SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

consciousness is therefore always initially asynchronous with my body. Even when recollecting,
fantasizing, or dreaming, my being-consciousness is at some remove from the temporality of my
body.
What this means is that in being-consciousness, my existence is effectively at the place of
the object of the consciousness I am, not “in” me or where my body physically is. Instead, my
existence is spread out over the objects that confront me, whether they are physical or mental,
real or imagined.
Consider, for example, the following sequence of events. Riding on the bus, I am
recalling my apartment and wonder whether I fed the cat. Another person sits down next to me
and his arm touches the side of my body. My being-consciousness is elsewhen, indeed "far off"
from where our bodies touch. Being touched, however, my consciousness is drawn back within
the temporal horizon of his my fellow passenger’s body. My being-consciousness is now at his
body. My body, touched by the other's arm, is now the topos of my perceptual consciousness.
The topos of being-consciousness is a temporal notion. Perception and all the other
modes of being consciousness are temporal. Looking at a landscape, I am at the shimmering
play of light and shade. Listening to music, my being-consciousness suffuses air that bears the
vibrations of the instruments being played and is carried along by the flow of the melody (20).
The account of empirical psychology, which begins with an actively searching, independent
consciousness and static objects to which movement is added, does not correspond to
experience. When I remember someone, my consciousness is "when" I last saw him or expect to
see him. And when I validate an other's existence, my being-consciousness is at his existence.
The notion of the topos at which being-consciousness brings together a modality of my beingconsciousness
and an object is a thoroughly temporal notion. To say that things are places
means that the objects of consciousness are temporal. As being-consciousness, one is caught
up in a relation between his existence and the object that confronts the exister, as Kierkegaard
once termed the existing human being (21). The relation varies with the kind of objects of which
it is consciousness.
The terribly awkward formulation I have been using without much comment can now be
seen to be both correct and useful for what it indicates because it allows me to think of
consciousness in a non-causal relational way. The notion of consciousness as a unidirectional
mechanism makes consciousness the cause of the perception of objects, the recollection of
memory traces, or the formation of images. In this case, consciousness has been thought to
function as an agency of a static ego. I am challenging that view.
How does existence, the exclusive feature of human being, originate(22)? An infant gains
his existence, which is equivalent to being-consciousness, thanks to the acts of validation his
caretakers provide (23). He first becomes aware of his own being-consciousness in the face of
the other who validates existence when he, the infant, in turn and without realizing it, validates
the caretaker's existence. Long before he can speak, the infant returns "the favor" of existential
validation with his gaze. Even in its first occurrences, then, validation is mutual, though the adult
caretaker's expectation of the infant's humanity leads the way.
What kind of object is my own being-consciousness for me? This is question the instigated
Husserl’s research. In order to prepare to answer the question, it is necessary to understand even
more precisely what existential psychology understands by an object of consciousness.
Existential psychology has its origins in phenomenology, which takes its name from the term
phenomenon. A phenomenon designates a thing as it directly and concretely – that is,
meaningfully – gives itself to me, not mediated and in any sort of mentally processed version.
Phenomenology attempts to establish the reflective conditions for making available for
examination phenomena as they present themselves. Psychologists since the English philosopher
John Locke have believed that we never experience things directly but that part of the bargain
of "being conscious" is that consciousness (as the agency of a central executive ego) is directed
to mental representations (versions) of things inside the mind of the experiencing subject. This is
one of the presuppositions of philosophical empiricism, which psychology as a discipline has