Notes on:“Husserl, Heidegger, and Transcendental Philosophy:

Another Look at the Encyclopaedia Britannica Article”by Steven Galt Crowell

We must distinguish between two different sorts of transcendental philosophies:

Principle theory proceeds by transcendental argument to justify, in terms of a principle, some truth claims or categorial framework, with respect to the question quaestio juris?, i.e. the question: By what right do we claim knowledge?Evidence theory proceeds by reflection seeking, in terms of an original field of evidence, to clarify the meaning structures that make possible any truth and any intelligibility.

Meaning is more fundamental than truth: truth is itself a particular structure of meaning. So, transcendental philosophy, insofar as it proceeds by means of reflection on evidence, is not constructed as a meta-justification of truth claims by means of transcendental argument, i.e., transcendental philosophy [transcendental phenomenology ] is not constructed by means of any principles of justification peculiar to philosophy.Transcendental phenomenology clarifies the meaning of the relations between assertions and evidence including their meaning in justifying the claims of transcendental philosophy itself. Hence, phenomenology is a philosophical empiricism which investigates the field presented to reflection as a field of meaning constitution purified of all uncritical positing [all assumptions or presuppositions to be used as a basis of argument] of being.

Husserl calls this “idealism” but it is an idealism only insofar as the intelligibility of the world can only be grasped by considering the intentionality of every experience. Husserl’s idealism is not a metaphysical idealism (i.e., not an idealism which claims that all reality is, somehow, mental), since the grasping of the intelligibility of the world includes clarifying, in this way, the meaning of the being of any possible world rather than any positing of some being or other (within the world).

Transcendental phenomenology contains the entire sense of natural realism as itself constituted in evident intentionalities. The unquestioned reality of the natural world comes to be understood, through the reductions, as constituted in whatever meaning it may have along with whatever existential validity may be attributed to it.Husserl envisages a transcendental clarification of the sense in which the world and worldly objects are constituted (in consciousness, i.e. included as a part of consciousness) as existing in themselves (i.e., their intelligibility).

Phenomenology invesitigates reason insofar as “reason” does not designate some psychological or mental faculty, but insofar as reason must be understood phenomenologically or (speaking in a more Kantian terminology) transcendentally.“Reason” designates the respective essential structures of those acts through which objects of the respective categorial type can come to be meant (intended). Such a self-contained multiplicity of act-species belongs to any object and is able to function in the unity of any corresponding cognition.The phrase “constituting acts” designates such a set of structures and indicates that these acts constitute the respective object (gegenstände) or that such an object is constituted through these acts. Nothing more is to be read into such usages.

However, while they agree that the transcendental field as a field of evidence and that recourse to this field is constitutive of phenomenological philosophy, Husserl and Heidegger disagree regarding the interpretation of the transcendental field, i.e. they disagree on what transcendental reflection on the phenomenological field of evidence accomplishes.The issue, then, is not a conflict between transcendental philosophy and ontology (e.g. realism, or naturalism), as it is too often depicted in the secondary literature, but rather both Husserl and Heidegger accept transcendental phenomenology, but disagree as to whether the transcendental field of evidence primarily carries out the task of an epistemology or that of an ontology.

When Heidegger treats phenomenology as a way of access to being, he is not drawing the concept of being from the natural attitude. The being Heidegger seeks is not equivalent to the posited-being bracketed by the reductions. Instead, he takes his starting point from Husserl’s insistence that none of the descriptive content (sense/intelligibility) of what is experienced in the natural attitude is lost in the reductions. The being-content of, for example, the perceptual object is itself a descriptive feature of the experiencing of that object (and similarly the being of a value or an eidetic object is itself a descriptive feature of the experiencing of that object).

It is possible, for example, to move from phenomenological psychology to transcendental phenomenology – retaining all the descriptive content – simply by effecting a change of attitude.

For Heidegger, since the totality of beings is distributed among the structures of the object domains of the positive sciences, what is left to philosophy is the determination of entities as entities, to understand beings with respect to their being.Heidegger envisages a clarification of the being of entities which enables them, in truth, to be as they are encountered in the natural attitude, insofar as they are disclosed through phenomenological reflection on their constitution (how they are given to consciousness).

For Heidegger, the world in general belongs to the essence of the pure ego. The term “world” is ambiguous, in Husserl’s writings, between

(a) the totality of objects in the sense of things present-at-hand [posited-being, that which is given, in the natural attitude, as simply existing in itself], i.e. the independent being-in-itself (substance) which is bracketed in the reductions, and(b) the world as the non-objective horizon of all possible positing (this horizon has no position within the world), i.e. the transcendental phenomenon – world – which is not a posited entity.

So, Heidegger’s point is that the transcendental ego cannot be worldless in sense (b), since nothing is lost in the reductions, the intentional field must also include the world – the horizon of constitutive activity – as pure phenomenon.

Husserl and Heidegger agree that the being of the present-at-hand is constituted by recourse to the transcendental, which is reflectively disclosed and which is not present-at-hand in the natural attitude. Heidegger says that, even if the constituting dimension [i.e., the transcendental field of evidence] is not itself an entity present-at-hand,

“…this does not imply that that which makes up the place of the transcendental is not being [Seiendes] at

all — rather it precisely raises the problem: what is the mode of being of that being [Seinsart des Seienden] in

which ‘world’ constitutes itself? That is the central problem of Being and Time.”

Letter from Heidegger to Husserl

How is the motivation to disclose the transcendental field possible?Heidegger tries to account for this motivation by interpreting the transcendental as an existential possibility of human beings in the natural attitude, i.e., the motivation to disclose the transcendental field lies in the ontological constitution of the subject – Dasein which is that being whose very being is an issue for itself, i.e. Dasein is that being that is capable of asking the question “who am I?”[The German word Dasein means being or existing, but Heidegger uses the term to designate what Husserl calls the transcendental ego]

For Husserl, the identical content of the transcendental and psychological egos means that the question of the (worldly) existence of the transcendental subject is meaningless.Heidegger too distinguishes between human beings and Dasein (the transcendental constitution of human beings), but insists that Dasein is an existential possibility of human beings; he argues against treating Dasein as merely an entity present-at-hand [merely given as simply as existing in itself in the natural attitude].

The issue is whether the phenomenological clarification of being must be extended to the question of the being of the transcendental field. Heidegger argues that that which constitutes [the transcendental field] is not nothing and so is in being, but not in the sense of that which is constituted. Heidegger argues quite plausibly that:

“[t]hat which constitutes is not nothing, and thus it is something and in being [seiend] — though to be sure not in the sense of the positive. The question about the mode of being of that which constitutes is not to be avoided. The problem of being is thus directed toward

the constituting and the constituted alike.”Letter from Heidegger to Husserl

The problem for Husserl is that he has to both hold that in order to bring the subject into view ontologically it must be objectified [objectivated] as something posited, but also hold that the transcendental subject was brought into view through the reduction of everything posited, and as that which is the positing origin of all possible objective meaning. So, Husserl can only think of the transcendental subject negatively (as that which is not a posited being) and with respect to its epistemological privileges (its possibility of knowing posited beings and their being).

This approach closes off the possibility of a phenomenological ontology (of all beings including, especially, the transcendental ego, i.e. Dasein) grounded in recourse to the things themselves. Hence, the mode of being of the transcendental ego must itself become a transcendental problem – even though it preserves the sense of all constitutional problems within the ontological problem.

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

by Martin HeideggerIntroduction

§§ 1-6 pp. 1-24

§ 1. Exposition and general division of the themeWe will be investigating the subject matter of phenomenology, trying to solve its basic problems, and not merely studying phenomenology as an activity. This means that we will be doing phenomenology in the sense that we will be studying the subject matter and engaged in the working out of the subject matter which phenomenology, as a method, investigates.The text focuses primarily on these problems insofar as they are problems.“This course sets for itself the task of posing the basic problems of phenomenology, elaborating them, and proceeding to some extent toward their solution. Phenomenology must develop its concept out of what it takes as its theme and how it investigates its object.”

[emphasis PT]

How are we to determine what the basic problems are?A) It is not enough to derive these problems from current conceptions of phenomenology, because these conceptions may not have captured the most important philosophical problems.B) Phenomenology has been thought of as a preparation for solving traditional philosophical problems in the traditional philosophical disciplines.

1) But this conception takes on the traditional problems of philosophy uncritically.2) So, to conceive of phenomenology as a preparation for solving traditional philosophical problems illegitimately presupposes that phenomenology must disclose just these traditional problems, and that phenomenology cannot alter or eliminate these traditional problems.

“Phenomenology” =df the method of scientific philosophy in general.

A) Since its inception, philosophy has been thought of as the most fundamental science including all other sciences and out of which all other sciences emerge.B) Such a conception of philosophy is called “scientific” to distinguish it from Weltanschauung (world-view) philosophy.

1) The Weltanschauung (world-view) conception of philosophy claims that philosophy primarily sets policies for interpretation and action.2) This conception undermines philosophy’s obligation to be a science [to give genuine knowledge – scientia - wissenschaft].

§ 2. The concept of philosophy: Philosophy and world-viewA world-view has come to mean not just reflection on the world of the senses, but a way of understanding nature and humanity’s place in nature and history.

A) World-views may be acquired consciously or by habituation. How a world-view is acquired or justified is irrelevant to its status as a world-view.B) World-views are culturally and historically determined.C) Cultural, and individual world-views may differ. [Note that this is not a claim in support of relativism.]

D) World-views are practical attitudes which direct behavior. They are not a set of theoretical claims. They do not inhere in memory as a collection of cognitive properties.

Philosophy is popularly thought of as an attempt to develop a world-view, and any philosophy that does not do so is thought to be worthless.

A) A world-view always arises out of a specific actual historical set of factical (factual aspects of human beings) possibilities for thought, action, and attitude.B) On this conception of philosophy, philosophy avoids religious and literary interpretations and so may, mistakenly, be thought to be the same as scientific philosophy, since

1) World-view “philosophy” tries to develop a world-view consistent with the results of the positive sciences, and2) World-view “philosophy” proceeds according to the rules of positive scientific thought.

Every world-view is positively related to some actual being(s), an existing world and a particular Dasein.

A) Kant, far from endorsing the world-view conception of philosophy (in the “scholastic sense” offering a table of concepts and principles of nature, and exercising a skill of reason), treats philosophy (in the “cosmic sense” asking the questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? as injunctions of reason) as the a priori ontological delineation of human beings as ends in themselves.B) The world-view conception of philosophy is inadequate because:

1) World-views always presuppose a positive relatedness to beings, an existing world, and a factically existing historical Dasein, and2) Since it must show how world-views, in general, are possible, philosophy cannot endeavor to formulate a particular world-view.

These reasons hold only if philosophy does not posit (i.e. is not related in its being to) any particular being(s).

[The question of being – What does it mean to be? – arises here.]

A) Does this mean that since what is not a being is nothing, that philosophy is about nothing? No!B) For scientific philosophy to be possible, then, there must be something given (es gibt) which is not a being.

1) Something that is not a being must be given (as a condition) for us to be able to orient ourselves toward beings. For if we did not, in some sense, already understand what it means to be, then we would be unable to direct ourselves toward beings.2) We must have an understanding of actuality, reality, vitality, existentiality, and constancy to be able to orient ourselves towards actual, real, living, existing, constant [e.g. numbers] beings. Such understanding is, as condition, transcendentally presupposed to any factual experience of beings. Such a priori practical and theoretical understanding need not be at first explicitly expressible, but it is transcendentally necessary.

§ 3. Philosophy as science of beingPhilosophy, then, is ontology; the science of being rather than of beings.Phenomenology’s basic problems are to establish that philosophy is a science of being and how it is such a science; philosophy must justify its own claim to be ontology, i.e. the possibility and necessity of an absolute [sll inclusive] science of being.

As ontology, philosophy interprets being, its structure and possibilities conceptually.

1) World-views, in contrast, posit beings (i.e., they are ontical, i.e. dealing with beings, not ontological, i.e., dealing with being).

2) Philosophy is concerned with the positing of beings as such [it is only concerned with beings insofar as they are posited], and hence is presupposed to every possible world view.3) Therefore, philosophy cannot possibly be the formation of a world-view (since it does not take on any attitude toward nor posit any beings).

4) Historically, it can be shown that the great philosophy of the past has tried, and failed, to be a science of being.

All non-philosophical sciences are about beings which are taken as given for investigation. Since they assume the positive existence of beings which form a region of study, we call them “positive sciences.”

How is it possible to think being as such?A) We may easily think of beings (e.g., a table, an action, a number, a word etc.), but it seems that to think of being is to think about nothing, since being is not a being [For Hegel, in his Science of Logic, for example, being = nothing].

B) However, every time we think with any form of the verb “is” [“to be”] we think being. So, everyone, not just philosophers, thinks being.C) Common sense, which says that since being is the simplest concept it needs no definition, is not to be trusted in philosophy, since common sense depends on the authority of local traditions and world-views.D) Instead, elucidating the significance of being and the possibility of understanding being are the most difficult and urgent tasks of philosophy.

§ 4. The four theses about being and the basic problems of phenomenologyWe will investigate four theses about being that have been advocated in the history of philosophy:These theses, to be studied in Part I, are:

(1) Being is not a real predicate. [Kant’s thesis](2) Being is articulated into essence and existence. [the thesis of Medieval thought, stemming from Aristotle]

(3) The being of nature (res extensa) and the being of mind (res cogitans) are the basic ways of being. [the thesis of Modern philosophy. Stemming from Descartes]

(4) Every being can be talked about by means of the copula “is.” [the thesis of Logic]

These theses are connected to the basic question of the meaning of being in general (as Temporality), which will be studied in Part II.

How is being to be investigated?Dasein is a being which exists in an understanding of being in its comportments (intentionalities) towards beings.Therefore, to investigate being we will begin with an investigation of the being of that being whose being is such that it, essentially, lives in an understanding of being, i.e. Dasein.

Understanding how it is possible to understand being will point us toward an understanding of the question what it means to be, as such (the question of the meaning of being).

(1) An analytic of the ontology of Dasein will help us pose the question what it means to be. (2) The ontological constitution of Dasein is found in temporality (zeitlichkeit: a more fundamental concept than the ordinary concept of time).

Therefore, (3) Dasein’s understanding of the meaning of being must be possible only on the basis of temporality.

In order to investigate being we must make clear the difference between being and beings –this is the ontological difference.Philosophy, then, is critical in the sense that it distinguishes being from beings. “Critical”, here, just means making, and continually respecting, the distinction between being and beings.Since being transcends [passes beyond the limits of] any being, yet is necessary before any being can possibly be given, the science of being is also called “transcendental.”

1) Only if we understand how temporality makes the ontological difference possible can the 1st thesis (Being is not a real predicate) be understood.2) We must ask whether the dogmatic assumption of the 2nd thesis (Being is articulated into a what (essence) and a way of being (existence)) can be grounded in the meaning of being as Temporality.

[NB: Aristotle showed that Being is not a category, see Aristotle, Metaphysics B (III) 3.998b, 20-27].

3) Regarding the 3rd thesis we must ask whether there are different ways of being, and if so, how it is possible for being to be a unified concept [univocal].4) Understanding discloses the meaning of being when, as in the 4th thesis, it says of any being “It is.” The disclosedness of being, through which being is given in understanding, is truth. Dasein is a being which discloses being. It is necessary to understand the connections between being and truth through an understanding of Dasein.

These four problems (to be investigated in Part II, even though only the first is in the text) arise out of the examination of the fundamental problem of being.This shows that the provisional investigations of Part I are not arbitrarily chosen nor a product of our theories, but emerge out of the matters themselves.

§ 5. The character of ontological method: The three basic components of phenomenological methodPhenomenology is the method that must be used if ontology is to be investigated scientifically.The method of an ontology directed towards being, is completely different from the methods appropriate to other sciences which are directed towards beings.Since being is connected to truth, Dasein has a special place in ontological inquiry. Only through Dasein, who understands being and so is open to the truth of being, can being be given.The ontological question (What is the meaning of being? Or better yet: What does it mean to be?) can only be approached, therefore, through an analytic of Dasein.Ontology cannot be done purely ontologically, instead one of the central tasks in clarifying the scientific nature of ontology is to show that ontology has an ontical foundation in a general analytic of Dasein [contra Husserl].

The method of ontology must also be clear about the form of knowing appropriate to ontology. This means that the method of ontology must take the ontological difference into consideration.The ontological difference is the difference between being and beings, this difference necessitates that being precedes beings and must, therefore, be known earlier, i.e. a priori.Since this priority belongs to a meaningful world, a world of possibilities, the sense in which being is known earlier than or prior to the world of factual beings, a world of actualities, must be clarified.The method for knowing matters a priori is phenomenology. Therefore, phenomenology is the method of ontology, of scientific philosophy in general.

There are three components of the phenomenological method:

(1) Since being is the being of some being, it can be understood only by beginning with some being, and by being led back from that being to its being, i.e. by means of the transcendental move. This is called “the phenomenological reduction.”(2) Reduction is a negative methodological procedure restraining us [epochè] from mistaking being for a being and it must be supplemented by a positive phenomenological construction. This construction consists in the free projection of a being onto its being: the actual onto its possibility [eidos].

(3) Since, concern about being begins with beings and beings are only given in the context of actual historical experience, every such experience is infused with traditional concepts and subject to their limitations.

So it follows from this third component, that no attempt to do ontology can be expected to be free from distortion in or insufficient articulation of its conceptions of the matters which it investigates (for example, the philosophical tradition has operated with an average concept of being in general that has not sufficiently articulated different modes of being).

Therefore, in order to make sure its concepts are genuine, phenomenology must be strictly critical [see these concepts in terms of their being not in terms of beings] of the concepts it uses by de-constructing them to expose their origins and discern whether they originate in the matters themselves.

Phenomenological construction is always, therefore, also a de-constructing of traditional philosophical concepts. This construction and de-construction is implemented a priori in the context of the phenomenological reduction.

(1) So, the three components of phenomenological method are not independent, but mutually interact and support one another.(2) De-construction is, therefore, a positive annexation of the tradition.(3) It also follows that the history of philosophy is an indispensable part of philosophy itself, not an accidental appendage.

§ 6. Outline of the course:Part One consists of four chapters:

(Chapter 1) Kant's thesis: Being is not a real predicate.(Chapter 2) The thesis of medieval ontology which goes back to Aristotle: To the being of a being there belong whatness (essentia) and existence (existentia, extantness).

(Chapter 3) The thesis of modern ontology: The basic ways of being are the being of nature (res extensa) and the being of mind (res cogitans).(Chapter 4) The thesis of logic: Every being, regardless of its particular way of being, can be addressed and talked about by means of the “is.” The being of the copula.

Part Two: (originally intended to consist of four chapters each corresponding respectively to the four parts of Part One, but only the first was written as part of the original lecture course)

(Chapter 1) The problem of the ontological difference (the distinction between being and beings).