Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological: Interpreting Husserl through Dilthey, 1916-1925
214
Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological: Interpreting Husserl through Dilthey, 1916-1925
214Paperback(New Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786607737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2018 |
| Series: | New Heidegger Research |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 214 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.94(w) x 8.73(h) x 0.65(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction — Preparing to "Be" Phenomenological
In January 1917, during an exchange about the role of logic in philosophy, Heidegger wrote Heinrich Rickert that as far he was concerned,
Pure logic is something extreme, a disguised criminal assault on the living mind — [and this is so] even if [its idea of] "absolute validity" makes it appealing to all those who are terrified of relativism, and if it attracts and comforts [so-called] "critical" realists obsessed about their precious "external world."
Obviously, Heidegger is not launching an assault on good reasoning. Rather, he knows that "reine Logik" and "absolute Geltung" have become powerful cultural metaphors that promote an undeservedly dominant outlook in modern philosophy — a basically Cartesian standpoint achieved by expanding the example of cognition in the mathematical and natural sciences, first by driving an epistemic wedge between "purely logical" cognition and the allegedly sloppy ruminations of everyday life, and then by assuming that the standpoint of a cognizing consciousness is the only proper model for any genuine "thinking" and that everyday life is just its subjective and forgettable origin. But the real point of this passage, here in this letter as in so much of Heidegger's early writings, is not about cultural facts, or the state of mainstream philosophy. It is about "who" philosophizes.
As the passage suggests, the young Privatdocent is already intensely concerned with becoming the kind of philosopher who does not think from the traditional modern standpoint — and not because there are other "psychological" alternatives, but because philosophizing is a relational activity (later, an "ek-sisting") and relating to everything as a Cartesian mind means that only external-like "objects" can be "phenomena" for it. Hence, the lead question in a number of Heidegger's early lecture courses is the question of how to resist his culture's scientistic appeal to the minds of aspiring philosophers — a question he sees as all the more urgent because the tendency to privilege "theorizing" and "objectification" and the "purely logical" seems to come so naturally to us (GA 56/57: 112–14). After looking at a short retrospective by Heidegger of how this "preliminary" concern for "who" philosophizes arose for him, I turn to sections that set out the way the rest of the book analyzes Heidegger's treatment, first of Dilthey and then of Husserl in light of this concern, in the years leading up to his idea that a phenomenological ontology must be "hermeneutically" oriented.
HEIDEGGER'S "PRELIMINARY" QUESTION
In a short summary of "My Way Up to Now [Mein bisheriger Weg]" in 1937–1938, Heidegger looks back toward his earliest work and tells us, among other things, that between 1920 and 1923,
all the previously attempted inquiries that touched upon truth, categories, language, time and history came together in the plan for an "ontology of human Dasein." However, this ontology was not thought of as a "regional" treatise on the question of man, but as the laying of the foundation for the inquiry into beings as such [dem Seienden als solchen] — together with a confrontation with the beginning of Western metaphysics in the Greeks. (GA 66: 413/366, author's emphasis)
At first glance, Heidegger seems to be supporting the usual topical approach to his work. His thought in these years was directed toward ontology, first fundamental and then "universal"; and because we inherit a tradition of metaphysics that gives an ultimately unsatisfactory series of responses to this topic, getting from fundamental ontology to the question of being "generally" must include a dismantling of the main positions in this tradition. Hence, SZ
originated in the years 1922–26 as an initial possible pathway for rendering discernible — from the ground up and in terms of an actual working-through — the question of being in an essential manner that leads beyond all the inquiries up to now and yet simultaneously leads back to a confrontation with the Greeks and Western philosophy.
So far, this all seems very easy to read in the standard, topic-oriented way.
But look again. Consider not just what Heidegger says here about the goal of his work or about the necessity of going through a fundamental ontology of Dasein and a destruction of Western metaphysics to get to it. Notice that the "pathway" he identifies is associated, not with his topic(s), but with the task of "rendering discernible" by an "actual working-through" of a nontraditional way of questioning it (them). Moreover, immediately before these lines, Heidegger says that all his planning and topical restructuring was able to take shape for him because of "the 'phenomenology' [that] brought to my own work a confident assurance in proceeding and questioning that at the same time became fruitful for my historical interpretations" (GA 66: 412/366). In other words, absent this phenomenology (n.b., the scare quotes!), no fundamental ontology, no dismantling of metaphysical doctrines, and no Denken. But there is more. Heidegger makes a point of not merely identifying phenomenology in passing as the sort of approach he takes to his topics, but of spelling out just what sort of approach this is. And it is not Husserlian.
He calls his writings before 1919 merely the "obligatory communications" one must make to become an academic. At best, he says, "they merely indicate something of what was urged upon me unmastered and without any real direction." Only after this did slow clarification begin, and in two directions. In the "historical" (and ontological) direction, there was "a resolute reverting to Greek philosophy via the figure of its first essential presentation, Aristotle" (GA 66: 412/365). In the other direction came a "serious engagement with the methodological approach [Verfahren] of Husserl's 'phenomenology'" (GA 66: 412/366).
Aristotle and Husserl. There is nothing unexpected in this. What is more surprising, and certainly much less frequently remarked, is Heidegger's emphasis on the process of "clarification" involved — a process that requires both a "resolute reverting" to the Greeks that is not just a rereading of texts, and also a "serious engagement" directed, not so much at what Husserl actually said but at his "approach." Heidegger calls this engagement an Einarbeitung — in German, among other things, the name for the kind of familiarization process and initial skill training one goes through when breaking into a new job. From the very beginning, he says, I undertook this engagement "without endorsing Husserl's fundamental philosophical position, that is, his Cartesianism and Neo-Kantianism." Rather, "my own path led me to a close reflection [Besinnung] on history [and thus] to an appropriative confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with Dilthey and to the establishing of 'life' as basic reality" (GA 66: 412/366). Both items are, of course, not recommended by Husserl, whose seminars were about phenomenological seeing and not about "history," and who was no fan of philosophies grounded in "the understanding of life." In other words, Heidegger's path is defined from the beginning in a non-Husserlian way — that is, with a reflection (Dilthey's Besinning, not the neo-Kantian Reflexion) on and a critical taking-over of the work of Dilthey. This question of how phenomena should be treated — "who" philosophizes and in accordance with what sort of un-traditional considerations — is what Heidegger calls the "preliminary" question for philosophy; and he continues to keep this question prominently in view throughout the decade leading up to SZ.
DESTRUCTIVELY RETRIEVING HUSSERL
Given, then, that Heidegger regards a generally Cartesian (and in his time, more specifically, neo-Kantian) stance as bordering on the philosophically criminal, it is no surprise that he is critical of the "theoretical-scientific attitude" he finds in Husserl's famous Logos article, which at the time would have been the obvious work to cite as an expression of his philosophical approach. And as we know, Heidegger's opinion was that Husserl's phenomenology is not very phenomenological. Yet one must read his objection carefully. It is not a critique in the familiar sense of picking apart and arguing against. Critiques of excessive theorizing are often unreflective about their own motives, but this is not the case with Heidegger's obviously very critical interpretation. Indeed, he quite deliberately formulates his criticisms in a way that avoids assuming in his own thinking the very "theoretical" attitude he opposes in Husserl. His aim is to take and maintain a more phenomenological stance than he thinks Husserl himself succeeds in adopting. Hence, a polemical and anti-objectivistic criticism would sabotage Heidegger's own intentions and end up avoiding Husserl's still too traditional approach to phenomenology only by maintaining it in some form in his own thought and adding a negative sign. This, explains Heidegger, would simply put him one step further removed from the phenomenological attitude he seeks to take up, not draw him closer to it. To use one of his own early phrases, Heidegger's evaluation of Husserl is a "destructive retrieval," not the expression of opposition. An opponent approaches philosophical differences as if they were a function of different philosophical "positions." A destructive retrieval tries to further something important by transforming how it is currently described and discussed.
Yet the temptation here to do a little comparative analytical "theorizing" is palpable. What could be more obvious? At the time of Heidegger's writing, Husserl's phenomenology is self-advertised as a philosophy of transcendental consciousness; Heidegger's, at least in its early formulations, as a hermeneutic phenomenology of Dasein. A familiar division of labor beckons here: Leave the scholarly details to specialists, while the rest of us argue over which "position" is the preferable choice. But Heidegger is not tempted. In fact, approaching either Husserl's view or his own as positions to be analyzed and comparing their different "ideas" about the nature of phenomenology would run specifically against his primary purpose. "External" interpretations of the usual kind are the sort of thing required by the theoretical-scientific attitude, and that is precisely their limitation. Neither critical analysis nor straight scholarship, no matter how competently conducted, is likely to change one's "philosophical attitude"; and as Nietzsche noted in his second Untimely Meditation, it can sometimes leave the critic or scholar worse off, as when one comes to settle for being a mere critic or takes so much pride in successful scholarship that thinking just like the master is confused with being a philosopher. In other words, because critics and scholars typically conduct their affairs as "subjects" — that is, knowers (e.g., of texts, as of nature) who treat our surroundings as full of things disclosed at a distance and cognizable as "objects" — if Heidegger were to move in this direction, he might learn a lot about Husserl's texts, about his claims and theories and methods and how they are indicative of his "philosophy." But operating this way, as if one were simply placed in front of the present evidence of Husserl's position, virtually guarantees a failure to understand what he means.
As we will see, it is from Dilthey that the young Heidegger learns how to distinguish understanding Husserl's writings (as an "interpreter") from conceptually analyzing them (as a "scholar" or critic). Then as now when it comes to philosophy texts, conceptual analysis, no matter how sensitive to nuance and shading, is never more than a few paces away from Quine's "whatever can be said can be said clearly." Or, to use a more homely example, ask yourself whether you feel really understood when someone conceptually analyzes your statements and reports what you must be "claiming." What Dilthey does, however, is place special emphasis, not just on understanding and analyzing being very different approaches, but on the fact that to understand instead of analyze involves becoming a different sort of reader, not just having a different set of interpretive tools. What Dilthey shows, says Heidegger, is that we must first "make our [own] factical existence accessible to itself, and in ourselves," so that our inquiries about others will be informed, not just by logical "reasoning" but by "an existential knowing" of the fact that no matter what a philosopher says, it is always possible (and sometimes enormously rewarding) to remember that he or she is "speaking out from and for the sake of ... being-there for a while at a particular time." This conception of a "hermeneutical" way of coming to a text or other expression of life is, as I noted earlier, Heidegger's philosophical expansion of Dilthey's concept of Verstehen. Specifically in Husserl's case, he says, only such an interpretation can follow the "unsettling" double-sidedness in his writings.
The double-sidedness Heidegger is referring to is Husserl's special and especially important way of not satisfactorily saying what he quite apparently means. What Husserl is intent on doing in his phenomenology seems original and philosophically speaking, potentially revolutionary; but what he says about doing it often seems just as obviously (and thus problematically) traditional. To see what Heidegger hopes to accomplish by making this distinction, we must be clear about his aims. Of course, the young Heidegger did not have the sixty-plus volumes of the Husserliana series in front of him, but even if he had, he would not have been interested in judiciously reconstructing Husserl's "phenomenological system"— later or earlier, published or unpublished.
What does interest him intensely is Husserl's then-current explanation of why phenomenological philosophy must be a kind of transcendental idealism; and this account seems to "betray" his own admonitions about returning to the things themselves by characterizing phenomenology as a sort of severely revised version of the modern philosophies of consciousness that, as Husserl himself admits, trace their origins to Descartes. But it strikes Heidegger that this simply cannot be the whole story. If we take Husserl at his word, then all we get is a transcendental idealist whose claims to originality and radicality lie on the same conceptual level as all of the familiar traditional machinery of method and system and being "scientific" and distrusting natural experience and ... Yet there also clearly seems to be something more than this to understand about Husserl's projected aim. Put quickly, the Husserl who self-advertises from the "standpoint" of a transcendental philosopher does not fit well together with the Husserl who calls upon us to cultivate the philosophical posture or "basic attitude" of someone who adheres to what he calls a phenomenological "principle of all principles."
To understand the "basic attitude" or "posture" of Husserl's philosophy, says Heidegger, one must treat his work as the "life-expression" of his fundamental sense of engagement with his surroundings that makes him push for a phenomenology even when his tradition-bound way of articulating this sense points away from it or obscures it. But to repeat, in order to pursue this kind of an interpretation — that is, to understand what "motivates" Husserl's originary phenomenological aspirations instead of settling for what the text says — we already need to "be" interpreters. Hence it is now clear why, in SS 1923, Heidegger is calling hermeneutics an inquiry that must come "before philosophy," one that asks about "what goes on in philosophy before it becomes what it is" (GA 63: 46/59). This inquiry "is not philosophy at all, but ... something preliminary that runs ahead of it and has its own reason for being" (GA 63: 20/16, my emphasis). This "reason for being" is, among other things, to determine how to distinguish between being a life-interpreter and being an objective knower as experiential options. Hence, Heidegger's insistence upon pre-philosophical preliminaries is nothing esoteric; it is driven by a desire to determine what fundamental philosophical intent Husserl's inquiries manifest, even when his articulations of this intent seem to discourage us from finding anything original.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological"
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