The early Heidegger and medieval philosophy: phenomenology for the godforsaken

3. The Phenomenology of the Early Heidegger

Chapter Three T H E P H E N OM E N O L O G Y O F T H E E A R LY H E I D E G G E R ..... the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of a hidden king. Hannah Arendt The early Heidegger’s circuitous path, from the Habilitationsschrift to Sein und Zeit ultimately moves in a single direction. The question that drives the Daseinanalytic of Sein und Zeit—the question of the being of time—first surfaces in Heidegger’s 1915 Scotus research. It reappears in the 1917–19 mysticism research, the remarks on Luther, the 1920–21 religion lectures, and the 1921–26 Aristotle research. The early Freiburg lectures document the variety of approaches Heidegger took to this problem , tentative solutions, experiments with language, and forays into the tradition, some that became lifelong projects, like the retrieval of nonPlatonic Greek thinking, others that were stillborn, such as the retrieval of primordial Christianity and medieval mysticism. The question arose out of Heidegger’s interest in the medieval quaestio disputata about the status of the singular. The Scotist doctrine of haecceitas led Heidegger into an investigation of intentional being (ens logicum) and the intentional structure of temporality. In his Scotist research, Heidegger discovered that the historical is singularized in a specific intentional mode, a directedness toward the here and now (hic et nunc), which is entirely ine ffable. How could something as close to us and everyday as haecceitas be so hidden? Heidegger was struck by Augustine’s observation that al60 though we always already understand the meaning of time, we are not able to express its meaning. With Scotus and Augustine pointing the way, Heidegger undertook in Sein und Zeit a phenomenological demonstration of how time functions as a pre-understood fore-theoretical horizon of everyday experience, a structure which, if never objectifiable, makes historical experience possible. He came to believe that the concealment of time in the history of philosophy was not coincidental. Our existential anxiety in the face of the finitude of time has in a hidden way guided the metaphysical tradition. If phenomenology was to see through this fog of existentially motivated deception, it would have to destroy the ontological tradition (trace it back to its original factical sources) and bring about something like a transvaluation of values. The onto-theological interpretation of being as changelessness, self-identity, actuality, and infinity would have to be overturned; being must be thought as change, difference , possibility, emergence into presence, and withdrawal into absence, in a word, facticity. In this chapter, I give an overview of the early Heidegger’s approach to phenomenology with a particular focus on its relationship to Aristotelian Scholasticism. Heidegger’s sources, Scotus, medieval mysticism, Luther, and early Christianity will be discussed in detail in the chapters that follow . Phenomenological Ontology and Aristotelian Scholasticism It is widely know that intentionality, the founding concept of phenomenology , is originally an Aristotelian-Scholastic concept.1 What is not so widely known is how the concept functions in Scholastic philosophy. For the Scholastics, intentionality is not the essence of consciousness, as it is for Franz Brentano and his student, Husserl; it is an indication of the immateriality of the intellect. In his largely unrecognized early study of HeiTHE EARLY HEIDEGGER 61 1. Jacques Maritain has gathered together texts of Aquinas on intentionality in the appendix to his Distinguer pour unir ou les degrés du savoir, 7th ed. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1963), 769–919; English: The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan, from the 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 387–417. degger and Scholasticism, The Tradition via Heidegger, John Deely argues that the notion of intentional being (esse intentionale) is crucial to understanding the non-Cartesian nature of Aristotelian-Scholastic psychology . The Scholastics distinguish the being of that which exists for the soul in its cognitive and volitional acts, esse intentionale, from the being of things, esse entitativum. The soul exhibits a feature found in no physical thing, the capacity to appropriate an object into its own mode of existing. This is a function of its immateriality. Because the soul is a form that is not fastened to any particular matter, it remains free to take on the forms of other things. The soul is a pure openness to beings. Esse intentionale, the being of knowledge...