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accord<strong>ed</strong> to consciousness 47 and a “deepening” of the notion of intentionality: “being-in”is a more primordial phenomenon that the subject-object (noesis-noema) relation, andHeidegger’s “existence” is something decid<strong>ed</strong>ly more than Husserl’s “intuitional consciousness.”Thus, while Husserl spoke of consciousness “intending” objects, Heidegger, in hisreformulation of the notion of intentionality, stat<strong>ed</strong>: “When Dasein directs itself towardssomething and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which ithas been proximally encapsulat<strong>ed</strong> [Husserl’s egological “sphere of ownness”], but itsprimary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which itencounters and which belong to a world already discover<strong>ed</strong>.” 48 (BT, 89) This worldwhich is “always already there,” into which, as it were, Dasein is simply “thrown,” iswhat the later Husserl call<strong>ed</strong> the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) -- a “magic word,” as Gadamersaid of it, that Husserl himself invent<strong>ed</strong>. 49 The notion of the lifeworld is one Husserlcame upon in the course of the investigations he undertook later in his life into the originsof modern science. By means of this “archeology” of Western consciousness, Husserl wasable to flesh out his earlier critique of naturalism by showing how the lifeworld is “theforgotten meaning-fundament [Sinnesfundament] of natural science.” The lifeworld is theprescientific world of liv<strong>ed</strong> experience on which all (natural) scientific constructs arebas<strong>ed</strong> and which they necessarily presuppose. Inde<strong>ed</strong>, as Husserl again and again insist<strong>ed</strong>,scientific constructs are mere idealizations, abstractions from and interpretations of thisprereflective world of imm<strong>ed</strong>iate life (“a garb of ideas [Ideenkleid]” thrown over thelifeworld). Although this is hermeneutically incontestable, Husserl nevertheless went onto insist that the natural sciences could be plac<strong>ed</strong> on a rigorous footing (and surmounttheir suppos<strong>ed</strong> “crisis”) only if the lifeworld itself could be scientifically account<strong>ed</strong> for.This, of course, was to be the task of the most ultimate of all sciences, “a science withoutbounds,” 50 i.e., a transcendental phenomenology which relates everything back to theconstituting activity of a transcendental Ego.For Heidegger, the significance of the notion of what Husserl was to call the lifeworldlay elsewhere. What the “pregivenness” (as Husserl would say) of the lifeworld means isthat, by virtue of our very existence, we possess what Heidegger call<strong>ed</strong> a “pre-ontologicalunderstanding” of the world (of “Being”). This was not, however, the formula for anultimate science of Being in Husserl’s sense, since what the discovery of the lifeworldsignifi<strong>ed</strong> for Heidegger was that all explicit understandings or theorizings, even those oftranscendental phenomenology, do no more than build on, and are interpretations of, thisalways presuppos<strong>ed</strong>, and thus never fully thematizable, “ground.” This is what Heideggercall<strong>ed</strong> the “hermeneutic situation.” (Cf. BT, sec. 45, 275) Everything <strong>com</strong>es to us, as itwere, pre-interpret<strong>ed</strong> (or pre-articulat<strong>ed</strong>). To see or deal with something, for instance, isalways to see or deal with it as this or that thing (this is what Heidegger referr<strong>ed</strong> to as the“existential-hermeneutic as.” [BT, sec. 33, 201]) For Heidegger all Being is in effectinterpret<strong>ed</strong> Being; as later hermeneuticians would say, “interpretation goes all the way47MTP.48Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 129, hereafterCompare this formulation of the notion of intentionality with that of Sartre quot<strong>ed</strong> above. Thesentence in BT, sec. 43a, 251 beginning thus, “Only because Being is ‘in consciousness’ — that is to say,only because it is understandable in Dasein…” clearly indicates that the term “Dasein” is Heidegger’sfunctional equivalent of Husserl’s “consciousness.”49See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. Chris Dawson (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 55.50As Husserl said in his entry on “Phenomenology” in the Encyclopa<strong>ed</strong>ia Britannica.15

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