move. Every world-moment is of potential significance and is potentially purposeful.

In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that ‘The entity which is essentially constituted

by Being-in-the-world is itself in every case its there…’.60 In the fundamental interestedness

or ‘state of mind’ of human living, ‘Dasein is always brought before itself and has always

found itself… in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has’.61 Far from providing an

existential compass for life which is resistant to bias, an unfettered Sartrian freedom, or an

58 Heidegger, M. BT, (Trans.) John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 1962/2006, 173 59 Malpas, J. Heidegger’s Topology, Being, Place World, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2008, 99. Malpas notes that whereas Macquarrie and Robinson translate ‘affectedness’ as ‘state-of-mind’ Stambaugh translates it as ‘attunement’. 60 Heidegger, M. BT, ibid, 1962/2006, 171 61 Heidegger, M. BT, ibid, 1962/2006, 174

aloof Husserlian forensic, Heidegger insists that my deseverant-directional-and-concernful

bearings in the world are tethered to my Lifeworld and its binding commitments. I look to

the world to provide significance for me, to serve my purposes… as if it were obliged to do so.

The Questioning Being is not ‘closed off’ from the world, consequently the world

neither furnishes existential co-ordinates I can steer by dispassionately, nor does it leave me

untouched. The background of the empirical world, forces its way into the foreground of my

life, through what Merleau-Ponty has alternatively described as its motivations. I am as

evocatively tethered to the world as is my shadow to me.

Even as I shake my fist at the situatedness of my life I reveal the situatedness of my

life more distinctly; our moods are exemplified by a ‘disclosive ‘self’-attunement’ and this is

because ‘Dasein’s capacity to encounter objects as ready-to-hand involves grasping them in

relation to its own possibilities-for-Being’.62 Nevertheless, whilst I jump and twist as a kite

does with the wind, I am vividly disclosing the potency of that wind. Heidegger prompts us

to see that the concernful tetheredness of the Subject to the world evokes a disclosure of how

the world really is when one is tethered to it.

Just as Merleau-Ponty has prompted an acknowledgement that motility is prior to

rational comprehension of the world, so Heidegger is insisting that one’s ‘moods are thus

ontologically prior to any form of mental directedness’.63 Indeed, ‘a mood-less Dasein would

not be Dasein’.64

Inevitably then, tetheredness clothes human experience in moods or states of mind.

Some moods Heidegger insisted, more fundamental than others, such as anxiety, tell us

more about ourselves than about the world because their prompt ‘is nothing and nowhere’;65

in this way they are indicative of the structure of being in the world. If this is indeed true,

then fulfilment and discontent are equally moods of this fundamental kind.

Suppose that I am shaving before leaving for work. I have a secure job teaching

intelligent, amiable students an interesting programme of learning. If I look back over the

course of my career I can as easily experience fulfilment or discontent. The evidence is

ambiguous. I may see the ageing in my face as indicative of maturity or alternatively of

encroaching incapacity. I may regard my morning weariness as indicative of the productive

‘rough and tumble’ of teaching or of reluctance to ratchet up the effort for another day’s

work. I may conclude that I should feel fulfilled yet at the same the tenseness in my body

belies my reasoning. Perhaps some other unnamed aspect of my life is robbing me of

fulfilment, the wish for a simpler life, fear of neglecting my role as a father, or a feeling of

being misunderstood by my employers. Perhaps it is just the grey, leaden sky outside the

62 Mulhall, S. Heidegger and Being and Time, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005, 77 63 Han-Pile, B. ‘Affectivity’, in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, (Eds.) Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 245 64 Han-Pile, ibid 65 Heidegger, M, BT, §40, 231

window that draws from me an enigmatic sigh. As the often inconclusive audit of my life

reveals, conferred identity must be weighed for significance and purpose, and my moods

somehow owned.

The reader may argue however, that I have overlooked a significant aspect of

Heidegger’s account of the unique mood of anxiety. According to Heidegger, anxiety

renders the entities of the world of little relevance, in doing so it brings forward the

worldhood of the world and its possibilities whilst disclosing to us the groundlessness of

our ultimate choices.66 But these characteristics are shared by discontent and fulfilment too;

as a result of the former for example, one may suddenly renounce the lure of exotic foreign

travel and long instead for home; one may find one’s amassed fortune is but a hollow

victory and feel unfulfilled. Alternatively fulfilment may cause one to disavow the lure of

further exotic travel and to decide to settle where one is abroad. Likewise, one may feel

fulfilled in one’s entrepreneurial efforts and lose the drive to ‘burn the candle at both ends’

in pursuit of additional wealth. Like anxiety, fulfilment and discontent disclose oneself to

oneself irrespective of the world’s specificity.

Beneath the judgement that one’s decisions are groundless, because of the arbitrary

pull of moods such as anxiety, discontent or fulfilment, is an attempted auditing of one’s

thwarted harmonisation of the world’s meaning, in terms of significance and purpose which

is indicative of an expectation that significance or purpose is to be found. A negative verdict

returned, on the productivity or utility, or on the meaningfulness or significance, of some

choice or other, does not mean that purpose or significance is no longer the issue; it means

that the desire for significance has not been fulfilled or its tension with one’s capacity for

purpose has not been resolved. Discontent and fulfilment are consequently prompts, like

anxiety, that are ‘nothing and nowhere’, and are equally indicative of the structure of being-

in-the-world as that of an essential questioning.

Heidegger aligns the mood, or state of mind of anxiety, with Dasein’s realisation of its

finitude. The inevitability and ownness of one’s death is disclosed in anxiety. ‘Dasein’s

anxiety can bring it face to face with the thrownness of its ‘that it is there’ and it is the reality

check that puts one’s possibilities, and the finitude in which one can realise them into

proportion.67 But this is not all. Heidegger uses the term significance to denote that which is

an authentic disclosure of what is for the being that cannot help but care about the outcome.

Death brings home the true significance, he implies, of the choices one makes, choices that

would otherwise be ungrounded. In my view, discontent and fulfilment also elucidate the

Questioning Being’s yearning that one’s life might not be in vain by the time it is done.

This individuation of one’s choices, on the basis of signification found in the

66 Han-Pile, B. ibid, 246 67 Heidegger, BT, ibid, §53, 311

inevitability of death, assumes that the disclosure of significance is a means to authenticity

and resoluteness in Dasein. As one scholar puts it, ‘Mortality is behind our sense of finitude,

and the recognition of finitude is what first makes some things matter more than others’.68 It

has been argued that because of the limitations of Dasein’s ‘future projection of possibilities’,

Dasein can avoid that indecision whereby ‘every set of possibilities would be open to it and

this would mean that nothing would stand out for Dasein as significant’.69

Whilst I recognise the focus that finitude brings to one’s choices, I doubt that the

paucity of time one has in which to accomplish a range of projects, is alone sufficient to

render some projects more significant than others. All things being equal I am unlikely to

build a cathedral out of matchsticks or do a Master’s degree in Crochet even if the threat of

death were exceedingly remote or somehow not a certainty. Significance comes from

somewhere else. In my view Heidegger’s discussion of Being-towards-death conflates the

justification one needs for one’s choices with the provocation one needs to get on and choose.

As death is approaching I am not assisted in my choosing by the tyranny of the urgent but

by the functionality or enrichment my choices offer me.

I contend therefore that essential to the Questioning Being is the desire for

significance and capacity for purpose that discerns the threat death represents to this quest.

Whilst death invokes a sense of urgency, it is the bivalent primordial drive I have posited

which reveals its import. If my identity is an accretion of meaning that I must appropriate

from my Lifeworld possibilities, then significance may well entail accomplishment of my

favourite projects prior to death; however it may be to prepare for death with mindfulness

before a cloud of witnesses; it may be to escape finitude in the anaesthetising distraction of

‘the they’ or alternatively some kind of hedonistic Epicureanism; it may be to embrace death

and eternal recurrence as a Nietzschian means to mastery; it may be to find in death as

martyrdom the very significance one seeks. Being-towards-death is the disclosure that the

human being cares whether life in toto has purpose and significance, because successful

appropriation of that which offers them, holds out the reward of authenticity.

1.7 Summary conclusion

“I think that a human being is a noun, something with a brain, blood, cells and a 3D object. However, a self is a sort of verb, so you are a self, a self is not a thing, a self is what you can be…”

E. W. Year 8 student aged 12 years, Chelmsford, England

I have argued that the Questioning Being is distinct from other animals and

68 Hoy, D. C. ‘Death’, in A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, (Eds.) Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 283 69 Malpas, J. ‘Martin Heidegger’, in (Eds.) Robert C. Solomon and David Sherman, The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 154

differentiated within its species by the accretion of meaning that accrues to its life and is

appropriated by it. I have described how the primordial desire for significance and capacity

for purpose, though subject to its own inner tensions, is a bivalent motivational drive

enabling one to own one’s singular presence in a shared world.

I have introduced the human world as an empirical background, whose meaning-

filled foreground becomes the intersubjective milieu in which self-definition takes place.

This equiprimordial constellation, comprising embodiment, intersubjective intentionality

and worldly embeddedness I have defined as the Landscape of Being; a necessary

explanatory foundation enabling human singularity to occur. The Questioning Being I have

argued, sensing its identity in all of its being, maintains an ongoing existential audit of its

harmonising efforts and the identity that it endeavours to curate. I have argued finally, that

the Questioning Being, in its recursive interaction with all that is, is existentially tethered to

the world. In the next chapter I explore more extensively the Lifeworld in which the Landscape

of Being is to be found. I evaluate Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied intentionality and

the way that this primacy of perception overturns mediational epistemology. I also consider

whether an inquiry such as this one, undertaken as it is by the Questioning Being, is able to

return to the ‘things themselves’ without the Husserlian epoché. Finally, I evaluate the

aspiration, derived from its questioning essence, that the Questioning Being sustains of

transcending its embodied and worldly tetheredness.