Abstract
Where exactly does Heidegger’s Way clearly begin to point to Being and Time? (Hereafter cited as BT.) There is something abrupt and arbitrary about any beginning, and a great beginning involves an especially violent burst of creativity. In retrospect, there is a tendency to dispute its intrusion and heal the breach in history by pointing to the precedents latent in the initial situation of departure. Anticipating this tendency, the historian wishing to recount its story must himself arbitrarily name his beginning and justify it as a beginning within and against the surge of precedents that then follow and, for the first time, become identifiable as precedents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Bernhard Casper, “Martin Heidegger und die theologische Fakultät 1909–1923,” Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 100 (1980), p. 541.
Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger zum achzigsten Geburtstag,” Merkur X (1969), p. 893; “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971, p. 50. Also in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), pp. 293–4.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heideggers Wege (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983), p. 141.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Wilhelm Dilthey nach 150 Jahren,” E.W. Orth, ed., Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart (Sonderband der Phänomenologischen Forschungen), (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1985), p. 159.
SZ = Sein and Zeit. The German pagination given here is to be found in the margins of its English translation, Being and Time, where the translators, Macquarrie and Robinson, call them the H-numbers. Other abbrevations: SS = Summer Semester and WS = Winter Semester.
Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed., Bernd Heimbüchel, Gesamtausgabe (GA) Volume 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987), pp. 114–17. Hereafter cited as ZBP.
This is a citation of Oskar Becker’s distillation which contains the essentials of Franz Josef Brecht’s transcript, the only extant first-hand student version of this hour. Gerda Walther’s transcript, due to the illness and death of her father, ends in mid-course on March 14, and afterwards copies Brecht. For the German, cf. my “Das Kriegsnotsemester 1919: Heideggers Durchbruch in die hermeneutische Phänomenologie,” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 99, no. 1 (1992), p. 106f.
Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972), p. 348. Hereafter cited as FS.
Heidegger’s letter to Karl Löwith on August 20, 1927. I wish to thank Frau Ada Löwith for access to the original of this letter and Klaus Stichweh for help in deciphering it. The German text of this letter is now available in its entirety in Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler, ed., Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, Vol. 2: Im Gespräch der Zeit (Frankfurt Klostermann, 1990), pp. 33–38, esp. p. 36f.
Once again, I am following Oskar Becker’s transcript, who added the outline designations, I.A., I.B., ILA. and LLB to Brecht’s first-hand version, and so provides convenient designations for us in following this important schema. For the German, written across the blackboard in a single row, cf. my “Kriegsnotsemester,” op. cit (note 6). It might be observed here that the term UrEtwas is to found only in the transcripts (several times), while the published edition speaks instead of the pretheoretical, preworldly something (ZBP 115–7).
Rickert’s report is to be found in Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Lehrjahre,” J.C. Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux, eds., The Collegium Phenomenologicum: The First Ten Years, Phenomenological Vol. 105 (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1988), p. 118.
I have dealt with this relationship in great detail in my “Why Students of Heidegger Will have to Read Emil Lask,” Deborah G. Chaffin, ed., Emil Lask and the Search for Concreteness (Athens: Ohio UP, 1994).
Emil Lask, Gesammelte Schnften, Volume II (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923), p. 78. Herafter cited GS I for Volume I, GS II for Volume IL
Fichtes Idealismus and die Geschichte (1902) is to be found in Lask’s Gesammelte Schriften,Volume 1 (=GS I).
John D. Caputo, “Phenomenology, Mysticism and the Grammatica Speculativa: Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5 (1974), pp. 101–117, esp. p. 107. Oversight of this hidden agenda of a pre-understanding of being in the habilitation work and, with it, the loss of a precious opportunity for insight into the phenomenon of mysticism, is especially detrimental to Caputo’s particular interests in Heidegger. Moreover, he perpetuates and even magnifies the mistake in various ways in his later books on the relation of Heidegger to medieval scholasticism and mysticism. Small wonder that, having missed this noetic dimension of modus essendi he goes on to speak of “the realism of the Habilitationsschrift,” which prevents Heidegger from seeing the “mystical elements” of the “event” of truth until after the “turn” of 1930. (Heidegger was in fact developing such insights and, for that very reason, already making the turn in 1919!) Cf. John D. Caputo, Mystical Elements in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens: Ohio UP, 1978) p. 152. There is more warrant for asserting that Caputo himself has allowed subliminal vestiges of scholastic realism to get the best of his phenomenological training. A little dose of transcendental idealism a la Lask might have averted the wrong turn, by recalling the aspects of Divine Idealism operative in the scholastic doctrine of ontological truth. In this regard, I missed the works of Albert Dondeyne in Caputo’s book, Heidegger and Aquinas (New York: Fordham UP, 1982). Cf. Also Roderick M. Stewart, “Signification and Radical Subjectivity in Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift’,” Man and World 12 (1979), pp. 360–386, esp. p. 365, who notes the active modus essendi with some astonishment and does not know what to make of it.
In scholastic philosophy, simple apprehension is called the first “act of the mind” and judgement the second.
This very Laskian phrase refers to the truth of simple apprehension or categorial intuition. This relationship between living (or ‘experiencing = erleben) and knowing, crucial for what follows, first takes shape in Husserl’s discussion in the Sixth Logical Investigation (§ 8, 39) of tacitly experiencing truth as identification in knowing the identical object. Cf. my articles on the Husserlian aspects of Heidegger’s thought: “Heidegger (1907–1927): The Transformation of the Categorial, ”Continential Philosophy in America“,” edited by H.J. Silverman, J. Sallis & T.M. Seebohm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1983) pp. 165–185, esp. p. 178; “On the Way to Being and Time: Introduction to the Translation of Heidegger’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Research in Phenomenology XV (1985) pp. 193–226, esp. p. 201. The Laskian phrase ”to live in truth“ thus first appears in Heidegger’s gloss of Husserl’s Sixth Investigation in Summer Semester 1925: Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe Volume 20 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), p. 70; English translation by T. Kisiel, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985) p. 52. Cf. also p. 94 (69) of this very same section in the course, where the one mention of Lask is to remark that he was influenced in his investigations on the logic of philosophy and the theory of judgment by Husserl’s treatment on categorial intuition. Heidegger introduces the phrase ”in truth“ in BT (SZ 221) as if it were common parlance. It is, of course. But shortly before (SZ 218, note), he had identified Lask as ”the only one outside of phenomenology who has positively taken up“ these portions of Husserl’s Sixth Investigation, from which Lask’s Logik der Philosophie (1911) was especially influenced by the sections on Sensory and Categorial intuition and his Lehre vom Urteil (1912) by those on Evidence and Truth. The investigation of these even more specific interconnections made by Heidegger might well prove fruitful for the understanding of all three parties in this philosophical ‘triangle’.
Cf. the excellent index to the English translation of BT Macquarrie and Robinson. For insight into the importance of such dimensions of undifferentiation for Heidegger’s sense of the formal indication, I am indebted to an unpublished paper by R.J.A. van Dijk and Th.C.W. Oudemans, “Heideggers formal anzeigende Philosophie.”
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), §13. Hereafter cited as Ideen I . First published in 1913, there are two extant English translations of this book.
Edmund Husserl’s Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft was first published in the neo-Kantian journal Logos in 1911. English translation by Quentin Lauer is in E. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Hereafter cited as Logos-essay.
I have summarized this course in others ways and for other purposes in my work on Lask (cf. note 10) and the Kriegsnotsemester (cf. note 6), but first of all, based strictly on the student transcripts, in “Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes ‘Faktizität’im Frühwerk Heideggers,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch 4 (1986–87), pp. 91–120.
Cf. Ibid., p. 97 n. 23, which pinpoints Paul Natorp’s use of the term es gibt in his courses at the time to describe the problem of “facticity” facing the neoKantians in their ongoing efforts to overcome 19th-century naturalism, for which the “irrationality” of facticity is insuperable. Cf. ZBP 122.
Jonas Cohn, Religion und Kulturwerte, “Philosophische Vorträge” of the Kantgesellschaft (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1914), p. 21. Heidegger refers to this article in ZBP (145n).
Lask likewise writes: “What is at issue here is nothing less than the very life and death of philosophy” (II, 89). But what is at issue for Lask is the philosophical institution of the search for the categorial forms of the non-sensory forms already operative in our experience, and for the forms of those forms of the forms, etc. This, from Heidegger’s perspective, is clearly a turn away from the already operative categorial intuitions in experience, which are to be explicated in themselves, toward ever escalating theoretizations of them. Ergo Heidegger’s final assessment of Lask: he was the first to see the problem of the theoretical in ovo,but this very problem is difficult to find in him since he turn wanted to solve it theoretically (ZBP 88). Heidegger’s thought experiment of the total reification of the world clearly bears dose comparison to Husserl’s experiment in Ideen I (§49) of world-annihilation. The detailed comparison, which must be left for another occasion, may be especially revealing for the understanding of the different “system of motivations” (Ibid., §47) accruing to a historically situated and contextualized intentional dynamics as opposed to the dynamics of an immanent and absolute consciousness. There is a great deal in §47 which must have inspired Heidegger’s descriptions of the primal something, like the ‘not yet’ of experience which “belongs to the indeterminate but determinable horizon of my temporally particular actuality of experience... Every actual experience refers beyond itself to possible experiences” and so serves as a motivating source of experience.
I have added this terminology from BT (SZ 5f), not only to relate this early discussion of the structure of a question to a later development of it, but also to raise the question of whether, aside from its use here as an illustration, there is really a point to a question like “Is there something?” What does it ask for (Erfragtes)? Is the Erfragtes collapsed into the afragtes here? Later, in examining formalization, Heidegger discovers that its product lacks a Vollzugssinn, i.e., it does not follow through to some sort of fulfillment. In short, such a question does not seem to be situationally motivated. It is the “trivial” (kümmerliche: ZBP 63) question of ens commune by a remote I and not the distressed (bekümmerte) question of ens proprium by a fully engaged I.
In a long letter to Heidegger on September 10, 1918 (Heidegger was then “in the field”), Husserl mentions that, after a pause of 5 years, he had begun to read Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie (1912) once again and was concerned about Natorp’s misunderstandings of his phenomenology. And whatever Husserl thus mentioned in this important letter to his future assistant and protégé became an explicit task for the Early Heidegger, as we shall see in other instances of these early years of proximity to Husserl.
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, pp. 56, 48 (German pp. 75, 65). Precisely in this Husserlian context in the course of SS 1925, Heidegger underscores the phrase “intuition and expression,” which is a dominating leitmotif of his courses of 1919–20. Due to the fictive license allowed by the format of his later “Dialogue on Language” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), the Old Heidegger pretends to forget that the title of his course of SS 1920 included this phrase. In fact, at one point, he wonders whether its title was not “Expression and Meaning,” the title of Husserl’s First Logical Investigation, which played such a crucial role in the development of Heidegger’s thoughts on the formal indication. Cf. his On the Way to Language, translated by Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 34 (German p. 128).
Das Worauf is the conceptual predecessor of “das Woraufhin des primaren Entwurfs” (SZ 324), “the toward-which of the primary project” of Dasein which in BT is formally defined as its “sense” (Sinn). (It already means ‘meaning’ in the transcendental context of early 1919. From this earlier context of its genesis, we also see why the English translation of this crucial term in BT as the “upon-which” is in the end erroneous.
Cf. my “Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes,” op.cit. pp. 102, 106f.
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinem Phänomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952). Hereafter cited as Ideen II. This book is now available in an English translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).
“Angeknüpft hat meine Seelenlösung an eine Sprangersche Abhandlung, die (in der Volkeltfestschrift) unter dem Titel ”Zur Theorie des Verstehens und der geisteswissenschaftlichen Psychologie“ Fragen behandelte, denen ein Hauptteil meiner Ideen II gilt und mit denen ich wohl länger und schmerzensvoller gerungen habe als irgendeiner der Lebenden.” R I Heidegger 10.1X.18, Husserl Archive, Louvain, Belgium (I wish to thank Samuel Ijsseling, Director of the Archive, for permission to cite from this letter.) Also significant for their common endeavors in this period is a remark by Husserl in a card to Heidegger in March 28, 1918: “Mir wächst in dem stillen Hochtal ein grosses Werk heran — Zeit und Individuation, eine Erneuerung einer rationalen Metaphysik nach den Prinzipien.” It is the SS 1925 version of Husserl’s courses on “Natur and Geist” that we have available to us as Husserliana IX. Cf. the English translation by William Scanlon, Phenomenological Psychology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).
For example, in a letter to Elizabeth Blochmann on May 1, 1919, Heidegger makes note of his “ständiges Lernen in der Gemeinshcaft mit Husserl,” “continually learning in my association with Husserl.” Martin Heidegger —Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918–1969, Joachim W. Storck, ed., Marbacher Schriften (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschafte, 1989), p. 16. Heidegger’s correspondence in 1920, on the other hand, already reflects a change in attitude toward Husserl.
Letter of Gerda Walther to Alexander Pfänder on June 20, 1919. I wish to thank Eberhard Ave-Lallemant of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich for permission to cite from this letter.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kisiel, T. (1994). Kriegsnotsemester 1919: Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Breakthrough. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-2964-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-1160-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive