Husserl and Heidegger on the Role of Actions in the Constitution of the World

Abstract

In this paper, I shall be discussing Husserl’s and Heidegger’s views on the role that human activity plays in the constitution of the world. While the basic idea in Husserl’s phenomenology is that we constitute the world through our consciousness, Heidegger’s main contribution to philosophy, it seems to me, is to focus attention on the idea that all human activity, all our ways of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, contribute to constituting the world.

I am grateful to mag. art. Elling Schwabe-Hansen for his help in finding passages in Husserl’s manuscripts that illuminate Husserl’s views and to the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities for its generous support of this research. I am also indebted to Hubert Dreyfus, Harrison Hall and Samuel Todes for their comments on an earlier version of this paper that was read at a symposium at the American Philosophical Association Western Division Meeting in Cincinnati, April 27–29, where they served as commentators. I have also been helped by comments from Robert Nozick and John Perry.