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Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction and the Question of the Existential Foundations of Rational Life

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09672550903493551

1466-4542

James N. McGuirk,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

Abstract Abstract Against the oft‐repeated claim that Heideggerian authenticity calls for a resoluteness that is either indifferent or inimical to normative rationality, Steven Crowell has recently argued that the phenomenon of conscience in Sein und Zeit is specifically intended to ground normative rationality in the existential ontological account of Dasein so that Heidegger puts forward not a rejection of the life of reason but a more fundamental account of its condition of possibility in terms of self‐responsibility. In what follows, I wish to take up the issue of an existential grounding of rational life and its implications for the phenomenological reduction in relation to the work of Husserl by showing that he too is concerned with a self‐responsible contextualizing of the life of reason even at the level of individual human existence. In this way, Husserl, like Heidegger, can be read as framing the phenomenological reduction in terms of the subject's concern for self‐justification. However, this 'framing' cannot be seen as a motivation to reduction but only as an 'after‐the‐fact' explanation of its import. But I will suggest, in conclusion, that the problem of the motivation to reduction is perhaps as much of a problem for Heidegger as it is for Husserl. Keywords: HusserlHeideggerreasonresponsibilityreduction Notes ∗ I am grateful to Ullrich Melle at the Husserl Archives, Leuven for kind permission to cite from unpublished manuscripts in this article. 1 See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (GA 20), hrsg. von Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979), pp. 210f., translated by Theodore Kisiel as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 156f.; Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (GA 26), p. 170, translated by Michael Heim as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 135; Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 8th edn. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), p. 363n., translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson as Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 498n.; Martin Heidegger, 'On the Essence of Ground' (henceforth EG) in Pathmarks, trans. William MacNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 106. Henceforth, references to the Gesamtausgabe will be given with the GA number with the German pagination, followed by the English pagination. All future references to Sein und Zeit will be included in the main text with both German and English pagination. 2 See also Heidegger's 'For Edmund Husserl on his Seventieth Birthday', in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31), translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), p. 476 (henceforth PTP). For a discussion of this point, see Jacques Taminiaux, 'Heidegger and Husserl'sLogical Investigations', in Dialectic and Difference, ed. by James Decker and Robert Crease (New Jersey: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 91–112. 3 I am avoiding the more usual translation into English of the term 'Dasein' as 'being there' on the grounds that the 'da' in 'Dasein' is ambiguous. It often does mean 'there' while the expression 'Ich bin da' would always be better translated as 'I am here' rather than 'I am there.' 'Being here', in my opinion, captures better the sense of 'Dasein' as present to Being or as the clearing of Being than does 'being there', where the referent of the 'there' is unclear. 4 See Edmund Husserl, 'Nachwort', in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Drittes Buch: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente de Wissenschaften (Hua V), hrsg. von Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), pp. 139, 162, translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer as 'Epilogue', in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 406, 430; Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (Hua I), hrsg. von Stephan Strasser. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 44, translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 2. 5 See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch (Hua III/1), hrsg. von Karl Schumann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 56, translated by Fred Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), p. 61. 6 See, for example, Rudolf Bernet, 'Phenomenological Reduction and the Double Life of the Subject', in Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY, 1994), pp. 245–68; and also Jean‐François Courtine, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990). 7 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (GA 24), hrsg. von Friedrich‐Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), p. 29, translated by Albert Hofstadter as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana, 1975), p. 21. Henceforth GA 24/BPP. 8 Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (GA 56/57), hrsg. von Bernd Heimbüchel (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), p. 110, translated by Ted Sadler as Towards the Definition of Philosophy (London & New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 92. 9 For versions of this argument, see Robert Pippin, 'On Being Anti‐Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, Subjectivity and Sociality', in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 375–94; Ernst Tugendhat Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1984), esp. pp. 328f. 10 Steven Crowell, 'Conscience and Reason: Heidegger and the Grounds of Intentionality', in Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (eds) Transcendental Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 43–62 (p. 44). Henceforth CR. 11 CR 49. 12 CR 54. 13 CR 53. 14 In this way, Crowell's argument is similar to the challenges to Tugendhat's challenge to Heidegger on truth. See, for example, Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger's Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Mark Wrathall, 'Truth and the Essence of Truth in Heidegger's Thought', in Charles Guignon (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 241–67. Both tend to point out that Heidegger is concerned with grounding ontic truth in ontological truth rather than replacing the former with the latter. 15 See n. 4 above. 16 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie (Hua VI), hrsg. von Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), translated by David Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Henceforth Hua VI/Cr. See also Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie Ergänzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–37 (Hua XXIX), hrsg. von Reinhold Smid (Dordrecht: Springer, 1992). 17 Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge 1922–1937 (Hua XXVII), hrsg. von Thomas Nenon and Hans‐Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: Springer, 1989). 18 See Edmund Husserl, 'Vienna Lecture' in Hua VI/Cr. 269. 19 Perhaps Husserl's most explicit engagement with Heidegger and Scheler can be found in the lecture 'Phenomenology and Anthropology', in PTP 485–500. 20 On this, see Hua XXVII, 79f., and also Hua VI/Cr., §§8–27. Husserl is specifically concerned with the tendency towards self‐forgetfulness of the scientific mission in its tendency to place too much weight on positivity that it loses sight of the subjective achievement of constitution. 21 Hua XXVII, 20–1. 22 For a discussion of this point, see Dahlstrom, Heidegger's Concept of Truth, pp.138f. 23 On the notion of the pre‐reflective see Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution (Hua IV), hrsg. von Marly Biemel (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), pp. 214, 272, translated as Ideas II, pp. 225, 284. At one point, Husserl describes the subject as 'a being who maintains himself in the commerce with the things of his thingly, and the persons of his personal, surrounding world and who, in doing so, maintains his individuality throughout', Hua IV, 141/Ideas II, p. 148. He also speaks, in a manner reminiscent of Heidegger's discussions of Befindlichkeit, of the fact that the subject is conditioned or attuned in its intentional activity, Hua IV, 140/Ideas II, p. 148. 24 Husserl usually tended to speak of a shift of attitudes in which we could pass from one to the other. See 'Husserl's Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg‐im‐Breisgau' (1917), in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 9–17 (p. 13). By contrast, Heidegger tended more to emphasize the split between the life of the everyday and the confrontation with Being‐in‐the‐world as such. See, for example, Die Grundbegriffe der Meyaphysik. Welt‐Endlichkeit‐Einsamkeit (GA 29/30), pp. 188, 207, translated by William MacNeill and Nicholas Walker as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 124, 138. 25 Talk of crisis and cultural renewal was somewhat 'in the air' at the time of writing of these pieces. Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918), for example, had had a profound effect on many thinkers around this time. 26 Heidegger explicitly attempts to connect authenticity and science in the sense that curiosity is transformed into theoretical curiosity, which is a desire to be in the truth, in the practice of science (SZ 363; BT 414). It is difficult to see how this is possible, however, given that the scientific spirit remains ultimately tied, as Karsten Harries has pointed out, to inauthentic curiosity. See Karsten Harries, 'Truth and Freedom', in Robert Sokolowski (ed.) Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition (Washington: CUA Press, 1988), pp. 131–56 (p. 147). 27 For a discussion of this issue see James G. Hart, The Person and the Common Life (Dordrecht: Springer, 1992), pp. 26f. 28 I do not mean quite what Iso Kern describes as the ontological way into the reduction in his famous essay 'The Three Ways into the Transcendental Phenomenological Reduction in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl', in Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (eds) Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 126–49. For Kern, we are led to insight about the transcendental life through a realization that the life of discovery in the positive sciences cannot be grounded by something which is itself positive (p. 138). What I have in mind is rather the possible motivations to transcendental insight which colour the life of ontic discovery in the natural attitude. 29 Further discussion of this in the context of the ontology of the person can be found in Ullrich Melle, 'Husserl's Personalist Ethics', Husserl Studies, 23 (2007), pp. 1–15. 30 Hua A V, 21 cited by Hart, The Person and the Common Life, p. 286. 31 This preclusion of adequacy is a shadow of infinity that is present throughout Husserl's writings. It is encountered most basically in the impossibility of adequacy in simple physical perception where I cannot actualize all perspectives simultaneously. But it is also present here at the existential level in the sense that while we can attain the ground in which the task of truthfulness makes greatest sense, we cannot discharge the task itself. 32 It is always persons that are the catalysts for such reflection (Besinnung), as James Dodd notes, so that even when we are concerned with cultural renewal and the question of mankind's rational destiny, it is always firstly for a self, for whoever reflects, that this concern is pressing. See James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), pp. 53, 67. 33 Hart, The Person and the Common Life, p. 29 34 Ibid., p. 34. 35 On the notion of the appellation 'human being' as a constituted sense, see, for example, Husserl's 'Amsterdamer Vorträge' ('Amsterdam Lectures'), in Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie (Hua IX), hrsg. von Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 314. A translation of this text can be found in PTP 224. 36 The full implications of the exclusion of the existing subject from the reduction is taken up by Eugen Fink in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). For more on this see my 'Phenomenological Reduction in Fink and Heidegger: On the Problem of the Way Back from the Transcendental to the Mundane Sphere', Philosophy Today, 53 (4) (2009), pp. 248–64. It is worth noting Husserl's increasing reticence about the results of this inquiry in the marginal notes. 37 See, for example, Hua I, 119/CM 86, where Husserl insists that any attempt to separate phenomenology from transcendental idealism must be based on misunderstanding. It is likely that Heidegger is the target here. 38 Heidegger draws attention to this in pointing to the peculiarly naturalistic sense of 'world' as it is used in many of Husserl's texts. See 'Phenomenology: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article', Draft B, in PTP 107–146 (138). 39 This notion of the 'final concrete whole' in relation to the phenomenological and natural attitudes is taken from Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 10. 40 Edmund Husserl, 'Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy', Lecture 1 in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), p. 69. 41 Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (Hua XVII), hrsg. von Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 137, translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 153. 42 See 'Phenomenology and Anthropology', in PTP 490. 43 See Thomas Prufer, 'Husserlian Strategies and Distinctions in the Crisis' in Recapitulations (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), pp. 48–57 (p. 57). 44 Kern, 'The Three Ways', p. 146. 45 Hua I/CM. 46 Hua VI/Cr. III B. 47 Hua VI/Cr. III A. 48 James Dodd has argued that the crisis that is addressed in Husserl's last work is not a state of exception but rather the norm so that speaking of the crisis as a sickness requiring a cure 'would be like calling life itself a disease'. See Crisis and Reflection, p. 52. But even this sense of the ubiquity of the crisis of meaning is only convincing from the point of view of the philosophical or phenomenological task and cannot reveal their significance in the first place.