Aristotle and Phenomenology

Abstract

This paper explores the centrality of seeing for phenomenological thinking. Through an in-depth discussion of Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle, this paper traces the complex relations between perception, language, truth, and falsity. What emerges is a deep connection between phenomenological concern with the philosophical theme of seeing and Aristotle’s thinking.

Often in conversation, and at times in print,¹ Richard Cobb-Stevens is well known for drawing striking parallels between Husserl’s phenomenology and Aristotelian philosophy. One characteristic aspect of his remarks that I have especially appreciated over the years is that they have rarely amounted to one of those rather dry scholarly footnotes that academics are fond of exchanging, where we track often faint and all too subtle lines of influence throughout the millennia. So in the case of Husserl and Aristotle, one sometimes comes across parerga and paralipomena of suggestions that Husserl had been influenced by a chance reading of this or that text of his ancient counterpart, or by some dissertation project of a long forgotten student before (or perhaps after) the war that analyzes an equally forgotten bit of flotsam of Aristotelian scholia. Despite their otherwise arcane nature, such scholarly affirmations of the influence of Aristotle, however limited, at least tease us with the promise of significant interest in the world of Husserl studies, since Husserl, though by no means an original interpreter of Aristotle, did arguably engage the legacy of the Philosopher in a significant manner. One need only recall that a discussion of Aristotle’s doctrine concerning the meaning of non-assertoric statements frames an important part of the argument in the VI Logische Untersuchung.² And of course Aristotle, in essential ways, is recognizable as a steady subterranean influence on Husserl throughout his career; for it is arguable that Aristotle’s presence can always be felt through the medium of Husserl’s almost constant engagement with the formulation of philosophical problems found in the philosophy of Brentano. That being said, and given its due, nothing in Husserl really approaches the level of Brentano’s or, perhaps more significantly, Heidegger’s attempts to appropriate Aristotelian themes in a systematic and creative manner. Yet Cobb-Stevens’ remarks always rise above all mere philological reconstruction; he wants to point more towards illuminating the bond of not so much a common set of positions shared by Husserl and Aristotle, as a shared attitude towards what is satisfying in a philosophical explanation, an attitude that draws these two thinkers together, despite all their differences, which are profound.

Since I was a student, I have been time and again convinced by Cobb-Stevens that Aristotle and Husserl share a fundamental philosophical kinship, and more, I think that what he is so fond of pointing out is of great importance—I would even go as far as to say that what makes Aristotle philosophically compelling today to a great extent also determines what makes Husserl and Heidegger philosophically relevant, and with that the promise of classical phenomenology as a whole.

My intention in this paper is to explore, in the spirit of innumerable remarks of Cobb-Stevens on these matters, what I take to be a key feature of this common bond of philosophical sensibility between Aristotle and phenomenology, namely the systematic elevation of the theme of seeing in philosophical discourse. Heidegger will play a critical role below in spelling this out, especially given that his work will allow us to relate the theme of seeing to the actual texts of Aristotle in a systematic fashion, but the philosophical impulse at stake will in the end remain fundamentally Husserlian.

Seeing as a Philosophical Theme

Let me begin by describing in general terms in what sense the theme of seeing plays an important role in classical phenomenological philosophy. There are in fact several dimensions to this, so it is important to try to bring the whole scope of the matter into view, in order to understand the immanent complexity of what might at first seem to be a rather simple and obvious phenomenon.

The first dimension is the most general, and has to do with the aim of phenomenology to provide a perspective within which philosophical problems can be approached. A fundamental motivation for both Husserl and Heidegger was a profound dissatisfaction with the way that philosophical problems had been taken up and understood, as problems, in contemporary philosophy during the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. This on one level involves familiar methodological concerns, which are exemplified by Husserl’s discussion of how to approach a clarification of the basic concepts of logic in his 1900/1 Logische Untersuchungen, or by Heidegger’s reflection on how to approach the rediscovery of the meaning of the question of being in the opening sections of his 1927 Sein und Zeit.³ However, these methodological reflections are not limited to the question of the proper formulation of tasks, but involve taking up the problem of the very sense of what it means to be faced with a task, or what kinds of demands, both methodological and ethical, are implicit in what we might call the problematicity of tasks.

This question of problems—or, one might say, the problem with problems—constitutes an important dimension of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl that one finds in his Marburg lectures from the 1920s that form an important preparatory phase for the project of Sein und Zeit. One of the things that was so dissatisfying about Husserl, from Heidegger’s point of view, was the impression that phenomenology, in its attempt to rediscover the motivating force of traditional philosophical problems, nevertheless failed to call the existential grounds of that force as such into question, which threatens to leave untouched a whole gamut of pernicious prejudices that Heidegger considers to be constitutive of modern philosophy since Descartes. Heidegger saw such prejudices embodied in the very manner in which “problems” are represented in contemporary thought, namely in the figure of a given task, one that is already pre-conceived from within its trajectory towards an anticipated, well-defined solution, and subsequently assigned to a community of researchers who work together towards its ultimate resolution. Problems, systematically posed and provided to a community as a set of research tasks (one might think here of Hilbert’s famous 1900 lecture outlining the top 23 “problems” facing modern mathematicians at the beginning of the last century as exemplary), represent a unique manner in which the posture of questioning, of questionability itself, is absorbed into a figure that from the beginning recognizes the questionable only from out of the given horizon of its elimination in an answer. This excludes, in Heidegger’s account, precisely the possible being of a question that does not yield to an answer, that remains indifferent to any promise or claim to its own resolution; or put another way, it compromises just what a problem allows us to see, by limiting the experience of seeing to a spectacle firmly resolved in the limits of its conclusiveness.⁴

The issue, one might say, turns on what one might call the intentional structure of problems, and this brings us to a second essential dimension of the theme of seeing, namely how in general to understand the role of intentionality in phenomenological investigation. This topic is vast; for my purposes, I want above all to stress that it is important to always keep in mind that “intentionality” in the classical phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger was never introduced as a solution to anything, but rather served as a heading for a specific class of “problems”—that is, problems of how different unities of sense are constituted in subjective life. The central issue of all of the problems pursued under the heading of intentionality is how to understand the role of subjective intentional accomplishments in the foundation of a given access to beings, whether the beings in question are those of the world, of the imagination, or idealities such as mathematical or logical objectivities. This means that the question of the intentional structure of problems has to do with how to describe the unity of sense thanks to which a question is constitutive of an access to the “being” of the questionable, or what is meant or intended in the question as a question. Thus we can rephrase Heidegger’s concern about losing the meaning of questions in our embrace of the understanding of all questions as problems aimed at answers: the issue has to do with what questions provide access to, what they make visible, and in what sense such access can be blocked by the modality of sense embodied in problems. That is, we need to ask whether rigorously formulated problems instituted as a set of tasks, those strange offspring of our increasingly comprehensive methodological sophistication, enhance or frustrate what is originally seen in questions.

This notion of intentionality as the heading for the varied problems of access, including those cases in which access takes the form of an essential obfuscation of sense, is fundamental to another “problem” basic to both the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, namely that of the world. This is the third dimension of the theme of seeing that will prove to be important for what follows. For both Husserl and Heidegger, the intentional unity of the sense of the world must be grasped in part from a tendency towards its obfuscation, or the tendency for intentional being, intentional access, towards its own immersion, and with that a peculiar loss and dispersion, in the very phenomenality that its own accomplishments have made possible. Husserl’s methodological strategies of epoché and reduction in his 1913 Ideen I,⁵ as well as Heidegger’s hermeneutical analyses of questioning and inauthenticity throughout Sein und Zeit, are all engagements with this fundamental list, as it were, of intentional life towards its own latency, or the tendency in which the potential for the manifestation of intentional life is passed over in favor of its other.

This obfuscation of the world (more the obfuscation that the world is, as opposed to an obscuring veil being drawn over an otherwise lucid world-presence), or of intentional being as that which secures access to the world, also lies behind Husserl’s and Heidegger’s engagement with the critique of modern science, which represents a fourth dimension of the theme of seeing. Science is of importance here not simply because it represents an articulation of things, or a given picture of how the world is, but more importantly it represents an explicit understanding of what it is to “have” a world, or the nature of the very ground for an encounter with beings. This understanding comprises what one could call the methodological essence of science, that never fully explicit set of assumptions that constitute the habitus within which explicit methodological principles and practices are formulated. This is a habitus that tends towards self-clarification, and to the extent that science pursues an explicit reflection on how it proceeds in bringing being into view, it does not stand in a simple naive relation to the problem of intentional obfuscation, but always at least partially succeeds in holding the problematic character of access itself in view.

This is, as Husserl argues in the introduction to his 1928 Formale und transzendentale Logik,⁶ the gesture of critique basic to the achievement of science, the original moment of which he traces back to Platonism. As a consequence, science has always already begun to at least implicitly understand the necessity of posing the problems of intentionality, of those fundamental conditions that determine the access to manifestation as such. But at the same time, in the form of a naive naturalism, science also embodies a peculiar modality of the obfuscation of this same question; in this way, science thus embodies the gesture of understanding what it means to make available a unified world of sense, but in such a way that renders this “making available” unavailable. Thus for both Husserl and Heidegger, however different their methods, the problem of science can be said to be the problem of bringing into view the life of intentional access that is operative but buried in science; for both, in short, a key philosophical task for phenomenology is the radical critique of the foundations of science, one that takes the form of a fundamental ontological investigation into the accomplishments of the intentional life that makes it possible (and impossible).

A basic gesture of phenomenology as a critique of science is to argue that the problem of science, and by extension the problem with problems, when understood as problems of intentionality, necessitates a reference to something other (if not outside) the unity of sense that constitutes scientific theory as a methodological whole. Here again we have an important factor in the dispute between Husserl and Heidegger—for the one, this “other” was consciousness, understood as that region of being or existence that forms the ultimate field of intentional accomplishment; for the other, this “other” was the comportments of human existence, of a Dasein that is not so much a region of given being as the existential problematicity of being, lived as a world-projection. We will return below to this dispute, since it will prove to be intimately related to the question of the importance of Aristotle for phenomenology. For now I only want to emphasize that, whether the ultimate aim be a Wissenschaftslehre or a Seinsanalyse, for both Husserl and Heidegger the problem of intentionality ultimately takes the form of the problem of life.

All of these problems—the problem with problems, the problem of the being of intentional access, the problem of science, and the problem of life—can, I would like to suggest, be understood as permutations of the more fundamental problem of seeing. To bring out some of the philosophical consequences of this, in what follows I will begin with some remarks on the manner in which the theme of seeing is developed within Husserl’s phenomenology, then I will move on to the manner in which this same theme is articulated by Heidegger on a very different philosophical register, one that is established through an interpretation of Aristotle’s remarks on the nature of meaningful speech, perception, and falsity. Throughout, our aim will be to understand the importance of Aristotle not only in reading Heidegger, but also in thinking further about the implications of Husserl’s approach to the theme of seeing.

Seeing as Intentional Consciousness (Husserl)

All of this is not to suggest, which would be absurd, that the theme of seeing is unique to phenomenology. What I would like to suggest, however, is that the theme of seeing takes on a very different weight in classical phenomenology than had been the case earlier in the history of philosophy. One way to bring this out is to consider what happens to seeing and its conceptual relatives (insight, intuition, vision, perspective, view, and so on) as a result of the legacy of modern philosophy since Descartes. The Cartesian legacy seeks to progressively cordon off, so to speak, seeing from the functions of judgment and the constructive capacities of the intellect generally. We can discern this legacy in Kant’s critical contrast between intuition (Anschauung) and understanding (Verstand, Vernunft); its force is felt even in early German idealism: the plea for a conception of “intellectual intuition” in Fichte and Schelling was never meant to dissolve the Kantian contrast between the immediacy of intuition and the discursivity of concepts, but sought instead to mediate their opposition through the intuitivity of a self-given consciousness. The parameters of a reflection on seeing are thus set in this tradition by the assertion of various kinds of limits, all in response to the perceived need for seeing to be supplemented by other activities or functions of the mind in order to secure structure, order, veracity, and even visibility itself.

Phenomenology can be thought of as an important countermovement to this trend, though in ways falling short of its outright rejection. So in Husserl, the idea of categorial intuition developed in the Logische Untersuchungen takes aim at any separation in principle between intuition and concept, weakening their opposition in favor of a notion of a descriptive intuitivity that belongs to conceptuality as such. Husserl goes so far even to emphasize that this intuitivity provides the ground for a unique methodological perspective on those contents of the understanding that the tradition would otherwise consider to be reducible to a set of purely discursive structures, such as propositional contents or states of affairs (what the Stoics called lekta, “sayables”), and eidetic structures both formal and material. The intuitive objectivity of such formations, grasped not in intellectual intuition but in the intuition of ideal objectivity, becomes emphasized once again in phenomenology, which can be said to break free from the prejudices that animated the medieval battles over nominalism and the distinctio formalis a parte re. Husserl sees himself as inaugurating a new descriptive science grounded in what he comes to call eidetic seeing (Wesenschau), a seeing that in each case follows the course of the originary evidence of the intuitivity of objects: “The universalization of the correlatively interrelated concepts ‘intuition’ and ‘object’ is not an arbitrary conceit but compellingly demanded by the nature of the matters in question.”⁷

This story is familiar, and the issue of Aristotle’s relation to phenomenology might, one could say, turn precisely on understanding the similarities and differences concerning their respective accounts of conceptuality and perception. Yet there is another dimension to the issue, which can be brought out by considering the development of Husserl’s formulation of the problem of transcendence in immanence in the years after the Logische Untersuchungen, in lecture courses such as the 1905 Idee der Phänomenologie and an important course from 1910 that Husserl gave under the title Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie.⁸

This reflection, which seeks to develop a conception of the immanent structures of consciousness that articulate the sense or meaning of transcendence, or that which is in consciousness but is not of consciousness, arises out of Husserl’s dissatisfaction with his account of categorial intuition in the VI Logische Untersuchung. There, Husserl had introduced his conception of the categorial perception of for example, a state of affairs as a founded perception, which involves both a continuity and a productive tension between the founding perceptual act and the founded apprehension of the logical object represented by the state of affairs itself.⁹ So for example I see that my coffee has grown cold; the perceptual foundation on which this seeing is grounded represents a set of accomplishments of manifestation that are essential to the experiential unity of “seeing that the coffee has grown cold,” but which do not include the specific categorial articulations of sense that are ultimately constitutive of the perception of the state of affairs as such (so the “this, that is the case”; the “is” of “is cold,” etc. are not elements of sensuous intuition). These categorial structures represent an intuitivity of the whole that is other than but founded upon the perceptual intuitivity of the experience simpliciter. Husserl’s argument for categorial intuition or categorial perception depends here on a broadening of the traditional senses of both intuition and perception, and he comes to see that this is only possible through (in part) understanding how the progressive complexities of immanent consciousness orient seeing towards ever more complex founded objectivities on the level of categorial articulation.

This was already the point of the analyses of complex intentional acts in the preceding studies of the Logische Untersuchungen: the point had been that consciousness is structured in such a way that manifold levels of transcendence, different senses of the “givenness” of the given, can be articulated, from the grounding achievements of sensuous life to the logical syntheses of full blown theoretical consciousness. What changes after the Logische Untersuchungen, as can be seen already in works such as Ideen I but above all in the posthumously published Erfahrung und Urteil,¹⁰ is that Husserl comes to see the founded unities which these different senses comprise to be in turn grounded in an immanence that, so to speak, folds back in on itself in accordance with complex orders of self-encounter. The intentional complexity of founding and founded, so central to the argument of the Logische Untersuchungen, is no longer limited to the simple concatenation of a multiplicity of intentional acts, but has its origin in the manner in which conscious life unfolds as the movement of a self-enriching experience. The very sense of “founded” then becomes articulated in a unique way in Husserl’s mature philosophy, since what comes into view is not simply an object of a higher order (such as a state of affairs, in contrast to the perceived objects that serve as its intuitive foundation), but the movement of a consciousness that rediscovers in its own established accomplishments those points of departure that allow for intentional complexity and higher order accomplishments. This opens up for Husserl a number of questions that had remained essentially dormant in the Logische Untersuchungen, questions having to do above all with the temporality of consciousness, and ultimately its history; likewise the themes of givenness, the being of immanence, and the role of intersubjectivity in the constitution of objectivity both perceptual and ideal.

I would argue that, in Husserl’s thought, this attempt to describe the immanent movement of intentional life gradually yields a description of seeing as not only a comportment towards the seen, one that can be understood in terms of an exercise of a faculty of sensibility or the movement of a desire, but also as a comportment that becomes more and more manifest to itself. That is, subjective life becomes manifest not so much as a particular species of object, so for example an object of inner intuition or perception, but instead as a subjective dimension of given constitutive life that opens up the possibility of ever more complicated dimensions of seeing. Intentional life becomes, in other words, progressively its own theme, in the wake of the development of a maturation of seeing.

In this way, finding the proper formulation of the question “what does it mean, to become aware of life?” becomes an essential requirement of intentional analysis. What does it mean, for a being who sees to bring the question of its own seeing into view, for its own being, as the intentional access to being, to itself become distinctively accessible? I take the maturity of this thought to be one of the salient differences between the Logische Untersuchungen and Husserl’s later writings on logic, above all Formale und trasnzendentale Logik and Erfahrung und Urteil: for the former, logic was essentially the study of the basic structures that account for the subjective accomplishment of complex meanings; for the latter, logic is the culmination of a self-maturing consciousness that finds in itself the potential to articulate its own rational essence. Each represents a figure of the analysis of access, and each attempts to frame the epistemological problem in terms of a descriptive analysis of the being of life; but it is only in the latter that Husserl breaks free from the lingering strictures of descriptive psychology, and discovers a uniquely powerful expression of the philosophical problem of consciousness.

An important consequence of Husserl’s mature approach, I would argue, is that it does not limit the form of the question of how the being of seeing comes into view by assuming it makes sense only if we take up a position outside of seeing, thereby making it an object of a reflection that does not belong to the dynamics of seeing itself. The point is rather that seeing can accomplish its relation to the seen in a modified fashion, one thanks to which the seeing of the seen is brought to the level of visibility, but a visibility that is ultimately immanent to its own originally “naive” accomplishment. In this way, the manifestation or phenomenality of seeing is recognized in light of a gathering potentiality, as it were, of the very life of seeing, or of consciousness, and it is in part the maturity of such a potentiality that is a precondition not only for logic, but also for phenomenological investigation as such.

This self-manifestation of comportment, as a developing potentiality that belongs to the fabric of conscious life, is again a theme that only gradually develops in Husserl’s thinking, culminating in the genetic phenomenology of the 1920s and 1930s. It does not emerge from an explicit engagement with Aristotle, though Husserl’s constant reflection on Brentano’s presentations in his Vienna lectures from the 1880s of the problems of time, perception, and imagination, all of which were profoundly influenced by a reflection on Aristotle, form a constant backdrop to its development.¹¹ It is in Heidegger, however, that we do find an explicit articulation of the theme of seeing from a phenomenological point of view that expressly engages Aristotle’s text; and it is Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle in the 1920s that will allow us to understand better the significance of the implicit place for Aristotle in phenomenological thinking.

Seeing as Language (   phunē sēmantikē)

As evidence for the central importance of seeing for Heidegger’s reflections on phenomenology, let us consider two passages from his 1924 Marburg lectures, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. These lectures provide both an important perspective on the pre-history to Sein und Zeit (in particular, as we will see, with regard to the concept of care, or Sorge), and include one of the most sustained critiques of Husserl to be found in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (though, as is characteristic, Heidegger’s remarks range only over a very limited scope of Husserl’s writings). More important for our purposes here, Heidegger in these lectures prefaces his critique of Husserl through an interesting and rich reflection on Aristotle, in which he introduces a number of ideas that are relevant precisely to the questions of world, intentionality, and the being of life that we have begun to articulate above.

The first passage can be found in §16a, where Heidegger explicitly identifies care (Sorge) as seeing: “Every care is, as such, a seeing.”¹² Care, here as in Sein und Zeit,¹³ is for Heidegger the fundamental structure of Dasein as a being-in-the-world; thus the ontology of Dasein amounts to an ontological interpretation of the phenomenon of care. If every care is a seeing, then seeing belongs to being in the world, not as an contingent supplement but as inherent to its very sense: “A kind of sight is, along with other things, inherent in being in the sense of being in the world.”¹⁴

Seeing is inherent to being in the world to the extent to which it captures the sense in which Dasein is in relation to both itself and to things. Heidegger’s reflections here allow us to introduce again, in a more precise way, the question of the world, which we already emphasized above, and precisely in terms of that vacillation between the world as manifestation and obfuscation, or the sense in which the conditions of access also set into place the conditions for a failure to see. Heidegger’s first move is to in effect fold the general structure of making manifest, or uncovering, into the basic constitutive order of care or seeing.

We should stress that sight, seeing, is not meant here as one capacity among others; above all it is not limited to theoretical activity, on whatever level or in whatever sense; it is instead a structural feature of Dasein, a constitutive element of Dasein as care. Care is here taken above all as that structure thanks to which Dasein “is” as an unconcealment, or uncoveredness: “This kind of sight has nothing to do with theoretical knowledge but is, instead, a kind of accomplishment of existence’s basic constitution, one that ought to be referred to as uncoveredness.”¹⁵

This is the first passage I wanted to stress. In ways that recall Husserl’s discussion of evidence in the VI Logische Untersuchung, Heidegger is here arguing that seeing and uncovered, manifest being stand in a fundamental existential correlation, forming the same fabric of accomplishment; they are not externally brought together by something else, such as an effort of verification that would have in view a “truthfulness” that is originally alien to both. Yet along with this comes an important broadening of the theme of seeing, one that moves beyond the figure of uncovering and deepens the sense of what is given with the being of uncovering. Being-in (the world) has the structure of uncoveredness, Heidegger argues, but also of a having, a characteristic of the sense of the world we have already alluded to above. In Heidegger’s description of ontical human existence, Dasein “has” what it uncovers, and this is a factor that must be included in any reflection on what it means when we say that what it uncovers is seen.

Disclosure, having, and world are thus for Heidegger wrapped up in the theme of seeing in a fundamental way, and we need to be thinking of this inner bond of “having” and “uncovering” when considering the second passage from Heidegger’s lectures to which I would like to draw our attention:

What is expressed by the phrase ‘in a world’ is not that two objects are related in some way to one another but instead that the specific being of what is alive is grounded on having the world in the manner of taking care of it [or: disclosing it in a comportment in which it discloses itself in its possibilities—JD]. We designate this orientation of an entity insofar as it lives, that is to say, insofar as it is in its world, as a kind of sight.¹⁶

This is important to emphasize, above all to evade the impression that the theme of Sorge somehow abandons a more Husserlian emphasis on intuition and givenness, as being in some way suspect as vestiges of a putative intellectualism. The complex of seeing and seen, of the movement of immanence and the unfolding of transcendence, so essential to Husserl’s thought, is in fact repeated here, not abandoned. Yet it is not just repeated in a modified form, but in a way that reflects the point of contention between Husserl and Heidegger, cited above, concerning how we are to bring into focus the lived character of intentional life, and thereby understand the inner bond between living and having at the heart of the uncoveredness of seeing.

That an understanding of the bond between a lived having of the world and seeing is at stake here can be seen in Heidegger’s discussion of the name “phenomenology,” which he pursues through a reflection on the meanings of phainomenon and logos in Aristotle. Heidegger stresses that phainomenon in Aristotle is not simply a self-showing, but a showing made possible by an orientation of encounter: “phainomenon is what shows itself of itself as existing; it is encountered by life insofar as life stands towards its world in such a way that it sees the world, perceives it at all in the aisthēsis.”¹⁷ The emphasis on seeing here thus determines how logos and phainomenon are to be brought together. Again avoiding a perceived hegemony of “problems,” Heidegger does not pursue the question in terms of the traditional gloss of the suffix “-logy,” where “phenomenology” would simply amount to a science that seeks to give an account of phenomena as phenomena, à la the traditional conception of phenomenology described by thinkers such as Lambert. There is rather a deeper connection between world and seeing that Heidegger is trying to illuminate, and he does this through a consideration of the conception of language at play in Aristotle’s De anima and De interpretatione. For in the end, it is language and manifestation that come together in the theme of seeing for Heidegger.

Let us look closer at this, and consider Heidegger’s discussion of logos in the 1924 Marburg lectures first. Here Heidegger is commenting on De interpretatione d, 16b26f (cf. Aristotle 1987, pp. 13–14): “Logos is audible being that means something, that is a voice: logos de esti phunē sēmantikē.” To have a voice, or an audible being that means something, is to be alive; “To have a voice,” as Heidegger puts it, “is a distinctive type of being, namely being in the sense of living.”¹⁸ Here one might think that Aristotle is, rather characteristically, providing an inventory of the senses in which we can say that someone is alive—to live is to see, but also to speak; or rather, speaking should be considered something alongside seeing as characteristic aspects of a human being. Thus animals (who are, after all, living beings) certainly perceive, and perhaps even make sounds, and maybe even have something like a voice; but such sounds and voices are not saturated with sense or meaning as in the case of humans. This might be so, but we nevertheless need to ask something more general, namely: what is the real difference between the two, namely seeing and speaking? To answer this, we need to know what meaningful speech (phunē sēmantikē) amounts to, or what we are to understand by a sound, made by a living being, that is properly saturated with meaning. But upon reflection we find ourselves led back to the question of what a phenomenon is, or what it is for something to become manifest—for a sound is laden with meaning only to the extent to which something in sound is manifest as its meaning or sense. But through what, or thanks to what in speech (logos) does something become manifest?

For Aristotle, the answer is: through and thanks to phantasia (Heidegger here cites De int. b 8, 420b31f). Again Heidegger: “Phantasia—that something shows itself. The sound is a voice (the sound of speech) if, by means of it, something is to be perceived (seen). On the basis of phantasia one designates the sound sēmantikē.”¹⁹

To be sure, this raises more questions than it answers. The scholarly debate that has been raging for centuries over the role of Phantasia in Aristotle shows little sign of resolution, and serves to raise even more questions.²⁰ But perhaps we can at least assert that, in this case, at the core of Aristotle’s position is the idea that in meaningful speech—or sound that has Phantasia —something comes to light (recalling the meaning of the root pha- which, as Heidegger emphasizes, is related to phōs light²¹), something shows itself, in a sense that is related to the manner in which something appears in an “image,” but not necessarily limited to a specifically graphic interpretation of phantasmata. This emphasis on something coming to light in turn yields for us not a specific, but in fact a general conception of seeing: for seeing can be described in general terms as a comportment in which “something comes to light,” which in Heidegger, evoking Aristotle, includes an emphasis on the role of meaningful speech. And this is in turn discernible at the core of Heidegger’s conception of care as an uncoveredness: the originary coming to light of what is in the horizon of the life of Dasein as an event structurally conditioned by language.

But there is more, and this binds Heidegger’s discussion with the theme of seeing that we find in Husserl: what comes to light is not simply the manifestation of this or that object of concern, but concernful comportment itself, and that precisely as a having of the world. Heidegger: “Insofar as a human being is in the world and wants something in that world and wants it with himself, he speaks.”²² This might strike one as an attempt on the part of Heidegger to situate the entire discussion of phenomenality on a practical register, an impression that would, for example, find sustenance if we were to look at Heidegger’s discussion of phronēsis in the beginning of the lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which was given the same academic year as the Einführung.²³ However, I would argue that we should leave the theme of the “practical” aside, since the point is not limited to intentional life being aimed at some end or other, which is not even the point in the case of phronēsis; rather, the idea Heidegger wants to emphasize is that of an originary investment in things, in a “having” of the world, not simply the manifold ways of being directed to this or that end or telos. To have means primarily: something is uncovered, where the uncovering that is oneself is likewise uncovered.

Let us continue with the passage from Heidegger we have been quoting, where he goes on to develop the theme of bringing something to light in language as specifically an uncovering in the modality of having. It is, again, a having that is also a self-having; the accomplishment of uncovering enriches and cultivates the manifestation of the one who reveals. This is what is means not only to have a voice, in the sense of a sound that comes from a living being, but precisely to speak. “[The human being] speaks,” Heidegger stresses, “insofar as something like a world is uncovered for him as a matter of concern and he is uncovered to himself in this ‘for him.’”²⁴ This formulation allows us to ask the question: what is the spoken word, as a fundamental unit of meaningful speech, such that it forms a response to the being-uncovered of world and self, as the basic structure of being-in-the-world? And how is this response of the spoken word, if we can call it that, complicit with the very being of manifestation that is, for Heidegger, at stake in bringing something to light? What does it mean to see with words, or to see in words something that there is to see, or that is there to be seen?

Perhaps one might argue that the word simply responds to what is given, or that it responds to what is given to be seen, and with that to be had. Words simply collect together what already is, providing for the ease of arrangement and organization; they thus record what seeing has already seen, and to that extent understood. Yet on Heidegger’s account the issue turns not so much on the given registered in language, if by that we understand something that does not need to be further established, but rather what Heidegger calls the facticity (Faktizität) of language. That is, the point is not simply to stress the relation of language to the already given, but instead the having-been-established of word and speech, thus as itself a given in response to a need to be established. In this way Heidegger’s interest is drawn more to Aristotle’s classification of language, meaningful speech, as belonging among those things that could have been otherwise, and which thus need to be explicitly set up in what they are. This is, for example, a key characteristic that ties technē together with phronēsis, but also, more fundamentally, with language itself.

This can be illustrated by considering a passage in Aristotle from the early chapters of De interpretatione, where he stresses the idea that meaningful sound is not meaningful by nature, phusei, but kata sunthēken, “by convention.”²⁵ It is meaningful, one could say, out of its factical already having been made meaningful in the becoming of Dasein as such. Yet in Aristotle language is not for all that an instrument, it is not an instance of a coming together of use and device, even in the form of a bodily organ (organon), such as the hand. Heidegger reads the remark at De int. 17a2 (cf. Aristotle 1987, p. 14), where Aristotle asserts that language is not like a tool or organon, as amounting to an emphasis of its Faktizität: “Language is the being and becoming of the human being himself,”²⁶ that is, language is the having-been-uncovered of the world and of Dasein in its being towards the seen in care.

A “voice,” then, or language as meaningful sound, in which something comes to light (in the manner of phantasia), is constitutive of the being and becoming of the human being as such. This is not just the designation of an origin, but rather an indication as to how human becoming is the shaping of a view, a seeing of things. The “conventional” character of language represents in this sense a unique modulation of a visibility, a phenomenality, that is determinate as the structure of the being of human existence itself. We can think again here of Heidegger’s discussion of phronēsis in the Sophist lectures, where he emphasizes that phronēsis, unlike technē, is for Aristotle not something directed outside of itself; the relevant telos that is here brought into view is not “outside,” para, to phronēsis, but is the illumination (the coming to light) of the being of phronimos as such.²⁷

This same point can in turn be made by reflecting on Heidegger’s comment on a rather difficult passage in Aristotle at De interpretatione 16b18 (cf. Aristotle 1987, p. 13), which reads: “Verbs themselves, spoken by themselves, are names and signify something (for the one speaking brings his thinking to a halt and the one listening pauses).”²⁸ The chief difficulty here is to understand what it is about speaking that “brings thinking to a halt” (histēsi… ho legōn tēn dianoian) and what about listening amounts to coming to a “pause” or rest (ēremeō). Heidegger’s answer helps us to understand better what is for him significant about the conventional or non-natural essence of language:

When we naturally go along living, then the world is here. We deal with it, we are preoccupied with it. If a word is then spoken, the process of opining is placed before something; in understanding the word I linger with that thing; in meaning something, I have come to a pause […] What matters for Aristotle, particularly also in contrast to Plato, is the fact that speaking, when it moves within the language, is something that, as far as its genuine being is concerned, grows out of human being’s free assessment of things; it is not phusei [by nature].²⁹

This reading allows Heidegger to in turn articulate the place and importance of apophantics in Aristotle’s thought: this lingering with things in words, resting on the heels of the accomplishments of uncovering, allows for ostension, or the possibility of pointing out (aufzeigen), of showing a being in its being-encountered. Language thus interrupts the flow of a simple, seamless engagement of things in the horizon of care, providing uncoveredness as a space for meaning, which just is ostension for Aristotle; “the primordial function of meaning is ostension, to point something out,” as Heidegger emphasizes.³⁰ Both speaking and listening represent breaks in the seams of understanding, breaks that are essential to the specifically cognitive shape of phenomenality; in grasping the meaning of a name, I pause in the broken flow of my understanding, and am thereby in a position to set off the given in order to show (and see) it come to light in its name. Likewise in naming something I contract, or constrict my engagement with the thing and its horizon, in order for language to set apart, set out what it is that is to be shown as named.

Language brings to light by pointing out; but this function of ostension, of meaning, is grounded for Heidegger in the facticity of language itself, which also, and this is very significant for Heidegger’s discussion, carries for Aristotle with it the possibility of falsity. This point, nurtured by a reflection on Aristotle, is essential to what one might characterize as an important modification on the part of Heidegger of Husserl’s phenomenology of perception. Heidegger’s approach, the beginnings of which are taking shape in Marburg lectures from the 1920s, effectively amounts to the articulation of the complex of seeing and seen in terms of a renewed problematization of language, one that runs against Husserl’s strong tendency to situate the complex of seeing within what one might call an argument as to the “primacy of perception.” And Aristotle, I would argue, is of fundamental relevance to this modification, because his thought has a deep resonance with both Husserl’s commitment to the primacy of perceptual life and Heidegger’s turn to language; and by extension, this entire debate forms the very basis for the contrast between Husserl’s emphasis on the concept of consciousness and Heidegger’s opposing concept of Dasein.

I cannot, of course, pursue all of this at once; for my purposes here, I wish only to indicate how Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle can illuminate for us how the Philosopher’s thinking provides important resources for both the argument for the primacy of perception as well as the origin of the problem of obfuscation in the existential interweaving, so to speak, of language and perception.

To clarify what I mean, let us in the remaining sections first turn to Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle on perception, in order then to outline how the issue of falsity and obfuscation is framed. This will in conclusion offer us a way to situate Husserl and Heidegger in a debate over fundamental problems in phenomenology that can, and should be recognizable as essentially determined by Aristotle.

Seeing as aisthēsis

Some caution is in order concerning how our discussion is here being framed, and on two counts. First, it is obvious that, from the beginning to the end of his philosophical career, from the I. Logische Untersuchung (“Ausdruck und Bedeutung”), or even from the 1890 Philosophie der Arithmetik, to the late Krisis-related text Ursprung der Geometrie,³¹ language had been a central theme for Husserl. More, the hallmark of the development of Husserl’s philosophy of language could be characterized precisely by a growing sophistication in grasping the implications of its facticity, its specifically instituted pregivenness, and with that its being bound up with the problematic of the obscurity of the world. Keeping this in mind, one should perhaps characterize the argument between Husserl and Heidegger as turning on how to understand the nature of the pre-givenness of language, its facticity and worldly character; it is not, in other words, a debate about whether the facticity of language is philosophically significant.

The second count on which caution is warranted is that Heidegger’s own approach in the 1920s in fact appropriates a characteristic Husserlian theme of the folding back of language, and acts of meaning in general, into seeing, into perception. This forms, for example, an important dimension of Husserl’s genetic account of intentional unity in his later writings, and is arguably even a prominent feature in the Logische Untersuchungen itself.³² In Heidegger’s Marburg lectures that we have been following, an analogous point is made through a reflection on Aristotle’s account of sensuous perception (aisthēsis), and serves as an illuminating moment precisely with respect to the relevance of Aristotle for central discussions in classical phenomenology. For the emphasis on language does not, at least not initially, represent a turning away from perception, thus the substitution of one modality of seeing for another; on the contrary, it instead sets the stage for a reflection on the intentional interpenetration of the sensed and the spoken.

Let us consider this point in more detail. There are four aspects of aisthēsis in Aristotle that Heidegger emphasizes in his Marburg lectures, all of which are significant for understanding the general structures of lived experience in which language is set, as so to speak the natural basis of animal existence that forms the substratum for the convention of language. The passages in Aristotle that Heidegger employs in this connection are from De anima B, 4–5; and G, 2.³³

The first point of emphasis is that in Aristotle “aisthēsis is an alloiōsis: a ‘becoming-different’.”³⁴ Perceiving as sensing is an originary being-other-than itself, and on this basis, that which senses can be described as a relational being (Heidegger here cites De an. 415b24; 416b34). “In perceiving,” as Heidegger puts it, “the one perceiving becomes himself someone different insofar as, in perceiving, he now takes up a stance towards his world in a definite manner.”³⁵ Such a being-other, of course, is a recognizable aspect of any description of a properly intentional relation; to evoke intentionality does not amount to ascribing or assigning a relation to elements that only then become two or more relata, in this case the perception and the perceived. Rather, the basic idea of intentionality is that relationality can be understood as an immanent structural manner of existence basic to an order of being. Aisthēsis in Aristotle approaches a expression of the “intentional” character of a living existence to the extent to which in sensing, the being of the one who senses is moved to be other than itself, thus becoming the sensing-of something.

The second aspect of aisthēsis in Aristotle that Heidegger want to emphasize specifies the manner of this being-different. Heidegger: “Aísthēsis is a paschein, a being-affected.”³⁶ In sensing, the sensing is something that happens to the perceiver; its relationality is ordered in accordance with a fundamentally passive dimension that circumscribes what Robert Sokolowski and others have described as the “dative of manifestation.” Again, this passivity lies at the heart of any phenomenological description of the intentionality of perceptual life; the point, neither in Aristotle nor in phenomenology, was ever to argue for a complete, unsurpassable passivity of perception, but instead to understand how the primacy of the passive, so to speak, determines the manner and function of any activity that roots itself in perceptual life.

This function of passivity is in turn specified by a third aspect of Aristotle’s conception of perception that Heidegger emphasizes, namely its distinguishing of something from something: “aisthēsis,” in other words, “is a krinein.” That is, aisthēsis sets off this…from…; in sensing, the soul distinguishes, discriminates something from something else. Thus sensing, perceiving is not just a passive being other, a moveable affected by the world, but the more complex dynamic of the being-affected of a life by its own being-other that allows for the setting off of something from something else.

Together these three aspects—aisthēsis as alloiōsis, paschein, krinein—form for Heidegger an intimate bond between aisthēsis and logos, to the extent to which the basic accomplishment of any ostension is just the bringing of something to light by the setting-off of something from something else. We can now appreciate better how seeing in the sense of aisthēsis shares common ground with speaking, precisely from the perspective of how something is brought to light, and not simply on the basis of a unity of “content,” where what has been seen is in turn spoken of. They share a common ground as both belonging to a more fundamental order of intentional life; specifically, logos embodies the appropriation of the originary structure of being-other than itself that is basic to the structure of aisthēsis. “The logos,” Heidegger goes on to say, “has the function of pointing out the perceived as such [Heidegger here cites De an. 426b20ff; cf. Aristotle 1993, pp. 50–51-JD]. This fact of the matter, namely, that of being different, is appropriated in the specific manner of speaking.”³⁷ Language, and seeing, thus yield a positioning, a placing of the living subject in care (Sorge, which is a seeing), whereby it is open to the multitude of whatever it is that can be set apart, or released in a differentiating ostention (aufzeigen). This yields for Heidegger a fourth essential aspect of aisthēsis in Aristotle, that being in the midst (mesotēs) of what is set apart that defines the being of perception; it is in the midst of things qua discriminating, or thanks to the tension opened and exercised by a differentiating looking one way to the other.³⁸

Language, despite its conventional character, is nevertheless situated in a being that is primordially a natural sensing-discerning of things; and in this way, comparable to the Husserlian reflection we described above, the functioning of language can be seen as effectively folding back into a complex of life that in turn feeds off a speaking that has deep resonance with primitive forms of a seeing that makes something manifest. Language is to be sure meaningful by convention, but it is a convention that essentially directs nature in a manner that is ultimately in harmony with its end and function as the opening space of phenomenal discernment.

If language in the traditional sense, namely as an artifice or instrument of articulation, has seemed to usurp sensing as being more fundamental, if concepts in other words have become stupid to life, it is precisely because our sense for this originary function of language in directing the movements of unconcealment, thus seeing, has been deadened. And in fact, Heidegger argues, language has become for us something that seems to work against unconcealment, as something that replaces seeing, in favor of a claim to truth on the part of an image of things in which things seem to play no immediate role. This, as Heidegger expresses it, renders the very concept of ostension deeply problematic:

Aisthēsis is present in the sort of being that has language. Whether or not it is vocalized, it is always in some way speaking. Language speaks not only in the course of the perceiving, but even guides it; we see through language. Insofar as language is taken up in a traditional and not in a primordial sense, it is precisely what conceals things, though it is the same language that precisely has the basic function of ostension.³⁹

The Falsity of Seeing

There is much to say about the problem of ostension from the point of view of intentional analysis, but Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle’s philosophy of perception is significant in another, related respect that I would like to emphasize. That is, the understanding of life as a primordial seeing that emerges in his reading of Aristotle is not limited to those patterns thanks to which things become visible, or manifest; of equal importance for Heidegger, or Husserl for that matter, is the sense in which things become hidden, or are obscured, not in spite of but because of the structure of seeing. Coupled with the project of clarifying the relation of perception and language in the figures of visibility is thus a reflection on the constitutive role of falsehood in our experience of the world.

This expansion of the reflection also allows us to develop the theme of phenomenon in phenomenological philosophy, and with that the question of what it means to bring the phenomenality of being into a descriptive focus. The assertion that the phenomenon qua phenomenon poses a unique problem of the access to being is a key gesture of phenomenological philosophy, one that follows in part from a sensitivity to the reticence of phenomenality to emerge as a proper theme for reflection. Heidegger approaches this problem in his 1924 lectures through a reflection on how it was that the term phainomenon came to connote illusion, or by extension how the semantics of the concept of appearance (Erscheinung) came to be more and more limited to that of “mere” appearance, thus undermining the sense in which phenomenality provides a meaningful access to anything at all, even itself.⁴⁰

Heidegger’s argument is that the restriction of the sense of phainomenon to “mere appearance” was not simply a mistake, or even if it was a mistake, it is one that can be traced back to essential motivations. What appears, what shows itself, appears in the world, and with that comes the potential for falsity and illusion; an integral element to the concept of phenomenality has to include an account of the potential of visibility, and with that of seeing, for providing the ground for illusion, for a manifestation that shows something by failing to make it evident (and not just a manifestation that fails to happen).

Aristotle is again of critical importance for Heidegger here, in particular De anima B 7, which continues the discussion on perception (aisthēsis) that Heidegger sketches in §2c of the Einführung that we discussed above. The Aristotelian text provides here an analysis of vision (opsis) and the visible (horaton). Aristotle argues that the visible, the seen, is either that which has color (chrōmatos), or “something which can be described in words but has no name.” (418a28) Color, or coloring as what overlies that which itself is visible from out of itself (touto d’esti to epi tou kath’auto horatou, 418a29–30), is tied intimately to the light (phōs), or specifically to the light of daylight, the brightness of daylight (Heidegger here uses the German im Helle to render the sense of en phōti that allows color to shine.⁴¹ Daylight itself, however, is what allows something to be seen through itself, or what Aristotle calls the “transparent” (diaphanes)—color just is what produces movement in daylight (418b1–2). However for Aristotle daylight is not a body (this is against Empedocles: light is not a body that moves), but rather a primordial manner in which something is made present; it is through the transparent, in other words, that the actualization of the visible takes place. Specifically, in the case of color, what is made visible in the transparency of daylight is for Aristotle an idion (cf. De an. 418a8: Aristotle 1993, p. 27), something sensible in only one way: so sight sees only color, just as hearing perceives only sound. Heidegger here emphasizes the important point that idion is contrasted by Aristotle against the koina such as change or movement, which belong to all the senses, as well as against the sumbebekota, or what is perceived along with or incidentally (this blue orb here as Pierre’s eye).

Interpreting the significance of these passages for the theme of seeing, Heidegger argues that “daylight is part of the being of the world itself,” that is, when taken in its specifically diaphanous character.⁴² This does not mean, however, that the world “is” daylight, or even limited to what is circumscribed by the day; or in other words, if the ostensive functioning of vision is considered, then what can be pointed out is not limited to what stands in the light. For what appears, the phainomenon, what shows itself, does not only show itself in the light, but also in darkness. Aristotle in fact emphasizes in De anima that there are things we see only in the dark, in that peculiar transparency realized as a particular modality that presence assumes within darkness. One might think of the stars in the sky, or sparks rising from a campfire, both of which would be hardly visible if at all in the full light of day; instead Aristotle cites, interestingly enough, the “fire like” qualities of funghi and fish scales. The point seems to be that it is only thanks to the support of the surrounding darkness from which such faint illuminations can feed that such things become visible at all. Heidegger’s argument is thus that darkness and light together, as two modes of the functioning of that transparency that forms the presencing of the visible, belong to the being of the world.⁴³

Yet how do light and darkness relate to each other? Aristotle argues that darkness should not be considered as a kind of light, but rather as the diaphanous that has the potential for light, or better: the diaphanous is darkness qua potential being, and light qua actual being. Thus Aristotle can argue the following: “The same underlying nature (phusis) is sometimes darkness (skotos) sometimes light (phōs)” (418b29f: Aristotle 1993, p. 27). This nature is itself colorless, that is, color produces movement only in the actually transparent, thus only in the diaphanous qua light; but darkness is nevertheless the same visibility qua dunamei on, and as the potential presencing of darkness it belongs to seeing just as fundamentally as the play of color in the light. That darkness is in some sense visible to us, as the very presence of visibility in dynamic form, plays a key role in the manner in which the dimly visible or barely visible is perceived. I take it that Aristotle would recognize that the campfire spark is of course a source of light, as is the star; the emphasis here is rather on the pattern of their manifestation, which is in both cases rooted in the being of darkness as potential being, as that into which light retreats in order for the phenomena of the barely or phosphorically visible to be possible. Yet that into which light retreats is, specifically, darkness as potential daylight—that is, the potential for the presence of visibility to be drawn to the light.

Aristotle fully recognizes the strangeness of his phrasing; we have no words, as he says in the passage we quoted above, for this “potential” daylight or transparency. That Aristotle lacks appropriate positive expressions for what we might call the fecund obscurity of nascent phenomenality, Heidegger argues, helps us to recognize a limitation basic to the tradition:

The fact that there is no name for these things indicates, however, that our language (doctrine of categories) is a language of the day. This holds particularly for the Greek language and is connected in their case with the basic starting point of their thinking and their formation of concepts.⁴⁴

Yet this “limitation” is not for Heidegger something that would call for a mere supplement that would round out a full language of being: “One cannot remedy that by somehow constructing a doctrine of categories of the night. Instead we must go back to a point prior to this opposition in order to be able to understand why the day has this priority.”⁴⁵ This yields a key point we can emphasize with Heidegger: the evidence of the world is the evidence of a being that is not one of pure illumination, but also of darkness, obscurity; this is in turn a fundamental point about the phenomenality of the phenomenon, in that it helps us to understand the importance of marking out a certain reticence to illumination that is constitutive of phenomenal presence. It is also an important point about the accessibility of phenomenality, and with that that of the being of the world: any description of how givenness and manifestation can be approached phenomenologically must include a sense for how the non-given and the darkness of manifestation play a fundamental role in how things are given. For the fact is that, even if our language, at least on the level of categoricity, is a language of the day, we nevertheless, from within the full horizon of intentional life (and with that of seeing), move most of the time between the night and the day. This is above all the case on the level of explicit perceptual orientation as a foundation for ostension: we engage the world by illuminating things, articulating them out of their obscurity into definite patterns of “this, not that”; “other than”; “in addition to,” and so on, that is, by way of setting things off and apart from one another. The fiery presence of the campfire is set off perceptually from the surrounding darkness; the ocean is set off from the sky and the coast; the phosphoresence of fish scales realizes their movements qua visible through the diaphanous medium of the dark pond as a potent reservoir of potential daylight. This setting off of things from one another is also, as Heidegger stresses, the way for Aristotle in which human beings move about the world (that is, qua kinēsis kata topon; here Heidegger is citing 427a18: Aristotle 1993, p. 52); humans roam the worlds as a seeing that, in setting things off from one another, articulates them in their presence.⁴⁶

This figure of kinēsis kata topon involves a discrimination limited neither to conceptual thinking nor language; the latter appropriates these distinctions among the visible and gives them a new form, a new structure based on a higher order “taking as.” This “as” structure of original setting off belongs to perception itself, to some extent even in the most primitive accomplishments of the sensuous, and in this way it saturates the full being of life as a seeing. The description that emerges from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is thus quite close to that of intentional life that we find in the mature Husserl, as described above: language, appropriating patterns of discriminating movement from the life of perception, enriches them in turn with its own logical accomplishments of discrimination and synthesis.

Yet in Heidegger’s description, not everything that belongs to this kinēsis kata topon falls within the strict confines of the transparently manifest; of crucial constitutive importance is also the obscurely manifest, the darkened given. Thus if the question of the consciousness of the world is the question of the relation of the being who experiences to the manner of the givenness of the world, then for Heidegger this involves as much a givenness shot through with obscurity and inaccessibility as it does with a givenness thanks to which things become accessible. With accessibility there comes a peculiar threat of inaccessibility to the being of things, to the extent to which their becoming manifest is possible on the ground of that being that is being “in the world.”

The role of the threat of the inaccessible is something that both Husserl and Heidegger are acutely sensitive to, I would argue, though in different ways that point us to a fundamental disagreement between them. To bring this out, first let us recall Husserl’s approach that we have already begun to describe above. For Husserl, the “given world” is the context of reference for the development of any problem; yet at the same time, world-experience in the form of the natural attitude obscures and frustrates any motivation towards more than a partial thematization of lived experience. Any encounter with beings is always skewed in the natural attitude to the task of fitting the profile of a given existent into the larger context of worldly relations; this tends to obscure the resources of subjectivity specific to pure phenomenality, which thus remains anonymous in its properly transcendental functioning in the constitution of sense. It is against this tendency for the being of seeing to limit its manner of self-manifestation that the Husserlian epochē is directed; the epochē in this sense is not a world-denial, but rather an attempt to put a distance between philosophical reflection and the natural acceptance of the orientation of reflection to the evidence of the world, thus a suspension of the natural attitude in favor of an attitude that promises to succeed in the illumination of the subjective achievements of world-experience that in the natural attitude are left, necessarily, in the dark.⁴⁷ In Husserl what becomes essential in this respect is the contrast between the being of consciousness and the being of the world, and with that the evidence that belongs to both, a contrast that promises to guide a radical reorientation within world-experience for a uniquely illuminating reflection on the sense content and unity of the natural theme of the world itself.

Heidegger understands the task posed by the threat of inaccessibility, or of the tendency for worldly life to obscure itself, in a fundamentally different way. For him, the natural obscurity if lived existence is, one could say, something that has a positive aspect that is systematically undervalued in Husserl, at least from Heidegger’s point of view. And here again Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle is decisive, in particular with respect to the latter’s reflection on the origin of falsity (pseudos).

The relevant text of Aristotle in this connection is Metaphysics 1024b17–1025a13 (cf. Aristotle 1987, pp. 277–278). Heidegger cites three respects in which Aristotle claims we speak of falsity: (1) a thing can be false (ōs pragma pseudos); (2) talk or speech can be false (logos pseudēs); and finally (3) there is false in the sense of a false human being (ōs anthrōpos pseudēs). False (pragmata and false logoi), Heidegger stresses, always point to the circumstantial character of things that conditions any activity of humans who navigate about the world through the discrimination of things and the higher order articulations of such discrimination.⁴⁸ Any speaking that engages the full range of these circumstances engages the possibility of falsity, of encountering things that are not there; more, the facticity of language itself always places the speaker in the horizon of the possibility of speaking falsely, either in the sense of unintentional erroneous speech or outright lies. To be false in the sense of a false human being is to be one who deliberately fabricates false accounts of things (1025a1f: Aristotle 1987, p. 278)—it means to positively inhabit the shadows, manipulating them in order to affirm an illusory world of specifically false appearances.

Heidegger’s overarching point in these lectures, and here he is clearly moving beyond Aristotle, is to argue that the distortion that belongs to the being of the world is not something susceptible to a mere reorientation in order to lift the veil, as it were, so as to reveal a unity of sense that is not as such subject to falsity. Accordingly, the task is not to find a manner to suspend the tendencies of our experience towards the self-obfuscation of what is encountered, as it is in Husserl, but rather to find a way to understand, within this movement between night and day, a way to fix just how it is that we are beings who engage in something like a world, which includes falsehood and deception as originary possibilities. This demands above all an appreciation of what Heidegger calls the “elusiveness” of the world, that peculiar character of worldliness in which things are present without being present; for it is precisely in its elusiveness that the world determines for the most part the unfolding patterns of human existence. Immersion in the world and deception are thus existentially bound up with one another. “The more concretely I am in the world,” as Heidegger expresses it, “the more genuine the existence of deception.”⁴⁹

We can also here recognize an important insight into the essence of seeing. If seeing, and the kind of seeing that is logos, includes the possibility of falsehood and deception concerning things that remain elusive even in their being seen, then this implies that seeing itself can function in the form of a kind of failure, a failure to articulate things as they are in favor of things are they are not. More, the potential for human beings to willfully inhabit the false, as a positive countermovement to the successful illumination of things, indicates a central role for the posture of evasion as a fundamental human possibility.

This discussion of deception and falsity in Aristotle, and its articulation on the fundamental level of seeing taken as a modality of being in the world, is clearly important to the Heidegger of the 1920s, providing an important resource for the contrast between authenticity and inauthenticity (Eigentlichkeit and Uneigentlichkeit) that plays such a central role in Sein und Zeit. But it is equally important, I would argue, for engaging Husserl’s conception of the “natural” or “naive” character of conscious life; for the absorption in the world, in being among things, is for Husserl not simply an act of focus or attention, but is precisely something that belongs to the tempo of a life that lives more in obscurity than articulated clarity, or rests upon assumptions and the “obvious” more than it does on an explicit articulation of things. Yet for Husserl there is, too, a reticence on the part of this obviousness, if not an elusiveness; and in the end I would argue that the difference between the two thinkers does not lie in the recognition by one of an obscurity that belongs to the being of the world that is somehow wholly lacking in the other.

In fact, the real difference lies in a disagreement concerning the validity of a theme that is arguably missing in Aristotle, but which haunts all of his discussions for any modern reader: the very concept of consciousness, and of a philosophical analysis oriented around its explication. For in Husserl, the point is not that obscurity, falsity, and error are inessential; rather, the contention is that philosophy can be oriented by a specific form of the suspension of naivete in order to bring into play a perspective that forms a unique basis from which to see—the basis of transcendental consciousness. Heidegger’s objection should thus be understood in terms of his suspicions that this turn to consciousness fails to illuminate philosophically the constitutive role of obscurity that he sees being evoked in Aristotle’s reflections on language, perception, and falsehood.

Conclusion

Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in §§1–2 of his 1924 Marburg lectures is in many ways designed to put into question the meaning of consciousness as a fundamental philosophical theme, which in turn allows him to pursue his explicit critique of Husserl beginning in §3. The critique itself is familiar: the theme of consciousness, in its modern, Cartesian-inspired form, is intimately bound up with a whole set of expectations about the aims of knowledge—of an evidentially secured, certain comprehension of self and world—that covers over from the beginning a genuinely rigorous phenomenological description of human existence. Heidegger’s strategy, familiar to us from Sein und Zeit, is to evade the trappings of this tradition by bringing its subject into focus qua Da-sein, and not Bewusst-sein, since the latter is hopelessly encumbered by intellectualist prejudices that insist on securing the known in its knowability. Here the supposed absence of a genuine concept of “consciousness” in the Greeks (above all in Aristotle) helps to lend some credibility to the possibility of reorienting phenomenology around the theme of seeing that is no longer determined from the perspective of a science of consciousness, but of intentional life more fundamentally construed.⁵⁰ One might see in this an objection to a very Brentanian practice on the part of Husserl of developing an analysis of structures of intentional existence, already fundamentally articulated in Aristotle, in terms of a conception of consciousness; such an approach is not an advance, but a rehearsal of all the failures of modern philosophy since Descartes.

To fully evaluate Heidegger’s critique, we would of course have to engage in more detail Husserl’s conception of consciousness, and above all consider the merit of its obvious Cartesian (and with that Brentanian) inspirations, which Heidegger himself begins to develop in the sections following the ones we have been citing above. There is not the space for that here; nevertheless, it seems to me that we can conclude from our discussion that it would be misleading if the only axis of interpretation of this critique turned on Husserl’s relation to Cartesian thought. For Husserl’s relation to Descartes turns on understanding the problem of error, of falsity and deception, in its most penetrating form—that of a being seeking to illuminate what is implicit in the accomplishments of manifestation, accomplishments that can come into view only through an insight into the tendency for the theme of subjectivity to obfuscate its own self-presence. And that, I would argue, is where a discussion about Aristotle becomes interesting, for Aristotle, as Heidegger shows us, offers unique resources for thinking through the problem of falsity for the life of seeing, resources that in turn provide us with a potential basis for evaluating the Cartesian perspective on the questions of the being of life, the relation to truth, and ultimately the problem of philosophical method as the culmination of the potential for the self-manifestation of intentional life.

The importance of Aristotle for Heidegger has long been recognized, for Husserl less so. In my view, the philosophical implications of the bonds between phenomenology and Aristotelian thought represent far more than an interesting historical footnote to the early development of phenomenology, which one could say drew its first breath in the almost immediate wake of the birth of modern Aristotle scholarship. These bonds are a still underexplored basis for a genuine, fundamental assessment of the legacy of phenomenology, since they promise to illuminate what is compelling about some of the basic philosophical commitments that characterize classical phenomenological philosophy—just ask Richard Cobb-Stevens.