Goethestein posted:
phenomenology, the study of phenomena, is also known as empiricism. hth (hope this helps)

Ok, this is an excellent place to try to delimit it.

The reason that I listed Franz Brentano is that he was Husserl's mentor. He was so into empiricism that he broke it at its joints, leading Husserl to give birth to phenomenology and explode its entire structure.

Brentano was an admirer of David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Ernst Mach, and Auguste Comte. Besides Husserl, he also taught Freud, the founder of Gestalt psychology, and a guy named Carl Stumpf. I'll briefly digress about Stumpf.

After Darwin's Origin of Species was published, there was a frenzy of interest in animal intelligence. One of these animals was a horse named Clever Hans, who appeared to be very skilled at mathematics. This attracted enough attention to create a commission headed by Stumpf to investigate the claims. Stumpf's assistant figured out what was going on and wrote it up here for anyone who's interested (no, the horse could not do math). I'll come back to Clever Hans later to transition from Brentano to Husserl

So yeah, the early days of psychology were not particularly pretty, which brings us back to Brentano. Brentano was committed to creating an "empirical psychology" that only drew inferences from what he called inner perception. How exactly this was supposed to work involved reading Aristotle as the first empiricist, attempting to reform his system of logic, and a really bizarre doctrine known as reism.

One of the things he did accomplish was to provide a useful frame of reference for how we think of the "mind" if it is somehow different from the brain.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/brentano.htm

In modern terminology the word "soul" refers to the substantial bearer of presentations and other activities which are based upon presentations and which, like presentations, are only perceivable through inner perception. Thus we usually call soul the substance which has sensations such as fantasy images, acts of memory, acts of hope or fear, desire or aversion.

We, too, use the word "soul" in this sense. In spite of the modification in the concept, then, there seems to be nothing to prevent us from defining psychology in the terms in which Aristotle once defined it, namely as the science of the soul. So it appears that just as the natural sciences study the properties and laws of physical bodies, which are the objects of our external perception, psychology is the science which studies the properties and laws of the soul, which we discover within ourselves directly by means of inner perception, and which we infer, by analogy, to exist in others.

There's an interesting parallel with eliminative materialism here.

Daniel Dennett posted:
Suppose evil scientists removed your brain from your body while you slept, and set it up in a life-support system in a vat. Suppose they then set out to trick you into believing that you were not just a brain in a vat, but still up and about, engaging in a normally embodied round of activities in the real world.

He then admits that this was a "modern-day version" of Descartes's thought experiment with an evil diety. He changed "diety" to some anonymous "scientist" and the diety's magical powers to this device:

The idea of the brain in the vat is a vivid way of exploring these questions, but I want to put the old saw to another use. I want to use it to uncover some curious facts about hallucinations, which in turn will lead us to the beginnings of a theory—an empirical, scientifically respectable theory—of human consciousness.

He concedes that actually doing this is only "possible in principle" which is a strange standard for empiricism. Brentano makes a similar argument in the link above about the immortality of the soul as a basis for his empirical psychology. Whether or not this is a mere coincidence is a question for phenomenology. I'll borrow Wittgenstein for a sec and then return to Dennett "explaining consciousness"

Wittgenstein posted:
....because we cannot specify any one bodily action which we call pointing to the shape (as opposed, for example, to the colour), we say that a spiritual activity corresponds to these words.

"Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit."

And Dennett:



Notice that the spirit haunting our computer is looking at a Necker cube as though it were three-dimensional and there are only coordinates on the side facing us. See Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction by Derrida. I'll connect Dennett back to Clever Hans and then move from Brentano to Husserl in my next post.

Edited by dm (Jan. 24, 2012 06:30:43)

mistersix posted:
Here's another good series of youtubes with Dreyfus covering mostly Heidegger, several people here have already seen it but its a good overview.

is being-in-the-world written like how dreyfus is speaking here? everything dreyfus was talking about made so much sense to me. also why don't marxists like later heidegger? isn't historicising his own understanding of being profoundly internationalist and materialist?!?!

aerdil posted:
im gonna take dm to a harvard bar where he can tell off some first year grad student regurgitating gordon wood

it is in my horizon of future possibilities:

Heidegger posted:
To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces. But in going through spaces we do not give up our standing in them. Rather, we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there.

you're reading Marcuse atm, right? Marcuse studied under Heidegger from 1929-1932. you can see the influence on him in his writings. Marcuse contacted him after the war and it didn't go well: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/40spubs/47MarcuseHeidegger.htm

shennong posted:

mistersix posted:
Here's another good series of youtubes with Dreyfus covering mostly Heidegger, several people here have already seen it but its a good overview.

is being-in-the-world written like how dreyfus is speaking here? everything dreyfus was talking about made so much sense to me. also why don't marxists like later heidegger? isn't historicising his own understanding of being profoundly internationalist and materialist?!?!

see the link with Marcuse above. Heidegger is very problematic in a number of ways (also see Badiou here). Badiou does some interesting stuff with in Being and Event.

Moran (p.436-437) posted:
Since Derrida portrays himself as having gone beyond both phenomenology and philosophy, it might be argued that his oeuvre ought not to be treated under the rubric of phenomenology or even philosophy at all. But Derrida's path beyond philosophy is essentially a route which went through phenomenology. He began his philosophical career rather conventionally as a student of Husserlian phenomenology, writing a number of close, critical studies of both the Logical Investigations and The Origin of Geometry. In these essays, Derrida sought to expose the hidden metaphysical presuppositions of traditional Husserlian phenomenology, which, in his view, far from being a presuppositionless science, actually belonged the history of metaphysics. Indeed, Husserlian phenomenology, with its commitment to self-identical ideal truths, remains, for Derrida, trapped in "the metaphysics of presence in the form of ideality". Derrida's critique, however, does not constitute a complete abandonment of the phenomenological mode of enquiry, rather he wants to liberate phenomenology from its attachment to the very metaphysical standpoint it claims to have overcome, seeking to get beyond phenomenology's addiction to the intuition of presence. In effect, Derrida is 'deconstructing' phenomenology.

During his university studies, he actually went to the Husserl archives. His thesis was The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, which remained unpublished until 1990.

p.437-438 posted:
In this early work, Derrida shows himself to be well grounded in Husserl's texts, and also to have been strongly influenced by the French philosopher Jean Cavaillès, and the Vietnamese phenomenologist and Marxist Tran-Duc-Thao. In his Preface, Derrida examines Husserl's oppositions (e.g. eidetic/empirical; transcendental/worldly; original/derived; pure/impure; genetic/constitutive) arguing that Husserl ignored the manner in which these oppositions in fact enter in some kind of 'dialectic', and, as Derrida says, 'contaminate' each another.

And then here we go on the Origins of Geometry that I posted above lmao

p.438 posted:
In 1956–1957 he visited Harvard on a scholarship, with the pretext of studying some manuscripts of Husserl but actually read James Joyce's Ulysses in earnest (allusions to Joyce's attempts to escape history turn up in Derrida's introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry). Indeed, Derrida's later embrace of the double affirmative ('yes, yes') is a conscious reference to Molly Bloom's speech at the end of Ulysses, and Derrida has even called Joyce's work "a great landmark in the history of deconstruction".

He was also an assistant to Paul Ricoeur, who I'm reading right now.

p. 438-439 posted:
In 1964 Derrida was invited by Hyppolite and Althusser to lecture at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In that year also, he published the first of his essays on Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics", in the Revue de Métaphy-sique et de Morale (reprinted in 1967 in Writing and Difference). This important essay, a major review of Levinas's publications, played a role in highlighting Levinas's work. Derrida criticises Levinas's interpretation of Heidegger's concept of Being but is drawn to Levinas's notions of eschatological history, and his conception of ontology as inescapably wedded to violence and war.

On Heidegger:

p. 443-444 posted:
As part of this turn towards the political, since the late 1980s, and especially in response to the publication of Victor Farias's book on Heidegger, Derrida has also attempted to understand and evaluate Heidegger's political commitment to National Socialism. In De l'esprit (Of Spirit) Derrida approaches Heidegger's politics indirectly through an examination of the ambiguous role of the term Geist ('spirit') in Heidegger's writings of the 1930s, arguing that Heidegger's fatal connection with Nazism came through his commitment to metaphysics and voluntarism. Whereas Heidegger was initially cautious in his employment of the 'spirit' in Being and Time, he later adopts the term in his Rektoratsrede of the 1930s in an uncritical and dangerous way.

And on Derrida wrt phenomenology:

p. 444 posted:
To understand Derrida it is necessary to understand his rather restricted conception of the nature of philosophy. Derrida belongs to the second generation of French phenomenologists, a phenomenology which had already been transformed into a French philosophical outlook by Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. Derrida himself emerged on the French philosophical scene at a time when the structuralist movement, and especially Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault were in the ascendant, and the elderly Sartre and existentialism were already passé. Influenced by the rather special sense of philosophy dominant in France in the 1950s and 1960s, Derrida understands philosophy primarily in terms of the contributions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and contemporary French theorists (Lacan, Bataille, Foucault). Philosophy as such can be summarised by the triad Hegel-Husserl-Heidegger. As Derrida has remarked: "My philosophical formation owes much to the thought of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger". Probably because of the influence of Jean Hyppolite, Derrida thinks of philosophy as exemplified in Hegel's system of absolute knowledge. To interrogate the meaning of philosophy, therefore, is to confront Hegel.

Hegel begins to take on a more important role in France. Though I think I can recognize some influence in Heidegger (and the explicit references), he calls dialectics a "genuine embarrassment" in B&T. This Hegel-Husserl-Heidegger triad is also evident in Merleau-Ponty and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Ricoeur.

babyfinland posted:
http://www.amiscorbin.com/textes/anglais/interviewnemo.htm

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to go over there. Heidegger fused hermeneutics with phenomenology and brought it back to philosophy in general after it had remained exclusively in theology for a while. His student and friend, Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as Paul Ricoeur did a lot there as well. I noticed that David Graeber actually cites Gadamer's Truth and Method in his book on debt the other day.

Heidegger began his studies as a (Catholic) theology student influenced by Aristotle and Neo-Thomism. While studying that, he read Husserl's Logical Investigations and eventually ended up studying logic and mathematics. From there, he moved to philosophy and connected with Husserl in 1916.

Edited by dm (Jan. 29, 2012 09:45:39)

dm posted:
I've gotta think about how to get to less technical stuff.

Ok, this is kind of a pain, but there's some stuff to go over with Aristotle that matters a lot. It's actually at the center of a lot of the stuff I've been alluding to about "mind stuff" and will be helpful for understanding Husserl, and particularly Heidegger.

The tricky issue with Aristotle is the notion of substance, especially in relation to change and matter. "Prime matter" is produced by the interaction of substance and change. The world is made up of substances. Substances are generally things you find in the subjects of sentences. Substances have "accidents" (which we would now call properties) that are referred to by the predicate of a sentence.

A substance is both form (essence) and matter. Form dominates because it determines what something is, while matter just gives you properties. Substances goes under two forms of change: 1) alteration, which is its coming to be something and 2) coming to be (called a simpliciter). The former is becoming something else and the latter is coming to be in in terms of existence.

If someone dies, they cease to exist as a living person but they can still retain an identity since we can talk about people who are dead. This is where complications arise concerning the "mind" or "psyche" and similar things: "Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit."

Much of the mysteriousness attributed to subjectivity is a product of our language, culture, and the concepts we use to think and talk about it. A particularly extreme example: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/

There's an important set of human cognitive capacities first noticed by social psychologists and philosophers in the middle of last century (see for example Heider 1958 and Sellars 1956.) The members of this set of cognitive capacities are almost always assumed to be closely related, perhaps in virtue of their being produced by a single underlying cognitive mechanism. To a first approximation the set consists of—

The capacity to predict human behavior in a wide range of circumstances.
The capacity to attribute mental states to humans.
The capacity to explain the behavior of humans in terms of their possessing mental states.

(See for example Stich & Nichols 1992.) The second and third capacities are clearly related: explaining the behavior of humans in terms of their mental states involves attributing mental states to them. But we should not assume without further investigation that all mental state attributions take the form of explanations of behavior.

The characterization of mindreading given above is too restrictive. In addition to attributing mental states and predicting and explaining behavior, there is a wide range of closely related activities. To begin with, we not only seek to predict and explain people's behavior, we also seek to predict and explain their mental states. In addition, we speculate about, discuss, recall and evaluate both people's mental states and their behavior. We also speculate about, discuss, recall and evaluate people's dispositions to behave in certain ways and to have certain mental states; that is, we consider their character traits. It may be that these additional activities are grounded in the three capacities mentioned above, but we cannot simply assume that they are. Throughout this entry the term “mindreading” is used in a wide sense to include all of these activities.

(Hint)

More on Aristotle later.

Sometime in 1927 Husserl began work on an article he had been asked to contribute to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Eventually, in the Fourteenth Edition of 1929,"Phenomenology" was published over the name "E.Hu.," though this version was in fact a very free--and much distorted--abridged translation by Christopher V. Salmon of Husserl's much longer text. Husserl's own final draft of the article is of interest in itself as a rich, concise "introduction" to phenomenology, but for several decades now scholars have been drawn to "the Encyclopaedia Britannica article" not so much as a text, but as an episode in the history of phenomenology. For Husserl's initial work on the article seems roughly to have coincided with the publication of Heidegger's Being and Time in February 1927. Husserl, who had long considered Heidegger to be his most promising student and true heir of phenomenology, but who had recently been experiencing misgivings about the "unorthodox" direction of Heidegger's work, appears to have taken the occasion of the article as an opportunity to measure the distance between himself and Heidegger and, if necessary, to attempt a reconciliation. Thus he invited Heidegger to collaborate, and their mutual engagement yielded four drafts: Husserl's original, a second draft with an introduction completely written by Heidegger together with numerous marginal comments, a transitional third draft, and the final version which contained little trace of Heidegger's participation. The final version testifies to the collapse of the collaboration. finally, to speak of him (together with Scheler) as "my antipodes."

Edited by dm (Feb. 3, 2012 08:45:46)

dm posted:
If you look at a clock with a second hand for long enough to see it move faster than the minute hand ticks, that's basically it.

i can't visualise this at all, you mean like a minute hand that's stepped and as it ticks, the second hand is moving faster than the ticking minute hand? man im dumb

shennong posted:

dm posted:
If you look at a clock with a second hand for long enough to see it move faster than the minute hand ticks, that's basically it.

i can't visualise this at all, you mean like a minute hand that's stepped and as it ticks, the second hand is moving faster than the ticking minute hand? man im dumb

It wasn't a great example. Think of a single duration in which both move at different rates as you watch them directly for a little over a minute. The second hand moves at a faster rate than the minute hand even though they're both measuring the same thing. This is not to say that 60 seconds isn't a minute at the level of objective time, which you get drawn back into during ordinary daily activities.

Meursault posted:
It's weird the first time you realize that time is lke an invention, it's something being imposed on people... like why does Japan or Thailand or whereever have the same time as us? Probably because of war/capital

It's been going on longer than capital, but yeah basically successive way of imperialism.

This is why I contend that phenomenology is quite relevant. At least in most English speaking countries, we really fetishize subjectivity and refuse to admit it. Like it would make that whole leap second thing a lot easier to analyze:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16625614
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/science/the-leap-seconds-reprieve.html

I linked those two articles because the City of London and Wall Street are likely to disagree on this one (cf. David Harvey on the whole frontier of space-time thing and world-systems theory). The BBC is much more in favor of keeping it than the NYT:

BBC posted:
The leap second was introduced in 1972.

It was added to keep our modern timekeepers - atomic clocks, which rely on the vibrations in atoms to provide a very accurate measurement of time - in line with our slightly less reliable timekeeper, the Earth.

Because our planet wobbles a little on its axis as it spins, it means some days end up being a few milliseconds longer or shorter than others.

This means that over time, the time based on atomic clocks, and the time based on the Earth's rotation drift further and further apart.

When this difference is deemed by the International Earth Rotation Service, which monitors the Earth's activity, to be approximately 0.9 seconds, a leap second is added to pull the two back into sync.

Sometimes a leap second can be added every year, sometimes not for several, with six-months' notice provided before action needs to be taken.

Those who wanted to lose the leap second said that the one-second increments were becoming increasingly problematic for a vast range of modern navigational and communication systems, such as sat-nav, financial services, air traffic control and the internet.

These all rely on having a continuous and stable timescale, so adding a somewhat unpredictable, one-second increment can be disruptive.

The UK, though, says any problems are exaggerated - and that losing the leap second could cause long-term problems, as the time based on the atomic clocks and the time based on the Earth's rotation would move ever further apart.

Over decades, this would amount to a minute's difference, but over 500 years this could be an hour, and over thousands of years, the Sun could be setting when atomic clocks claim it is morning.

Time zones would also probably become irrelevant. This isn't terribly surprising since physics has been trying to come to terms with it for a long time, even if it continues to be somewhat thorny issue for some people.* The problem is even worse than the dichotomy they described above though. We experience days because the earth rotates around the sun but the earth also rotates on its own axis. Our earliest attempts to come to terms with this survive in the form of geometry and calenders

Now our experience of a day is very significant even if we want to organize significant aspects of our lives around the vibrations of atoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm

I'm not too sure on the details, but places like Alaska have really long days and nights at certain parts of the year and the light deprivation can cause problems as anyone with jet lag or a job with irregular shifts (esp. with significant night-time hours) can tell you. They have even given these problems the status of a psychological disorder in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

*The following exchange is from a D&D thread:

It's a mathematical model that makes wonderfully useful predictions. But what does Ψ represent? And I'm not talking about |ψ|2 which describes the probability where particles can be detected. What existing thing (if anything) does Ψ describe? The Copenhagen interpretation, well it basically answers that this way "quantum mechanics does not yield a description of an objective reality".

In other words the very criticism being leveled at psychoanalysis in this thread. The response "well it's useful" is basically all we can say about the standard model too. And it's another example of the issue right at the heart of things, the relationship of symbol to reality.

Two of the replies:

Actually the modern interpretations of quantum physics say that it represents the actual objective reality, |ψ|2 represents our perception of reality. It is important to remember that we, as perceivers, are made of ψ values.

I think you need to study QM from a scientific standpoint some more before using it in a philosophical/critical theory context. The wave equation Ψ has a clear physical meaning, established by the Copenhagen interpretation. It is the probability amplitude of a smeared electron. This physical description is necessitated by the attribution of |ψ|^2 as an electron's probability distribution, as the this quantity (for anything, not just electrons) is equal to the probability amplitude multiplied by its complex conjugate.

Most of the claims you see about how QM raises questions about causality are sensationalist at best, and often pseudoscience.

Oh hey, interpretation is a significant part of what hermeneutics is about! Not dealing with these issues just displaces them.

discipline posted:
Space and Time Studies own... if I got a PhD it would totally be in Geography (or as my old prof used to call it, Jigrafee)

It's weird because I can't tell precisely where these kinds of issues got discarded wrt pedagogy. If you ever take an anatomy class, for instance, you learn that the drawings in the textbooks are pretty much exactly the opposite of an engineering blueprint. The pictures are like ideal composites to highlight certain features and don't look a heck of a lot like their real counterparts. This is why cadavers are used for training. I'm quite glad that surgeons don't rely on how an official body interprets a symbol to know what they're doing when they operate.

shennong posted:
i am super interested in this if only because i find clock time seriously anxiety-inducing lol. its worth noting that groups like the inuit who live/hunt etc above the arctic circle and therefore experience the season-long day/night cycle basically were not subject to time discipline until recently. my father used to live up there in the 70s and even at that point many of the inuit didnt have any particular regard for clock time and thought of it as basically being silly/useless

You don't have to use it just because it's there. There are plenty of activities you carry out without using it (having a sense of the time is not the same as checking a clock). You also don't necessarily check timekeeping devices every time you're around them. So what do you do? That's what phenomenology is about.

This is where things will get a bit weird for a second.

It will be helpful to understand a concept usually referred to as a "state of affairs" in English. Husserl was drawing on this guy, but it's similar. It's significant that the work was influential on Cantor, who was a friend of Husserl's.

In English, its most basic form tends to be like "it is the case that ____" or "it is not the case that ____" where you fill in something that is, in standard logic, either true or false. I'd make an important modification to this because I happen to believe that they can sometimes be true and false because they don't exist in and of themselves. This tends to confuse people really badly in English-speaking philosophy (and people speaking philosophy in English), so it will be helpful to employ a second imaginary construction called the "trivialist" who believes everything that you would deny (it is the negation of everything you believe).

Because it is impossible to keep track of everything that you would never believe under any circumstances, it's helpful to "keep around" whenever someone tries to say that this would force you to accept all sorts of really bizarre things. It's basically a transcendental strawman because you are incapable of confirming anything it would say, hence its negation is also simply things that are true.

Now from that it follows that there are a considerable number things that people would and in fact do agree with you about! Easy examples are the existence of physical objects that they can see right in front of them, though they might disagree about some details (at a minimum, they will be looking at it from a slightly different angle). We can take this to its logical conclusion with Wittgenstein's Tractus and it fails. But wait a second...

Descartes posted:
SEVERAL years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences...

...I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, , and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice...

Wittgenstein posted:
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

It seems like we have a lot of room to navigate between these two extremes wrt what exactly this whole world thing is about once we admit change and subjects. In particular, we replace Kant's things-in-themselves with something more like Bolzano had in mind (and allow them to potentially be both true and false):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Bolzano

As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available to us in a certain way. We intimated that we are always already involved in an understanding of being. From this grows the explicit question of the meaning of being and the tendency toward its concept. We do not know what "being" means. But already when we ask, "What is being'?" we stand in an understanding of the "is" without being able to determine conceptually what the "is" means. We do not even know the horizon upon which we are supposed to grasp and pin down the meaning. This average and vague understanding of being is a fact.

The act of questioning discloses this prior understanding of what the question is directed towards. We can seize upon this prior understanding and reveal another one, continuing in a sort of regress until the question can be properly formulated.

Thus the meaning of the expression "phenomenon" is established as what shows itself in itself, what is manifest.

And what I quoted above:

One speaks of "appearances or symptoms of illness." What is meant by this are occurrences in the body that show themselves and in this self-showing as such "indicate" something that does not show itself. When such occurrences emerge, their self-showing coincides with the objective presence [Vorhandensein] of disturbances that do not show themselves. Appearance, as the appearance "of something," thus precisely does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something makes itself known which does not show itself. It makes itself known through something that does show itself. Appearing is a not showing itself. But this "not" must by no means be confused with the privative not which determines the structure of semblance. What does not show itself, in the manner of what appears, can also never seem. All indications, presentations, symptoms, and symbols have this fundamental formal structure of appearing, although they do differ among themselves.

This clearly draws on Husserl's first investigation in the second book of Logical Investigations. He also distinguishes himself from Husserl here because Husserl was concerned with the way things appear to us. Heidegger is concerned with the fact that they appear in the first place.