SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

19. Nor is perceptual consciousness like a beacon searching the physical world for interesting
things or antennae sampling the environment for stimulating or useful things. It does not function
at all like a mechanism.
20. The temporality of auditory perception is easier to grasp than that of visual perception.
21. Søren Kierkegaard, "Den Existerende," Concluding Unscientific Postscript [1846] (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 468.
22. Neither Husserl nor Heidegger has anything to say about the "genetic psychology" of
consciousness. Yet it is precisely in the dawning of consciousness in childhood that we can see
the connection between consciousness and existence. One of the aims of this essay is to restore
the "genetic" perspective to phenomenological psychology.
23. I often recall in this connection what Jean Beaufret said in 1983: "Instead of consciousness,
Heidegger used the word Dasein [Au lieu de conscience, Heidegger dit Dasein]." This comment
is published in Eryck de Rubercy and Dominique Le Buhan (eds.), Douze Questions posées à
Jean Beaufret à propos de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983), p. 69.
24. Our privately produced, more complex variants on these primary ideas or representations
are another matter.
25. The contractor sees the stresses of various masses balanced in the construction of the
classroom, the teacher and his students feel stresses of a different kind.
26. Before the invention of such an inner world, I conjecture, things were not conceived as we
have learned to "see" them: separated from me by my body, understood as a barrier between
inner and external realms that requires the intervention of my senses to pass through that very
barrier in order to introduce the raw material for representations of external objects into the
interior of my mind, where they are recorded and stored. Regardless of why it was conceived,
however, the so-called inner world is nowhere to be found. In any case, as we have seen, there
is no need for the concept in order to account for how in being-consciousness objects confront
us.
27. This has its counterpart in the "negative hallucination," a well-known act of perceptual
consciousness that occurs when I want to ignore or tune out an annoying sound or bothersome
chattering.
28. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900] (London: Hogarth Press, 1953). The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vols. IV-V (esp. Ch. 7).
29. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, "The Empty Word and the Full Word" (1953), in Anthony
Wilden (ed. and trans.), in The Language of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1968), p. 27. The unconscious is "the discourse of the other," what the other knows and can say.
30. The objects of retention are percepts or images. This much seems clear about retention: an
object of retention is not a single percept or image, but rather a meaningful whole comprised of
many percepts or images, a Gestalt or patterning of perceptual and imaginary elements. The
result of an act of retention (what is usually called "a memory" or "memory trace") is one of the
most difficult topics for psychologists. I will omit consideration of the problem here, since
memories proper (recollections) do not depend on fixed contents ("memory traces"), even if