Abstract
As we know from his lecture course of the summer of 1925, Heidegger is very critical towards Husserl’s description of the “natural attitude” (GA 20, pp. 155–156). Furthermore, Heidegger apparently views the task of describing the world in the way we naturally experience it in our everyday life as a crucial one, a task on which the success of the whole of phenomenology could depend (cf. GA 20, p. 156; SZ, p. 52).1 Thus, if Husserl’s analyses of the natural attitude are flawed, as Heidegger claims, in the eyes of the latter this would not be a minor detail in Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger must be granted this point. We phenomenologists have not always been phenomenologists, and some of us are not even constant phenomenologists, at least not constantly doing phenomenology. We all statt in, and often return to, perhaps even mostly remain in a “natural attitude,” busy with pursuing “natural” goals, going about our “everyday” business. On this Husserl and Heidegger agree. They also agree that somehow this “natural” or everyday life is what feeds phenomenology. Phenomenologists are not people who turn their eyes to a different world, but women and men for whom this world, indeed especially in its most “obvious” and “trivial” aspects, has become a problem, or even an “enigma.”
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References
This is emphasized by Daniel O. Dahlstrom in “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl,” p. 238, and in Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, p. 123.
“Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) is supposed to refer simply to the world of everyday, natural life. It is of course a famous term of Husserl’s from the thirties, but is even found in manuscripts dating back to Husserl’s Ideen project (cf. Hua IV, pp. 288n, 374–376). What makes the concept of “lifeworld” so apt for my purpose of describing both Husserl’s “natural attitude” and Heidegger’s “everydayness” is, of course, that the term is also evident in the early Heidegger. It appears in most of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses (e.g., GA 56/57, pp. 210, 214; GA 59, pp. 58, 151; GA 60, pp. 11–12, 328, 336; GA 61, pp. 6, 94, 96–97, et passim), but nowhere as frequently as in the winter course of 1919/20 (cf. GA 58, pp. 59, 62–63, 66–71, 75–77, 79–80, 174–176, 207–208, et passim). A natural question, of course, is who coined the term in the first place. Apart from the fact that establishing “rights of ownership” is not a purpose of this study, perhaps we should agree with Gadamer that Husserl and Heidegger’s relationship in 1919 must have been such that it would have excluded as irrelevant and improper any questions of ownership (cf. Gadamer, “Die phänomenologische Bewegung,” p. 127n). In any case, Ernst W. Orth has documented that the term Lebenswelt was coined neither by Husserl, nor by Heidegger (cf. Orth, Edmund Husserls “Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ” pp. 132–136).
Husserl notes in the margin on p. 74 in his copy of Sein und Zeit (here Heidegger again polemically speaks of “staring” at pure objects): “mere things — staring” (RB, p. 22). Husserl frequently writes “Einwand” (objection) in his marginal notes to SZ, when he senses a hidden attack on his own philosophy, and even if he doesn’t write “objection” here, he would hardly have noted Heidegger’s use of “staring,” if he did not feel that it had a critical edge to it. After all, this word is not one of the important technical terms in Sein und Zeit.
“And experiencing and knowing can indeed be a major help for other kinds of concern” (RB, p. 20).
Likewise, if visual perception seems to occupy the principal part in my discussions of Husserl’s analyses of perception, this must not be taken to mean that Husserl is simply a “philosopher of the visual sense.” Husserl analyzes tactile perception extensively in his lectures and manuscripts, and in general, neither Heidegger nor Husserl should be accused of “visualism.”
Therefore, accusing Husserl of having “theoretician’s narcissism” (cf. Barbara Merker, Selbsttäuschung und Selbsterkenntnis, pp. 79, 194) is wrong. Because it is such a superficial criticism it might lead one to miss any true critical potential that Heidegger’s account might have vis-à-vis Husserl.
See, e.g., Husserl’s marginal note to SZ, p. 69, line 20. Heidegger writes: “If we look at things just “theoretically‚ we are without an understanding of readiness-to-hand.” And Husserl replies: “But naturally a theoretical look at the implement [Zeug] is required if we are to grasp and have it as such objectively and to explain it descriptively” (RB, pp. 21–22).
Thus, Hubert Dreyfus is hardly justified in claiming that Heidegger has to “force” Husserl to acknowledge that there could be other types of access to objects than just that of perception (cf. Dreyfus, “Introduction,” pp. 20–21).
One cannot disagree with Rudolf Bernet’s declaration that “[w]hat Heidegger says about daily life corresponds fairly well to Husserl’s notion of “the natural attitude‚” (Bernet, “Phenomenological Reduction and the Double Life of the Subject,” p. 257). Nevertheless, “fairly well” still leaves room for differences that can later prove significant.
As to the notoriously difficult question of translating Heidegger’s terms, I shali try to stay within the suggestions given by Dreyfus (cf. his Being-in-the-World, pp. x–xii), and Kisiel (who does not strictly hold to one translation of each word — cf. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, “Appendix D,” pp. 490–511), when not simply using the German phrases, or more readily understandable “traditional” terms. I believe that those who prohibit any paraphrasing of Heidegger with “traditional” concepts, in fact, are not acting in accordance with Heidegger’s intentions. Heidegger’s early lectures testify to a very pedagogical thinker (try comparing with Husserl’s lecture courses) who strives to achieve clarity. Although he does see the need to coin somewhat “stränge” (even “ugly,” according to himself; SZ, p. 38; GA 20, p. 203) terms, he is very clear about his reasons for doing so.
Heidegger’s notions of Zeug and readiness-to-hand have recently been criticized by Gail Soff er (“Phenomenologizing with a Hammer: Theory or Practice”). She tries to show that readiness-to-hand can neither be shown to be “genetically,” nor “statically” prior to some sort of presence-at-hand. As I see it, however, Soffer basically fails to notice that which is Heidegger’s concern, viz. to demonstrate that the being of our everyday objects is missed if we adopt any kind of “layer ontology.” Much more on this in Chapter VI.
SZ, p. 442 (Heidegger’s marginal note to p. 98).
Cf. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, p. 375. Elsewhere, Kisiel relates that Heidegger studied the manuscript of Ideen II “intensively” while preparing for the lecture course of the summer of 1925 (“On the Way to Being and Time,” p. 195).
John Scanion emphasizes this in his study of the natural attitude (“Husserl’s Ideas and the Natural Concept of the World,” pp. 229–232).
I think that it is, therefore, fundamentally wrong to claim that the other “at first” is a thing, according to Husserl. For example, Bernhard Waidenfels makes such a claim in Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs (pp. 45–46, 201), and strangely, so does Kathleen M. Haney, who wants to defend Husserl’s theory of Fremderfahrung. Cf. her Intersubjectivity Revisited, pp. 45, 47, 50, 105, et passim.
EU, p. 56; Hua XV, p. 506. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 360–361. Sartre defends the stränge view that either the other is an object for me (in which case she cannot be a subject), or she is the subject for whom / am an object (in which case I am “degraded,” “enslaved,” and objectified). Cf. Being and Nothingness, pp. 252, 256, 267, 270, 273. For a brief survey of Merleau-Ponty’s and Sartre’s phenomenological attempts to come to grips with the problem of intersubjectivity, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität, pp. 112–127.
That this is at least part of what concerns Heidegger can be seen from the fact that when introducing the negative extreme of solicitude, he even calls it substituting (stellvertretend-abnehmende) solicitude (GA 21, p. 223).
Although Heidegger takes some Steps towards an analysis of Dasein’s peculiar spatiality, he avoids the problematic of the body in Sein und Zeit (cf. p. 108), which Husserl does not fai! to notice (RB, p. 25). See Chapters V and VI of the present study.
“Besides the tendencies which proceed from other individual persons, there are demands which arise in the intentional form of indeterminate generality, the demands of morality, of custom, of tradition, of the Spiritual milieu: ‘one’ [ ‘man’] judges in this way, ‘one’ has to hold his fork like this, and so on“ (Hua IV, p. 269; cf. Hua XIV, p. 225, and Hua XXIX, p. 42).
Dreyfus, I believe, is therefore not right in claiming that the source of the intelligibility of the world is das Man (cf. Being-in-the-World, pp. 155, 161). Frederick A. Olafson rightly criticizes this aspect of Dreyfus’s Heidegger-interpretation in his paper “Heidegger à la Wittgenstein or ‘Coping’ with Professor Dreyfus” (pp. 54–63). See also the debate between Taylor Carman (“On Being Social: A Reply to Olafson“) and Olafson (“Individualism, Subjectivity, and Presence: A Response to Taylor Carman“), and Pierre Keller’s argument for a middle position (Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience, pp. 161–167).
Fink says that the natural attitude is a “transcendental“ concept. Cf. Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939,p. 113.
So Sebastian Luft recently argues. See his thorough account of Husserl’s notion of the natural attitude, “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude.” Ricoeur similarly argues that it is an illusion to think the natural attitude can be described from within it (Husseri, p. 18).
What is at stake here is whether we should accept the interpretation of the natural attitude. Concerning the experience of the natural attitude (which might turn out to be quite different from the Interpretation the natural attitude itself gives of it), there is agreement: phenomenology must stay faithful to immediate, everyday experience.
Husserl, of course, uses the unfamiliar expression “the general thesis of the natural attitude,” because he knows very well that what he is trying to describe is on a level different from, and more basic than that which we would normally call “beliefs.” There is, in other words, no reason to assume that Husserl would disagree with Wittgenstein’s Statement: “The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting point of belief for me” (On Certainty, § 209). Compare what Husserl says in Krisis: “The world is not a hypothesis that sole sense in which hypotheses have meaning for positive science [...]; all hypotheses in the positive sphere are hypotheses upon the ground of the ‘hypothesis’ of the world“ (Hua VI, § 72, p. 265). Similarly, Hua XXIX, p. 268. Heidegger states in Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs “that the world is ‘there’ before all belief” (GA 20, p. 295).
The similarity with some of Wittgenstein’s points in On Certainty is striking. Cf. the latter work, § 115: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” (Similarly, §§ 341, 354).
The transition from the possibility of illusory particular experiences to the non-apodictic character of the evidence of world-existence as such cannot be justified. John J. Drummond seems to underestimate this important point in his attempt to demonstrate that the “Cartesian” and the “ontological” ways to the reduction are equally necessary. Cf. Drummond, “Husserl on the Ways to the Performance of the Reduction,” p. 57.
We could also formulate a Wittgensteinian version of this argument. As Husserl shows, a “presentifying” (vergegenwärtigende) act such as remembering involves “two” subjects: the one that remembers and the remembered subject (Hua XI, p. 309). Presumably the same must hold for dreaming. Now suppose that my sitting here wide awake in front of my Computer is in fact just a dream. If I (i.e., the dreamt subject) were now to say to myself, “perhaps I am dreaming” — this wouldnot be true. The dreamt subject is exactly “wide awake”; only it is just a dreamt subject. Cf. to this Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §§ 383, 676.
A clear exposition of Husserl’s different ways to phenomenology is found in Iso Kern, “Die drei Wege zur transzendental-phänomenologischen Reduktion in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls.” Most of the contents ofthat article are also found in Kern’s book Husserl und Kant, pp. 196–237.
Perhaps Eugen Fink is hinting at this problem when he describes the hypothetical world-annihilation as “a hypothesis that remains unilluminated with regard to its methodological presuppositions” (Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939, p. 129). See, too, Antonio Aguirre, Genetische Phänomenologie und Reduktion, pp. 34, 44, 54–55, and Soren Overgaard, “Epoche and Solipsistic Reduction.”
Cf. Fink’s similar remarks in HuDo II/l, pp. 39–40.
I thus agree with Eugen Fink’s claim that Husserl’s phenomenology has no worldly problem as its motivation (Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939, p. 110). However, that does not mean that there can be no motivation to set out on the path to phenomenology. It only means that this motivation cannot be a “theoretical“ problem. Fink’s articles on Husserl are, incidentally, very excellent commentaries, and I refer to their profound insights on more than one occasion in the course of this study. Fink seems to be guilty of only one serious mistake. Dan Zahavi convincingly criticizes Fink for falsely attributing to the very late Husserl the view that a primal life not yet divided into ego and alter should replace transcendental intersubjectivity as the ultimate place of Constitution (cf. Zahavi, “The Self-Pluralisation of Primal Life. A Problem in Fink’s Husserl-Interpretation“). Interestingly, at the time of the writing of the VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Fink admits that this notion of a “deeper life of absolute spirit that lies prior to all individuation“ (HuDo II/l, p. 183) is more his own than Husserl’s.
Luft suggests a motivation slightly different from the one I (following Heidegger) shall suggest. Common to them both, however, is the notion that it must be something that is not of our doing, but rather “happens” to us whether we like it or not. Cf. “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitüde,” p. 165. William Jon Lenkowski argues the same in his article “What is Husserl’s Epoche?” Lenkowski even emphasizes the disruption of the familiär in the very terms that Heidegger uses to characterize anxiety: “[W]e must be able to find, at the level of passivity, an occurrence in which the world — the sphere of ‘familiarity’ in which one is “at home” — becomes un-familiär, estranged; an occurrence in which [...] Heimlichkeit gives way to Un-heimlichkeit, in its double sense of ‘homelessness’ and ‘strangeness,’ ‘uncanniness’” (“What is Husserl’s Epoche?”, p. 309). However, Lenkowksi does not seem to notice how much this resembles anxiety as described by Heidegger.
According to Theodore Kisiel, Heidegger actually avoids the existentialist vocabulary from the summer of 1923 and onwards, until the last draft of Sein und Zeit (cf. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, pp. 275, 316).
Cf. Carl F. Gethmann, Verstehen und Auslegung, p. 130. Rudolf Bernet (“Phenomenological Reduction and the Double Life of the Subject,” p. 163) and Jean-Luc Marion (Reduction and Givenness, p. 73) even see anxiety as performing a kind of “phenomenological reduction.“ Apparently, the idea is originally Jean-Francois Courtine’s. Cf. his Heidegger et la phenomenologie, pp. 207–247. I am gratefiil to Dan Zahavi for having drawn this to my attention.
Günter Figal, for instance, claims that the analysis of anxiety, the call of conscience, and being towards death, are central to the very project of fundamental ontology: “on these analyses depends the whole program of a fundamental analysis of Dasein” (Martin Heidegger zur Einfuhrung, p. 75). His thesis finds support in some of Heidegger’s own texts from the late twenties (see, e.g., KPM, pp. 237–238, 283–284). As I show in Chapter III, however, Heidegger admits in an earlier text — in the better part of which he uncompromisingly criticizes Husserl — that what really makes ontological research possible is something Husserl discovered.
See Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” esp. pp. 230–231. Ernst Tugendhat argues along similar lines in “Das Sein und das Nichts,” but emphasizes, as I do too, that this transition to the “nothing” is not important to Heidegger’s argument (pp. 58–61).
Cf. Figal, Martin Heidegger: Phänomenologie der Freiheit, p. 200: “If one wanted to articulate this experience one could say that it is questionable whether one can now give the talk — and precisely this can be interpreted as the experience of ‘potential-for-being.’”
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 29.
Cf. Plato, Theaetatus, 155d: “This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” Similarly, Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and first began to philosophize.”
Eugen Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939, pp. 115–116, 182. Indeed, on one occasion, Husserl himself refers to wonder as the beginning of philosophy (Hua VI, pp. 331–332).
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Overgaard, S. (2004). Natural Attitude and Everyday Life. In: Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World. Phaenomenologica, vol 173. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2239-5_2
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