The Meontic and the Militant - University of Memphis

Downloaded by [University of Memphis], [Bryan Smyth] at 07:39 14 December 2011
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
come to regard as still beholden to a certain transcendental naïveté. 10
Fink’s proposed revisions to the original Meditations cut strongly against
their ‘Cartesian’ character, in particular by insisting upon the pregivenness
of the world as phenomenology’s initial situation, and emphasizing
that, just as much as it encompasses transcendent being, the world
includes the sphere of human immanence. To deflect the common but
mistaken view that performing the phenomenological reduction entails
withdrawing into an inner domain of apodictic self-certainty, Fink locks
human existence within the mundane world by circumscribing it ontologically,
that is, by interpreting the ‘natural attitude’ as a necessary transcendental
fact of human existence. Rather than as any kind of
psychological complex within the world, it is a matter of the constant
world-apperception that is essentially constitutive of human experience.
For Fink, world-belief is ‘the primal happening [Urgeschehen] of our
transcendental existence’ (Fink, 1988b: p. 187) such that ‘existing-withinthe-belief-in-the-world
and believing oneself to be human are one and
the same’ [Im-Weltglauben-sein und im Selbstglauben als Mensch sein
sind untrennbar eins] (KS, p. 115/109). Hence, rather than as the ‘natural
attitude’, Fink preferred to denote the mundane predicament of human
existence as Weltbefangenheit, captivation in/by the world (see Bruzina,
1998: pp. 57–60, cf. Cairns, 1976: p. 95). Human beings as such are
imprisoned by ontic preoccupations.
Although familiar with the disagreements between Husserl and
Heidegger over the being of transcendental and mundane subjectivity, in
thus posing the ‘question of being’ Fink was not following Heidegger (cf.
Bernet, 1989). For he rejects the ‘ontological priority’ of Dasein. Instead,
his move is to rethink Husserl’s project on the basis of a sharper ontological
difference between mundane and transcendental subjectivity, construing
the former as the latter’s worldly self-apperception, i.e., as the
constituted product of extramundane constitution. For Fink, ‘the existent
is only the result of a constitution’, and ‘constitution is always constitution
of the existent’ (SCM, p. 23/21; cf. p. 108/99). Key here is that the constitutive
coming-to-be of an existent is not itself an existent (SCM, p. 82/
73) and thus cannot be understood in terms of worldly ontology. Fink
argued that, pending a special reduction of it, our idea of being pertains
exclusively to constituted objectivity of the natural attitude – hence the
transcendental naïveté of the original Meditations (cf. SCM, pp. 78–84/
70–5). As constitutive origination and becoming of the world, what we
would call transcendental being ‘is’ ‘simply and solely in the process’
(SCM, p. 49/45; cf. p. 107/97). Fink denotes this constitutive process as
‘enworlding’ [Verweltlichung], or more precisely, as primary or proper
[eigentliche] enworlding (SCM, p. 108/99; cf. p. 23/21). And he refers to
its ‘being-mode’, which transcends the mundane idea of being, as
672