The Ontology of Being and Experience

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

- Part One. Man and His Culture in the Ontological/Cosmic Perspective. - Chapter Two. The Ontological / Cosmic Framework -

In this respect, it is helpful to refer to Sherrington's famous example [Sherrington 1947: 262] that sets out to explore what the "I" means when I move my hand. This "I-doing" cannot be a perception, but only awareness. He concludes that my awareness and myself are one: the "I-doing" is awareness of myself in the motor act. The "I" is therefore the self.

Sperry's new approach to consciousness also concerns the latter's relationship to the external world because it implies that the qualitative pattern properties of entities are as real and causally potent as the quantitative data, measurements and abstractions, which are properties of the entities' parts or elements. In consequence, values (qualia) and the multiple and differential richness of reality are recognized and preserved.⁸

The last view explaining the mind-body dichotomy in non-reductionist terms is linked to Niels Bohr's complementarity principle in quantum physics. Complementarity, in Bohr's sense, refers to the dual nature of micro-entities, which are both particles and waves, therefore, their precise measurement at the same point in time is not possible; thus, no incompatibility can arise between them. On this basis, Bohr thought to develop an analogy concerning the mind-body problem, explained as the complementarity of the mechanistic and conscious nature of the mind. Testing of the brain as a physical object manifesting physical processes would preclude the observation of its conscious character, and vice versa; the mind's two distinct aspects, as brain, a physical object and as a conscious entity endowed with a free will, cannot be simultaneously displayed.

The two separate levels of observation are, in these two modes of description, complementary.⁹

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

- Part One. Man and His Culture in the Ontological/Cosmic Perspective. - Chapter Two. The Ontological / Cosmic Framework -

order to get closer to the meaning of Being in general. Only Dasein's nature as Being-in-the-world is determined in an existential way; it cannot be considered as a subject matter, it can only be defined by being its own Being. The other beings are either entities Dasein encounters within-the-world, or such entities Dasein comes across within-the-world and whose nature it discovers in their specificity.

The difference between Being and beings is a pre-ontological phenomenon [Heidegger 1982: 319], that is, it is beyond our comprehension. In fact, this distinction, the ontological difference, is the reason why any ontological determination is a priori, the realization of a possibility. In consequence, any objectification or determination of being is a re-collection, Dasein's remembering of such beings [ibid. 324-326]. Karl Jaspers in his Philosophy of Existence, followed a similar line of thinking. For him, Being, which always recedes from us, is encompassing. It never becomes an object and always contains a paradox; whereas objective, determinate appearances are modes of the encompassing being. Existenz or Dasein is not only a self-being, or a determinate mode of the encompassing, but also transcends its own being through relating to the encompassing Being, -- perhaps not more than a distant remembrance [Jaspers 1971: 17-21].

For both Heidegger and Jaspers, the structure of transcendental Being encompasses nature, the living and inanimate worlds; in this sense, the universe is ontologically transcendent. Being gives sense to all beings. Only man, defined as Da-sein takes part simultaneously in the ontological world of Being and in the ontical, factual world. Dasein's transcendence is therefore evident in its consciousness, through which it distances itself from the world in which we live, the "worldhood" of the environment. The necessary individuation of Dasein is closely related to its transcendence, its uniquely proper perspective. Existence is therefore emergence, an emergence of Being from itself as Dasein [Heidegger 1985: 109]. This emergence into existence denotes a being aware of itself, possessing an awareness or consciousness as being.

It would be a mistake to relate Heidegger's characterization of Dasein's Being to the object-subject dichotomy. He explicitly says, "subject and object do not coincide with Dasein and the world" [Heidegger 1962: 87]; Dasein in his ontic existence is an object as an entity within-the-world. In addition, as concerned with itself, with its own Being and with Being as a whole, it is a transcendental subject belonging to the ontological existence. To consider the world as subjective means simply that it is the world of Dasein whose being is in the mode of being-in-the-world. This fundamental statement makes it evident that Heidegger circumvents the Cartesian turn in his ontology by putting aside the question of true being in the sense of certainty. As Hilary Lawson recently pointed out, the transcendental Being, Dasein's Being, in Heidegger's description, is entirely reflexive in nature [Lawson 1985: 32]; the reflexivity of understanding — the fore-structure in Heidegger's terminology — is thus expressed in the hermeneutical circle.

If Dasein understands itself most of the time in terms of its world, it is necessary to examine what meaning Heidegger gave to the designation "Others"? Beyond the subject-object dichotomy, Others stand for everything else than the I, for those against whom the I stands out. Those Being-there-too from whom one distinguishes oneself serve a purpose because from among them, one's Dasein emerges too. Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein; this is an existential characteristic of Dasein, its existence is essentially an existence for "the sake of Others." Self-knowledge is also grounded in the shared existence with fellow humans and is correlate to the understanding of Others. The existential unity with Others excludes all such everyday characteristic relationships such as needing the Others and empathy with Others (empathy comprehended as bridging the distance between two subjects). Dasein's sharing the existence of Others represents an authentic community; they represent part of its worldhood. The grasping of Others as worldhood is described by Heidegger as Dasein's being "circumspectively concerned" with Others in the world; in the case of human relations, between "fellow-Dasein" who all have their specific Being, the circumspective concern is transformed into "care." "Care" is a fundamental ingredient of Dasein's essence and it is manifest toward other Beings who are "themselves Dasein. These entities are not object of concern, but rather of solicitude" [Heidegger 1962: 167; italics in original]. Being-with, of course, excludes Being-alone [ibid. 156], and it automatically implies the understanding of Others, because knowing is a primordial, existential mode of Being. Solicitude and care towards another Dasein leads to self-knowledge and to the self-disclosure of the Other, -- toward mutual understanding.

In sum, Heidegger re-established the cosmic unity of nature in the form of universal Being and undertook to heal the dualism developed by the Cartesian and scientific philosophies, eliminating, at the same time, the mind-body problem. In his ontological analysis of the structure of Being he concentrated on man's contrast, the ontic means this everyday world in which we all live, what common sense takes as the world, in which we all locate ourselves at a point in history and in a particular geographical position.

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

- Part One. Man and His Culture in the Ontological/Cosmic Perspective. - Chapter Two. The Ontological / Cosmic Framework -

Being-in-the-world, Dasein, and accomplished, in his own way, the task assigned by Toulmin to postmodern science "to reinsert humanity into nature" [Toulmin 1982: 210].

(

) E

O

/C

Experience is used here in the deepest sense of the term, as the ontologically, culturally meaningful, and cumulative interaction of the encounters of man, and of generations of men, with the world, nature, and society. For this reason, experience constitutes the practical aspect of the ontological/cosmic framework in which human existence is encompassed; it involves human intentionality and responsibility embedded in the natural and societal contexts. Hodgson calls man's experiences mental events, which do not entirely reflect the external world [Hodgson 1991 193]; in fact, certain features of the latter never enter a given human experience. As each mental event is unique, it is impossible to predict them or to quantify mental events of different persons for measurement and comparison, because quantitative deterministic laws do not govern them.

Experience, in the Heideggerian perspective, is "a mode of the presence of Being." Experiences happen to beings who endure or suffer them; undergoing these experiences overcomes and transforms these beings as experiences are not of their own making [Heidegger 1970: 57]. However, in his comments on Hegel's concept of experience, Heidegger calls these experiences ordinary or mundane in contrast to the non-mundane or ontological experiences in which, in Hegel's terms, a "reversal of consciousness itself" happens.

This reversal means that while ordinary or everyday consciousness does not pay attention to anything but the given, practical aspects of a thing, in ontological experience, attention is turned to the "Being of beings,"

to the disclosure or appearance of Being which means other Dasein [Heidegger 1970: 125-127]. Thus, in the Heideggerian interpretation of Hegel's concept of experience, the latter looses its epistemological connotations; experience is no longer a particular mode of knowledge, it is a communicative act, as Habermas would say, a conversation of beings qua beings [ibid. 113-114]. This conception of experience truly is a Hegelian dialectical movement of the consciousness, based on the ontological difference; a journey from the pre-ontological toward ontological knowledge, as it represents Dasein's determinate act.

Our second source of the ontological/cosmic concept of experience is John Dewey's philosophy, although he sometimes shows a certain hesitation between the cosmic and the reductionist/monist worldviews. Dewey was the most explicit in respect to the cosmic perspective of human life based on experience in his Experience and Nature. For him, experience is the central phenomenon of the life of man, and experience is embedded in nature. Experience

recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality... Life denotes a function, a comprehensive activity, in which organism and environment are included... [Dewey 1958: 8-9].

The concept of the subjectivity of the human mind is only a necessary instrument to channel natural energies toward the ends of man. This leads to the isolation of scientific experimentation and knowledge from primary experience, setting up opposition between the two. As a result objects of selective preference are erected into exclusive realities. Dewey speaks of natural continuity in the life of the world and man. Yet, continuity, cognitive experience, has to originate within a non-cognitive sort, thus the intellectual or cognitive is secondary or derived as compared to the primary experience.

Dewey clearly emphasized the pervasiveness of Being when he states that all experience is an event, and every event is wholly immediate, self-sufficient, terminal and exclusive, proof of an unknowable existence.

This understanding of direct experience is linked to what Clifford Geertz called "experience-near" and

"experience-distant" concepts; experience-near concepts are spontaneous, fleeting, "un-self-conscious"

[Geertz 1983: 58] in which physical and mental are indissolubly bound together.

______________________________________________________________________________________

The primordial problem in Dewey's philosophy, perceived from this perspective, is therefore metaphysical or existential, not psychological or epistemological. Cause and effect are part of the same historical process.

Dualistic distinctions giving, for example, reality to atoms at the expense of mind and conscious experience are not distinctions standing for "kinds of reality," though they might be genuine because they are

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

- Part One. Man and His Culture in the Ontological/Cosmic Perspective. - Chapter Two. The Ontological / Cosmic Framework -

instrumental. In fact, everything is intertwined; joining events, as joining of parts of space or periods of time, reflects as much reality as their distinction from each other before the act of joining. Each process has its conditions, but the process, conditioned as it is, must lead to an end-event, a conscious experience and an actualization. Events have a temporal quality: direct, immediate, indefinable. This, however, does not influence the end-value of the experience of existence. Dewey juxtaposes this temporal quality of events and the temporal order discovered through reflection. Temporal order is a matter of cognition, whereas the temporal quality of events is an immediate trait of every occurrence, conscious or unconscious. Past, present, and future are entirely interlinked as "an integral part of the character or nature of present existence"

[ibid. 111].

In contradiction to Meadian behaviorism,¹² Dewey differentiates between direct meaning and cognitive, intellectual meaning. Direct meaning is experienced in the immediacy of an event or in the use of a tool, whereas cognitive meaning is a derived intellectual significance referring to or giving evidence of a future, potential consequence of an experience. Intellectual or cognitive meanings are, therefore, instrumental.

Dewey does not underestimate the importance of intellectual meanings because they affect the meaning of the world and result in existential change. Experience and meaning are interrelated in the immediateness of experience; meaning, act and attitude are undifferentiated. Experience, in the ontological perspective, defines meaning, but meaning does not define the reality experienced.

It therefore becomes clear that in Dewey's ontology dualism was eliminated. The distinction between individual and society or culture is maintained, but in an organic relationship, as the human world is in such a relationship with nature. The double character of the human individual is not represented by the mind/body problem, but in his "opacity of bias and preference" against his "plasticity and permeability of needs and likings" [ibid. 242]. The first of these tendencies induces him to isolation, discreteness, aloofness, solitude;

the other directs him toward relationships with Others, continuity in the societal, cultural, and historical framework, and security in the community. Therefore, Dewey speaks not of individuals with minds, but of individual minds. For him, the individual's mind is embedded in the community's culture and tradition, in its systems of beliefs, recognition and omission, acceptances and rejections, expectancies and disillusions.

Minds proceed with the appraisal of meanings which are transmitted from generation to generation [ibid. 216-219]. Although the individual is conditioned by his cultural environment, as his experiential framework is partially defined by his society and culture, he nevertheless remains the main actor in his encounter with both the natural and cultural environment. The self is the final instrument of man, "the tool of tools, the means in use of all means" [ibid. 246-247] for achieving its ends-in-view; consequently, man's experience is not solely culturally defined, but culturally defined because it is ontologically embedded in existence.

The ambivalent character of the individual and of human collectivities is rooted in nature. In Dewey's theory, nature is ambiguous as well, showing arbitrariness and intolerance, regularities and flexibility. This conjunction of "whimsical contingency and lawful uniformity" in the natural world makes these properties unavoidable, ineradicable in the human world [ibid. 242]. Dewey's analysis of mind and consciousness, perception and knowledge is consequently permeated by incertitude relative to the natural world and to the human being; both show contingent traits and, in comparison to cognitive expectations, intermittent anomalies.

For Gadamer, experience is related "teleologically to the truth that is derived from it" [All of the following citations on Gadamer's concept of experience are from Gadamer 1985: 310-325]. He affirms the character of process of every experience:

(1) An essential negativity: the experience-process is not an "unbroken development of typical universals,"

but is constituted by "continually false generalizations being refuted by experience." The consequence of this process is then the refutation of what was hitherto regarded as typical. In language, the difference is made between "experience, which fits in with our own expectations" and the experience we simply have. The latter is experience in the real sense, always negative, correcting the preceding experience which provided a non-adequate perspective.

12For George Herbert Mead, the objective world and our world of experience are separate, and for Mead this dividing line is bridged by meanings the mind gives to objects of the physical world in accordance with the characteristics these objects acquire for humans in the course of experience. External and internal experiences are distinguished by the fact that the latter are constituted by meanings given to physical objects by the mind. (Mead, [1934]: 131, note 35).

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

- Part One. Man and His Culture in the Ontological/Cosmic Perspective. - Chapter Two. The Ontological / Cosmic Framework -

(2) A dialectical nature: dialectic leads not to definitive knowledge but to "an openness to further experiences." It represents a radically undogmatic attitude and a readiness to learn from new experiences.

(3) A dimension of human finitude: experience inevitably involving many disappointments and the appropriation of new experiences through successive negative instances, revealing in man's historical nature an essential complement to knowledge. This insight is not knowledge, but an escape from deception which held man captive and, therefore, is also part of man's nature forged through experience. Thus, experience is experience of the human finitude; real experience is the one in which man becomes aware of his finiteness.

The experience of finitude means that man realizes he is not master of time, that there is no certainty and that all dogmatism reaches an absolute barrier "thus true experience is that of one's own historicality."

The concept of "emergence," an important feature of experience as the basis of existence, was recently revived by Joseph Margolis and constitutes the bridge between ontological Being and ontic realities. Its locus is experience as conceptualized by Heidegger and Dewey, but in a much sharper focus. In Margolis' words

By 'emergence' is meant the existence, the coming into existence, of phenomena that are not describable or able to be explained in terms restricted to physicalist (or materialist) categories [Margolis 1990: 175].

The ontological "emerges" into the ontical at the moment of experience. Experience is a symbiosis, for Margolis, of the perceived and the percipient, of the real and the known, of the indissolubly intertwined realist and idealist aspects of human existence. In experience "the ascribability of both physical and non-physical properties to the same particular things" [ibid. 171] becomes a fact, because experience is intertvowen with intentionality in human nature. For this reason, experience does not fall under nomological imperatives, and it is entirely contextual. Cultural phenomena, which are intentional and reflexive, emerge as well in individual and collective experience, a formulation that ensures that the physical or natural characteristics and the intrinsic, intentional qualities are congruent.

But precisely this emergent nature of experience, its unforeseeable character due to intentionality, its sometimes revolutionary irruption on the scene of social life as an exceptional event, justifies Giddens' concept of the sequestration of experience in modernity and, perhaps even more, in post-modernity. He means by this phenomenon that society intends to "institutionally exclude" from social life the unavoidable, fundamental issues of human existence, the ever-present or recently emerged existential predicaments, in order to safeguard the general feeling of ontological security purchased at the price of day-to-day activities [Giddens 1991: 155-156]. The sequestration of experience therefore is a principal element in the destruction of the ontological/cosmic framework of life in modernity and post-modernity.

The point of departure for the present inquiry thus consists in the ontological/cosmic perspective, a holistic framework of understanding the universe. Nature in a cosmic perspective not only is the physical world, the totality of physical, chemical, biological and neurological processes, but the entire domain of the mental, the totality of the psychological, emotive, cognitive phenomena. Nature represents a holistic concept against all dualism and monism; it is not a mystical or mythological concept but coherent with the evolutionary character of culture spelled out in the preceding pages. Culture is part of nature.

______________________________________________________________________________________

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

- Part One. Man and His Culture in the Ontological/Cosmic Perspective. - Chapter Three. The Uniqueness of Human Nature -

CHAPTER THREE

THE UNIQUENESS OF HUMAN NATURE

In the evolutionary process, the human species occupies a particular place. This special status of man in the universe is the outcome of his multilinear biological evolution interacting with the cultural process, of which man is the only creator and agent. To understand man's cultural role, one must carry out an examination of the uniqueness of human nature with reference to its five fundamental aspects: the self-awareness and transcendence of the human self; its intentionality; the integrative function of its mind; the capacity of human nature for symbolic expression and communication; and the linkage between man, his community and culture or, in other words, the interaction between culture and society. This means, of course, that those from the two elements of the Strawsonian concept of a human person — predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics — only the first category of characteristics apply here. The physical description is sufficiently explicable in terms of the biological and neurological sciences. Therefore, the following considerations would fall into the domain of the meta-physical. Something beyond the physical stands, therefore, as a fact, an undeniable, sui generis reality: man, with all his capabilities and possibilities.