SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

is the source of all possibilities. A mysterious plenum, indeed, and one that applies only to
existence and not to anything that is.
Experience confirms that validating an other's existence always depends on the
presence of the living body of the other, just as it implies the actuality of my own body on the
scene. Its terminus ad quem, however, is an absence – all that the other is not. This is not
absence of the other, for example, in the uncanny situation of hearing an other's voice
transmitted through a telephone receiver or seeing his image on a video screen during a "live"
transmission. In such circumstances, validation is precluded in principle, since one of us is not
there. Where is he, then? It is not a question of spatial location, however. It is rather a temporal
matter.
Whether looking at a photograph of an other taken, say, a week ago or viewing an
image that is being transmitted from the next room to a video display screen in front of me, the
other is in another temporal framework. He is elsewhen. Only when we are face to face are we
present to each other, but the fact remains that the consciousness I am of an Other's existence is
of nothing, an absence. We must study this absence further.
Viewing the corpse of someone I have known well does may urge my validation of his
existence, but this cannot happen. The person had in some way been this object now lying in
front of me, and in his own way had once also had that body. Now, however, he cannot exist.
He can only be these remains. He is now complete, a closed case. We cannot again be
anything to each other. I can only remember what I took the other to be, which continue to be
part of my future in its own way. But with respect to what once had existence (and is now only
these remains) nothing new can become part of my future. Nor is the object lying there the
body anyone can be. The conditions for existential consciousness are missing. If I nevertheless
attempt to validate "his" existence, I experience that odd sense of uncanniness and helplessness
that is a primary feature of our experience of someone who has died.
It is easy to see why the death of someone "does not compute." I can only recover from
my past what has a place in my future. Only what can figure in my future "makes sense." What
happens when the other has died precludes his having anything further to do with my past and,
hence, with the future it (my past) has.
The uncanniness derives from the missing nothingness between us that will mark my
relation to this object from here on out. I am faced with an anomaly. The dead other is neither
absent nor I present. When he validated my existence, I heard the other's words, felt his touch,
and returned his gaze. No none of that is possible.
As the term suggests, "validating" is closely related to "valuing." But existential
consciousness is not valuing consciousness, since I can value only what an other is, not his
existence. Existential consciousness precedes any acts of consciousness that reveal the other in
terms of value, such as male or female, as father or mother, boss or hireling; as fellow (one who
speaks a language I also speak) or outsider or madman (one whose language does not make
sense to me), burgher or proletarian. Acts of validating consciousness likewise precede any
judgments I might I make about the other that have social or political meaning the other can
have for me. Validation makes possible the development of the complex of formal economic
and business arrangements between what the other and I are, as well as the conditions for
political life.
H. The Objects of Consciousness
Further observations about the objects of acts of consciousness are now in order. A better
understanding of them will make our understanding of the object of existential consciousness
clearer. Psychologists have traditionally described mental life as consisting of a variety of
faculties or functions of consciousness, but this account misunderstands the nature of beingconsciousness.
First, as Husserl pointed out, there is no pure consciousness of any kind, existing