on the influence of an epistemological framework in fundamental morality

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Marionettes and the Strings of the World:

On the Influence of an Epistemological Framework in Fundamental Morality

A minor thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Master of Arts

By

Philip Thomas Reynor

National University of Ireland

49 Merrion Square

Dublin 2

UCD School of Philosophy

College of Human Sciences

Master of Arts in Philosophy

October 2008

School of Philosophy

Head of School: Dr Brian O’Connor

Supervisor: Prof Dermot Moran

External Examiner: Dr Simon Glendinning



Contents

Introduction 4

I

§ 1. The Normative Content of the Framework 6

§ 2. The Framework Schism of Subject and “World” 9

§ 3. Preliminary Discussions of the Topics Relevant to the Inquiry 11

§ 3.1. Illustration of the Archaic Framework Infiltration of Moral Science 12

§ 3.2. Preliminary Discussion of Background Immersion 15

§ 3.3. The Epistemological Frameworks Atomisation of the Background 17

II

§ 4. The Husserlian Picture and the ‘Crisis’ of the Sciences 19

§ 4.1. Husserl on the “Crisis” 20

§ 4.2. Husserl on the Transcendental Ego 23

§ 5. Husserlian Intentionality and Background 26



III

§ 6. Fundamental Ontology and Morality 30

§ 6.1. Being-in a Background Understanding 31

§ 7. Solicitation as the Potentiality for Being-Moral 34

§ 8. Worldliness as Fundamental Intentionality 38

§ 9. The Normative Functionality of Solicitation as the

Foundation of Morality 41

§ 9.1. An Alternative Understanding of Moral Normativity 43

Conclusion 46

Bibliography 49



4

Introduction

The framework of moral science is structured in terms of ‘faculties’ and concepts of

λόγος , dialectic, reason, logic, ‘intuition’, desires, maxims, norms, motives, compassion,

empathy and so on. Yet how is this framework understanding possible and on what is it

founded? Over the course of our historicality the contents of this framework have beendisclosed and discovered, elements have been concealed and seemingly discarded while

others have been covered-up. Confronted with this tangled mess of moral briars one

might assume the task of analysis with the aim of unveiling the fundamental moral

concept or of delineating explicitly the ‘faculty of morality in man’. Nevertheless, is

discovering a ‘moral faculty in man’ or a ‘true’ moral concept propitious at all? Is it even

possible? Alternatively, could this perennial task of investigating and defining what is

supposedly articulate and determinable in order to found moral science be the result of an

epistemological framework understanding which has insidiously maligned the very

thinking that aims at the founding itself? An epistemological framework that structures

our thinking on these matters in terms of an inner entity over against an outer one. What

if the foundations ran beneath our conceptual morality, our norms and laws, beneath

reflection and articulation and the schismatic structure of the framework and emerged as

nothing less then a solicitation by the world itself?



5

If this were the case, then any investigation of our moral foundations would

exclude requirements to interrogate the ‘truth’ of any moral concept as such, to examine

the viability of a norm, or to test the logic of any moral claim whatsoever and thus you

will find none of this here. There will be no search for the definitions of concepts, we will

not strive to uncover the archaeology of a ‘faculty of morality’ in man and when these

themes are encountered they will merely serve as secondary, as a searchlight to illuminate

the framework in an endeavour to overcome it. What we are investigating is not moral

science as such but the foundations on which it stands, the bedrock of inexplicit

background understanding and prereflective affordances that are the undisclosedpotentiality for a moral-being with all its conceptual and normative complexity, its good

and evil, its heroes and its villains.

The first task of this paper is thus to expose the framework which conceals and

deforms our grasp of the foundations of morality through its habitation of our holistic

background understanding. In the course of this paper we hope to demonstrate the

functional nature of this framework as a dualiser; something which penetrates our

understanding, subtly urging bifurcations of the subject matter of any investigation into

Cartesian oppositions such mind and world, subject and object, appearance and reality.

We will disclose the holistic nature of our involved being-in-the-world, our worldliness,

as the fundamentum of moral science and thus oppose those who proliferate the

framework at this level of explication. For those who place a representational or mental

content at the fundamentum of explication, those who see concepts as the fundamental

motivation for moral action, those who posit a ‘faculty’ of morality are those who serve

only to propagate the framework and conceal our actual fundamental moral experience.



6

I

§ 1. The Normative Content of the Framework

The positing of moral norms which are grounded within a framework understanding –

that is to say grounded in some form of directed mental state such as ‘intuition’, desire,belief, made possible through a representational content i.e. what the mental state is

directed at, what it is about – can be demonstrated from the outset. Take, for example, the

following passage which appears in Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality and

although the purpose of this passage for Schopenhauer was comparative (in the end he

simply offers his own alternative for consideration), it illustrates the normative and

conceptual content of the framework through a variety of formulations. Schopenhauer is

contemplating the reasons (given by various philosophers) as to why a young man, who

had set out to murder a love rival, being beyond suspicion and detection, may have

desisted in his plot after an “inward struggle”.

He may have been prevented through religious reasons, such as the will of God, the

retribution to come, the day of judgement and so on. Or he may say: ‘I consider that the

maxim for my proceeding in this case would not have been calculated to give a

universally valid rule for all possible rational beings, since I should have treated my rival



7

only as a means and not at the same time as an end.’ 1 Or he may say with Fichte: ‘Every

human life is a means to the realisation of the moral law; hence I cannot, without being

indifferent to that realisation, destroy one who is destined to contribute to it’ (Moral

Philosophy, page 373)… Or he may say in accordance with Wallaston: ‘I considered that

this action would be the expression of a false proposition.’ Or like Hutcheson he might

say: ‘The moral sense whose feelings, like those of any other, are incapable of further

explanation, prevailed on me not to do it.’ Or Like Adam Smith: ‘I foresaw that my

action would not excite any sympathy at all for me in those who witnessed it.’ Or in the

words of Christian Wolff: ‘I recognised that I should thus work against my own

perfection and not help that of another.’ Or he may use the words of Spinoza: Homini

nihil utilius homine: ergo hominem interimere noliu .2 In short he may say what he

likes…Accordingly where does the foundation of morality lie? 3

This passage demonstrates the operation of the framework at a foundational level within

the inquiries of Schopenhauer and his contemporaries. The concepts and norms

forwarded here are effectively ways in and out of morality; they constitute the conceptual

and normative apparatus of moral science. They are the ‘tools’ of the moral trade.

Nevertheless, how these ‘tools’ are possible, how their meaning is discovered is the

pressing question, concealed all too often by a framework which, through appeals to

maxims and ‘faculties’ or to ‘intuition’, seeks to found morality in the “inner man”

through the content of his consciousness and, as we can see above, this framework is the

breeding ground for a vast progeny of incongruity.

[1 Kant, I. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals . Academy 429. A.S.][2 ‘To man nothing is more useful then man; I was therefore unwilling to kill the man.’ Ethics, prop. 18,school. Tr.]3 Schopenhauer, A. On the Basis of Morality . p. 168-170.



8

One of the fascinating features of the framework is that it continues to operate

under various guises today. Although idealist or rationalist dualisms are no longer in

vogue, they carry on influencing thought and understanding through the framework they

established. If we take Mark Hauser’s thesis from his work, Moral Minds , “I argue,” he

tells us, “that our moral faculty is equipped with a universal moral grammar , a toolkit for

building specific moral systems.” 4 The foundations of morality are understood by Hauser

as the biological endowment of a universal moral grammar, which resides in a ‘moral

faculty’. Now, aside from the inherent overwhelming ambiguity of our social and cultural

moral norms, which Hauser believes are “acquired” by this ‘faculty’, the sobering issuehere is the ontological one. Hauser’s model relies on a subject/predicate ontology, that is,

an ontology that is theoretically based on a representationalist inner/outer model. This

model posits moral subject/agent/mind/’faculty’ “acquiring” its morality from a socio-

cultural “world” (as in a totality of moral propositions) as its two fundamental isolated

entities and can thus be referred to, following Charles Taylor, as an inner/outer (I/O)

framework. 5 Moreover, even though the bifurcation is not as explicit today,

‘representations’ of some description (beliefs, predicates, properties) are still operating

here as the mediator for our knowledge of the ‘outside’. One of the main obstacles in

such an ontology is its inability to explain adequately the holistic meaningfulness of these

representations. And once we understand that a norm is only meaningful within a holistic

context, then the claim that a norm in abstractio , “acquired” by a ‘moral faculty’,

captures its functional contextual complexity appears specious.

4 Hauser, M. D. Moral Minds . p.xvi. [The first italics are my own, the second are the author’s].5 See: Taylor, C. ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture’ in The Cambridge Companion to

Merleau-Ponty . p. 26-48.



9

Having grown our moral limb, that is, “acquired our cultures specific moral

norms” 6, how are we supposed to make a moral judgement? If one takes our moral

understanding to consist of ‘units’ of moral syntax, the more ‘units’ you attribute to any

particular moral judgement the more elaborate an explanation will be required in order to

get the relevant ‘units’ to come to bear on that particular act of judging. And the simple

fact, as illustrated by Schopenhauer, is that there are countless possibilities within the

framework and no solid foundation on which to base a significance criteria; any one

‘unit’ of moral syntax could be relevant to any other. Is it even theoretically possible to

get the structure of an entire moral framework, which contains systems of beliefs, desires,reasons and norms – in other words a “world picture” – to bear on any single occasion of

moral judgement? To put this another way, if the ‘moral faculty’ represents the

“acquisition” of the current state of social and cultural morality as an amalgam of ‘units’

of moral syntax and if something within that current state were to alter in some way, the

young man murdering his love rival for example, how does the universal moral grammar

determine which ‘units’ of moral syntax remain the same and which are to be altered?

The burden of explanation here falls to those who work within this framework, a

framework whose contents are manifest as a schism of subject and “world” resonating

down through the bedrock of our epistemological tradition.

§ 2. The Framework Schism of Subject and “World”

The res cogitans and its variants, given their dependence on inner representations

of an outer “world”, are unsuitable for the purposes of our investigation. Any

6 Hauser, M. D. Moral Minds . p.xvi.



10

fundamental presuppositions of an theoretically isolable subject/agent/mind/’faculty’ are

intricately bound to the I/O frameworks various distortions of fundamental morality, as

we will see, this epistemological picture covers-up the potentiality for being-moral with

this fundamental ontological schism of subject and “world”. The remainder of this schism

is in each case the problem of how we reunite these factions. However, that which shows

a certain priority as the locus of our framework understanding of morality cannot be

phenomenologically disclosed as isolated, rather, it must be understood as an entity that is

always already fore-has an understanding of morality ; as an entity which is involved and

immersed in a world, rather then isolated from it. The entity, which will show its priorityat the level of fundamental disclosure, is not an isolated subject. In contrast, it is an entity

whose morality is fundamentally a worldliness, a potentiality for being, which is not in

itself explicit or articulate. The entity required is Heidegger’s Dasein and “[a]ccordingly

those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-

hand of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each

case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that.” 7 In presenting a being that in its

being has the potentiality for morality we take a step outside the I/O framework. Since the

potentiality for Dasein’s being-moral is not a property of an isolated cogito but a way for

Dasein to be , we are beginning with that unity which is so problematic for those

spellbound by the I/O picture. Our interrogation of morals will be tackled ontologically

and phenomenologically and we shall take as the locus of our interrogation, not the being

of a res cogitans , but the being of the Dasein.

7 Heidegger, M. Being and Time . p.67.



11

§ 3. Preliminary Discussions of the Topics Relevant to the Inquiry

The themes of our inquiry have been established in a preliminary fashion and we now

turn our attention to the inquiry itself. In every inquiry there is something which is

inquired about and in the case of this particular inquiry that something is fundamental

morality. What will be interrogated in this inquiry, in order to disclose and uncover that

which is inquired about, is Dasein’s being-in-the-world, worldliness, and background

understanding, which all amount to an originary transcendence in which fundamental

morality is disclosed as a potentiality for being. The preliminary task is thus to launch aninvestigation into the structure of Dasein’s worldliness and the nature of this background

of intelligibility. If this task is set aside or ignored the inquirer allows the I/O framework

to conceal fundamental morality by subtly dictating the approach and the questioning and

thus the inquiry begins in medias res with those concepts, norms and ‘faculties’ that

require founding themselves. Before any leap into these central topics, however, we must

heed our caveat , so primarily, in order to escape the framework, we need to describe and

analyse its historical conception. This description serves the dual purpose of further

illustrating the problems which the framework instantiated from its inception, while

providing supplementary illumination as to the nature of the frame in another of its

various guises. From this vista, we can begin our discussion proper of the themes central

to this inquiry.



12

§ 3.1. Illustration of the Archaic Framework Infiltration of Moral Science

In order to illuminate the archaic framework infiltration of morality and the

problematic nature of this I/O framework we can turn our attention to Plato’s attempts, in

his early dialogues, to define and explain moral concepts. The question he essentially

asks in his early dialogues is “What is ‘T’?”, where ‘T’ is (generally) a moral concept

such as justice, courage or virtue. These Platonic attempts at definition led P. T. Geach to

raise the accusation, following Wittgenstein, of Socratic fallacy. 8 So what is this Socratic

fallacy? The supposition, according to Geach, that the definition of a concept (‘T’) is

needed in an appeal to individual examples. Moreover, it is warranted to point to anexample (of ‘T’) only by appeal to a correct definition of the concept (of ‘T’), implying

that it is logically impossible to search for the definitions of moral concepts . As a search

for a definition of a concept must appeal, in a way that is recognised as being needed, to

examples (of 'T’); but, it is possible to recognise the appeal to examples as being needed

only by appealing to the definition itself. This, however, implies that it is a condition for

the possibility of searching for a definition that one has already found it – the search is

thus logically impossible, according to Geach.

Figuring on Plato’s background understanding were the moral concepts and

norms of his age. However, he came to realise that these concepts, while being used

freely in everyday talk, were not taken thematically and thus were not understood

rigorously. As a result, he sought to define them and this search for definitions is possibly

one of the earliest moral steps into the I/O framework. It becomes clear from Geach’s

accusations that the trouble lies in the relation between the concept ‘T’, take virtue, and

ostensible examples of ‘T’, take the virtuous individual. It appears that nobody can know

8 Geach, P. T. ‘Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Commentary’. Monist 50: 369-382 (1966).



13

anything about virtues or a virtuous individual, or that a virtuous individual is indeed

truly virtuous, unless they can provide a definition of virtue. The consequences of this are

twofold; firstly, in many cases it seems that we apparently know a ‘T’ when in fact we do

not and, secondly, it is impossible to test a definition of ‘T’ against known examples of

‘T’.

Plato is working here within a representationalist framework understanding. This

is evident if we look briefly at Plato’s discovery of the “forms”, είδος , where our

knowledge of ‘T’ is in effect a representation of an ideal ‘T’. A statement regarding ‘T’ is

true or false in virtue of what Plato terms ‘reality’. One of Plato’s main presuppositions isthat the definition of ‘T’ which is sought is not true based on the socio-cultural domain in

which it operates, rather it is true in an absolute sense. Thus, Plato posits ‘reality’ as that

which the definition he seeks is true in light of. So, seeking a definition of ‘T’ is

effectively seeking knowledge of a‘reality’ that is timeless and immutable – the ideal

“form” of ‘T’.

Wittgenstein, whose lectures Geach attended, offers us a thread, which may lead

us out of this labyrinth. In the Philosophical Investigations , he states that “Ein Bild hielt

uns gefangen” 9 and this phrase underlies succinctly the above problems. In this case, the

picture holding the philosopher captive is the representationalist framework, an

epistemological picture that is still operating subtly today. When we utilise the basic

concepts of morality as the fundamental moral entities and inquire into their individual

existence, είδος , we fail to account for the holistic referential structure of Dasein’s

background understanding. We cover up the fact that the philosopher is immersed in a

9 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations . §115. [‘A picture held us captive’]. From: Carmen, T andHansen, B. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty . p.26.



14

world and that this immersion constitutes a general contextual non-explicit understanding

of that world. Plato not only severs morality from the originary transcendence of Dasein,

rendering the concepts separable individual entities, but he places them on high requiring

a specific kind of access to them, λόγος . In the context of the Socratic fallacy, we can

interpret Wittgenstein’s above remark as his recognition of the perpetuation of a Platonic

preconceptual representational framework and its habitation of our background

understanding, to the extent that it has become “obvious, unchallengeable, the necessary

irreplaceable context for all our thinking about these matters…In this way it worked

insidiously and powerfully”.10

In other words, the representationalism that begins inPlato’s early dialogues is still deeply pervasive and subtly influential in our thinking. This

picture began with Plato and framed his questioning and reasoning on matters of morality

and because of the nature of a framework understanding it was rarely identified or heeded

explicitly or thematically.

The result of working within this framework was, for Plato, that the answers he

was searching for were rendered inexpressible by his reasoning regarding moral entities;

as were his asking of the questions through which he hoped to express those answers.

Wittgenstein may have had this realisation himself when he noted “Das Unaussprechbare

(das, was mir geheimnisvoll erscheint und ich nicht auszusprechen vermag) gibt

veilleicht den Hintergrund, auf dem das, was ich aussprechen konnte, Bedeutung

bekommt.” 11 The difficulty for Plato, if he had attempted an elucidation of this

background would have been an inability to make it explicit or articulate it within his

10 Carmen, T and Hansen, B. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty . p.28.11 Wittgenstein, L. Culture and Value . Trans: Winch, P. Chicago University Press (1984). p.16. [‘Perhapswhat is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against whichwhatever I could express has its meaning’.]



15

framework – it could never be an ideal form. The background against which expressions

have their meaning cannot be formulated into a ‘T’, it is not a separable element, and yet

it was this background that enabled Plato to pose the question “What is ‘T’?” in the first

instant. These considerations lead to the task of describing our immersion in the world,

our worldliness, as a step towards uncovering Dasein’s habitation of a background

understanding.

§ 3.2. Preliminary Discussion of Background Immersion

Part of our task is coming to terms with the framework understanding, which aswe have seen, allots some role, in one sense or another, to representations and the schism

of subject and “world”. We have posited Dasein’s background as the holistic ground for

our founded understanding of moral sense and meaning. This background environmental

understanding is illustrated quite elegantly by Merleau-Ponty when he says:

[I]t is the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance. The

background of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and its

aim stand out, the zone of not being in front of which precise beings, figures and points

can come to light. 12

Merleau-Ponty’s meaning here is quite clear: in order for what is fore-grounded to

assume significance, a sense or a meaning, it must do so against a background, which he

likens to a “reserve of vague power”. As the locus of this background understanding we

have taken Dasein (being-there) and it is now time we unpacked the immersion of the

12 Merleau-Ponty; Phenomenology of Perception ; p. 115.



16

‘being’ in the ‘there’ that it inhabits. This will afford us a preliminary description of our

worldliness and throw some further phenomenological doubt on the place of the res

cogitans as a fundamentum. The where of the ‘there’ is the world, a hub of shared social,

cultural and moral practices; it is a world in which the ‘being’ of the Dasein is absorbed.

As an existentiale , ‘Being-[amidst]’ the world never means anything like the

Being-present-at-hand-together of Things that occur. There is no such thing as the ‘side-

by-side-ness’ of an entity called ‘Dasein’ with another entity called ‘world’. 13

In The Transcendence of the Ego, Jean-Paul Sartre also discloses this immersion, the

being-amidst of Dasein in a world – rather then seeing an ‘I’ alongside a “world” – in his

description of the experience of chasing after a streetcar. In running after the streetcar, ‘I’

am no longer an issue, ‘I’ am so immersed or involved in the catching-the-streetcar that

there is no longer an ‘I’ reflecting on the experience. The experience is prereflective.

What is meant by this ‘ego-less’ experience is that “I am immersed in a world of objects;

they constitute the unity of my [worldliness]…they present themselves with qualities that

attract or repel – but I have disappeared I am nothing.” 14 Now, having caught the tram

one can decide to look back upon the chase and in reflecting on the experience the

possibility of an ‘I’ placed by the reflection as the locus of the experience emerges – “I

was chasing the streetcar” – this however is not a part of the actual experience of the

chase itself. Sartre takes simple everyday experiences like chasing a streetcar, looking at

the time or gazing at a portrait and describes those experiences as they are prima facie

13 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p. 81.14 Cumming, R. D. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre . p. 53-54. [My italics]. I have italicised the aboveparts because they will be crucial in the discussion of the phenomenological normativity, which is itself central to our theory of fundamental morality.



17

without attributing to them anything that is not present in the experience. The same

immersed transparent experience holds true for a myriad of performances that we take

part in every day of our lives – walking through doors, reading a book, turning on a light;

the list is endless. As Heidegger notes, “‘Being-[amidst]’ the world in the sense of being

absorbed in the world…is an existentiale [a mode of being of Dasein] founded upon

Being-in.” 15

§ 3.3. The Epistemological Frameworks Atomisation of the Background

In coming to grips or understanding or analysing these experiences we areconstantly adding in aspects that do not belong, expanding or atomising the experience.

An example of this can be seen at the beginning of George Berkeley’s Essay Towards a

New Theory of Vision . Guided malignantly by the representationalist framework, he sets

out the theme of his inquiry, “…to consider the difference there is betwixt the ideas of

sight and touch, and whether there be any idea common to both senses.” 16 To a remark

such as this one, the phenomenologist might reply, “The object which presents itself to

the gaze or the touch arouses a certain motor intention which aims not at the movement

of one’s own body, but at the thing itself from which they are, as it were, suspended .”17

Thus, in reaching to open a door the hand is already in ‘communication’ with the

doorknob, as is my body in chasing-the-streetcar. Describing the experience is not a

matter of presupposition; we do not, like Berkeley, suppose the atomic nature of the

15 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p.80.16 Berkeley, G. An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision . § 1.17 Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception . p.370. [My italics]. Again we see that tensionsinherent in the experience are evident for Merlau-Ponty.



18

senses and then raise the problem of how to glue them back together, just as we do not

presuppose the schism of subject and “world”.

The phenomenological recognition of the experience of immersion can guide us in

describing the structure of our worldliness and we will come to see these experiences as

marking out the structure of our fundamental potentiality for morality. What we must

take out of all this is that we are fundamentally immersed in the world rather then

separate from it, and as such our understanding of that world, our worldliness, our ability

to get around and deal with our environment, is embedded in the world which we inhabit

as a background intelligibility. Our fundamental epistemological relation to the world isnot explicit, is not an act of consciousness giving meaning to a representation of a

“world”, it is not knowledge of a manifold of isolated entities, propositions or properties,

but the habitation of a world that is always already meaningful, which affords the

potentiality for being-moral through tensions which attract or repel. Unlike Plato’s

search for definitions or Berkeley’s atomisation of our holistic experience into ‘units’ of

sense, unlike enlightenment appeals to reason, to ‘intuition’, to linguistics, to logic all of

which harbour an inner/outer framework; our epistemology posits a figure which has

sense, meaning and significance only against a background understanding which is

embedded in the world itself. We posit an epistemological structure that is fundamentally

prereflective and preconceptual, an understanding that is the habitation of this meaningful

world.



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II

§ 4. The Husserlian Picture and the ‘Crisis’ of the Sciences

An appropriate place to begin our discussion proper is Husserl’s attempts to relate our

scientific understanding back to the structures of what he termed the Lebenswelt (life-world) in his The Crisis of the European Sciences . Through our discussion of the

Husserlian picture, we hope to bring out the importance of intentionality in fundamental

morality. Not only will Husserl’s epistemology inform our thesis, but it will also aid us in

our attempts to avoid the representationalist I/O picture as it operates in intentionality,

which will become a focus for debate. On this front however, we will tend towards a

Heideggerian formulation of intentionality for reasons that will become evident below.

Our discussion so far speaks in favour of practical lived experience and against

theoretical or conceptual forms of disinterested contemplation as we intend to disclose

the foundations of morality not in reflection and contemplation but in our immersion in

the world, our worldliness, and our prereflective, preconceptual dealings in the world.

Nevertheless, simply switching the focus from theoretical to practical forms of lived

experience is not enough to eradicate framework enchantment. A far more radical

rethinking of what is most basic is required to disclose the nature of fundamental morality

and dissolve representationalist epistemologies as a fundamentum. To do this Dasein’s



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originary transcendence, the fundamental mode of Heideggerian intentionality that

underlies both practical and theoretical forms of intentionality, is required. First,

however, we must introduce traditional intentionality and this can be achieved,

appropriately enough, through a brief, and thus necessarily distorted, examination of

Husserl’s work on the 'crisis' in the foundation of the sciences.

§ 4.1. Husserl on the “Crisis”

Discussion is initiated on the “crisis” as it addresses the concealment of

immediate modes of lived “actual” experience through an understanding of these modesof being in terms of a “world” of objects. Furthermore, the way in which non-theoretical

“actual” experience and practice – for Husserl the Lebenswelt 18 – constitute the

foundation of a scientific, theoretical, disinterested attiude concern us greatly.

In The Crisis of the European Sciences, one of the most important questions posed by

Husserl is how does science (for our purposes moral science) with its guiding norm of

‘objective truth’ emerge from the Lebenswelt ? To put this another way, how do we relate

our incredible feats of scientific undertstanding back to the structures of our non-

theoretical lived modes of experience (or being) and how is this relation constituted?

What we are talking about here is the question of theoretical forms of consciousness

emerging from non-theoretical lived forms and practices. Husserl believed that science

had concealed the Lebenswelt , the foundations of the scientific attitude itself, with a

rational understanding of the “world” as a totality of ‘brute facts’ or objects.

18 The first formulation of the Lebenswelt appeared in Husserl’s Idea’s I (1913) as the Erfahrungswelt orthe ‘world of experience’ but he did not take a thematic approach to the concept until The Crisis of the

European Sciences (1936). See: Moran, D. Introduction to Phenomenology. p. 181.



21

The “crisis”…[is] distinguishable as the apparent failure of rationalism . The reason for

the failure of a rational culture, however, as we said, lies not in the essence of rationality

itself but solely in its being rendered superficial, in its entanglement in “naturalism” and

“objectivism”. 19

We have seen this overbearing rationalization at work in Plato, Berkeley, Schopenhauer

and his contemporaries, continuing on up into the modern day as the analysis of moral

entities (norms, concepts and ‘faculties’) as representations of ‘brute facts’ of nature thus

propigating the schism of subject and “world”. From Galileo onwards, according to

Husserl, we have been implementing this universal rationality as a goal in our scientific

practices. The norm of ‘objective truth’ has become entirely pervasive as a method of

explanation, concealing disclosiveness as a mode of unveiling the structures of the

Lebenswelt .

Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing that the world, the

physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence

in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognise as true only what is objectively

established in this fashion… 20

The problem then, is how do these ‘brute facts’ of nature gain meaning and what has

become “questionable” for Husserl is the “the whole manner in which [science] has set its

19 Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences . p.299.20 Ibid. p. 6-7. The quote continues “…and if history has nothing more to teach us then that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolvethemselves like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever shall be so, that again and again reason mustturn into nonsense and well-being into misery? Can we console ourselves with that?”



22

task and developed a methodology for it”. 21 In order to resolve the “crisis” we must relate

our scientific understanding back to the structures of the Lebenswelt , back to Dasein’s

worldliness. We are thus far in agreement with Husserl on the notion of the “crisis”

itself, a “crisis” which we attributing to the moral sciences in general and which we

believe has risen from an epistemological picture initiated by Plato. However, because

the relation that exists between science and Lebenswelt is “constituted” and that we can

unravel this “constitution”, according to Husserl, by understanding how meaning emerges

in acts of consciousness , we must at least suspect Husserl’s thinking of an infiltration by

the I/O framework.In our preliminary discussions above, we described our immersion in the world,

an immersion that was explicated in terms of a background understanding, which

attributes meaning to an figure embedded within a whole. This meaning is not the

conscious or mental attribution of function predicates to ‘brute facts’ but is “a locus of

shared understanding organised by social practice.” 22 Our embedded knowledge of a

situation is a palette of knowledge, a “multi-media” event, which is predominantly not

enunciated or articulated. Thus, the background is one of a meaningful environment or

world and this environment is the whole within which meaning is embedded; my chase

for the streetcar, gazing at an apple tree, would be nonsensical without it. But Husserl’s

theory of meaning, which has as its core acts of consciousness, grates against the

phenomenology of “actual” experience, in which, no transcendental ego or cogito , can be

discovered, no overt acts of consciousness. Conflictingly, meaning is embedded in a

holistic background where the foregrounded figure always already fore-has a sense . The

21 Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences . p. 3.22 Carmen, T and Hansen, M., eds. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty . p.31.



23

addition of acts of consciousness into the experience, to give -meaning to the ‘brute facts’

of a “world”, appears logically unnecessary simply because there is no need to give -

meaning or for meaning to emerge if that which is to emerge is already part of the fore-

structure of the experience or if that which is given is already possessed prior to the

giving. So how do we give meaning to the ‘brute facts’ of moral science, at bottom, we

do not.

§ 4.2. Husserl on the Transcendental Ego

In light of the constitution of the relation between science and the Lebenswelt and inorder to thematise it, Husserl engages in what he calls the “universal epoch ē”, which he

critically contrasts with earlier attempts at reduction known as the “Cartesian way”.

[W]hile the [Cartesian epoch ē] leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it were, it

brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content , since there can be no

preparatory explanation; so one is at a loss, at first, to know what has been gained by it,

much less how, starting with this, a completely new sort of fundamental science, decisive

for philosophy has been attained. 23

Husserl wishes to “proceed, here…by asking after the how of the worlds pregivenness”,

that is, to take as his subject “not the world simply, but the world exclusively as it is

constantly pregiven to us in the alteration of its manners of givenness”. 24 Thus, to unveil

23 Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences . p. 155. [My italics].24 Ibid. p.144. Husserl’s talk of pregivenness also seems to damage his notion of meaning giving acts of consciousness, since, if what is pregiven is meaningless, then in what sense is it given at all? And if theworlds pregivenness is given with meaning attached then meaning giving acts of consciousness are



24

an ego empty of content is to take as a locus or ‘zero point’ ( Nullpunkt ) something which

excludes any modes of pregivinness since, for Husserl, meaning must be given in acts of

consciousness emerging from “the original constituting life proceeding within [the

transcendental ego]” 25 as a set of function predicates or “meaning- formations ”

“overlapping” out of which new meaning is constituted.

Husserl fails to realise that he has arrived at the hub of originary intentionality and

thus, for our purposes, fundamental morality. He has uncovered background immersion

and what is pregiven is meaning embedded in a world rather then an ego. However,

given his dedication to the notion of mental content, he believes an ego empty of suchcontent dissolves the pregivennes of our practical modes of lived experience and with it

the structures on which Husserl is attempting to found the sciences. He is captivated by

the picture of “the ego [as]…the centre of all effects and actions, of all attention,

grasping, relating connecting” 26 which thus conceals the fundamentum of experience.

Consciousness, for Husserl, must always already have a representational content, the

schism of ego and “world” is originary, as is the “inner man” at a fundamental level of

intending. The how of the worlds pregiveness is our background, what Mereau-Ponty

referred to as a “reserve of vague power”, it is not contained in a consciousness, but in

our worldliness. Thus, at this fundamental level, what Husserl calls the ‘ego’ is more then

merely empty of content it is lost in the vastness of a world laden down with meaning.

It is the structures of the Lebenswelt which Husserl views as a “new sort of

fundamental science” and within these structures Husserl recognises something like our

unnecessary. Finally, if what is pregiven is constituted by meaning giving acts of consciousness then theworld, as reality, becomes dependant on acts of consciousness opening the door for all sorts of scepticism.25 Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences . p.185.26 Husserl, E. Ideas II . § 25, p. 112.



25

background understanding which he terms a “Heraclitean flux”. Yet, since a background

in which meaning is embedded cannot be constituted by a consciousness in the giving of

its meaning, as it is that which Dasein inhabits, that in which we are immersed, it is seen

as incomprehensible and inexpressible.

We wish, then, to consider the surrounding life-world completely…the world in which

we live intuitively, together with its real entities [ Realitäten ]; but [we wish to consider

them] as they give themselves to us at first in straightforward experience…Our exclusive

task shall be to comprehend precisely…this whole merely subjective and apparently

incomprehensible “Heraclitean flux”. 27

The background is a familiarity with the world that allows us to navigate through it in a

transparent manner, in other words, without paying any explicit attention to our

navigational capability. This is a prereflective, preconceptual, intentionality which

discloses the world as familiar; as that in which Dasein is immersed and as that in which

meaning resides. As such, there is no need for an inner/outer schism within this

epistemology. Thus, for someone captivated by the subtleties of the framework, this

background is discovered as incomprehensible and inexpressible given that it must be

understood in terms of an “inner man”, which is revealed, for Husserl, as an emptiness.

As Heidegger proclaims, “Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein.

Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and

world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of

27 Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences . p.156. [My italics].



26

being-in-the-world.” 28 This absorption in the world is an originary transcendence, it is

what underlies our practical and lived modes of experience as a fundamental

intentionality and because Husserl is compelled to locate this understanding in the “inner

man” and “do justice to the absolute singularity of the ego and its central position in all

constitution” 29, he is apt to discover that this transcendental ego, his ‘zero point’ of all

meaning- giving , is empty of content.

§ 5. Husserlian Intentionality and Background

In order to work our way out of the I/O framework and disclose the foundations of

morality in Dasein’s originary transcendence, we must for the sake of clarity, briefly

forward the view against which Heidegger turns: Husserl’s theory of intentionality.

Intentionality, for Husserl, is the directedness of mental states towards an object.

When I believe (mental state), that belief is about, directed toward, something

(intentional object) and that something could be a house, the Minotaur or Quine’s “round

square cupola on Berkeley College”. Within a ‘founding’ act of intending, for Husserl,

there are intentional modalities which gather around a core ( Kern ) – the originary

giveness of the ‘founding’ act – on which they are ‘founded’. “Perception [is] the act in

which all “origination” lies, which constitutes originally …” 30 The modalities are a

recognition of the fact that the manifold acts of intending represent their objects

variously, for example, as perceived, imagined fantasized, expected and so on and these

28 Heidegger, M. Basic Problems of Phenomenology . p.297.29 Heidegger, M. Basic Problems of Phenomenology . p.186.30 Husserl, E . Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness . p.283. From: Husserl . Shorter Works .



27

mental states are founded on the possibility of actual perception and as such Sein-bei

(being-with).

That which enables the directedness of intentionality is a mental property known

as the intentional (or representational) content. Nonetheless, the intentional act itself is

focused on its object rather then its contents and in this way the object of thought is

transcendent. The content of the intentional act, which makes the directedness of

intentionality possible, is interpretative and the mental state has a bearing on this

interpretation as it contains an Auffassungssinn (interpretative sense). In our everyday

perceiving, for example, our experience is unequivocally realist. We see “the physicalthing there, outside <us>” 31 – the transcendentally existing apple tree – and what is

perceived is the apple tree, not my sensations . Having proceeded through an eidetic

reduction and bracketed the “outside”, that is any notions of transcendence, to get at the

reduced perception, Husserl discovers the tree simpliciter is nothing but “the perceived

tree as perceived .”32

The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its chemical elements, etc. But the

sense – the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence –

cannot burn up; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties. 33

In other words, Husserl is attempting to demonstrate that sensations do not constitute the

whole of our meaning-intending. Our understanding the tree in the way we do, as

something to be harvested for apples lets say, is not an intending of the sensations but a

31 Husserl, E. Ideas I . p.91.32 Ibid. p.8933 Ibid.



28

sense-interpreting act that discloses the interpreted sense. Thus, there must be categorical

features within the intentional act which enables the possibility of our expressive variety

in all sense perception.

Husserl is once again forwarding a sort of background intelligibility as

“Hyracoidean flux” of meaning-intending. His intention may have been to distinguish

between the sensuous and categorical features of the intentional act although, the

interesting thing for us is that in his eidetic descriptions the “Heraclitean flux” has been

rendered somewhat comprehensible. Husserl recognises his immersion in the world

through the application of the eidetic reduction and in his immersion, he inexplicitlyarrives – as Sartre did in his description of chasing-the-streetcar – at the holistic

meaningful unity of Dasein. Husserl has recognised the ‘background’ meaning of the

perception, has realised that this ‘background’ is something without properties, that this

sense is present not solely with respect to the sensory element in the experience and has

attempted to articulate it in terms of an eidos or essence. 34 However, as we noted above,

he necessarily fails to grasp the absorption of the ‘self’ in the holistic unity of this

involvement because of the mental content at the centre of his theory of intentionality and

meaning. To claim that the “Heraclitean flux” of the Lebenswelt is constituted by the

transcendental ego is to render the “new sort of fundamental science” of the Lebenswelt

as doxic – as fundamentally dependent on mental states, which are possible because of a

representational content. Our background understanding, which is the kind of

intentionality that does not presuppose a mental content, making the perceived tree

intelligible as a tree, cannot be analysed in terms of mental states. Now, as Husserl’s

34 This is reminiscent of Plato for who the forms can be thought of as the essence of things, as ‘reality’, andinterpreted as an attempt to articulate the fore-structure of the worlds meaningfulness.



29

background contains its own kind of knowledge, this knowledge must be based on an

intrinsic system of beliefs and this space of beliefs is the representational structure of the

life-world, forming the basis for Husserl’s new doxic science. The “Heraclitean flux” is

essentially a doxic flux and, as such, in a Husserlian take on background understanding

one would be forced to populate the background with a representational content.

The consequences of framework submergence should be quite evident now. The

framework operates covertly in various guises, but fundamentally generates the cadre of

an “inner man” whose knowledge of the “outside” is mediated in one way or another,

through a system of beliefs, intuitions, desires, propositions, properties and so on. Thisiconograph of epistemology has commissioned the vast amount of scepticism regarding

our access to “reality”. It has petrified in itself an impermeable foundation for those

incarcerated by its intrigues and has stultified great thinkers from Plato to Husserl.

Moreover, even when they teetered on the cusp of the frame itself, it never permitted

escape. Crucially, it has covered-up our originary transcendence, fundamental

intentionality, an intentionality that presupposes no mental content, but is an absorption

in the world we inhabit. For these reasons, the nature of our foundational moral-being has

been concealed beneath a historical shroud of analytic construction which imprisons our

thought through its habituation of the apeiron of meaning itself: the Dasein.



30

III

§ 6. Fundamental Ontology and Morality

The epistemological picture for those who are captured by the inner/outer

framework is met immediately with the problem of transcendence, which underscores theI/O fault line. If they adopt a linguistic approach the question arises, how do we measure

the truth-value of statements regarding the subjects on which we predicate? In the doxic

domain they might ask, how do our beliefs correspond to ‘reality’? And in both cases,

they are forced to ask what the relation is between the subject and object, inside and out

and how are we to represent our knowledge of the ‘outside’, how is it mediated? This

stanchion of thinking urges an epistemology, as we have seen, in terms of an “inner life”,

cogito or a ‘faculty’ and its representation, predication or beliefs regarding the outside

“world” or ‘reality’, which is understood as a totality of objects or ‘brute facts’, in such a

way that the “world” is meaningful through an interior, formed representation, which

facilitates the possibility of knowledge in a mediating operation. This latent Cartesianism

leads us down various vistas of thought to conclusions which we have seen to be both

problematic and illuminating. In disclosing the main characteristics of our framework, we

have paved the way towards an analysis of our background understanding and disclosed

Dasein, “self and world…together in a single entity”, as opposed to “inner life”, as the



31

locus of our understanding. It is time we began to relate this entity Dasein, its background

understanding and its worldliness, to fundamental morality.

§ 6.1. Being-in a Background Understanding

Dasein is an entity that is always already inhabiting a certain moral

understanding as the moral fore-structure of its worldliness. This moral understanding,

however, was exposed as inchoate and structured by a framework understanding, which

can now be taken as a founded ontical mode of morality, rather then a founding

ontological one. Nonetheless, Dasein’s worldliness demonstrates from the outset that theDasein, as immersed, is always already involved in a world of morality. Dasein’s ability

to “take a stand” on its being, as we will see, demonstrates that being-moral is not

something like the ability to define and utilise isolated moral concepts, to situate them in

‘moral faculties’ with respect to other moral entities or to establish or “aquire” the norms

of society, but is a potentiality for being. Our framework propigation of ontologically

isolated moral entities with their characteristic properties and predicates is ontical , which

is to say that the being of these moral entities is not characteristic of the being of Dasein

and ought to be distinguished from Dasein. To put this another way, when we say Dasein

always already inhabits a moral understanding, we are not talking about something that

Dasein can enter and exit, the ways in and out of morality or a moral ‘toolkit’ that Dasein

“acquires”. Conflictingly, what Dasein is always already in (in the sense of involved or

immersed) is the world and we hope to show that the structure of this being-in-the-world,

is the potentiality for being-moral, from which, the moral sciences have developed and on

which they are founded. What we are attempting is a continuation of Husserl’s endevour



32

from the point of view of moral science through the application of Heidegger’s

ontological insights in an attempt to avoid the I/O framework and unveil the

fundamentum of a moral experience intricately bound to the world we inhabit.

However, Dasein tends to understand its own being in terms of ontical being –

such as the totality of objects taken by the framework to make up a “world” – in which

case, it must be noted that being-in-the-world as the potentiality for being-moral is not a

property, predicate or ‘faculty’ of Dasein, it is an existential , a lived mode of being. Thus,

Husserl was apt to observe that, “Merely fact-minded sciences make for merely fact-

minded people.”35

In addition, Heidegger adds that, “In Dasein itself, and therefore in itsown understanding of Being, the way the world is understood is…reflected back

ontologically upon the way in which Dasein itself get interpreted.” 36 If world is

understood as a “world” of ‘brute facts’, a totality of objects whose ontical mode of being

is being-in-itself, we tend to interpret our own being in terms of the factuality of enetities

rather then as the facticity of a Dasein – thus arises a familiar epistemological picture.

Absconding from the inner/outer framework as it appears in morality amounts to a

reinterpretation of our potentiality for being-moral in terms of Dasein’s fundamental

modes of being, rather then through the being of those entities which we ourselves are not

and which constitute the structure of the framework.

The meaning of being in general, as Heidegger uncovers, displays its own

distinctions, its own structure. Being must be distinguished from beings as the

fundamental condition of our understanding of beings, in other words, in that we are we

possess a preontological understanding of being, an understanding that has yet to be

35 Husserl, E. The Crisis of the European Sciences . p.6.36 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p.37.



33

thematised. In order for Dasein to be purposfully moral – in the traditional intentional

sense of beliving the act to be moral or interpreting it as such – it must always already

fore-have an inarticulate background understanding of the potentiality for being-moral of

beings such as ourselves. Now, although it is necessary that in order to understand our

potentiality for being-moral we must antecedently, preontologically, understand the being

of beings. It is not necessary to possess explicit moral concepts, norms and thus a

‘faculty’ for morality in order to have a potentiality for being-moral; as the potentiality

for being-moral lies in our originary transcendence and is thus inarticulate, non-

conceptual, prereflective and inexplicit. We could also say that in each and everyfundamental intentional act, originary transcendence, lies the potentiality for being-moral.

One cannot establish a moral maxim, for example, or utilise a moral ‘toolkit’, unless one

fore-has a background understanding with its characteristic originary normative

funcionality . However, it must be noted that the I/O framework inhabits our background

understanding, as it is part of the world in which Dasein is absorbed. The kind of

influence the framework can have upon the background is one of concealing our

originary transcendence, being-in-the-world or worldliness, with ontical modes of being-

in-itself. What ontology can disclose, however - through the recognition of originary

transcendence as the fundamental mode of intentionality - is the structure and functional

normative solicitation of our pre-ontological potentiality for being-moral.



34

§ 7. Solicitation as the Potentiality for Being-Moral

The fundamental meaning of morality therefore lies in a contextual background

understanding, which is not to be taken as a totality of entities, but as a totality of

references that structure our worldliness. In this way, the intelligibility of an involved

(potentially) moral act is embedded within a referential totality, which structures our

worldliness and has a hermenutic moral potential. The drowning man is understood as

“to-be-rescued”, for example, and this solicitation can only be interpreted as

“courageous” as it habituates alongside a “world” of morality, which contains the conceptof courage. In a similar way, the involved act of hammering is an understanding

embedded within the structures of our worldliness, within a referential totality that

includes nails “to-be-hammered” into wood, houses “to-be-built”, etc and can be

interpreted as “I am/was hammering” in or on reflection. Therefore, fundamental

morality is always a potentiality for being and nothing more. This background

understanding, as a discovered referential totality of involvements, structures our

worldliness. “In this totality of involvements which has been discovered beforehand,

there lurks an ontological relationship to the world.” 37

The fundamentum of our morality, the potentiality for being-moral, is not

something with a definite list of properties, but the fundamental mode of Dasein’s being,

being-in-the-world and this fundamentum is originary transcendence. “’Being [amidst]’

the world in the sense of being [immersed] in the world is an existentiale founded upon

Being-in.” 38 Conceptual courage is founded in our dealings with the world, in an

37 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p. 118.38 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p.80-81.



35

involvement in the world, in the structure of our worldliness. “The kind of dealing which

is closest to us is…not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which

manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of knowledge.” 39 Just

as we comport ourselves towards the hammering as an “in-order-to” fix the doorframe,

we comport ourselves toward the drowning man “in-order-to” rescue him. “In dealings

such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the “in-

order-to” which is constitutive of the equipment we are employing at the time.” 40 Even

though we are not strictly talking about “equipment” as such, what is being used in the

later case is a world and this functionality is possible on the basis of a backgroundunderstanding of that world. This kind of everyday being-in-the-world is not a theoretical

or rational “bare perceptual cognition” of the “world”, but a solicitation in Dasein.

That with which our everyday dealings [primarily] dwell is not the tools themselves. On

the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work – that which is

to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears

with it a referential totality within which the [solicitation] is encountered. 41

When we are involved in the potentiality for being-moral, we are immersed in a

referential totality, yet what tends to be analysed is a moral “world” and what is asked

about is ‘courage’ or ‘cowardliness’ rather then the potentiality for being-moral. At

bottom, we need to acknowledge that a specific mode of being belongs to Dasein, being-

39 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p.95.40 Ibid. p.98.41 Ibid. p.99.



36

in-the-world, and as a worldly being Dasein always fundamentally comports itself toward

that world pre-ontologically.

When Dasein comports itself pre-ontologically, preconceptually, toward the

drowning man or toward a hammer it always fore-has an understanding of the being of

that being. This is an intelligibility founded in our being-in-the-world, causal properties

cannot account for fore-structure of this meaning; being solicited by the drowning man

can only be understood within the totality of our dealings in the world. Thus, in order to

grasp what the meaning of morality is in general, fundamental morality, we must ask how

the fore-structure of Dasein’s worldliness is possible and that entails taking the focus off isolated concepts of morality and turning our attention to the modes of being of Dasein.

Being-moral, unlike adhering to a moral concept or norm, is not Dasein satisfying the

occidental cultural ideal of that concept, contrary to this, it is the solicitation of Dasein in

its environment which, like Sartre’s streetcar, is then open to interpretation upon

reflection as a potentiality for being-moral.

Of course, we are not saying this is strictly the case every time. The individual

who encounters the man drowning may, like Adam Smith above, pause and reflect that

the action of rescuing the man, who could be a known criminal, would not excite any

admiration at all in those who witnessed it and being the kind of person who is driven by

the admiration of others, decide to turn a blind eye. Regardless of this, Adam Smith can

recognise the drowning man as such. The drowning man can be made sense of as

“[Dasein] certainly does not dwell [primarily amidst] ‘sensations’; nor would it first have

to give shape to the “swirl of sensations” to provide the springboard from which the

subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’”. That the drowning man ‘primarily’ has



37

a sense and meaning, as a drowning man, is the phenomenal evidence which testifies to a

background understanding on which this environmental event figures. We do not

encounter a swirl of sensation to which our “inner man” gives meaning, the drowning

man always fore-has a sense and a meaning. Within this encounter, Smith’s environment

has taken on new power with new “lines of force” opening up within it, normative

tensions attracting or repelling him. Charles Taylor provides an excellent example which

discloses the nature of these “lines of force”.

I am informed that a tiger has escaped from the local zoo, and now as I walk

through the wood behind my house, the recesses of the forest stand out for me differently,

they take on new valence; my environment now is traversed by new lines of force, in

which the vectors of possible attack have an important place. My sense of this

environment takes on a new shape, thanks to this new bit of information. 42

In these situations our bodies appear to be doing the driving. The clearing is understood

as “to-be-crossed”, the murky undergrowth as “to-be-avoided”, a hill invites a sprint and

the tree on the hilltop offers rest and support. These relevancies ‘show-up’ for me

preconceptually and as an embedded environmental understanding they are not explicitly

articulated in our everyday dealings. Thus, while all this navigation is taking place, while

one deals expertly with ones environment, ones minds can wander and debate through

various subjects: “I should have avoided the woods today”; “Potatoes or pasta for

dinner?” Thus, we can refer to Dasein’s dealings as a “multi-media” event. These

dealings, however, cannot be understood within an I/O framework simply because there

42 Carmen, T and Hansen, M., eds. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty . p.32.



38

is nothing ‘inside’, there is no “inner life” at work in this ability, unless one were to argue

that Dasein’s skill in traversing a wood lies in thoughts about the noble potato. For if, in

order to rescue the man, one had to sit around articulating the possibilities inherent in the

act of rescue, such as tides, wind strength, comparing one’s swimming abilities against a

summing up of the potential weight of the man versus our own and on and on. The

drowning man would always be certain to drown. Contrary to this, however, the

drowning man is intelligible as “to-be-rescued” or “to-be-avoided”, an intelligibility

which sends us running for the hills or in which one finds oneself dragging the man out

of the water. Nevertheless, in neither case did the runner or the rescuer consciouslydecide what the best course of action would be, they did not contemplate or reflect,

ponder or conceptualise. We are the marionettes of the world and our manipulator is

neither our judge nor our jury. The solicitation in itself is not good or evil, courageous, or

cowardly, or virtuous. Our dealings are effectively those of a marionette “taking a stand”

on its being, coming to life on stage, and this parturition is the potentiality for being-

moral, a potentiality that is realised in review. The brightness of this stage, however,

conceals the darkness of its audience.

§ 8. Worldliness as Fundamental Intentionality

Heidegger articulates the structure of being-in-the-world, worldliness, in terms of, as we

saw above, an “in-order-to”. However, various other structures display themselves within

Dasein’s being-in-the-world, such as an “in-which”, “towards-which”, “for-the-sake-of”

(um-willen ) and a final “for-the-sake-of-which” ( Worum-willen ) and these structures are



39

Dasein pre-ontologically “taking a stand” on its being. This can be illustrated by

returning to our example. The park “in-which” I used the life-ring “in-order-to” give the

drowning man some purchase in the water “towards” rescuing him “for-the-sake-of”

saving his life, finally, “for-the-sake-of” being a lifeguard. Within this structure, using the

life-ring takes on significance in terms of my being a lifeguard, which is for Heidegger

taking a stand on my being and this dealing is “the interconnection by which the structure

of an involvement leads to Dasein’s very being as the sole authentic [final] “for-the-sake-

of-which”.” 43 The structure of worldliness is not a representationalist intentionality but an

originary transcendence, which is Dasein’s basic relation to the world and is the ‘freeing-up’ of our background understanding; in that, it opens up our own potentiality for being.

Whenever we let there be an involvement with something in something

beforehand, our doing so is grounded in our understanding such things as letting

something be involved…[which] must be disclosed beforehand with a certain

intelligibility.44

The type of intelligibility that Heidegger is propounding is a background

intelligibility. This background is a referential totality of involvements, these

involvements are Dasein responding, or being solicited by, relevance, significance, or

“lines of force” within its environmental dealings and this solicitation is a structured

worldliness. However, because the background is a holistic sort of dealing it does not

have any particular goal, thus, the final “for-the-sake-of-which” is always impending, a

43 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p.117.44 Ibid. p.118-119.



40

potentiality for being, and as such our worldliness as a totality is always outstanding.

Unlike the rescue of the drowning man, which can be said to have succeeded or failed,

the final “for-the-sake-of-which” is never completed as there are no conditions for the

success or failure of our being-in-the-world. This radically opposes traditional

intentionality understood as a directedness towards an object under a particular mental

state and thus implying conditions of success or satisfaction. In the traditional picture

there is always a fundamental belief, a desire, an achievable goal in which the beliefs and

desires are made manifest. This view is opposed by the structure of Dasein’s being-in-

the-world as disclosive – opening up the space within which things shows up in theirbeing and their meaning – our worldliness frees up the things with which we can deal, it

frees up our environment in its meaning, it is Dasein’s originary transcendence and is that

on which both practical and theoretical (representational) intentionality are founded.

It is commonly taught in philosophy that what is transcendent is things, objects, however,

what is originally transcendent, what does the transcending , is not things as over and

against Dasein; rather, it is the Dasein itself that is transcendent in the strict sense.

Transcendence is the fundamental determination of the ontological structure of the

Dasein …It will turn out that intentionality is founded in the Dasein’s transcendence and

is possible solely for this reason – that transcendence cannot conversely be explained in

terms of intentionality. 45

Heidegger is telling us that it is not intentionality that relates “mind” and “world”, it is

the disclosive space of worldhood, and our being absorbed in a meaningful world, which

45 Heidegger, M. Basic Problems of Philosophy . p. 162.



41

makes traditional intentionality possible. Our immersion in this world and our absorbed

dealings with it constitute originary transcendence, which discloses the world and is

discovered as a background of intelligibility. “This primal [originary] transcendence

makes possible every [traditional] intentional relation to beings.” 46 This intentional

relation to beings emerges from the Da of the Dasein’s immersion in the world, which we

mentioned earlier, we always already fore-have an understanding of the being of beings

and this understanding of being, as being-in-the-world, discloses the being of beings

enabling something like a belief or a desire in them. In other words, in order for us to

understand the drowning man situation and react to it as a “to-be-rescued” we mustalways already inhabit an understanding of being in our involvement with and our

dealings in the world, which are modes of immersed activity. This is the intelligibility,

the structure, on which moral science is founded.

§ 9. The Normative Functionality of Solicitation as the Foundation of Morality

We are finally in a position to posit our thesis regarding the nature of fundamental

morality. All our discussion up to this point has been geared towards clearing the ground

to explicate our thesis that moral science is founded in the normative functionality of

solicitation as a potentiality for being-moral . This kind of phenomenological normativity,

as we will see, is not to be confused with traditional notions of norms as rules or maxims.

We have disclosed Dasein’s fundamental mode of being as being-in-the-world,

worldliness, and this worldliness amounts to a structured intelligibility in which we deal

with the world at a preconceptual, prereflective, unarticulated level of understanding, a

46 Heidegger, M. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic . p.135.



42

background understanding. The world that we are in solicits us with affordances at the

most fundamental level of intelligibility, originary transcendence. Originary

transcendence is a disclosive intentionality, in that it frees up our preliminary

understanding of the being of beings, which is necessary for us to make sense of anything

at all and for the world to have a meaningful fore-structure. This is phenomenologically

evident in that we always already possess a holistic understanding; things have a sense

and a meaning within the referential totality of our involvements.

What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the

motor-cycle… The fact that motor-cycles are what we [primarily] hear is the phenomenal

evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells [amidst] what

is ready-to-hand within-the-world. 47

The solicitations, structured by our worldliness, attract and repel us. The world itself

is a reservoir of potential, a locus of meaning that contains its own forces, and within this

environment we are solicited into action and that action is a potentiality for being such

and such, a potentiality for “taking a stand” on our being, structured by a final “for-the

sake-of”. “In understanding a context of relations such as we have mentioned, Dasein has

assigned itself to an “in-order-to”, and it has done so in terms of a potentiality-for-Being

for the sake of which it itself is.” Therefore, when the valency of the environment opens

up new “lines of force” the actions that these affordances solicit in us are our potentiality

for being ourselves and thus the person who flees “takes a stand” on his being as being a

person who flees and the rescuer too “takes a stand” on his being as such. In the action

47 Heidegger, M. Being & Time . p. 207.



43

we realise our potential, a potential that always impending and never complete, thus the

tragedy of the hero is that he is always the villain of another story.

§ 9.1. An Alternative Understanding of Moral Normativity

In our preliminary discussion of background immersion, some of the aspects of

phenomenological normativity were disclosed. The tensions inherent in solicitation came

out as features of the experience that attract or repel. Another aspect of solicitation which

emerged was that we saw that ‘consciousness’ looses all content, which is to say that the

experience is prereflective, preconceptual and unarticulated. In Merleau-Ponty’s accountof solicitation, from the Phenomenology of Perception , there a felt tension in the “actual”

experience that exists between Dasein and the object from which it is suspended. This

tension comes out in his description of perceiving an object.

For each object…there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a

direction from which it vouchsafes most for itself…The distance from me to the object is

not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates around a norm. 48

This normative tension decreases to as Dasein nears the “optimum distance”, it deviates

to a lesser extent from the norm until, upon reaching the “optimum distance”, the charm

lies in achieving a nil deviation from the norm, which is in effect the feeling of balance.

So, the worldly structure of immersed chasing-the-streetcar is experienced as a felt

normative tension which lessens as Dasein reaches its object, in this case, the streetcar

and the chase has sense and meaning within the referential totality of involvements, a

48 Merleau-Ponty, M. The Phenomenology of Perception . p.352.



44

background of intelligibility. The streetcar thus solicits me to chase it and in responding

to this affordance Dasein is attempting to achieve a balance between itself and the object

with which it is involved. We propose that being solicited by our environment and

responding to these affordances, like thoughtlessly jumping in to rescue the drowning

man, is the fundamentum of all morality, is the possibility of moral science in general. If

this is the case, the meaning of morality in general is unarticulated, prereflective,

preconceptual and inexplicit in its fundamentum; the meaning of morality is structured in

our worldliness. It presupposes no beliefs and no desires, no fearing, loathing or loving, it

is a affordance in which we respond bodily to an environment and “take a stand” on ourbeing such and such.

It is when these acts fall into the space of reasons, succumb to reflection and

analysis, that we begin to understand them conceptually and normatively (in the

traditional sense). We begin to say the rescuer is virtuous, courageous and a true hero

risking his own life to save another’s, when in fact none of these considerations were

present in the “actual” experience. In some cases, we may even come to believe our

heroics were thoroughly dim-witted and, simply put, that is exactly what they are. We do

not stand back and use reason to consider the consequences at this fundamental level and,

as a result, the consequences can be dire. If we return to the Schopenhauerian discussion

above, it could very well be the case that, as the young man raised his blade to murder the

love rival, he was unable to do it, not because of any explicit moral considerations, but

because the tensions felt between himself and his potential victim were too great and

repelled him to an “optimum distance”. The world itself solicited the young man to act as



45

such and as such, preventing the act of murder. Therefore, the world itself could be the

hero of Schopenhauer’s story.

Plato’s search for definition helps bring to the fore the ambiguity inherent in

moral science due to its founding in solicitation. Plato’s asks the question “What is T?”,

where ‘T’ is a moral concept and in order to ask this question and for it to be meaningful

he and his interlocutors must always already fore-have an understanding of ‘T’, as P. T.

Geach was apt to point out. The possibility of asking the question, as meaningful, is due

to our fundamental potentiality for being-moral, as ‘T’ is founded in the potentiality of

the “lines of force” that inhabit our background intelligibility. Now, as the fundamentumof morality has no business in the space of reasons, fundamental morality gives rise to a

science that is inchoate in our theoretical and practical grasp of it. An act solicited by an

affordance has merely a potentiality for being-moral and is always open to interpretation

in an intersubjective manner even though, for the Dasein involved the act was a

normative functionality rather then a contemplative practice. In this way, moral science is

a hermeneutical science as it is founded on solicitations that are inexplicit and

inarticulate. The fact that the Dasein in question is “taking a stand” on its being as such

and such is not to say that this “taking a stand” is anything but a tacit understanding of

itself. Originary solicited normative functionality as the potentiality for being-moral must

be grasped in terms Dasein’s worldliness and each and every transparent solicitation

holds within it the power of a potential morality through which we effectively shape who

we are.



46

Conclusion

The notion of a ‘crisis’, as introduced by Husserl, was the critical basis for our

discussion of fundamental morality. Husserl’s attempts at founding the sciences in the

Lebenswelt indicated that a similar ‘crisis’ existed in the field of morality, which even a

brief examination of moral science was capable of revealing. This ‘crisis’ is evident inthe various problems inherent in our moral understanding. We hold that at the root of this

ambiguity lies and epistemological framework of understanding subtly informing our

thinking and that this picture has captivated thinkers for centuries. Plato may have

initiated this epistemological tradition through a theory of forms, taking as fundamental

‘reality’, a realm of ideal entities, which he then sought to define. Needless to say,

however, that his endeavours were forever beginning and ending in aporia . This

epistemological picture was propagated through the Cartesian tradition in philosophy

which posited a res cogitans against a res extensia and, in this, the framework atomised

our “actual” experience, created the schism of inner and outer, and placed all the worlds

meaning in a mind. This I/O framework became so entrenched, so basic and fundamental

as to be almost indubitable and in order to disclose the fundamentum of morality and

resolve the ‘crisis’ it became imperative that we elude this picture.

Originary transcendence, our worldliness, was disclosed as the fundamental

determination of the ontological structure of Dasein and thus traditional intentionality, the



47

Husserlian understanding of intending, is founded in Dasein’s transcendence and is

possible solely for this reason. The structure of our worldliness, the transparent

immersion of Dasein in the world, is the phenomenological evidence for this originary

transcendence, a transcendence which cannot be understood in terms of a mental content

and thus cannot be founded in traditional intentionality. The dealings of the immersed

Dasein unveiled a background of intelligibility, a “reserve of vague power”, which frees-

up the world as the fore-structure of our worldliness and resides in Dasein’s transparent

encounters in a world, which are always already meaningful. Through the consideration

of our immersed dealings, the normative functionality of solicitation displayed itself asthe potentiality for being-moral. As such, the fundamentum of morality, the solicitation

of Dasein by the world which it inhabits, was discovered as morally neutral, a “taking a

stand” on its being. Nevertheless, the potentiality for being-moral resides in the

solicitation which can be interpreted in terms of the founded modes of moral science. The

world itself is thus analogous to a puppeteer pulling the strings of morality and we are the

audience who witness the performance of the marionette, perceiving only its

independence, judging, praising, exalting, ruining and condemning, but all the while

oblivious the role of the manipulator.

Our world is a tapestry of “lines of force”, which function to solicit action as the

threads of that tapestry weave their way through our surroundings, twisting through our

limbs, seducing and rebuffing us like an environmental magnetism. Spinoza once

declared that if a stone which has been catapulted through the air became conscious, it

would believe itself to be flying of its own accord, he added only, that that stone would

be correct. So while the puppeteer plucks the moral strings, the puppet is astonished by



48

its incredible feats of independence and in the darkness of the theatre the dwells a

nescient judge.



49

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on the influence of an epistemological framework in fundamental morality

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