Chapter 3: Significance and Purpose: identity won and lost

“Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.”

Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception

2.1 Introduction

“…the concept of the purposiveness that nature displays in its products must be one that, while not pertaining to the determination of objects themselves, is nevertheless a subjective principle that reason has for our judgement, since this principle is necessary for human judgement in dealing with nature.”

Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgement

In the previous chapter I explored the manner in which the Questioning Being is

embodied in the empirical world, a manner that is necessarily concernful because it is at all

times embedded in the Lifeworld of human meaning that it formulates and appropriates.

The whole world of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and primordial

experience of the world necessarily confers upon the world any significance and purposive

value it has such as this. Purpose and Significance, though not the world’s facticity, reside in

the Questioning Being which constructs them out of the things at hand in the world. It does

so because it cannot do otherwise. The Questioning Being derives its coordinates, those

measurements by which it charts its precarious way through the Landscape of Being, from the

purpose and significance it extracts from the intersubjective world. This orienteering is both

tacitly and explicitly undertaken.

It may be seen furthermore, that one’s identity-sense is not merely an audit for the

present moment, of the extent to which one has successfully harmonised one’s primordial

desire for significance and capacity for purpose with the Lifeworld. It is also an audit of this

required equilibrium as the means for making one’s way in the world into the future. This

equilibrium governs one’s self-understanding, one’s sense of place in the intersubjective

world and the sense of continuity one maintains, even as one changes and the world around

changes too.

It has become clear that science is indeed, for all its description of fundamental

atomistic components, a second-order expression1 of the things the Questioning Being finds

in its world of experience. Science offers us nevertheless a frame of purposive-reference, if

we can only resist the accoutrement of an apparently well-fitting ‘garb of ideas’2 that

1 Merleau-Ponty, M. PP, 2006, ibid, ix 2 Husserl, E. Crisis, 1970, ibid, Part II, 51

calcifies (something analogous to the biblical King David’s impeding armour).3 This

purposive-reference has the potential to complement the frame of significance-reference that

engagement with the world engenders. Once again, personally resolving the profound

tension between scientific truths and existential truths is a task that falls to one’s identity-

sense, and one scholar has identified the history of ideas since the nineteenth century in the

light of this identity crisis saying, ‘Positivist man and Existentialist man are no doubt

offspring of the same parent epoch, but somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are

divided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice they make of their own being.’4

In this chapter I examine these two primary structures of human identity, the desire

for significance and the capacity for purpose, and focus more extensively upon the tension

between them. As Kant has contended, the purposiveness of human judgement regarding

the natural world, though a regulative rather than a constitutive principle, is nevertheless

indicative of the structure of human thought.5 Indeed elsewhere, Kant argued that things in

the world have significance or value too because, and only because, human agents confer it

upon them.6

With reference to identity I wish to argue that because of the capacity for purpose

one possesses, one is predisposed to accept functionality as a validating aspect of one’s life

and its paraphernalia. One is also predisposed to allow one’s regard for this capacity to

obscure the significance each person desires, or to postpone indefinitely one’s own

acquisition of it. Thus too often, purposefulness is accomplished at the cost of significance.

I can impart, both to my own life and to the life of the Other, significance as an end-

in-itself, or I can appropriate the Other as purposeful for my own ends. If Kant is right that

we impose an ought upon each is that we find, then because this purposiveness is a capacity

essential to the Questioning Being, we will not only identify purpose in things but impose it

upon them too. Such an imposition of purposiveness however initiates a struggle. A struggle

to harmonise purposiveness with the significance humans desire; experienced as a

deficiency, the human desire for significance is a frailty before ever its accomplishment becomes a

strength. Illustrative of human history in so many ways therefore, is the preeminent

dominance of purposiveness as an essential human trait over the desire for significance

which speaks of an essential human lack.

One’s need for as yet unattained significance can devalue the purposefulness one has

attained too; consider the junior trainee who is unteachable because of a desire for

advancement; the parent who breaks up the family home to find affirmation in an extra-

3 I Samuel 17: 33-40, NIV 4 Barrett, W. Irrational Man; A Study in Existential Philosophy, London, Heinemann, 1972, 19 5 Kant, I. (Ed.) A. Wood, Rethinking the Western Tradition; Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, 10 6 Kant, I. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Rachels, J. The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 1993, 129

marital affair; the accomplished professional who wagers it all on a bid for acclaim.7

Human identity I hold to be the accretion of meaning that attaches to one’s life

through an appropriation of the world. It is gained in the significance and purpose afforded to

one’s life on the basis of the way one proceeds through life. This accretion of meaning is not

merely reactionary however, it is in part anticipatory. Just as ‘philosophical’ judgement,

whether amateur or vocational, attributes an ought of significance to each human life, so

‘scientific’ judgement, whether amateur or vocational, attributes a purposive ought. Identity

may be won in the accretion of significant and purposive meaning to one’s life, and lost in

an imbalance between these two structural necessities. The terrain in which this tension is to

be resolved of course is the Landscape of Being; the embodied, intersubjectively intentional

embedded life of each interdependent Questioning Being.

Of course it is not only in the service of the natural sciences that purposiveness is

key. In business, in politics and in economics also, one finds this to be the case. My point is

that singular identity is embodied in the necessary situated resolution of tension between

the reduction of human meaning to purpose and the elevation of human meaning to

significance.

Heidegger, well known for his insight into the concernfulness of situated existence,

argues that things in the world are intrinsically purposeless. Whether a Kantian

purposiveness or a Heideggerian equipmental suitability is adduced, this attributed utility is

the work of human judgement most distinctly encountered in scientific rationality. In a

sense it is the purposive capacity of the Questioning Being that allows all things in the world

to be, at least potentially, ready-to-hand. It is the significance desired, and intersubjectively

afforded the Other, that allows the Other to be present-at-hand and invites them to

reciprocate. Neither is essential to any ‘thing’ in the world of itself, for both significance and

purpose are human assignations.

In his later writings Heidegger brings back to our attention the fact that though the

Questioning Being necessarily interrogates the world for its significance and purpose, things

in the world ‘are not changed by our questioning’.8 The ‘psychospiritual process in us’ that

becomes a collaborative intersubjective endeavour, call it science or philosophy, history or

art, plays itself out without ontological impact on beings themselves.9 With one exception.

7 Descartes even, by consensus hailed as the father of modern philosophy, has been described as that ‘minotaur’ the young Heidegger opposed with Aristotelian ammunition. The Cartesian rationalist project with its dualist cul-de-sac might be construed as just such an overbalance which emphasises reasonable significance to the detriment of demonstrable functionality and purpose. (Krell, D. F. General Introduction, in Heidegger: Basic Writings, (Ed.) David Farrell Krell, London, Routledge, 2011, xxv). 8 Heidegger, M. The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics, in (Trans.) Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000, 31 9 Heidegger, M. The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics, ibid, 2000, 31

The Questioning Being itself is both defined and re-aligned by this interrogative process. We

change ourselves in answer to our world-questions. Correspondingly, this implies that the

Questioning Being is free to select its ‘way to be’ in the world.

2.2 The role of human freedom in the expression of human “What my freedom cannot determine is whether the rock ‘to be scaled’ will or will not lend itself to scaling. This is part of the brute being of the rock.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothing

I have been arguing that the primordial determining structure of human identity is a

defining desire for significance and capacity for purpose. I have contended furthermore that

there is an inherent and generally uncomfortable tension between these equiprimordial

elements. One can see diversely in the phenomenological analysis of the human condition in

both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, an indebtedness to unknowing purposive experiences in the

world which habitually guide ones lived engagement with it. One can also identify an

indebtedness to a guiding interpretive framework which sifts these experiences for life’s

significance. Both posit the interplay of primordial structures of human ‘being-in-the-world’,

and an interpretation of our ‘lived’ relationship to the natural world, to other persons,

history and culture, which is somehow ‘primordial to any subsequent reflection’ or the

‘explanatory accounts of the natural sciences’.10 Each perceive a delicate balance between the

recovery of such hidden and unknowing experiences and knowing comprehension of

them.11

Whether or not one completely endorses what Sartre and Merleau-Ponty tell us,

certainly they show, in their analysis and in their analysing, that human identity

comprehends and harmonises the features of its situatedness via some kind of negotiation

between purpose and significance. Human identity is singularly revealed in the way that

this harmonising task is resolved. In this section I subject their existential analyses to this

reading.

For Merleau-Ponty, being-with describes embeddedness in the world. His work is

developed around the insight that human being-in-the-world forms a unifying structure

within which individual self-consciousness arises, and within which the perceptive and

active encounter with others, with natural things, and with historical-cultural practice, must

be seen to take place. A dialectical interconnectedness between the elements of the ‘synergic

system’ ‘self’-others-world is the fundamental reality posited.12

10 Compton, J. J. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Human Freedom, in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 10, Seventy-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct., 1982), 577 11 Compton, J. J. ibid 12 Compton, 578

Interconnectedness is not apparent in Sartre however, for whom being-in-the-world

constitutes a place of fragmentation. Whereas for Merleau-Ponty apparent human freedom

must accommodate reciprocity with the environment, in Sartre negativity, and alienation

epitomised by the nondialectical opposition between human consciousness as for-it-self and

being-in-it-self, is the fundamental reality. 13 Being-in-the-world is conceived distinctly, even

contradictorily, in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘interpretive frameworks’.14

If my identity develops as a consequence of the accretion of meaning that attaches to

my life within the world, and if this results from an appropriation of the world that is truly

mine, then in some sense I must be free. I must be free to choose this over that, to transcend

my situatedness, to resist my urges and veto my instincts. What can these two

phenomenologists disclose about the role of human freedom in the experience and

expression of human identity? Interestingly, Sartre offers a test-case by which to understand

his existential observations, a test-case which receives a phenomenological response from

Merleau-Ponty.

For Sartre a situation gains significance in the light of freedom’s purposive

unfettered choice, whereas for Merleau-Ponty the choice gains significance from the

purposive recursivity one has with one’s situation; for the former the situation is revealed in

the choosing, as by implication is one’s identity, for the latter the choosing is revealed in

situatedness and therefore identity is revealed in one’s situated choosing.

Thus for Sartre, when the situation is measured for its fit against one’s freely

projected existential goals, the situation is found to be wanting or promising. Its

motivational character for an agent is derived from this measure of suitability. The

motivations that engender actions therefore are firstly an agent's free intentions, and then,

the specific features of the situation understood as significant to them. Sartre acknowledges

a reciprocity at work between one’s free intentionality and one’s situation; ‘Human-reality

everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these

resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human-

reality is’.15

For Merleau-Ponty this is unconvincing. Existential goals alone do not grant

significance to the specific features of life’s situations, for prior to this conscious meaning-

making one is already always engaged with the world. Our freedom does not disregard but

rather ‘gears’ itself to the specifics of any situation. This adaptation is consequently

derivative of the situation and the means by which our motivated actions arise. Human

freedom is contingent then upon one’s life situations and its expressive parameters are

circumscribed by them. In a purposive sense motives are prompted by the situation even if

13 Compton ibid 14 ibid 15 Sartre, J. P. Being and Nothingness, 489, in Compton

they are not to be construed as the efficient causes of our actions;16 these motivations are

intentionally significant internal prompts.

Sartre’s test-case focuses on a hypothetical climber considering a crag and the

feasibility of climbing it as an analogy for life’s choices; the natural environment offers a

situation which is responsive to the climber’s projected intentionality. The crag accordingly

appears ‘not scalable;’17 ’Thus the rock is carved out on the ground of the world by the effect

of the initial choice of my freedom’ he says.18 The rock-face acquires significance from the

climber’s purposive intentions though Sartre acknowledges that such human freedom

cannot determine ‘whether the rock ‘to be scaled’ will or will not lend itself to scaling. This is

part of the brute being of the rock.’19 Nevertheless, though the brute in-itself of the rock-face

stands as an external ‘basic reality’, it possesses no determinate character as motive for the

climber; resisting or cooperating are not intrinsic to the in-it-self but constituted by or

disclosed in the climber’s projecting freedom. Describing a dynamic relation between the

agent and the situation, which he terms ‘the coefficient of adversity of the given’, Sartre

states that ‘The rock will not be an obstacle if I wish at any cost to arrive at the top of the

mountain…’ it will discourage me however ‘if I have freely fixed limits to my desire of

making the projected climb.’20 I choose, the world responds, and external to me there can be

no limitation to my free choice.

Though Merleau-Ponty concedes that a rock’s unclimbable status, or indeed any

other attributed status, is necessarily derived from human meaning-making, even without

conscious intentionality such as a decision to climb them, ‘these mountains appear high to

me, because they exceed my body's power to take them in its stride....’21 Whilst I find it

convincing that underpinning my identity-sense there is a living body or natural ‘self’

‘which does not budge from its terrestrial situation and which constantly adumbrates

absolute valuations’, too simple a telling of Merleau-Ponty’s position will not account for

new and puzzling situations my unthinking embodied intentionality cannot resolve and

which consequently arrest my attention. Indeed, such a telling would fail to recognise my

conscious compensation, prior to a situation, for my known genetic, psychological or

cultural dispositions that experience, or others, construe to be potentially controlling. Indeed

this ‘attending to’ seems altogether different from the perceptive attention posited here.

Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty, rightly in my view, reinstates the body alerting us to

the prethetic role of the intentional arc saying, ‘Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain

around me intentions which are not dependent upon my decisions and which affect my

16 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 50, in Compton 17 Sartre, J. P. BN, 488, in Compton, ibid, 581 18 Sartre, ibid 19 Sartre, 488, in Compton, ibid 20 Sartre, ibid, in Compton, ibid, 582 21 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 439-40, in Compton, ibid, 582

surroundings in a way which I do not choose.... not of my own making, they originate from

outside me, and I am not surprised to find them in all psychophysical subjects organized as I

am’.22 The efficacy of this intentional arc is not a consistent, determinable factor even so; a

mindful person may override their state of being, perhaps having acquired from childhood a

disposition that mistrusts or rationalises embodied intentionality, or even despises the

body’s promptings. Consequently, though Sartre may wrongly assume that a transcendent

human presence affords meaning to a world, which it is unfettered by, Merleau-Ponty

overlooks the human capacity to be driven by calculated or calibrated decisions from a very

early age. Though we may indeed comprise ‘systems of body intentions’ before being

persons, our identity-sense is also holistically attuned and our habitual engagement with the

world may develop, over time, reluctance to move intuitively without conscious assessment

of an environment.

In the main however I accept that in a basic way our embodied interests and skills

pre-structure our interactions with the environment. Though a Heideggerian projective or

purposive intending in the world eventually dominates, at a pre-thinking perceptual level

we can be sensitive to the initial hindrances or enablings that things entail for us. Why

otherwise do tall people stoop or insecure people unwittingly sit facing the door through

which newcomers enter? The Questioning Being must recursively engage with the

environment prior to thought or conscious recalibration. Its freedom is constrained by this

recursivity.

The key to the divergent emphases of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty is of course in the

weighting given to embodiment. Though Sartre regards human beings as embodied subjects

whose lives are only comprehensible as persons situated contingently within time and place

within the world, Merleau-Ponty regards embodiment as a primordial embodied disposition

wherein situations motivate and responses are generally ready-made.

In Sartre’s fable of the hiker, a walker unlike his companion, after hours of walking

in the hot sun, gives up, throws his rucksack down, and lies beside it. Both thinkers could

accept the cause to be the hiker’s singular decision to quit rather than the external effects of

pain or fatigue. After all, hikers engage with pain and fatigue differently. Both Sartre and

Merleau-Ponty would agree that the fable affirms that while the hiker could have behaved

differently, doing so would entail them modifying their way of being in the world.

Sartre regards the human being as entirely free so to disengage from this way of

being, whereas Merleau-Ponty posits an accretion of meaning which attaches to a person

and calls this the ‘sedimentation of our life’. Borrowing from Husserl, he argues for a stance

towards the world which due to its repeated reinforcement acquires a ‘favoured status’ for

us, so for example, an inferiority complex which has been operative and reinforced for

22 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 439-40 in Compton, ibid

twenty years is habituated and entrenched.23 Because Sartre disputes that anything outside

of freedom can restrict it our lives are characterised and progressed by unfettered specific

choices. For Merleau-Ponty however, generalities and probability are phenomena which

furnish diverse ways in which I can ’make my abode in’ attitudes and patterns of action

which ‘genuinely incline although they do not compel’.24 Though I may be an accomplished

climber I may be defeatist, cautious, full of bravado, or obsessively methodical. My ‘abode’

in an inherited or habituated accretion of meaning renders determining factors something

internal I must work with rather than something external I must work against. This

embodied middle-way, suspended between the psychic and the physiological, Merleau-

Ponty recognises as ‘categorically impossible’ for Sartre's ontology.25

Sartrian freedom irons out the textures of embedded lived existence such as my self-

esteem or my personal pain threshold. It denies also the extent and nature of my historical

or cultural memory; the inherent immediacy these have and how I live through them are

rendered impotent and equalised. One cannot consequently be sensitive to these experiential

textures or conceptually attuned to their dynamic contribution to existential choosing.

Contra Sartre, for Merleau-Ponty these bodily experiences are not so much a part of the

external in-itself of the world however, as experience’s textures that are intentional, already

rendered purposive or significant, and already defining in our engagement with nature.

Human identity, as I have argued, animates the accretion of meaning attaching to

each singular life; the purpose or significance one seeks in the world is coloured and shaped,

enabled and delimited by our incipient behavioural tendencies and once found, modified by

them. Pain, fatigue, self-esteem and world-awareness for example, in varying ways give

character and direction to our activity. My interaction with this experiential texture is

therefore an internal motivation more foundational than a thought-through response;

indeed, I identify myself in its tendencies.

Human freedom rests upon our harnessing of involuntary body intentions which

contribute to the formation of generalised attitudes toward the world, these in turn comprise

the involuntary, but constantly reviewed background for specific choices. Freedom

contributes to identity in its appropriation of the background array of involuntary

intentionalities available for conscious willing. My life accrues meaning in the choices I

make, and the choices I make are demarcated by the behavioural tendencies I have inherited

or habituated in conjunction with the specific situations with which they resonate.

Of course inherited traits, habituated tendencies and generalised attitudes, as the

seedbed from which our choices grow, take time to emerge and are the gradual

23 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 441-442, in Compton, ibid, 584 24 Compton, ibid 25 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 122, in Compton, ibid

sedimentation of a recursive socio-historical process. Intersubjective embeddedness in the

world, in institutional forms such as a language, family, race, class, or nation, each with its

own history, is an essential aspect of our situatedness.

These lenses, through which we perceive the world and so appropriate it, precede

any particular choosing on our part. For Sartre however such institutional realities represent

alienation from others because each person so situated finds themselves in the presence of

meanings they did not initiate.26 Though society institutes relations of all kinds that one

inherits, for Sartre they are nevertheless maintained and appropriated as externals, admitted

as significant or allied to one’s purposes, solely through free choice.

Consider says Sartre, a labourer in 1830, who patiently endures his poverty as

inevitable. Though he can choose to acknowledge oppression of the ‘working classes’ as his

own unjust lot, it requires his adoption of a different lens of perception if his experiences are

to arouse his rebellion. Freedom must appropriate a different set of possible conditions, an

alternative horizon, attainable by revolution, against which his own condition is accordingly

signified as unbearable and avoidable.27 Thus motivating conditions are aspects of one’s

actions, not their antecedent causes. Sartre’s assessment is that a worker becomes ‘working

class’ not because of economic conditions or economic forces but through appropriation of a

transcendent stance, an opposition which brings them into the living foreground prior to the

free choice to revolt. Not so, responds Merleau-Ponty.

Sartre’s view is of course problematic and in the previous chapter I discussed the

relationship that the Questioning Being has with the ‘basic facts’ of existence. Exploitation

can steal a person’s health despite contentment with one’s lot. For Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s

account fails to explain the emergence of the labourer’s class-consciousness and the reality of

social intersubjectivity. History is seasoned with provocations to enact free choice, and this

is illustrative of the recursive exchange between generalised and individual existence;28 the

Labourer in 1830, aware of the improved working conditions afforded workers in different

trades after agitation for them, may consequently feel exploited and motivated to protest.

His life is lived in a shared world resonating with class-consciousness.

The labourer’s self-understanding as a worker or a bourgeois, is indeed aligned to

an appropriative alliance with a possible revolution and the meaning-making accompanying

it, however the labourer’s evaluation is not transcendent of his environment even if his

aspirations are, but springs from his present and past intersubjective coexistence in a shared

world.29 The Questioning Being is free within a constraining network of intersubjective

intentionalities; each human identity acquires its singularity in the place ‘between’ ‘self’ and

others rather than in existential autonomy. Interconnected at a primordial level in

26 Sartre, BN, 520, in Compton, 585 27 Sartre, BN, 435, in Compton, ibid, 586 28 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 449-50, in Compton, ibid, 586 29 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 446-7, in Compton, ibid

involuntary intentions joining us through our bodies, we collaborate and conflict, and

thereby attain conscious singularity.

Acts of freedom of course entail temporal change. For Sartre the past is in itself a

mere contingency whose meaning I appropriate in my present. Nevertheless, like Merleau-

Ponty and unlike Husserl, he recognizes that our ‘temporalization’ contains no absolute

moments. There is a structure of becoming in which the present fuses a projected future with

a retained past.30 Problematically however, this becoming does not happen to me as a

consequence of my temporal embodied and embedded existence in the world. I am instead a

pure, individualised and disembodied consciousness, and each moment is a creation

indebted to nothing outside of choice itself. Ironically this unfettered freedom renders

voluntary deliberation a ‘deception’, for nothing is ever permanently appropriated, it must

be chosen again and again.

For Merleau-Ponty it is conditioned choice precisely that is truly effective and affords

me the freedom I have. The certain significance of nature and history which my situation

offers and my identity accrues, does not limit my access to the world, but rather it is my

means of communicating with it.31 Rehabilitated in the world, the Questioning Being,

through its whole-body interrogation of experience, communes with that world in recursive

engagement. Identity is won by means of an indebted and contextual freedom, not through

the creative acts of consciousness alone, but in a recursive intentional collaboration with the

environment and others. The Questioning Being is embedded concernfully within nature

and prompted by it to express culturally and historically some of its possibilities.

3.3 Purpose and significance in the human relationship to technology

“… he was restoring, yet again, that newly pressed down/repressed earth, upon which he stands erect… the body/sex of the mother nature. He must challenge her for power for productivity. He must resurface the earth with this floor of the ideal.”

Luce Irigaray, in Any theory of the Subject

Heidegger contends that ‘questioning builds a way’.32 I have identified the human

being as the Questioning Being and, whether its interrogatory stance is an unthought

embodied response to worldly existence, or articulated in conceptual and reasoned thought,

this is how humans have made and continue to make their way in the world. It is in this

sense I employ this descriptive term rather than to imply that all humans are conversant

with the rules of logic or consciously subject their experience to sustained analysis.

30 Sartre, BN, 465-6, in Compton, ibid, 586 31 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 455, in Compton, ibid, 587 32 General Introduction by David Farrell Krell, in The Question of Technology, Heidegger; Basic Writings, (Ed,) David Farrell Krell, London, Routledge, 2008, 215

Every human person stands in some relationship to, or provocative juxtaposition

with, technology understood in the Heideggerian sense of a functional lens through which

the world is perceived. The Amazonian Indian has a place in the community defined by his

purposeful contribution as much as does the German law graduate. Everywhere life is

understood in the context of the human activity of positing ends and procuring and utilising

the means to realise them.33 Thus the building of a canoe or of a body of legislation are

intrinsically part of what technology is. Heidegger affirms that such an instrumental and

anthropological definition of technology is correct but, he asks, is this all?

Heidegger’s rather laborious discussion of Aristotle’s four causes concludes that a

thing said to be technological owes its presence to these four causes, but something else

entirely unites them all. That uniting element is poiesis, a ‘bringing-forth’,34 or the making-

apparent, of something. ‘Through bringing-forth the growing things of nature as well as

whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their

appearance’.35 Thus the fourfold cause of a thing causes it to come into appearance in

bringing-forth, in a manner which accords with them.

Is technology a revealing of what truly is? Maybe, in the sense that technology

imposes upon things a mode of revealing which obscures all else. The ‘putting to use’ of the

matter of facts in the world is a consequence of purposiveness, and so by way of example as

Heidegger contends, technology ‘puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply

energy which can be extracted and stored as such’.36

Reflection on the Kantian observation I made previously, that purposiveness is a

cognitive trait of human knowing, in conjunction with the Heideggerian observation that

technology champions a functional appropriation of the world, and Merleau-Ponty’s

positing of a pre-conscious, whole-body, functionally recursive engagement with it, combine

to reveal a dominant historiological element in the Landscape of Being whose bias is

apparent today. Human identity is constrained to appropriate a world which it predominantly

understands in utilitarian terms.

To break out of the unreasonable demand-making that expects the world and its

populace to furnish one’s purposive needs, a disruption must wean one from this profound

bias in environing culture. Awakened by such a disruption, the Questioning Being is then

forced to assert its latent desire for significance in an all-too-rare interrogation of technology

and its functionalist tunnel-vision in an effort to regain ontological equilibrium.

Increasingly in the twenty first century, despite its potent individualism, the

development of human identity is warped towards a satisfaction of its capacity for purpose

33 Heidegger, M. The Question of Technology, in Heidegger; Basic Writings, ibid, 2008, 218 34 Heidegger, QT, in Basic Writings, ibid, 220 35 Ibid 36 Heidegger, QT, ibid, 223

in denial of the essential desire for significance that complements it. Failure to strike a

balance of some kind leads to exploitation. It leads to the procurement of the Other as a

means to an end, rather than as an end in itself; ironically it also entails that one succumbs to

the appropriation of oneself by the Other as a ‘useful thing’. Indeed, if one regards oneself as

insignificant one succumbs more readily.

In the same way that Heidegger regarded the re-clothing of a ‘tract of land’ in the

garb of a ‘coal mining district’, an imposition of definitional purposiveness, so it is my

contention that the human can be incarcerated in the delimiting purpose it is procured for.

This acquisition, or conquest of the Other, finds affinity with further imbalances in human

society, and this is unsurprising for they have been frequently successfully conjoined. For

example; acquisitive purposiveness has aligned itself to the masculinisation of purposeful

endeavour in society, thus marginalising purposiveness of other kinds. As a consequence, in

the masculinised objectifying of the Other, the Other is rendered emasculated. ‘Men get the job

done’, this alignment proposes, ‘and you know they are really men because they take what

they can use to that end’.

Let us take a closer look at this phenomenon. Just as identity is not the

accomplishment of a bias-free transcendental mind, so the technological subjugation of the

Other does not operate through some kind of unbiased pragmatism employing an

exclusively intellectual intuition. The Questioning Being develops its hierarchies through the

contextualised exigencies of bodily existence. By this means, and not merely in philosophy

but throughout history, it is apparent that ‘all theories of subjectivity have presupposed that

subjects are male’.37 Consequently, agency too has been masculinised. One deconstructivist

reading of the resulting binary logic in public discourse sees masculine power absolved

from its maternal debt through the exclusion of the feminine. It avows that such a notion of

reality is ‘produced in a sensate body’ whose sense of ‘self’ and world is developed when its

impulses, emotion and feelings, are integrated, disciplined and directed towards a self-

identity. For male and female alike this self-identity achieves an autonomy won through

separation from the mother’s body.38 Problematically however, that liberating separation has

been remodelled in a way that mirrors the throwaway utilisation of persons at large in

society; the sloughing off and negating of the no-longer-required. The Other, here the

feminine Other, has become a neutered male, purposively obsolete. The mother, the womb,

no longer a mystery, is now a sometime useful object which has outlived its purpose. The

masculinised notion of the subject, the actor, the agent, paves the way for the ‘masculinised’

monopoly of purpose.

37 Atkins, K. Commentary on Irigaray, in (Ed) Self and Subjectivity, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, 267 38 Atkins, Commentary on Irigaray, ibid, 268

The history of Woman is illustrative of the wider masculinised conquest of the

world. However tenderly it is done, society’s treatment of woman as a ‘helpmeet for man’,39

offers a sacralisation of an object consequently rendered mute. Woman, the ‘speculum’40

which nevertheless refuses to mirror back obediently to a masculinised purposiveness its

heroic acquisitive procurement of the world, becomes use-less. Femininity becomes

ornament. It cannot be purposeful in its own right nor is it granted authoritative voice as a

suppressed desire for significance.

This regrettably describes the only currency a masculinised purposiveness

recognises. That which is procured is objectified and so a thing to be used; that which has no

purpose is at best a whimsical curiosity, at worst a neutered thing, for there is in this

currency no legitimate and equal Other. Women and conquered men become things to use

or the useless to despise.

Why is this relevant for a phenomenology of identity? Because as a man or woman I

am embedded in the ‘everydayness’ of the Lifeworld, until such time as the thwarting of my

intentionality, or the failure of my harmonising attempts at equilibrium, prompt an audit of

my identity-sense. As a consequence I imbibe culture’s value-laden positional clues and

make my way in the world according to their coordinates. Propelled by such a bias as this

masculinisation engenders, I may as a man be predisposed to covet purposiveness and

measure my identity-sense by its acquisition, and of course suppress my existential desire

for significance. Alternatively, as a woman I may be inhibited in my expression of

purposiveness, regarding it as a negation of femininity, and find nevertheless that any

expression of my desire for significance is construed accordingly as weakness.

In both literal and metaphorical application then, the ‘object’ in yielding to the

imbalanced purposiveness of the dominant ‘subject’ submits to the subject’s erroneous

desire to appropriate ‘her’. She (the yielding) is not he (the overcoming), and furthermore, he

cannot possess her if ‘she’ remains a ‘she’, ‘she’ must become a thing.41 This analysis holds

true beyond heterosexual intersubjectivity too; any subject reduced to purpose only, which

stands as Other to the masculinised acquisitive Subject cannot be possessed purposively and

remain a significant subject. Their subjectivity must be forfeited and it is achieved through a

denial or negation of their significance.

In this thesis I contend that one’s identity is an accretion of meaning attained through

appropriation of the world. The Questioning Being is not available for appropriation however; it

39 This of course is an archaic translation but it has nevertheless fuelled much debate about women’s rights in marriage. Genesis 2:18 King James version. And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.’ 40 Irigaray, L. Any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’, in (Ed.) Kim Atkins, Self and Subjectivity, Malden, Blackwell Publishers, 2009, 272 41 It occurs to me that there are many suggestive correlations between this negative sketch and the philosophy of

overcoming espoused positively by Nietzsche. I will leave the reader to decide whether they are warranted.

ceases to exist in the obliteration of significance, even when this is the consequence of purposive

affirmation. The profound implications of this process, scandalously blatant in the

subjugation of women as useful, is true by extension to the emasculating subjugation of the

other, even when that other is male, or when the acquisitive subject is female. As usual the

metaphorical is derivative of the literal. And so, as the economy of discourse has revealed

time and again, in gender, in race, in age and in class, ‘the silent allegiance of the one

guarantees’, ironically, ‘the auto-sufficiency, the auto-nomy of the other’, ‘as long as no

questioning of this mutism as a symptom - of historical repression - is required. But what if

the ‘object’ started to speak?’, or indeed, to renew its questioning?42

I see here a consequence and further implication. Firstly, when the Questioning

Being abandons questioning as a way of making its way in the world, it denies itself and is

dehumanised. Purposiveness is not demonic, nor is it of necessity in antipathy to questioning.

Indeed it is a primordial capacity of human identity as supremely epitomised by the sciences

humans have developed. Nevertheless, as J. S. Mill, who controversially in my view,

regarded utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions contended, ‘The beliefs which

we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the

whole world to prove them unfounded…’ Certainty of the truth, including existential truth

is attainable by a fallible being, in no other manner.43 Questioning is vital to the humanising

of purposiveness.

Secondly, it might be inferred from the masculinisation of purposiveness that

signifying therefore is a feminised trait or need. Perhaps this is assumed where meaning-

making is construed as a softer, less factual, mode of thinking and being. My response is that

this is the ‘flip-side’ of a regrettable polarisation of that twofold, and necessarily

complementary primordial human essence, the desire for significance and capacity for

purpose. Both purposiveness and signifying are intrinsically vital to all human flourishing

and within the spectra they comprise, true and distinct masculinity and femininity are found

but are not respectively synonymous. Glimpsed in Irigaray’s indictment against masculine

appropriation of feminine subjectivity is therefore a deeper masculinisation of

purposiveness. I do not assume that femininity and masculinity, any more than

purposiveness or signification are two exclusive human ways to be. However,

Purposiveness and Signifying, Masculinity and Femininity must be rescued from false

dichotomising which renders the first pair synonymous with the latter.

42 Irigaray, L. ‘Any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the masculine’, in Kim Atkins, 272. I am aware that my use of this text may be criticised are a masculine appropriation of its gender specific insights thus confirming its stark indictment. My view is that if Irigaray’s judgement is warranted it is an all-pervasive tendency; such rampant machismo is not discerning. 43 Mill, J. S. On Liberty, Oxford University Press, 2008, 26

How pervasive is this polarisation of human identity and its fundamental

essence? The masculinisation of purposiveness has accompanied a particularised

normalising of purposiveness. Thus men have been able to dominate science, for it is by

such procurement ‘man’s domain’ and, as such, science has been dominated by domination

rather than collaboration. As Heidegger puts it, though he looks beyond science per se, ‘the

revealing that rules’ throughout modern technology is characterised by a domination which

is challenging forth; one might almost employ the analogy of a Lazarus commanded to arise

from the grave. This domination commands nature to release its energy, once unlocked, this

energy - nature’s bounty - becomes a procured commodity, owned, stockpiled and sold to

the highest bidder.44 The normalised purposiveness that Western society has masculinised is

commanding rather than consultative.

The purposiveness of technology commands that all remain immediately to hand,

inventoried as a resource in the ‘standing-reserve’, no longer seen for what it is itself but for

what purpose it may serve at a moment’s notice. No longer an autonomous object, what is

procured as standing-reserve waits as an itemised extension to myself, ready to do my

bidding; the airliner on the runway is my escape to the sun; the woman at the counter my

means to acquire groceries; as I have described already, the disused railway line becomes

my route to fitness. Though ultimately humans such as I perpetuate this revelation of things

as ‘on hand to do my bidding’, I am not in ultimate control because I too am subpoenaed,

summoned to my place in the standing-reserve. Thus to win my identity, dependent as it is

upon a desire for significance, I must wrest it free from another’s appropriation of my

capacity for purpose.

If I am to be emancipated from mere purposiveness I must acknowledge the

‘enframing’45 that summons me to validate the standing-reserve. Alternatively, all that is

actual, the background, the foreground and the Other, my personhood too incidentally,

becomes something to be procured or appropriated purposively, or to be discarded as

useless and without significance. It is through signifying that the Lifeworld comes alive,

becomes a part of my life; it is through granting significance to the Other as Subject that I am

finally not alone. Finally it is through the accretion of meaning as purpose and significance

that I acquire, develop and sustain identity.

The human tendency to overemphasise purposiveness results in a loss of

equilibrium. The problem facing humankind and accordingly human identity, perhaps as a

result of a reactionary abhorrence in post enlightenment society towards the mythology of

ancient and medieval worldviews, is the corruption of our sense of the unconcealed. What,

implied the Logical Positivists, can there be aside from those matters of fact procured by

44 Heidegger, QT, ibid, 224 45 Heidegger, ibid, 227

purposive thinking? Though purposive science can successfully describe the fabric of the

background of our lives, ‘there is in the midst of all that is correct’ the danger that ‘the true

will withdraw’.46 The severing of significance from purposiveness brings an impoverished

appropriation of the background world into the foreground of human existence and, if it

brooks no questioning, humanity withdraws too.

Rather than a recognition that others, that nature, that creativity and beauty have

intrinsic significance of their own, all must audition for anthropic usefulness. Heidegger

laments the very positing of consciousness’ constituting power that phenomenology after

Husserl is charged with. The enlightenment mantra, ‘man is the measure of all things’, has

come to mean that everything the Questioning Being encounters exists only insofar as it is

an extension of ‘man’; ultimately ‘man everywhere and always encounters only himself’.47

Problematically however, just as woman cannot mirror man back to man as he wishes to be

seen, neither nature, nor the divine, can reflect humankind; ironically in fact, this narcissism

entails that ‘nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself’.48

Heidegger’s warning is that enframing prevents the appearing of what presences

itself. Unquestioned purposiveness blinds us so that we no longer see significance. We can

no longer get back to things themselves. Put esoterically, ‘Enframing blocks the shining-

forth and holding sway of truth.’49

Travelling from Pune to Mumbai I passed a bewilderingly large billboard beside the

highway. It dwarfed a primitive village, overshadowing its impoverished inhabitants with a

vast advertisement for cutting-edge mobile-phone technology. The purpose of a hoarding,

indeed of mobile phones too, is ostensibly that of communication. In an age of instant global

communication mobiles allow one to speak across the globe and beyond. But advertising has

done little for communication, for communication requires that we grant the other

significance in the form of a voice we will attend to. The Indian villagers clearly had the

capacity to be consumers, but they were not significant as people. Standing in reserve as a

future market for marketing, future networkers for networks, their present significance as

persons was ignored. Human identity must be reclaimed from a purposiveness that

obliterates significance, for both are equiprimordial; if the Questioning Being is to be

‘fetched home’ into its essence, it must be allowed to question its way back to a pursuit of

significance in partnership with its capacity for purpose.

Heidegger’s assurances that within enframing somehow, is to be found a mystical

‘letting be’ for man to endure, though opaque, contains the embryonic idea that within

humankind itself is the solution. Whilst humankind is not the measure of all things,

46 Heidegger, ibid, 231 47 Heidegger, QT, in BW, ibid, 232 48 Heidegger, ibid 49 Heidegger, ibid

undoubtedly the Questioning Being measures all things. It is here in questioning that

significance is allowed to arise. Although ‘the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every

view’,50 ensures that unfettered procurement obscures significance, nevertheless

questioning makes a way towards harmony through the path of disquiet. In the thwarted

appropriations of our lives, disclosed in the uncomfortable experiences of enforced waiting

and indeterminate exploration, the Questioning Being is brought back to its essence.

The identity of the Questioning Being is fostered consequently in a harmonisation of

the desire for significance and the capacity for purpose. One’s identity-sense is accordingly,

a faculty for questioning, one of life’s vital signs, and this audit must be an ongoing priority

for human singularity and solidarity alike.

‘All revealing’ says Heidegger, is endangered by the essential unfolding of

technology and threatened with being ultimately ‘consumed in ordering’; 51 one’s identity-

sense, its questioning sensitivity ignited by disquiet, can resist the standing-reserve

however, though it cannot banish it. Meaning-making, whether a signifying in art or poetry,

altruism or faith, or significance indirectly sought in politics, religion, philosophy or

community, comes from a questioning that is not merely purposive; redemptive meaning-

making is catalysed by the desire for significance which grants to each singular human the

possibility of significant singularity in harmony with its capacity for purpose. It is for this

reason, as Merleau-Ponty points out, ‘…man, as opposed to the pebble which is what it is, is

defined as a place of unrest’.52

3.4 The winds of change: history and human identity

“History has meaning, but there is no pure development of ideas. Its meaning arises in contact with contingency, at the moment when initiative founds a system of life taking up anew scattered givens.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Les Aventures de la Dialectique

So far in this thesis I have traced all human motivation and accomplishment back to

the primordial trait of the Questioning Being, a binary trait which fuels its questioning

tendency. This is not to suggest a simplistic kernel to human life but to identify the

fundamental ubiquity of the human desire for significance and capacity for purpose whose

harmonisation is vital for sustainable human identity. At the heart of the notion and practise

of history this primordial trait is at work.

History is the human record of change, a recognition of time passing which either

selects out the significant as landmarks, or chronicles the passing of life to accomplish a

50 Heidegger, QT, ibid, 236 51 Heidegger, ibid, 236 52 Merleau-Ponty, M. Sense and Non-sense, Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, 66

purposive agenda. To illustrate the former one might cite urban development, gender

emancipation or territorial annexation as key significant thematics. In terms of the latter one

might curate historical accounts in order to eulogise a king, to sanitise the past, to write an

apologetic for divine actions or to legitimise a victor’s demands over the vanquished. I do

not deny that matters of fact comprise the background of our shared lives but only

acknowledge the partisan nature of histories that bring it into the foreground through

selective accounts.

Merleau-Ponty, introducing a lecture series on Husserl, presents the Heideggerian

notion of inhabitation as akin to the late Husserl’s notion of history as ideation. Essentially

one could argue that partisan accounts can nevertheless resonate with each other and

contain furthermore, timeless truths or historical essences in which others can participate. In

my view, key to both is the appropriation of meaning which makes another’s history also

one’s own, just as, for all his revisionism, Merleau-Ponty finds a road to travel by in his

historical reading of Husserl.

Consider Merleau-Ponty's use of the Husserlian example of the geometer. Euclid’s

development of geometry opened up a region in which future geometers can operate and

laid down a formal conceptual route one must travel by each time one engages in geometry.

To this extent then, one participates in Euclid’s thought, in fact in Euclid’s history, in doing

geometry. Represented by Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s ideation makes its ‘lateral repetition’

redundant, and instead serves ‘to launch culture toward a future… to outline a futural,

geometrical horizon, and to circumscribe a coherent domain.’53 When we participate in

history we do so as travellers climbing higher. Similarly with inhabitation, one might speak

of repetition, but also the possibility of a future which travels the road laid down in order to

discover the new. Euclid’s historical geometric endeavours do not consign mathematicians

to the occupation of a space repeated endlessly, but enable an occupation which is the very

harbinger of new discoveries. Illustrating the congruence between my key

phenomenological thinkers, one scholar has noted, Merleau-Ponty has given us a Husserlian

account that is ‘markedly Heideggerian’.54

To my mind, even with the syncretist gloss Merleau-Ponty applies, Husserlian

history becomes a map of significances. For Husserl everything historical becomes

‘understandable’ in the ‘being’ peculiar to it, ‘a unity of a self-questioning interior and

intelligible structuration that develops as a result of that inner motivation.’55 Husserl

53 http://erlebnis.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/merleau-ponty-on-history-and-meaning/. Accessed 31st May 2014, 23:47 54 http://erlebnis.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/merleau-ponty-on-history-and-meaning/. Accessed 31st May 2014, 23:47 55 Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, in William Casement, Husserl and the Philosophy of History, History and Theory, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Oct., 1988), 230

admires the way most historians address this ‘spiritual’ aspect of the human; they include

spiritual being, and prioritise ‘the history of ideas’ above ‘the history of events’,56

nevertheless they mistakenly attempt to study the psychical with methods appropriate to

the physical. Historians cannot penetrate true reality; simply put, the philosopher deals with

the truth of essence, while natural and humanistic scientists, limited by the natural attitude,

deal with facts which are necessarily relativistic.

For Husserl, phenomenology discovers the real meanings of things through a process

of ideating abstraction. This is a mental act, applicable to history, in which the thinker grasps

the essence of something. The abstractive act may be a generalisation whereby an

approximate morphological essence is grasped, or it may be an idealisation which grasps an

exact essence.57 Thus in reviewing the meaning of history, one might accomplish via an

empty ideating abstraction, concepts that govern history, I have called these significances. It

is readily apparent however, that I cannot submit unforeseeable historical events to ideating

abstraction until they occur. Also I cannot grasp the direct presence of events through eidetic

intuition, unless I have appropriated that essence for myself and the presencing fulfils that

intention. Thus we must attend to lived life, for as the Danish prophet warned us so simply,

‘life must be lived forward and understood backwards’.

Husserl’s notion of ideation, applied to history as the historically defining idea that a

nation or community of people embodies, initially arose out of his dismissal of the

historically contextual embeddedness of perception which forfeited timeless truth and

relegated historical insights to relativity. It has been argued since that this is a false

phenomenological dichotomy.58 The historically defining idea for Husserl was, in Europe,

epitomised supremely in the rationalistic questing resolve, or theoria59, threading through

European humanity to the present day. The ‘Inner history’ of Europe therefore underlies

and supersedes all personal and historical events. Here is history distilled into its essential

significance.

History pertinent to the phenomenologist Husserl concludes, is that ‘culture of truth’

which discloses founding intuitions and meaning-giving acts.60 Not the diverse experiences

of actual people at various times, but the ‘primal wellsprings’ from which current tradition

was originally drawn.61 For Husserl, historical reflection becomes all of a piece with the

phenomenological search for the things themselves and ‘historical, backward reflection… is

56 Casement, ibid 57 Drummond, J. J. Historical Dictionary of Husserl's Philosophy, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, 2007, 104-105 58 Kaufmann, F. The Phenomenological Approach to History: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Dec., 1941), 159-172 59 Husserl, The Vienna Lecture, Crisis, 1970, 285 60 Guignon, C. ‘History and Historicity’, in Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, , 548 61 Guignon, ibid, 549

thus actually the deepest kind of self-reflection aimed at a self-understanding in terms of what

we are authentically seeking as the historical beings we are’.62

Heidegger in contrast, held that history is an element of the ‘factical’ thrownness to

which we are tethered, and by implication as concernful beings, to the purposive lives we

appropriate for ourselves. Fundamental to Being and Time is his portrayal of the worldhood

of the world, an ‘all-pervasive background of meaningful relations’ wherein we find

ourselves already thrown. As being-in-the-world, Dasein is inextricably bound up with a

background of inherited significance and relevance relationships it must appropriate

purposively.

For Heidegger this shared world is accessible only through the interpretations and

practices of a linguistic community, a theme echoed in the phenomenology of Husserl and

Merleau-Ponty. The linguistic community however represents for Heidegger the

indeterminate perspective of ‘anyone’. Dasein is bombarded by this dominant

‘interpretedness’ which disseminates ‘the possibilities of average understanding and of the

state of mind belonging to it’.63 Socialisation necessitates imbibing this everyday

standardisation of language and practices. Thus again we no longer encounter the things

themselves spoken about, but instead a superficial linguistic commonality in the form of I-

said-because-she-said-because-he-said.

Dasein is that concernful being, directed towards the future in undertaking projects

fuelled by the past, and ‘making present’ that which it attempts. This temporality is the very

condition enabling history. ‘It is because Dasein is a ‘movement’ or ‘happening’ with a

distinctive structure that historical unfolding and ‘world history’ is possible’.64 History takes

the form of a ‘tradition’, the ‘calcified set of uprooted and groundless presuppositions’ that

constrain the parameters of judgements and behaviour. Too often this ‘tradition’

overwhelms and obscures those originating ‘primordial wellsprings’ Husserl spoke about.

Historical investigation has legitimacy in drawing us back to the sources.

Here Heidegger diverges from Husserl. If one can find and maintain personal integrity

in the public commonality of the linguistic community one can be authentic; in

appropriating it for oneself, ‘tradition’ becomes ‘heritage’. The importance of history for

both Husserl and Heidegger lies in the ‘authentic happening of human existence’ arising out

of the future meaning-conferring projects one adopts.65 Being authentic in one’s historical

context means for Husserl the identification of ‘one overarching project’, the significant inner

62 Husserl, 1970, in Guignon, ibid, 551, italics mine, ‘what we are authentically seeking’ echoes our sensibility of human identity as the embedded desire for significance which often is obliged to transcend that embeddedness. 63 Heidegger, BT, ibid, 211 64 Guignon, ibid, 552 65 Guignon, ibid, 553. NB, ‘history has its essential importance… in that authentic happening of existence which arises from Dasein’s future’. Heidegger, 1962, 438

history of one’s community, and for Heidegger ‘experiencing oneself as a participant in a

range of purposive undertakings defined by one’s heritage’.66 For the lives we lead, the world

is ready-to-hand, as are its inherited significances. For Heidegger it is the appropriation for

oneself of contextualised history as purposeful in one’s Being-towards-death that history is

authenticated, as ‘heritage’.67 For Husserl history is distilled into a significance that

transcends lives, for Heidegger history is that personally appropriated purposive existential

meaning. Either way, one must make history one’s own if it is to enrich one’s identity.

In my view Merleau-Ponty, with his reinstatement of embodiment as essential to the

subject, offers a link between Husserl’s history as the sedimentation of significance and

Heidegger’s history as purposive. Merleau-Ponty like Heidegger, argued that the philosopher

must not be construed as a detached ‘spectator’, but as a ‘situated’ participant in a shared

world. Intersubjectivity, raising inevitably questions concerning the relationship of the ‘self’

with ‘the other’, is consequently a matter of ‘history’ for history is the negotiated human

record of change and of time passing; indeed, the theme of history is fundamentally the

same as the theme of the other.68 As I have noted already, the question of ‘the Other’ arises

essentially because ‘the Other’ is always my potential negation, the place in which conflict

arises. Though I am indebted to intersubjectivity for my identity, intersubjectivity is

inevitably conflict.

The Questioning Being is not merely a psychical thing, nor is its identity-sense

merely that of a discrete reflecting consciousness placed alongside the world of objects. I

sense my identity holistically through the body that I am and the world of things is always

and necessarily present in me through my body. Though an external object certainly ‘stands

before me,’ says Merleau-Ponty, ‘I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it’.69

Thus as I have already rehearsed, to exist is to be one's body and to be one's body is to be a

‘body-subject'’, a unity transcending the dichotomy of mind and body, subject and object.

This concept invokes a paradoxical and ambiguous relationship, in which consciousness and

materiality, subjectivity and the world of ‘things’, are co-extensive. Because of this

ambiguity one’s identity requires harmonisation, between a desire for significance as

subject, and one’s practical and participatory purposiveness in action as a part of the world.

That world of things is always and necessarily present in us, for our bodies question

the world as to its purposiveness for us. Through our bodies we have a world, and our

existence is inseparable from our inherence in things, an inherence in a world that is both

66 Guignon, ibid 67 Heidegger, BT, 435, in Guignon, Ibid 68 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1966). La philosophie de l'existence. Dialogue 5(3): 307-322. Originally a lecture given in Paris, 1959 in Kruks, S. Marcel and Merleau-Ponty: Incarnation, Situation and the Problem of History, in Human Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1987), 225 69 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 1962, 150, in Kruks, ibid, 236

shared and changing. I am the history I appropriate. My sense of history, in general and also

personally, relies on thought grounded in the fact of this changing world. Thus as Merleau-

Ponty shows, it is through my body as a unique and ambiguous, but nevertheless really

objective thing in the world of things, that I can ‘know’ that I exist from day to day and in

some particular context. My body, this proof of my historical existence, lies in part, beyond

myself in things, and verifies my existence only when grasped in action toward the external

world. In significations that I find as givens, I work out a purposiveness and attempt a

harmonisation which can never be entirely my own exclusive possession. Thus is my

identity won.

As subjectivity I encounter the world as that realm, Husserl memorably contended,

in which I do not hold sway, that thing I do not pervade or control. Nevertheless I am not

pure subjectivity, distinct from the world in the transcendental manner Husserl invokes, nor

as in the bleak Sartrian radical bifurcation of things. The reason for this Merleau-Ponty

explains, is that like a temporary ‘hollow’ or ‘fold’ made in being, I am simultaneously part

of being and distinct from it. I share the historical purpose of things, yet my significance

transcends them. My identity is historically embedded just as my empirical being is

embedded in the Lifeworld; this is not a static petrifying status but the very reason my

identity evolves and the source of meaning on which it feeds.

For Merleau-Ponty the ‘body subject’ is characterised in a quite particular manner as

dialectical and he notes, ‘The dialectic ... is the tending of an existence towards another

existence which denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained’.70 Just as the

Questioning Being is a recursive or dialectical reality, so too its situation is also dialectical, it

can both affirm and negate; ‘it is both the field of my freedom and a limit to my freedom,

since it is ‘other’, as well as being mine’.71 My historical situatedness is ambiguous because I

grasp the unity of my bodily existence through an intentional perception of objects, yet

something always transcends that perception. My situation commits me, not to a

transcendent grasp of things-in-themselves, but to a perspectival grasp of the objects of

history seen from one adumbration, a view which disallows others to me whilst revealing

that in this shared world other perspectives are tenable; indeed I find it is so in colliding

with them.

3.5 Sounding the depths: human identity as a history affirmed

“Self-consciousness is desire itself.” G. W. F. Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit

70 Merleau-Ponty, (1962: 167-168) in Kruks, S. Marcel and Merleau-Ponty: Incarnation, Situation and the Problem of History, in Human Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1987), ibid, 238 71 Kruks, ibid, 239

What is a self-consciousness, consciousness of? It is the will, not necessarily explicitly

expressed, to be a ‘self’. The Questioning Being desires a unified coherent existence, a ‘my

view’ on the world, sustainable as a singular reassurance of worldly presence despite its

fleeting characteristics.

The fleeting nature of lived life entails that identity is always a history. A history or

record, vulnerable to revision and negation, of change as it impacts upon this being desirous

of being. A desirous being that is, which cannot quench its incessant questioning for

everything it resolves initiates further puzzles and to cease questioning is to cease being

human. This being can however find significance and the desire for such significance is

essential to the harmonising of experience, that identity-sense that offers at least a temporary

assurance of ‘self’.

Rather than an introspective ‘self’-cognisance, self-consciousness is the Questioning

Being’s embodied attempt to win its identity through presencing itself in an intersubjective

world. In the next chapter I will explore identity’s transparency which results from

unchallenged being in the world. Forced waiting and exploration I argue, are however those

occasions in which our intentionality is thwarted and our identity-sense is thrown into sharp

relief as a result. At such points the Questioning Being is provoked to audit its ‘attempt to

be’ within a world that resists. Indeed, it is only when our intentionality as it threads out

into the world finds itself headed-off that we discover our intentions. When unchallenged

by the assumption of others, or the limitations of our environment, our identity becomes

enmeshed with the background world and disappears. At such times, fearing to forfeit this

pleasant plateau of success, but desirous of ‘self’-cognition, we look to others for affirmation

and validation, or search introspectively, with Humean puzzlement, for the Cartesian ‘I’.

As I have noted already, identity is a work in progress and its dynamism arises from

its temporality. This dynamism is compounded by an amorphousness that arises because no

life is complete until death. As Heidegger frequently reminds us, one never sees oneself as a

finished product; the ‘self’, as Hegel insists, is always only in the process of becoming. Self-

identity is consequently best understood as desire itself. Unless I am to artificially attempt

self-disclosure somehow, through the intentional thwarting of my own intentions perhaps, I

must rely on the recognition of other Subjects, a recognition I cannot attain through

purposive conquest: without this intersubjective affirmation there is no being to

consciousness, only becoming. Self-identity is therefore an intersubjective accomplishment.

Hegel’s dialectic for the progressive development of human self-consciousness is

more persuasive as a random configuration, for taken progressively, Hegel’s stages iron out

the regressive and repetitious steps that typify the way human identity is won and lost, set-

backs his philosophy is reputed to have embraced. The Questioning Being furthermore, does

not always crave mastery of physical and living objects. The Aboriginal way of life, surely

indicative of a primordial life-stance, attempts harmony with, rather than mastery of the

land. It is not clear either that a desire for mastery of living objects results inevitably in

struggle. Ancient Egypt it seems was populated by an underclass, and even a hierarchy, that

acquiesced to the outrageous demands made by others upon their persons. Nevertheless,

history is littered with the evidence of intersubjective struggles. Indeed, though sometimes

merely metaphorical, the human struggle for mastery has often been ‘unto death’. The

conditions that prompted Hobbes to invoke the idea of societal contracts suggests that this

struggle is most often not one-to-one but one-against-all. Whether by contract or by

conquest however, the Master-Slave relation surfaces and resurfaces in the cut-and-thrust of

political, ecclesiastical, economic and even familial relationships.

If the serfs of Medieval England were ever ‘stoical’, so too surely were the

dispossessed African slaves of the colonial empires. Hegel’s developmental stages can be

better understood in my view, as oscillating states-of-being uncovered in one’s often audited

will to be, and indicative of some people sometimes. What person alive is perpetually in

conflict or immovably rational? Nevertheless, something in Hegel’s assessment of the

acquisitive nature of human beings holds true. History of course, is not a solipsistic but

intersubjective endeavour experienced as a tension between my desires and capacities and

those of myriad others; it is here that history’s dialectic takes shape. Indeed I might lose my

grasp of history and together with it my identity in the other’s negation of that history I

attempt to appropriate.

All experience of the world is distinctly personal experience of a shared world.

Though we may agree via negotiation, no two human beings can share an identical

perception for we each appropriate uniquely, situation, history, intentionality and the

process of meaning-making. Even so, it is possible to argue, as does Merleau-Ponty, for a

shared intersubjective nexus which derives from a ‘primordial communication’ rooted in

our common embeddedness in the world. He insists that this primordial communication is

no illusion ‘...in the perception of another, I find myself in relation with another ‘myself’,

who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am, in relation to the same being that I

am.’72

If my perception, uniquely situated though it is, can be confirmed in the perception

of another, why not history, which is after all an account of the changes that perception

accommodates? Did the war end here? Is the economic climate responsible for increased

migration? Is slavery eradicated or merely targeting new victims? These historical questions

pertain necessarily to a shared world in which the Questioning Being is embedded, as a

72 Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of perception and its philosophical consequences, 1964b: 17, in Kruks, ibid,

240

changing thing. The questioning Other holds the key to answering such collective questions,

but more than this, the power of affirmation of my status as one who questions.

According to Hegel, affirmation of identity gained through the Other’s endorsement

is fraught however, because to the extent that the subject is aware of the other as a subject, it

is aware of its capacity for purpose. It must, instinctively, procure the other for its own use,

or be procured as that subject’s object. It is in a holistic sense in my view, not confined alone

to consciousness, that the subject becomes aware, in the moment of ‘recognition’, of a threat

the other poses. The subject becomes aware of itself as an external object to the other; it is

consequently ‘vulnerable to negation by that other consciousness’.

Having sketched out the Hegelian notion of that threatened negation above, I

contend that it is the desire for significance which makes the subject vulnerable to ‘a life and

death struggle in the effort to establish self-certainty’73 as a significant being. The desirous

prize of affirmed status as being-for-itself, demands of the Other, mediated endorsement.

Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness as ‘simple being-for-itself’, proposes exclusion from

itself of everything else, an unachievable isolation. I am an embodied part of the world and

the world is in me. It is however my desire for verification of the audit my identity-sense

undertakes, which necessitates another witness, for both purpose and significance in human

terms are intersubjectively assigned.

As an embodied intersubjective intentionality embedded in the world, it is not

objectivity that eludes being-for-self, but significance. In mutual recognition then it is this

desired attainment of significance which is possible only when ‘each is for the other what

the other is for it’.74 Ontologically speaking, we are intersubjectively intentional beings

whose questioning of being desires endorsement from the other. But when the Questioning

Being seeks this affirmation a competitive objectifying tension ensues. Each consciousness

that so desires affirmation of its significance in subjectivity, must win it from the other at the

other’s expense.75 This tension-in-reciprocation is, despite its capacity for conflict,

nevertheless an affirmation of the shared primordial communication I mentioned above.

Merleau-Ponty’s reading therefore of intersubjectivity’s dialectical struggle is that it

illustrates our shared common ground in the world as embodied beings.76

Considering this constitutive struggle in Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty further

argues that consciousness cannot enforce its wishes without a body and so the subject must

act on others by acting on their bodies. Thus it can only reduce them to slavery through

embodied action in the world and as I have intimated already, this is derivative of the

imbalance arising from a projection of purposiveness in denial of another’s significance. The

73 Atkins, K. Commentary on Hegel, in Self and Subjectivity, Malden, Blackwell, 2009, 62 74 Hegel, Self-Consciousness Lordship and Bondage, in Atkins, 2009, 66-67 75 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception, (Trans.) C. Smith. London: Routledge 2006 and Kegan, P. French original, 1945, 355, in Kruks, ibid, 241 76 Kruks, ibid, 241

body-subject impresses upon the other its purposive goals, utilising the other’s capacity for

purpose whilst recognising only its own desire for significance as a subject. In this syncretic

reading, history is truly disclosed as a struggle; the historical struggle between master and

slave, between classes, between ethnicities and between genders and so on.

Human history in the life of each Questioning Being is a record of its delicate attempt

at attaining both harmonisation and authenticity in the world. This too must be balanced,

but in the changing world shifting situational parameters ensure that the requisite balance

changes too. In the tension between an often tacit desire for significance and an often readily

apparent capacity for purpose, the historical conflicts arise wherein human beings are

individuated, and mastery and compliance play their part.

I have described human identity as a history. But what is the relationship between

history as a description of change in the background of the causal world and the history

each person appropriates for themselves? Is human history anything more than determinate

inevitabilities or relativistic irrelevancies? Does human action initiate or represent any

universal certainties?

For phenomenologists such as Husserl, general essences arise out of ideational

abstraction rather than inductive abstraction, and this discloses, not the average of

cumulative experience but the essential quality implied in the unity of a given experience. A

historical essence is a pervasive motivational pull towards a particular future because of a

particular past. But can it be true for all?

Whilst an abstraction from concrete human experience moves beyond the local and

temporal milieu, this situated origin remains relevant as the primary source of the eidetic

observations made; the background from which the intersubjective Lifeworld is

appropriated. For example, one historical account of the aftermath of the Second World War

in Europe, extrapolates from its specifically attributed accounts, the eidetic observation that

in comparison to the haunting brutality of the battlefields of the First World War (because it

involved occupation, deportation and the mass displacement of civilian populations as well

as fighting) ‘…the Second World War entered far more deeply into everyday life. Constant

daily violence shaped the human psyche in countless ways…’.77 Such movements are the

‘givens’ that Merleau-Ponty speaks of in his judgement that history’s development arises in

collision with the contingent. Though one can posit essences in an abstraction of history,

concrete history acquires its pattern from found and appropriated personal histories which

reveal common elements. The essential characteristics of Second World War experience may

be understood in these terms as a crystallisation of the essential form such an experience

signifies to the human disposition and finds expression in that ‘primordial communication’

77 Applebaum, A. Iron Curtain: The crushing of Eastern Europe, London, Penguin History, 2013, 13

which captures our common embeddedness in the world. Historical essences, such as an

epoch, are temporally conditioned and outworked in a particular temporal span so

expressing the attitude of a certain phase in historical life. In a recursive manner, which

discloses our worldly embeddedness, they give to the experience of historical individuals an

identifiable tenor of life.

One may understand the essence of an epoch to be the pervasiveness of a common

mood that animates and directs human beings in a particular historical situation. I might

describe the post war years in Europe therefore as turbulent because their historical essence

arises from a concrete historical context constituted by a unity of feeling from which diverse

manifestations of life radiate and toward which they converge. Once again, matters of fact

are not to be doubted in their objective validity as the background world, but their particular

evocative power is inseparable from the lives in which it plays out.

Phenomenological reflection therefore, echoes historical analysis in ascribing an

essence to swathes of human history, whilst tracing every essence to its constitutive basis in

contextualised experience. Universal certainties are distilled from mutually affirming

collective experience. It is clear nevertheless, that the history actually experienced by each

Questioning Being in any shared epoch, is its own history. Whether one lived in Germany or

Poland as the Iron Curtain descended on Europe; whether one is employed, unemployed or

an employer when a financial crisis bites; these inner histories, dialectically appropriate

shared universal certainties, just as our taste buds interact with the intrinsic properties of the

foods we eat. Even so, these adumbrated historical perspectives do not negate the eidetic

universal any more than the Lifeworld negates the background empirical world.

The Lifeworld is encountered in human culture, that sedimentation of the actions of

past persons which is pre-existent with respect to the development of any particular person.

Each Questioning Being stands inevitably in some relation to culture and must appropriate

it. As a consequence human identity is historical, for a culture is a historical artefact

interiorised in the life-history of each appropriating being. Human identity therefore is

indebted not only to the constraints of one’s embodiment but to the appropriative

parameters of one’s particular cultural world or worlds.

With the reinstatement of embodied intentionality the Questioning Being is no longer

a being alienated from nature or history but an ambiguity which fuses material history

which is objective, and a subjectivist history that is not, and in so doing discloses universal

and timeless certainties.

3.6 Summary conclusion

“Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it

exists only in being acknowledged.”

Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit

In this chapter I have argued that the Questioning Being is predisposed to accept

functionality as the validating aspect of life. I have contended that one’s desire for

significance is accordingly experienced as a deficiency, and that unchecked, this imbalance

can result in lost identity. Nevertheless, it is in the border country between purpose and

significance that the Questioning Being quarries the resources for harmonising the

Landscape of Being with its ownness.

In uniquely selecting its ‘way to be’ in the world, whether habitually or consciously,

the freedom of the Questioning Being rests upon a harnessing of involuntary body

intentions, and generalised attitudes toward the world, which comprise the tethered and

constantly reviewed background of our conscious choosing.

Free, within a constraining network of intersubjective intentionalities, each

Questioning Being’s identity acquires its singularity in the place ‘between’ ‘self’ and others

rather than in existential autonomy. Utilising primordial, pre-reflective interpretative

frameworks, engagement with the world is enabled. Having compared an assessment of this

harmonising freedom in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, I conclude that our embeddedness in the

world, and our questioning capacity to transcend it, supplemented by a dispositional

‘attending-to’, determine the boundaries of the world-sensible freedom the Questioning

Being employs.

I have also investigated the dominance of purposiveness, an all-pervasive functional

utility motivating human life and societal progress. This utility births a predominantly

masculinised and combatively acquisitive purposiveness. Due to the masculinised

objectifying of the Other, the feminine Other has in particular been afforded worth, either in

terms of her usefulness, or if ‘useless’, evaluated as ornament.

I have also considered the Heideggerian notion of ‘enframing’, the functionalist

purposiveness of ‘technology’, which reduces all being to an inventoried resource in the

‘standing-reserve’. Thus purposive humankind, distanced from the balancing corrective of

sensibility to significance, is no longer technology’s master but one of its tools.

Finally, I have noted that the notion and practise of history arise from the ontology of

human questioning. I have highlighted the disconnect between Husserl’s relativist-resistant

notion of history as ideation and Heidegger’s understanding of history as an appropriated

and purposive heritage, and posited a bridge between them by way of Merleau-Ponty’s

positive dialectic. Accordingly, my history casts a shadow across the intersubjectively

negotiated history of the Other, just as the Other’s does over mine.

I have noted additionally, that temporal human identity is always an essentially

dynamic history vulnerable to revision. The Questioning Being must rely on the recognition

of other Subjects, a recognition unattainable through purposive conquest: without this

intersubjective affirmation there is no being to consciousness, only becoming. Human

history in the life of each Questioning Being is a record of its delicate attempt at attaining

both harmonisation and authenticity in the world.