Avoiding Heidegger

I should confess an avoidance to Heidegger that is particularly defensive in nature. I actually want to protect Husserl from Heidegger in a really irrational kind of way, which is besides the point from a philosophical perspective. Nonetheless, I do believe that reading Husserl and Freud together should provide an interesting perspective from which to interpret Heidegger. This is the unfortunate reading that you might have found here in this blog, unfortunate because it is oh so long and tedious and incredibly self-gratifying. For that, I apologize.

I began closely reading Being and Time today (where all my reading of it before has been admittedly sophomoric) and noted that Heidegger's take on facticity is particularly compelling. Recall that Husserl had argued in Ideas II that the psycho-physical subjectivity is grounded in the body by the faculty "I can," this faculty I understand as a leading thread to the pure Ego in all its transcendental numbness. Heidegger understands such an attempt as positioning a metaphysical entity in corporeality in a factical relationship to the world that leaves the fundamental relationship between the metaphysical entity and the world mysterious. Heidegger's facticity is remarkably more intimate, grounded in "taking care" that he believes is fundamentally apprehensive in nature but that also presupposes that every subject-object relation is fundamentally a taking-care that we cannot parse down to a pure Ego as the final theoretical absolute substantial subjectivity which transcends somehow our finitude. For Heidegger then the common ontological mistake is a kind of natural attitude that misplaces the task of ontology in privileging knowledge rather than making this facticity as a kind taking care of oneself within the world explicit in its phenomenality.

This is a fascinating idea, but perhaps we should be careful before we fully accept it as such. If we are to question facticity, make it "wonderful" phenomenologically, and then make this the essentially of Dasein, then we must be very careful explicating the narrative under which we construct this factical essential nature of Dasein. Where Heidegger is compelling I also find him to be unnerving, and I have the sense that in trying to lay hold of some anthropological essentially proves to be a risky business at the ontical level.

These are just brief thoughts that probably seem obfuscatory, or perhaps still sophomoric in nature. Let's just say I am worried that we might level at Heidegger a vague accusation of essentiality that we could level at Freud in his worst moments (phallic stage, anyone?) or Lacan when he priveleges a certain socio-symbolic law of the father? With Heidegger, admittedly, this accusation is aimed at what? Finitude? Being? I have no idea.