Page 70 - Critical and Cultural Theory

READING
what is universally meant rather than with subjective perceptions.
With Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Phenomenology moves
towards Existentialism, according to which subjectivity is not a
given but a process of constant production. The world is a
product of our projections (what we make of it) but we are also
subjected to the world - we are flung down or thrown into being,
in a place and time we did not choose. We are both inside and
outside nature: we have a will and a consciousness but we are also
animals, and hence cannot adopt a stance of detached contempla-
tion from a mountain top, for we merge continually with the
objects of our consciousnesses. Our thinking is always historically
situated - not in terms of a social/collective history, but in terms
of a personal history which amounts to being-towards-death. In
Being and Time (1927), Heidegger questions the notion of Being as
a pure presence, insulated from Time 3 and advocates the concept
of Dasein (from Da = there + Sein = to be) as a form of Being
which has no fixed nature. 'Being-there' can never be taken for
granted: it has to be invented, legitimated and appropriated all the
time.
This view anticipates the Existentialist position advocated by
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), according to which existence precedes
essence - namely, existence is a constant performance of choices
and actions which allow us to come into being, rather than the
embodiment of a pre-existent metaphysical essence. ('Man is only
what he makes of himself.) The problem with Dasein is that it
misinterprets itself and its world by regarding itself as a fixed
entity or substance and is thus tempted to believe that it may
transcend the contingent world: in fact, Dasein is in the world and
inseparable from it, with others and inseparable from them - and
this inseparability threatens its integrity. Existentialism goes on to
emphasize the centrality of perception. For Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (1907-61), in particular, the form of an object depends on
how it is perceived, however erroneously and distortedly. He also
stresses the importance of embodiment: we never perceive as pure
consciousnesses, since consciousness is inevitably embroiled in a
tissue of flesh and blood.
Heidegger's stress on the perceiver's historical location has a

3 **" For an example of this notion, see the discussion of Plato's theory of Pure
Forms in Part III, Chapter 6, 'The Simulacrum'.

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