REMARKS ON HUGH HEYSEN

Heysen’s work convinced me to embrace the “science fiction aspect” of

ontology. As tedious and confused as forum solipsists might be, their
radicality is admirable. Young Wittgenstein, with whom Heysen agrees
on this issue, can be viewed as a sublimation of such solipsism that
shrewdly “empties the subject.” Errant forum solipsists work from a
confused concept of the subject which is somehow everything and not
everything. But early TLP Wittgenstein sees that such a solipsism is
just as much a pure realism, albeit necessarily a perspectival realism.
2

Heysen offers many phrases that attempt to disclose this basic structure
of experience, which is equivalently the basic structure of being itself.
He says that “the selfing of the world is the worlding of the self.” He
also says that “the self worlds and the world selfs.” He talks of the
“reelworld,” as if life or existence is a film. But it’s crucial to understand
that no one is watching this film. Being simply “shines forth” with
an ego-like motivational structure, structured also like a perspectival
painting.
3

David Woodruff Smith’s introduction to Husserl discusses the possibility

of using an ideal VR set to do phenomenology. I think Heysen would
mostly agree. But this ideal VR set is just a rhetorical device that points
at the “full unity” of experience. The challenge is to make typically
transparent experience opaque for itself. The practical person looks
right through the way that objects are given to the “objects themselves”
in their practical worldly relevance. So the round table is grasped as a
round table even when not seen from above (when it doesn’t look round
to the eye in the more literal sense of looking.)
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I’ll interject personally and say that Heysen (and his philosophical ally
Zassenhauer) are fun to read. The pleasure is related to that given by a
science fiction story. But it’s reality itself that becomes more rich and
open through exposure to such impractical philosophy. The mundane
begins to glow. It’s a bit like the magic of childhood returning, though
it’s all quite organized and sober. Heysen writes or attempts to write
nonfiction. He sides with the silly, radical, and possibly boyish tendency
in philosophy. He doesn’t let politics, for instance, guide him into a
Serious practical realism. I can only assume that Heysen agrees with
Stumpf that dragging philosophy into such banality is a general attack
on the transcendent and the sublime. Stumpf calls this a triumph of
the spirit of seriousness which is also a triumph of Burroughs’ “Ugly
Spirit.” For Stumpf, the sense of transcendence is one of the great joys of
being human. “Agency” is the state of being governed by a Cause that
cancels irony and innocence. “Spirit” is born from the contradictions of
agency, and Spirit is something like Schlegel’s infinite Irony, awkwardly
presented also by Stirner.
5

Now I’ll offer a few comments on Heysen and Heidegger. Early Hei-
degger suggests we earnestly ask the question: “Am I [my] time ? ”
Gadamer claims that Heidegger claims that “being is time.” I take Hey-
sen to agree. He writes of an “ego-like worldstream”, also known as an
“ego-like lifestream.” So life and world and existence are one. Heysen
does write of our anticipation of the end of the stream (or the stream
including an anticipation of its cessation), but he doesn’t go on to insist
on its central importance. Living for thousands or even millions of years
is logically possible, no matter how implausible. So Heysen does not
accept the transcendental use of mortality. At most he’d acknowledge
the difficultly of clarifying the idea of living forever. I understand this
to be a theoretical position. Heysen very much expects to die before he
is 200 years old (or even 100 years old.)
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Hobbes is another important influence. Heysen just ignores the indirect

realism of Hobbes and relishes the penetration and style of Hobbes at
his best. For instance : Continual Successe in obtaining those things
which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual
prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this
life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind,
while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never
be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.
What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly hon-
our him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that
now are as incomprehensible, as the word of School-men, Beatifical
Vision, is unintelligible.
7

Heysen takes Hobbes to have capture the goal-driven on-the-way ego-

like structure of world-streaming. This is related to the “falling im-
mersion” discussed in the “Dilthey draft” of Being and Time. The
worldstreaming or beingstream includes something like a pain-pleasure
aspect or channel, along with a sense of bringing-to-fruition this or that
wordly task. The “timestream” is stretched. Is Heysen saying some-
thing different on Heidegger on this issue ? I don’t think so.
8

William James is important in the same way Mach is, seeming saying
the same thing in Does Consciousness Exist ? James, like Heysen,
answers no. Of course the concept exists, so the point is again to deny
either the subject or the object the status of being fundamental. Here’s
James : My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there
is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which
everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’
the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of pure experience may
enter.
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“Pure experience” is good, though it’ll tempt some to think of an ex-

periencer as primary. Instead, the name “pure experience” drags the
history of its development behind it. Such experience is pure because it
is no longer representation. It is not something between a subject and a
hidden real world. It is just that which is. It is a beingstream that
includes embedded entities that are for practical reasons often sorted
into thoughts and objects, and so on. But these embedded entities are
connected like the threads of a blanket. They are semantically interde-
pendent.
10

Note that this flux or stuffstream is always conceptually articulated,

already already meaningrich. So we might call it a meaningstream.
But we can’t ignore how loud, colorful, hot, cold, stinky, drowsy, dizzy
this experience is. We might call it time itself, but we must think time
as “full” or “concrete.” We use “streaming,” “flux,” and “time” to
indicate the manic restlessness of this “experience” that does without
an experiencer or an experienced. For what’s intended is the primal
source of both. Being is [concrete] time is meaningsteaming
sensuality. Here we try to name what is most intimate and familiar in
one sense and yet typically invisible for the prejudiced theoretical gaze.
William James already notes our tendency to look through sensations
toward the practical worldly objects in his Principles of Psychology.
But James himself quotes Reid, the famous philosopher of common-
sense. James even mentions that blindness in one eye is often not
noticed till long after it occurs. This tendency is what Heidegger calls
“falling immersion.” The daily round has a hypnotic obviousness. The
philosopher is a lucid dreamer, one who obtains a limited surfacing and
can therefor see the usual immersion as such. This lucid dreamer can
shift attention from the objects of the dream to the way they are given.
Just as crucially, the philosopher as lucid dreamer brackets practical-
ity so that a small field of possibility is vastly enlarged. For instance,
Mach’s flattening of the subject-object distinction is beautifully direct
and complete, but it is, as he describes so well, absurd to the practical
mind which, after all, we cannot do without. The lucid dreaming of the
philosopher is necessarily only occasional.