Abstract
At the end of the 1960s, Patocka claimed that the philosophical relation and dispute between Husserl and Heidegger was a burning issue in the phenomenological thinking of the day; a challenging problem, demanding a great effort to achieve a deeper understanding of Phenomenology. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty was proposing that Husserl had done all the work, and that Heidegger had basically followed his teacher’s indications, contributing novel aspects and layers to the phenomenological way of philosophizing. I believe that even today, almost five decades after these estimations, the issues remain unresolved and are of perhaps even more burning importance.
The decades that have passed have provided us with some more hints, but these have not yet satiated our need to penetrate into the depths of the difficulties surrounding the philosophical relation between Husserl and Heidegger. The character and fate of phenomenological philosophy, as well as its place in the present philosophical milieu, depend crucially on the way we understand the complexities that connect the thinking of these two great philosophers. We still need to clarify what happened during the period between the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and the appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), and the parting of the ways that followed almost immediately after the latter succeeded the former in the chair of philosophy at Freiburg, in 1928. What Phenomenology was and can be, and whether this philosophy can in some form stand powerfully next to other philosophies, vis-à-vis the philosophical problems of the past and, more importantly, the critical problems of the present historical situation, are questions that can be answered once we have deepen our understanding of this issue.
Keywords
- Transcendental Phenomenology
- Phenomenological Reduction
- Phenomenological Philosophy
- Ontological Region
- Intentional Consciousness
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- 1.
See PTP, 310, 382.
- 2.
See Hua VI, 192.
- 3.
From this point of view, we may reconsider the views presented by Moran (2000b) and Crowell (2002b). Moran in particular is of the opinion that Phenomenology is not actually a research program with its own characteristic research methodology and defining tenets, but that it is rather just a set of people historically related among themselves (2000b, xiv, 3, 21, 189). Husserl and Heidegger are thus just related founding figures who, in the end, came to serious disagreements that are not bridgeable from any possible phenomenological viewpoint (2000b, 90, 188, 198, 208, 260). Moran, however, cannot avoid the implication that, since he is giving an account of Phenomenology, there must be a unifying characteristic behind all the persons belonging to this kind of philosophizing. Nevertheless, no unambiguous direction is offered. At best, something like a “family resemblances” story could be distilled from his approach. From the point of view of a Normalized Phenomenology, there is the hope that something more positive is possible. The reader can follow the traces left within the chapters of the present book, and reflect on them when we reach Chap. 10.
References
Crowell, Steven-Galt. 2002b. Is there a phenomenological research program? Synthese 131: 419–444.
Ingarden, Roman (ed.). 1968. Briefe an Roman Ingarden mit Erläuterungen und Erinnerungen an Husserl. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge.
Moran, Dermot. 2000b. Introduction to phenomenology. London/New York: Routledge.
Patočka, Jan. 1998. Body, Community, Language, World. Trans. E. Kohák; ed. J. Dodd. Chicago: Open Court.
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Theodorou, P. (2015). Introduction. In: Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 83. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16622-3_1
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