THE HEIDEGGER’S DECONSTRUCTION OF METAPHYSICS AS THERAPY FOR THE HUMAN CONDITION

ABSTRACT

The text, result of a theoretical study, reflects on the potential of the philosopher Martin Heidegger's thinking about the possibilities contained therein to re-experience the background from where our theoretical and practical undertakings are constituted. The emphasis lies on deconstruction and fecundity present in it for psychology and other human sciences. We will situate the problem, present in general outlines his thinking and present some challenges that represent indications of a therapyfor the explanations, theories and practices of care for the human being. This movement into the non-thematized environment where we live and think, but which is the condition of possibility of the same environment, is constituted as access to the human condition, in the direction of proximity to the inaugural. And it allows an understanding and liberation of the human being beyond ontic projects, resulting in a therapy of specialized therapies, a therapy of the human condition in the world.

Keywords:
Heidegger; deconstruction; therapies

RESUMO

O texto, resultado de um estudo teórico, reflete sobre o potencial do pensamento do filósofo Martin Heidegger no que se refere às possibilidades nele contidas de reexperimentar o fundo a partir do qual os nossos empreendimentos teóricos e práticos se constituem. A ênfase recai sobre a desconstrução e fecundidade nela presente para a psicologia e para outras ciências humanas. Situaremos o problema, apresentaremos em traços gerais o seu pensamento e apontaremos alguns desafios que representam indícios de uma terapia para as explicações, teorias e práticas de cuidado com o ser humano. Esse movimento para dentro do ambiente não tematizado onde vivemos e pensamos, mas que é a condição de possibilidade deste mesmo ambiente, se constitui como acesso à condição humana, na direção da proximidade com o inaugural. E permite a compreensão e liberação do ser humano para além dos projetos ônticos, resultando em terapia das terapias especializadas, em terapia da condição humana no mundo.

Palavras-chave:
Heidegger; desconstrução; terapias

RESUMEN

El texto, resultado de un estudio teorético, refleja sobre el potencial del pensamiento del filósofo Martin Heidegger en lo que se refiere a las posibilidades en él contenidas de reexperimentar el fondo desde donde se desarrollan nuestros emprendimientos teóricos y prácticos. El énfasis recae sobre la deconstrucción y la fecundidad en ella presente para la psicología y para otras ciencias humanas. Situaremos el problema, presentaremos en trazos generales su pensamiento y apuntaremos algunos desafíos que representan indicios de una terapia para las explicaciones, teorías y prácticas de cuidado con el ser humano. Este movimiento hacia el ambiente no tematizado donde vivimos y pensamos, pero que es la condición de posibilidad de este mismo ambiente, se constituye como acceso a la condición humana, en la dirección de la cercanía con lo inaugural. Y permite una comprensión y liberación del ser humano más allá de los proyectos ónticos, resultando en una terapia de las terapias especializadas, en una terapia de la condición humana en el mundo.

Palabras clave:
Heidegger; desconstrucción; terapias

Introduction

Sciences, as specific areas of knowledge, were constituted from the assumption of a certain object, part or aspect of it, and a method or mode of access and approach to it. They separate an element from its general and universal scope and constitute it as that from which the investigation and production of knowledge take place. For this reason, a determined science always presupposes and moves within a comprehensive horizon that is normally not thematized in the investigation, description and explanation of its object. There is a ‘fundamental whole’, a pre-understanding, under which something is recognized as something. Objects or reality are constituted as such under this presupposed background, a prior meaning that is the light that allows to see this and that. Distinctions, separations, comparisons and evaluations are rooted in this background. Thus, two things happen: there is an opening or understanding of the being (of what things are) already always presupposed and not explained, called the ontological level, and, at the same time, a fragmentation and separation of what is offered in the opening as object of theoretical consideration, which constitutes the ontic level.

It can be said that “the West is effectively a fragmenter [...]. Indeed, it was fragmentation (that is, the attitude that consists in building partial objects) that provided the West with technical and intellectual power” (Cyrulnik& Morin, 2013, p. 11). And in addition to fragmentation and the power of control and predictability, there is also the ‘forgetting’ of the ‘paradigm’, of the comprehensive opening in which we have always found ourselves and which allows to determine objects as such. In this movement, philosophy, as a search for an understanding based on the totality and within it, is losing space and importance. The results of investigations with isolated and particularized objects are incredible and allow previously unimaginable predictive and control power. The realm of values is becoming increasingly suspicious or, as Guignon (1998) writes in relation to science, that it was the “dispersion of the traditional image of reality as value-laden, a cosmos with meaning, in favor of our own modern naturalistic view of the ‘universe’ as a vast aggregate of objects in causal interactions” (p. 238).

The model of investigation and possible knowledge is linked to a way of understanding reality as a mathematically decipherable extension. Producing knowledge, and even exercising a profession and living itself, are increasingly linked to a rationality, practically hegemonic in the West, which is characterized as scientific. In this environment, the human sciences will conquer their space and consolidate. Like the physical and natural universe, the human phenomenon becomes fragmented and ‘distributed’, giving rise to the various fields of human sciences. The foundation and model of rationality is, primarily, the way of thinking that was developed in the domain of the natural sciences and that was extended to the scope of the human, social or spiritual sciences.

Scientific knowledge advances “through the uncommitted and free, systematic and as much as possible rigorous observation of natural phenomena” (Santos, 2018, p. 25). Knowing is quantifying, not qualifying (hence the disqualification of values; what it is worth and cannot be quantified). It results in the expulsion of intentionality, assumptions, temporality. And knowledge, as Santos (2018) notes, loses in wealth as it gains in rigor. There is a process of reducing reality to linear causalities and seeking predictability and security. But “we know that linear causalities are abusive: we are the ones who produce them to give the world a reductive vision and, therefore, full of security” (Cyrulnik& Morin, 2013, p. 49).

As human beings, we were, throughout the process of building our way of existing and understanding the world, consolidating an understanding of what is and what is not, a comprehensive opening within and from which we understand the world, things, ourselves and within which we also act. Heidegger (1889-1976), one of the important German philosophers of the 20th century, called this opening the understanding of being, and it, while giving access to reality, also hides the opening as opening, or the sense of being. Insofar as it is a horizon that illuminates, like a ‘clearing’, and allows things (entities) to be, the naturalized and everyday attitude also hides its own historical and finite condition. Our explanations, theories, beliefs and institutions are part of the order and logic that consolidate this comprehensive opening, which tends to perpetuate itself. It ensures and guarantees predictability and control over reality, not least because it institutes reality.

In order to be able to see, hear, experience beyond the limits of the established opening (beings), it is necessary to open up and assume this same opening kept in tradition. Heidegger proposes deconstruction as a path and strives to achieve it. This is why his thought represents the possibility of a therapy for the instituted, for what is consolidated as reality. Conceptions of human beings and therapies within the field of psychology are also constituted within and from this metaphysical environment and tend to remain faithful and congruent with the comprehensive opening that allows and sustains them.

Philosophy, for its autonomy and freedom, for its fidelity more to the search than to the found, is always an antidote against the epochal and cultural calcifications that tend to form. Not as a denial of the achievements that were possible for humanity, but as a constant exercise of ‘seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing beyond’ the achievements, and this beyond includes attention to the implicit assumptions, normally hidden, that organize and solidify a given world. And Heidegger, because of the radicalness with which he thinks, can be a guide in this trajectory. Evangelista (2016) writes that “Heidegger’s phenomenology presents itself as a way of reflection on the being of modern science, which is a manifestation of being as a reserve fund available for production. So, it can shed light on the being of psychology” (p. 184). And Stein (2012) observes that

Existential analytics has as its task a metapsychology or hyperpsychology, whose characteristics of being, which is described there, come not from its simple anchoring in an empirical universe, but is restricted to a philosophical scope, which will, however, serve as an instrument of evaluation of other processes that are not philosophical processes (Stein, 2012, p. 47).

In this sense, we present elements of Heidegger’s thinking, from the ontological horizon that he conquers with his philosophy, which can serve as a setting for understanding the conditions of the sciences that deal with specific objects and the visualization and experimentation of their more general context. A therapy in the sense that it allows specific sciences to better assess their place, their connections and assumptions; that offers sufficient distance from themselves and from involvement with their object. And we understand therapy precisely in the sense of a process of coping with elements normally kept in obscurity, but which has an important weight in the functioning of something, be it a person, institution, theory or technique. Therapy as a movement of progressive expansion of self-understanding, with greater control over the elements that make up this phenomenon, but which needs an exteriority that serves as a challenge and confrontation in the expansion of consciousness. It is an opening movement beyond established and consolidated limits, expanding the availability to freely and creatively embrace the roots and the future in its occasional nature.

It is not intended, therefore, to specifically discuss a psychological therapy or to offer some alternative to them, but to think, in general, of the possibility that the therapies themselves, as theories and techniques of human care, maintain vigilance and awareness of their limits and possibilities, and we will do so from the philosophical contributions of Heidegger. We will then present, in general lines, some questions that are at play in the thought of this philosopher, which can be constituted as this exteriority with which the human sciences, especially the psychologies, can confront. We suggest that his work offers the possibility of reaching a vision beyond determinations, towards the founding and original experience of interpretations consolidated in the tradition.

Deconstruction of everyday existence

Heidegger produced a work in which he sought to recall the elements of our western existence that were covered up by the determinations and institutionalizations that are in force in the present. He worked to reduce the weight of objectifications, of our daily and naturalized involvement with objects and projects, what we call reality (entities), with the purpose of recovering the original and previous conditions that are buried and that we end up forgetting - the sense of being. The movement of his thought is a process of appropriation (making his own, not impersonal and anonymous) and freeing himself from the shackles of naturalized and mechanical involvements with reality, with the scope of rescuing thinking beyond calculation, an overcoming of philosophy as metaphysics and the thought that does not consider its presuppositions and assumes them as evident. Therefore, he exercises a reflection that seeks, through questioning, to free itself from everyday life, inappropriateness, inauthenticity and the uprooting of current saying and thinking, towards the opening where things happen, allowing to live in the interval between being and entities.

His diagnosis, presented systematically and matured in Being and Time - although his thought did not start or stop in this work -, offers a vision beyond the way we are used to reading reality and ourselves. It points out that human beings cling to the understanding horizon of entities and forget about being (Heidegger, 1998). In this way, things seem evident and clear to us, but this is due to the fact that we have forgotten their provenance, their roots, their context and references. In this sense, “the German philosopher remembers that it is necessary to dwell on what is taken for granted, and, therefore, it remains unthematized and little questioned, in its original sense” (Feijoo&Mattar, 2015, p. 653). It then shows that the human being understands himself from the reality and time in which he is (the world in which he is a human being), and in which he acts, relates, feels and understands, that is, there is initially and normally the inclination “[...] to understand his being from that entity with which he is essential, constant and immediately related in his behavior” (Heidegger, 1998, p. 39). This, however, leads to the oblivion of the finite condition and the human proximity to the being: that “in its being it behaves comprehensively with respect to that being” (Heidegger, 1998, p. 79). He tends to get lost in the hectic and always urgent occupation of things, knowledge, institutions and tasks. Hence the need to rethink the question of the meaning of being.

We can make an analogy between Heidegger’s movement of thought and Plato’s cave myth: we are born and grow up within a comprehensive horizon, a cultural and linguistic universe (a cave), ‘space’ where we are constituted and from which we draw the conditions from which we understand ourselves always, which Heidegger (1998) calls daily life. We exist from what is offered to us in this ‘environment’; we evaluate, judge, feel, act, think within this horizon. It is, after all, the familiar, comfortable and predictable place we know and where we know how to act and what to expect. This tradition is the material that constitutes our consciousness, the comprehensive opening in which we inhabit and from which we understand the present and look to the future. Initially and normally, we remain in this opening which, at the same time, closes us to the experience of the opening itself. In other words, it makes it difficult for us to notice and experience the cave where we live, because the occupation with things and ‘visions’ inside the cave hide the cave itself, and see it in itself.

Another way of thinking about this question comparatively is in the relationship between light and the objects that appear to us from it. We see objects, but we do not see the light that allows us to see objects; we only see objects that are in the light. The sense of being is the light from which entities (objects) can appear as such, but the clearing itself does not show itself as something, as something in this relationship. It is the difference between being and entities, which Heidegger calls ontological difference. The focus on entities allows for a forgetting of light as an opening and horizon within which entities appear. Everyday life is this forgetting, existence that is trapped in the ontic relationship (with objects, realities, facts), forgetting the previous conditions, the sense of being and the project character of our existence and the world.

The daily occupation with entities produces, therefore, a forgetfulness of being. Asking again about the meaning of being is an exercise that has the potential to prepare the rescue of sensitivity and ability to ‘see beyond’, to ‘feel beyond’, to ‘experience beyond’ what our experience with entities, with the available reality and present allows. But not a certain seeing, feeling and experiencing, as it is not a seeing, feeling and experiencing an entity or a set of entities, but from the horizon, the opening, the cave or the light where the entities can be in a certain way, it can be this or that. It is not about seeing, feeling or experiencing something that is still missing, but about the not-something, being, or nothingness, which is its condition of possibility.

In everyday life (inside the cave), there is no need to return to the sources of traditions, knowledge, rites, understandings, theories and practices, to keep close to the source, to re-experience things in its giving, because the ability to ‘see beyond’ reality has been lost. Accommodated, accustomed and familiarized with a certain way of existing, understanding, seeing, feeling, acting, always shared with others who participate in the same tradition and language, it becomes very difficult to stop, drill and deepen the ‘place’ where we are and run the risk of losing the comfort of the cave, of everyday life. Accustomed to shadows, echoes, images consolidated and stored in a shared language, we tend to continue our lives within the expectations and perspectives opened in the present. We live as if representations (shadows) reflect things naturally and faithfully. We do not even suspect that the world in which our existence takes place is only a possible world, a project, and not something like ‘the’ world as such.

In immersing in everyday life and impersonality, we do not intend to have to see and speak for ourselves and from ourselves, much less are we willing to open our eyes and ears to what lies beyond the objects and organization of the cave. We protect ourselves, we exist, we speak and listen from and within the universe of the impersonal and public, where no one is actually responsible or has to assume existence as their own. In this shared world, we are what everyone is, against or for the things that are authorized within the logical and comprehensive opening where we are. As Heidegger (1998) writes, the Human Dasein inhabits and is familiar with a world (being-in), is at home in the ‘world’ where he was born, grew up, develops and exists.

Heidegger (1998, p. 85) registers that “now the constitution of Dasein is known - moreover as if it were obvious - marked by inadequate interpretation”. The interpretation we make of ourselves in the familiar daily immersion leaves in shadow the fundamental constitution of Dasein as being-in-the-world. However, it is more than reality or some determination extracted from its behavior, that is, beyond reality it is a possibility. With the notion of Dasein (in the German original), Heidegger points to the human being in its original condition, as a possibility that is always found in some reality. It refers outside and beyond the historical determinations with which it is characterized in everyday speeches.

To remember and release the being from the possibilities of automatic and mechanical occupation with entities, the philosopher explores some devices that break the logic and consistency of this everyday and impersonal world, such as anguish, death, boredom and amazement. In the case of anguish, he writes that it is “the possibility of a privileged opening, because it isolates. Such isolation removes Dasein from its decay and reveals its property and impropriety as possibilities of its being” (Heidegger, 1998, p. 212). In anguish, he glimpses the possibility of understanding existence that has always fallen into everyday life and, with that, also the possibility of its own assumption. Anguish that sometimes takes us, produces a break in the organized web of everyday life, makes the threads that make up the web of reality loosen and thus reveals the finiteness and the background that we need to ignore to be sure that we are in a safe and reliable world.

The same happens with the phenomenon of boredom (Heidegger, 2011), related to the issue of time: when we cannot occupy and fill all time (to be completely occupied) and, therefore, master it, it is time itself that appears as time and bores us (in German boredom is Langeweile, ‘long time’). When we are not occupied with things, projects, activities (that is, with beings), we are faced with time as such, an ‘empty’ time, which lingers and desolates us. In everyday life, we are captivated and imprisoned by the things we occupy ourselves with and, with this, we hide time as time, because everything is available, including time through the clock, the stopwatch. In boredom, an emptiness announces itself and time becomes problematic; we cannot control and pass time (with ‘hobbies’) and we are sent back to ourselves and to our being-in-the-world, to our finitude; from the scope of determinations or realities to possibilities. Later in his work, Heidegger (2015) also deals with astonishment as “the return trip from the current character of family behavior to the opening of the involvement of what is hidden, in whose opening what there is current up to now is revealed at the same time as the strange and the fetter” (Heidegger, 2015, p. 19). Anguish, death, boredom and amazement are occurrences that dismantle familiarity and refer to the origin of the present human condition.

That is why we can say that Heidegger’s philosophical exercise throughout his intellectual life is a movement to clarify and illuminate more and more the possibility as such (not this or that specific possibility) and does not intend to be fixed in reality (in a realized possibility or under execution). By making the movement back to the factual conditions, to forgotten assumptions, but underlying the undertakings and understandings, an experience of experiencing itself as such is produced, and perhaps one could say, it opens up the possibility of thinking about therapy from the perspective of experience the opening within which we exist.

Discourses about entities and, therefore, about sciences that deal with entities or aspects of entities, including psychologies, also tend to remain and accommodate themselves to everyday life. In everyday life, or in the cave, theories are at the service of what is available or potentially available according to the current opening, called metaphysics. Objects are discussed and researched, but not the possibilities of being of these objects and the relationships between them.

The philosopher’s thought in question, through the investigation not of specific objects, but of the meaning of being, can help us to untangle and free us from fixation on certainties and, not infrequently, from obsessions, dogmatism and even fanaticism in relation to what we are dealing with and how we understand ourselves, our theories and our practices, which continually unfold from unquestioned assumptions.

The effort focuses on drilling and digging deep into the truth of objects, in search of the truth of being. In this itinerary, the thinker is faced with the task of dismantling the logic, language and assumptions that, unquestioned, keep us in the security and certainty in relation to the world that we have from the impersonal everyday, from the received tradition, but not made own and authentic. Familiarity with representations makes it difficult to access what is in question and can, therefore, go through a process of deconstruction to conquer the freedom and transcendence of the human, to re-experience what is hidden in this or that way of dealing with objects, note Heidegger (2009). It is not a question of condemning any theory or method, but of remembering that they are always a possible, situated and committed project.

Tradition and language in human self-understanding

Heidegger (2009) expressed to Medard Boss the desire that his thinking could go beyond the field of philosophy and reach the ontic sciences and, with this, help to better understand the human being and everything that is related to him, including therapeutically. In the words of Stein (2012), it was “the philosopher himself who had an interest in observing the possible applications of his thought in the field of different therapeutic theories and practices” (Stein, 2012, p. 13).

The potential of this philosopher’s thinking lies in the exercise of overcoming dualistic and dichotomous models, or the paradigm that underlies and grounds current theories and practices, including psychotherapeutic ones. His thought represents a constant coming and going between what is given, objectified, reified and what is refused; a rescue of what is unthinkable in what is being thought and done, the elements that constitute the preconditions and the ‘foundation’ of what is manifested and crystallized in everyday language and in ‘normal’ theories and practices. It is a rescue of the difference between beings and entities, of ontological difference (Heidegger, 2015) and which aims to overcome the indifference in which everything became an object, a thing. Therefore, to rescue the sensitivity to the difference that was forgotten, resulting in the ability to open up to what is not foreseen and programmed in our theories and methods.

Precisely because it does not offer an object, there is the possibility of releasing the potential of the unusual, the unexpected, of the other in thought and action. It is not so much about finding a new recipe to solve problems related to the objects of psychologies, but conquering the freedom of openness, becoming available to try what is not accessed with the usual language of entities. If we know things through the knowledge we have, from what our consciousness is awareness of, we have to deconstruct that knowledge to prepare the disposition for opening in itself. The phenomenological attitude intends to develop the ability to let oneself be, “the serenity towards things and the openness to mystery” (Heidegger, 2011, p. 26). For the sciences that deal with the human being, it is interesting that access to their object is not determined by understandings and practices closed by the logic of calculation and predictability, as this “could trap, bewitch, overshadow and dazzle Man in such a way that, one day, the thought that calculates would become the only thought admitted and exercised” (Heidegger, 2011, p. 26). To avoid this clouding, the philosopher is concerned with the understanding of being presupposed in the theoretical and practical undertakings of human existence, in order to exercise the ability to see, listen and experience guided by the serene welcoming of the unusual that always gives itself over and over again on each occasion. The human being “is not so much an object, but an event or happening that unfolds - the movement in the course of a lifetime” (Guignon, 1998, p. 243). Based on this, it is possible to postulate a therapeutic relationship that is open to the object, and not closed and limited by previous understandings and techniques that remain unquestioned throughout the process and the therapeutic relationship.

This attitude clearly characterizes one of the important qualities in the therapeutic process, that is, the openness and freedom to listen to the other, for the singular and unique happening of each encounter and each person. Before and despite the theory, there is a singular existence and a life being lived that are manifested in the relationship. Theories are not mistakes, but determined and generalized accesses, related to an event that always tends to overflow the limits they offer. It is not a denial of what constitutes intentionality, what shapes our access to phenomena, but a constant preparation for a receptive attitude that is not limited to the interpretative possibilities of this or that theory or technique.

What is at issue with this thinker is, among other things, attention to the conceptions of the human being that guide our theories and our practices. It offers conditions, through deconstruction, to rethink the therapeutic relationship beyond the consolidated explanations and practices that do not themselves put their vision in question, which implies closure and unavailability for the occasional and the future. That is why he considers the relationship between being and time to be fundamental. We catch or collect what comes to us from the future from the resources we have in the present and that were built in the past. Familiar with the present, we become incapable of receiving and accepting the future as such, as it manifests itself from oneself and not from the past. Gumbrecht (2015) wrote about the broad present that “has become a dimension of expanding simultaneities”, producing the “closure of futurity” (p. 16). We ‘kill’ the future from the present in the name of predictability, control and security (or ‘truth’, ‘reality’). We tend to eliminate historicity and time to guarantee the truth. Stein (2012) states that “in historicity, what escapes us is the question of the measurability of the human being and the possibility of making a theory that makes him completely an object” (p. 130).

Therefore, we usually understand what happens, and what comes from the future, with the comprehensive resources that we already have and that have been produced throughout our history, gathered and kept in language and tradition, at the expense of historicity. Our training tends to endow us with knowledge and actions that are based on previous achievements, but do not prepare us for freedom and openness to the future, for the ‘event’, the ‘instant’. Or for the ability to listen and see freely. What we already know becomes the net or filter with which everything else is known. In this way, we know with and from the past. We interpret with what we know; and we apply what we know to what is offered here and now.

We cannot, however, isolate or forget what we know (and what we are!) with the intention of achieving neutral, impersonal and aseptic knowledge. If we refuse our heritage, the tradition within which we become what we are and in which our thinking is constituted, we will lose the mediation that makes it possible to encounter something as something. Without prior understandings, theories and explanations of tradition (without language, after all) we lose access even to things, to the world. It is therefore necessary to start a hermeneutic work of appropriating tradition. Tradition is the environment, the environment within and from which something can be something. Without a tradition we would not have access to the world and things within the world.

At issue is the understanding of the being that, once again being questioned, opens spaces, breaks, clues to what is not foreseen and contained within what we already have in the present. This means boldly and consciously penetrating the comprehensive circle (hermeneutic circle), not to destroy the past stored in language, but to appropriate it authentically and move within it autonomously.

Therefore, it is not a question of throwing away the tradition accumulated in psychotherapeutic research and practices, but of evaluating the often narrow and reductionist limits in which they usually place us; to minimize the tendency to close ourselves to the human phenomenon, manifesting itself here and now, in its occasionality, preferring theory and its confirmation. Hence Husserl’s well-known motto of returning to ‘the things themselves’. A return to things, beyond (or below) representations, theories and explanations with which we clothe them and in which we imprison them.

Heidegger (2012), for whom “language is the home of being” (Heidegger, 2012, p. 127), notes that it has become a prisoner of the metaphysics of presence, of time as presence and has lost its dimension of indictment and insinuation. We fix language in what is said and lose the inaugural dimension of ‘saying’. Both language and what it refers to have become petrified in the tradition called metaphysics and, therefore, it is necessary to “prepare a thinking experience with language” (Heidegger, 2012, p. 140). Language also needs to remember its presentative (happening) and not only representative (objectifying) dimension.

Language, and also the objects it represents, fit the representational model and that is why we tend, in everyday life, to cling to our knowledge and practices. Our knowledge about the human being becomes more important than the human being. These are the things that need, somehow, to adjust to our knowledge so that, after all, they are true and coherent. It is the human person who needs, in the therapeutic encounter, to manifest their symmetry and adjustment to the therapist’s knowledge so that there can be some progress and possible ‘cure’. The therapist who think from a given theory recognizes the ‘truth’, the reality, or the problem, the disease, if he can identify elements that produce the connection between knowledge and the symptoms of those seeking help, but he is not necessarily open to what the other actually manifests and how he exposes.

Our language, which is always language that says something about something, is the access and mediation with the world, things, phenomena and, therefore, with the other in the therapeutic relationship as well. We arrive at things, at the world, at ourselves, at others, mediated by language. Our access to the world as a world and to things as this or that thing is linguistic. If language becomes opaque and rigid, it is necessary to work with it so that it becomes inaugural and original again; remember its displaying dimension, indicative before becoming a representation and before the objectification and crystallization of the senses that it carries and keeps. There is a need for language therapy.

Appropriation of tradition

In this process, there is a challenge for the human being to be rediscovered as Dasein, who exists, experiences, thinks and acts based on himself and allows others, the world and things to also be themselves. Extrapolating the tendency to exist solely from the everyday impersonal and, therefore, from the shared comprehensive and explanatory horizon and kept in the shared language, there is the challenge of letting things be themselves, within and from the resources that tradition offers us, but now with the appropriation of these. Heidegger intends “a ‘creative appropriation’ of our philosophical heritage, mainly Greek, freeing it from what prevents us from accessing the truth of its past and confronting it” (Blanc, 2015, p. 66). Appropriation implies a personal confrontation with what we are made of: from tradition. Not to deny or naturally accept, but to release the creative possibilities that lie hidden within it.

The slack and fallen generation that Heidegger talks about in On the Way to Language can be overcome in favor of withdrawing from incessant dispersion and distraction. A movement that seeks intimacy and connection that increasingly disappear due to impersonality and absorption in everyday life (Trawny, 2013).

The thinker (and also the therapist) is someone who puts himself in a movement of crossing and meditation on the sayings that hide their origin and, therefore, exercises a serene and attentive listening to what appears. In addition to the determined knowledge that the therapist carries with him in the theories with which human beings and their health think, he also cultivates the openness that the silence resulting from deconstruction and appropriation provides. But the trend of everyday life is that we become consumers, reproducers and explainers of the brilliant intuitions and experiences of men and women of the past, but without our having a word of our own.

We receive and reproduce what we inherit, with small modifications and adjustments. We lack sensitivity and disposition to create, not out of temper or rebellion, but out of genius, as we see in the great formulators of theories and practices in the tradition. We usually live and think from them, from the past, and we do not cultivate the disposition to welcome, think and create based on what comes to us in each moment and event. We tend not to speak from what happens here and now, but from the accumulated knowledge that we inherited from thinkers and researchers of the past.

The available formulations and methods end up in plastering us and becoming our implicit or explicit certainties. Thus, “every formulation is dangerous. It constrains saying, reducing it to the exteriority of a hasty opinion and easily undermining the slowness of thought” (Heidegger, 2012, p. 69). The daily urgency and immediacy end up suffocating thought. The operation that calculates, handles available elements, adjusting, combining, separating and classifying becomes more comfortable and reliable. Thinking, however, is slow and silent. There is in Heidegger the emphasis on freeing thought from calculus, which operates without concomitant consideration of what we already know and what is shown to us in research or in the therapeutic relationship here and now.

In the human sciences we also tend to do calculations. We operate with what we know and apply it to what comes to us from the future. Heidegger writes in Being and Time, that in everyday life “the possibilities available have been limited beforehand to the scope of the known, accessible, tolerable, of what one should and usually do” (Heidegger, 1998, p. 216). In psychology a number of theories, techniques and methods are available, which are applied independently of the meditation on the difference that always arises and insinuates itself in each person, encounter, phenomenon or thing.

In order not to succumb to the temptation of security provided by the attachment to what we already know and do, of controlling reality and uninterrupted objectification, Heidegger (1999) claims the freedom of the attitude of “saying ‘yes’ to the inevitable use of technical objects and [...] at the same time saying ‘no’, preventing them from absorbing us” (p. 26), which results from a slow and tireless thinking, attentive and responsible, which seeks the roots and the ground where things rest, always before the separations and objectifications.

An “effort to transform man, and with it, the inherited metaphysics, into a more original Dasein” is expressed here (Heidegger, 2011, p. 401). The being of the human being, his Dasein, this original and establishing experience, is not something that can be determined, apprehended and made available as a thing, as a theory, as a technique or method. We can, however, set out on the path, open to what we do not know in advance, to what cannot be obtained and determined, but which can only always be prepared, thinks Heidegger (2011). The care and attention that can arise in this disposition alert us “to the impossibility of making ourselves an object according to the limits and criteria of any theoretical and methodological framework” (Seibt, 2015, p. 204). We are not essentially determinations or substances, but we are care and possibility.

Final considerations

As we have shown, Heidegger’s thought is one of being on the way, in which it is important to recover the capacity to continue experiencing the origin of the load of tradition that has lost its vigor and vitality in the linguistic representations and structures that we create. This path is characterized by the deconstruction of theoretical and practical crystallizations with which we are involved and which are the lenses through which we understand ourselves and the world. In Heidegger’s thought there is a constant concern “with the shaking of devitalized habits, with the rupture of incrusted realities” (Trawny, 2013, p. 46).

We are facing a persistent and radical work of perforating reality in the direction of possibility; from tradition crystallized towards its sources; of conceptual representations to happen. It is the relearning of the child’s natural attitude, the attitude that is always close to what is experienced because it is not loaded and saturated with previous knowledge and actions. A relearning of the possibility of experiencing things beyond objectivity, the available, the present. An attitude in which assumptions, the understanding that organizes and gives meaning to the world, are not forgotten in the movement of experiencing entities, human phenomena, the human being as human. An opening for dialogue and against the monologue (Gadamer, 2011), where the ‘other’ is authorized to be himself from within. It is, therefore, necessary to exercise acceptance and listening to what is withdrawn, what is left over or refuses in the calculation we make with the available knowledge.

Instead of substance, the human being is existence, which has itself in charge. The measures of normality and illness, of maturity and immaturity are brought back to their roots and appear in a new light: they are inserted in the creative flow and at the same time that determines the reality of what we call human beings. If “[...] Man is born possibility and not determination” (Sodelli&Sodelli-Teodoro, 2011, p. 249), determinations can be illuminated in an unusual way by returning to the experience of being and of our origin. The daily involvement with entities (and the determinations of the human being and of reality) goes through a new experience, through a therapy that expands and deconstructs immobility and universalizations. Disposition for the unpredictable and unusual of each moment is prepared.

The deconstruction of metaphysics, which passes through existential analytics (movement towards the original understanding of the human being), is like a therapy of the situation, the horizon, the conditions in which we always find ourselves, as beings-in-the-world. We are born, we grow, we think and we become what we are from a heritage that has been slowly and gradually gestated throughout history. This heritage offers certain possibilities and closes others, just as it happens with each cultural universe. When looking for the roots and sources of this world, an opening process takes place that is therapeutic, freeing from determinism and conditioning. Guignon writes:

While inauthentic Dasein drifts, following the latest fashions, authentic Dasein ‘remembers’ its roots in the broad unfolding of its culture, and experiences its life as if it were indebted to the broad drama of a shared history (Guignon, 1998, p. 254).

Psychological therapies are based on this ‘shared history’, ‘paradigm’, a certain understanding of being, which has become largely predominant in the West, and which reduces its reach to the sphere of being and closes itself to the future, because it is disconnected from its roots, provenance and, with that, is lost in the midst of the present reality. Accompanying Heidegger in this exercise can be a therapeutic and liberating experience, which restores responsibility and uniqueness to the human being and authenticity to techniques and theories. A work that has the potential to regain the ability to think, feel, exist and act based on the temporal opening of each person, and that prepares the willingness to welcome the unusual and unpredictable.

It is a therapeutic process that requires, as we have indicated, a work with language, of deconstructing the crystallizations of the senses, which opens up to the sources of concepts and theories. Language is the medium where our access to the world takes place and is guarded. It is within language, with the appropriation of a certain language, that we have access to a world (we are being-in-the-world). But the world that opens up in a certain language, with its senses, logic and grammar, offers access to a certain reality and closes to others. Therefore, “the linguistic exploration, basically etymological, constitutes the access path of understanding what is shown in the immediacy of its showing itself” (Duarte, 2017, p. 20).

The return to the founding experiences, to our origin, is a therapy of the human condition and, therefore, a work with the senses crystallized in the language and in the understandings that this language carries, a therapy of the comprehensive universe that shelters us and in which we tend to house ourselves (everyday), and from which we understand, measure, classify, judge everything that happens to us and to the world. A therapy of explanations or ‘rationalizations’ with which we understand and act, with which we access the world, other people and ourselves.

In the case of Heidegger’s thinking, we have a therapy that does not contribute to adjustment or partial reforms within reality, but that aims to develop an attitude in which one lives from ‘care’ (Sorge), which frees each one to himself, to his autonomy, freedom and responsibility. Based on ownership and authenticity, the ‘other’ is also freed for its own possibilities. Free from the need for control and predictability, relationships with oneself, with others and with the world become an emancipatory and constantly enriching experience, although always accompanied by ‘anguish’ in relation to what constantly escapes and refuses, from our finite condition.

A new theory or technique, more precise and true, does not result from deconstruction. Recovering the provenance and originality of the human being allows the development of the willingness and sensitivity to accept the character of the project of existence and the world in which it takes place.

The fundamental ontology and every effort to deconstruct metaphysics constitutes a dive into the comprehensive universe in which we live, not to destroy it, but to rediscover and place oneself close to the beginning, so that we can always act creatively again and not automatically repeat. It is a “hermeneutically formed consciousness” (Gadamer, 2011, p. 76), open and receptive to otherness.

Heidegger’s philosophy intends to remove from the shadows the image of the human being of tradition, always presupposed in our dealings with objects and events in the world. Its phenomenological presentation or description of existence dilutes this image in the sense of substance, endowed with certain objective and essential qualities that allow the establishment of an ahistorical measurement parameter for their behavior.

We inhabit object-level (ontic) descriptions and explanations, and we normally expect this also from the authors we study; to help us solve the ‘working’ problems at the object level. Heidegger’s thinking moves, however, at the level of conditions of possibility (ontological), not describing objects or realities, but uncovering the possible being (not the real being) that hides behind instituted realities. His work is not a punctual answer to our objective problems, of the ontic universe, but an extension of the horizon of objects to ‘space’ that opens up the possibility of objects and substantializations. Accompanying his thinking, therefore, makes possible a fundamental therapy, in which the problem is not the objects, but the fact that the objects are something, this or that, these objects and not others. After all, the fact that something is something.

It is not a therapy for specific problems, but it has the potential to make it possible to re-experience the problem as a problem, from the proximity to ontological difference, the very experience of being able to experience objects. Therefore, it does not offer a new therapy. But the possibility of always and continuously rethinking our anthropological and epistemological assumptions, the conditions that shape our therapeutic or pedagogical theories and practices. It offers us the experience of dismantling, deconstructing the world where we are what we are and do what we do.

Instead of gathering more theoretical material to support the project of a world in force and predominance, it leads to diving into it in order to appropriate it and, in this way, gain autonomy and independence. Heidegger offers the opportunity to lighten the burden of tradition that determines our relationship with the world, with things and with ourselves. He suggests the development of the capacity to letting-be (Sein-lassen) with serenity (Gelassenheit), as opposed to the tendency to exert ever greater and unrestricted control and dominion over everything.

The deconstruction of metaphysics, through the path of fundamental ontology that asks again about the meaning of being that had been forgotten and buried in the evidence and clarity of our knowledge and practices, and which goes through the analysis of human existence as the place where being finds its manifestation, can constitute a path to a therapy of the human condition in the world, a return to the forgotten home. Not a therapy that corrects and tranquilizes the unique individual within the project of humanity we share, but a therapy of the very project of humanity that constitutes our being as a Dasein, human beings situated, rooted and involved in a finite project.

We suggest, therefore, the appropriation of Heidegger’s meditation as a therapeutic possibility for the sciences of specific (ontic) realities. But this therapy does not consist of specific methodologies or instruments for specific cases, but a perforation of the ‘place’ where we find ourselves when we research, think, take care of each other and seek solutions to problems. It is not an objective description of a path or another posture in relation to an object or issue, but the development of an open and receptive attitude towards things, beyond the theoretical-practical framework in which we always find ourselves and that guides our access to the phenomena of the world, whether they are pathologies, the human being, the objects we deal with. A phenomenological posture or therapy that is a constant preparation to accept things as they are offered, without automatically sacrificing them from unquestioned presuppositions; an incessant preparation, without ever reaching a new definitive objective determination in relation to the phenomenon in question for us.

Referências

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Mar 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  22 Apr 2019
• Accepted
  27 Mar 2021