Abstract
So far in this study, the notion of unity within phenomenology seems to prevail almost completely over plurality. But along the way, I refrained from answering many urgent questions. On more than one occasion, I postponed a question, sometimes with the remark that, as a question of being, or of ontology (in Heidegger’s sense), the thematic treatment of the question properly belonged to a later chapter. Indeed, most if not all of the questions, postponed in this way, are questions that somehow involve the relation between the issues concerning constitution, “transcendence” (in Heidegger’s sense), and being. In the present chapter, the attempt must be made to tie up some of these loose ends.
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References
Husserl scholars would probably want to know at this point whether the priority claimed for the “understanding of being” is a “static” or “genetic” priority. It seems to me that Heidegger wants to say that it is both. That is, temporally we must have understood “as what” to approach tools before we are able to use them, and as a matter of “logic,” too, relations to entities presuppose an understanding of their modes of being. This suggestion is hardly refuted by Heidegger’s emphasis that understanding of being is “not prior in the order of measured clocktime” (GA 24, p. 100). The claim that it makes no sense to say that understanding of being precedes an experience of an entity by a certain number of minutes does not necessarily exclude all kinds of temporal priority (cf. ibid., p. 462).
Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism, p. 24. Okrent continues (same page): “But Heidegger doesn’t claim that there can be no intentions directed toward a thing unless we understand it.” Given our many references in Chapter III, Section 1, and in the present section, this claim of Okrent’s can hardly be confirmed. The question to be discussed, then, is only whether Okrent is right that Heidegger’s view is “wildly implausible.”
As Daniel Dahlstrom says, “pragmatic readings” such as the one Okrent offers “tend to ignore or at least misconstrue the significance of the difference between ontic, preontological, and ontological levels” (Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, p. 428). See Section 3 of the present chapter.
This is intimately connected with Heidegger’s ambiguous relation to idealism. He consistently maintains that although being would not “be” if Dasein did not exist, nevertheless entities would not be affected by Dasein’s non-existence (SZ, pp. 183, 212). This has led some commentators to conclude that Heidegger contributes to Husserlian phenomenology a realist impulse. See, e.g., Henry Pietersma, “Husserl and Heidegger”; John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, p. 27; and Joseph Margolis, “Phenomenology and Metaphysics,” p. 166. David R. Cerbone, “World, World-Entry, and Realism in Heidegger,” attributes a more sophisticated realism to Heidegger, a realism that only concerns entities, and in fact ultimately places Heidegger beyond the realism-idealism-debate. But since, according to Heidegger, we can have absolutely no relation to entities except in and through an understanding of their being — which means that no entities could ever reveal their an sich being, indeed could not be said to have any being, if a Dasein did not exist — then the kind of “realism” that Heidegger defends would seem to be a very thin one that cannot, in the last analysis, be all that different from Husserl’s transcendental “idealism” (cf. SZ, p. 212; GA 26, pp. 194–195). However, I cannot argue this point here.
Thus, this must be what Heidegger would reply to Sartre’s criticism that Heidegger can never make intelligible the concrete ontic relations with others (or things). Cf Being and Nothingness, pp. 248–249.
It is truly astonishing how clearly Eugen Fink sees this. As is well known, Fink is of the opinion that ”[n]either Heidegger nor Husserl sees the other without a certain `foreshortening”’ (Doriion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, p. 25). In an unpublished manuscript quoted by Ronald Bruzina, Fink specifies this relationship in a way that is relevant to our present discussion, in observing that “Husserl is blind to transcendence, Heidegger to constitution” (Husserl ist blind für die Transzendenz, Heidegger für die Konstitution) (Bruzina, “Gegensätzlicher Einfluß — Integrierter Einfluß,” p. 142).
Many commentators argue that Husserl’s “inner time-consciousness” should never have been named thus, since the phenomenon Husserl describes is not “inner,” but prior to the distinction between inner and outer. See Thomas Prufer, “Heidegger, Early and Late, and Aquinas”; Robert Sokolowski, “Ontological Possibilities in Phenomenology”; and James G. Hart, `Being and Mind.”
As already emphasized in the introduction, a comprehensive study of being and subjectivity in Husserl and Heidegger would have to deal in much greater detail with the question of temporality. In the present study, the accent is on subjectivity’s bodily embeddedness or situatedness in the world, not on the temporal dimensions of subjective life. Good accounts of both differences and similarities between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s accounts of temporality are found in Rudolf Bernet, “Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Zeit bei Husserl und Heidegger,” and in Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, pp. 149–159.
These two kinds of entities — equipment and Dasein — are not, of course, the only ones Heidegger recognizes. Although there is no reason to assume that it is intended as an exhaustive list, it is worth noting the inventory of entities and their modes of being that Heidegger presents in the 1928/29 lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie: “So, with regard to these different kinds of being of entities, we can differentiate: the existing: the humans; the living: plants and animals; the present-at-hand: material things; the ready-to-hand: things for use, in the widest sense; the subsisting [das Bestehende]: number and space” (GA 27, pp. 71–72). I cannot possibly deal with all of them in the present context, however. Besides, from the beginning, Heidegger’s explicit critique of Husserl centers precisely on the question of the modes of being of the two kinds of entities singled out for discussion in this chapter (cf. Soren Overgaard, “Heidegger’s Early Critique of Husserl”).
See Barbara Merker, Selbsttäuschung und Selbsterkenntnis, pp. 79, 194. See, too, Heidegger’s own remarks in Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriff:s on this “basic phenomenological illusion” (GA 20, p. 254).
Husserl appears to have been troubled by Heidegger’s notion of Vorhandenheit: “What kind of meaning does presence-at-hand take on? <That of mere things <had> in the corresponding external observation? But even that is not entirely understandable” (RB, p. 22). In her article, “Phenomenologizing with a Hammer: Theory or Practice?”, Gail Soffer also argues that the concept is “poorly defined.”
In the winter of 1924/1925, Heidegger develops in great detail how this interpretation of being has its roots in the Greek understanding of ousia (GA 19, p. 466, et passim). For discussions of whether Husserl, too, is an exponent of “metaphysics of presence,” see Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Rudolf Bernet, “Die ungegenwärtige Gegenwart,” and Robert J. Dostal, “Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger.”
Elsewhere, however, he emphasizes that the founded layers of value, practical usefulness, etc., contribute a new “ontological sense” to the object (Hua III/1, pp. 267, 355), as Jim Jakobsson has reminded me. But I do not think this changes anything essential: Husserl remains committed to the layer ontology, and that is ultimately the problem.
Dagfinn Fsllesdal seems to come close to this view in maintaining that “Heidegger regards our practical ways of dealing with the world as more basic than the theoretical” (Follesdal, “Husserl and Heidegger on the Role of Actions in the Constitution of the World,” p. 371). However, much depends on how this statement is interpreted. As we see shortly, there is indeed a way in which Heidegger does want to claim priority for “practice.”
When Heidegger says that “knowledge” is a founded mode of being-in-the-world (SZ, p. 61; GA 20, p. 222), then this must not be understood as a testimony to the secondary nature of all kinds of perception. What is “founded” is only the purely theoretical observation of things — a kind of practice that, as Husserl himself says in Krisis, is only one among others, and historically a quite late one at that (Hua VI p 1131
There are obvious affinities between this Heideggerian account of perception and Wittgenstein’s notion of “aspect-seeing.” A good account of the convergence is found in Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World, although Mulhall’s presentation of Heidegger is not entirely free from problematic claims. Thus, Mulhall seems simply to take for granted that the “baroque metaphysical structures” supposedly construed by Heidegger are really “grammatical” structures “seen through a glass darkly” (On Being in the World, pp. 159, 3).
Thus, Okrent is precisely wrong at the point where he identifies existential understanding with “practical” understanding (cf. Heidegger’s Pragmatism, p. 131).
Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 53.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, pp. 106–107.
Being-in-the-World, p. 104.
For a penetrating critique of the pragmatic reading of Heidegger, see Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, esp. pp. 199–200, 233n, 305–306, 423–433. A somewhat different critique of the pragmatic interpretation is found in William D. Blattner, “Existential Temporality in Being and Time.” Since the pragmatic reading fails to reach the level of ontology that really interests Heidegger, it is very difficult for advocates of such a reading to argue for the originality of Heidegger’s thinking vis-à-vis Husserl, and at the same time present a fair account of the latter’s phenomenology. See Dagfinn Føllesdal’s response to Dreyfus (Follesdal, “Absorbed Coping, Husserl, and Heidegger”).
We have already several times referred to Theodore Kisiel’s claim that Heidegger studies Ideen II intensively while preparing the detailed Husserl-critique to be presented in the lecture course of the summer of 1925 (GA 20). Kisiel, “On the Way to Being and Time,” p. 195.
Eugen Fink is of the same opinion in Nähe und Distanz, pp. 286–287.
Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity, p. 137.
The Paradox of Subjectivity, p. 140: “Like Kant and Husserl, Heidegger in this work [Sein und Zeit] essentially leaves us suspended between these two incompatible views of ourselves, as if the alteration between them were simply and descriptively an inescapable part of human experience.”
If we could take the latter as Husserl’s last word on the matter, then the question would remain to what extent this is in fact an advance beyond Descartes. After all, Descartes knew very well that I am not in the body “as a sailor is present in a ship, but [...] I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit” (Meditations on First Philosophy [The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II, p. 56]). However, when Husserl emphasizes that he is no longer talking about ”substances” in any sense, but about abstract moments (Hua VI, p. 232), or indeed even dismisses that conception in favor of the view that we are dealing only with two different “perspectives” (Blickrichtungen) (Hua XXIX, p. 159), then he seems to leave the Cartesian view behind.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 304.
One therefore cannot, in my view, claim that Husserl is more “accurate” with reference to the fact that we do, sometimes, experience something present-at-hand, as Dermot Moran claims in his article “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality.” The main issue is whether one can make intelligible entities such as other subjects and tools the way Husserl attempts it, not whether we ever experience something merely on-hand, nor in fact whether these latter experiences necessarily presuppose a switch from some other, and more original, pre-ontological mode of understanding (as Heidegger often claims) (e.g., SZ, p. 61).
Cf. David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity, p. 94.
Cf. Rudolf Bernet, “Phenomenological Reduction and the Double Life of the Subject,” p. 255: “by revealing the correlation between constituting consciousness and the constituted world, the phenomenological reduction makes manifest precisely the (pre)-being of this consciousness and the being of this world as well as the difference between them.” See, too, Klaus Held, “Heidegger and das Prinzip der Phänomenologie,” p. 121.
Cf. Husserl’s protest against the generality of that claim (RB, p. 37).
See Daniel Dahlstrom’s remarks on the proper translation of the concept of Dasein in Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, pp. xxiii-xxv.
For reasons that need not concern us here, Heidegger feels entitled to call this disclosedness of Dasein “original truth” (SZ, pp. 220–221), a decision that has spawned a lively discussion in the literature on Heidegger. Ernst Tugendhat provides a detailed critique of Heidegger’s identification of disclosedness with truth in Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (esp. pp. 259–405), a critique that is by and large seconded by Cristina Lafont, Sprache und Welterschließung (esp. pp. 148–231). For two very different attempts to defend Heidegger against Tugendhat’s critique, see Carl F. Gethmann, Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln, pp. 115–168, and Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, esp. pp. 394423. Dahlstrom’s attempt (and implicitly also Gethmann’s) is criticized in Soren Overgaard, “Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Revisited.”
For some corroboration of this reading, see Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, pp. 259–260, and John Sallis, Delimitations, pp. 112–118.
Held, “Einleitung,” p. 41.
For a discussion of Heidegger’s account of self-awareness, see Steven Crowell, “Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time.” That Husserl, too, has a theory of pre-reflective self-awareness is argued by Dan Zahavi in Self-Awareness and Alterity.
The strange circumstance that Heidegger should use the concept of ”geistig” here — one of the terms that, according to Sein und Zeit, is precisely to be avoided (SZ, p. 46) — is noticed by Jacques Derrida, who devotes an entire book to tracing this concept through Heidegger’s works. Cf. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question.
One misses Heidegger’s point completely, if one assumes that Heidegger refuses and ”resists [...] the return to an embodied Dasein” (Alweiss, The World Unclaimed, p. 90; cf. pp. 103–104, 124, 142, 165), and as a consequence ultimately describes a Dasein that has to be characterized as disembodied and devoid of spatiality (ibid., pp. 87, 107, 125).
Even Merleau-Ponty, who more than anyone else emphasizes that we are our body (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 206), sometimes speaks of consciousness as “having” a body (e.g., ibid., p. 351). The notion that the body is my “anchorage in the world” is also found in Merleau-Ponty (ibid., p. 144). Is this not at bottom a Quite Cartesian way of expressine oneself?
Compare to this, Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, p. 260. Similarly, Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, p. 212: “With Dasein described as being-in-the-world, some have found it strange that Heidegger does not offer a phenomenology of embodiment in Being and Time. The primary reason for this is that Heidegger is trying to conceptualize the being of human being prior to the traditional distinction between mind and body.”
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Overgaard, S. (2004). Constitution, Transcendence, and Being. In: Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World. Phaenomenologica, vol 173. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2239-5_7
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