Preamble to a Phenomenology of Congregational Life

Oftentimes we don't know what we have lost until we don't have it. 

The phenomenological movement attempted to uncover the fundamental meaning of the entities, properties, and relations in which we find ourselves, in which we dwell. The idea is simple enough. We are always already within a world of meaning prior to any explicit philosophical reflection upon this world. The man at work in his workshop knows how to get around in the shop; he knows what things he needs in order to make the things he wants to make. He "knows" these things pre-reflectively. He probably has not stopped to do an explicit ontological inventory of items in his shop and the properties each has that allow them to be related to each other.  Rather he just walks his shop and gets what he needs when he needs them. 

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1985-1980),  Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and a host of other thinkers were interested in getting to the immediate meaning of things, to their sense prior to explicit investigation. Husserl, in particular, was interested in what Frege (1848 - 1925) called Sinn, the mode of presentation of objects in the world, the that by virtue of which objects could be picked out in the world and referred to. Frege famously said that names had both sense and reference. Names refer when the sense of the name picks out an existing object.  Just because a name does not refer does not mean it has no meaning. After all, the name could have referred were there to be an object that satisfied the Sinn of the name. 

Frege's famous example was the Morning Star and Evening Star. Astronomers for centuries were able to identify the Morning Star as Morning Star and the Evening Star as Evening Star without knowing that the Morning Star is the Evening Star. The modes of presentation of Morning Star and Evening star differ, but there is identity in that to which they refer: Venus.  Accordingly, the name Morning Star refers to Venus as it presents itself as the Morning Star while the name Evening Star  refers to Venus as it presents itself as Evening Star.  Within a more comprehensive theory we identify the Morning Star and Evening Star.  So what is this world of sense by and through which we believe we have made reference to the world? 

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) spoke in terms of the manifest and scientific images of the world.  He espoused a scientific naturalism that nonetheless sought to save the appearances.  In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars characterizes the manifest image of the world as "the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world," it is the framework in and through which we ordinarily observe and explain our world.  (See Willem deVries, "Wilfrid Sellars," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.). Persons and the things meaningful to persons is what has center stage in the manifest image of the world.  

The scientific image of the world is deeper; it is that which we hold ultimately is the case despite how things appear. Sellars famously adjusted Protagoras' statement to "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind).  The scientific image states what is the case, while the manifest image states what appears to be the case. Importantly, the manifest image is not merely an error.  It is a description of the place in which humans find themselves phenomenally prior to theory and experiment and the reality of how things stand in themselves.  

While Sellars held that what ultimately exists is that to which oue best scientific theories appeal in explanation and prediction, he understood that we do not and cannot live our lives merely within the conceptual categories of scientific naturalism. While neither Husserl nor Heidegger in anyway denigrate the activity of scientific theory-formation and confirmation, they really were interested in the world as it appears to and for consciousness.  (Heidegger despised the term consciousness for many reasons, but I will use it nonetheless in this context.). Husserl was so interested in what immediately appears to and for consciousness that he advocated a suspension of thinking in terms of our natural attitude of what there really is, and bid us to hold in abeyance questions of what there ultimately is apart from us and concentrate on that which is present to consciousness. His phenomenological reduction advocates that we again encounter the things themselves that give themselves to consciousness, before pressing on to the question of whether those things are real, whether they somehow track with that which ultimately is.  

Husserl believe that returning to die Sache Selbst of immediacy allow us to ground science even the more deeply. Heidegger wanted to examine the objects of our intentional acts within the meaningful context in which they dealt in order to get clarity about the nature of the world we immediately inhabit.  

While both he and Husserl were interested in the Umwelt in which we find ourselves, Husserl could never find a way ultimately out of his own transcendental image of things.  For Husserl, the transcendental ego exists as that which reaches out through its intentional "ego rays" to objects in meaningfully encounters.  Heidegger, however, had no time for such metaphysics.  What is given to consciousness is being-in-the-world.  Instead of an isolated ego related to its world of intentional objects, there is already the unitary phenomenon of hat which is phenomenologically prior to an ego and that which the ego intends. Husserl's transcendental ego becomes Heidegger's Dasein, the unitary being-in-the-world phenomenon that is clearly present in ways that a transcendental ego cannot be. 

Heidegger's emphasis was on the immediacy of that which shows itself as itself in the Lichtung (lighting up) of Dasein itself. Dasein is the "there-being" that in its being is always interested in being.  While Husserl's project was epistemological, Heidegger's became ontological. What are all those things that are, that in relating themselves to us, make us the kind of beings that have worlds?  

We are always already in a world and what it is to be me is to have a world of a definite contour. The manifest image of things, according to Heidegger, has been passed over in the history of philosophy.  It has not been deeply explored because our attention has always been drawn away from the immediacy of our life in the world to the question of what lies "present-at-hand" to us beyond that image.  We have been traditionally interested in the world of the Vorhandsein, the world of beings that are. But in concentrating on this, we have lost what is before our eyes. We have lost the very meaningful context in which we already live in all of our inquiry.  

Sellars understand that we cannot do without the manifest image of things, but he believes what ultimately is cannot be given by what phenomenally stands close by. We need to move to the deeper structural explanation of that surface the manifest image reveals.  Heidegger, however, wants us to follow Husserl and attend deeply and passionately to that which displays itself to us in all we think and do. Heidegger's interest in the immediacy of the world and the universal structures of immediacy that ground that world gives him quite a different orientation from Sellars. They latter was interested in science, but the former in religion. 

Heidegger's work at Marburg was filled with religious interest. Accordingly, Husserl had designated Heidegger to be his student that could apply the phenomenological method to religious experience and religion as such. What is the world of religion, and what are the deeper structures of religious experience and meaning as such that make possible any religious world?  Heidegger is accordingly interested in the facticity of religious life, the meaningful structures within which religious people operate and find themselves. Heidegger famously tried to understand the experience of the early Christian as being-to-the-parousia, an idea he later adjusted to Sein zum Tode, being-unto-death.  

All of this is is preamble for the topic to which I allude in the title: A phenomenology of congregational living. What is it to live congregationally?  In our penchant to treat congregational life using the tools of the social sciences we may shortchange what it is to be congregationally. Clearly, we could seek to understand congregational growth and decline by appealing to general sociological principles indexed for our particular historical-cultural standpoint. This can be extremely enlightening, of course.  But in the effort to explain and predict congregational processes, we may lose what shows itself as itself.  Were we to attend to the be-ing of congregational life we might find in the manifest image the world itself in which religions lives and moves, the world in which we finally find meaning, a salvific meaning allowing us to live unto the future.  What I am suggesting here, inter alia, that it is in the manifest image of things that we find meaning, purpose and ultimately hope.  

While the body dies and scientific naturalism finds no basis upon which survival of death is possible -- or maybe even conceivable -- within the manifest image, God is close at hand. Christ saves us and brings us into his house of many rooms. Our fundamental experience of being-in-the-world is not one where meaning is absent and must be constructed.  Our fundamental experience is filled with meaning for we are beings who in our be-ing find the question of be-ing at issue for us. As Heidegger says, the ontic superiority of Dasein is found in its ontological constitution.  As Augustine said, "our heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in you, O Lord." A thick description of the facticity of Christian being-in-the-world reveals what that life is like, and holds open the possibility that that life which is ontologically possible can be my life or your life. 

As the embers of western Christianity begin to smolder, it is important for us to know what it was for men and women to have lived this extraordinary life.  For many of us, the living of Christian life is always a living of that life within the Christian congregation.  We can perhaps remember what it was and how it was decades ago, and we can compare that living to living today.  Where was the axes of meaning then and now? What has changed? How was it that we could once recoil at the thought of touching the sky while now such touching is simply business as usual?   

In the next post I will try my hand at examining the facticity of congregational living. Perhaps we will be granted ontological insight into the preciousness of being-as-communion in Lutheran congregational life. 

Grounding Ethical Vision and Mission Statements

Some of us at the Institute of Lutheran Theology will soon be engaged in consulting work to institutions and businesses to aid them in casting their own ethical mission and vision statements. The increasing use of sophisticated algorithms by companies and institutions have created new situations in which the institution or business ends up treating managers, employees and customers in new ways, yet ways that are not the result of individual people making decisions to treat these managers, employees and customers in new ways. 

People who write computer code construct algorithms that function as decision procedures. For instance, in writing an algorithm for a self-steering car, the coder has to program the car to do certain things given certain inputs. The idea is that the program will give an output as a function of the present state of the machine and relevant inputs it has while in this state. The car would not presumably move to crash into the motorcycle to its left, if it had not already been in states of danger for some time, and if this option had not been coded in as the best response to a certain sequence of danger states given some new driving inputs.   

It is very clear to me that thinking about helping businesses and institutions do ethics on the ground is a different activity than teaching ethics to students at the university. In some ways, it is much more challenging because we deal here not with hypothetical scenarios, but with real flesh and blood human beings. 

When teaching ethics at the university, I always tried to deal with the standard normative ethical theories and the meta-ethical challenges to those theories. This meant that I always dealt with Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory, utilitarianism, Kantian-inspired deontological theory, and divine command or divine will theory.  

Standardly, I treated as well the meta-ethical challenges to normative ethics: ethical subjectivism, ethical emotivism, psychological egoism, and ethical relativism. I introduced ethical intuitionism in light of the Open Question argument proffered by G.E. Moore, and discussed the non-natural intuition of the good in Moore and the non-natural intuition of the right in Ross. There is not much time in one ethics course to do all of this, however, so I made sure to cover the standard four normative ethical approaches.   

Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory is an ethics of self-actualization or realization which attempts to understand the excellence of human beings in terms of human dispositions to behave, that is human habits. In a society like ancient Athens where there was deep agreement on what the good is, there was agreement on what traits or characteristics human beings ought to have to be good. If the telos of human beings is their happiness, that is their "total human flourishing," then one should seek to cultivate those intellectual and moral virtues, that is, those "powers of the soul" whereby human beings together can profoundly flourish. To grow the intellectual and moral virtues is to increase in human excellence and to realize the good.   

Utilitarianism espouses a consequentialism; it claims that the goodness or badness of an act is a function of its likely consequences. There are many kinds of utilitarians. One can be a hedonistic utilitarian who understands the good in terms of crude pleasure, or perhaps a eudaimonian utilitarian identification ing the good with higher human values.  Accordingly, the good is not simply pleasure, but the happiness of human flourishing in general. One can be a global or universal utilitarian claiming that the act should bring about the greatest happiness for everyone in general, or could be a regional or local utilitarian claiming that the utilitarian calculation should privilege some particular group or community. One must also distinguish between an act and a rule utilitarian in that while the first holds that the direct consequences of the particular concrete act are what is ethically relevant, the second argues that it is the rule that the particular act falls under that ultimately determines its goodness or badness.  

The deontological perspective claims that acts or good and bad of themselves apart from their consequences. Kant most famously argued for the categorical imperative, a formal principle by which an act's moral properties obtain apart from any hypothetical antecedents. Kant claimed two subjective maxims of this categorical imperative: 1) so act such that your act could in principle be universalized, and 2) so act such that you always treat the other as an end-in-themselves and not as a means to your end.  

Finally, divine command or divine will ethics claims divine primal intentionality determines the rectitude of an act. It is incumbent on S to do P if and only if God wills P (to be done be S). Divine will ethical theories must then give an account both of the nature of the divine will itself and of our epistemic access to it.  

But none of these normative theories work very well in our present context actually to inform ethical decision-making. The problem is that people disagree rather profoundly on the presuppositions upon which such theories are based. 

For instance, the plausibility of virtue ethics famously depends upon a basic agreement in the community about what the good life is.  Aristotle said that a good person is one that does the good and that the good is that which good people do. This makes sense if there are not competing moral visions within a society. Notice, however, that even if their is near unanimity about what the good is, the theory does seem prone always to the critique launched by Luther and others. Focussing on virtue-building places the action on the self. Cultivating our moral virtues as part of self-realization towards maximal human excellence puts the action on the side of the subject. She or he must train themselves to evince the suitable dispositions to behave, and such training is ultimately the result of what James once called "the dull heave of the will." 

But part of what it is to live morally, it seems, is to be not reflecting upon oneself all of the time.  Yet the ethic of self-realization places the focus of the self on the self as that self endeavors to cultivate the proper dispositions that constitute character,  those general habitualizations that constitute our moral excellence.  

There are deep problems with utilitarianism as well. As it turns out, calculating likely consequences from an act or rule utilitarian perspective makes many positions questionable because we really don't know what the real consequences of our actions are. Claiming that it is probable that act X issues in consequences P is not granular enough it seems.  Would we not need to know precisely what that probability is in order to do the utilitarian calculus rightly?  Moreover, discriminating what the good is, e.g., pleasure, cultivation of virtue, human flourishing, is itself not amenable to utilitarian calculation.

Recall that Bentham claimed that the Principle of Utility need not be argued for because, as it turns out, the principle objectively obtains, and that we humans simply do act in accordance with it. While this is plausible if one is a universal hedonistic act utilitarian perhaps, it is not the case if one is a regional eudaemonistic act or rule utilitarian.  We need some independent philosophical argument, it seems, to say with Mill against Bentham that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a sated pig.  Moreover, while the move to rule utilitarianism seems to protect utilitarianism in general from crude counterexamples, it might be asked whether rule utilitarianism does not abandon utilitarianism altogether.  Clearly, the claim that S ought to do act X if and only if X were in accordance with rule R that, if it itself were universally instantiated, would conduce to the maximum distribution of happiness is itself consistent with act X itself causing great pain or unhappiness to S. But this seems like an abandonment of utilitarianism entirely.  

Notice as well that utilitarian calculations place the moral action in our own reasoning. We must calculate the likely consequences of an act or rule, and only after such calculation can we determine how to treat the person standing in front of us. Again, it seems like this kind of moral reflection places the action within the echo chamber of our subjectivity. We do X because we have done the suitable calculus and, on the basis of the kind of utilitarian we are, we can determine that it is rational to do X.  How my doing X impacts Bob who stands before me, is relevant only insofar as I can describe the doing of X in ways that take into consideration the consequences for Bob of my doing of X. 

Our friend Kant gets us to consider the noumenality of duty, and asks us if we can conceive that one ought to do X in the absence of one's freedom to do other than X. We are then told that we should treat others as ends in themselves and not as means because others are denizens of the same kingdom of ends we ourselves occupy. He argues that we must not act in ways that end in moral contradiction. For instance, if I were knowingly to lie, then I must accede that it might be a general moral law that people could lie. But if this were a general moral law, then dissimulation itself could not be specified, because there would be no institution of truth-telling from which lying diverges. This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it is what pure reason does when it is concerned with the practical.  Pure practical reason is human reason set free to investigate what we ought to do mostly unimpeded by historical and cultural conditions.  

Finally, there is divine will theory of either the static or dynamic variety.  Since the latter is demonstrably incoherent, this leaves the former, and clearly it is a matter of reason to discern what the divine command is, and whether we have a duty to do it. One cannot in our post-Christian context simply assume that there is a divine being whose primal intentionality on creation is objectively the case, and whose intentional objectivity is epistemically accessible to human beings.  

In other words, if we want to cast ethical mission and vision statements in the business world by getting people to affirm the objective reality of the ethical and getting them to see that it is rational to accept that they have epistemic access to it, then we shall have a very steep hill to climb in accomplishing our ethical work. 

In Lutheran fashion, one might think that ethical theory provides the light by which the law confronts us as a curb on what we would otherwise want to do, a mirror by which to apprehend our own moral inadequacies, and a guide as to how we should comport ourselves. The light clearly is where the action is. In classical theology it is the primordial divine intentionality manifesting itself in the eternal law, the light of the universe itself. One can connect this light to Wisdom as it was prior to the creation of the world and ultimately to the logos.  

When I was a graduate student, I studied meta-ethics because I already did not believe one could do normative ethics without first getting clear on the sources, grounds, and methods of ethical adjudication.  My meta-ethics class one summer was with an excellent professor whose constructive contribution to the course was to point out that the only motive one could possibly have to do X from a meta-ethical standpoint was that the doing of X was conceptually tied to the desire to do X. From the standpoint of analytical ethics, he might be right. In other words, we are left with a psychological egoism functioning underneath meta-ethical reflection.  

I think I was a pretty good ethics teacher for undergraduate students because I could generate scenarios quite easily on the spot and I was able to keep their attention. The problem, of course, was that normative ethics is unfortunately today in many respects a fool's game. I don't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong, but rather they are all inadequate either when confronting complicated ethical situations we presently face or when they are placed against our moral intuitions. The longer I taught ethics, I found myself actually asking students to consult their moral intuitions as a way to test the normative theories we introduced. I straightforwardly suggested to them that their moral intuitions should function as data for ethical theory-making.  

But I knew that this gets it all wrong. Isn't normative ethics supposed to tell us what is the case? Ought it not trump moral intuitions altogether? Should it not function pedagogically to teach us what moral intuitions are worth having?  We don't form ethical theories in order to be applicable and adequate to ethical data, but rather to give us the principles by which we might act and value.  

Towards the end of my teaching of ethics I developed a rather elaborate way to think about normative ethics, replete with suitable defeaters. Additionally, I would argue that when there was a conflict between utilitarian and deontological perspectives, one had to go outside theory and evaluate the situation from a standpoint external to either theory.  Of course, here one could not help but privilege one's own moral intuitions again. If such a view from above the normative ethical conflicts is not to be a view from nowhere, then that view must be informed by something concrete.  But what could this be if not our moral intuitions? 

Often in teaching ethics, I would discuss G.E. Moore's famous Open Question argument that purports to show that any analysis of the good in terms of natural properties -- actually any properties -- leaves us in the situation of asking with sense if it is good that the good is so analyzed.  G. E. Moore was an ethical intuitionist because of this argument, and I do confess to believing that his comparing the instrinsicality of yellow with the the intrinsicality of the good a first-rate philosophical move. Just as we can identify yellow without conceptually stating its necessary and sufficient conditions, so we might identify the good without being able to give an analysis of it in terms of something more basic.  

It strikes me today that a new approach is needed if we are ever going to get outside of the philosophy classroom when contemplating the ultimate grounds for corporate ethical vision and mission statements. Emmanuel Levinas' notion of the immediacy (and transcendence) of the Other, despite its philosophical complexity, might actually be able to be explained simply to people today-- people within institutions and corporations alike -- who have lost their way among the endeavor to justify what it is that is good and right.  Most of the people we shall speak with in framing corporate ethical vision and mission statements will not seriously ask for the philosophical grounds why the torturing of children is wrong. They will already know it wrong.

Levinas' notion of the exteriority of the ethical, the demand of the Other upon us through the immediacy of the face can provide a way to adjudicate simple ethical questions like the torture of innocent children. Looking into the face of a child and torturing him or her is for most people simply unthinkable. One does not need to plunge into one's own subjectivity -- Levinas called the self and its ontology the realm of the same, the realm of totality -- to ground a demand not to torture. The demand needs no grounding in ethical principles that themselves presuppose ontology, rather the demand is simply given in the face and eyes of the Other.  

Maybe the light we seek in the doing of ethics can be found in the face of the Other, the face which places a demand upon all of us, including managers of algorithms and writers of code. Maybe we don't have to get much deeper than that with people with whom we work. If pushed we can say we are committed to the view that the social situation with its concomitant primacy of ethical demand needs no further justification.  Wittgenstein said, of course, that the spade must stop somewhere.

We can use Levinas' starting point and build defendable, albeit somewhat superficial, but ultimately communicable ethical positions for institutions and businesses. In certain contexts we can do what Levinas does: connect the face of the Other with God through the notion of a trace.  We can always say we could go deeper if we have to. By emphasizing the exteriority of ethics we guard ourselves from falling into some totalizing project of justifying the very nature of ethics to ourselves or whoever might listen before we can deal with the concrete person standing before us. This will get us to the practical much more quickly, and give our audiences a sense that we know what we are doing as consultants without taking them through a 300 level class in philosophical ethics.  

At the end of the day in phenomenology generally one either sees the phenomena described or one does not. If the face of the child before us does not move us out of our own freedom to a position of responsibility for that child, then it is doubtful that an appeal to normative ethical theory will do so. At the end of the day, it seems, the demand of the Other upon us cannot be given an analysis in terms of some set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  While the word 'Infinite' would not have been used by Moore to characterize this non-natural intuition of the good, his claim of the irreducibility of the Good is of the same spirit as Levinas.  Both were, after all, inspired by Plato, whose Good was the presupposition both of the forms and our access to them.  

Plato's Good constitutes, with Levinas, the priority of metaphysics over ontology. The latter is ultimately an affair of the self, but the former points away from the self and towards the divine.  Levinas and Plato document that "invisible desire" towards that which is other than the self, a desire not born of a need or lack within the self, but an ecstatic desire to transcend entirely the self and its machinations. Ultimately, both knew that salvation consists not in a being otherwise, but rather in that which is otherwise than being. 

The Heideggerian Engine: A Glimpse Under the Hood

In four days I shall begin taking another group of students through Heidegger's epic book, Being and Time.  What should they know when beginning the journey?  What words of wisdom do I have as they embark?

I think that the best thing I might say is that reading Heidegger is not about imparting knowledge at all. It is not a book fundamentally about things, but a book that happens in its reading. One might say that it is a text that happens in the happening of reading itself. 

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is often thought to be exceedingly difficult to grasp. Heidegger is a philosopher using the language of the philosophical tradition, but using it in ways that many regard as strikingly idiosyncratic. Clearly, we all know what being is, or at least we thought we knew before reading Heidegger. In fact, prior to reading Heidegger we might be tempted to believe some explanation is occurring in the following: 

• X asks, "What is being?" 
• Y responds, "That which is."  

If we have read Plato and Aristotle, we perhaps are prone to contrast the realm of being somehow with that of becoming. Plato thought being was stable and eternal, the kind of thing that can be known as something discrete and definite.  Aristotle regarded primary substances as the locus classicus of being. There are things that are, that are stable enough to carry properties, sometimes contrary properties over time. This particular cat is now hungry and later is sated. Bill is in Florence and now in Athens. The United States once had 13 states and now has 50. This seems simple enough, but Heidegger exposes the complexity of such simplicity.  

As a boy on an Iowa farm, I went into the barn and experienced life with animals. I experienced animals eating, drinking, congregating and defecating. Often they would be curious or frightened by me. Their life was part of the life of my five-year-old self.  I had not yet come to regard these animals as having some being apart from their basic intelligibility to me in the little world in which I dwelt. 

I don't know when it happened exactly, but at some point I came to recognize the animals in my world as beings existing apart from me with particular properties that didn't depend upon me.  Heidegger would say that I now had fallen, that I had, in fact, adopted a pretty complex and ultimately unsupported view on things.  But I knew nothing then about the Verfallenheit in which I now found myself.  

My father taught me that steers and heifers had to achieve a certain rate of gain in order for their lives among us to be profitable to us.  After all, we were farming, and we had to cashflow the animals.  Somehow we needed the market price of our animals to be greater than the feed we fed them, plus the labor we expended upon them, plus the costs of medical treatment for them, and some percentage of the cost of barns, fences and feeding mechanisms, manure spreaders, tractors and all of the rest of it. 

Farm kids soon learn that different breeds of animals have different properties, e.g., temperaments, disease resistance, ease of birth, propensities to convert feed into weight gain. It is important in livestock husbandry that one knows the properties animals have apart from us because the very profitability of one's enterprise depends upon such knowledge. I learned many things on the farm about animals, machinery, tilling practices and efficiencies, mechanical qualities of machinery, and the nature of the greatest variable for successful farming: the weather.  

I learned about cold and warm fronts, low and high pressure systems, and the related possibilities of precipitation and storms when lows, highs and fronts were located in particular places and had particular qualities. I thought about the conditions leading to drought and the possibilities of those conditions manifesting themselves given the current macro conditions. I wanted to know about the processes of weather in themselves. I had adopted a view of things, in which things were the more real the less meaningful they were to me. 

Maybe all of this led me to want at an earlier time in my life to be a scientist, actually I dreamt of becoming a physicist. I was deeply intrigued about the in itself of things, and believed that mathematics could describe that in itself and predict future changes in it. I remember watching the Feynman Lectures on Physics in my Honors Physics class as a college freshman.  I was intrigued about special and general relativity, about cosmology, about the fundamental laws of nature that determine the very contour of the in itself.  

Perhaps all of this made my first reading of Heidegger difficult.  Although I did not know it, I was deeply committed to a substance ontology quite early in life.  I thought the world consisted of objects that somehow self-identify as the objects they are, and I believed that these self-identifying objects (substances) could possess modifications while still being the substances they were.  In other words, I believed that substances could contingently take on differing properties while remaining what they essentially were.  

Early on in life, I already bought the distinction between necessary essential properties and contingent accidental properties. There was something that made me who I was -- or so I thought -- and that which made me who I was continued to perform its function apart from whether I wore my hair long or short, or whether I even had hair.  

It seemed the most natural thing to me that the world would be what it is apart from me, and that my dealings with the world, particularly my knowing of it, did not change the world. The worldhood of the world was, accordingly, logically, ontologically and epistemically independent from my subjective apprehension of it -- or so I assumed. 

Accordingly, I was from a rather early age committed to the subject/object dichotomy.  As a knowing substance, I was that upon which the objectivity of the world manifested its effects.  The world was filled with substances being themselves, I was a substance being myself, and my substance was the subject in relationship to objects apart from me being substances in themselves.  As I said, all of this made my early reading of Heidegger difficult.  

What, after all, was Heidegger getting at in his phenomenological description of the world? Was he not finally describing the color, the projection of my subjectivity on the objects of a quite colorless world?  When I first read Heidegger I thought, "How can he escape idealism?  How can he not be committed to the assertion that the properties of my substance -- of the substance if one is an objective idealist -- are what they are, and that these properties determine the contour of the world so encountered?  Is this not simply another rerun of Kant's "Copernican Revolution?" 

But I will admit that I missed what was fundamental. By looking for something profoundly transcendental, I simply could not see what was before my eyes.  The mystique of Heidegger, the engine propelling his thinking, is nothing transcendental or profound at all. I could not see under the hood in those days, and had I seen I might have judged then that the car had no engine at all! 

I had to go back to my five-year-old self to see it, and those steps backwards did not seem to me to be steps forward at all.  I struggled with Heidegger's technical German vocabulary, hoping to find in his technical philosophical terms something foundantional, some ground upon which his philosophy was based. I searched for some deep ontological commitment or some fundamental presupposition that would explain what he was saying and why he was saying it. In all of this, I simply overlooked the fact that my five-year-old self would not have searched for, nor understood, what an ontological commitment or a fundamental presupposition even was.  

What Heidegger was inviting me to do in Being and Time was simply to look around me and notice everything I constantly overlooked and ignored. If there is any fundamental presupposition he has, it is simply this: Notice where you are and what you are doing. Even at five, I knew the way of the farm; I knew the smells, the rhythms, the places I could walk and the things I could do. These comprised my world, the world in which I found myself and the world in which I dwelt. I knew the way to the house, to the table, to my bedroom. When it rained I found myself under a roof, and when it snowed I wore my boots and mittens. String from mom's sewing box was that which made the barn cats excited. Barn hay was that in which new kittens were encountered.The rock on the barn ledge next to the milk cow was that by which ice in the pan was broken.  

How effortlessly I navigated the complexities of it all! I could "get around" on the farm; I knew how to deal with things. Of course, I did not abstractly know that there was a context that allowed my dealings, and I did not conceive that this context was part of my culture which itself was related to history.  My five-year-old self had neither read Dilthey nor Troeltsch -- I did not read much in those days -- so was unaware of the "historical problem" as a problem, but that did not matter.  I had agency, I could act and somehow my actions made sense in my farm world.  

My reading of Being and Time began to give me language to talk about my more primordial "gettings around" in the world, my facility to deal with the wholly meaningful world in which I found myself.  Heidegger taught me that human be-ing is that be-ing in and for which be-ing is at issue.  The word 'Dasein' even connotes this; I am being 'there' or 'here'.  Prior to any grown-up conception of the world in which I am a subject confronted by objects, I live a world of meaning and purpose.  It is only when reflecting on this world of meaning and purpose that I am aware of the clearing that is my being and the world's worldness all together. Heidegger calls all of this being-in-the-world, meaning that my be-ing, is a be-ing that already has a world. There is no world without be-ing in it, and there is no be-ing without a world to be in.  The 'in' is not a spatial term, but is what Heidegger terms an existential.  I am a being, who in my be-ing, is be-ing-in-the- world.  Accordingly, my being is being-in-the-world.  

Before I read Heidegger seriously, I had read books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Crack in the Cosmic Egg.  It is probably the case that I never did understand exactly what it was to "overcome the subject-object dichotomy" recommended in those books because I simply already knew that there were subjects and objects.  How does one overcome that which is?  I had also read Eliade on Eastern religious traditions and knew that moksha and nirvana got us to places where we were no longer isolated subjects, but could somehow become simply a "drop in the cosmic ocean."  But none of this actually dislodged my own commitment to substance ontology. One might say that such a commitment only dies with violence.  These texts were not violent enough. 

But I see it, and Heidegger wants you to see it as well. He wants you to look under the hood of your commitments about being, to the be-ing that is be-ing in and through your commitments about being. Heidegger wants to give you an "a ha" experience, and the koan he chants is substance ontology itself. So what is the sound of one hand clapping? So how can an isolated subject build a bridge to the external world?  How indeed?  

Read Being and Time freshly by taking off your glasses of substance ontology. Look and see what it is to be.  To be is actually everything we do in the everyday.  We get around pretty well, and there must be some structure to this getting around. What are then the ontological possibilities of our being which allow any of our concretely actual gettings around in the world?  It is here, I admit, that the smell of the transcendental returns.  

Heidegger is a philosopher, after all, and his description of getting around in A-fashion or getting around in B-fashion finally must lead him to ask what is common to A-fashion getting around and B-fashion getting around.  In a faint echo of Kant who asked about the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such, Heidegger asks about the ontological conditions which make possible the actuality of what he calls the ontic, the actual and concrete what is in which one deals in one's world.  What might it be to uncover the conditions for the possibility of any dealings, conditions which are endemic to experience as such, conditions which are deeper than person X or Y or fashion A or B?  

I will write more later, but for now simply enjoy reading Being and Time, my students, and be ready for adventure!