Abstract
This paper attempts to shed light on Heidegger’s critical appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology. It begins by reviewing Heidegger’s basic criticisms of Husserl’s philosophical approach as well as his ambivalence towards it, an ambivalence that raises the question of whether Heidegger shares Husserl’s idealist trajectory. The paper then examines how Heidegger appropriates what he regards as two of Husserl’s “decisive discoveries,” namely, Husserl’s accounts of intentionality and categorial intuitions. Regarding the first discovery, the paper demonstrates how Heidegger tweaks the method of phenomenological reduction for the purpose of describing intentional experience in terms of being-in-the-world. As for the second discovery, the paper shows how Heidegger adapts the basic sense of categorial intuitions, both pre-thematically and thematically, into his existential analysis. In conclusion, the paper discusses how the role of horizons in Heidegger’s analysis of temporality provides him with firm reasons to resist an idealist interpretation of phenomenology.
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Notes
- 1.
Heidegger GA63, 5. I am grateful to Andrew Butler for helpful suggestions and astute criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.
- 2.
Kisiel 1985, 196.
- 3.
Heidegger GA20, 168; GA21, 88.
- 4.
Heidegger SZ, V, 38, and 38 Anm. 2; GA14, 93–99; GA15, 373–76.
- 5.
Heidegger GA17, 266–75.
- 6.
Heidegger GA20, 124. Heidegger also criticizes Husserl’s epistemic construal of the basic structure of all intentionality (GA20, 169).
- 7.
- 8.
See Dahlstrom 2018a, 211–228.
- 9.
Heidegger GA14, 97.
- 10.
Specifically, what passes in phenomenology for the purported self-announcement of phenomena in acts of consciousness was conceived more originally. Thus, phenomenology re-discovered the fundamental feature of Greek thinking, “if not philosophy as such.” The more this insight became clear to Heidegger, the more the question weighed upon him: whence and how does the thing itself, what phenomenology demands be experienced as such, determine itself? “Is it consciousness and the objectivity of what is an object for consciousness or is it the ‘to be’ of the particular entity in its unhiddenness and hiddenness?” The question is obviously rhetorical and yet Heidegger’s follows it with a repeated invocation of phenomenology’s role: “Thus I was brought again to the question of being, illuminated by the phenomenological stance, and troubled in a manner different from the way I was before by the questions that proceeded from Brentano’s dissertation” (Heidegger GA14, 99).
- 11.
Heidegger GA14, 101. Phenomenology is not distinguished, as other philosophical disciplines are, by a subject-matter but as a way of doing things or a ‘how of research’ (see Heidegger SZ 27f, GA20, 105). The context of “My Way into Phenomenology” should not be overlooked. The essay’s purpose is, in part, to tout Hermann Niemeyer, the head of the publishing house so closely linked to the phenomenological movement throughout the twentieth century. For this purpose, Heidegger draws attention to Niemeyer’s publication of major works on phenomenology by Husserl, Scheler, and himself. Not to praise, but to bury phenomenology in such a setting would be unseemly and this must be taken into account in evaluating the complimentary tone of Heidegger’s remarks about phenomenology.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Heidegger GA21, 98f; Husserl Hua III/1, 191: “Der Begriff der Intentionalität, in der unbestimmten Weite umfaßt, wie wir ihn gefaßt haben, ist ein zu Anfang der Phänomenologie ganz unentbehrlicher Ausgangs- und Grundbegriff.”
- 15.
Husserl Hua IX, 601–602. For a valuable discussion of a Husserlian response to these remarks, see Luft 2002, 18–22.
- 16.
See, for example, Heidegger GA9, 123–175.
- 17.
Heidegger GA20, 165: “Diese Frage, was erforschen wir am Bewußtsein als seinem Sein, formuliert Husserl auch so: Was können wir an ihm fassen, bestimmen, als objektive Einheiten fixieren? Sein heißt für ihn nichts anderes als wahres Sein, Objektivität, wahr für ein theoretisches, wissenschaftliches Erkennen. Es wird hier nicht nach dem spezifischen Sein des Bewußtseins, der Erlebnisse gefragt, sondern nach einem ausgezeichneten Gegenstandsein für eine objektive Wissenschaft vom Bewußtsein.”
- 18.
Heidegger GA20, 145–149; 155. The term ‘naturalistic,’ as Heidegger applies it to the character of the natural attitude, is not equivalent to ‘physicalistic,’ but instead designates an extension of ontological categories paradigmatically appropriate for natural objects; see Heidegger GA17, 273f, 303. Heidegger’s criticism no doubt overreaches, particularly given some of the analyses undertaken by Husserl in Ideas II.
- 19.
Heidegger GA20, 165–171.
- 20.
Heidegger GA20, 34–46.
- 21.
Heidegger GA20, 165: “Gegenüber dem Transzendenten, dem Physischen der Natur, ist das Psychische das immanente Gegebene, es ist, wie Husserl hier sagt, ‘der Gegenwurf von Natur.’” Heidegger is referring to Husserl’s essay, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (Husserl 1910, 314).
- 22.
Husserl Hua IX, 274 Anm. 1.: “Gehört nicht eine Welt überhaupt zum Wesen des reinen ego? Vgl. unser Todtnauberger Gespräch <1926> über das ‘In-der-Welt-sein’ (Sein und Zeit, I, § 12. 69) und den wesenhaften Unterschied zum Vorhandenen ‘innerhalb’ einer solchen Welt.”
- 23.
Heidegger GA17, 97–99. With its ad hominem character, this criticism of Husserl’s motivation is interesting because it was delivered two years prior to the criticism of Husserl’s phenomenological method and content (the criticism of his “ontological myopia” mentioned earlier) and because it forms a substantial part of the first Marburg lectures given by Heidegger, after leaving Freiburg and getting out from under Husserl’s shadow.
- 24.
Heidegger SZ, 10.
- 25.
Or is the entire effort of Being and Time a youthful misadventure, a mistaken detour (Abweg) taken by Heidegger under the spell of his erstwhile mentor? See, among others, Van Buren 1994, 136, 365–367.
- 26.
Heidegger 1992/3, 159–160. A few months after this April 1925 address, Heidegger adds a third such discovery – “the original sense of the a priori”; Heidegger GA20, 34–122.
- 27.
Within the confines of this paper, I do not elaborate on this temporal aspect. Suffice to say, however, that although both thinkers regard temporality as foundational, the differences between their analyses are profound. While Husserl analyzes it as internal to and co-constitutive of sensory consciousness, Heidegger analyzes it, by contrast, as structurally co-constitutive of being-in-the-world.
- 28.
Heidegger SZ, 27.
- 29.
Heidegger SZ, 37f.
- 30.
Heidegger GA20, 98.
- 31.
Brentano 1925, 133f; see Husserl Hua XIX/1, 385–87 and Tugendhat 1970, 27 Anm. 17; cf. also Bell 1991, 234 n. 18 for the difference between the inexistence of a mental content (according to Brentano’s early theory of intentionality) and its nonexistence, a possibility which he later builds into the criterion of an intentional relation.
- 32.
Heidegger GA20, 35–63.
- 33.
- 34.
Husserl Hua III/1, 297: “Jedes Noema hat einen ‘Inhalt’, nämlich seinen ‘Sinn’, und bezieht sich durch ihn auf ‘seinen’ Gegenstand”; see, too, Husserl Hua III/1, 302–03. Or in the terminology of the Logical Investigations, corresponding to the specific “quality” of each intentional act, there is a specific “content” or “matter”; cf. Husserl Hua XIX/1, 425–31. For Heidegger’s characterization of noesis and noema as well as the respective sorts of phenomenological investigations they entail, see Heidegger GA20, 129.
- 35.
Husserl Hua XIX/2, 65-52; Hua III/1, 324: “Der ‘Satz’ ‘bewährt’ oder auch ‘bestätigt’ sich, die unvollkommene Gegebenheitsweise verwandelt sich in die vollkommene.”
- 36.
Husserl Hua III/1, 336–37: “So umspannt die Phänomenologie wirklich die ganze natürliche Welt und alle die idealen Welten, die sie ausschaltet: sie umspannt sie als ‘Weltsinn’ durch die Wesensgesetzlichkeiten, welche Gegenstandssinn und Noema überhaupt mit dem geschlossenen System der Noesen verknüpfen, und speziell durch die vernunftgesetzlichen Wesenszusammenhänge, deren Korrelat ‘wirklicher Gegenstand’ ist, welcher also seinerseits jeweils einen Index für ganz bestimmte Systeme teleologisch einheitlicher Bewußtseinsgestaltungen darstellt.”
- 37.
Husserl Hua III/1, 127; see, too, Hua III/1, 51: “Das Prinzip aller Prinzipien” and Hua III/1, 314–317: “Die erste Grundform des Vernunftbewußtseins: das originär gebende >>Sehen<<.”
- 38.
Husserl Hua III/1, 157: “Nur die Individuation läßt die Phänomenologie fallen, den ganzen Wesensgehalt aber in der Fülle seiner Konkretion erhebt sie ins eidetische Bewußtsein und nimmt ihn als ideal-identisches Wesen, das sich, wie jedes Wesen, nicht nur hic et nunc, sondern in unzähligen Exemplaren vereinzeln könnte.”
- 39.
Husserl Hua III/1, 159; Hua XIX/2, 686–87. Thus, the reductions are to be understood, not so much as a means of taking leave of ordinary experience, but rather as a means of recovering key overlooked aspects of it.
- 40.
Husserl Hua III/1, 129–30.
- 41.
Husserl Hua III/1, 65–69; 158–59: “Durch die phänomenologische Reduktion hatte sich uns das Reich des transzendentalen Bewußtseins als des in einem bestimmten Sinn >>absoluten<< Seins ergeben.”
- 42.
- 43.
Heidegger SZ, 45: “Die existenziale Analytik des Daseins liegt vor jeder Psychologie, Anthropologie und erst recht Biologie.” See also Heidegger SZ, 51 where Heidegger notes that, in relation to “positive sciences,” the investigation pursued in Being and Time is carried out “not as ‘progress,’ but rather as a retrieval and ontologically more transparent purification of what has been ontically discovered.”
- 44.
Heidegger SZ, 6.
- 45.
Heidegger SZ, 43.
- 46.
In his lectures Heidegger’s attitude toward the phenomenological reduction is ambivalent. In the summer of 1925 he charges that the phenomenological reduction – at least in the hands of Husserl – is “fundamentally unfit to determine positively the being of consciousness” (Heidegger GA20, 150); in the summer of 1927 he describes how the phenomenological reduction figures in his own determination of the project of phenomenology as fundamental ontology; see Heidegger GA24, 29.
- 47.
Heidegger SZ 3-4, 21, 25. For Heidegger’s insistence on the quite positive dimensions of this project of “destruction” with respect to the history of philosophy, see SZ 20 and 22–23.
- 48.
Just as the Husserlian reduction supposes a natural attitude, so Heidegger’s ontological-existential analysis supposes an ontic-existential comportment.
- 49.
Heidegger GA24: 89–92, 230–31, 249.
- 50.
Husserl Hua III/1, 89–91; Heidegger SZ 217–218.
- 51.
Husserl Hua III/1, 207–08: “Das Ding, das Naturobjekt nehme ich wahr, den Baum dort im Garten; das und nichts anderes ist das wirkliche Objekt der wahrnehmenden ‘Intention’. Ein zweiter immanenter Baum oder auch ein ‘inneres Bild’ des wirklichen, dort draußen vor mir stehenden Baumes ist doch in keiner Weise gegeben, und dergleichen hypothetisch zu supponieren, führt nur auf Widersinn.” Cf. Heidegger SZ 163–164; also Husserl Hua III/1, 225–29.
- 52.
Heidegger SZ 53–54.
- 53.
Heidegger SZ 151; cf. also SZ 54. In this connection, a basic similarity to the use of ‘sense’ in both phenomenologies should not go unmentioned, namely, the common effort to elucidate sense as the condition of meaning. For Husserl, sense is presupposed by meaning, the latter applying to linguistic constructions such as words and sentences (cf. Husserl Hua III/1, 284–85; cf. also Heidegger SZ, 166 Anm.1 for Heidegger’s reference to this account; see also Husserl Hua XIX/1, 56–57 and Tugendhat 1970, 36 Anm. 44). An analogous constellation is elaborated by Heidegger in two respects. First, understanding is a condition for interpretation (Auslegung) and not vice versa, that is to say, understanding, here conceived as a practical wherewithal and know-how, need not be ex-pounded (ausgelegt) and take the form of assertions (Aussagen). Second, discourse (Rede), precisely as a way of communicating with one another, is the condition for language (Sprache) and linguistic entities - and not vice versa (cf. Heidegger SZ 160–167, esp. 161). On the differences between Husserl and Heidegger in this regard, see Taminiaux 1991, 59–61.
- 54.
Husserl Hua III/1, 162: “die phänomenologische Methode bewegt sich durchaus in Akten der Reflexion.”
- 55.
Husserl Hua III/1, 162–63; 95: “Die Seinsart des Erlebnisses ist es, in der Weise der Reflexion prinzipiell wahrnehmbar zu sein.”
- 56.
Husserl Hua III/1, 77: “Im cogito lebend, haben wir die cogitatio selbst nicht bewußt als intentionales Objekt; aber jederzeit kann sie dazu werden, zu ihrem Wesen gehört die prinzipielle Möglichkeit einer ‘reflektiven’ Blickwendung und natürlich in Form einer neueren cogitatio, die sich in der Weise einer schlichterfassenden auf sie richtet.”
- 57.
Husserl Hua III/1, 165.
- 58.
Husserl Hua III/1, 162–65.
- 59.
Husserl Hua III/1, 172.
- 60.
Husserl Hua XIX/2, 657–93; see, too, Heidegger GA20, 89.
- 61.
Husserl Hua XIX/2, 657–61, 665–76. As the last example suggests, categorial intuitions are often intuitions of the relation of parts within a whole or of parts to a whole. In 1919, as he became more adept at phenomenological seeing and worked on a new interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger’s interest returned once again to the Logical Investigations. In particular, he came to see, as he puts it, the import of the difference between sensory and categorial intuitions (developed in the Sixth Logical Investigation) for determining the multiple senses of ‘being.’
- 62.
Husserl Hua XIX/1, 484–95; Hua XIX/2, 685–87; Sokolowski 1974, 33f: “‘Is,’ ‘and,’ and ‘next to,’ as syncategorematic components of categorial wholes, are the deposit left by various categorial, ‘intellectual’ acts of consciousness. They are not read off things as attributes but originate in the acts by which consciousness articulates discrete parts within what it intends, and simultaneously composes a whole out of these parts.”
- 63.
As these glosses suggest, Husserl does not appear to thematize existence as such, something akin to the meaning of the existential quantifier. Indeed, he seems to concentrate solely on being white, expressed in the proposition ‘this paper is white’ that corresponds to that very state of affairs.
- 64.
Heidegger GA20, 34.
- 65.
Heidegger SZ, 44, 54.
- 66.
See Heidegger GA21, 410 and GA15, 377f. In different ways, each thinker maintains the precedence of possibility over actuality; see Husserl Hua III/1, 178.
- 67.
Heidegger GA56/57, 65, 109, 117, 219; GA58, 138.
- 68.
Heidegger SZ, 194, 197.
- 69.
Heidegger GA20, 75.
- 70.
Heidegger SZ, 147.
- 71.
Heidegger GA20, 75. Still, if Husserl overemphasizes the role of perception in his account of intentionality, Heidegger’s initial presentation of being-in-the-world overstates the extent to which the latter is shaped by praxical involvement (if I may be allowed the phrase).
- 72.
After all, Husserl gave him his eyes; see Heidegger SZ, 146: “Das Verstehen macht in seinem Entwurfcharakter existenzial das aus, was wir die Sicht des Daseins nennen.” Taminiaux interprets this passage as an indication that “the traditional privilege of intuition (Anschauung), the privileged status of seeing remains” (cf. Taminiaux 1991, 65). But such an interpretation must be reconciled with Heidegger’s further remarks in the same context, grounding “all sight primarily in understanding” (Heidegger SZ, 147).
- 73.
Heidegger SZ, 147.
- 74.
Heidegger SZ, 200f.
- 75.
Husserl Hua III/1, 156-58.
- 76.
Heidegger SZ, 12, 42.
- 77.
Heidegger SZ, 298, 231, 133.
- 78.
See, respectively, Heidegger SZ, 231, 233, 248, 262, 278, 42f, 323.
- 79.
Heidegger SZ, 236.
- 80.
Thus, Heidegger speaks of the essences of Befindlichkeit (Heidegger SZ, 190), Rede (SZ, 296), Verstehen (SZ, 214), and Wahrheit (SZ, 222), but also of the essences of Sorge (SZ, 285), Negation (SZ, 285), Entschlossenheit (SZ, 298), Zeitlichkeit (SZ, 329, 348), and Geschichte (SZ, 378).
- 81.
Heidegger 1949; see Dahlstrom 2010, 185–207.
- 82.
Several of Heidegger’s subsequent essays and lectures take the form of essentialist analyses, each with a common structure; see Dahlstrom 2018b, 39–56.
- 83.
The origin of the “apophantic as-structure” of assertions (“it is a fork”) is, Heidegger contends, the hermeneutical as-structure; cf. Heidegger SZ, 158f; GA21, 156.
- 84.
Heidegger SZ, 148–151, 360; see note 27 above.
- 85.
This reticence is evident even when he broaches the topics of realism and idealism; see Heidegger SZ §33.
- 86.
Heidegger SZ, 365
- 87.
So, too, it might be argued that any footing for the charge of idealism is removed, given that the sense of ‘world’ here is not that of the totality of entities but the system of possibilities grounded in Dasein’s being ‘for-the-sake-of-itself’; the world in that sense trivially depends on Dasein, but that fact is indifferent to the question of whether any entities exist without Dasein. My thanks to Andrew Butler for this observation.
- 88.
They also may point to a place or, better, a time-space, within which the ecstasies figure.
- 89.
Heidegger SZ, 366.
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Dahlstrom, D.O. (2021). Senses of Being and Implications of Idealism: Heidegger’s Appropriation of Husserl’s Decisive Discoveries. In: Parker, R.K.B. (eds) The Idealism-Realism Debate Among Edmund Husserl’s Early Followers and Critics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 112. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62159-9_13
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