Existence and Consciousness

Abstract

Philosophers interested in Heidegger’s thought and those interested in the nature of consciousness seem to have assumed that their areas of interest are mutually exclusive. Heidegger clearly is not doing philosophy of mind in any of his works. He does not even make constructive use of the term consciousness in Being and Time, much less in his reflections on thinking and language. He wants to avoid giving primacy to discursive understanding as well as to the self with regard to both existence and thought. But his way of understanding existing and thinking appears to me to be helpful when one wants to understand the existential immediacy of consciousness, that is, when one attempts to articulate the insight that consciousness is a state of human being which transcends the particular intentions of the self. This problem area is not new. Leibniz, for example, spoke of the essence of substance in terms of a type of urgency or Drang toward the realization of that order which each monad embodied. Kant puzzled over the mind’s unavoidable “interest” in rational unity, an interest which appeared to him, albeit faintly, to be immediate to the rational act. He further speculated on the felt power of reason’s ethical nature. One is under a categorical demand intrinsic to reason, such that he suffers self-disunity or a sense of inner unworthiness—I think that we would say guilt today—if he acts contrary to those demands. There are many other examples which point to the possibility that some dimensions of consciousness may be understood with reference to the inevitable drift or felt teleology of one’s state. Usually, however, one finds the suggestion that man is deeply inclined toward some type of self-actualization without finding that suggestion carefully developed.