Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Trancendental Phenomenology

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The alternative, in my view, to articulating a phenomenological tradition in which Husserl and Heidegger are not perennially opposed to each other is the withering away of anything that might be understood as a distinctive contribution of “continental” philosophy to the philosophical tradition. In a recent book Robert D’Amico has claimed explicitly—though I believe prematurely—that this has already occurred. Claiming roughly that because the phenomenological movement from Husserl to Heidegger failed to establish itself as a genuine tradition—which requires “an open horizon of issues, problems, and possible clarifications” and cannot “consist of only the ‘foundational’ texts”—continental philosophy as a whole has in fact “ceased to be” a philosophical movement at all. Yet whatever might be said about the “end of philosophy” wing of continental philosophy , there has always been a phenomenological movement that fits D’Amico’s description of a “philosophical tradition,” and by reconceiving the relation of its founders, Husserl and Heidegger, in terms other than that of being “alternatives” (as D’Amico sees it), I hope to intervene in that tradition in order to strengthen it. See Robert D’Amico, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 252–53. 2. I have in mind such works as Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit, Donald Davidson’s Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, John Haugeland’s Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, J. E. Malpas’s Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, and John McDowell’s Mind and World, among others. Though very different, all of these writers recognize something like the priority of meaning and pursue it in a quasi-Hegelian way that reminds one of the neo-Kantian movement rather more than of Kant (or Hegel) himself. 3. Nothing is easier than to find remarks on Husserl of the most dismissive sort, especially in Heidegger’s letters. For instance, in a letter to Karl Jaspers on December 26, 1926, Heidegger writes that “if the treatise [i.e., Sein und Zeit] is written against anyone, then against Husserl”—whose work, Heidegger goes on to intimate, is “sham philosophy” (Walter Biemel, ed., Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 1920–1963, 71). Such statements are often used as license to ignore the manifest Husserlian content of Heidegger’s text, explaining it away as the result of Heidegger’s precarious academic situation. 4. John van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 44, 136, 25. 5. Ibid., 15, 55, 51. 265 266 N O T E S T O P A G E S 8 – 1 6 6. Ibid., 38–39. Thus, van Buren, 39, cites with approval Thomas Sheehan’s suggestion that “we might enhance the explanation of Heidegger’s subject-matter by retiring the terms ‘being’ and the ‘question of being’ from the discussion.” It is certainly true that these terms foster “remythologizing” tendencies both in Heidegger and in Heidegger scholars. For a recent forceful statement of the dangers , see Thomas Sheehan, “Nihilism: Heidegger/Jünger/Aristotle.” However, a different view of Heidegger’s “subject-matter” (the one I shall argue for in these chapters) suggests that there are more ways of avoiding such metaphysical mythologies than by abandoning philosophy altogether, even if Heidegger does not manage to hold to them. 7. Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 242, 241, 202. 8. In this sense Heidegger’s designation of philosophy as “skepticism” (see chap. 7 below) is not—as it perhaps is for Hume and Derrida—propaedeutic to overcoming the mania of philosophy altogether (an invitation to a personalistic or antiscientific stance) but rather is propaedeutic to a critical reorientation of philosophy itself, just as it was for Kant when he motivated his “critical solution” to the antinomy of reason by a “skeptical representation” of the issue that showed that either answer would be “mere nonsense.” See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 436 (A485/B513). 9. Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 232. 10. Ibid., 167, 325. 11. Ibid., 87, 219, 304. 12. Ibid., 203. 13. A similar confluence of existential and transcendental themes—though in a manner opposed to the Husserlian elements of the present proposal—has recently been given acute expression in John Haugeland’s Having Thought, whose introduction is entitled “Toward a New Existentialism.” 14. Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, 88. 15. Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, 43; henceforth abbreviated LP. 16. John McDowell, Mind and World, 85. 17. While there can be no question of pursuing this issue in detail here, helpful discussion of McDowell in relation to...