The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

9 Husserl

9 Husserl IN ADDITION TO his demythologizing of medieval Scholasticism, the young Heidegger also attempted to unmask the original kinetic-personal physiognomy of being behind the traditional guiding metaphysical question at work in Husserlian phenomenology. In this sense he approached Husserl as a paradigmatic representative of the modern epoch of transcendental "ego-metaphysics " (G61 173). One finds this historical situating in Husserl's own later Krisis and other contemporaneous writings, where he worked out systematically how his longstanding ideal of "rigorous science" fit into the history of metaphysics. He explained how the primal establishment (Urstiftung) of the ideal telos of "universal science" took place with the Greek philosophical turn to the intelligible arche, the origin/kingdom, of the eidos, which is universal and transtemporal. Here "metaphysics ... was honored as the queen of the sciences."I The re-establishment (Nachstiftung) of this ideal in modernity began with Descartes's turn to subjectivity, which displaced both the Greek cosmos and the God of medieval thought as the arche of the universal, transtemporal eidos. With Descartes, writes Hegel, "we are at home, and like the mariner after a long voyage in a tempestuous sea, we may now hail the sight of land."2 The ultimate telos of the history of metaphysics is for Husserl the final establishment (Endstiftung), namely, the "infinite task" of his own phenomenological exploration of "the kingdom [Reich] of transcendental consciousness ," which is "the kingdom of absolute being" (IRPl 159/194). Here Husserl casts himself in the role of an Old Testament prophet who, though certain of his mission to lead philosophy out of the exile, wilderness, and "crisis " of the contemporary loss of faith in metaphysics, nonetheless suffers from the "unhappy consciousness" of homesickness: "The author sees the infinite open country of the true philosophy, the 'promised land' on which he himself will never set foot" (IRP3 161/21). Similar to Derrida,3 the young Heidegger, this hidden king, attempted to show precisely that Husserl's promised ideal of a universal, transtemporal eidetic kingdom of transcendental subjectivity was in principle unfulfillable through the praxis of actual phenomenological investigations and was exposed inevitably to deferral, exile, way, mourning. "Be2 °3 204 The End of Philosophy tween the idea 1 And the reality 1 ... Falls the Shadow 1 For Thine is the Kingdom / ... For Thine is 1 Life is 1 For Thine is the. "4 The Fundamental Book of Phenomenology If Heidegger's new turn to Husserl's phenomenology around 1919 used phenomenological conceptuality in order to work out a phenomenology of primal Christianity, then conversely he simultaneously used the latter to effect a destructio and repetition of phenomenology, as well as of his own earlier phenomenological ontologie. He now wanted to push phenomenology in the direction of a more radical historical philosophy of that question about being he had discovered in Aristotelian Scholasticism, Brentano, and Braig during his student years. "The question about being," he wrote in SS 1925, "is sprung loose through the immanent critique of the natural trend of phenomenological research itself" (G20 124/91). If Husserl said, "you and I are phenomenology ," Heidegger could well have replied, you and I-and Luther and Kierkegaard and Aristotle. Here Heidegger focused on the Sixth Investigation in Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen. Because it dealt with intentionality as the "categorial intuition " of "being" and with the "truth" at work here, Heidegger, against the self-interpretation of the mens auctoris, preferred this early work to Husserl's later texts beginning with his 1913 Ideen, which announced a turn to transcendental idealism. Heidegger later reported in his "My Way in Phenomenology " that "the distinction worked out [in the Sixth Investigation] between sensory and categorial intuition revealed itself to me [after 1919] in its scope for the determination of the 'manifold meaning of being,' " a problem he had discovered in Brentano (SD 86-87178-79). In a 1973 seminar devoted to the influence of the Sixth Investigation on his youthful thought, he said that the "essential discovery" and "burning point of Husserl's thinking" was the notion of the categorial intuition of being, which then became an "essential motivating force" and "basis" for Heidegger's own thought. For here Husserl "brushed against the question of being" (GI5 373-78). In SS 1925, we thus find Heidegger stating that the Logische Untersuchungen is the' "fundamental book of phenomenology," even though the later Husserl "no longer held his work in very high esteem." He saw Husserl's later transcendental "self-understanding " of phenomenology as a "fall...