Abstract
This article asks the double question of the relation between Husserl’s methodology and Heidegger’s "question of being", on the one hand, and the pertinence of various "analytically" inspired, Anglo-American readings of Heidegger, on the other. We claim that such readings remain trapped in a pre-phenomenoligical "natural attitude", and that this is precisely because they fail to take seriously the rigourous Husserlian phenomenological methodology, and notably the reduction, that makes Heidegger’s thinking possible and, specifically, that conditions the intelligibility of the "question of being". The intelligiblity of this question, and of Heidegger’s ontology and his positions in general, are muddled and obscured by the post-Carnapian presuppostions that still dominate much of the so-called "analytic" tradition in English-speaking philosophy. We demonstrate the decisive importance not just of the reduction but also of categorial intuition for Heidegger’s understanding of "being", and we show how the atomistic formal ontology presupposed by the philosophical heirs of logical positivism was precisely the target of Husserl’s phenomenological mereology, the establishment of which was the goal of demonstrations of the possibility of eidetic and categorial intution. We show in the process how readings that distinguish sharply between phenomenology as a science of being (or ontology) and as a science of consciousness (or of phenomena) are fundamentally misguided. We finish by suggesting how the transcendental stage of the reduction, when understood as an extention of the eidetic stage, indicates why no definitive "science" of being is possible, but only a "question".
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Notes
- 1.
W.V.O. Quine, “On What There Is”, in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1953, pp. 6–7, 11–15.
- 2.
These categories are in turn heuristic fictions, or “constructions” (Aufbauen) according to Carnap. See Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, tr. R. George, University of California Press, 1967 (1928), esp. §§99–101. Cf. especially “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932), in Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism, New York, MacMillan, 1959, pp.60–81, and A.J. Ayer’s popularization and simplification of these views in Language, Truth and Logic, London, Gollancz, 1936.
- 3.
The “metaphysical” presuppositions that are to be bracketed by the phenomenological reduction must be understood to be “metaphysical” in the narrow, Kantian sense of dogmatically presupposed entities, structures or processes that cannot be given in experience. For a treatment of the critical differences between the Kantian and the phenomenological understandings of what it means for an entity to be given in experience rather than “metaphysically” presupposed, see J. Rogove, “The Phenomenological a priori as Husserlian Solution to the Problem of Kant‘s ‘Transcendental Psychologism’”, in I. Apostolescu and C. Serban, Husserl, Kant and Transcendental Phenomenology, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 2019.
- 4.
J.-F. Courtine, « Reduction phénoménologique-transcendantale et différence ontico-ontologique », in Heidegger et la phénoménologie, Paris, Vrin, 1990, p. 209.
- 5.
T. Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- 6.
Th. Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift, Lahnam, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
- 7.
Frederick Olafson, Heidegger and Philosophy of Mind, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 135–150.
- 8.
Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, op. cit., pp. 157–158.
- 9.
This is not only valid for his Logical Investigations, with their famous and explicit declaration of “metaphysical neutrality”, but also for Husserl’s post-1912 phenomenology, whose supposed “idealism” – as we shall see, and as we have more thoroughly demonstrated elsewhere – is just as metaphysically neutral, and in the same sense, as is the supposed “realism” of the early Husserl of the Investigations.
- 10.
Kant, Logik (ed. Jäsche, 1800), Werkausagbe, Frankfurt-am-Main, Surkamp, vol. VI, pp. 432–582; and Vorlesung über Logik (AK GS, Berlin, de Grunter, 1966, vol. XXIV).
- 11.
See for example: Hua XVIII, §§16, 49; cf. ibid., §14: For Husserl, the very concept of normativity requires that the normativity be itself founded on theoretical intuitions, whereby the very bindingness of the applicable norms can be adequately constituted in such a way that they may become binding. See also Hua XVII, pp. 44–48. What is “given” in experience – the “raw data” that must subsequently be processed by the subject – includes “logical data [logischen Gegebenheiten]”; things like “the true”, “the non-contradictory”, etc., can and must, in order to be known, constitute the object of an intuitive experience or “insight”.
- 12.
§§40–58, Hua XIX pp. 657–709.
- 13.
GA 20, pp. 34–109.
- 14.
Summarized by Jean Beaufret in Heidegger, Questions IV, Gallimard, 1977.
- 15.
Husserl, Logical Investigation V, §11.
- 16.
See Jacques Taminiaux, « Heidegger et les Recherches logiques », in Le regard et l’excédent, Kluwer, La Haye, 1976.
- 17.
See note supra.
- 18.
While French readings have generally been complicit in the latter, Anglo-American readings coming out of the “analytic” tradition have, as we have already noted, have often fallen victim to the former to such an extent that the repercussions of the latter have become secondary if not unintelligible for them. As J.-F. Courtine has thoroughly and judiciously shown, Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit both presupposes a radical critique of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and constitutes its methodological radicalization, with “anxiety” being the new methodological key which “constitutes a sort of ‘repetition’ of the Husserlian problematic of the épochè and of phenomenological-transcendental reduction” (op. cit., p.234). Our purpose in the present article is not to discuss again the ruptures and continuities between Husserl and Heidegger, but rather to underscore how, whatever their differences, Heidegger’s methodology presupposes the classical (Husserlian) phenomenological critique of the empirico-positivist metaphysical presuppositions as its own condition of possibility and intelligibility. The “radicalization” Heidegger carries out through his introduction of the theme of the existential analytic does not alter this basic fact.
- 19.
Steven Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: the matter and method of philosophy”, in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall, Blackwell Companion to Heidegger, p. 54.
- 20.
Jean-Luc Marion, Réduction et donation, Paris, PUF, p. 65; « an sich… ist Ontologie nicht Phänomenologie » (Husserl, Ideen…III, Hua V, p.129); « Es gibt keine Ontologie neben einer Phänomenologie, sondern wissenschaftliche Ontologie ist nichts anders als Phänomenologie » (Heidegger, GA 20, p. 98). J-L Marion goes on to cite Hua V, p.76: “All ontologies fall victim to the reduction and disappear”, without however citing the passage that precedes and contextualizes this statement: see immediately infra.
- 21.
Cf. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, “Beilagen”, Hua VII, pp. 401–406 et passim.
- 22.
Cf. Hua V, loc. cit., “On the relation between phenomenology and ontology”: “In transcendental experience all ‘transcendent being’, understood in the normal sense as effective being [wahrhaftes Sein], is neutralized, bracketed. What should purely and simply be left over is consciousness itself in its own essence, with intentional being [Vermeintsein] in the place of transcendent being.” However, what is “left over” [übrig] after the reduction is what is “given through immediate intuition” and is the object of a “pure description”, and what is “bracketed” are the “dogmatic science-entities [Wissenschaftsbestände] or all sciences such as physics and psychology”.
- 23.
Ideen…I, § 24.
- 24.
Cf. J. Rogove, op. cit.
- 25.
GA 20, pp. 90–93; Hua I, passim.
- 26.
“… nicht Herstellen als Machen und Verfertigen, sondern Sehenlassen des Seienden in seiner Gegenständlichkeit” (GA 20 p. 97).
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 136. Cf. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 24, §§3–5, Wegmarken, GA 9, pp. 47–77, and Courtine, op. cit., pp. 226–229.
- 29.
GA 20, pp. 34 et sq.
- 30.
GA 20, p. 108.
- 31.
In our soon-to-be-published doctoral dissertation, Une science sans présupposés? Intuition eidétique et structure méréologique entre réduction phénoménologique et réductionnisme logico-empiriste, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016.
- 32.
Logical Investigations III and IV; Ideen…I, §§9–16.
- 33.
LI III, ch. 2, §14; cf. Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith, “Pieces of a Theory” in B. Smith, Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1982, p. 44.
- 34.
Formal and Transcendental Logic, Hua XVII, pp. 53–92.
- 35.
GA 20, pp. 58–64; Hua VI, §46, pp. 161–163.
- 36.
GA 20, pp. 136–159.
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Rogove, J. (2022). Formal and Fundamental Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger. In: Rogove, J., D’Oriano, P. (eds) Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_7
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