File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0111, message 16


Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2001 16:17:00 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Zollikon: Unconscious


Cologne 03-Nov-2001

Michael Staples schrieb Fri, 2 Nov 2001 19:26:19 -0800:

> ME: What is outside my awareness is hidden to me. My psyche is not an inner
> instance, located or functioning somewhere inside my body (brain, heart,
> intestines...), but it is the openness of my being to the clearing of being.
> This clearing out there is the site where world happens, where I can become
> aware of beings, or remain oblivious to them or gain cognizance of them only
> partially and distortedly. (I say "can" because Dasein is in the first place
> a being-enabled, possibility, Seinkoennen.)
>
> MS:>>Yes, I understand this. The psyche is not an inner instance located or
> functioning somewhere inside my body. I understand that it is the openness
> of my being to the clearing of being. Let's lose the notion of inner and
> outer. Still, does this necessarily mean there cannot be instances within
> being that take place outside my attention? No...because:
>
> ME:"...our attention is mostly absorbed by and focused on one matter, we are
> unaware of most of what is happening around us in the world."
>
> MS: So, this is what I think of as being unconscious. Perhaps a better way of
> saying this might be "un-attended-to"? How would that sit?
>
> And yet, it seems to me that there are un-attended-to "activities" that have
> meaning to me that suggest (suggest) purpose. Now...if that fantasy of
> purpose arises, then I have an un-attended-to purposeful activity that
> presences within the clearing. How would that sit?
>
> And what would be the problem of imagining this purposeful activity as a
> fantasy being? If it presents itself in fantasy as a being?
>

Michael,

What is unattended to is one way of things being absent, and they can
come into
presence through a shift of the focus of attention. Such a shift can
come about
by the things themselves calling attention to themselves, e.g. by
breaking down.

What about purpose? Freud took parapraxes and dreams as evidence of the
unconscious in the sense of a subject with hidden intentions. If, by a
slip of
the tongue, I say what I do not intend, but something similar that shows
an
entirely different meaning, then something other than intended is called
to
presence. Freud attributes this other presencing to an unconscious,
hidden
intention of a 'second level' subject, but it may be just an accident.
Because
Freud is pre-cast within the mind-set of the metaphysics of
subjectivity, he has
to cast the unconscious as the subject underlying all "stuff that
happens".

In Aristotle's _Metaphysics_,  the accidentality of accidents (_ta
symbebaekota_) is one of the modes of being, i.e. accidentality is a way
in
which beings (_ta onta_) presence. Aristotle says that accidents happen;
they do
not have causes. He deals with accidents also in the special context of
analyzing the mode of being of productive technique (_technae
poiaetikae_). In
any production, the producer (artisan) has a knowing foresight of what
is to be
produced, i.e. brought forth into presence. Thus, for instance, the
carpenter
knows how to make a bedstead and knowingly envisages the bedstead before
it is
actually produced. His practical labouring activities are guided by the
end
(_telos_) of the bedstead to be produced.

Nevertheless, things can and do go wrong. The carpenter may, for
instance, gouge
the bed-head while planing it when the plane slips. This accident could
ruin the
intended, fore-seen product. Or, more generally, the activity of
producing is
always a guiding away from and a correcting for mistakes. A mistake is a
parapraxis, i.e. literally, an action that is 'next to' (_para_) the
intended
action (_praxis_). The mistakes or parapraxes have to be excluded from
the final
product by corrective actions. Thus, productive action is always a
corrective
working against accidents, _ta symbebaekota_, excluding that which
happens
without cause, in order to ensure that the actual product corresponds to
the
pre-envisaged end-product. What is unintended has to be kept in
absentia.

Now, we wouldn't say that when the carpenter makes a mistake in making a
bedstead, that this mistake is attributable to a hidden intention, an
unconscious wish fulfilment. Or we would do so only under special
circumstances.

To take up your mention of fantasy and imagination: Aristotle and Plato
too
speak of _phantasia_, and dreams, which are a kind of fantasy. In the
metaphysics of subjectivity, imagination is a representation of beings
in the
soul or mind. When we dream, do we imagine things, do we make fantastic
representations of them? For Freud dreams are a product of dream-work,
i.e. the
work of the unconscious, deeper level subject, which transforms a
hidden,
unconscious desire into some censored, imagined dream happening. The
work of
psychoanalysis is then to undo the representations produced by dreamwork
to
uncover the hidden wish.

But this is a subjective interpretation of dreams in the sense that the
dream is
essentially and invariably traced back to an ultimate underlying
subject, the
unconscious. What if dreams are just another way of being in the world?
Then
there is no dream-work and not necessarily any hidden intention encoding
itself
in or breaking through censorship. Instead, dreaming is a way of being
with
things and people in the world, not just imagined representations of
them. When
I dream of and talk with my father, whom I know in waking life is long
since
dead, I am with my father himself, not with a representation of him.
Dreaming of
my father is a way in which my father is present in my world, and this
mode of
presencing is not inferior to or lesser than another way of my father
presencing
in my world-opening. This being-with is also always mooded. By turning
the focus
of attention to our dreams we can find out more about what our concerns
are with
the world and how we are attuned with the world. This doesn't mean that
there is
necessarily a purpose or intention in what we fantasize in dreams.

Michael
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