Ludwig Landgrebe
When Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the work of an as yet all but unknown private lecturer, first appeared more than sixty years ago, its publication was meant to usher in one of the greatest transformations that German philosophy had undergone since the conclusion of the epoch of idealism. From the very beginning, the apparent opposition between the antipsychologism of the first volume and the “psychological” investigations of the second volume constituted a stumbling block for critics. The further development of Husserl’s phenomenological method allowed the coherence of the two approaches, which seemed prima facie irreconcilable, to become ever more clearly apparent. Looking back thirty years later in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl gave the decisive interpretation of this coherence and thus ended the discussion of this question once and for all. However, the ambivalent reception to which Logical Investigations was subjected remained characteristic of the fate of all of Husserl’s later works. Following the publication of Logical Investigations and Husserl’s subsequent teaching in Göttingen, an extensive school formed around Husserl. In spite of this, the majority of Husserl’s students at the time (who also labeled themselves “phenomenologists”) felt the need to reject the next work to appear from the school’s leader, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, even though this work presented only the consistent continuation of those beginnings and developed the principles of phenomenological method in a comprehensive problematic for the first time. This paradoxical situation, which always presented the greatest difficulties for the understanding of phenomenology and its proper goals, was repeated in the further development of Husserl’s thought [Gedanken] in the years following World War I. Admittedly, during this period Husserl no longer enjoyed an extensive influence over a school as he did during the Göttingen years. Nonetheless, here too arose once again the discrepancy between what he himself wanted and the way in which his students interpreted and further developed his ideas. It went so far that he felt it necessary, in the afterword to Ideas,1 to draw a sharp line between his phenomenology and all further developments influenced by it. From then on, he stood firm: in the interest of scientific tidiness, when one speaks of phenomenology and “phenomenological,” one must distinguish precisely between phenomenology in Husserl’s sense and phenomenological directions in a broad sense.
This unique relationship of Husserl’s phenomenology to its workings out would be less conspicuous if one could determine turns and breaks—and, in this sense, periods entirely distinct from one another—in Husserl’s development. However, entirely to the contrary, Husserl’s work developed in a completely continuous manner such that even its final form must be regarded as the consistent unfolding of a fundamental motif that was already operative in the first writings.2 Thus we are given occasion to reflect [Besinnung] on the grounds out of which this so continuously developing philosophy could come to experience further continuations that diverged in such varied ways and that deviated so completely from one another. In the following, I will show how transformations of this kind, in their incremental emergence, are grounded in the manner in which Husserl’s ideas themselves developed. This by no means occurred as a consequence of banal misunderstandings (although of course there were some of these too), but rather with a certain inner necessity.
This sketch of phenomenology is drawn in view of the motives lying in phenomenology itself that led to its transformation by Husserl’s students and other thinkers influenced by him. A presentation of the complete history of phenomenology’s influence is not intended. I will restrict myself to the essential philosophical consequences and reinterpretations, to the extent that these emerged by the end of the 1920s.
In doing so, I will settle for a more summary discussion, without going into the details of the individual representatives, of the first period of the formation of the phenomenological school, which includes Husserl’s teaching in Göttingen after the appearance of Logical Investigations up to roughly World War I.3 By contrast, emphasis will be placed on the transformation of the concept of phenomenon and phenomenology that Martin Heidegger undertook in Being and Time. The relationship of Husserl’s phenomenology to the Göttingen school can be surveyed relatively easily; one can highlight how its representatives were more inclined to take up individual motifs that Husserl had emphasized more firmly at one time or another in his development than they were to take possession of the whole of Husserl’s fundamental tendency. Heidegger’s transformation in Being and Time, by contrast, involves an attack on precisely this fundamental tendency.4 A discussion of the sense of this transformation is thus especially suitable for leading us to the question concerning the ultimate presuppositions of the method practiced by Husserl and the limits of this method.
Intentionality in Husserl and in Brentano
The fundamental, driving motif in the whole development of Husserl’s phenomenology is the doctrine [Konzeption] of intentionality that is specific to him. However often he may have emphasized this, and however obvious it may sound today, the importance of this doctrine and the consequences that result from it were largely misunderstood, even by his students. Only in this way was it possible for individual motifs of phenomenology (eidetic intuition, analysis of intention as a new psychological method, and so on) to be isolated and for their inner unity—initially concealed from Husserl himself—to be overlooked. This was facilitated by the fact that Husserl had adopted the word and concept of intentionality from his teacher Franz Brentano and initially viewed himself as proceeding wholly in accordance with Brentano’s ambitions. It only became clear to Husserl much later, looking back on the course of his development, that he had already transformed this concept of intentionality from the very moment of taking it over, indeed that he had really only taken over the word intentionality, as he himself later said. Insofar as the subject matter [Sache] was concerned, Husserl had something entirely different in view from the outset. Thus, it was possible for a common term to conceal a profound difference, and in a way that was at first quite misleading even for Husserl himself. In order to understand this, we must take a look at Brentano’s concept of intentionality. It will then become clear how the questions that Husserl posed as early as in Philosophy of Arithmetic (his first published work) would not have been possible at all if he had consistently remained at Brentano’s standpoint. Much less would the analyses of Logical Investigations have been possible. Brentano saw the critical part of that work as in many respects a continuation of views that he had already advanced, although he expressed grave objections concerning the constructive efforts of Logical Investigations, as became clear from the correspondence between them.
The difference in manner of expression is already most instructive. Brentano never speaks, as Husserl does, of the “intentionality of consciousness,” but only of the intentional relation, the relation that individual acts have to something, to their intentional, “mental” object. This implies that individual, distinct acts are contrasted in our consciousness for reflective inspection. Each of these acts is distinct from the others in that it has a different intentional object, and indeed that each has its own. The idea that two or more descriptively distinct acts could have identically the same [dasselbe] intentional object—an idea that played an important role for Husserl from the beginning—is quite foreign to Brentano. He speaks only of how distinct acts can have an equivalent [die gleiche] intentional relation without asking, however, whether such talk of “equivalence” [Gleichheit] does not first gain its sense from the fact that these acts have identically the same object. For otherwise it cannot at all be indicated in what respect the distinct acts are supposed to be equivalent [gleich]. Of course, Brentano saw that the intentional relation is a relation of an entirely unique kind. It is not necessarily a relation between two existing objects; it is possible (for example, in phantasy presentations) that one member of the relation does not exist at all. Admittedly, Brentano did not advance beyond this observation in his fundamental clarification of this “relation.” His main interest pertained to the classification of the basic kinds of intentional act, of “psychic phenomena.” However, this classification did not make use of purely descriptive means; rather, in many cases it allowed perspectives of an argumentative kind to become decisive. All the same, this plan of a new classification of “psychic phenomena” in itself already contributed much toward clearing up the problematic of consciousness. In this respect, its significance for Husserl’s development is not to be underestimated. Faced with the rigidity of traditional philosophy when it comes to distinguishing “faculties of the mind” [Gemütsvermögen], kinds of act, and the like, one comes to see that the fundamental concepts of the philosophical doctrine of consciousness are in need of radical revision.
Decisive for distinguishing Brentano’s conception of intentionality from Husserl’s is that in Brentano’s investigation of the intentional relation, all epistemological questions are consciously excluded from the outset. For him, the task of a psychological description of psychic phenomena remains exclusively a matter of establishing the fundamental classes, investigating their reciprocal relationships, and establishing that the intentional relation cannot be a relation in the usual sense. The question concerning the relationship of the intentional object to the actual, the actually existing, object, and with it also all the problems of evidence, do not as such concern him. They have nothing to do with psychological description and thus must be set aside from the outset. Brentano thus stands fully and consistently on the ground of an epistemological realism. For him, a probable inference, as a causal inference to the thing that causes the acts, counts as the sole path from psychic phenomena with their intentional objects to the actual object, to the “external world.” This can also be seen from the fact that he conceives psychic acts, which are subject to classification, in principle as undergoings [Erleidungen], a concept that, as a genus for all conscious phenomena, can by no means be acquired by way of pure description. (In such description, those experiences in which we are given to ourselves consciously as actively comporting ourselves part ways with those states in which we know ourselves to undergo something.) On the contrary, this concept can only arise through deliberation on the origin [Herkunft] of acts, on their causation through external stimuli. Deliberations of this kind, however, go beyond what is accessible by pure description.
By contrast it must now be shown that Husserl, already in his earliest research, stood upon a different ground. That is not to say that he himself was aware of this, much less that he stated it. The point is rather that his approach can be shown to make sense only under this presupposition.
The first philosophical task to which he put himself was that of clarifying the concept of number as the fundamental concept of mathematics. From the outset it was clear to Husserl that the analysis of the concept of number belongs to psychology.5 That is, of course, an idea that was familiar and obvious to him from traditional psychologism, aside from the fact that the way in which he executes this idea contained in itself already in embryo the “sublation” [Aufhebung] of psychologism (in the double, Hegelian sense of an overcoming that at the same time brings out for the first time the proper correctness of that which is overcome). He inquires into the act through which something like number [Zahl] (understood as cardinal number [Anzahl]) comes to consciousness, and he finds it in the presentation of a totality [Inbegriffsvorstellung]: “Any object of a presentation, whether physical or psychical, abstract or concrete, whether given through sensation or phantasy, can be united with any and arbitrarily many others to form a totality [Inbegriff], and accordingly can also be counted. For example, certain trees, the Sun, the Moon, Earth and Mars; or a feeling, an angel, the Moon, and Italy, etc. In these examples, we can always speak of a multiplicity, and of a determinate number.”6 Such a totality originates “in that a unitary interest—and, simultaneously with and in it, a unitary noticing—distinctly picks out and encompasses various contents.”7 The collective connection through which the presentation of a totality comes about consists in our conceiving these contents, however disparate they may be, together “in one act”: “In this manner the contents are present simultaneously and joined together. They are one. And it is by means of reflection upon this unification of the separate contents through that complex psychical act that the general concepts multiplicity and determinate unity originate.”8
It was only possible for Husserl to pose such questions and to attempt in this way to clarify a fundamental mathematical concept because from the beginning his conception of the essence of consciousness deviated from Brentano’s. Husserl inquires regressively from numerals [Zahlzeichen] back to the phenomena of consciousness that indicate them and that lend sense to them. With a numeral we can connect an entirely empty, “inauthentic” [uneigentliche] presentation or an “authentic,” more or less fulfilled one. An authentic presentation is one in which the process through which we reach the cardinal number is conducted step by step, consciously, and originally [schrittweise bewußtseinsmäßig ursprünglich vollzogen]. Thus, Husserl seeks the way of producing upon which we advance from mere numerals to the authentic presentations that indicate numerals. He is aware that, at least for lower numbers, this path can always be traveled, indeed, that numbers can draw their original sense only from such an original process of production. Already at this time, he grasped this production [Erzeugung] as a performance [leistende Tätigkeit], a “collecting” [Zusammennehmen] guided by a unitary interest. Thus, his focus is already directed toward consciousness as productive consciousness. Looking back on these investigations he would later rightly characterize them as the first attempt “to go back to the spontaneous activities of collecting and counting, in which collections (‘totalities,’ ‘sets’) and cardinal numbers are given in the manner characteristic of something that is being generated originaliter [ursprünglich], and thereby to gain clarity respecting the proper, the authentic, sense of the concepts fundamental to the theory of sets and the theory of cardinal numbers.”9 It was thus expressed in his later manner of speech, “a phenomenologico-constitutional investigation; and at the same time, it was the first investigation that sought to make ‘categorial objectivities’ of the first level and of higher levels … understandable on the basis of the ‘constituting’ intentional activities, as whose achievements [Leistungen] they make their appearance originaliter [ursprünglich], accordingly with full originality of their sense.”10
This is, of course, an interpretation of the sense of his investigations in Philosophy of Arithmetic from the perspective of horizons first obtained much later. And we by no means intend to say here that this sense of his approach was already at that time clear to him in this way. Rather, we are saying that a procedure of this kind was only possible because his questions even then—though without knowing anything of their proper goal—were already moving in this direction. That is to say, if it is to be traveled at all (as it was in those investigations), the path from numerals back to the conscious processes out of which they originally draw their sense presupposes, at least in embryo, a concept of intentionality according to which intentionality is to be understood as an act of meaning [Vermeinen]. Only then can the question of the “authentically supposed,” of “authentic” presentations in general, be posed in a way that makes sense at all. Only then can signs, notwithstanding all the inauthentic presentations that they initially and frequently awaken, be interrogated with respect to what is authentically meant by them, what toward which the intention is authentically directed. Deviating from Brentano, the talk of intentionality is thus taken literally. It is conceived as an intending that goes forth from inauthentic to authentic presenting. In other words, it is conceived as a striving that is directed toward a production, specifically toward generating [Herstellen] an authentic presentation. Of course, Brentano was familiar with the difference between authentic and inauthentic presenting, and it played a major role in his analyses. But his analyses stuck with the discovery of these various kinds of intentional relation to an object, which he contrasted with one another in a purely static way. He did this, one might say, without taking into consideration the dynamic aspect of the transition to an originally giving presentation, the transition from the intending of what is merely symbolically indicated to its fulfilling intuitive exemplification [Veranschaulichung]. And precisely this was central for Husserl from the outset. Or, if his lines of inquiry are to be made intelligible at all, it must be taken as central, though he himself was not aware at the time that he had thereby given to the concept of intentionality a conception deviating entirely from Brentano’s. Thus, he was not interested in simply drawing out the individual modes of intentional relation. Rather, he was interested above all in intentionality as a link, so to speak, that connected the individual acts with one another in such a way that unfulfilled acts refer to fulfilling ones in a manner befitting consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig]. This is what Husserl, in Logical Investigations, would call the syntheses of transition of fulfillment or disappointment, and what had materially [der Sache nach] already become thematic here [in Philosophy of Arithmetic]. This problem cannot even turn up within Brentano’s lines of inquiry (though he was close to striking upon it in his investigations of adequation), to say nothing of obtaining the central significance that it had from the beginning for Husserl. It is only through grasping this significance that one can make the decisive step beyond the atomizing perspective of sensualism. This perspective is still operative in Brentano’s isolating classification of individual kinds of acts, even though he had already overcome sensualism in a different respect with his discovery of intentionality. When Husserl later emphasized time and again that the essence of consciousness is synthesis, synthetic achievement, this was only the genesis of the seed that can be detected in those earliest investigations.
We also find already laid out here the radical break with the traditional determination of the concept of consciousness in which whatever pertains to presentation and cognition always stood in the center. All the problems of classification—questions into the foundation of emotional comportment [Gemütsverhaltens] and of willing in presenting, and so on—thus become problems of the second rank. Consequently, Husserl’s convergence with the Leibnizian doctrine of the monadic actio is connected with this new conception of intentionality, as he would later attempt to grasp intentionality as the primal striving of the monads. All determinate acts of cognizing, feeling, desiring, willing (as one distinguishes them from one another into classes) can then only be understood as modifications of this primal striving. Intentionality as intending thereby becomes a fundamental structure of consciousness that lies deeper than all the determinately definable “intentional experiences” that one can distinguish from one another in reflection.
It is still a long way, of course, from the first beginnings in Philosophy of Arithmetic to these fully developed consequences. Here it is enough to show that this destination was already established at that time. An essential difference between Husserl and the representatives of the dominant psychologism is that Husserl did not initially become aware of his bias toward a psychologistic grounding of mathematical concepts. However, given his primary interest in questions of the foundations of formal mathematics, he soon ran into difficulties with this approach, concerning which he would retrospectively state, in the foreword to Logical Investigations:
Where one was concerned with questions as to the origin of mathematical presentations [Vorstellungen], or with the elaboration of those practical methods which are indeed psychologically determined, psychological analyses seemed to me to promote clearness and instruction. But once one had passed from the psychological connections of thinking, to the logical unity of the thought-content … no true continuity and unity could be established. I became more and more disquieted by doubts of principle, as to how to reconcile the objectivity of mathematics, and of all science in general, with a psychological foundation for logic.11
With that, the central problem of Logical Investigations (or, the unity of its two main problems) is indicated, namely, the problem of bringing the ideal unity of the logical into harmony with the multiplicity of its subjective modes of givenness. Husserl only gradually realized how his concept of intentionality contained the power to overcome these problems. He became aware of how it offered the possibility, on the one hand, of establishing the ideality of the logical once and for all in the critique of psychologistic doctrines, and, on the other, of clarifying for the first time the sense of this ideality in subjectively oriented investigations. (These investigations were still designated as “psychological” in the first edition of Logical Investigations.) He saw himself pushed by this tension “more and more toward general critical reflections on the essence of logic, and on the relationship, in particular, between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known.”12
As a mathematician, the error of the psychologistic subjectivization of the contents of thought must have been clear to him from the start. However, his argumentative refutations of psychologism would never have obtained their penetrating power if his thoroughly new conception of the essence of consciousness had not been at their basis from the outset. (At best, they could have led to an aporia concerning ideal objectivities, the domain of “propositions in themselves” [Sätze an sich], as in Brentano.) This doctrine is the driving force of all the arguments in the first volume of Logical Investigations, and these arguments only have the ancillary function of helping this doctrine emerge. It makes it possible for the first time to bring the ideality of the logical into connection with subjective experiences: only if consciousness is conceived as a meaning [Vermeinen], as intending in the sense of a performance [leistenden Tätigkeit], can one retain ideality without thereby falling prey to the “Platonism” rightly criticized by Brentano. The question then arises concerning what is authentically meant in acts, concerning the sense of the intentions that these acts consciously [bewußtseinsmäßig] bear in themselves. And no epistemological argument can dispose of the fact that precisely in the presentations of the number five, for example, this ideal, identical unity is what is meant.13 Given in the manner appropriate to consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig] is the fact that various acts, regardless of the diversity of their real [reellen] content, can have the same intentional object (in the strict sense of identically the same). This assertion would necessarily have appeared absurd to Brentano, with his purely static isolation of the various modes of intentional relation. It acquires its sense, however, as soon as intentionality is understood as [an act of] meaning [Vermeinen]. With that, the questions that Brentano and all psychology had ceded to epistemology—questions concerning the “actual” object that may “correspond” to experiences—are integrated into the domain of analytic description. They turn up as problems concerning the distinction between emptily intending acts and acts that actually give the object itself. They cannot be solved in the analysis of isolated acts. Rather, they can only be solved in view of the syntheses of transition in which what was previously emptily meant, emptily indicated, expected, or phantasized, and so on, comes to a self-giving, gives itself in the manner appropriate to consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig] as “itself there,” whereas the empty intendings “refer” to the fulfillments. This conception of the intentional object as the pole of a multiplicity of intendings related to it is only the later, felicitous designation of facts that Husserl had in sight from the beginning.
One thereby avoids the embarrassment surrounding the sense of the transcendence of ideal objectivities (concerning the place where they are properly to be found, since they certainly cannot be components of the real external world, which ultimately led Brentano to deny that they exist at all). For meaning, intending is, taken quite generally and in accordance with its sense, already a “being outside” with objects, and it no longer requires first specifying a path from the immanence of acts to transcendent objects. Objects, whether real or “ideal,” are determined in their being as poles of identity, as what is identically meant in a multiplicity of actual or possible acts related thereto. The question concerning the actual being of these objects is thus reduced to the problem of characterizing the intentional achievements [Leistungen] in which objects give themselves in the manner proper to consciousness [bewußtseinsmäßig] as “themselves there.” In the case of ideal objectivities, these achievements are spontaneously productive activities.
It is obvious that the unity of the two motifs that dominate the thematic of Logical Investigations did not initially come clearly to light for Husserl. According to the context, one or the other was more strongly emphasized. In the critique of psychologistic doctrines it was natural for the main emphasis to be placed on working out the ideality of the logical. This was the case to such an extent that critics saw this emphasis as the essential thing and believed they had to accuse Husserl of falling back into psychologism in the second volume. They did not see that it is precisely the concept of intentionality developed in the second volume that first provides the ground supporting the critique of psychologism in Prolegomena. In order to understand this ambivalence in the reception (which Logical Investigations found both among critics and disciples) it is necessary to linger at somewhat greater length with these beginnings and especially with the difference between Husserl and Brentano.
Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Phenomenological School
The universal significance of the new concept of consciousness admittedly did not yet emerge in Logical Investigations. Here, Husserl was concerned above all with grounding formal logic anew, and intentional structures were taken into account only insofar as was required for this purpose. However, even here there already reside the motives for a further expansion of the problematic. Initially, the essence of intentionality as synthesis (synthetic achievement) became clear to Husserl in operations with numbers. He soon became aware, however, that this is only a special case and that all logical objectivities in the broadest sense, all categorial objectivities (of which the objects of formal mathematics constitute only a part), pose similar problems. Logical operations find their expression in linguistic structures, in propositions, etc. These must be interrogated regarding their significance as what is authentically meant in them. One must ask, where does what is meant come to authentic, fulfilled (i.e., intuitive) givenness? This leads to the distinction between sensuous and categorial intuition, intuition of the universal as opposed to the sensuous intuition that gives an individual. The latter is important not merely for the sake of contrast. Rather, it involves at the same time the question concerning the structure of those acts that make something present [vorstelligmachenden Akte] (later called “doxic acts”), which provide the foundation for logical operations, for the formation of general concepts and general judgments.14 The most obvious example of sensuous intuition that gives an individual is external perception. For that reason, it forms—with its modifications of memory, phantasy-presentation, and so on—the next topic of Husserl’s research. As early as the publication of Logical Investigations, he had developed this topic in extensive investigations that he originally wanted to publish directly subsequent to Logical Investigations. This did not come to pass. However, these topics were developed and deepened ever anew in the lectures from Husserl’s first years in Göttingen, and they belong to the lectures that at the time had the strongest influence on the formation of Husserl’s school.15
[In these lectures,] the distinction between these analyses and psychological analyses in the usual sense becomes ever more clear. Indeed, this was a distinction that was already inherent in the fundamental doctrine of intentionality. Perception, presentiation [Vergegenwärtigung], memory, and so on are admittedly phenomena of consciousness. But if their proper essence—that through which alone they can be understood—is intentional achievement, then in analyzing them one must always at the same time keep one eye on the intentional objects, on what is meant in the way in which it is meant and what can be brought to self-givenness through their interconnections. That is, to every feature of the object there must correspond a structure of consciousness in which precisely this feature comes to givenness. We thus require, in exact correlation with the analyses of consciousness, an immersion [Vertiefung] into the essence of intentional objects and their structures, a reflection on the being-characteristic of the entity that becomes the object of consciousness. Admittedly, the intentionality of consciousness had already at that time received increasing recognition in psychology, but only as a purely psychological problem. The Husserlian concept of intentionality as achievement [Leistung] first made it possible to treat questions concerning the essence of objects in strict correlation to the structures of consciousness. It was for these questions that Husserl then took up the old term ontology, with a transformation of its meaning: ontology of the thing in correlation to the achievements of consciousness in which it comes to givenness. This was the sense of the task that Husserl assigned himself with his analysis of sensuous perception and its modifications.
Here is a further difference from the psychology of the time: it was not inductive, empirical contingencies that were at stake in these correlations, neither on the side of consciousness nor on the side of the objects. At stake instead were essential connections, essential structures of both the intentional achievement as well as what is achieved in it (i.e., the entity that comes to self-givenness). This too was an insight that originally forced itself on Husserl in his preoccupation with the fundamental questions of mathematics, namely, the insight that not only formal mathematics, arithmetic, and set theory concern idealities, but that, in its way, geometry does as well. Specifically, geometry is concerned with the essential structures of spatial shapes in general in such a way that the insights of geometry have the characteristic of an unconditioned universality that cannot be acquired empirically. However, a physical thing, as it is given in perception, is subject not merely to the essential laws that pertain to its spatial shape; it always has some color or another, and as an actual thing that is not merely a phantom it stands in a causal nexus with other things. Those are not accidental facts any more than conforming to the laws [Gesetzlichkeiten] of its spatial shape is. They are essential connections belonging to the structure of physical things: a physical thing cannot be a physical thing at all without these structures. And to every objective structure of this kind there correspond psychic achievements in which the object comes to self-givenness as an entity with this structure. It is constituted [sich konstituiert], as Husserl expressed it at the time.
Thus, the correlativity between the essential structures of intentional objectivities and the essential structures of the experiences in which these objectivities come to givenness was inherent from the outset in the fundamental doctrine of intentionality as achievement, and it was incrementally unfolded on its basis. Programmatically, there arises at the same time the requirement that for every kind of objectivity, every kind of entity, there must be correlatively a proper kind of self-giving in intentional achievements, that is, in corresponding self-giving experiences. If, then, consciousness is to be grasped in the full scope of its achievements, then all of the kinds of objectivities must be taken in their essential structure as clues. One can then inquire regressively into the conscious events that correspond to these objectivities with respect to which the talk of entities (and in the case of self-giving, talk of entities of this or that kind that truly are) obtains its sense. This implies at the same time that alongside the “analytic” a priori (the formal logical-mathematical essential structures that were, in their correlation to the corresponding achievements of consciousness, the primary topic of Logical Investigations), there appears on the objective side the synthetic a priori. Alongside formal ontology, material ontologies appear, the first example of which is the a priori insights of geometry that were then followed by the remaining structures of spatial-physical being. Finally, the essential structures of nonphysical being—of personal and other being—appear (though at first this was admittedly demanded programmatically more than it was actually developed, something that only occurred later with the drafts for the second volume of Ideas): all of this in correlation to the corresponding achievements of consciousness.
The universal significance [Bedeutung] of this correlationism was, to be sure, only gradually worked out by Husserl in the decade up to the appearance of Ideas (1913). That it would develop in this way was by no means certain from the outset, even after the publication of Logical Investigations. Thus it is all the more comprehensible that this correlationism was not fully appreciated by his students and all those, such as Max Scheler, who, though strictly speaking not his students, were influenced by Husserl. Rather, for the most part it was only one of the two motifs that came into the foreground more or less independently from the other: on the one hand, emphasis was placed on the descriptive-psychological motif, which showed its fecundity above all for the new formation of psychopathology;16 on the other hand, emphasis was placed on the ontological motif (as in Reinach, Geiger, and Conrad-Martius). Here it was specifically eidetic insight [Wesenserschauung] that was regarded as Husserl’s essential achievement and the proper core of phenomenology, not only for the question concerning entities and their regions but also in descriptive-psychological analyses. Use was made of the appeal to essential insights to a much more liberal degree than in Husserl, and without giving an account, as Husserl had, of the methodological uniqueness of “seeing essences” [Wesensschau]—something that frequently brought phenomenology into ill repute as an intuitionism lacking a method. Of course, Husserl’s students generally acknowledged his fundamental principle—that every kind of objectivity must have its mode of intuition—but they did so without actually making the connection of self-giving intuition and the being-character of the objectivities given into a problem, and without even understanding self-giving as an intentional achievement. In general, things remained in a more or less “static” correlationism between intention and object. Hence, even that principle could be interpreted in the sense of a “turn to the object” (as is done frequently down to the present day), as a theory-free eidetic seeing of the actual in all of its domains. With this interpretation, however, one forfeits precisely the essential aspect of Husserl’s ontological approach: it was not intended to provide naïve realism with a good conscience and to lead to a flight from subjectivity, but rather to make its problematic more profound.
Thus, the first phenomenological school with its disseminations was characterized by an ambivalence: the two principle motifs of Husserl’s phenomenology—the eidetic-psychological and the ontological—were taken up and pursued not in their inseparable cohesion, but instead more or less separated from one another. In stating this, we do not mean to express a critique of that school, in which there unfolded a collaboration of rare intensity and fecundity sustained by the highest ethos. We intend only to render historically intelligible from the uniqueness of his work’s development the remarkable nature of Husserl’s reception and influence. And here it is revealed that on a higher plane the ambivalence was in principle the same one that had already been operative in the reception of Logical Investigations. Once again, this reception was grounded in a failure to understand the proper sense of Husserl’s original conception of intentionality. This can also be seen from the fact that the essential deepening that Husserl had given to the concept of intentionality in his analyses of temporal consciousness right after the publication of Logical Investigations was all but disregarded. In these analyses, the entire import of his concept of intentionality as achievement is already revealed. These analyses represent the link by which Husserl’s transition to the problematic of the phenomenological reduction becomes intelligible.
The context in which Husserl in 1905 first fleshed out the lectures on inner time consciousness shows that it is the problems of external perception17—already addressed for the revision of Logical Investigations—that led Husserl into this domain. The analysis of the structure of external perception leads to the question concerning the ultimate unities in the stream of consciousness out of which all synthetic-constitutive achievements are built. According to Brentano’s doctrine, these ultimate unities are the acts that, as the objects of inner perception, are distinguished from the objects of outer perception. The acts themselves, in the way in which they become accessible in reflection, are for him the ultimate givennesses. Husserl, however, for whom, owing to his doctrine of intentionality, every givenness of an object is the result of a synthetic achievement in which this object is constituted, could not stop at this point. The acts themselves must also be interrogated with respect to the intentional achievements on the basis of which they are given for reflection as immanent unities. Indeed, every act is itself already something temporally extended [Erstrecktes] in consciousness, a unity of duration in which the various phases of its enduring can be distinguished from the whole of the completed, constituted act. Thus, Husserl arrived at the temporal flow of consciousness with the multiplicity of its sequential phases [Ablaufphasen] in which the acts themselves are constituted as a unity: they are not simply ultimate pregivennesses, but rather they are themselves the products of intentional achievements.
This implies that the investigations of inner time consciousness are by no means concerned merely with obtaining the consciousness of time, of temporal duration, and of temporal relationships as some sort of objectively pregiven and fixed magnitudes. Every assumption, every assessment or conviction concerning objective time, every positing of an existent [Existierendem] that transcends the stream of consciousness, such as positing time itself [der Zeit] as the “form” of objective objects [objektiver Gegenstände], is excluded from the outset. The inquiry is not into existing time, but only into phenomenal time and the immanent time of the flow of consciousness itself.18 The issue is the manner in which the acts themselves and, correlatively, the manner in which the intentional objectivities that come to givenness in the acts come to awareness as temporal, and thus the manner in which an immanent unity is constituted in general as enduring. This occurs in the original flow of impression and retentional holding-on-to [Behalten] as a minimal achievement of intentional synthesis. But what is accomplished in it? Not merely the bringing-to-givenness of temporal duration that is already on hand somewhere in advance or the bringing-to-givenness of differences in temporal duration. This psychological question concerning the origin of temporal consciousness is already clearly separated from the phenomenological question posed here. The former is “directed toward the primitive formations of time-consciousness, in which the primitive differences of the temporal become constituted intuitively and properly as the original sources of all the evidences relating to time.”19 This psychological question relates only to the becoming conscious of duration and of differences in duration, to the threshold values that are decisive for grasping the differences in duration, etc. (whereby, however, this duration is already conceived as measurable somehow with objective measures so that objective time itself is already presupposed). In the Husserlian investigations, by contrast, an entirely different question is posed from the outset, namely this: How do we come at all to sense something as temporally enduring, temporally extended, purely in itself and not in relation to something else? Somewhere the impression of temporal duration and of the flowing of time must originally arise so that anything that can be given to us at all can be measured and compared in its duration. Every measurement of time already presupposes the original consciousness of temporal succession, duration, and extension. The inquiry is into the possibility of this consciousness, and thus not into the impression of something that is already there in advance and is then merely grasped, but rather into something that first comes to be in this original temporal consciousness. Original temporal consciousness thereby acquires the characteristic of a productive consciousness. It is no mere grasping of pregiven time, but rather, in its original flowing it first forms time in general and thereby forms the possibility of any kind of grasping of a pregiven succession or a pregiven duration. In this sense, Husserl designates the flow of internal temporal consciousness as absolute subjectivity, for whose moments there really cannot be any names at all.20 For names, of course, are always names for the kind of thing that is itself already temporal, not for the kind of thing that first forms time, but for the kind of thing that already somehow exists in a time that has already been pre-given. This is not presupposed for those [other] structures of temporal consciousness, so Husserl can even say “there is no time of primordially constituting consciousness.”21 That is, its achievement is not an event that plays out in time, but rather it is that in which time is first formed and which gives sense to any talk of time and temporal structure of any kind whatsoever.
It can thus be seen that with these questions Husserl is moving in a dimension that for the most part had previously not been entered upon or seen by philosophy at all.22 And these insights do not emerge in this context as a totally new revelation but are rather only the consequence of the doctrine of intentionality as achievement that originally guided him. It thus also becomes clear, of course, that consciousness cannot be conceived as a mere succession, a chain of cogitationes in the sense of the tradition (though Husserl preserved this manner of speaking into his last years). On the contrary, the fundamental structure of consciousness is something entirely different from everything explored by psychology with its distinction of acts (among which the act of thinking always takes a distinguished position). Indeed, one can say that the expression “consciousness,” when used for this sum of achievements, is rather misleading and directs one into the orbit of a tradition that Husserl had abandoned. There are structures in whose construction [Aufbau] what we customarily call consciousness presents only a determinate, already quite high level of consciousness. The concept of consciousness as achievement—intentionality as achievement, this original doctrine that guided Husserl from the beginning—reveals its whole meaning for the first time with the penetration into this dimension of questioning. It renders intelligible how all further continuations of phenomenology right up to its latest period and the claim to universality posed by the phenomenological method are only the consequences of this approach.
This was not at all understood by the students of the time. Rather, these investigations were taken up only as a special problem of psychological-phenomenological analysis. Indeed, in a similar sense, Brentano had already—earlier and publicly, though unbeknownst to Husserl—projected a diagram of time, and his concept of proteraesthesis [Proterästhese] points in a similar direction to Husserl’s concept of retention. But for Brentano, it remained a purely psychological problem that was not brought into connection with the fundamental questions of epistemology and ontology. And it could not at all be brought into connection with them because Brentano’s concept of consciousness remained within the above-mentioned boundaries.
The transition to the achievements of time-consciousness is the first step toward grasping consciousness as self-producing: the achievement of intentionality is the lowermost production [Schöpfung] of itself as a flowing, streaming consciousness. That does not mean production into pregiven temporal space but rather production of the possibility of flowing [Verlauf] in general. At first blush, this claim may sound exaggerated. Does consciousness not have its beginning and end in time? Is it not bound to organic processes, and does it not pass away with them? All this talk of processes existing [seienden] “in time” already presupposes the time, and it is precisely this time whose self-forming is supposed to become intelligible here in the first place. However, in order to grasp consciousness in this way as self-producing and thereby as first giving the possibility of temporal succession in general, and in order to avoid falling prey to the temptation of projecting it as a temporal event in an already pregiven time, we require the universal exclusion [Ausschaltung] of all positings and assumptions that transcend the pure stream of consciousness. This exclusion must be undertaken methodologically.23 In the analyses of isolated contexts and syntheses of acts, such as those of perception, this reduction purely to consciousness and what is supposed in it as it is supposed was not a particularly difficult problem. And in this sense, the reduction was also applied by the phenomenological school wherever it was a matter of analytic investigations of intentionality. But as soon as time-consciousness with its self-producing characteristic enters into view, it is no longer possible to treat the reduction as a merely methodological device for bringing off purely introspective psychological analyses and to leave undecided the being-characteristic of intentional objectivities. Rather, with the problem of consciousness, the problem of being [Sein] in its universality is also unrolled. For every entity [Seiende] is certainly determined in some way or another through its relation to time. It is in time, temporally enduring, or “extra-temporal,” which also surely includes a certain relation to time. If the most original and deepest achievement of consciousness is thus grasped as time-formation, then it is only consistent that every kind of entity [Seiendes], too, cannot be understood in its origin otherwise than on the basis of achievements of consciousness. Consciousness is then no longer an entity, or an occurrence in a determinate entity, but rather absolute subjectivity, whose moments have “no names” because all names, in accordance with their original meaning, designate already constituted entities. But precisely in this case we require a proper methodology in order to work out absolute subjectivity in this purity and to fend off all the objectivizing tendencies that force themselves upon us time and again.
Thus, it was certainly no accident that Husserl, immediately after working out the lectures on temporal consciousness, increasingly directed his attention to reflections on the phenomenological reduction. Already in 1907, two years later, he presented the reduction in lectures for the first time, and from then on it was a central theme for him until his death. For Husserl, this did not mean turning away from materially directed research toward deliberations on method, as is often maintained. Rather, our considerations up to this point should let it be seen how for Husserl the reduction is nothing other than the entryway into the fundamental questions of metaphysics. It is not something that can be done away with beforehand once and for all. On the contrary, every phenomenological analysis in ever new and ever deeper layers bumps into the necessity of the reduction in order to advance from all previously constituted being [Sein] to ultimately constituting, absolute subjectivity.24 Only on the basis of the phenomenological reduction is phenomenology put in a position to make its claim to universality, specifically, the claim that it is able to clarify the sense of all talk of the being of entities by returning to the achievements of subjectivity in which entities are constituted.
Being and consciousness are thus inseparable correlates. The world, the totality of entities, is functionally dependent on consciousness. It is nothing other than a system of intentional poles in which the intentions of communally experiencing subjects meet one another in unanimity and are validated. That means at the same time that everything that we can meaningfully speak of as an entity is an index for achievements of consciousness in which this entity is to be brought to givenness. Talk of a transcendence that is absolutely inaccessible to consciousness is just empty words with which we cannot authentically present anything for ourselves at all. Every question concerning the sense of being—concerning that of which it might make sense at all to say “it is” or “it is in this or that way”—can only be a question concerning the achievements of consciousness in which this being [Sein] shows itself [sich ausweisen]. All experiences that give meaning to the words of philosophy and metaphysics must be consistently demonstrable [aufweisbar], and the method of this demonstration [Ausweisung] is universal intentional analysis. That is, in brief, the idea that grounds the phenomenological method’s claim to universality. If it is actually and comprehensively executed in ever new steps of the reduction, then there can remain nothing outside that could be a possible topic for philosophy at all.
It would exceed the limits of these observations to go beyond these hints and attempt a presentation of the difficult problematic of the reduction with all the paradoxes to which it leads and that are resolved in its execution. Introduced in the first volume of Ideas (which appeared alone at the time) in the form of a much-compressed program, the phenomenological reduction was the teaching least understood by students and contemporaries. With its introduction, the moment is marked after which the Göttingen phenomenological school, much as it had failed to recognize the systematic import of the previous step (in the analysis of time), almost without exception denied Husserl a following that could have formed the bridge from the older intentional-analytic investigations to the reduction. And so it came to pass that, instead of being understood as a consistent continuation of motives already broached in Philosophy of Arithmetic and Logical Investigations, the central position taken by the reduction in Ideas was understood rather as a departure from Husserl’s original tendencies and as a frustrating approach to an idealism in the Neo-Kantian mold. The interpretation of Husserl’s ontological turn as a “turn to the object” had already come to be overly taken for granted. This misunderstanding was facilitated by the fact that one can find in the mode of expression of Ideas many external accommodations to Neo-Kantianism (especially that of Natorp), which, under the circumstances, could deceive a reader regarding the fundamental differences.25 With the publication of Ideas, Husserl had hoped to make available to his students for the first time a comprehensive presentation and manual. Instead, paradoxically, the work fundamentally marks the end of the Göttingen phenomenological school, which was also brought about soon thereafter in an external sense by the outbreak of World War I and by Husserl’s appointment to Freiburg. From then on, Husserl was really a solitary thinker. A broad, school-forming influence such as he had enjoyed in Göttingen was denied him in Freiburg. From then on, on a case-by-case basis, his influence acted on isolated personalities who took up and reinterpreted his teaching.
Heidegger’s Being and Time and the Problem of a Limit to the Phenomenological Method
The most important of these reinterpretations will be the object of the following considerations. It takes place in the exposition [Auslegung] of the concepts of phenomenon and phenomenology in Heidegger’s Being and Time and in the critical allusions to Husserl’s method that permeate this work. I will show that Heidegger’s reservations concerning Husserl’s method are much more radical and pertain much more to the whole than all of the reservations expressed against his teaching by Husserl’s earlier students. At the same time, Heidegger clearly was not aware of undertaking a reinterpretation of phenomenology. On the contrary, he was convinced that he was only expressing the proper intention of phenomenology in a more precise form. This becomes even clearer from Heidegger’s remarks to the draft of the article “Phenomenology” for the Encyclopedia Britannica (which Husserl composed shortly after the appearance of Being and Time) and from Heidegger’s letter to Husserl from October 22, 1927.26 The severity of the dissociation from “existential philosophy” that Husserl then carried out in 1930 in the “Afterword” to his Ideas, however,27 shows that these differences could not be overcome through this discussion. Looking back at this discussion, it certainly must be said that neither of the two philosophers was able to survey the position of the other in its full scope. It can easily be shown that many critical statements on both sides rest on misinterpretation. Nonetheless, there remains a deeper, substantive reason for the opposition, which can be explained in terms of the divergent approaches of the two thinkers.
If we begin by inquiring into the convictions common to both thinkers, we find above all a fundamental methodological principle of phenomenology that was recognized by Heidegger without reservation just as it was by the older phenomenological school. This is the principle that every kind of entity has its own way of giving itself that is appropriate only to it, and that meaningful philosophical statements can only be made on the basis of this self-giving. Specifically, Heidegger grasps this fundamental principle in a certain variation that Husserl had already given to it some years prior to the composition of his Ideas. In this variation, the fundamental principle presents itself in the form of a demand to establish a “natural concept of the world” [natürlichen Weltbegriff]. This problem of the natural concept of the world was for Husserl by no means posed merely as the problem of a description of entities free of theory. It had rather a determinate function within the total context of the systematics that culminated in the doctrine of the phenomenological reduction. This function can briefly be characterized as follows.
As has already been mentioned, the clues guiding intentional analysis, as the universal exposure of the achievements of consciousness, are prescribed by objectivities, by the various modes of being of objects [des Gegenständlichen]. Each of these sketches out an appropriate kind of conscious achievement in which entities of its region come to givenness. Thus, if the question concerning the achievements of consciousness is to be properly posed, it requires above all the insight into the structure and layering—the founding relationship—of the objectivities themselves. Only in this way can one understand what is properly and originally the object of experience—what are correlatively the lowest and most primitive achievements of consciousness—and what, by contrast, is already a constituted object of a higher level—and correlatively what is an achievement of consciousness at a higher level. The dominant tradition of natural science suggests certain prejudices concerning the original object of experience, specifically the prejudice that the object, as it is presented in the “exact” determination of natural science, is an entity in the proper and original sense. According to this prejudice, everything else is merely superstructure, a matter of pasting “value predicates” onto this purely “objective object” [objectiven Gegenstandes] and the like. But one thereby fails to recognize that the object in the sense of mathematical-physical natural science is itself nothing original, nothing that is immediately given in experience, but rather much more a product of certain “idealizing” methods that are exercised on what is immediately experienced—methods that have a determinate goal and already presuppose an abstract dismantling of the world as it is encountered in original, immediate experience.28 So if one wants to find the actual, original division of entities, of objects in their various domains (regions)—what then becomes the guide for the question regarding the associated achievements of consciousness—one must demolish this plethora of prejudices that, dazzled by the ideal of exact cognition, has accumulated over the centuries. One must penetrate to entities as they are immediately given in experience. One must penetrate to the world of pure experience. In other words, one must obtain a “natural concept of the world.” The problem of the natural concept of the world had already been introduced by positivism, but here in particular the original intention was perverted into its contrary. For the conviction remained dominant that such a natural concept of the world could only be obtained by dissecting the world into sense data as its ultimate elements in which (entirely in the spirit [Sinne] of the mechanistic-sensualistic mode of thought) one was supposed to find what properly and originally is, the ultimate givennesses of experience. For Husserl, by contrast, the demand for a natural concept of the world obtained a new importance and was reinterpreted in the sense of the primary principle of phenomenology. He did this by allowing only those experiences that are free of the prejudices of natural science to count as actually original experience and by pressing forward from the already mathematized world to the immediate, human surrounding world [Umwelt], later called the “life-world.” But in contrast to the older phenomenological school, which also saw a theory-free immersion in the essence of objects as the fundamental requirement of phenomenological methodology, though without directing its attention to the world-concept itself, for Husserl it was precisely this world-concept wherein his problematic and the task of establishing pure experience always retained an ancillary function: prior to the performance of the reduction and prior to the constitutive analyses of consciousness that are to be carried out on the basis of the reduction, guiding clues must be obtained by isolating [Herausstellung] the world as it is disclosed in original experience.
For Heidegger, in this statement of the problem is found one of the most important of the stimuli received from Husserl. Being-in-the-world is for Heidegger a fundamental structure of Dasein. To understand the world in its relation to Dasein, and to understand Dasein itself in the way in which it originally is worldly and has world—this is the topic of fundamental ontology.29 Of course for him it is not embedded, as it was for Husserl, in the systematics of the reduction, which he rejects. That does not mean that for him this problem of the natural concept of the world comprises merely a description of entities in their essence free of theories, as for Husserl’s older students. Rather, in Heidegger the problem is made more profound such that even his reason for rejecting the reduction is entirely different from that of those earlier students. Where this newfound profundity lies can be made clear from the discussion of the concept of phenomenon presented in the Introduction to Being and Time.
Taken generally and formally, phenomenon means “that which shows itself in itself.” Within this formal concept of phenomenon one can distinguish the vulgar concept of phenomenon from the phenomenological concept. The vulgar concept is the one recognized by the older phenomenological school as the sole decisive concept. It refers to appearances in the Kantian sense, that is, what is accessible through empirical intuition. But this is precisely what is not at issue in the phenomenological concept of phenomenon. On the contrary, seen once again in the horizon of the Kantian problematic, what is to be understood phenomenologically by phenomenon can be grasped by saying “what already shows itself in appearances, prior to and always accompanying what we commonly understand as phenomena (though unthematically), can be brought thematically to self-showing [and] what thus shows itself in itself (‘the forms of intuition’) are the phenomena of phenomenology.”30 Accordingly, we can understand these phenomena as the conditions of the possibility of experience that remain unthematic and veiled in normal experience directed toward entities. A phenomenon is “something that essentially belongs to what initially and for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way that it constitutes its meaning and ground.”31 Phenomena in this sense are thus not entities as they are immediately given in experience, but rather what constitutes the being of entities, in other words, what allows us to understand the extent to which we can meaningfully speak of their being in a given case: “The phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings [entities]—its meaning, modifications, and derivatives.”32 But phenomena in this sense are nothing other than the structures of Dasein itself in relation to which all talk of being and entities receives its sense. Unveiling these structures is the task of fundamental ontology, which provides the groundwork for every further ontological question. Here too (just as for Husserl), instead of the realistic “turn to the object” (which was characteristic of the older phenomenological school) there is the turn back into the depths of “subjectivity.” Heidegger, however, avoids the terms consciousness, subject, and subjectivity in order to preclude the possibility of an interpretation of his analysis that would fall back into the orbit of the traditional subject-object problem. Confronted with this, Husserl could, of course, object that it is precisely the structures of subjectivity—of consciousness and its intentional achievements—that have become thematic here (subjectivity as the condition of the possibility for any givenness of entities whatsoever), provided that the talk of “consciousness” is taken in the comprehensive and profound sense in which he took it. And apparently, the same turn that Husserl had first performed with complete clarity in Ideas was there in Heidegger, too. But why, then, do we find in the place of “absolute subjectivity” and its intentional achievements the finitude of Dasein, and why the rejection of the reduction as the entryway to the veiled depths of subjectivity?
It might seem obvious that, in inquiring into the reasons for this difference, one should stick to the passages in Being and Time from which it emerges that, for Heidegger, intentionality is merely “comportment toward entities.” Then his objection—that one can understand any given comportment toward entities only on the basis of the structure of being-in-the-world and that conversely one cannot illuminate being-in-the-world through intentional analysis—appears comprehensible. Seen in this way, intentional analysis retains its proper sense, though this is only a subordinate sense, specifically, that of the investigation of a determinate and specific structure of being-in-the-world.33 However, it is clear that this conception of intentionality satisfies at best only the usual psychological concept of intentionality and not Husserl’s concept. For if intentionality is understood as achievement, and its deepest layer as temporalization, the formation of time, then it certainly cannot mean mere comportment toward entities that have already been given. Rather, its achievement must be the self-forming of time, the formation of the possibility of allowing entities to be encountered at all. Comportment toward entities is in Husserl’s sense merely a determinate layer of intentionality, specifically that of act intentionality, of the individual acts in which we comport ourselves in a receptively grasping way (as, e.g., in sensuous perception) or in a spontaneously active way (as, e.g., in predicative judging). Nonetheless, it would be wrong to seek to deduce the difference that separates Heidegger from Husserl merely from such a manifest misunderstanding of the import of Husserl’s concept of intentionality and to thereby be done with the matter. The reason must lie deeper and it must still obtain even when this superficial misunderstanding has been removed.
One indication of the direction in which we must look is given by the numerous passages in Being and Time in which Heidegger opposes the theoretical “just viewing” [nur hinsehen] of the “impartial observer.” [Heidegger takes this to be] the way in which, according to Husserl, the structures of subjectivity that make experience and having a world possible—and on their basis, the sense of being in general—are to be disclosed. It cannot be the reflection of the impartial observer that achieves this, but only the performance of existence itself. All philosophy has the sole function of letting the metaphysics that has always already occurred in Dasein become explicit.
It will not suffice simply to trace this opposition back to the difference in personality between the two thinkers (as was often done at the time) by saying, for instance, that in the one case it is a matter of a contemplatively directed attitude and in the other a more active-decisionistic attitude.34 Rather, we must attempt through interpretation to find the substantive reason—which, admittedly, is nowhere expressed—for this difference and from its salient manifestations to probe its real core.
In fact, Husserl’s method is a method of universal reflection, and the stance of the reflecting phenomenological ego can be none other than that of the “impartial observer” if the structures of consciousness are actually to be unveiled by reflection in the universality of their achievements. When Heidegger opposes the “impartial observer,” this implies an attack on the core idea of Husserl’s phenomenology. Specifically, it is an attack on the idea that grounds his method’s claim to guarantee a universal entryway to all philosophical problems. That this connection between the stance of the phenomenologizing ego (as an “impartial observing”) and the phenomenological method’s claim to universality necessarily obtains can be made intelligible through the following consideration.
Through the reduction, every positing that transcends consciousness is bracketed. The phenomenologist steps back to observe the interconnections of consciousness and its achievements. In them he does not have (if intentionality is actually understood in its depth as achievement) an isolated subject, encapsulated in its immanence. Rather, he has the whole world as it is meant by him and built up in his intentional achievements. It can easily be shown that objections that this procedure leads to a worldless immanence, solipsism, and so on rest on a misunderstanding of the concept of intentionality. These objections are not capable of bringing forth anything cogent against Husserl’s method or of setting the discussion concerning the import and potential limits of this method on solid ground. According to the phenomenological reduction, the totality [All] of entities—including me myself, the one who philosophizes as this human being in the world, and also the “others”—becomes intelligible as something that constructs itself [sich Aufbauendes] from the inside out [von innen her] through achievements of consciousness.
Of course, this presupposes not only reflection in general on some conscious process or another, not only a turn of the gaze in general from the straightforward, thematic objective direction back to the experiences that constitute objects, but it also presupposes that reflection is universal: it cannot remain merely occasional [gelegentlich] and possess only an instrumental function in one or another context of practical comportment. Even in extraphilosophical, daily life, such occasional reflection takes place often enough; I turn from the direction of objects back to my experiences, perhaps to assess whether they deceive me. In this case, I am interested in doing something as a practical human being, and reflection serves only this action; it is occasional, and my factual interests—what I factually am and that for which I factually strive—are thereby affirmed. Through the reduction, however, all that is bracketed; not only my doxic positings but also my practical goals and my volitional positings. I am no longer engaged in their performance, but rather comport myself toward them and my collected experiencing as an impartial observer. Only in this way can reflection become universal and can all the achievements of consciousness be unveiled. The occasional, reflective turn that stands in the service of some practical objective, potentially even in the service of an objectively directed cognitive practice, cannot be universal at all. It is satisfied when it has reached its respective goal, at which point it is given up as an attitude and attention returns to the straightforward direction toward objects.
In universal reflection, as made possible through the performance of the reduction, I myself, as a factual human being with goals and desires, am also bracketed alongside everything else. Of course, this by no means implies that the phenomenologist ceases to be a human being. It means only that, for the question concerning the sense of being and every determinate being-thus [Sosein], this fact must be disregarded. Taking it into account can contribute nothing to answering this question. Only through bracketing this fact and through universal reflection do the essential correlation of being and consciousness and the functional dependency of being on achievements of consciousness become accessible. The question, then, no longer concerns my factual being, my interests that are conditioned by the moment and its decisions. Rather, this fact of my self as a human being in the world, always in a determinate situation, becomes an indifferent initial example by means of which I can make clear, amongst other things, the structure of factual human Dasein as it always is in its determinate situation.35 There thus obtains a necessary interconnection between the universality of the phenomenological method and the attitude of impartial observing. Only in it can the proper essence of subjectivity and its achievements be unveiled in their full scope.
Therein is resolved at the same time the old idea that true being only discloses itself in theory, except that the sense of this idea has undergone a transformation: theory, the theoretical seeing of the “impartial observer,” is not immediately [geradehin] directed toward entities but is directed in the correlative perspective toward entities qua achievement of intentionality. That is, it is directed toward the achievements of consciousness in which being is constituted. As achievements that were previously “anonymous,” or concealed, these are the topic of phenomenology. They are not something that was simply there in advance. Rather, this is the kind of recourse in which subjectivity first posits itself as constituting subjectivity and first acquires itself. All occasional reflection on achievements of consciousness adheres to the common prejudice that something is there (a conscious event) that simply plays out in correlation to being. Here, however, this idea is overcome by making reflection universal and by allowing no being [Sein] simply to stand. On the contrary, one inquires regressively from all being [Sein]. Indeed, one even inquires behind the being of experiences themselves, and they are grasped as experiences that first produce themselves in inner time consciousness, the consciousness that forms time itself. The sense of the theoretical seeing of the “impartial observer” thereby also receives a new character. It is not the simple theoretical seeing of a subject that already exists [seienden] in the world, the simple interrogation [Vernehmen] of something that always already is. Rather, it is a seeing in which subjectivity first unveils itself for itself as time- and world-forming subjectivity and in doing so becomes aware of itself as the condition of the possibility of all talk of being and entities.
If we keep these connections in view, it becomes comprehensible that an attack on one of Husserl’s core ideas is contained in Heidegger’s rejection of “impartial seeing,” specifically the idea to which the Husserlian method’s claim to universality clings. We can disclose the ground of this rejection only by bringing to mind the fundamental tendency of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. According to it, we can say in advance that Heidegger rejects Husserl’s method because to his mind it does not really take seriously Dasein’s original experience of itself, that is, because the originality of Dasein’s existence cannot become accessible by means of this method. According to Heidegger, Husserl’s method can only lead to an “idealized subject” and not to the innermost essence of Dasein, the facticity of its existence. In fact, it must halt just before this. Thus, precisely what constitutes “subjectivity” in the most proper and radical sense is not unveiled by Husserl’s method, but rather remains concealed.
What might be the significance [Sinn] of these considerations, and have we actually touched on a limit of the phenomenological method with them? Is it true that in this method the facticity of Dasein does not become accessible?
In order to arrive at an answer, let us recall that the method of intentional analysis is a method of guiding clues. That is, an entity, as it is initially simply given in the multiplicity of its achievements, becomes the clue guiding the regressive inquiry into the synthetic achievements in which it is constituted. What stands before us in experience as an entity is a product of these achievements, and they become accessible in the regressive questioning from the completed product back to the way in which it is formed in consciousness. For example, for a perceived thing, there emerges first the distinction between the thing itself and the manner in which it is meant in a given case, the manner in which it is given in profiles [Abschattungen] first from this side, then from that side. These profiles, too, are nothing ultimate, but rather the product of an apperception of sensuous data, which are themselves again not mere data but already constituted unities to which a multiplicity of sequential phases is to be assigned as that which constitutes them. Thus, we inquire regressively from every pregiven unity into the multiplicity that constituted it all the way back to the lowermost synthetic achievement, the temporalization of inner time-consciousness. Husserl himself labeled this procedure “regressive”: regress from the objective unity back to the constituting multiplicities and from there the reconstruction of the objectivities out of their ultimate intentional structural elements. Every unity in the broadest sense (according to which an “act,” too, is itself already a constituted unity) becomes a guiding clue for regressive inquiry, and without such clues there would be no starting point whatsoever for reflection on intentional achievements.
It is precisely in this way, too, that the question concerning the being of the human itself—the finite, being-in-the-world subject—is posed. I myself—this human being, bearer of this name, living here and now, with these customs, intuitions, and life-goals acquired through my upbringing, tradition, and so on, with this vocation—am a product of a self-apperception in which I come to givenness for myself as this determinate [human]. However, as the objective thing is not given only for myself as something constituted in my own nexus of experience, but as an objective thing, so is it given in this way for others who experience alongside me. So too am I, in the way in which I conceive myself, not merely the product of my own intentional achievements, but rather am intersubjectively constituted as such and such a human. I can descend as deep as I like into my own, as it were, solipsistically conceived nexus of experience, and I still will not find there what constitutes me as this particular personality. The fact that I know myself as the bearer of this name refers already to the intentional achievements of others (the parents who gave me this name), and my intuitions and so on refer to the upbringing that I have received. Thus, as this particular human being, I am not only the human being I conceive myself to be, but also at the same time I am the one who counts as this human being for others, my fellow human beings. That is, as this finite, worldly existing human being, I am the product of intersubjective intentional achievements that I arrive at through regressive inquiry.
However—and this is how we must now understand the sense of the Heideggerian objection in Being and Time—am I actually thereby grasped as myself, in the core of my self as this unique existence? Am I not grasped merely as one object among other objects, as the bearer of roles that are assigned to me in my being with others, just as, indeed, in being given a name there is implied the assignment of a role (henceforth and for the rest of my life I shall count, for myself and for all others, as the one thus named). But, among all those experiences before which I am led in regressive inquiry from the completely constituted “I, this human” and which constitute my self-apperception, do I even find those experiences through which I am brought before the core of my self? Beyond everything that I am in the world for others, beyond all roles that are assigned to me in my being with others, do I find in this way those experiences through which I am brought before myself and in which the absolute uniqueness of my own existence is announced, the facticity “that it is and has to be”36? As an experience that absolutely isolates me, places me before the uniqueness and finitude of my Dasein, and that calls me back from all interweavings in worldly togetherness Heidegger sees, above all, anxiety. This anxiety is the “anxiety before the nothing” that rises from the depths of Dasein and is no longer an intentional experience like being afraid of something in which a determinate givenness of the surrounding world is disclosed.
In other words, in regressive inquiry there can be found, in accordance with their essence, only those experiences that have a determinate intentional achievement, namely the constitution of an objective unity, such as of me myself as a human being in the world in the way in which I am for myself and for others. In regressive inquiry, however, one cannot find those experiences that have no such achievement, to which no such objective identical unity is to be ascribed as the constitutive product of these experiences. These experiences have only, as it were, the characteristic of an index for what I am in truth (this finite Dasein that has been placed before the nothing) and they announce to Dasein its innermost essence in a way that it keeps locked up for the most part. It is precisely these experiences that make the proper “essence” of Dasein visible and out of which it must be grasped in its core. They provide no clues for any kind of intentional analysis because there is no objective product displayed as their achievement from which one could regressively inquire into them.
Hence, Heidegger must deny the sufficiency of intentional analysis where it is a question of actually understanding the finite human being in its way of being worldly. And one could interpret his objections by saying that they arise from a further radicalization of the problem of the natural concept of the world. This was the task that Husserl set for himself, namely, that of granting the original experience of world and of human worldly being its proper due. In Husserl’s manner of analyzing the worldly being of the human, tracing it back to the constitutive achievements of self-apperception, the innermost tendency of his own project would not be carried through to its end, namely, the complete production of the view from the inside of everything that is pregiven as an entity in straightforwardly directed experience. For the human being, as the product of self-apperception, would still be, as it were, the “human being from the outside,” not the human being grasped from the core of its interiority as it announces itself in those experiences that bring it before its finitude. According to this critique, the ultimate ground of all self-knowing of the worldly subject in its finitude has not been brought to light. This is a self-knowing that comes alive only in the performance of existence [Existenz] and in the resoluteness that shoulders anxiety but that is silenced beforehand in reflection on these experiences. This self-knowing, as it is announced in anxiety and the call of conscience, is for Heidegger an ultimate ground of existence, something operative prior to all philosophical reflection [Besinnung]. It is the self-knowing of Dasein in its facticity.
The facticity of Dasein, as its innermost, essential core, should not be confused with the fact of being human [Faktum des Menschseins] in the Husserlian sense. We emphasize this in order to avoid in advance an objection that suggests itself. It is not the case that with this facticity Heidegger left standing—simply in the spirit [Sinne] of realism—an unresolved objectivity that was not traced to constitutive achievements, an ultimate, simply pregiven fact over against constituting absolute subjectivity. The self-apperception of the worldly human being in which this human being factically always finds itself can actually be exhibited as a product in the Husserlian method. It is a constituted achievement. It constitutes for Husserl the worldly fact of being human [des Mensch-seins] as the way in which one always has oneself in advance and is aware of oneself as this determinate human being in this determinate surrounding world. But this way of the having itself of the worldly, constituted human being is something totally different from the knowing-of-itself in those experiences in which the facticity of Dasein announces itself. Facticity, in Heidegger’s sense, is by no means what it is to be a fact (a worldly fact) in Husserl’s sense. Heidegger’s facticity is the ground of all possible manifestation. The methodological place in which it appears for Heidegger is thus the same as that in which for Husserl absolute subjectivity appears as it is unveiled through the method of reduction and guiding clues, inquiring regressively from constituted being. Even this fact is not, but rather it temporalizes itself; it is formative of time and world and is therewith the ground of the possibility of every pregiving of an entity in experience.
It would lead us too far afield to go on to show (1) how the problem of the a priori is hereby posed, admittedly in a misleading analogy [with Husserl], but, nevertheless, once again completely different from how Husserl posed it; and (2) how the manifestation [of the a priori] cannot be a direct reflection on experiences but is rather an interpretation that regresses from the immediate expressions in which facticity is manifested. We can only emphasize once again that precisely this problem of the a priori, of obtaining an approach [Ansatz] to ontology, was Heidegger’s real insight in Being and Time, within which the existential analytic of Dasein has only an ancillary function. The ontological insight obtained from it is this: the experiences in which the facticity of Dasein announces itself manifestly resist intentional analysis in the Husserlian sense. There is nothing to be said about them that could be found as their constitutive achievement on the path of reflection. In other words, the being of Dasein—or, its innermost structure, facticity—cannot be grasped according to the schema of an object constituted as a unity in subjective multiplicities. That is, human Dasein cannot at all be grasped in this way. To speak more generally, the idea of being is not to be grasped solely by means of the idea of the object in the way the latter becomes the guiding clue for constitutive analyses in the multiplicity of its intentional species [Artungen]. In point of fact, to be, for Husserl, is to be an object. And it is precisely this equation that Heidegger opposes. With it, a peculiarity of Husserl’s phenomenology is indicated, and the essential purpose of this contrast [with Heidegger] was to allow this peculiarity clearly to emerge.
We can no longer discuss here to what extent a limit of the phenomenological method is thereby reached. Husserl himself, especially in his late reflections, emphasized the necessity of a metaphysics whose central theme would be the question concerning facticity. His investigations from the thirties concerning the teleological structure of subjectivity can be understood as the transition to this metaphysics. To what extent these are still to be counted as phenomenology remains an open question. Thus, even here Husserl’s work opens a path into the future. Only through immersion in the open possibilities of the continuation of this work will it be possible to show how its approaches perhaps bear within themselves the power to take up into themselves as moments all of the further developments this work has inaugurated as well as the problems introduced by these developments.
Translated by Hayden Kee
NOTES
1. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 11 (1930): 549–570. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. M. Biemel (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971), 138–162 [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 405–430].
2. Oskar Becker has already suggested the continuity in the development of Husserl’s Phenomenology. See his “Die Philosophie Edmund Husserls,” Kant-Studien 35 (1930): 119–150.
3. For the details, see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).
4. This is true at least with respect to the latent critique of Husserl’s ideas that pervades Heidegger’s Being and Time. However, for the claim that, seen as a whole, the relationship is not one of mutual exclusion, but rather reciprocal complement, see Ludwig Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1963), 87 and 137–138.
5. Cf. Husserl’s habilitation treatise “Über den Begriff der Zahl,” in Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, ed. Lothar Eley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 289–339 [translated by Dallas Willard as “On the Concept of Number,” in Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 305–358].
6. Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik, 16 [17].
7. Husserl, 74 [77].
8. Husserl, 45 [46].
9. Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 90–91 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 86–87].
10. Husserl, 91 [87, trans. modified].
11. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Erster Band, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 6 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 42].
12. Husserl, 7 [42].
13. See Husserl, 174–175 [180], one passage out of many from which it emerges how this new concept of intentionality forms the groundwork for the critique of psychologism.
14. For the conclusive treatment of this problem, see Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1948) [translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks as Experience and Judgment, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973)].
15. Cf. W. Schapp, Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Halle: Niemeyer, 1910); H. Hofmann, “Untersuchungen über den Empfindungsbegriff,” in Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 26 (1913): 1–136; P. F. Lincke, Die phänomenale Sphäre und das reelle Bewußtsein (Halle: Niemeyer, 1912); P. F. Lincke, Grundfragen der Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1918). These treatises serve as an example of how Husserlian intentional analysis—especially of perception—was taken up and advanced.
16. Here one might give special mention to the writings of L. Binswanger and A. Schwenninger, but the psychopathology of K. Jaspers and Kretschmer’s Körperbau und Charakter (Berlin: Springer, 1921) [translated by W. J. H. Sprott as Physique and Character (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1925)] are also informed to a great extent by phenomenology. Psychology itself was built up on a phenomenological basis by A. Pfänder. His circle of students went on to attend especially to the ontological problematic.
17. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolph Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 1–98 [translated by John Barnett Brough as “The Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from the Year 1905,” in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 1–103].
18. Husserl, 4–8 [4–8].
19. Husserl, 9 [9].
20. Husserl, 75 [79].
21. Husserl, Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 78 [83]. [Landgrebe quotes “Es gibt keine Zeit des urkonstituierenden Bewußtseins,” but the passage Landgrebe is referring to reads “Von einer Zeit des letzten konstituierende Bewußtseins kann nicht mehr gesprochen werden” (“We can no longer speak of a time that belongs to the ultimate constituting consciousness”)—HK.]
22. See Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie, 182–183.
23. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 4–8 [4–8].
24. See Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie, 100–110, 173.
25. Husserl and Natorp were good friends and right at that time in close personal contact. Husserl subjected Natorp’s General Psychology of 1912 to close study and made it the object of many seminars.
26. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), esp. xv, 590–591, and 600–601 [translated and edited by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer as Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 35–68 and 136–137].
27. See note 1 above.
28. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954) [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)].
29. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927), 52 [translated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 53].
30. Heidegger, 31 [30].
31. Heidegger, 35 [33].
32. Landgrebe provides no citation, but this is also a direct quote from Sein und Zeit, 35 [33]—HK.
33. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 115 [112–113].
34. [Reading “dezisionistische” rather than “derisionistische”—HK.]
35. Let it be mentioned here that the possibility of such a bracketing of factical subjectivity and its facticity must appear problematic in light of Husserl’s late work. Cf. Landgrebe, Der Weg der Phänomenologie, 173, 205–206.
36. [“Daß es ist und zu sein hat.” Landgrebe provides no citation, but this is a direct quote from Sein und Zeit, 134 [131]—HK.]