AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PARAGRAPH IN WHICH
HEIDEGGER REJECTS HUSSERL’S IDEAS ON PHENOMENOLOGY
When did Husserl first become aware from Heidegger’s break in his tradition? I directed my attention to this question and re-read Being and Time, viewed specifically through a Husserlian lens, attempting to discern the first significant departure in their conceptions. The first 6 paragraphs begin innocuously, but paragraph §7 The Phenomenological Method of Investigation announces itself as separate:
With the question of the meaning of Being, our investigation comes up against the fundamental question of philosophy. This is one that must be treated phenomenologically. Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a ‘standpoint’ or represent any special 'direction'; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself. The expression 'phenomenology' signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the how of that research. The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves,1 and the farther is it removed from what we call "technical devices", though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines.
Here, Heidegger is seminally, formally, and implicitly rejecting Husserl, and thus §7 offers a unique opportunity. We are given a passage narrow enough in scope but one that offers deep insight into Heidegger’s contentions with his mentor, laid bare line by line. In this paper, I will dissect the sentences in the above passage to argue that it signifies the breakage in phenomenological tradition between Heidegger and Husserl, and I will demonstrate that despite his neglect to mention his mentor’s name, Heidegger is in fact directly refuting Husserl’s ideas in logical progression. Specifically, this paper will solely focus on the above paragraph, as it itself offers rich insight into the rift between their two philosophies while simultaneously not overwhelming us with too much text. First, I will demonstrate that by mentioning a ‘standpoint’ and ‘direction,’ Heidegger is in fact referring to and refusing Husserl’s method of reaching a ‘phenomenological standpoint,’ arguing that this process is too abstract and technical and, importantly, misdirects the investigator. Afterwards, I will then show that Heidegger disputes what Husserl is misdirected towards, namely the subject-matter, or the “essence,” offering instead an alternative view of a phenomenon. Finally, we conclude with his last sentence of the passage, in which I argue Heidegger sees Husserl’s ideas as circularly problematic, in which both method and result are flawed, and that they lead to each other is also flawed. This paper will assume a basic introduction to Heideggerian and Husserlian terminology and will reintroduce simple versions of relevant vocabulary as necessary.
REJECTION OF HUSSERL’S STANDPOINT & METHOD
I argue that in referring to a rejection of a subscribed ‘standpoint’ or ‘direction,’ Heidegger is in fact disputing Husserl’s transcendental methods. He writes,
[Our phenomenology] does not subscribe to a ‘standpoint’ or represent any special 'direction'; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself.
First, I must explain some background on Husserl’s ideas before explaining why Heidegger disagrees with them. Indeed, the ‘standpoint’ here is what Husserl called the ‘phenomenological attitude,’ which transcends the ‘natural standpoint,’ or the everyday behavior in which we conflate our everyday psychological experience with what is ‘real’. I note that while Husserl made no normative claims on this attitude as positive or negative, his project in Ideas is to understand how to transcend objects of experience towards their essence. He states, “[It] is not merely an individual object as such, a ‘this here,’ …it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictable which must belong to.” In other words, Husserl claims to lay bare what is essential is not merely a thing or object, the ‘this here.’ We must adopt a phenomenological attitude to transcend this everyday standpoint towards the underlying essence of the objects of our experience. And while a discussion surrounding essences is out of the scope of this paper, what is relevant is that the objects of everyday experience are not is essential; instead, what is essential must be found through transcendental methods.
Re-reading the above text with this in mind, I now claim that Heidegger is indeed responding to Husserl’s ideas by stating that “phenomenology does not subscribe to [a ‘standpoint’ or direction] nor can it become so long as it understands itself.” For a phenomenology to subscribe to a standpoint or follow a direction is precisely what Husserl recommends, arguing that we should all adopt the transcendental approach to find essences. Heidegger viewed this as problematic - it assumes an abstract ideal. Namely, this ideal is one that claims a transcendental ideal (or essence) must exist and bely all experience, and it is that essence we must seek. Instead, Heidegger recommends we examine what we experience “proximally and for the most part.” In our everyday dealings, how Dasein meets things “proximally and for the most part,” or how phenomena is “what shows itself in itself.” Thus, instead of Husserl’s essence, we arrive at Heidegger’s entity, a far more concrete perspective that is itself not a particular dogmatic standpoint. By examining the entities as phenomena showing themselves in themselves, we need not adopt an abstract transcendentalist viewpoint, instead of Husserl’s phenomena, which is one transcended and analyzed beyond that found in the ‘natural standpoint’ entering the status of essence. I thus conclude that in stating “phenomenology [should not] subscribe to a ‘standpoint’ or represent any specific direction,” Heidegger is in fact introducing his divide between the methods finding essence and entity.
REJECTION OF HUSSERL’S ESSENCE
In the above section, I showed that Heidegger found troubling Husserl’s insistence of his phenomenological standpoint to discover essences. Now, I will show why Heidegger disagreed with this subject-matter and what he recommends instead. He writes,
[Phenomonology] does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the how of that research.
Husserl’s goal in his phenomenological investigations was to understand the ‘transcendental ideals,’ or essence - that which goes beyond the objects of our consciousness or experience. This means he is primarily attempting to understand an object, then. Here, I refer to object in the context of subject-object relationship, wherein we are the subject utilizing his phenomenological approach to find the object or the essence. This is Husserl’s underlying subject-matter of phenomenology, namely that the ultimate goal of his investigations is to discover a ‘what’ (the essence) underneath our experiences. I contend that Heidegger instead views phenomenology - if understood properly - as not what an object is but rather how we can understand that which creates the ‘what’ of an object. To understand why I make this contention, I look to one of his primary questions in the book, namely what makes “the Being of beings” or what “determines entities as entities.” These are questions are not investigations of subject-matter but rather of methodology.
Following from this, it would then be appropriate for us to claim that Heidegger disagrees with Husserl’s goal of phenomenology to find the “what” (essence) that supplants objects (everyday experience) of the ‘natural standpoint,’ instead, Heidegger is chiefly concerned with “how” an entity is at that standpoint: how do we understand things that “show themselves in themselves?” Even his discussion on Semblance closely follows this perspective, insofar as he is chiefly concerned with how entities are entities, rather than what entities “truly” are. For him, this question must be nonsensical, as it does not utilize what is proximally and for the most part near us. If I were to interpret Husserl’s goal in Heideggerian language, I might say that Husserl’s phenomenology is to investigate things that “only truly show themselves outside of themselves” through various phenomenological tools like imaginative variations. Thus, while Husserl is investigating a subject-matter, Heidegger is attempting to find “what lies in the light of day or can be or can be brought to the light.”(Heidegger 51) It must be that to even describe phenomenological investigations with such concreteness is an act in and of itself a rejection of Husserl, further substantiating my earlier claim that while Husserl conceived of phenomenology as objects, Heidegger conceived of it as a tool.
REJECTION OF HUSSERL
We arrive now at an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. One might have noticed above that Heidegger disagrees with Husserlian phenomenology’s result (essence) because of its method (phenomenological reduction), and that we also disagree with the method because of the result. Heidegger summarizes the problematic cyclical nature of his mentor’s ideas in his final sentence, which coincidentally acts as a nice conclusion for our discussion.
The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call "technical devices", though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines.
This dense statement can be interpreted as follows: the more genuine our method of phenomenological investigation is, the more we will come to terms with entities as themselves without the need for any special technical methods. In following with my above arguments, we can take this interpretation one step further and state simply that a good phenomenological method allows us to study entities as they are, instead of what theoretical thing we think they actually are.
CONCLUSION
It is interesting to note that during his research in Freiburg, Husserl spoke frequently Heidegger - his assistant at the time - as the phenomenological child. The historical anecdotes of their premature, mutual admiration are especially intriguing now, after we have analyzed how Heidegger incisively strays from his mentor’s tradition in just a few sentences. To tackle the rift between these two philosophers is an undertaking a few books in length, but in this paper I focused narrowly on what I viewed as the first sincere departure Heidegger undertook in straying away from Husserl. In my writing, I examined a portion of §7 through a two-step process - looking at Husserl’s method and his result of said method. Namely, I demonstrated that Heidegger deconstructed Husserl’s arguments by first examining the idea of a phenomenological standpoint, a perspective that is problematic in that its methodology necessitates a technical tool, the transcendental standpoint, that arrives at an ideal too abstract for Heidegger’s usage - the essence instead of the entity. Following on from this, we then see that Heidegger’s chief concern is that while Husserl sees phenomenology as finding a particular subject-matter of the essence, Heidegger sees the study as understanding “how” an entity is an entity, or understand the Being of beings. Thus, the mentor is searching for a what, while the mentee is searching for a how. Finally, we wrapped up both ideas with Heidegger's concluding sentence, stating that Husserl’s ideas are problematic because both the tool and the goal are fundamentally flawed. As a result, I hold firm to my argument that this paragraph was a strong rejection of root Husserlian notions, and a declaration Heidegger was proclaiming in straying from his mentor’s tradition.