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10 Ontology and Transcendental Phenomenology between Husserl and Heidegger I n 1983 Timothy Stapleton advanced the claim that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology was largely motivated by an ontological problematic and not, as was argued in the previous chapter, an epistemological one.1 Critical examination of this claim provides a convenient framework for clarifying the new sense of ontology demanded by phenomenological philosophy so far as it is genuine “first philosophy ,” in which (as Husserl claimed in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology) “the total sense of philosophy, accepted as ‘obvious’ throughout all its historical forms, [is] basically and essentially transformed” (Hua VI:16/18). As I have argued throughout this book, such a new sense of philosophy arises with the recognition that the space of meaning cannot be approached with the resources of traditional metaphysical (ancient) or epistemological (modern) philosophical paradigms. The systematic relation between the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger turns on what is required to move beyond this impasse, namely, the apparently paradoxical notion of an ontological transcendental philosophy. In this chapter, then, I shall continue my argument that Heidegger is better seen as developing and advancing Husserl’s transcendental philosophy rather than as rejecting it altogether. The issue of the relation between transcendental and ontological phenomenology is often framed in something like the following terms: Heidegger admired the “realistic” Husserl of the Logical Investigations, whose categorial intuition opens up a new avenue to being and to the question of the unity of being. But he (along with other erstwhile followers of Husserl) rejected the master’s “transcendental turn” in Ideen I, especially the “transcendental reduction,” which discloses the constitutive 182 183 O N T O L O G Y A N D T R A N S C E N D E N T A L P H E N O M E N O L O G Y activity of absolute consciousness with its noematic correlates. The reduction opens up the transcendental dimension, but it appears opposed to any ontology. The existence of things is bracketed in order to thematize their modes of givenness (as noemata), and the worldly existence of consciousness is bracketed to thematize its pure and self-contained act life, the syntheses in which noemata are constituted as unities of meaning. In Husserl’s view, ontology is a worldly, or pretranscendental, discipline, a branch of logic that can be pursued, without the reduction, as an eidetic science of formal and regional object types.2 It remains “transcendentally naive” unless relativized to the evidential syntheses of transcendental constitutive consciousness grasped in a specifically reflective direction of inquiry. The transcendental turn therefore uncovers the ground of ontology, but it is not itself an ontological form of inquiry.3 Thus, in order to develop an ontological phenomenology Heidegger had to reject the reduction, thereby rejecting transcendental philosophy. There could be no ontological transcendental philosophy. Stapleton, however, offers a different account. He argues that it is a mistake to see the transcendental reduction as motivated by epistemological considerations: Husserl is concerned with apodicticity, with indubitable evidence, but that issue is distinct from his search for “ultimate foundations,” for evidence that is “first in itself” (HH 42). The claim that transcendental consciousness is characterized by such evidence arises in a search for a kind of being that would escape the epoche, the foundation for an “ultimate science of being” (HH 17). The transcendental reduction is “merely a variation and logical extension of the eidetic reduction” (HH 57) in which “eidetic rationality” completes itself by drawing the ultimate consequence of the theory of wholes and parts from the Logical Investigations, namely, that transcendental consciousness alone can be the ultimate “concretum,” that which is truly self-sufficient in the order of being. On this basis Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology does not result in “a surrender of the ontological problematic” (HH 4). Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, oriented toward the ontological difference, can be directly compared with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, oriented toward consciousness, because they are both engaged in the same enterprise: “The reversion to consciousness . . . in Husserl’s phenomenology, the bracketing of Being, is undertaken in order ultimately to clarify the meaning of the Being of entities” (HH 89). Stapleton’s thesis thus brings Husserl and Heidegger together at the level of an ontological problematic, but he continues to see a dichotomy between transcendental and hermeneutic phenomenology. It is this that I would like to begin to question here, since I hold that Heidegger’s...

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