Heidegger, Renaud Barbaras, And The Phenomenology Of Desire

The interplay between presence and absence has always been an important theme in phenomenology, especially in the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. This interplay has also been an important topic in other strands of philosophy, notably the ones that take Hegelian dialectics as their point of departure, fostering a particular understanding of (human) life as subjectivity; a subject whose life is moved by virtue of desire: desire to perceive, to understand and/or to incorporate the external object. As such, desire betrays a being that is finite, insufficient and incomplete. It is a subject characterized by lack.

It is generally considered that Heidegger doesn't have an account of desire . It is assumed that the notion of desire is ignored by Heidegger, because it is historically tied up with subjectivity and thus doesn't fit his existential analytic of Dasein. Instead of desire, we have an account of mood [Stimmung]. Whenever we look for the way factical Dasein moves and discloses presence and absence on the pre-reflective level, we encounter Angst.

In this paper I have two modest aims: Firstly, I will try to present some of the main arguments of the contemporary French phenomenologist, Renaud Barbaras (Sorbonne), who tries to articulate a phenomenology of desire. The prospect is to try to bring Barbaras in fruitful dialogue with the young Heidegger, because I am of the opinion that at some point Heidegger did what Barbaras tries to do today. The philosophical problems that inform Barbaras's phenomenology pose a possible entry point into raising some questions and trying to attain a better understanding of some early Heideggerian notions.

Secondly, I want to show how the notion of desire does figure in young Heidegger's phenomenology of life, especially in his early Freiburg lectures. I cannot provide an exhaustive account in the space provided, but I will at least frame the issue in a way that would open up the way for a future more detailed analysis of this topic. The young Heidegger considered phenomenological (i.e. Husserlian) intentionality to be based on the neo-Aristotelian, scholastic, notion of desire [??????], taking the phenomenological account of desire and intentionality even further through the phenomena of tendency [Tendenz] and motivation [Motivation] in life. Indeed, some of these early Heideggerian notions are in some respects abandoned, and thus the said conceptual framework belongs to an early Holzweg. But that does not necessarily discredit the arguments of this paper.

Renaud Barbaras: Life, Movement, and Desire

Most of Barbaras' work on desire is as yet untranslated but from the few that have been translated into English we can gather what he demands from a phenomenology of desire. I will present here some of the main arguments he makes in his 2008 essay 'Life, Movement, and Desire'.

Barbaras wants to rethink the unity and accomplishment of life, in terms of desire. Or, we can also say it the other way around: he wants to rethink desire from within the manifest unity of the accomplishment of life. That involves both a renewed understanding of life as well as of desire, aiming at a renewed understanding of vital movement. He wants to articulate a unity in life that overcomes a strict opposition between "life" and "interiority" on the one hand, and "non-life", "exteriority" and "lack", on the other. He wants to articulate exteriority as an absence towards which life strives, rather than absence that is a lack out of which life comes, and in relation to which life is (heterogeneously) defined.

Barbaras wants to define vital movement on the basis of its own self, of its own accord, and not from external phenomena that reduce life to categories that are foreign to life. He credits Jonas for being sensitive to the problem of defining vital movement, but he finds Jonas' definition of life as self-preservation to be problematic because in this manner life is not thought on the basis of itself but on the basis of its opposite: the negation that is death. The negation of absence. By defining the movement of life as metabolism, as self-preservation, one still understands life as a subject that is moved on the basis of seeking to satisfy its needs, and thus keeps movement and life apart. According to Barbaras, Heidegger's definition of life also falls prey to this problem, as it is attached to a constant threat of destruction: life is defined in terms of death, instead of on its own accord.

Barbaras insistently asks: "Why must the vitality of life be understood in terms of what threatens it rather than as a dynamism of its own?" This needs to be reversed, he says: "In truth, only a being that is originally capable of moving itself, that is essentially movement, is able to act to satisfy its needs", writes Barbaras.

Thinking of life as the negation of death fails to grasp the unity and continuity of vital movement. By grasping movement in terms of desire as desire for self-preservation presupposes a kind of "interiority" and "subjectivity" that is able to feel frustration or satisfaction.

Barbaras invites us to grasp life as accomplishment, not preservation. But accomplishment doesn't mean completeness or totality. Accomplishment is a kind of unity that still maintains the hiatus in movement. He wants us to acknowledge this primary unity of living beyond active and passive, while still recognizing that thought is continually torn apart by this ambiguity. This original ambiguity is inherent in the very word "life", he says: "to live" in French, designates both "being alive" (Leben) and the feeling or experience of something (Erleben). This linguistic ambiguity within this single word is not accidental: rather it poses a fundamental problem that we need to address, as it marks a schism in life itself.

This hiatus directs us towards desire: "If there is a genuine unity of life, it must take root in a third kind of being, the ignorance of which leads inescapably to the schism of the living being and lived experience". The linguistic ambiguity that is set up and expressed in language, between "objective living being" and "lived experience" has a third alternative in "movement", which is what is realized in life. Barbaras urges us to see movement not as "displacement" but as "realization".

But how is movement realized? How is its unity accomplished? Aristotle and Hegel assume that the unity of movement is realized by a subject that is able to sum up the parts into a totality. Barbaras tries to distance himself from Aristotle and Hegel in how this unity is grasped in the first place: "Living movement should be interpreted as ontogenetic movement, which does not receive its unity from a substrate, that is, from the living being, but which constitutes its own unity and, in doing so, constitutes the unity of the living being".

But for Barbaras "unity" and "accomplishment" is not "completeness" or a "totality". While Barbaras sees a unity in life, he also sees a fundamental incompleteness at the heart of the living being, one that is always already there and cannot be fulfilled or satisfied by momentary achievements.

Vital movement is desire which "cannot enclose itself [.] because that to which it relates cannot totalize itself from the start. Life's temporal openness refers to the unrepresentable or non-totalizable character of that toward which life advances".

Finally, Barbaras points at a crucial operation that desire, the fundamental character of life, affords. Life does not strive for satisfaction but rather for manifestation. In Barbaras' own words: "Life is the tendency to presentation".

The Young Heidegger on tendency, motivation, and the actualization/enactment of life

I disagree with the view that Heidegger does not have an account of desire, and I also disagree with Barbaras' assumption (following Jonas) that Heidegger's definition of life is attached to a constant threat of destruction, defined in terms of death. That is true for the Heidegger of the middle and late period, but not of the early-Freiburg Heidegger. In the remaining space I have, I will point out three things: firstly, the moments when desire expressly figures in early Heidegger; secondly, how the young Heidegger makes almost exactly the same demands that Barbaras makes today, for a phenomenology of life that lets life show its fundamental character out of itself (rather than mediating its definition through its opposite). Finally, I will point out how Heidegger's notions of tendency and motivation denote a phenomenon that encompasses what Barbaras calls desire, and in that context is also aligned with Barbaras' demands for an account of vital movement as a) unified, non-totalizable and incomplete, and b) as accomplishment of manifestation.

The most important occurrence of the term "desire" in Heidegger's entire corpus, is probably a direct reference to desire which he makes in the Summer Semester of 1923, during the lecture course Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. There he says that the notion of intentionality [Intentionalität] that Husserl inherits from Brentano, ultimately leads back to the medieval conception of directed consciousness, itself derived from Aristotelian ?????? (desire).

Heidegger's early project involved the radicalization of the notion of intentionality so as to uncover the deeper ground that constitutes the unity of intentional life, at the pre-theoretical level. In this context, he tried to capture in a non-theoretical way that which supplies the impetus of the directionality of intentional life. If we see Heidegger's early work in this way, then we can already contextualize his comment on desire and intentionality and his later affective turn. Going even further back in time to the Winter Semester of 1920-21 in which Heidegger taught his now well-known lecture course on The Phenomenology of Religious Life, we see how Heidegger sees in Augustine a phenomenological account that considers desire as one of the forms of temptation, tentatio, "not in a biological-psychological and theoretical attitude, but according to the characteristics of the how he has factically experienced it". For Augustine, "life is really nothing but a constant temptation". It is important to note that Heidegger reads Augustine here as a phenomenologist.

We also discover that Heidegger, during that course, identified Augustine's notion of temptation [tentatio] with his own phenomenological notion of tendency [Tendenz]. Temptation is defined by Heidegger as tendency. This is explicitly associated with desire. Temptation, or tendency, is the fundamental character of life, with desire being one way in which this fundamental character manifests itself. But how does Heidegger himself define his notion of tendency [Tendenz] and where can we find an account for it? We find it mostly in his Winter Semester of 1919-20 lecture course titled Basic Problems of Phenomenology.

In that lecture course, Heidegger tried to define the "subject matter" of phenomenology, trying to take Husserlian analysis further than Husserl himself did, and especially trying to articulate what distinguishes phenomenology from contemporaneous neo-Kantian strands of philosophy. Heidegger defines phenomenology as "original science", the science of the absolute origin of the spirit in and for itself - 'life in and for itself', a science that must ruthlessly reject "every attempt to place itself outside of the vital return to the origin and the vital emergence out of it".

The sphere of phenomenology is defined as the "presentation" or "givenness" [Gegebenheit]" of life. Heidegger calls our attention to the "genuine, concrete realization and the actualization [Vollzug]" of life. The demands made by Heidegger in this lecture are similarly worded to those of Barbaras. Heidegger also asks that life be thought not on the basis of the biological disciplines, but rather approached anew on the basis of its own character so as to allow new forms of manifestation and expression to be understood from out of themselves. Heidegger himself also begins by noting an ambiguity in the word "experience", whereby the substantive designation names both the experience itself but also that which is intentionally encountered.

Heidegger begins by (epistemologically) prioritizing the actualization/enactment [Vollzug] of life. In my opinion, Heidegger's usage of the word Vollzug, does not essentially differ from Barbaras' notion of "accomplishment" and "realization". Intentional life is enactment. Heidegger takes the fulfillment that comes with intentional givenness (i.e. the fact that a being can "intend" an object or a World) as the accomplishment of life that shows that life has a certain "self-sufficiency" [Selbst-Genügsamkeit].

Heidegger defines "self-sufficiency" as the form of intentional fulfillment, it is the form that achieves directionality towards transcendence. This self-sufficiency is what Heidegger also calls the "in-itself of life" which is so invariable in its types that is also includes what we take as "the exact opposite of the self-sufficiency of life".

According to Heidegger, the self-sufficiency of life, is not a structural "overcoming" of life, but it is the tendency of life towards fulfillment from within life itself. Self-sufficiency is thus a direction of life in itself characterized in such a way that it takes its motivation from its own factical flow. As such, I think it is safe to discern that self-sufficiency is an expression of life. We can rephrase it thus: life is a tendency towards fulfillment, towards enactment, towards actualization, whose motivation lies within life itself.

It is important to note two things here: firstly, that life is not exhausted by self-sufficiency. Life has the tendency to fulfill itself and self-sufficiency is the form of intentional fulfillment, but this is still motivated by tendency. Secondly, Heidegger provides us here with a definition of the movement of life that is not heterogeneous: it is not grasped in relation to death or non-life; rather, it is grasped from within itself, but without being reduced to a solipsistic or subjectivistic, but it is attached to "selfhood".

In Heidegger's own words:

"[Life] itself poses tasks and demands to itself that always remain solely in its own sphere, so that it seeks to overcome its limitations, its imperfections, to fill out the perspectives [ergebenden Perspektiven auszufüllen] arising within it, again and again, only "in" the basic character that is prefigured by its ownmost self-sufficiency and its forms and the means derived from them".

The fulfillment of self-sufficiency is never final, says Heidegger, since the tendency-character of life "unleashes ever-new starting goals, and from there, manifolds of motives and motivations are brought into effect". Life's self-sufficiency is how the motivation of new tendencies manage to fulfill themselves. Self-sufficiency is the basic character of the "self-world" [Selbstwelt]. In my opinion, the Heideggerian notion of self-sufficiency could mean what Barbaras means by (a non-totalizing) unity and accomplishment in life.

Further on, we can see how tendency works for Heidegger here, and whether it covers what Barbaras means by desire. Heidegger identifies tendency [Tendenz] and motivation [Motivation] as the basic structure of factical life. Even though Heidegger does not achieve full clarity about tendency and motivation, he gives us some crucial insights. Firstly, he identifies tendency and motivation as the structures that constitute the ground of experience, the so-called "naked homogeneity" [nackten Gleichartigkeit]. This does not mean that tendency is something that is self-identical, stable and always present since Heidegger acknowledges a plurality of competing tendencies.

Tendency accounts for the development of "stability" in our relations, as well as for "the new" that we may encounter. Tendency is that which gives direction, either explicitly, consciously posited, or even when it "sneaks up on us" [sic.]. And just like there are many directions in life, so there is a multiplicity of tendencies in life, in the things we encounter.

I don't think that tendency can be either reduced to a substratum, a substance or a subject, an ??????????? that is present, or reduced to absence. As I mentioned earlier, there is a plurality of them, that accounts for manifestation as well as destruction/absence. It is through tendency that something new becomes available, by an exchange of one tendency for another, and it is through tendency that an interruption of the habitus of the self-world takes place (habitus here denoting developed habits, i.e. tendencies that have become stable and have created a certain "structure of everydayness").

Heidegger seems to use tendency and motivation interchangeably, but if we look more carefully and pick out the precarious distinction between the two. Enactment, actuality, emerges out of motives. Motivation is the "coming-from" [Herkommen] in life. On the contrary, tendency refers to the "going-forth" [Fortgehen] and the "inclination-toward" that exists in life. Tendency and motivation are understood relationally, i.e. they should not be understood as two objects but as two modes of relating, and they can also exchange their functions, or their functions can coincide, so that a tendency can become a motivation and vice versa.

Finally, tendency and motivation are what establish manifestation [Bekundung]. Heidegger says that tendency and motivation are behind the phenomenon of "taking-notice" [Kenntnisnehmen]. They are the structure that provides the "directional force" behind the intentional phenomenon. Heidegger also draws a connection between manifestation and self-sufficiency: manifestation is that which self-sufficiency means and achieves. I believe that this relation between tendency and motivation and manifestation in Heidegger, already points in the direction that Barbaras wants to go when he argues that life does not strive for satisfaction but rather for manifestation and in that context appeals for a reconfiguration of desire in terms of a "tendency to presentation".

Concluding Remarks

In conclusion, it should be said that it is rather impossible to achieve full clarity on how Heidegger understood these notions, especially since he never provided a full systematic exposition of them, and since he later abandoned them. It is also impossible to establish a real-life dialogue between Heidegger and Barbaras. But I think it is worth establishing the dialogue for two reasons: firstly, because it would enable us to take up the notion of desire and share Barbaras' current concerns. And secondly, because it reveals an aspect of Heidegger's thought that st