Primordial givenness in Husserl and Heidegger

pp. 163-202

in: Panos Theodorou, Husserl and Heidegger on reduction, primordiality, and the categorial, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstrakt

In his Ideas I (1913), with his thought experiment of world-annihilation, Husserl becomes persuaded that the beings of which we are conscious do not simply lie "out there' in themselves, enjoying an independent (realistic) existence. Our experience of beings in a world, qua total horizon of beings, is the achievement of our intentional consciousness, which unfolds its overall constitutive possibilities. It is because of this that in our everyday meaningful comportments, we are always intentionally correlated with what is "Vorhanden" for us.It is generally thought that Husserl was of the view that, for us, primordial consciousness is the perceptual experience of nature-things; simple sensory perceptual things. That is, on the lowest level of our conscious life, we are intentionally correlated with simple perceptually appearing things. Our experience of cultural beings or, more broadly speaking, things of value (goods) like tools, books, etc., is intentionally derivative and founded upon the former.