Heidegger’s Transformations of Husserl

Posted on July 12, 2008
Filed Under Heidegger, Philosophy |

I was reading John van Buren’s excellent paper on Heidegger’s thought as a radicalization of Husserl. It’s “The Young Heidegger and Phenomnelogy” in Dreyfus’ and Wrathall’s Heidegger Reexamined (which if you look around you can find as a PDF so you don’t need pay the ridiculous Amazon price which is over $200). Van Buren argues that Heidegger’s basic ‘call’ to consider Being actually predates his encounter with Husserl and that it’s this basic consideration that determines all his thought. In effect it’s the idea that the origin of the latter Heidegger predates Heidegger’s published works let alone The Turn. He also argues that with this knowledge one should see Being and Time as having more in common with the later Heidegger than the works with which it is usually cast. I’m not sure about that but then I’ve always been persuaded by Richardson that there was less to the Turn than some suggest.

What I found most interesting was how van Buren sees Husserl’s basic categories in Heidegger and how they become transformed.

Of course the most famous and arguably the most important difference between Husserl and Heidegger is the transformation of universal intuition into hermeneutics. That is one moves from what is basically a kind of platonism behind the sensuous objects of experience into a hermeneutics out of “the lived experience of lived experience.” We move from a fixed presence of an eternal essence into semiotics. (Well, that’s more a Peircean critique - I might get to that later since I think Peirce’s phenomenology shares the same differences)

Nearly as interesting are Heidegger’s use of Husserl’s noematic obejctivity, noesis and making present. These three categories of Husserl are roughly the content-meaning or intentional object, the relational meaning or manner of intending, and enactment-meaning or performance or temporalizing-meaning. If you’re not familiar with Husserl’s terms - and I always need a crib sheet myself - check out this discussion of Husserl and Russell I did a few years back. This is similar to the idea of descriptions of objects, acquaintance with objects and then the present idea.

With Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl these become world, care and temporalizing. This transformation occurs because Husserl is caught up in only a kind of theoretical knowledge or knowledge as only present-at-hand. For Heidegger or engagement with things is much more than an idealized theoretical stance and those engagements must be brought into philosophy. In the much later Heidegger, according to van Buren content-meaning, relational meaning and temporalizing meaning then become the Fourfold (earth, sky, gods and mortals), poetic dwelling and the destiny of being.

I’ll admit to not being a fan of the Fourfold too much - if only because nearly everyone I encounter gives it a different meaning and then brushes it aside as none too important. However I do think that the Earth-World division in “On the Origin of the Work of Art” is quite useful. While van Buren doesn’t mention that work I think we’d have world as content-meaning and earth as relation-meaning. Strife is the conflict between our relation with entities and our world of meanings of entities. Strife is found in that essential turn of the hermeneutic circle rather than Husserl’s reduction.

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