a priori

is not about knowing. Rather, it is about 'being'. It is about those things that are given to us if not always clearly and openly.

According to Heidegger, phenomenology succeeds in turning this idea upside down. The a priori is not what humans know first, but what is first. The original sense of the a priori, says Heidegger, is a title for being, not for knowing. The a priori part of a perception is the deeper layer of categories that a phenomenon relies on without openly expressing them. For example, in the case of a blue car, blue is a priori with respect to the blue car, and color is a priori with respect to the blue and the car, and 'is' is a priori with respect to all of them. When I perceive a car I am probably focused on all its specific details, not on the fact that it has color or that it simply 'is.' But if these elements were not present, my whole perception of the car would be impossible. Conscious awareness always skates along a thin icy crust, one that hides countless deeper layers that are also given to us, but not clearly and openly.

Being

knowing

is essentially an empirically uninformed premise that helps one’s argument go through, and is therefore said to be “known”.

is not about knowing (as Kant would have it) but about being. The a priori part of a perception is the deeper layer of categories that a phenomenon relies on without openly expressing them. Conscious awareness always skates along a thin icy crust, one that hides countless deeper layers that are also given to us, but not clearly and openly.

This gives us what Heidegger calls the original sense of the a priori. This Latin term is widely used by philosophers, especially Kant, to describe what comes before all experience. In Kant’s philosophy, for example, space and time are a priori, because in his view we do not discover time and space through experience; rather, experience would not be possible without space and time in the first place. The usual interpretation of the a priori regards it as a term pertaining to human knowledge. That is to say, many philosophers think that a priori means anything humans know before an experience occurs, even if they only know it tacitly in some sort of background manner. According to Heidegger, phenomenology succeeds in turning this idea upside down. The a priori is not what humans know first, but what is first. The original sense of the a priori, says Heidegger, is a title for being, not for knowing. The a priori part of a perception is the deeper layer of categories that a phenomenon relies on without openly expressing them. For example, in the case of a blue car, blue is a priori with respect to the blue car, and color is a priori with respect to the blue and the car, and “is” is a priori with respect to all of them. When I perceive a car I am probably focused on all its specific details, not on the fact that it has color or that it simply “is.” But if these elements were not present, my whole perception of the car would be impossible. Conscious awareness always skates along a thin icy crust, one that hides countless deeper layers that are also given to us, but not clearly and openly.

a priori, n.Definitions

a priori