The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

4 Ontologie

4 Ontologie WHAT DOES THE later Heidegger's almost offhanded label of "onto-logic" for his earliest thought mean? In his 1912 essay "Das Realitatsproblem in der modernen Philosophie" (The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy), he argued that Berkley's and Hume's "esse-percipi formula, the identification of being and being-perceived," completely ignores the intentionality of consciousness which is always directed outward to the world. We find Heidegger focusing on the intentional relation to being throughout his student writings and dealing with it in terms of the three characteristics of noematic content, noetic relation, and finally the enactment or performance of the noesis/noema relation . In the following, I explore in turn each of these characteristics in Heidegger 's early articles, his doctoral dissertation, and his qualifying dissertation. The Kingdom of Logical Sense (Dasein, Truth, Place) Heidegger dealt with intentionality specifically in the form of "the judgment " and defined its content-sense as pure "logical sense" (Sinn), that is, as the logical ground for making judgments about beings. For example, we read in his doctoral dissertation that, "as what is immanent for the occurrence of the judgment, the sense, i.e., the content [Inhalt], can be called the logical side of judging." And again in his qualifying dissertation, "The 'ens rationis' means the content [Gehalt], the sense of psychical acts; it is being in an observing and thinking consciousness-it is the 'ens cognitum, the thought, the judged." The thrust of Heidegger's ontologie was to maintain the status of logical sense as an "autonomous realm" (Bereich), a "kingdom" (Reich), which is distinct from the ontic spatiotemporal reality of both the psychical acts of judging and the physical world about which judgments are made (G1 2/PR 64; G1 172, 277, 166). Das Befragte, that which is interrogated, is psychical acts and the physical world, whereas das Erlragte, that which is sought after, is the logical sense at work here as the being of beings, that is, as the intelligible etiological ground that allows one to understand and explain beings as beings. With this onto-logical difference between logical being and spatiotemporal beings, Heidegger inserted himself squarely within the struc- 66 The Student Years ture of the guiding question of the first metaphysical beginning of western philosophy . Let us first examine this in his doctoral dissertation and his preceding philosophical articles. Here he presented himself as a pure logician living in the modern "age of psychology." The young champion of logic took on the task of refuting psychologism, that is, the reductionist attempt to explain the sense of judgments in terms of the spatiotemporal reality of psychical processes . The first four parts of his dissertation criticized four psychologistic theories, which respectively see judgment in terms of a "genesis" from "apperceptive mental activity" (Wilhelm Wundt), as "consisting" of "component acts" (Heinrich Maier), as a "basic class of psychic phenomena" (Franz Brentano ), and as something "fulfilled" through the "action of the psychical subject that is demanded by the object" (Theodor Lipps). Heidegger's main criticism was that the very questioning in psychologism has already from the start intentionally looked away from the logical content of judgment to the psychical act of judging and is thus a theory not about the logical, but about the psychological. "Its failure to understand is not a mere misunderstanding, but a genuine non-understanding." Psychologism omits the essential "distinction between psychical act and logical content," between the noetic act of judging and the pure noematic logical sense to which the act is intentionally directed. The pure sense of the judgment "the book cover is yellow," that is, the beingyellow of the book cover, can be reduced neither to the material book nor to the psychic act of judging (Gl 165, 18, 161, 22, 167ff.). The last part of Heidegger's dissertation proceeded to outline a "pure logical doctrine of judgment." He explained that there are four distinct and irreducible kinds of reality, namely, the physical, the psychical, the metaphysical, and the logical (sense). Since sense is not to be confused with the other realms, one must say not that it "exists" or that "it is," but rather that es gilt, it validates , it has validity. The being of sense is, Gelten, validating, validity. As such, it is indeed "a something" that "lies before us" and "is here [da]" for judgment . Thus, in a surprising anticipation of his later terminology, Heidegger here called logical sense "a manner of Dasein," being-here-the very term that...