SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

consciousness is not a unified power. It is not one thing, as traditional psychology had taught.
The structure, and hence the nature, of being-consciousness varies with what claims its attention,
takes as its object, and thereby has as its content. These are different modes of beingconsciousness,
not states of consciousness.
Being-consciousness attends to what confronts it (13). It is the very relation between its
acts and its objects. The structure of the relation varies with the kind of object of which there is
consciousness (idea, percepts, images, memories, and so on). Acts of imagining consciousness,
for example, are therefore structurally different from acts of perceiving consciousness or acts of
recollecting consciousness. This may be summarized by saying that being-consciousness is
intentional; that is, it has the structure of a relation determined by the nature of the object of
which there is consciousness.
Phenomenology has endeavored to study the kinds of relations of being-consciousness in
their pure state before they are distorted by the interpretation language invariably imposes on
them. It seeks to recover the data recognized and studied by academic psychologists, but in
their original form, purified as much as possible of the prejudicial ways of seeing the acts and
contents of being-consciousness that the natural scientific point of view introduces. According
to Husserl, being-consciousness is always concrete, but after linguistic interpretation, which
always effects an abstracting (that is to say, symbolizing) transformation, the data of beingconsciousness
are deprived of their concreteness. Language, above all, produces such
abstractions of the concrete data of consciousness.
The consciousness I am with regard to my being differs from the being-consciousness an
other is with regard to my being. With this distinction the question of my existence opens up for
psychology. The question for existential psychology then becomes my experience of the other's
existence and pari passu the other's experience of my existence. My own relation of
consciousness to my own being occurs with respect to one dimension of what I am: my future.
Consciousness of my past is therefore accessible only as directed toward this future and occurs
in the form of what we call recollection. Consciousness of my future as such occurs in the form
of desiring and wishing, fantasizing and reverie, all of which are forms of willing (14).
Only the other can be consciousness of my present. One's consciousness of an other's
existence has its own characteristic acts. As we will see, existence is an object for one's
consciousness unlike any other.
G. Consciousness of Existence and Validation of the Other
When an other is consciousness of my existence, he is consciousness of nothing between us. That
is to say, his consciousness of my existence is of nothing that I am; it is not consciousness of
anything I am, of any part of my being. It is simply consciousness of this very absence of
something between his existence and my existence (15). The key to understanding this, of
course, is that for Heidegger and existential analysts, “nothing” is precisely the fons et origoo of
possibilities.
Initially in everyday life, the other comes face to face with my existence and I with hers,
but on those occasions there is usually a great deal in fact between us, including in particular
the body each of us is, as well a host of preconcpetions, recollections and the like. Existential
encounter begins on this basis. When an other's consciousness of my existence dominates his
awareness, however, all of the things on hand between us except, including especially our
bodies tend to take on exaggerated importance. Soon there is literally everything between the
two of us and the nothing of each other's existence is lost sight of. This determinate though
ordinarily inexplicit plenum consists of everything on hand between us with which we may
occupy ourselves. The things we handle, arrange, and use are the places where our acts of
being-consciousness meet and intersect. Things are places where what I am meets what the
other is. We meet chiefly at the things we most immediately are, namely, our bodies.