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for Husserl is a non-distortive elaboration of subjectivity, a transcendental reflection onconscious acts, phenomenology under Heidegger be<strong>com</strong>es hermeneutical, the provisionalthematization of that which is hidden, that which cannot be directly access<strong>ed</strong> through reflectionbut must be “formally indicat<strong>ed</strong>.” 11 Kisiel characterizes this as a move from“intuition” to “understanding.” For Husserl intentions are fulfill<strong>ed</strong> in intuitions, where theparadigm for an intuition is a sense experience, the imm<strong>ed</strong>iate grasp of content. The intentionheads for the intuition. If it is not fulfill<strong>ed</strong> it is an “empty” intention. Heidegger findsthis view artificial, struggling under the epistemological construct of experience as asubject / object confrontation. Intentionality analysis remains inadequate to phenomenologyre-conceiv<strong>ed</strong> as “the hermeneutics of facticity.” Heidegger’s phenomenology would digbeneath intentionality, and the cognitive-paradigm impli<strong>ed</strong> by it, into the fore-theoreticalfoundations of all human experience.For the young Heidegger experience is always already structur<strong>ed</strong> before it be<strong>com</strong>es theterm of an intentional act. Consciousness does not “intuit” things, but “understands” them,that is, it finds them understandable, laden with meaning, and appearing within the horizonof Dasein’s practical involvement with them. A thing is not first ‘given’ to us as an intentionalobject; it is first reveal<strong>ed</strong> to us as an historically-charg<strong>ed</strong> nexus of meaning.What is understood is not an object for a subject but a liv<strong>ed</strong> experience for a living humanbeing. According to Heidegger, Husserl’s intentionality analysis never accesses the mostbasic level of liv<strong>ed</strong>-experience because it remains stuck in a theoretical paradigm, whereDasein is interpret<strong>ed</strong> as primarily a knower / perceiver. For Heidegger the practical concernsof life prec<strong>ed</strong>e knowing and perceiving. Knowing is an act characteristic of a specialkind of activity, the theoretical project of science. But Dasein is more than a knower. Care(Sorge) is possible because the world is not a mute aggregate of un-interpret<strong>ed</strong> sense data,awaiting the naming activity of intentional consciousness. The world is pervad<strong>ed</strong> by understandability.12 Heidegger speaks, not of consciousness, but of Existenz, thrownness intoa world. Whatever intentions may emerge in the ‘subject’ are always already prec<strong>ed</strong><strong>ed</strong> bynon-intentional horizons of meaning, “the ecstatic structures of worldly existence.” 13As early as the 1919/1920 course Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (GA58)Heidegger was radicalizing Husserl’s notion of intentionality in terms of factical life. Nolonger understood as the convergence of subjective acts with intend<strong>ed</strong> objects, intentionalitybe<strong>com</strong>es indicative of life and its motivational tendencies. Every life-tendency is direct<strong>ed</strong>toward a certain content, but this is not originally an object, a thing with a distinctessence. Rather the term of a tendency is a concretely determin<strong>ed</strong>, historically singulariz<strong>ed</strong>life-world, a meaningful-whole that motivates the self to behave in a certain way. By 1921Heidegger had introduc<strong>ed</strong> the notion of “<strong>com</strong>portment” (Verhalten) into his lectures as aterm for fore-theoretical intentions, underscoring the factical involvement of the self withits world. The situational connotation of the German word Verhalten corrects the11The key discussion on formal indication occurs in Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie desreligiösen Lebens, GA60, <strong>ed</strong>. Claudius Strube (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995); English: ThePhenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsche and Jennifer Anna Gosetti (Bloomington, Ind.:Indiana University Press, 2004), 38-45. On formal indication see Ryan Streeter, “Heidegger’s FormalIndication: A Question of Method in Being and Time,” Man and World 30 (1997): 413-30; John vanBuren, “The Ethics of Formale Anzeige in Heidegger,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69,no. 2 (1995): 157-170; Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as FormalIndications,” Review of Metaphysics 47 (June 1994): 775-795.12Kisiel precisely formulates the difference between Husserl and Heidegger on this point: “TheHeideggerian retrieve opposes Husserl in situating the understanding and exposition of meaning not in actsof consciousness but first of all in a pre-conscious realm of being-in-the-world, which is already pervad<strong>ed</strong>by ‘expressivity.’” Kisiel, “The Transformation of the Categorial,” 98.13Ibid., 100.269

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