PREPARATORY PRECIS TO A CLOSE INVESTIGATION OF THE APOPHANTIC LOGIC OF THE GREEKS ACCORDING TO THE ESSENTIAL IDEA OF HUSSERL 


 

Phenomenological intuition isn’t concerned with the problem of perception, but with speaking what is there into disclosure. The things are thought in the Cartesian manner, as what is. The ego or ‘I’ is not considered at all. The “is” is not Being or the Element, but it is what “is” as something. The apophatic approach, or the something as something, “that” is a chair, “that” is the sky, “that” is boredom. Boredom too, can be “distinct and clear”. Distinct means that it is analytically available, as something contrasted with something else in what is there. Clear means that the essence is intuited, such that it is something, i.e., it has an incomparable peculiarity, what in logic becomes a differentia.

The Element is Being in the early Heidegger. But in the latter Heidegger the Element ceases to be thought as Being. Heidegger attempts to give expression to the Element in the example of the old-fashioned Sunday. There are three stories: The railstation, the superficial party, and the old-fashioned Sunday. Let us examine each point:

1.The railstation is the truth of boredom, it shows how the things “separated” and analytically available as what contrasts with the other things, allows the proposition of boredom to become “distinct”. The situation of the waiting is concrete, the train will arrive. One only needs to wait for the ‘long while’ to pass. The “distinct” situation, taken in aggregate, is an instance of the boredom. The concrete situation as a whole, waiting for the train, is in essence, boring. 

2.The superficial party is the essence of boredom, it concerns the thing “gathered” as opposed to what is “separated”. The gathering is not of the people at the party, but of the boredom, of what sprints by but is a “waste of time”. The conversation was not necessarily ‘tedious’ but it was boring for the reason that it was a waste. In this example, the peculiarity permeates everything, and this one quality can not be analyzed or contrasted. Only as a whole does the superficial party present itself, in the way Heidegger observes it, as something ‘out there’ that stands before one. It is not something before one that the example speaks about, but the waste of time. This peculiar form of “waste” is the essence of boredom. 

3.The old-fashioned Sunday is the Element of boredom. I.e., the Being. In this example we must not suppose, like the railstation, that the end of that day will bring the end of that boredom. The example is an attempt to express the Element, it is not to be thought as a “long while”. What we think of is neither truth, the things there, the train coming to the station, the one walking about with nothing to do, or, the inner state of the one who has been enchanted by the corruption of the superficial party. The party pervaded everything, it gathered and pervaded everything, but it was experienced psychologically, by some ‘I’, who, later, only after, realised the ‘wasted’ character of those tedious hours, who only after saw them for what they were. The old-fashioned Sunday, is the day itself, the beings there. The Element itself is brought open as the matter to be noticed. 

How, in the phenomenological vision, can the Element ever come to be observed? The difference in the texture of the envisaging has to be considered as ‘behind’ the phenomenological intuition. In something like the way that the substrate of the things, seen as something, in the logical judgment, are, left behind, in the phenomenological intuition through the Cartesian removal of the ‘I’. What is removed in the Elemental vision? Heidegger is in a difficulty, because the world is not removed. Boredom, a being in this or that human world, might not be necessary to human beings as human beings. So one might reach the Element of boredom, the Being of boredom, but not come to Being. We can not say that the world is removed, what is supposed to be removed is the thinking of the world. The thinking of the world (the animus) rolls back, and the Being of the world is envisaged.

Other ways of envisaging, taken in the widest sense of seeing or intuiting, but not in the objectivist sense, or in the sense of the problem of perception involving, e.g., an optic loop etc., lead to the Element, in the sense of the envisaging of the world, rather than the relations of interesting things, on the one hand, or the peculiarity of the ‘I’ with its withdrawal or inclusion in the assimilation of the world project as it is brought forth by rubric or with statements and speach. Glossa is language, whereas logos is speech. Written things, likewise, are not language. Language, schematic-abstractedly, also names this Element. Abstractedly thinking, is the thinking of the social projection, that doesn't ‘force’ back the thinking to the world Element. In the latter Heidegger this concrete possibility of envisaging the Element no longer serves to name Being, for the reason that Being is then thought as the unity of the fourfold in various senses. The analysis of the Element is by no means cast aside, but the sense of what is to be thought through is modified through the education of the thinking towards the task that draws it forth. The Element may also be thought in connection to the leading concept of Nietzsche, Rausch. The Rausch would then be thought as time, as the world time, and not either the inner or the being-analytic time.