Clearing: method and contestation
08
Mar
It is through phenomenology that it is possible to resume the positivity of the being
in relation to the only possible transcendentality, where the thing opens up in the dimension of the transcendental, the one that we developed in last week’s post and which in a certain way is opposed to Kant’s transcendent, which goes towards the knowledge of the object and for this reason it is confused with subjectivity.
In phenomenology, there is an intentional consciousness in its “a priori”, taken in a similar way to the subjective (proper of the subject), however, consciousness as a phenomenon reveals what is hidden, what the Greeks called “alétheia”, but at that moment science and all awareness of it was early.
In the phenomenal experience of the clearing (lichtung) there is the truth of the being that gives itself with a kind of “arch-phenomenon” (Ereignis), this is the very thing of phenomenology, where its intentionality is, but this also remains hidden.
If we create a void in consciousness in a phenomenal way (the phenomenological epoche), we open ourselves to our truth, we can enter a clearing even before an external event clears us up, this is the reason why humanism in both Heidegger and Sloterdijk is tied to history.
It was Hans Georg Gadamer who developed “The Question of Historical Consciousness” in his contestation of the romantic historical truth which is a quasi-determinism defended by many variants of leftist thought (Marx did not defend it), however there is the question of “natural time” in opposition to “human time”, a self-awareness of consciousness itself.
The hermeneutic circle method is a way to break this conception of consciousness that is only “temporal”, but it comes up against what must be “beyond the human”, shrouded in mystery and vices of historical interpretation.
Rüsen (2011) says that there is a type of historical consciousness made through the “intellectual transformation of natural time into human time”, understanding natural time as contingent events and human time as human representations of life itself.
Few are able to see in their own representations distortions of the truth, interpretations and repressed feelings that do not “clear” the conscience, this seen in a civilizing panorama transforms authoritarian, inhuman and destructive concepts into obscurity of the conscience, not to use the Greek alethéia again.
