Abstract
Most of the secondary literature on Hermann Weyl’s philosophical writings and on his interest in phenomenology focuses on the 1910s and 1920s and on the relation to the work of Edmund Husserl. In contrast, little attention has been paid to Weyl’s later writings and to how they relate to later phenomenology. The present paper aims to fill part of this gap by considering Weyl’s work of around 1950 in which he critically evaluates several phenomenologically inspired notions from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. As it turns out, Weyl here aims for a third way in between Heideggerian phenomenology and Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism.
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Notes
- 1.
The following discussion is partially based on earlier works of mine in Sieroka, 2010a, pp. 333–349.
- 2.
For the sake of completeness, it should be added that indeed similar views can be found in Husserl’s later philosophy (as, for instance, in his “Origin of Geometry”). In the present paper, however, the focus is on Weyl’s self-assessment—that is, the focus is on how Weyl himself located the claims of other thinkers in relation to his own view.
- 3.
Here one can also understand Weyl’s late appreciation of, if not enthusiasm for, Paul Lorenzen’s work on an operationalist foundation of mathematics (see ETH-Bibliothek, Archive, Hs91: 365–369; see also Sieroka, 2010a, pp. 101–102).
- 4.
Weyl mixes up the Heideggerian terminology a little: Heidegger’s term is “In-der-Welt-sein,” whereas Weyl writes “Sein-in-der-Welt.” This, however, does not have any serious consequences (and the English translation makes use of the changed word order anyway).
- 5.
See also Fichte’s notion of a “wavering of the imagination” (Schweben der Einbildungskraft) which marks the same kind of see-saw mechanism (see Sieroka, 2007, 2010a, 2010b for details). Moreover, in the letter to Hecke just quoted, Weyl uses the German term Schöpfung (“creation”) instead of Erkenntnis (“insight”). This nicely emphasises the common and active character of insight and symbolic construction.
- 6.
Notably, even within Heidegger scholarship it has been claimed that it is exactly the idea of a pre-theoretic foundation of human existence that marks a specific Fichtean inheritance in Heidegger (see Denker, 2000, p. 115); and Weyl’s notion of a ridiculous circle in combination with such a pre-theoretical encounter of the world fits extremely well into Weyl’s own reading of Fichte in a particularly anthropological and pragmatist way (see once more Sieroka, 2010a, for details).
- 7.
Another important parallel to Cassirer are Weyl’s “historical dialectics of science,” as one might call it. Again and again, Weyl presents the development of mathematics and physics as a historical unfolding of human reasoning (see, e.g., Weyl, 1921, 1925, 1949c; cf. also Weyl 1968, 2009, passim). However, whereas in Cassirer this view might be largely influenced by the work of Hegel, in Weyl it is the work of Fichte; including Fichte’s attempt to write a “pragmatic history of the human mind” (see Sieroka, 2007, 2010a, p. 26).
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I would like to thank Richard Allen for his very careful comments and suggestions on content, language, and grammar.
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Sieroka, N. (2020). Unities of Knowledge and Being – Weyl’s Late “Existentialism” and Heideggerian Phenomenology. In: Wiltsche, H.A., Berghofer, P. (eds) Phenomenological Approaches to Physics. Synthese Library, vol 429. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46973-3_5
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