THINKING THE "LIFE" IN "LIFEWORLD":

A "WORLDLY" INSCRIPTION OF INSTINCTUAL DRIVES AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Dennis E. Skocz

Heidegger's Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, the text of a winter semester lecture course of 1921-1922, is both frustrating and intriguing. [1] Aristotle merits only passing reference and the lecture takes a seemingly erratic course as a discussion of the meaning of philosophy morphs into a reflection on the future of the German university. Overwrought sentences and unusual terminology make for difficulties. Nonetheless, the lecture offers a compelling glimpse into the workshop of Heidegger's mind as the concept of what will become "being-in-the-world" takes shape. Beginning with a composite notion of life, which oddly excludes any biological sense of the term, Heidegger derives the concept of world which will develop into the "being-in-the-world" of Being and Time. By the time of that work "life" has disappeared from "world" as Heidegger's "lifeworld" of the early 1920s gives way to "being-in-the-world," the nucleus of a powerful anthropology, from a philosopher who, from the start, eschewed an interest in elaborating a philosophy of human being.

This paper reflects, both with and against Heidegger, on the various senses of "life" pertinent to the phenomenon of lifeworld, seeking to understand why Heidegger excluded the biological from consideration and how the biological, on Heideggerian terms, can be married to the "worldly" in a way that enriches both the concept of life, biologically understood, and world. The fuller concept of lifeworld, so developed, will offer the basis for incorporating notions of instinct, drive, and the unconscious without derogation from the ecstatic dimension opened up by "world". At the same time, with a "world"-derived conceptuality underlying our thought regarding these notions, we can bypass the difficulties of interpretation associated with psychoanalytic theory. This paper is not meant as an exegesis of Heideggerian texts. Heidegger serves as a guide through the issues of life and lifeworld because (a) being-in-the-world is arguably the most influential of various lifeworld architectures, (b) the relationship of biological life and world are deeply problematic for him, and (c) Heidegger does in the end offer a way of incorporating "life" into "lifeworld" (qua being-in-the-world). In the brief span of a paper we can, of course, only sketch out the lines of a much more ambitious project.

Webster's identifies some 21 different senses of the noun "life" and 14 discrete senses for the verb "to live" (in both transitive and intransitive forms). [2] The German dictionary distinguishes some15 meanings for the noun Leben and 11 for the verb in its various grammatical forms. [3] Alluding to the vagueness and ambiguity of the term "life" as used at the time, Heidegger explores a broad spectrum of meanings for "life" in the lecture course of 1921 noting more than a dozen usages and reflecting on the grammar of the verb, especially in its intransitive form. [4]

The intransitive of "to live" suggests that life/living/to live is somehow self-contained and subjective. Heidegger would retain the subjective element of living as lived experience but holds out for a reference to something concrete outside life-as-lived. In "to live, " he observes, "there is a concrete experience to be presentified, even if at first the explication of the sense is purely and simply a matter of 'feeling.'" [5] To be sure, "to live" can connote mere feeling (e.g. as in "to live through or endure"), an affection of one's internal state, but Heidegger apparently means to indicate more by speaking of a "concrete experience to be presentified." Presentifiable/concrete points to something overt and tangible.

The critical transition from "life" to "world" occurs in a reflection on the peculiar feature of the intransitive verb "to live":

"The intransitive sense of the verb 'to live,' if presentified concretely, always takes explicit form in phrases such as to live 'in' something, to live 'out of' something, to live 'following' something, to live 'from' something. The 'something,' whose manifold relations to 'living' are indicated in these prepositional expressions (which to all appearances, have been casually heaped together), is what we call 'world.'" [6]

Even though the intransitive as such lacks an object which "completes its action" or "transfers its action from a subject to an object," the intransitive "to live" exceeds itself, goes beyond itself, through its prepositional "suffixes" which link it to what Heidegger calls the "world." Even in our example of the "subjective" sense of "to live" – i.e. “to live through or endure” -- there is yet something that one lives through; living through is not completely explained in taking account of the affective state of the subject. The transitive verb "to build" has its completion in something like "house." House is what building builds. The intransitive "to live," although its does not have a grammatical object, nonetheless has its "completion" in a world: "The phenomenological category, "world," immediately names -- and this is crucial -- what is lived, the content aimed at in living, that which life holds to." [7] World then is the product of a reflection on the phenomenon of life. It is essentially correlated to life. Their relatedness is one of referentiality: life refers to world. The nexus created by this referentiality is indicated by the fact the one can substitute "world" for "life" in various expressions ("to go out into the world" vice "to go out into life"). World is "the basic category of content-sense in the phenomenon, life." [8]

"World" then is born from "life," but from the middle of the lecture course of 1921 forward "world" takes over, i.e. "world" becomes the explicandum and "life" falls out of the picture. On the basis of "world" Heidegger builds what will become "being-in-the-world." By the time of Being and Time "life" is dead as a generative concept. To be sure, there are numerous references in Being and Time to "life"; none are insignificant and several bear close attention for this project. It is clear by then, however, that "life" is not central for Heidegger's project.

Before leaving the lecture course of 1921, we need to note three remarkable aspects of that reflection that bear on this project: (a) among all the many usages and senses of life/to live Heidegger surveys none refers to biological life or existence, (b) Heidegger explicitly excludes consideration of the concepts of modern biology, and (c) Heidegger holds "life philosophy" (Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson, and Scheler) at arms length. This is surely a curious case: what begins as a wide-ranging effort to think through the concept of "life" brackets out the living as organic!

How is it that "life" gets left behind? Indeed, why is it that biological life never makes its to the "starting line"? Is there a way in which the biological/organic can be inscribed into being-in-the-world or lifeworld without damage to the integrity and power of either the concept "life" or "world" -- indeed in a way that enriches both concepts?

Any number of explanations suggest themselves as answers to the above. The following, however, will form the basis of our response.

Life is left behind in the explication of world because world, along with the other categories attached to it, does the conceptual work that Heidegger requires. Keep in mind that the "life" from which Heidegger derives the concept of world is one in which no biological element is included. World, care, meaningfulness, sequestrations, ruinance, and the like serve so well to flesh out the concept of factical life that Heidegger can afford to keep reference to life minimal.

The Heideggerian project also explains why biological and indeed other senses of life can be relegated to the sidelines without detriment. By the time of Being and Time it is clear that Heidegger's defining project is to think being. The Daseinanalytik is a prolegomena meant to take us to the threshold of the being question via consideration of the question of time. Heidegger is not primarily interested in developing a philosophical anthropology nor a regional ontology of living (=organic) being. To be sure, in the lecture course of 1921 the being-question does not emerge as Heidegger's project. Here too, however, neither the analysis of factical life as it develops via the concepts of world, care, and related concepts nor any ontology of life-as-organic defines Heidegger's project. The explication of factical life is ancillary to understanding the nature of philosophy which Heidegger describes as a "basic mode of life itself . . . [one] which brings life back from its downward fall into decadence." [9] The explication of this statement would require a separate reflection, but it makes clear that the analysis of factical life in the lecture course of 1921 is subordinate to an understanding of philosophical life comportment. Understanding this, one could find it plausible that Heidegger would bracket out an analysis of the biological -- a subject which assuredly furnishes subject matter for philosophical reflection but arguably not something pertinent to understanding philosophy itself as a mode of life.

Notwithstanding the above, it is puzzling that "biological concepts of life are to be set aside from the very outset [as] unnecessary burdens" or why the principal themes of life philosophy are not taken up. The latter offers "certain moments of sense" for Heidegger's own analysis of factical life and Heidegger commends life philosophy as "an actual attempt to come to philosophy rather than babble idly over academic frivolities." [10] Heidegger's exclusion of modern biology seems more like a stinging rejection, but, even at that, he allows that "certain motives might spring from these concepts [those of modern biology]." [11] The lack of clues in the lecture course of 1921 prompts us to speculate and to look outside that lecture for an explanation of why biological life is bracketed out.

The explanation put forward here for Heidegger’s rejection of the biological sense of life is that the notion of organic life built around a certain concept of drive -- one which claimed the attention of biology at the time and was central to many life philosophies -- is a stumbling block for a lifeworld built upon the notion of world as it matures in being-in-the-world. The "modern biology" and life philosophy of the time pose the issue of life as a contest between mechanism and vitalism. Common to both views is the notion of a force or forces which impel the movement of the living organism. In the mechanistic concept organic forces do not differ from inorganic forces and the organism is understood as a machine whose adaptations to its environment can be understood via a complex of causal relationships. [12] Life philosophers, like Bergson, challenged this view and posited an underlying creative and vital impulse outside the mechanistic-causal scheme -- a dynamic principle which accounts for both the unity and diversity of life forms and their evolution over time. [13]

Heidegger confronts the contest of mechanism and vitalism in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, a lecture course from 1929-1930. There he describes mechanism's view of the organism as that of a "bundle of reflex arcs." Stimulus and response constitute a cause-effect relationship between the organism and its environment; the sum of these relationships serves to account for the "vitality" of the organism. According to Heidegger, vitalism, which purports to offer an alternative, only plays into the conceptuality of mechanism by accepting its underlying premise -- the organism as a structure of unfolding processes -- and supplements explanation with a supra-mechanical force that nonetheless leaves the fundamental character of life unquestioned and unclarified. [14]

The failure of both mechanism and vitalism to address the fundamental issue of the essence of life itself, to leave the matter unclarified, explains why some eight years earlier Heidegger may have avoided the issue of organic life as an "unnecessary burden."

The 1929-30 lecture course, however, offers a positive contribution to the understanding of animal life and, we shall argue, to the animality of that rational animal we call human. More precisely, the concept of animality or organic life that Heidegger offers in the 1929-30 lecture course allows one to graft life-as-organic to being-in-the-world to "produce" a lifeworld which does justice to both life and world.

The key notions to emerge from Heidegger's phenomenological description of the animal as "poor in world" are encirclement and captivation.

The animal -- from the unicellular organism to the domestic animal companion -- is not a self-contained bundle of reflex arcs that just happens to find itself in a spatial location. From the very outset the animal/organism finds itself already always in an environment, a surrounding, which is as much a part of its being-as-organism as are its body, organs, and the vital processes thought to be contained in that body. [15] The animal environment situates the animal between inorganic being (e.g. stone), which is essentially "worldless," and the human being, essentially a being-in-the-world. The animal has and does not have a world, Heidegger says. [16] It does not apprehend beings as beings, but is, nonetheless, related to things outside itself. [17] The animal, Heidegger says, is encircled or ringed-around. The en-ringment of the animal constitutes a zone of "disinhibition." [18] For the most part, objects and events in the vicinity of the animal are of no interest to it; they do not serve to release or stimulate the animal's instinctual drives. Within that vicinity (author's term) there are however objects/events/phenomena which can come to occupy the animal, provoking it to act or react. The zone of those things to which the animal is "freed" to respond is the ring of disinhibition. "Dis-inhibition" may strike one as odd. The idea is that animal behavior is oriented to discharging an instinctual tension. The animal's ring is that zone in which things that allow for the discharge of instinctual tension become accessible. They do not/not become manifest as things present-at-hand in a world, as they do for human beings. Nonetheless, there is an "open" in which the animal has its being, an openness named by encirclement, wherein the animal's constitutive drives may encounter those stimuli which allow it to discharge instinctual tensions. [19]

Captivation names the relatedness of the animal/organism to things within the ring. Captivation means that the animal is not free to address beings as beings but that its relatedness is subservient to the set of its instinctual drives, which nonetheless play out in the animal's behavior within its encirclement. Captivation signifies that the animal is "taken by" those things which "disinhibit" its instinctual drives; it is an "absorption in the totality of interacting instinctual drives." Its openness is a qualified openness to things which can stimulate it and thus serve the survival of the animal and promote the preservation of the species. [20]

This is not the place to lay out the exacting and nuanced descriptions which Heidegger adduces to support his interpretation. It is not possible to give a full account of Heidegger's elaboration of encirclement and captivation in such a brief paper. Nor should we imagine that Heidegger offers a complete account of animal being. His examples might well bias the account. Domestic and domesticated animals, to which he only alludes briefly, behave differently than bees, which come in for considerable discussion. Heidegger deals with instinct but not with learned behaviors nor with animal "intelligence" as it shows in goal-oriented behavior or "language use" by primates. This paper seeks to incorporate the instinctual as described with reference to animals within the human lifeworld. But, a fuller phenomenology of animality itself might require a reverse borrowing -- supplementing the instinctual behavior model of "lower" animal life-forms with broader "world" concepts when it comes to describing "higher" animal life-forms. The Chimpanzee, for example, might not be quite so captivated as the bee and arguably has, in some sense, a notion of tool and instrumentality like that within the human world. The encirclement common to Chimps and bees then might not do justice in describing the "world" of the primate. Without derogation to the difference which Heidegger underscores between the human and the animal, it might be necessary to mark and describe phenomenologically essential differences within animality itself and selectively adapt human lifeworld concepts to higher animal life-forms.

All of the above suggests how much lies beyond our focus. Our question is this: If we take the description of encirclement and captivation at face value, what is distinctive and fruitful for understanding the lifeworld of human beings? Two factors stand out.

First, Heidegger locates the play of instinct within something like a world. The organism is already always related to things outside itself. Its definitive complex of drives and instincts are not linked to stimuli from the external world "after the fact," but rather, from the very outset, stand in a structural and constitutive relationship to objects and occurrences outside the organism. Heidegger's is a "demand pull" rather than a "cost push" concept of drives, or rather one in which the push of instinct meets the pull of stimuli within an already established zone of behavior. The description of encirclement gives phenomenological flesh to the concept of environment as it applies to organic being. It suggests how things are accessible and open to the animal without thereby suggesting that they are present-at-hand in the way they are to humans.

Second, captivation enjoys a beneficent ambiguity. On the one hand, it denotes a relatedness beyond the organism to something outside itself and, on the other hand, a being-taken-by the captivating object and a subservience to instinct. Instinct, "myopic" when it comes to seeing beings as beings, is not blind, but has a peculiar and distinctive vision. Instinct's object takes hold of the animal; within that hold, the environs of the animal open us as a field within which the animal orients itself in relation to its drives. The animal/organism is both bound and free. That which captivates also disinhibits or "frees" instinct of its tension. None of this invalidates or diminishes findings regarding the covert workings of neurological or other biochemical processes in the organism. But, stimulus and response, instinct and its satisfaction involve much more than the operation of processes within a cause-effect nexus. To human observation animal drives manifest themselves in overt behavior, unfolding coherently within an encirclement or ring which constitutes a field of behavior.

Taken together these two distinctive features of Heidegger's analysis allow us to think lifeworld in a way that incorporates the instinctual and to ground the interpretative practice of psychoanalysis in lifeworld terms. Before going any further, however, we cannot avoid discussing the applicability of a phenomenology of animal being to human being.

Unquestionably, Heidegger's intent in the 1929-30 lecture course was to describe the "world poverty" of the animal in order to underscore what is different and distinctive in the human's having-a-world. Heidegger himself, however, opens the door (unconsciously?) to applying his phenomenology of animality to humans by reminding us at the outset of his discussion that humans are rational animals. [21] If one may inquire about the rationality of the rational animal so might one reflect on its animality. Heidegger does not reflect on what his discussion of animality might tell us about our own animal being. To be sure, we should not expect that one can simply transpose the results of his investigation into the human domain without further ado. On the contrary, the differences might very well make all the difference.

Heidegger insists, and rightly so, that one cannot conflate the animal and the human. Captivation, as it applies to humans, is not the same as the captivation that Heidegger applies to animals. Again and again, Heidegger takes pains to tell us that captivation is a privative mode of having an object, that in captivation the animal does not apprehend beings as beings, as things present-at-hand. Seeing beings as beings in their present-at-handedness only belongs to humans who can be said genuinely to have a world. The animal never does and never can see things as they are but always, i.e. constitutionally, operates within the domain of instinctual drives. [22] As one thing ceases to captivate the animal by disinhibiting an instinctual drive another captivating object and instinctual drive emerge to take its place. Heidegger offers the example of the many types of female insects which copulate first and then devour their mates -- eros and thanatos in the insect world! [23] The point is that the animal is ever captivated; that, unlike the human, for whom captivation is one possibility-of-being, the animal is constitutionally related to its surroundings via captivation. It is just this difference, however, which makes the concept of captivation of utility for understanding the instinctual as a human phenomenon as we shall see below. Indeed, it is within the space of the difference between the animal and the human world that we shall locate what is significant for the human science of psychology.

But first, this architectural note. If the organic has its world that extends out and around the organism, then we should be able to map this world upon the worlds within which we already situate the human "organism." Back to the lecture course of 1921. There Heidegger distinguishes three worlds of care: one's-own- world, the shared-world, and the surrounding-world. One's-own-world, not to be identified with the Ego, is where one "encounters himself in a worldly manner" -- i.e. in the totality of one's caring (=meaningful relationships). To the extent that one is related to others in some mode of care, one inhabits a shared-world -- here, think of Mitsein. The "unbounded" surrounding- world represents the "outer limits" of caring involvement with things and individuals. Heidegger is somewhat vague; one has the impression that the surrounding world is the ground of all worlds in what, Gestalt-like, might be imagined as a figure-ground relationship. The surrounding world seems to be the periphery from which things and events enter to take "center stage" and become part of one's-own-world or a shared-world. The boundaries of the worlds here described are not fixed but fluctuate on the basis of the directions of caring. [24]

If the organic and instinctual has something like a world, then one should be able to graft it, as a subset of one's-own-world, unto the inclusive world-map implicit in Heidegger's description of the three worlds. The hermeneutical significance of this move is to bring instinctual life within a mode of openness. The play of instinct and what releases instinctual energy will not be understood from the start as something covert, the workings of psychochemical processes accessible primarily to neurologists. Rather, captivation will be available to phenomenological description in the behavior of the human animal. Captivation, recall, is relatedness to . . . in which the organism is taken by . . . and behaves, i.e. manifests itself, albeit in subservience to instinctual drives. The topography of drives would change fundamentally, were we to transpose them from the "basement" of the psyche to a space of appearance where they play out.

The new topography would redound to the benefit of both lifeworld phenomenology and psychiatric theory.

For its part, the lifeworld of being-in-the-world as developed in Being and Time, for example, is conspicuously lacking in a conceptuality and semantic to articulate instinctual and driven behavior. Dasein knows neither hunger nor desire. It may take tool to hand with a view to satisfying basic needs, but these needs themselves find no articulation within the schema of the ready-to-hand. Mitsein or being-with describes a "with" without intimacy or eros or the being-turned-having of lust. Mutatis mutandis, the concept of captivation offers at least a first approximation to a phenomenology of human instinctual/driven comportment within a world.

To be sure, captivation, in so far as that notion has application to the human domain, would not denote a permanent and defining limit or restriction. Humans as such can and do understand beings as beings and can articulate beings in their present-at-handedness. This constitutional possibility-of-being does not however rule out the sense of a subtending, inarticulate current of behavior, human but captivated and encircled, instinctual and driven, that remains on "automatic pilot" until a supervening action/event reinscribes the captivated behavior, perhaps (a) within the compass of circumspective concern -- the satisfaction of a drive meets with an obstacle and the instrumentality of circumspection is engaged -- or perhaps (b) within the purview of theoretical observation which moves straightaway to regarding the thing (in this case, what captivates) as present-at-hand.

If Heidegger's own account of animal being can supplement his description of human being-in-the-world, it also offers something to psychoanalytic theory. For phenomenologists the unconscious has always presented an unsatisfying reification of phenomena -- phenomena to which the adjective "unconscious" might be suitably applied and whose importance has never been denied. [25] Ascribing a place for instincts and drives and crediting it with meaning and agency does nothing to explain, describe, or clarify "unconscious" phenomena. Undoubtedly, locating drives and instincts within the depths of an "unconscious" symbolizes their hiddenness. But, it does not illuminate the nature of that hiddenness to say that they are in a hidden place. And, if we take the hiddenness of things concealed in the unconscious straightforwardly and seriously from the outset, it becomes something of a puzzle to account for how it is that they become apparent, as they do in therapy, whose work is, after all, to liberate the patient from the hold of his/her drives.

Captivation seems to provide a way out of the predicament -- a way of understanding how something can be "hidden in broad daylight." What captivates is not apparent as the being-that-it-is to the one captivated in the course of captivation, but as a behavior which plays out in the surroundings of the "actor." It is in principle decipherable to an other (e.g. a therapist) and to the one captivated, whose subsequent recognition of having been driven is the culminating revelation of successful therapy. In the Zollikon seminar session of September 7, 1963, Heidegger tells us that "concealment is not the antithesis of consciousness but concealment belongs to the clearing [overt] . . . the inaccessible shows and manifest itself as such [in the clearing] -- as the inaccessible" (emphasis added). [26] The beneficent ambiguity of the concept of captivation, alluded to above, makes it possible to understand just how the drive can be concealed and inaccessible to the one captivated but yet decipherable and ultimately available to her. And here the difference between human and animal captivation is pertinent. Precisely because the human is not constitutionally captivated, she can presentify what captivates, see the being as a being present-at-hand. The encircling ring can become inscribed within a truly open world where projects are freely undertaken, where collaboration with other humans inserts my own world into a shared-world, and where the being of beings can address us.

* * *

This paper leaves much unaddressed. The content of the unconscious includes much more than drives and instincts. We have said nothing of its mechanisms and subterfuges as these are laid out in Freudian theory, nor anything of dreams and their interpretation. The difference between the normal and the pathological would have to be treated. A paper of this limited scale can only point the way to a reformulated way of understanding the instinctual. It will have been successful, apart from any clarification of issues within psychoanalytic theory, if it shows how the instinctual and life-as-the-organic can find a place within the lifeworld. If it accomplishes this, we would end on a note of irony, for in plugging a gap in the lifeworld concept of Heidegger we have found the needed "materials" already within the corpus of his work.