SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

8. When I brush up against the body I am in this way, I have an experience that is disturbing. I am
reminded of the sensation of pure "stuff" (substance) as Husserl describes it. For example, I
expect to taste apple juice, but have mistakenly picked up a glass containing milk. The first
surprising sip is of neither apple juice nor milk. It is the shocking taste of pure "stuff."
9. Certain of the so-called psychotic disturbances include chronic experiences of this kind. For
someone disturbed in this way, the body he has may even be interpreted as an animate or
inanimate mechanism.
10. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). The Philosophical Works of René
Descartes (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), Vol. I, pp. 131-199.
11. The existential psychologies of Rollo May and others still begin with experience.
12. See the lectures Husserl gave during the summer semester of 1925 at the University of
Freiburg, published as Phenomenological Psychology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).
13. Attention, which has an important emotional dimension, is being-consciousness (as a
relation) from the perspective of the body in contrast with the object of being-consciousness.
14. Like any mode of consciousness, willing is willing of something determinate. The same will
hold in general, though with important variations, for its subtypes desiring, wishing, fantasying,
and reverie. But since what I will is based on what I make of my past, imagination will play an
essential part in envisioning my future, just as it also plays a major role in the reviving and revising
of my past in recollection. Nor is willing based solely on what I am. It must also take into account
what others are, and that includes what they do that affects my existence. The characteristics of
recollection and willing can be understood only by studying the objects peculiar to those modes
of being-consciousness. Recollection is probably the most enigmatic mode of beingconsciousness.
A few observations on the topic are given in Appendix II, below.
15. This nothing is not a meaningless emptiness. It is comparable to the nothingness of what is
"seen" in the dark or "heard" in utter silence.
16. When I observe certain works of art – a carved or painted or mechanically produced (still or
moving) image of an other, for example – I may imagine a body that can arouse my sexual
desire, but the question of that human being's existence does not arise. It is also that way with a
memory of someone. The other does not belong to a plastic or electronic representation of him.
The fact that we can be aroused by such representations is the source of a peculiar frustration
which is similar to the kind of frustration that occurs when the voice of an other is heard through
a telephone receiver.
17. My past has an identity, a seeming life of its own, which is why I speak of the future as
something my past has. I think this is what psychologists have been referring to when talking
about the ego (the "me" or the "I"), which need not be consciousness.
18. Here and throughout the word ‘exist’ is used in an active sense. Based on its Latin root, exist
means to "stand out into" a place or situation. In being validated by the other's existence, I stand
out in the situation between us in the way something sets itself apart from everything around for
perception. It is thus comparable to the emergence of form from ground described by Gestalt
psychologists.