Abstract
In 1983 Timothy Stapleton advanced the interesting claim that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology was largely motivated by an ontological problematic and not, as is more commonly thought, an epistemological one.1 Critical examination of this claim provides a convenient framework for what I would like to do in this essay, viz., start to clarify the new sense of “ontology” demanded by phenomenological philosophy so far as it is genuine “first philosophy,” in which (as Husserl always claimed) “the total sense of philosophy, accepted as ‘obvious’ throughout all its historical forms, [is] basically and essentially transformed.”’ My question is whether or not there can be an ontological transcendental philosophy, and it concerns the systematic relations between Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. I believe that too much has traditionally been made of their differences. Though there are obvious places where the two positions are incompatible, I would argue that Heidegger is better seen as developing and advancing Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, than as rejecting it altogether.
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References
Timothy Stapleton, Husserl and Heidegger: The Question of a Phenomenological Beginning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983 ). References to this book will be incorporated into the text, abbreviated “S.”
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 18, Hua VI, p. 16.
Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book,trans. Frederick Kersten (The Hague: Martinus loft 1983), pp. 18–33, Hua III, pp. 23–40. Here the logical issues of formal and regional ontologies are handled prior to the main part of the text in which the phenomenological, transcendental standpoint is introduced. The same structure is found in Formal and Transcendental Logic. References to Ideas I will be incorporated into the text, abbreviated “I.”
On the “transcendental naivete” of ontology, see Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic,trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 151ff, Hua XVII, p. 159ff. On the distinction between ontology and phenomenology, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book,trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 65–77, Hua V, pp. 76–89.
Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology,trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 18, Hua II, p. 23. 6lbid., p. 1, Hua II, p. 3.
Cf. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Proglegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985 ). I shall discuss this interpretation in more detail in Part II. References to this volume will be incorporated into the text, abbreviated “HCT.”
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 265, Hua XIX/1;, p. 27.
Edmund Husserl, “Der Encyclopaedia Britannica Artikel, Erster Entwurf,” in Phänomenologische Psychologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962 ), Hua IX, p. 248.
The passage is from Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 21, Hua I, p. 61.
No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentative intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originally (so to speak, in its ‘personal actuality) offered to us in ’intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there“ (I 44), Hua III, p. 52.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edwin Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 ), pp. 60, 62.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 59; A11–12/B25.
Heidegger, Being and Time, op. cit., p. 62.
Karl Lehmann, “Metaphysik, Transzendentalphilosophie, und Phänomenologie in den ersten Schriften Martin Heideggers,’ Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görres Gesellschaft 71 (1964): 333–367.
For some discussion of transcendental philosophy in Heidegger’s early work see my “Lask, Heidegger, and the Homelessness of Logic,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,Vol. 23 no. 3 (1992).
Martin Heidegger, “Neuere Forschungen über Logik,” in Frühe Schriften, (Gesamtausgabe Bd. 1), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,“ also in Friihe Schriften,pp. 189–410.
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982 ), pp. 110–111.
Ibid., p. 319f.
This can be further substantiated by locating Heidegger’s work within the context of the then-current debates going on among the various schools of neoKantianism. See, for example, the detailed studies by Manfred Brelage in Studien zur Transzendentalphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965 ).
Frederick Olafson, “Consciousness and Intentionality in Heidegger’s Thought,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 12, no. 2 (April 1975): 91–103.
On the significance of the “understanding of being” for the development of Heidegger’s transcendental philosophy see my “The Question of Philosophical Method in Heidegger’s Early Freiburg Lectures,” forthcoming. On the transcendental interpretation of Being and Time generally see Carl-Friedrich Gethmann, Verstehen and Auslegung (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1974).
The text, entitled “Substantive Difficulties,” from which this citation comes records some of Heidegger’s remarks concerning Husserl’s Encyclopaedia Britannica article. It is found in Hua IX, op. cit., p. 602.
Heidegger, Being and Time,op. cit., p. 68.
In this respect Olafson, op. cit., pp. 93–94, is quite right to argue that “while [the conception of noesisi is modified in important ways, it clearly survives and forms a part of Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein” in Being and Time.
Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), p. 263.
Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology,op. cit., p. 21.
I have tried to address some aspects of the question of the “world” in Husserl and Heidegger in my “Husserl, Heidegger, and Transcendental Philosophy: Another Look at the Encyclopaedia Britannica Article,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,Vol. L, no. 3 (March 1990): 501–518.
See, for example, the discussion of this issue in all versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article (e.g., Hua IX, p. 275f.).
Of course, many commentators have criticised this as an inconsistency in Heidegger’s philosophy, but my concern is not with that but with the character of that philosophy as Heidegger understood it. See for example Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983); Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990); Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), among many others.
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Crowell, S.G. (1997). Ontology and Transcendental Phenomenology Between Husserl and Heidegger. In: Hopkins, B.C. (eds) Husserl in Contemporary Context. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1804-2_2
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