Analysis of the Nature of Human Encounter in a Healthy and in a Psychotic State

Abstract

The time when philosophy reached upwards to the regions of the transcendental in order to seek on that high plane the primal conditions of the law of thought and perception ended in the second half of the last century with that counterstroke by which Nietzsche assigned thinking to the sphere of life and then contrasted the great reason of the body to the lesser reason of our minds. It is with Heidegger’s thesis on the end of metaphysics that the antipodes of idealistic philosophy has seemed to have been reached; for the ontological examinations of Being and Time turn to the immanence of the everyday, to that which we come across “first and most” in our lives. This has shown, to our surprise, that just that which we come across in everyday life, that which seems so completely natural, is really the most obscure and least understood of all. Therefore it is no wonder that in Heidegger’s Being and Time, the work which has influenced philosophical thinking most since Hegel and Nietzsche, questions arise about things which we assume we know quite as a matter of course, questions which are concerned with our understanding of the nature of things like our health, understanding, chatter, curiosity, ambiguity, worry, conscience, and so on.