> Dasein is "to be there" and "there" is the world: the concrete,
> literal,
> actual, daily world. To be human is to be immersed, implanted,
> rooted in
> the earth, in the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. A
> philosophy that abstracts, that seeks to elevate itself above the
> everydayness of the everyday, is empty. ... The world *is* -- a fact
> that is, of course, the primal wonder and source of all ontological
> asking. It is here and now and everywhere around us. We are in it.
> Totally. ... In-Sein, this "being in", is not the accidental
> location of
> water in a glass, of a table in a room. Applied to man's Dasein, it is
> the total determinant of his "being-at-all". There is nothing
> spiritual
> or metaphorical about this. ....
>
> Heidegger's "mundanity", to use this eroded word in its strongest
> etymological sense, would overthrow the whole metaphysical mind-body
> tandem and the dissociation between essential being and being
> here-and-now. For Heidegger, being-in is not an attribute, it is
> not an
> accidental property of extension, as it would be in the
> Aristotelian idiom:
This is a phenomenology of consciousness as consciousness of internal relations i.e. it is a rejection of the idea of reality as consisting ultimately of substances in the senses of Aristotle (entities that bear qualities without being themselves qualities) and Descartes (entities whose essential qualities exist independently of their relations with all other entities).
In Hegel, Marx, Whitehead and Husserl, however, the idea is "phenomenologically" grounded in the "lifeworld" in a quite different sense. The "lifeworld" there is human self-consciousness, human "experience", uninterpreted within the concepts of a particular ontology such as one constituting "self" and "world" as "substances" in "external relations". Husserl's idea of the "epoche" points to the need to suspend particular ontological conceptions of what we are conscious of in order to perceive what we are in fact directly conscious of. This then becomes a rational ground for claims not just about the content of consciousness but also about "self" and "world" in so far as these are revealed by consciousness approached in this way.
The dissolution of the mind/body split resulting from this phenomenologically grounded conception of ourselves as activities within internal relations rather than substances in external relations underpins Marx's idea of human experience as "praxis" (a concept sublating other aspects of Aristotle e.g. the idea of a developed capability for artistic making, the "trained hand", as a "second nature"). This then becomes the basis for the end in themselves activities of creating and appropriating "truth" and "beauty", i.e. the basis for both "science" and "art" and for the critique of "science" in its modern form as dogmatic adherence to an ungrounded "scientiific materlialist" ontology (a critique found in Husserl's Crisis of the Modern European Sciences).
Both these activities are understood as necessarily "social" in the sense I've many times pointed to in Marx, i.e. they constitute the content of relations of mutual recognition, relations that are "internal" in the above sense. This is elaborated in the passage from "Comments on James Mill".
In Dialectics of the Concrete, Karel Kosik provides an interpretation of Marx focused on showing this correspondence with Husserl and critically distinguishing Marx and Husserl from Heidegger.
One advantage of the Marx/Husserl version of "phenomenology" is that (as indicated by Marx's idea of enlightened thinking as "enlarged thought" - an idea corresponding to Husserl's idea of "transcendental intersubjectivity") it can't lead to metaphysical racism and to answering the "call" of "Being" represented by National Socialism by joining the "movement" and becoming its willing instrument.
Ted