Challenging the transcendental position:the holism of experience

Claude Romano

Published online: 15 March 2011! Presses Universitaires de France 2011

Abstract Taking the problem of perception and illusion as a leading clue, thisarticle presents a new phenomenological approach to perception and the world:‘‘holism of experience.’’ It challenges not only Husserl’s transcendentalism, but alsowhat remains of it in Heidegger’s early thought, on the grounds that it is committedto the skeptical inference: ‘‘Since we can always doubt any perception, we canalways doubt perception as a whole.’’ The rejection of such an implicit inferenceleads to a relational paradigm of Being-in-the-World that differs from Heidegger’son many points.

Keywords Holism ! Heidegger ! Husserl ! Skepticism !Evenemential hermeneutics

Phenomenology has had no other task than the elucidation of the problem of theworld, or rather what Husserl called its ‘‘enigma’’ (Ratsel), that is, its paradoxicalmode of givenness, its remarkable transcendence with respect to consciousness, quaall-enveloping, all-inclusive horizon—the ‘‘horizon of all horizons.’’ This ambig-uous mode of givenness, oblique and elusive, was first approached on the basis of afixed philosophical framework—that of transcendental thought. To the question ofthe phenomenological status of the world, of how this phenomenon (if it can becalled a ‘‘phenomenon’’) is given, Husserl answers by tracing this mode ofgivenness back to the constitutive operations of a pure ego. However, varied theanswers subsequently surfacing within the phenomenological movement have been,

Translated by Michael B. Smith, Berry College (smithster@gmail.com).

C. Romano (&)Universite Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV), Paris, Francee-mail: clromano@wanadoo.fr

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Cont Philos Rev (2011) 44:1–21DOI 10.1007/s11007-011-9165-x

they all have a ‘‘family resemblance.’’ In Heidegger, for example, though the wholeidea of constitution has been abandoned, the Dasein nevertheless remains, by itsfinite ontological project, ‘‘world-forming’’ (Weltbildend), and thus the worldremains a characteristic of its transcendence, a moment of its unitary ontologicalstructure, Being-in-the-World. In the following reflections I would like to attempt tooutline, not so much a new answer to the problem of the phenomenological status ofthe world or a new solution to its ‘‘enigma,’’ as a new framework in which to be ableto formulate this problem itself. I call this framework ‘‘holism of experience.’’‘‘Holism’’ comes from the Greek to holon, the whole. As a first approach, let usconsider that a holistic conception rests on the adage according to which ‘‘the wholeis greater than the sum of its parts.’’ A holism of experience thus applies this sameadage to experience as such—and to the world in that it forms the ‘‘milieu’’ of allexperience. An experience is only an experience if it fits into the entirety ofexperience, which is not the simple sum of its parts.

1 The transcendental position and the problem of skepticism

In a sense, the approach I propose is not new. It was anticipated many times byauthors as varied as Dilthey, James, Bergson, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, toname a few. Thus, for example in Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in denGeisteswissenschaften, Dilthey tries to shed light on the phenomenon of the unity oflife (Lebenseinheit), which he also refers to as ‘‘connectedness of life,’’ Lebenszu-sammenhang. This sort of unity, such as a biography, for example, tries to recapture,resides in a meaningful connection between the parts and the whole of that lifeitself: ‘‘Life and what is re-experienced manifest a special relationship of parts to awhole, which is that of the meaning of parts for the whole.’’1 ‘‘The category ofmeaning designates the relationship of parts of life to the whole as rooted in thenature of life.’’2 In other words, life is a meaningful totality to the extent that each ofits parts contains meaning only in virtue of its being a part of the totality of life. It isthe totality of life that primordially possesses the characteristic of being endowedwith meaning—which the parts of that life possess only by derivation. Thephenomenon of life can, therefore, only be apprehended in the perspective of aholistic conception in which the whole is not reducible to the sum of its parts.

In phenomenology stricto sensu, it is probably Heidegger who, in the wake ofDilthey, most clearly validated such an approach. As early as in 1919 he rejected an‘‘atomizing analysis (atomisierende Analyse)’’3 as an approach to the phenomenonof life, and recommends a ‘‘structural analysis (Strukturanalyse)’’4 that does justiceto the holistic constitution of the experience of life as such. This idea linksHeidegger’s first conceptuality, elaborated in the framework of a ‘‘hermeneutics offactical life,’’ to that of fundamental ontology. The ontological structures of Dasein

1 Dilthey (2002, p. 249); id. (1992, p. 229).2 Dilthey (2002, p. 253); id. (1992, pp. 233–234).3 Heidegger (1999, p. 61) [Below Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe is abbreviated GA #, p. #].4 Ibid., p. 5.

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are in each case total, impossible to break down into elements: ‘‘Being-in-the-Worldis a structure which is primordially and constantly whole.’’5 The different‘‘moments’’ of that structure that can be distinguished through analysis only havemeaning against the background of the indecomposable unity of that structure takenas a whole. ‘‘The determination of Dasein as being-in-the-world is a unified andoriginal one…. [This basic constitution] is still always wholly there as itself…. Thebringing out the individual structural moments is a purely thematic accentuation andas such always only an actual apprehension of the whole structure in itself.’’6

All the originality of the phenomenology of Sein und Zeit resides in the light it shedson structural totalities (the In-der-Welt-sein, the Mit-sein, the Sein zum Tode, etc.)that do not consist of a sum of elements, and are not reducible to a string of‘‘lived experiences’’ having the mode of existence of subsistence (Vorhandenheit).

Although it is possible to find in phenomenology (and outside of it) cases thatanticipate a holistic-oriented approach to our experience (or to what might better betermed our primary and primordial openness onto the world), it remains nonethelessthe case that this approach has hardly been conceptualized in a rigorous manner assuch. Its originality cannot be said to have been singled out in the least; and mostimportantly, the implications and critical significance of that approach with respectto the transcendental dispensation that has prevailed in phenomenology even afterHusserl have scarcely been noted, even by the authors who have adopted andthematized it. What is it, then, that constitutes the force and critical potential of aholism of experience?

First of all, how can a holism be characterized more specifically? Many versionsof holism have flourished in contemporary philosophy: epistemological holism(Duhem-Quine), a holism of beliefs and interpretation (Davidson), semantic holism(Wittgenstein), conceptual holism (Sellars), mental holism (Descombes). Let uspause to consider the example of beliefs. A holism of beliefs stipulates that it isimpossible to have a belief without ipso facto having many others, and in realitywithout having a system of beliefs, since a belief is compatible or incompatible withother beliefs, can be derived from certain other ones, and itself plays an inferentialrole in the acquisition of new beliefs. In other words, there is no such thing as anisolated belief. A belief cannot possess the properties it does (have meaning, beverifiable, and intervene in reasoning) unless there are other beliefs possessing thesame properties, with which it bears logical relations. These properties can bequalified as ‘‘holistic’’ to the extent that a belief only possesses them within a whole.In a holistic system, certain parts of the system only possess at least some of theirproperties if other parts possess the same or other properties (complementaryproperties, for example). Thus, certain beliefs can only have meaning if other beliefsalso have meaning; but certain beliefs cannot be true unless others (their negations)are false. Hence we can characterize a holistic system as being a system whose partsdo not possess at least some of their properties unless other parts of the systempossess the same or other properties; and consequently whose parts only possess

5 Heidegger (1962, p. 225) [Below Heidegger’s Being and Time is abbreviated BT, p. #]; id., (1986,p. 180) [Below Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit is abbreviated SZ, p. #].6 Heidegger (1992, p. 157); GA 20, p. 211.

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these properties within the whole of which they are parts, and in virtue of therelations they bear to the other parts of the system.

We now understand what a holistic conception of belief means. But what does aholism of experience mean? Let us take the concept of experience in its broadestsense, including not only experiences in the strong and ‘‘original’’ sense—those inwhich the thing itself is given in praesentia (leibhaft, as Husserl would say), but alsoaffective, emotive, remembered, imaginary, and oneiric experiences, which are only‘‘experiences’’ in a modified sense (and sometimes in the ‘‘as if’’ modality). Amongthese experiences, some open onto the world itself: These are classically called‘‘perceptions.’’ A holism of experience maintains that the property of being aperception is a necessarily holistic one. An experience is a perceptive experience ifand only if it blends in seamlessly with the whole of the perceptive experience—thatis, if it presents a structural cohesion with the system of perceptive experience intoto. This property of cohesion is not coherence in the logical sense. Coherenceapplies to beliefs or propositions; cohesion applies to phenomena. The latter consistsin a set of structural invariants (spatiotemporal ones, for example) that underlie allvariation of phenomena. A perception possesses a cohesion with other perceptionsif, through their succession, a certain number of structural invariants arepreserved—those, for example, which make possible the manifestation of theidentity of an object through space and time and in changing perspectives. Thus, wecan reformulate the holistic principle that is at work in perception by saying that anexperience cannot possess the property of being a perception, that is, an experiencein the originary sense, unless it presents a structural cohesion with other experiencesthat are themselves perceptions, i.e., unless it is integrated with the whole ofperception, which possesses primarily the aforementioned property of cohesion.

In fact, what is true of perceptive experience also applies to what that experienceis the experience of: the world. The same holistic principle can, then, be formulateda parte objecti: the characteristic for a thing’s being perceived is itself dependent onthe cohesion of that thing with its surroundings, but that cohesion is first acharacteristic of the whole, that is, of the world itself, before being a characteristicof one of its given parts, and in order to be able to become one. Only a wholeendowed with structural cohesion (a world) can be perceived, and it is only to theextent that it is blends seamlessly into a world that a thing can, in turn, be perceived.

These still preliminary formulations only bear on the experience in its first andoriginary sense: ‘‘perception.’’ In no case are they to be construed as excluding thepossibility that other holistic aspects can be found in other modalities ofexperience—in memory, for example, or in affective dispositions. I leave thisproblem aside. We begin, in any case, to get a sense of the type of problem—orchallenge even—to which a holism of experience has as its vocation to respond.This problem is that of knowing what permits us to assert that our primaryexperience of things, our ‘‘perception,’’ does indeed open onto the world itself. Thisdifficulty was posed to phenomenology historically in the wake of skepticism, to thepoint of orienting and conditioning phenomenology’s entire approach to theproblem (or the enigma) of the world. Indeed, the skeptic asks, What assurance dowe have that our perceptions, as simple experiences of consciousness, ‘‘represen-tations’’ or ‘‘ideas,’’ do indeed relate to objects outside us, and that they put us in

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contact with the world itself? Reduced to its hard nucleus, skepticism with respect tothe ‘‘outside’’ world rests on the following inference. Since we can always doubt anyparticular perception, we can always doubt perception as a whole. Since a localdoubt—and a local illusion—are always possible, a general doubt—and a generalillusion—are also possible. Must we accept this inference? It is precisely thisquestion that it is the role of holism to answer.

Before confronting this difficulty head on, let us note that the inferenceunderlying skepticism’s doubt about the existence of the world is not only aningredient of Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt, but also the basis of the entiretranscendental problematics of Husserl. Until we have understood the role playedby that inference in the economy of transcendental phenomenology, we will have noway of making a positive or negative evaluation of phenomenology’s ultimatecharacterization of the world. It goes without saying that every perception may turnout to be illusory after the fact. But just because a punctual illusion, affecting apunctual perception—which reveals itself by that very fact not to be a perception—is always thinkable, must we conclude that a generalized illusion is also thinkable?Husserl’s response to this question, like Descartes’ before him, was undeniablyaffirmative. This is attested not only by the hypothesis of the annihilation of theworld as presented in section 49 of the Ideen I, but also by the transcendental modeof conceptualization as a whole. Indeed, that entire conceptuality rests on theseparation between a realm of absolute certainty—the ego and its cogitationes—andanother one that is subject to doubt—the realm of transcendent objects. Moreprecisely, despite the ‘‘breakthrough’’ of intentionality beyond a philosophy ofrepresentation, Husserl continues to contrast the domain of absolute givenness (thatis, the absolutely given, which he thinks of in the first phase of his thought as realimmanence, before enlarging that immanence, at the time of his transcendental turn,to immanence in the intentional sense, which includes within it all the realtranscendences) with the domain of real existences ad extra, the things of nature, theevidence of which remains forever ‘‘presumptive,’’ that is, subject to skepticaldoubt. Thus, the pre-transcendental distinction of Cartesian origin between givensreally immanent in consciousness (hyletic and noetic data) and really transcendentgivens (external objects) is at once transcended and paradoxically conserved underthe transcendental dispensation. As R. Boehm notes, phenomenology attributes ‘‘anew meaning to these terms [immanence and transcendence]’’ while at the sametime ‘‘a parallel use of these same terms in the traditional sense (of ‘‘real’’immanence and transcendence) will prove indispensable and be retained.’’7 Andsince these concepts are enrooted in the ‘‘doubt’’ approach, Cartesian doubt is atonce rejected (because it ends up in a mundane ego) and confirmed in its rights bytranscendental phenomenology. Husserl continues to maintain that the externalworld can collapse into illusion at any moment, and that transcendental conscious-ness alone is exempt from doubt. But, through the transcendental turn, thisconsciousness from now on includes the world as a noematic correlative, as thehorizon of its constitutive operations.

7 Boehm (1959, p. 486).

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Husserl, despite the fact that he attempts, thanks to intentionality, to clear thepath toward a non-Cartesian conception of the pure ego in its relationship to theworld, remains tributary to the Cartesian approach, because he continues to considerthe ‘‘doubt’’ approach itself, and its end product, the ‘‘cogito’’ as self-evident,regardless of whatever change of orientation he may impart to them. He does notraise the least question about the validity of a generalized doubt. Three affirmationsflow directly or indirectly from that idea:

1. The epistemological primacy of the ego vis-a-vis the world. The ego, given toitself in absolute self-evidence, is the first entity knowable in principle [endroit], and the only one knowable apodictically, whereas knowledge of theworld remains always subject to doubt.

2. This epistemological disparity between ego and world is extended into an onticdisparity: consciousness constitutes a self-sufficient (selbststandig), absolutelyself-enclosed sphere, whereas the world exists only relatively to consciousness;its being is a dependent one. ‘‘If we exclude pure consciousness,’’ he was fondof saying in his Gottingen seminars, ‘‘then we exclude the world.’’8

3. The twofold primacy (epistemological and ontic) of the ego with respect to theworld leads to making subjectivity the locus of primary truths that areabsolutely exempt from doubt, lending themselves to a transcendentalphilosophy, and taking precedence over truths merely derived from the othersciences. In other words, adherence to the skeptical inference ends up in anepistemology of absolute foundations in virtue of which transcendentalphenomenology can offer a foundation for all the sciences, be they a priorior empirical.

There is good reason to recall the radical dependency of Husserl’s transcendentalposition on the skeptical idea of a generalized doubt. Even in the undertakings thatresolutely break with phenomenology understood as ‘‘twentieth-century Cartesian-ism,’’9 there remain troubling structural analogies that raise the delicate question ofthe degree to which these undertakings have truly gone beyond what has hithertoserved as our frame of reference. In Sein und Zeit, for example, even though ‘‘theambiguities of the concepts of immanence and transcendence’’ (to borrow Boehm’sexpression once again), are abandoned in favor of a conception of In-der-Welt-Seinthat strips Dasein of all interiority and divests the being to which it relates ofall exteriority—even though Heidegger asserts with the utmost clarity that‘‘the question of whether there is a world at all… makes no sense…’’10 so that‘‘the skeptic… does not need to be refuted’’11; in sum, even though he seems to rejectthe entire problematics underlying Husserl’s neo-Cartesian perspective by reassertingwhat he had been saying since 1919, namely that ‘‘the true resolution of the problemof the reality of the external world lies in the understanding of the fact that this is in

8 Ingarden (1975, p. 21). [‘‘Streichen wir das reine Bewusstsein, so streichen wir die Welt.’’].9 Husserl (1998, p. 3); id., Husserliana [abbreviated below as Hua] 1, p. 3. See also Husserl (1973, p. 1);id., Hua 1, p. 43.10 BT, pp. 246–247; SZ, p. 202.11 BT, p. 271 [trans. slightly modified—Tr.]; SZ, p. 229.

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any case not a problem, but rather an absurdity (Widersinnigkeit),’’12 it is quite easyto detect troubling similarities that remain between his conceptuality and that ofHusserl. First of all, Dasein, by its comprehension of being, which only de-centers itin appearance, holds the originary opening, the Erschlossenheit, that makes allwithin-the-world discovery of entities possible, so that Dasein, or, rather, thecomprehension of being in it—remains the condition of the (quasi-transcendental)possibility of appearing of the world and of entities as a whole. ‘‘There is world onlyand as long as Dasein exists,’’13 Heidegger writes. This generates an idealism of anew kind, which no longer betokens the tracing of entities as a whole back to aprivileged entity, but rather the tracing of the being of these entities back to theunderstanding of being that belongs to the exemplary existent,14 which by the sametoken makes that being into ‘‘‘that which is transcendental’ for every entity,’’ andmakes of this ontological transcendentalism the ‘‘only correct possibility for aphilosophical problematic.’’15 What comes of all this is a primacy of Dasein that isno longer simply ontic, as in Husserl, but ‘‘ontico-ontological’’ for the formulationof the question of being. According to a new version of Descartes’ ‘‘tree ofphilosophy,’’ Dasein, insofar as it possesses a comprehension of being, is thecondition of possibility of all the regional ontologies, and consequently of all thecorresponding sciences: ‘‘the ontico-ontological condition for the possibility of anyontologies.’’16 It is true that, with fundamental ontology, the emphasis has shiftedfrom a primary and exemplary entity to the being of that entity, but this shift hasonly loosened, not broken, the initial Cartesian shackles. Heidegger asserts thatskepticism’s problem is an absurdity, but he does not say for what reason. On thecontrary, he continues to maintain certain themes that might lead us to believe thatthe skeptic’s problem is well posed. He says, for example, that the world is‘‘subjective’’ through and through, in the sense of ‘‘the well-understood concept ofthe ‘subject,’’’17 Dasein as Being-in-the-World: ‘‘The world is something Dasein-ish…. It is there, as is the being-there [Da-sein] that we ourselves are; in otherwords, it exists.’’18 The world in the ontological sense is thus nothing but a momentof the ontological constitution of that entity, and this is the case—paradoxical as itmay seem—regardless of whether that entity, Dasein, exists or not in fact, andwhether there does or does not exist a ‘‘world’’ (in a derived sense) in which thisentity exists in fact. ‘‘If I say of Dasein that its basic constitution is being-in-the-world, I am then first of all asserting something that belongs to its essence (Wesen)and I thereby disregard whether the being of such a nature factually (faktisch) existsor not.’’19 The world that belongs to the ontological constitution of Dasein as being-in-the-world is not, then, the ‘‘world’’ (in a derivative sense) in which Dasein exists

12 GA 56/57, p. 92.13 Heidegger (1988 p. 170); GA 24, p. 241.14 BT, pp. 255–256; SZ, p. 212.15 BT, p. 251; SZ, p. 208.16 BT, p. 34; SZ 13.17 Heidegger (1988, p. 216); GA 24, p. 308.18 Heidegger (1988, p. 166); GA 24, p. 237.19 Heidegger (1984, p. 169); GA 26, p. 217.

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or does not exist de facto, no more than the facticity of that entity (Faktizitat) isreducible to its factuality (Tatsachlichkeit), no more than its existence (Existenz),qua ontological determination, signifies its reality (Wirklichkeit) in such a ‘‘world.’’But then the world has become twofold, and the one in relation to which theskeptical problem is meaningless is no longer the one focused on by the skepticthrough the expression of his doubt. The ‘‘subjective’’ world of the ontologicallywell-conceived subject remains a ‘‘configuration’’ (Bildung) of the latter, as will bestated in the Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. It is not insignificant that the reduction,that transcendental procedure par excellence, is able to continue to play a role, albeita discreet and largely implicit one, in the economy of fundamental ontology.Anxiety remains analogous to an epoche. Heidegger, because he was unable to givea positive formulation of what makes the skeptical problem a false one, despite hisadvances and revolutionary intuitions, remains largely a prisoner of Husserl’s (andthereby, partially at least, of Descartes’ and Kant’s) transcendental perspective; heconceives of Being-in-the-World in a way that remains symptomatically ambiguous,for he attempts to free himself from transcendental theses without leaving theproblematic framework in which these theses are set.

2 What does the holism of experience mean?

Heidegger is certainly right not to take the skeptic’s problem seriously. But he iswrong not to take seriously the reasons that must lead us not to take this problemseriously. Instead he says nothing about them, and thus remains bogged down in apost- or crypto-transcendental conceptuality rather than trying to understand theopenness to the world that is inherent in all true experience—and essentially so.From all appearances it would seem that Heidegger was content here, in resolvingthe difficulty, to impose a new paradigm, the In-der-Welt-sein, by fiat, withoutdwelling on the reasons that make it necessary. But in philosophy the forceful fiatnever has as much force as the patient resolution of a problem in the form of soundargumentation.

Let us then attempt to confront directly the problem Heidegger leaves partlyunresolved, the broad outlines of which we have begun to bring into view. What is itthat makes the problem of skepticism an ill-posed one? Let us return to the case ofperception. What is it that makes the inference ‘‘since one can always doubt anyparticular perception, one can always doubt perception as a whole’’ illegitimate?

On Husserl’s view, it is the always open possibility that the world may dissolveinto an illusion that obliges us to maintain an unbridgeable eidetic differencebetween the being of the cogitatio and that of its cogitatum—between theexperiences given in indubitable immanence and the objects in the world which mayor may not correspond to them. This eidetic difference is no less valid for perceptionthan for the other intentional modalities. Thus, declares Husserl, a ten-storeybuilding standing before us in the flesh can very well be perceived—we may evensay that its perception is its being given in the flesh (leibhaft)—and it should beadded that this would still be the case, even if we were victims of an illusion; that is,even in the absence of a ten-storey building in the world. ‘‘The foregoing

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characterization’’ [Leibhaftigkeit], he specifies, ‘‘is not to be understood in the sensethat there would pertain to the essence of every perception as such the existence ofthe perceived Object, the persistence of that which stands there in it in the mode ofpresence in the flesh. In that case, talk of a perception whose object did not existwould indeed be countersensical; illusory perceptions would be unthinkable.’’20

But in Husserl’s view, given the abyss of meaning separating the absolute being ofthe cogitatio from the ‘‘dubitable’’ being of the real thing ad extra, it must be possibleto talk about the perception of something, i.e., about its mode of givenness‘‘in the flesh,’’ without that thing existing in any way. Deferring to ordinary usage, inwhich ‘‘perceiving’’ is contrasted with ‘‘being the victim of an illusion,’’ or with‘‘hallucinating’’ an object (such that ‘‘to perceive that p’’ implies ‘‘p,’’ while‘‘to hallucinate that p’’ implies, on the contrary, ‘‘not p), Husserl maintains afundamental and irreducible difference between Leibhaftigkeit, which applies toall perception regardless of whether or not it is marred by illusion, andGlaubhaftigkeit, the belief bestowed on an object when it exists and which mustbe withdrawn from it in the case of an illusion: The former is ‘‘fundamental andessential to perception as such,’’ while the latter ‘‘can either supervene or belacking.’’21

Not every departure from ordinary usage constitutes in and of itself aphilosophical ‘‘error,’’ let alone ‘‘nonsense’’; but certain cases can raise formidabledifficulties. Is it really possible to isolate within perception a ‘‘nucleus’’ common to‘‘true’’ and to ‘‘illusory’’ perception (since Husserl’s innovation consists, amongother things, in authorizing the use of ‘‘illusory perception’’), namely givenness ‘‘inthe flesh,’’ Leibhaftigkeit, which, if we are to believe the founder of phenomenol-ogy, constitutes a descriptive characteristic of all perception, whether the thing thusgiven (in the flesh) exists or not? How can a perception open up for us the thingitself in the flesh without that thing’s existing in any way? Husserl maintains that itmust be possible to distinguish between the object given in the flesh qua intentionalcorrelate of the act of perception and the real object, which may or may notcorrespond to it, in view of the fact that the latter is in principle subject to ageneralized doubt. In other words, because the skeptical argument is valid, we mustaffirm that a perception may have no object (in the sense of a res existing in theworld) without ceasing thereby to be a perception. There must be an elementcommon to perception and illusion on the basis of which they are differentiated.Hence the search for additional criteria that would make it possible to distinguishbetween true corporeal givenness and an illusory corporeal givenness. For Husserl,these criteria are two in number.

1. Perception is a positional consciousness whereas the consciousness of anillusion replaces the ‘‘thesis’’ of consciousness with a ‘‘counter-positing’’(Gegenthese).22

20 Husserl (1997, p. 12); Hua 16, p. 15.21 Husserl (1997, p. 13); Hua 16, p. 16.22 Husserl (1982, p. 332); Hua 3.1, p. 320.

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2. Perception and illusion differ as to the mode of linkage of the adumbrations orsilhouettes (Abschattungen) through which the object appears: Perception is aflux of concordant silhouettes, constantly confirming and corroborating oneanother in the unity of an experience—illusion a flux of discordant silhouettes,exposing the emptiness of their object through the outburst of a conflict.Obviously these two criteria are of a piece: A doxic modality of belief isattached to a concordant flux of silhouettes, while the discordance, the outburstof a conflict between concurrent appearances brings about a doxic neutraliza-tion at the conclusion of which the object is no longer given as anything but a‘‘mere appearance.’’

There is therefore an element common to both the actual apparition and the mereappearance, or to the experience and the pseudo-experience, and that element issupplied by the Abschattungen, which are truly immanent to consciousness. In thefirst case they confirm and corroborate one another, while in the second they‘‘explode’’ in conflict; but they inhabit consciousness regardless of whether theperceived object exists or not. As a result of this common element, perception maybe said to be reducible to an illusion that constantly confirms itself, and the illusionto a perception that conflicts with itself. Identical immanent givens or Abschatt-ungen can at one moment underlie authentic perceptions, and at another supportmere appearances, depending on how they are linked or coordinated with oneanother. Illusion is a contradicted or crossed-out reality, and reality, to adoptHusserl’s Leibnizian formulation, a ‘‘coherent dream.’’23 Let us call this conception‘‘conjunctive’’: It claims that one and the same experience could just as well be aperception as an illusion, depending on how it is coordinated with other experiences.A conjunctive conception of perception rests on a non-eliminable remnant ofpsychologism or mentalism. Indeed, once there is an element (the Abschattung)common to both the apparition ‘‘in person’’ and the merely seeming appearance, a‘‘phenomenon’’ that is neutral with respect to that distinction and that is present inconsciousness regardless of whether the object that appears exists or not, this‘‘phenomenon’’ must be logically distinct from the object that appears. It can benothing other than a mental intermediary. And indeed in Husserl the Abschattungendo retain, even after the transcendental turn, a status that is entirely different for theobjects that emerge through them: They are really immanent givens, whereas theirobjects are transcendent. Despite his break with psychologism, Husserl constantlyslips back into its well-worn passageways.

Moreover, the conjunctive conception of perception he defends does not evensucceed in truly accounting for the difference that exists between a perception andan illusion. Let us suppose that it is legitimate to distinguish between blue as a pureimmanent content of my present perception of the vase, and blue as an objective,really transcendent property of that object; let us suppose, further, that the secondcan always turn out to be illusory, whereas the first alone is indubitable. By comingcloser or by changing the lighting I may discover that the vase is not blue, but green.The conflict between incompatible appearances brings about the crossing-out of my

23 Husserl (1973, p. 17); Hua 1, p. 57.

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earlier perception. But in thus placing the difference between perception andillusion in the way the silhouettes are interlinked, in conceiving of illusion as acrossed-out and obliterated perception and of perception as a confirmed illusion, wehave already yielded to skepticism on the essential point. For if a perception canonly legitimately be considered a perception for as long as it proceeds in aconcordant manner, it can never rightfully be considered a perception, since theconcordance of its silhouettes is always provisional, essentially exposed to thespecter of illusion; and, if I do not know already at the present moment withcertainty that what I have before me is a blue-colored vase, it is hard to see howI could end up discovering this. In placing the perception/illusion distinction atthe end of a confirmation process that is in principle infinite—endless—Husserl hasmerely endorsed the skeptic’s doubt, the thesis of which is precisely that it isimpossible, on the occasion of a presently lived experience, to determine whether itis a perception or an illusion. And it is pointless to respond by arguing that myreasons for accepting the existence of the vase gradually take on more ‘‘weight’’ thelonger the perception lasts: The tenth time I circle that object, its existence will beno more certain than the first time. Either it is certain from the start or it neverwill be.

But doesn’t the error lie in the supposition of an element common to trueapparition and mere appearance—those Abschattungen that, being neutral withrespect to this distinction, can be nothing but an interface between the world and us?In opposition to a conjunctive conception, which propounds that the same livedexperience can be both perception and illusion, differing only by the way it iscoordinated with other lived experiences, and that consequently an illusion and aperception can be indiscernible on all points while they are being experienced, wemust propose a disjunctive conception, which affirms that an experience is eitherperception or illusion, but never both at once. There is nothing in common betweenthe true apparition in person and the mere appearance. Thus, strictly speaking, thereare no illusory perceptions, but only illusions of perception.

In truth the stumbling block for the conjunctive conception is an insufficientphenomenology of the illusion contrasted with perception. If we describe perceptionand the illusion in a phenomenologically adequate manner, we see that the modalityof givenness of their object is as different as night and day: An apparent object isonly apparently an object, it is a pure fictum that cannot be given in the same way asa real thing in the world. There is no need, here, to postulate an element common toillusion and perception, which, in the case of the latter, would somehow slip inbetween our openness onto things and those things themselves. Let us examine thetypical case of hallucinations, an in-depth description of which has been given to usby Erwin Straus and Merleau-Ponty. The victim of a hallucination rarely ‘‘believes’’in the existence of the object of the hallucination in the same way he or she believesin the existence of the perceived object. In an experiment by Zucker24 that speakseloquently to this issue, the schizophrenic patient thinks he sees a man postedregularly beneath his window. He describes his general bearing, his height, hisclothing. A male nurse is asked to stand at the same place, dressed in a similar way,

24 Qtd. by Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 334).

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and to imitate that person’s bearing as closely as possible. The patient immediatelyperceives the difference. ‘‘It is true that there is someone,’’ he says. ‘‘It is someoneelse.’’ The fact is, the object of the hallucination has the appearance of a perceivedobject, but is manifested otherwise, and as it were on a different stage than that ofthe real world. ‘‘The illusion of seeing,’’ Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘‘is, therefore, muchless the presentation of an illusory object than the unleashing and letting run crazy,so to speak, of a visual power which has lost any sensory counterpart.’’25 The foxfireof the illusion is a fleeting upsurge—unstable, indeterminate. It has nothing of theregulated process through which the appearing thing is enriched with ever newdeterminations. The hallucination consists in ephemeral ‘‘phenomena,’’ shimmeringglints and glimmers, sounds, shivers, lights and shadows that vanish almostimmediately and do not give purchase for a true grasp: harbingers of a pseudo-presence; not a presentation of objects—even fictive ones. When we are dealingwith identifiable ‘‘things’’—persons, animals, and so on—these hallucinatory‘‘things’’ present no more than a generic style and physiognomy. Of course aphenomenology of the illusion should give an account of the irreducible diversity ofillusory phenomena, which extend from hallucinations in the strict sense to falsejudgments about true perceptions. This task cannot be undertaken here.

One might be tempted to raise the objection that there must be an elementcommon to perception and illusion, since the latter passes itself off as the former.Is it not part of the essential nature of appearance to fool us with respect to the truenature of what appears? Now, in order for an illusion to pass itself off as being aperception doesn’t it have to be indiscernible from one during the moment of itsbeing experienced, that is, for as long as it does not give itself away as being anillusion? But that objection rests on a sophism. From the circumstance of our beingsometimes induced to err by a misleading appearance it is just as impossible to inferthat this appearance is identical with a true apparition as it is absurd to conclude,based on the fact we sometimes make mistakes in adding up numbers, that the tworesults, the correct and the incorrect one, are equivalent. Are we then such infalliblecreatures that we can make mistakes only in cases where it would be impossible toavoid doing so? Of course the illusion fools us, plays us along, and appears to besomething it isn’t—but that does not make it homogeneous with perception.The illusion is no more a false perception than the perception is a true illusion.The hallucination of an object should not be put on a par with its perception:It is a pseudo-givenness of an object and not the givenness of a pseudo-object, to bethought of according to the same paradigm as the givenness of a real object in theworld. It is an appearance of givenness and not the givenness of an appearance.

This ‘‘disjunctive’’ conception of perception, thus baptized by Hinton,26 andsince adopted by such authors as Austin, Putnam, and McDowell, was probablydefended for the first time by Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception.‘‘The illusory thing and the true thing,’’ he writes, ‘‘do not have the same structure’’;and, it should doubtless be added, the ‘‘thing’’ of the hallucination and the perceived‘‘thing’’ are not things in the same sense. ‘‘The hallucinatory phenomenon is no part

25 Ibid., p. 340 [trans. modified—Tr.].26 Hinton (1973). See also Austin (1962), Putnam (1999) and McDowell (1998).

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of the world, that is to say… there is no definite pathway leading from it to all theremaining experiences’’; ‘‘The hallucination is not a perception, but it has the valueof reality, and it alone counts for the victim.’’27 What attests to this fact is that allillusions can only be pointed out as such in the context of the perceived world, i.e.,against the background of a world possessing a structural cohesiveness. Being anillusion is precisely not being inscribed within a unified and unshakable world; it isto enter into conflict, not with other isolated perceptions, but with perception as awhole. At this point, we come to the limits of the disjunctive conception, which inreality is but a first step in the procedure attempting to show the vacuity of theproblem of skepticism. As long as we are content with asserting that there is noneutral sense of appearing that is common to both perception and illusion, or to theapparition in person and the mere appearance, we continue to assume that ourperceptive experience could be adequately described as made up of ‘‘buildingblocks’’ that are always isolable in principle, and will be superimposed on oneanother and assembled in such as way as to form a totality. But perception cannot beso described. Experience in its original sense, neither a ‘‘synthesis’’ of livedmoments always ideally isolable nor a ‘‘flux’’ of such moments, possesses anessentially holistic constitution. The skeptical doubt founders when it is confrontedwith the fact that to be a perception is not a property that can be ascribed to a livedmoment or an experience taken in isolation. It cannot be ascribed to the part unlessit is first ascribed to the whole of which the part is part, since each perception takenfrom this whole is only a perception to the extent that it possesses a cohesion withall the others—that cohesion being a property of the whole before becoming aproperty of the parts and making it possible to become a property of those parts. Wecan doubt any perception, but not perception as a whole, because a perceptive‘‘error,’’ an illusion, or a hallucination, presupposes the perceived world, i.e., theworld already possessed of structural cohesion, failing which they would not be ableto be decried as such. Hence a necessary reversal: The world is not the correlate ofan experience indefinitely confirmed—which, since it is ceaselessly confirmed,might just as easily not be confirmed—but that which has no need of confirmation,since all confirmation and information presuppose it. As Merleau-Ponty says,‘‘We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we mustinstead say: the world is what we perceive.’’28 The world is not presumed to be true aslong as its coherence is confirmed; its coherence is prior to all presumption of truthor falsity; it is that alone on the basis of which something can be presumed tobe illusory. This is why the idea of an entirely illusory world has no meaning.An illusory world would have to be able to manifest its artificial nature against abackground of perceptive coherence; thus it presupposes exactly what the skepticwished to eliminate by that hypothesis: a coherent and real world, beyond all possibleillusion.

Nevertheless, in order to think this through to the end, we must abandon a certainnumber of ideas and even a whole framework of thought that Merleau-Pontycontinues to consider established: that which makes of the ‘‘cogito’’ the

27 Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 344, 339, 342, respectively).28 Ibid., xvi.

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Archimedean point of all thought and all phenomenology. The requirement of aprimordial, indubitable truth is part and parcel of the Cartesian theory of science,that is, of the epistemology of absolute foundations that claims to furnish knowledgeas a whole with a fundamentum inconcussum. But is not science rather a collective,constantly self-correcting undertaking, such that each of its statements may becalled into question, but not all at the same time? That, in any case, is the Cartesianconception of knowledge that led Husserl to seek in the cogitationes quacogitationes self-certifying ‘‘foundations’’ beyond all possible doubt. On this view,these lived experiences [vecus] are necessarily true qua lived experiences, but theycould turn out to be false from a different perspective, namely in their claim to putus in relation with external things. Our experiences are evident in themselves, andtherefore indubitable, but they are always questionable with respect to their claim toopen onto a world. Thus, an experience can continue to be an experience while atthe same time having nothing corresponding to it in reality. But is it not part of theessence of an experience qua experience to put us in touch with the world?

It is on this point that a holism of experience suggests a complete reversal ofperspective. The false presupposition underlying the entire Cartesian tradition (withits ramifications in phenomenology) consists in maintaining that it is meaningful toattribute such a thing as truth or falsity to experiences considered in isolation,conferring on some of them a relation to objects, and on others not. The truth is thatan experience is only an experience if it is integrated in a coherent way to the wholeof experience—if it possesses cohesion with experience as a whole. Or to speak interms of ‘‘perception’’: An experience is only a perception if it is integrated into thewhole of perception, so that an experience that fails to meet this criterion is not adeceptive perception—it is not a perception at all (but a hallucination, illusion,etc.). In short, it makes no sense to attribute to an isolated experience the property ofbeing a perception (and therefore also the property of not being a perception), in theabsence of its integration into the whole of perception. It is the whole that deservesthe appellation of ‘‘perception’’ properly so called; such and such a perceptionseparated off from that totality is called perception only in a derivative sense.Something may be said to be ‘‘perceived’’ only if it emerges from a world endowedwith a structural cohesion. Experience is not a synthesis of lived moments [vecus]that could be true or false taken in isolation; there is no experience that is not‘‘genuine,’’ because it is not an experience unless it is integrated seamlessly withinthe totality of experience, and therefore there is no experience unless it opens outonto the world as such.

Thus, perception is a phenomenon that is not only holistic, but radically holistic:The property of being perceived is a property of the whole, that is, of the world,before being a property of its parts. Only a world endowed with structuralcohesiveness is perceived (and is by that very fact a world) and only a thing that isintegrated into such a world can be perceived. In this sense, being a perception is aproperty of a more holistic nature than being a belief, to revert to the example withwhich we began. Indeed, it is true that to have a belief presupposes having otherswith which that belief possesses logical relations. I cannot have one belief unlessI have a whole system of beliefs. For all this, I am not an automaton rationale: my

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system of beliefs can have flaws in it, and in most cases it does. All my beliefs arenot coherent, but this does not keep them from remaining, at least provisionally,beliefs (pending my knowledge of which beliefs I will have to sacrifice in order torestore a coherent system). But with perceptions things are quite otherwise:A perception that does comport with the whole of perception, that is, that does notemerge from a world endowed with structural cohesiveness, is simply not aperception. To perceive is essentially to perceive a world, that is, a whole endowedwith cohesion. Perception does not just happen to be of the world: there is noperception but of the world.

The holism of perception inevitably ends up, then, with what might be calleda ‘‘descriptive realism,’’ which must be rigorously distinguished from ametaphysical realism—the latter being most often expressed in the form of acausal realism. If to be a realist means to conceive of perception as ‘‘an event inthe world to which the category of causality, for example, can be applied,’’29 touse Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, one would be right to conclude that suchrealism is a failure.30 Indeed it is absurd to claim to explain experience itself andits ability to put us into a direct relation with objects and events on the basis ofthe objects and events taken from that experience, and on the basis of theircausal relations to a subject. On this point, we must agree with Husserl’s anti-naturalism. The intentional discourse is irreducible to a causal discourse, and therelation of appearing is irreducible to an external relation. Experience is a givingof the thing itself without mediation of any kind, whereas the links of causalityintroduce a virtually infinite number of mediations between reality and us. Causalrealism is a hybrid conception that rests on an endless confusion between thelevel of a pure description of apparition and a genetic explanation of its content.But the difficulties in which such a realism gets bogged down are by no meansinexorable. There is a descriptive realism that in no way reduces our primaryexperience of the world to causal links of whatever degree of number andcomplexity, for the simple and good reason that all causal relations are atomicwhile our experiential relation to the world possess a holistic constitution. Here,descriptive realism is a consequence of the holistic approach to experience, andnot the other way around. From the point of view of a pure description of thephenomena, the only coherent position consists in maintaining that experienceopens onto the world itself in the absence of any intermediary. The perception ofthe world presupposes its existence and is indissociable from it. This is whatmakes of the skeptical problem that haunts phenomenology to the point ofbecoming entangled with a great many of its fundamental affirmations a problemthat is irremediably ill posed.

29 Ibid., p. 207. See also BT, p. 251: ‘‘But what distinguishes this assertion [‘‘the external world is Reallypresent-at hand’’] is the fact that in realism there is a lack of ontological understanding. Indeed realismtries to explain Reality ontically by Real connections of interaction between things that are Real.’’30 Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 49, 363–364, 369); ‘‘The return to perceptual experience… puts out of courtall forms of realism,’’ Ibid., p. 47.

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3 The phenomenon of the world

The reversal of the problem induced by holism destroys at its very root thepossibility of the skeptical doubt, which constitutes the presupposition—neverchallenged—of the separation between two spheres of being, the independent beingof consciousness, and the dependent being of the world, and thus underlies the entiretranscendental account of things. Experience, as a totality that cannot be brokendown into elements, is better apprehended in terms of ‘‘being-in-the-world.’’ But theidea of being-in-the-world that is pertinent here, while being free reformulation ofthe one developed in Sein und Zeit, is not identical with it. A holism of experiencecan only lead to the pure and simple abandonment of the transcendental perspectivethat continues to be decisive up to and including the first Heidegger. Being-in-the-world is nowise a characteristic just of Dasein—or of Dasein taken in isolation: anontological determination of that entity considered in itself, minus the world inwhich it is ‘‘factually’’ situated at birth. Being-in-the-world is a structuralcharacteristic of a system, the one formed by a ‘‘subject’’ endowed with practicalabilities and the world. And therefore it is equally impossible for openness,Erschlossenheit, to be an ontological characteristic of Dasein minus the existence ofa world to which it is open. Being-in-the-world designates a structure that is bothrelational and holistic, and for that reason it cannot be thought in the terms of atranscendental philosophy, in which the ‘‘subject’’ and it alone would play the roleof ultimate ‘‘condition of possibility.’’

In order to understand being-in-the-world, we must attempt to deepen the senseof this dual structural affiliation of a ‘‘subject’’ involved in a world and a world towhich this ‘‘subject’’ is open. For the moment, we have limited ourselves toperception and its correlate, the perceived world. The world is not only the totalityof what is perceived, but far more the totality of the perceptible or of theexperienceable as such. To speak of the ‘‘perceptible’’ and the ‘‘experienceable’’ isto evoke a capability on the part of the subject: the capability of perceiving andexperiencing. The world cannot be the totality of the perceptible without a‘‘subject’’ capable of perceiving (it), i.e., endowed with a specific ability. But thecrucial point here is the following: Such ability is only given to a ‘‘subject’’ thatconstitutively belongs to the world through its body and is situated and corporeallyembedded in it. The body’s belonging to the world is a necessary condition for thebestowal on the subject of a capacity of a certain kind—a capacity in virtue of whichthe world can in turn be qualified as the totality of the perceptible or theexperienceable as such. The capacity of perception can be possessed only by a‘‘subject’’ who belongs to the world essentially as a body, and that capacity can beexercised only in relation to the world in which this ‘‘subject’’ is situated. Theopening onto the world for the experiencing subject presupposes that the latterbelongs to the world.

But the world is not only that in relation to which one sole capacity, perception, isexercised. The world is rather that to which the manifold of capacities of a‘‘subject’’ having a world is related. We do not relate to the world just within theperceptive register, but in multiple practical and affective modes, bringing into playin each case specific modes of comprehension. Already at the level of what we

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commonly call ‘‘perception,’’ the panoply of things, beings, and events are notsimply manifested to us, but are manifested with determined meanings. Thesemeanings are not ‘‘added on’’ by consciousness to a neutral given that would beanalogous, in the ‘‘psychic’’ domain, to ‘‘brute facts’’ as supplied by physics; theyare part of the very manner in which things declare and present themselves to us atfirst encounter. The sea that shimmers in the deep announces itself to mecompellingly as a refreshing promise, inviting me in for a swim; the granite ledgeslining the sea’s steep shoreline call out to me as accessible, scalable. All these‘‘living meanings’’ depend essentially on my goals, and address my practicablepursuits. The appetitive vectors are not projected upon things arbitrarily, but ratherflow forth from the system that the objects offered to perception form with a‘‘subject’’ endowed with goals and abilities of various orders. If the sea winks fromafar with its sempiternal virginal air, it is not because I somehow already had it inmy head to go swimming—otherwise such a project could never germinate; on thecontrary, it is because I have the capacity to entertain such projects and to go for adip when the circumstances lend themselves to it. Here two distinct senses of the‘‘possible’’ emerge. The world is presented as a manifold of opportunities, i.e., ofpossibilities offered to my repertoire of potential physical acts in virtue of whichthings acquire a meaning, show themselves to me with a significance that is theirvery way of appearing to me and of manifesting themselves. Correlatively, suchpossibilities can only belong to things and give them the pre-linguistic meaning theyhave—always already, for me—because I possess corresponding abilities. The seacan only reveal itself in the distance as a call to go swimming if I have the capacityto dive in and swim; the granite ledges can only appear to me as climbable if I havethe ability to keep my balance as I move across them, and so on. These trivialobservations allow us to draw attention to a vital point: Things can show themselvesto us with meaning, and the world present a certain side of things that calls uppossible paths of action, only for a ‘‘subject’’ endowed with specific capacities, andthese capacities, in turn, are of such a nature as to require a world to be able to bepossessed and exercised: They are ‘‘world-involving,’’ as Charles Taylor would say.They are capacities that can be possessed only by a subject who himself appears insitu, within a world, through his body: They do not belong to a subject simpliciter,but to a subject-in-the-world. And, consequently, the meaning with which thingspresent themselves to us beginning at the level of perception is a holisticcharacteristic of the system a ‘‘subject’’ forms with the world.

Here a second acceptation of the term ‘‘holism,’’ distinct from the one we havebeen using, comes to light. It is no longer just a question of asserting that everyexperience depends in its essence on the whole of the experience within which it hasits place and which alone can make it an experience. Now we must emphasize thatthe meaning with which things manifest themselves to us are offered to ourunderstanding as practical modalities of our ongoing transactions with them. Thismeaning is not conferred on them from the outside by a ‘‘subject’’ that would holdthe key to it, in virtue of an arbitrary and a-contextual assignment of meaning, but israther a characteristic of the system that a specific environment forms with a‘‘subject’’ endowed with capacities of several orders. Meaning is not the product ofa Sinngebung, nor, consequently, of a constitution of objectivity by successive

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strata, as Husserl thought. Nor is it something freely conferred on the world in virtueof projects carried out by the work of a subject. This meaning emerges at thejuncture of a world that takes on a certain look and a subject endowed with certainabilities, or more precisely, it emerges from the system they form together. It is arelational characteristic of an indecomposable totality.

The meaning that comes to light in things depends on the very manner in which asubject is able to approach them in light of his or her possible practices. Thesepossibilities, rooted in capacities, are of three orders: ‘‘natural’’ possibilities, invirtue of which a piece of fruit looks tasty, or the sea, inviting; ‘‘cultural’’possibilities; as when the same inlet may immediately make me think of Estaque ala Cezanne or Derain; and ‘‘existential’’ possibilities, of a particular and noteworthynature. This last requires our further attention.

Indeed, man is not only capable of acquiring new capacities as a result of hisexperiences or his conditioning within a group, as is the case with certain higheranimals. He is capable of acquiring capacities on his own. This means that he iscapable of forming his own projects, of relating to his existence itself sub speciepossibilitatis. In truth, man not only forms projects in the sense of plans conceivedin advance and capable of reaching goals determined by his ‘‘nature’’—for exampleall the vital requirements he shares with other animals. He sets ends for himself, asKant would say, or, putting it another way, he not only makes first order choices,deciding on some particular action, but second order choices as well, i.e., choicesinvolving the sort of existence that seems desirable to him, or the person he aspiresto be. He is capable of life projects that concern his idea of himself, and thus theentirety of his existence as such. For example, standing before an accessible oceanin the mid-day sun, I may or may not decide to go swimming, based on whetherI am in the mood, the amount of free time I have, and objective dimensions ofthe situation, such as whether or not swimming is allowed in that cove. But placedbefore that possibility, I can ask myself a different sort of question: Assuming I feellike going swimming and the circumstances lend themselves to it, should I or shouldI not go swimming? Is it desirable or not, with respect to the sort of person I aspireto be? Is lazing around in the sun all day worthy of me, or had I not better get towork? Is that the way I want to live? Is that what I want to do with my life? Thus,existential possibilities may by defined as possibilities that appear to me to becompatible with the sort of person I aspire to be, the way I understand myself, andthe way I view my own existence. Put more simply, something is possible in theexistential sense if it is in agreement with a life project, i.e., with an existentialproject. The intrinsic characteristic of existential possibilities is that with respect tothem we can never avoid the necessity of decision. To exist as a human being is toexist in such a way that our existence is an issue from which we cannot escape, sothat any refusal to decide in this case remains a kind of decision—in the form of arenunciation of all decision-making. For to remain in a state of indecision is still away of deciding about the type of individual we aspire to be. Human existence istherefore such as to require, in order for it to be the existence that it is, that we existit in the first person in deciding on the sort of existence that seems desirable for us.Human existence is such that it falls to us to choose it, and to project ourselves into

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it in order to give it an overall orientation in keeping with a fundamental project—because for a human being that is what it is to exist.

The world as it presents itself to us from the point of view of a phenomenology istherefore not just the totality of the possible in the sense of the perceptible and theexperienceable, but also what we can relate in the light of capacities of variousorders that belong to us as human beings, including the highest of them, whichcontrasts man with other animals: the capacity of deciding about one’s entireexistence as such. The world is the structured totality of possibilities that areafforded us in light of our practical capacities of different orders. Insofar ascomprehension is one of these practical capacities, the world is also a signifyingcontext, a horizon of meaning. As Heidegger writes, the world is ‘‘the totality of theessential intrinsic possibilities of Dasein.’’31 These possibilities are structuredand hierarchized in keeping with a means-end relation. Certain projects depend onothers, and are subordinate to them, but all ultimately depend on a general project ofexistence that defines me as such. The world, then, is definitely not a simple totalityof objects, facts or states of things that could be experienced and known; it is also,and no doubt first and foremost, a system of possibilities relative to capacities ofseveral orders in light of which all that can be presented to the ‘‘subject’’ takes on ameaning—a system of possibilities that are subordinated to that noteworthy capacitythe subject possesses of deciding by himself about his own existence.

Thus we have attained a concept of world such that it no longer makes sense tosay that it is unilaterally ‘‘configured’’ by a Dasein. Indeed, many possibilities thatcome to light for us in the world depend on our capacities, but they are assuredly notmade possible by them. For example, all that can present itself to us perceptuallydepends on possibilities of essence, and notably on the universal space–time a prioriwhich structures all experience: These possibilities of essence are obviously not(no more than are logical possibilities, as a matter of fact) ‘‘made possible’’ by us.If the world does indeed designate a universum of possibilities, these possibilitiesare certainly not all such that it would make sense to say of them that they are‘‘configured’’ by Dasein—nor, consequently, that Dasein is, as such, ‘‘the configurerof the world’’ (Weltbildend). On the contrary, we should insist on the fact that withthe exception of these noteworthy possibilities that only ‘‘exist’’ to the extent thatDasein has always already projected itself into them, and that I have called‘‘existential possibilities,’’ most of the possibilities are not configured by a‘‘subject’’ but offer themselves to it in the form of a situation it has not desired ordecided upon: They are opportunities that depend on the circumstances. Of coursethere are only opportunities for one who is capable of grasping them in the pursuitof goals, and—in the case of the human being—because he has given himself goalsin determining his entire existence as such. But it does not follow that thesepossibilities are made possible by him. Capacities and opportunities appear on thecontrary as strict correlatives.

We must replace the transcendental paradigm, which still haunts fundamentalontology, with a relational paradigm, in virtue of which all that is given to us by theworld, and the world itself, are only meaningful in reference to the capacities of

31 Heidegger (1984, p. 192); GA 26, 248–249.

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several orders of a ‘‘subject’’ that is itself in the world as a body, and that belongs tothe world by its very nature. If, consequently, we think of this mutual belongingnessin virtue of which we are only in the world to the extent that we belong to the world,and we only belong to it to the extent that we are in it—only then can we attempt tograsp the following critical point. The existential possibilities are not projected onceand for all by a ‘‘subject’’ without moorings in the past, without a history. Moreoriginary than the possibilization of the possible by the decrees of Dasein are thepossibilities that precede it and are born of founding events. Vulnerability to theevent, the passibility qua immeasurable exposure to what goes beyond our powers,to what ‘‘strikes us with powerlessness’’ in and through its very upsurge, thus appearmore originary than all self-possibilization. An event is not only what catches meunprepared and by surprise, what strips me of my expectations and takes the groundfrom beneath my feet at the moment I least expect it; it is first and foremost thatwhich wreaks havoc with my fundamental projects in light of which I understandmyself and my own existence, and hence my possibilities in the existential sense—configuring them from beginning to end. And since the possibilities that structurethe world are interrelated and form a system, since for us there are never anydetached possibilities, such upheavals of existence strike the possible as such at itsroot: They overturn the world as such and no longer allow us to understandourselves as ‘‘the same.’’ Of course an event first strikes certain possibilities andcircumstances, but in affecting specific possibilities, it falls back onto the possible asa totality; it reconfigures the world itself at its birth. Thus, for beings like ourselves,who are vulnerable to the event, the possible per se as a whole—the world—isalways suspended above the abyss of the event, always exposed to these criticaltransformations in which existence as such hangs in the balance, changing usthrough and through. The world hangs in the balance in the event; it has beenforever self-originating for us in inaugural events—beginning with the remarkableone of our birth. For this reason, the phenomenological analysis of the world arises,in one of its aspects at least, from what I have called an ‘‘evenementialhermeneutics.’’

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