The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World. Ľubica Učník

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      Husserl’s later insight is to acknowledge prepredicative experience, which is the route to his reflections on the life-world. He extends his investigation into the constitution of meaning to account for the life-world, where we already encounter typical instances of things. We already “objectify” imprecise experiences to constitute meaningful things. Husserl moves from the constitution of things to the outer horizon of meaning: a meaningful thing leads to another meaningful thing and so on, until the external horizon of all objects is disclosed. The move is from things to the horizon. Presumably if we go back to the things themselves, stripping away the garb of ideas and considering them without the overlay of scientific hypotheses, we will be able to change that outer horizon, recovering the life-world that is the ground of formalization, as Husserl argues. Husserl attempts to clarify the problem of modern epistemology. How do we know things, and what is the ground of our constitution of meaning? His answer is the transcendental ego. Since Husserl starts from things, the meaning of the whole—as later addressed by Heidegger and Patočka—is not a part of his project.

      Heidegger moves away from Husserl’s solution to the constitution of meaning in transcendental subjectivity but retains his insight that we typically encounter things in the world. Heidegger’s change of focus is to account explicitly for a questioner—Dasein—who understands things, prior to any theoretical reflections, by simply dealing with and using them. In Heidegger’s formulation, we do not understand things in their singularity; rather, we understand the project that we are involved with. Here the meaning of things is not primary. Heidegger’s focus is, of course, different from that of Husserl: he is interested in Being. It is a shift from epistemology to ontology: not “How do we know the meaning of things?” but “What are things and what is the Being of a questioner?”; he explores how the Being of a questioner is different from the Being of things. Heidegger starts by rethinking logic as logos, speech, and considering the Being of a questioner who is a speaking being living in and understanding the world already. He claims that by rethinking logos, we realize that the meaning of things is constituted by “freezing” our initial understanding of them—imprecisely revealed through our engagement with words in our projects—into words that we can then use to communicate with others via language. Language is similar to theorizing: we consider things outside of our lived experience, outside of their initial context, when we use words. This reconsideration of logos as speaking leads Heidegger also to rethink the concept of truth; from the correspondence of propositions and things to aletheia—unhiddenness—or showing something forth. Heidegger is not concerned with meaning constitution but with the meaning of the whole, the question of Being.

      The difference is in their respective understandings of the life-world. Husserl’s life-world is structured as an everyday world that the formalization of science has obscured with the garb of ideas. By questioning this formalization and returning science to its original impulse to understand the world, instead of structuring it through this garb of ideas, we can recover the human understanding of things and reinstate science as a responsible human achievement. By contrast, Heidegger insists that we cannot reveal the original structure of the life-world. Science’s revelation is already dependent on its mathematical basis. Hence, there cannot be an “original” life-world that is covered by scientific explanation. Our understanding of the life-world is already informed by the modern mathematical project.

      Husserl and Heidegger use the notion of “meaning” differently. Heidegger’s consideration is with the overall meaning of the world, being already scientific, enframing us all in its design. For Husserl, the lived understanding of the world can be recovered from scientific misconceptions if we pay attention to the constitution of the meaning of things, recognizing that even scientific formalization is based on our human experience of the “typicality” of objects that we encounter in everyday life.

      Arendt accepts Heidegger’s reading of Dasein. Human beings are not the same as things that we encounter. However, the structure of Dasein is not adequate to account for our understanding of the world. She posits the human condition in order to historicize Dasein,⁹ yet she proposes a different structure to account for the constitution of meaning. Using the history of events, as she would say, in a very idiosyncratic manner, she critiques the privileging of contemplation over action. In her narration, it seems as if homo faber and animal laborans drove the transformation of action from ancient Greece to the modern age. Meaning is subsumed to either the means-ends categories of homo faber (i.e., utilitarianism) or the categories of animal laborans (i.e., the consumption [or modern destruction] of the whole world). For Arendt, it is not ideas but events that change the world: her distrust of philosophy leads her to this path. She shows the problematic nature of consumer society as well as the inadequacy of scientific speech, yet the transformation of the conception of nature from the ancient Greeks to the modern scientific construction of the world is not accounted for in its own right.

      Patočka accepts Husserl’s theory of meaning constitution, but he objects to the transcendental ego as the space where meaning is constituted. He also accepts Heidegger’s critique of the structure of the life-world, agreeing that we live in a world we understand via a scientific model whose basis is already mathematical. In order to rethink the life-world, or, as he calls it, the natural world, Patočka addresses the meaning of the “whole”; not as the outer horizon of things (as in Husserl) and not as a history of Being that swallows up the Being of a questioner (as in Heidegger). He returns to the Greeks to consider the way the idea of nature has changed throughout history. He credits Husserl with the discovery of “objectification” in our everyday encounters with things (not just in the sphere of ideas); and he credits Heidegger with his proposal that modern science, being mathematically based, is already uncovering “mathematical” processes rather than things. Patočka also applauds Arendt for pointing out that, initially, we do not use things (as Heidegger would have it), but we are born into a community that teaches us about the things we use and our way of life. He then offers different approaches to thinking about the changes instituted by modern science.

THE PROGRESSION OF BEING

      In a very schematic way, following Patočka’s exposition, we can say that in the mythological world, myths explain everything by relegating all meaning to a primordial past. When this world collapses—when myths cease to explain why things are—the pre-Socratics attempt to confront the mystery of the world through Kosmogony, and the mystery of the world becomes a mystery of Being, of why things are. Moreover, a new question comes to the fore: If gods do not rule the world, who does? The ancient Greeks, addressing this second mystery, disclose the problem of human participation in affairs related to their Being in the world.

      Socrates takes over these two aspects and brings Being and politics into mutual relation. Politics is now a part of being human, as Socrates notes. His knowing that he does not know discloses that we simply cannot know why things are and how they are. We are finite human beings whose knowledge is always situational. We cannot know what justice and good are. The only way to gain knowledge and meaning in the world is to keep asking questions in relation to the historical situation of humans.

      Plato, distraught by Socrates’ death, attempts to secure the space of questioning by positing the unchangeable realm of Ideas, thus providing a stable basis for the human quest for knowledge.¹⁰ Aristotle, already schooled in the Platonic solution, realizes that Plato does not explain the terrestrial realm. Platonic ideas are unchanging, but phusis (translated today as “nature”) changes. Aristotle’s solution is to conceptualize change as change-in-the-world. For Plato, this is precisely what we cannot account for, since we live in the world of the Heraclitean flux. Yet Aristotle introduces the idea of motion and change that he can theorize about. Change is conceived in terms of movement within bodies: the process of generation of plants, humans, and animals and their movements from one place to another are explained by his conception of dunamis, the inner motion of each body according to its nature. Being—why things are and how they are—is explained by this capacity to change.

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