ABSTRACT
Negation has referred us to freedom, freedom to bad faith, and bad faith to the being of consciousness, which is the requisite condition for the possibility of bad faith. In the light of the requirements which we have established in the preceding chapters, we must now resume the description which we attempted in the Introduction of this work; that is, we must return to the plane of the pre-reflective cogito. Now the cogito never gives out anything other than what we ask of it. Descartes questioned it concerning its functional aspect-“I doubt, I think.” And because he wished to pass without a conducting thread from this functional aspect to existential dialectic, he fell into the error of substance. Husserl, warned by this error, remained timidly on the plane of functional description. Due to this fact he never passed beyond the pure description of the appearance as such; he has shut himself up inside the cogito and deserves-in spite of his denial-to be called a phenomenalist rather than a phenomenologist. His phenomenalism at every moment borders on Kantian idealism. Heidegger, wishing to avoid that descriptive phenomenalism which leads to the Megarian, antidialectic isolation of essences, begins with the existential analytic without going through the cogito. But since the Dasein has from the start been deprived of the dimension of consciousness, it can never regain this dimension. Heidegger endows human reality with a self-understanding which he defines as an “ekstatic pro-ject” of its own possibilities. It is certainly not my intention to deny the existence of this project. But how could there be an understanding which would not in itself be the consciousness (of ) being understanding? This ekstatic character of
human reality will lapse into a thing-like, blind in-itself unless it arises from the consciousness of ekstasis. In truth the cogito must be our point of departure, but we can say of it, parodying a famous saying, that it leads us only on condition that we get out of it. Our preceding study, which concerned the conditions for the possibility of certain types of conduct, had as its goal only to place us in a position to question the cogito about its being and to furnish us with the dialectic instrument which would enable us to find in the cogito itself the means of escaping from instantaneity toward the totality of being which constitutes human reality. Let us return now to description of non-thetic self-consciousness; let us examine its results and ask what it means for consciousness that it must necessarily be what it is not and not be what it is.
