Stichwort: Traum

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, Topics in Education

Titel: Traum - Tag, Nacht

Index: Binswanger: Traum des Tages, der nACHT

Kurzinhalt: The dream of night is influenced organically, for example by the state of one's digestion, and is of no great significance. But the dream of morning is the Dasein, the existential subject beginning to posit himself in his world

Text: 5/9 Let us recall by way of a preface to what I am going to attempt to say about art what we said about the good as the developing subject. We must pass from the logical essence of man, something that is common to heroes and scoundrels, mewling infants and saints, something that is verified in everyone equally, to man as concrete potentiality and concrete duty; from man as substance to man as conscious subject; from thinking of a set of faculties and their actuation to thinking of a concrete flow of consciousness, and to thinking of that concrete flow in terms of the subject and his concern that defines the horizon of his world. The subject is not only in his world, but by his intersubjectivity, which we indicated by the phenomenology of the smile, he has a Mitwelt, a world-with-him of other persons with whom he is aware of living. Again, he has a world about him of tools, artifacts, buildings, and so on - an Umwelt.1 That flow of consciousness is captured by Ludwig Binswanger, who used Heidegger's thought to give a new angle to depth psychology.2 Binswanger wrote a little essay entitled 'Traum und Existenz.'3 There is a French translation of this essay, Le réve et l'existence,4 the advantage of which is that Binswanger's rather short essay is prefaced by a long introductory essay by the translator that runs to about 130 pages and helps one get the point. Binswanger distinguishes between the dreams of night and the dreams of morning. The dream of night is influenced organically, for example by the state of one's digestion, and is of no great significance. But the dream of morning is the Dasein, the existential subject beginning to posit himself in his world. He is doing so symbolically, but it is the first movement towards being awake. The subject with his concern will be in his world; the world and the subject are simultaneous. The reason Heidegger speaks of Dasein is that he does not want any split between subject and object. Dasein means the subject and his world; both are simultaneous and correlative. If we think of ourselves that way, we realize that if we know anything about anything it is through meaning, through the intentional order. The stuff of our lives is intentional insofar as we have any consciousness of it at all. Consciousness is not the whole of reality; there are such sciences as biology and neurology, physics and chemistry; but anything that we are above the biological level, and anything that we know, is contained within a field of intentionality, a field that includes the sensitive, intellectual, judicial, and voluntary. These transitions from logical essence to concrete potentiality, from substance to subject, and from faculty psychology to the flow of consciousness are a helpful background to what I want to say about art. And Binswanger's distinction will soon prove helpful in speaking about experiential patterns.5 (209f; Fs)