Jan Patočka
With the beginning of this century there arose a new philosophy, one that attempted to bring about a style of thinking different from previous styles. As true philosophy, it is not meant to work in the wake of the special sciences, their methods, and their familiar lines of inquiry. Rather, it is meant to see through the prevailing prejudices in daily life and in natural cognition and with this perspicuity to work out both its proper methodology and its original lines of inquiry and to establish a completely autonomous field of knowledge. In doing so, phenomenology wants neither to be nor to renew a formal-abstract discipline; rather, for all its high generality, it wants to be a very concrete discipline. Phenomenology concedes to positivism that philosophy cannot be an isolated science, and that there would be no place for it if it wanted to concern itself with exploring the real structures and lawfulness of things. But phenomenology is also not a discipline that reflects a priori, in logical formality, on presuppositions and conditions of possibility. Phenomenology does not want to presuppose even logic but to investigate its ground and basis. It does not want to investigate reality but the appearing of everything that appears. Since phenomenology conceives this task as a philosophical and foundational one, it cannot accept the subordination of the problem of appearance to psychology, which proceeds as a natural science and is based in the natural sciences. Phenomenology must thematize appearing as such, wherever and however it may be found; it must owe its procedure only to appearing as such and not yield to any of the current prejudices about the appearing of what appears, prejudices that sprouted from the traditions of metaphysics and of the individual sciences.
Thus, phenomenology was and is truly the most original philosophical direction of the century, one that also imposes or imposed the greatest demands: to establish anew the autonomy of philosophy; to bring about a philosophy as rigorous science; to develop a metaphysics that is finally generally accepted; to pose anew the fundamental problem of philosophy, the question of being; to lead the whole of metaphysics back to its ground and to penetrate into this ground; to free the question of truth from its traditional sclerosis; and to open for the whole of philosophy another beginning. That these great ambitions contradict one another in part arises from the fact that the fundamental problematic of phenomenology—the question of the ultimate ground of the appearance of that which appears—received two radically different answers from two great thinkers, even though both adhered to [the practice] of drawing out appearances just as they give themselves from the “things themselves,” and in the process to realize what alone is suited to helping the cause of phenomenology to its limit.
Phenomenology would be in a bad way if it should not succeed in bridging the oppositions between the two fundamental doctrines in a way that uncovers the ground of their difference—and indeed phenomenologically—in the things themselves, and if the thing itself could not decide the contested points. To that end we must seek in both thinkers those motives that exhibit commonalities; we must attempt to work out the unifying feature behind and beneath the opposition. This unifying feature ought not lead to an eclecticism but to a critical response to both doctrines.
In what sense is the younger phenomenological doctrine a completion of motives that had been abandoned in the older? In what sense can adhering to the older doctrine on certain positions illuminate the difficulties of the younger? Those are examples of some of the lines of inquiry to be attempted here.
Above all, however, this essay should aid to a return “to the things themselves.” I will begin with things just as they show themselves and as they appear, and I will stay with this self-showing without surrendering to speculation.
Husserl’s late work Crisis has shown that science and traditional metaphysical philosophy begin with constructed concepts and never push beyond to something like pure, unbroken experience.1
It is not the phenomenological reduction but rather this exposure of the modus procedendi of science and traditional philosophy that is the starting point of the phenomenological method. To wit, when construction has been exposed as a procedure of disciplines that advance by mathematical projection and experiment, an almost self-evident task is revealed: to return, regressively questioning and critiquing, to the genuinely original experience upon which every construction must ultimately rest.
This task is not merely a reflective one, as Husserl believed when he took the original “givenness” of the present thing as guaranteed in the intentionality of consciousness. The prejudice that something originally given can be seized in “immanent perception” is [here] rejected, and with it the associated method of objective clues. One discovers the self-showing of the things by interrogating the appearing things regarding what allows them to appear as they appear and by attempting by way of inquiry-driven distinctions to break through to this ground of what appears.
Of course, this deconstruction of constructions by no means implies that this [task of phenomenology] can be conducted without any anticipation, without the guidance of a fundamental idea. The diversity of phenomenological projects, the very differences among concrete descriptions and analyses of phenomena, depends upon that guiding idea which directs the great progression of phenomenological work, the progress toward concrete experience. It is clear that one catches sight of different phenomena when one adheres to intentionality as the ground of the appearing of what appears (that is, when one adheres to the thought of the original restriction of all experience to an objective correlate, the concept of consciousness) than one does when one departs from the fundamental experience of the relatedness to being and the nihilation that occurs in the ground of Dasein and relinquishes the concept of consciousness and intentionality as the ultimate ground of experience. It is nonetheless the thrust into phenomena, their fullness and their interconnection, that must decide the matter concerning the guiding ideas. These must then be tested in their relationship to one another; one must be mindful of where these deviate from one another, where they are in conflict. The sources of conflict must be considered more exactly. Above all else, one must have great confidence in discerning where the sources of original experience and their unimpeded course flow and where these have been impeded or even obstructed by the remnants of constructions. Husserl believed that a pure view of phenomena could be obtained through the singular procedure of the reduction. That was doubtless an illusion, for we must inquire time and again into the historical sedimentation of the positings of being. But the attempt to lay bare the original structures of experience must be undertaken continuously on a provisional level, for only in this way can one, through further questioning, penetrate deeper.
This conquest of construction, initiated in phenomenologically oriented philosophy, is no mere theoretical concern, pertaining only to philosophers in their professional interest.
Construction, as such, is indispensable and not dangerous. Its danger begins to show itself where it is molded into an abstract ontology, into a conception of the essence of beings. This, however, as the history of modern science and philosophy testifies, has been taking place for three hundred years, and this whole period down to the present day can be designated as a triumph of construction. In repeated advances, modernity has replicated the foundational process called subject-object division, the mathematical outline of being, the progressive specialization from the point of view of an “objective” structure, and the reducing [Zurückführung] of every as yet “nonobjective” remnant to an objective ground. Technical civilization is nothing other than the setting to work of this project, which gradually comes to appear self-evident because it has become important, even indispensable, for life.
I spoke of “repeated advances” because this process has been interrupted by interludes of reflection: by the intellectual movement in Germany from 1770 to 1830, and by the philosophical turn in the first decades of our century. Soon enough, however, the triumph of unreflective construction continued and achieved ever new successes.
Reflection becomes ever more difficult because the successes are ever greater. Only today is it possible to see that the most constructivist sciences, having endured crises, are beginning to reflect upon their own constructivist character, and this is an utterly new factor to be valued as an important stage upon this path.
Reflection is so difficult for a number of reasons. For one, there is no alternative of similar completeness available. Furthermore, where practical success is the goal and where human beings are to be helped, we must always begin with construction. The “self-evidence” of construction makes those who oppose it and who draw attention to the fact that its nature jeopardizes human beings appear as insidious enemies of humanity and its supposedly obvious ambition, “progress.”
Today there are significant attempts to ground scientific and practical procedures on an observation of anthropological relations that is “suitable for humans,” that is, on a fundamentally phenomenological manner of observation. Such a field seems to be found in psychotherapy. The possibility of posing the problem in a similar way seems obvious in upbringing [Erziehung] and pedagogy [Erziehungswissenschaft]. As a field wrought by philosophy, theology shines through the obfuscations of the modern efforts to ground a purely theonomic theology that is nonetheless—contradictio in adiecto—a theology legitimated by appeal to human experience, and [having endured these efforts,] the possibility of returning the fundamental experience of the divine to human beings also shines through. There might also be occasion to consider a similar critical reflection in the field of the political and thereby to sketch in a positive way a humanization of the most important field of human action (not a “humanizing” in the sense of the familiar “ideal of humanity” but rather a phenomenology of doing, acting, and making, including work, following roughly the initiatives of Hannah Arendt).
It should perhaps also be noted that these last observations agree with Edmund Husserl in his work Crisis to the extent that these facts and possibilities seem to point out that the present crisis of humanity is not remediable unless a new science comes into sight, one whose projections of being no longer begin with constructions. Admittedly it is questionable whether today we are already in a position to accomplish this new science, whether the new projection will not be a long time in coming, and whether we are not condemned to tarry still in provisional matters and the critical preliminary stage. And yet, as was indicated above, there are omens that announce the turnaround, and even the conflict of phenomenological conceptions and systems seems to show the following: a phenomenology cannot be redeemed by a constructivist manner of observation, but only by a deepened phenomenological manner of observation.
Heidegger says in Being and Time, §7:
The expression “phenomenology” signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content, but the how of such research.2
The term “phenomenology” differs in meaning from such expressions as “theology” and the like. Such titles designate the objects of the respective disciplines in terms of their content.… The word only tells us something about the how of the demonstration and treatment of what this discipline considers. Science “of” the phenomena means that it grasps its objects in such a way that everything about them to be discussed must be directly indicated and directly demonstrated.3
As far as content goes, phenomenology is the science of the being of beings—ontology.4
That implies that, in accordance with its object, phenomenology is not a new science, but rather, since its fundamental concerns coincide with those of philosophy (which, as ontology, is the oldest science and the origin of all remaining sciences), it is the oldest of all sciences.5
Husserl’s first sentence in the introduction to Ideas I reads: “Pure phenomenology, the way to which we seek here, the unique position of which relative to all other sciences we shall characterize and show to be the science fundamental to philosophy, is an essentially new science which, in consequence of its [fundamental] peculiarity, is remote from natural thinking and therefore only in our days presses toward development.”6 The “fundamental peculiarity” of this science of “phenomena” is that its phenomena, which also underlie the other sciences, emerge in an attitude that has only recently been defined, an attitude that modifies the sense of the phenomena of these sciences in a determinate way.
So, in any event, in the latter case we have an entirely new science with phenomena for its object, and in the former case we have a method of that science which is oldest of all with respect to its theme. “The fundamental feature,” the new attitude, could admittedly be approached just as a method, and then it would rightfully read, “primarily the method.” But “primary” would then mean only as much as “introductory,” “functioning as access to the proper matter.” For Heidegger, “primary” designates the original, that upon which everything depends and in which the essence of the thing consists. For Husserl, however, the essential is the acquired basis of the modified phenomena themselves, upon which the entirely new science arises. This is, for him, the proper theme of phenomenology. Thus, he continues, “To understand these modifications or, to speak more precisely, to bring about the phenomenological attitude and, by reflecting, to elevate its specific peculiarity and that of the natural attitudes into the scientific consciousness—this is the first and by no means easy task whose demands we must perfectly satisfy.” The first, but not the central task: the center is the basis itself, and thus Husserl adds, “if we are to achieve the realm of phenomenology and scientifically assure ourselves of the essence proper to phenomenology.”7 We see here an opposition delineated, and we can guess already from the quoted texts that it will be no simple assignment to obtain insight into the scope and background of this opposition. One senses commonalities, yet what clearly emerges in the end is an opposition.
Husserl made inroads toward pure phenomenology by seeking an appropriate subjective entry to his “idea of pure logic.” He could not find this in the empirical psychology of his contemporaries. More suitable was Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Point of View with its idea of the certainty of being and the intentional relation as fundamental characteristics of psychic phenomena (both fundamentally refer to Descartes, although Descartes never thought out the idea of intentionality in a subjective direction, even though this was suggested by him). It was not adequate, however, for acquiring the “elements for a clarification of cognition.” Here it was a matter of epistemological—read, philosophical—problems, more specifically a matter of philosophical methodology. The discovery of the dynamic character of the intentional relation (intention—fulfillment with identical object-relation) and its analysis turned this relation into intentionality and intentionality into the essence of the mental [Geistigen]. That meant at the same time that the dynamic-intentional has a universal significance: There is intention-fulfillment not only in the domain of individual being, in the sensible but also in the domain of the ideal, the categorial, and so on. A philosophical-methodological project thereby became possible which allowed the advantages of empiricism and an “intuitive” rationalism to be united. This project shared with empiricism direct, intuitive access to phenomena; the endeavor of turning the philosophical problematic into an intuitive one resting on direct manifestation [Aufweisung]; and an aversion to construction from abstract principles. It thereby became possible, with the help of categorial fulfillment and eidetic intuition, to overcome empiricism’s one-sidedness, its adherence to that which is individual and contingent. The same principle of dynamic intention also offered the prospect of a purely structural consideration of everything mental while excluding external influences, above all those of the mathematical projection of nature, for the subject-object relation (res cogitans—res extensa) no longer had to be treated causally; rather, it sufficed to conceive and dissect it purely intentionally-structurally. To that end, a tidy elimination of every causal manner of consideration was required, the naturalistic (i.e., Cartesian) one as well as the theological-transcendent one (as Descartes himself employed). The solution was provided by a most perspicacious and original analysis of Descartes’s methodological skepticism, an analysis that distinguished in his procedure two independent components: a suspension of judgment, or a bracketing of the thesis, the so-called epochē, a limbo that refrains from decision; and the actual initiation of doubt. For the purposes of the exclusion of a causal consideration, one does not need to go as far as doubt; the limbo—the exclusion or bracketing—suffices. Of course, this must not be restricted to individual theses but rather must apply to the “general thesis of the natural attitude,” that is, the conviction, preceding (instinctively) all individual theses, that the totality of beings exists in an absolute way independently of every thesis. This “general thesis” is related above all to nature, that is, to the aggregate of physical things and processes, upon which in natural succession living things and the mental also depend. If I set the general thesis out of action, then the belief in this world-totality (whose being is, in accordance with its sense, independent) is suspended and along with it the belief in everything transcendent to consciousness. These transcendent beings can then be “reduced to the purely immanent,” for the objective world is not canceled or weakened through doubt but preserved in the form of objective correlates of intentional acts with all their apparent characteristics. They now receive the sense of phenomena, and the subjective receives the sense of pure (i.e., purified of the objective being-thesis) phenomenon. Appearances form a realm, and the researcher can thematize them in a pure, inner intuition and subject them to eidetic abstraction and insight in order to capture their pure essence. Thus, a perspective upon an as yet unknown field of research opens up, a field infinite like nature is in each of its fields. Yet it is the field of a wholly different, undreamt-of science, where the sense of the research as dependent upon the sense of that which is researched is entirely reversed. For if up until now the research project of “natural science” was directed by the thought of the absolute being of the world and, according to its sense, the dependence of mind, now by contrast the objective is seen and investigated in its noncausal, essential-structural dependence upon subjective correlates (i.e., in its structural constitution). Instead of comprehending the structure of the universe on the basis of the mathematical-constructivist projection of a res extensa, one builds up intuitively (in the sense of intentionality) from the ego cogito cogitatum.
With Walter Biemel’s publication of The Idea of Phenomenology: Five Lectures as the second volume of Husserliana,8 we know that the thought of this reversal and methodological alteration of sense in the reduction to pure immanence that does not conflict with transcendence in self-givenness was there previously as a methodologically mature working through of the reductive procedure.
The lectures contain neither the thought of a general thesis nor a clear distinction of epochē and skepticism, although in their place there is the thought of a building up of objectivity in pure immanence, that is, constitution.9 If, then, the thought of the epochē appears in its purity, as an act of freedom capable of suspending all theses regarding beings, then the question naturally arises whether the suspension here characterized is actually carried far enough, namely, that it would be able to show its full import. Specifically, it becomes clear that the suspending of suspension [Suspension der Suspension] prior to the entrance into subjectivity is motivated by something that can have no ground in the epochē itself. Husserl says, “with good reason we limit the universality of [this epochē]. Since we are completely free to modify every positing and every judging and to parenthesize every objectivity which can be judged about if it were as comprehensive as possible, then no province [Gebiet] would be left for unmodified judgments, to say nothing of a province for science.”10 Accordingly, this restriction takes place for the sake of the founding [Fundamentierung] of a science. This science quite clearly bears features of a positive science, of a science of beings in themselves. The pure phenomena are admittedly designated as irreal.11 They are irreal, however, only insofar as they are devoid of theses concerning everything transcendent, that is to say, insofar as they do not belong to the real-transcendent world. The sense of their being is modified; there is no longer any world-being [Weltsein]. Nonetheless, they are, it makes sense to say of them that they are, and the suspension of positing halts before them, that is to say, precisely the justification to posit them as being is explicitly declared and emphasized. They are not real, but not all beings need to be real, that is, dependent upon the world. On the contrary, we are poised to discover a mode of being of beings [Seinsweise des Seienden] that is neither real nor ideal—and yet, they are beings all the same.
The science of pure phenomena is accordingly a science of beings, a positive science. As such it has an infinite field, one to be cultivated in progressive research, although it is inexhaustible. It even bears unmistakable features of an ideal of science unique to the positive special sciences, namely, the accumulation of knowledge through progressive research in the continuity of generations. Indeed, it also bears certain features that show it to be related to ancient episteme, namely absoluteness, the incontrovertibility of the truths achieved through it. Modern science, by contrast, has an essentially hypothetical character. However, Plato’s episteme (and so too Aristotle’s) is not a science of beings (beings in our sense are for Plato the objects of doxa) but one of ideas, which the moderns designated as unreal and nonactual. Husserl’s ideal of science is in fact quite clearly informed by its relation to psychology. In the treatise Philosophy as Rigorous Science, [the science of pure phenomena] is claimed as the groundwork of a psychology that is scientific in the true sense (and also as the groundwork of a true critique of reason), which, to be sure, must not mean that it is a science like psychology. Its relationship to psychology is better conceived of as analogous, mutatis mutandis, to that of mathematics to natural science, that is to say as a relationship of one positive science in the modern sense to another, where each science grows and progresses by itself and has its particular object as well as its own characteristic method. For phenomenology, this is the priority of intuition, in the sense of the originality of reflection and eidetic seeing, over the deductive-constructivist procedure that predominates in the mathematical disciplines.
Admittedly there are explanations, both in the treatise Philosophy as Rigorous Science as well as in Ideas I, that testify that Husserl assigns to phenomenology first the task of investigating the essence of the being of the psychic in the form [Gestalt] of pure phenomena. Although he asserts that one can never approach the essence of the psychic through contingent experience and experimentation, he combats naturalism on the strength of judgments concerning the essence of the being of physical things [des dinglichen Seins] and of the psychic, and the fundamental difference between the two: physical things have their identical “nature” in the manifold of their sides and effects, whereas the psychic has its essence without existing as identical in the manifold of appearances.
By way of summary, one could perhaps interpret the beginning of the introduction to Ideas I in the following manner: Husserl seeks a new fundamental science of philosophy called pure phenomenology.12 This new fundamental science, in its systematically pure grounding and execution, is the first of all philosophies and the indispensable precondition for every metaphysics and any other philosophy (by metaphysics Husserl understands the science of fact [Wissenschaft vom Faktum]).13 Its first task is to determine in a rigorously scientific way the sense of the modification that phenomena (physical, psychic, historical, etc.) undergo when they become pure phenomena. That is to say, the task is to distinguish the phenomenological attitude from the natural attitude.
But what does it mean to distinguish the phenomenological attitude from the natural attitude? Is the alteration of attitude merely subjective, to be defined through an act of the subject? If that were so, then one would not yet understand the achievement [Leistung] of this attitude. With respect to their content, the phenomena themselves remain afterward what they are. In this they are not modified. What pertains to them, insofar as one can say of it that “it is,” remains what it was. What is modified, however, is this “is,” the sense of their being. What is at stake in this attitude, then, is the sense [Sinn] of the being of pure phenomena in comparison to the sense of the being [Seinssinn] of what is given in the natural attitude.
The sought-after science (and to seek means to question), then, is on the way toward the question of the being of pure phenomena (and with that also toward the question of the being of consciousness and of the object of consciousness). It inquires about being, for the result—which arose in questioning—of the fundamental operations of the epochē and reduction is an ascertainment of the way in which the being of the world and the being of consciousness can be delineated and the way in which they relate to one another. Husserl, however, believed he could achieve this [result] with a science of types, like the modern positive sciences which always have a being as their object, one that they seek to evaluate in their infinite progress over the course of generations and through the additive accretion of the results of research.
If one looks at the situation in this way, then this Husserlian questioning is certainly something profoundly different from the systematic collection and articulation of experiences on the basis of pure immanence, and accordingly something profoundly different from answering. The Husserlian questions go toward being, toward something that determines the fundamental sense of beings in the mode of the world and in the mode of consciousness, whereas answers make statements in which this sense is already presupposed and which thus fundamentally cannot further determine this being [Sein]. The answers given by the object of the desired science thus fundamentally cannot answer the questions that arise in the conception of the epochē and in the thought of a reduction of worldly beings.
In this way, Husserl seeks one science and finds two. He seeks the fundamental science of philosophy. Metaphysics has long been viewed as such a science. As is generally known, however, metaphysics has fallen into disrepute in modern times because it cannot demonstrate itself to be a positive science in the sense of constant, apodictic progression on the firm ground of a secured object. That toward which Husserl strives coincides to a great extent with what Kant imagined when he spoke of a metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a science. Even Kant, in the famous paragraphs of the second introduction to Critique of Pure Reason where he describes the evolution of a science, measures philosophy by the yardstick of positive science.14 However, whereas Kant had logic, mathematics, and mathematical natural science in mind as models, Husserl had a scientific psychology, a science of mind. And while Kant saw the turn to the objective a priori (instead of empirical fumbling about) that must lie ready in the human mind as the foundational move for a science, Husserl finds the decisive act for the grounding of his philosophical science in the epochē as suspension of all validity of the world, indeed of every objective validity whatsoever. He spoke not so much of a metaphysics as science but rather of a new critique of reason.15 Pure phenomenology, we see, takes the place of traditional metaphysics.
If that is the case, then it would perhaps be obvious to pose the following problem: does what Husserl conceives as an answer (i.e., as a genuine science of phenomenology) actually suit the fundamental question? And does the answer, in order to be developed correctly, require a suitable question?
Is the epochē a stance [Haltung] that has been appointed to serve as an introduction into the realm of pure phenomena, and thereby a being with an as yet unexamined sense of being; or is it in essence an act that, conducted in its full universality, allows our gaze to be conducted away from beings in general and toward being—and not merely toward the being of pure phenomena,” but rather toward the sense of being in general?
And then again, does one obtain a being of a different being-sense from that of the res (for the res cogitans, too, is still a res, even if it lacks the attribute of extensio) simply by suspending the thesis of the transcendent in order to be able to view the purely immanent in absolute presence? Is the reflective having of the self what is original? Is what is viewed in this having the essence of the self? Is it not then above all to be approached and as such conceived as the weightiest, the fundamental accomplishment of the subject, if ontic truth is seen as certainty, as a fundamental accomplishment of the “subject”? Has there not become visible, precisely through the epochē and in the being commonly designated as “subject,” what must necessarily be respected in this original grasping: the possibility not only of presenting beings, but prior to that, the possibility of grasping being?
Must not the laying of the foundation of philosophy as science have come up short with this Husserlian formulation of the problem? What, then, for Husserl was the resultant answer from his line of inquiry into the question of the sense of the transcendental stance [Haltung]? What is the sense of the being of pure phenomena? They are “absolute being,” the “nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum,” because they are themselves surely the fundamental res: “The realm of transcendental consciousness as the realm of what is, in a determined sense, ‘absolute’ being, has been provided us by the phenomenological reduction. It is the primal category of all being (or, in our terminology, the primal region), the one in which all other regions of being are rooted, to which, according to their essence, they are relative and on which they are therefore all essentially dependent.”16 The sense of this primal region, then, is to be the foundation, the sub-stratum of all other being: “The theory of categories must start entirely from this most radical of all ontological distinctions—being as consciousness and being as something which becomes ‘manifested’ in consciousness, ‘transcendent’ being.”17 It is clear: in the ontological line of inquiry, not much new has been achieved in comparison to Descartes. The fundamental division of finite modes of being is the Cartesian one. Only the immanence [of res cogitans] was emphasized; the sense of the res extensa faded into being an object, and the relation of the two is turned into one of intentionality rather than a causal-objective one. But the regions of being are not the only concepts of being that arise in this context. There is also talk of essence, of categories and a primal category, of ground and grounded. All that surely demands a systematic treatise concerning its sense. But that task was omitted, for one was in a rush toward the construction of a science of the pure phenomena, a wholly new science.
Then again, was the Husserlian idea of the possibility of a doctrine of “purified subjectivity,” of an original kind of conception of the “subject,” groundless? Simply asserting this, too, would be one-sided. One cannot simply regard this subjectivity as that toward which the way is exclusively and originally opened in the epochē. The epochē, more radically conceived, opens the way to the being of beings of every mode of being. But what is required for the “purification of subjectivity” is not only the epochē but also insight into a historical nexus of conceptions of being. The epochē is in a position to guide [our] view from beings to being. It can breach the prejudice of the absolute mode of being of the transcendent, of beings in the mode of res extensa. But is it capable of remedying the prejudices in the conception of being that have resulted from a murky tradition, from the confounding of being with beings, and from the lack of the problem of being in its points of orientation? The epochē warns us not to regard beings as the only possible theme of knowledge, and it explodes the corresponding prejudice. But it is insufficient to reveal the distortions, masks, and burials that occur in being itself. Only a historical procedure is capable of that, one that exposes traditional interconnections, opaque assumptions, and uninterrogated components in the current representations and conceptions of being. These must then be seen through in their supposed obviousness, and their dogmatic inertia is, so to speak, to be hunted out. “Purified subjectivity” can first be targeted when the roots of the prejudice of the genuine grasping of the self in a reflective gaze (which can grasp nothing but the res cogitans), and the ground upon which these roots grow have been uncovered. The theoretical stance [Haltung] of a pure gaze is, however, fundamentally a comportment [Verhalten] that presupposes a “for the sake of itself” [Um willen seiner] (and as such more than a “pure” gaze, which would be a present gaze), and the “for the sake of” [presupposes] a “nonindifference,” a “something is at stake” [es geht um etwas]. And these are all structures which are, of course, to be grasped reflectively, but which allude to an essentially responsible and acting being that therefore is to count as original and takes priority over the representing comportment with which the Cartesian approach is predominately, if not exclusively, concerned. In this way there comes into view not only the more original temporality of human experience, awaiting, and the situation in which we already find ourselves, but so too the phenomenon of responsibility [Verantwortlichung] as giving over [Über-antwortung] and with that also the task of grasping the “subjective” essence as free, ethical, ontologically one with understanding.
If this is a dogmatic-metaphysical formulation of the problem, then the whole of German Idealism beginning with Fichte, and even Kant with his efforts to overcome the dualism of the representing and the freely acting ego, must be called “dogmatic.” (This aside is meant as a comment concerning the critical position-taking of a contemporary philosopher who suspects that the agenda of a dogmatic metaphysics lies in the critique of the primacy of consciousness and reflection.18)
The conception of phenomenology as a method of ontology thus gives impulse to two sciences, both of which admittedly are not to be addressed as new but rather as renewed through this method: ontology as the search for the answer to the question of the sense of being and ontology of human life, which one could also call the theory of the soul. The theory of the soul is a new science in the sense that it stands in fundamental opposition to the Cartesian ontology of the res cogitans and seeks the theory of a mode of being that is fundamentally not that of the res. This “fundamental ontology” is made possible by unfolding anew the question of being, for this is where human Da-sein, as the site of being (in the understanding of being), must naturally be targeted. Thus, human life must not be conceived as a “present-at-hand” res cogitans, to be viewed in the distance of reflection, or as conscious being [Sein] present-at-hand, but rather as something that comports itself to itself in its understanding of being. This means that grasping the self is not a pure seeing of a being by the same being, a “pure, intellectual intuition”; rather, it is itself conditioned and guided by an a priori. Neither the naive nor the reflective, philosophical grasping of the self is ever without an interpretation, without an a priori preliminary understanding, as one can see best in the example of the Cartesian cogito, which admittedly possesses the absolute certainty of self-grasping, but only for the present moment. As such, it presupposes a mathematical conception of time, that of the tradition. The concept of reflection itself is profoundly modified in the moment where one sees that “consciousness” is not the fundamental concept of all understanding (understanding here taken as comportment toward beings) but is rather before all else an understanding of being that, itself unthematic, allows beings to be presented thematically. Self-consciousness can be nothing other than the turning-toward this being [Seienden] in its relation to being, a turning that is itself guided by an understanding of being. This turning-toward by no means needs to release the kind of being of the targeted being in a manner corresponding to that kind of being. In that case it is no original understanding that has, on the basis of the critical destruction of inherited prejudices, become for the first time an insight; it is an “average” and leveled-off understanding.
Presupposing the concept of consciousness as something ultimate behind which it is impossible to advance any further belongs to those attempts to state the ultimate limits of philosophical interpretation. Such attempts take as a basis a certain way of interpreting being in order to absolutize that way (e.g., the impossibility but also the superfluity of ontology, because being cannot be defined and is moreover a self-evident concept, one that is not to be further analyzed).
It is thus a vain struggle to attempt to reach consciousness in pure reflection. For grasping this being depends, as far as the horizon of its understanding has been cleared, upon what we can never achieve of our own accord from a knowledge-project as a projecting because we do not have the presuppositions of our life at our command. On the contrary, they command our life. We have only historical experience, which teaches us that these presuppositions are, in a certain sense, variable, and that being “clears” itself in different ways. Thus, we can never maintain that we have reached the limits of the knowable, a definitive [grasp] of the a priori.
One can thus characterize the Husserlian standpoint in the following way: it is the continuation of the metaphysical pursuit of the concept of being without a clear, explicit differentiation of the ontological difference between being and beings. In this difference, however, lies the proper sense of the epochē, when conceived generally. If the question concerns being, the answer offers a being, as was already the case with the Presocratics: Thales inquired into the being of things, what they “really” are, and he answered “water,” a being that can be employed as a “model” for the variability of being.19 With the epochē, Husserl too performs the step back from beings, he seeks (inquires into, questions) being, and he answers through a being, the cogitatio of a cogitatum. He renews Cartesian metaphysics with the Kantian concept of the transcendental.
With the clarification of phenomenology as a methodological concept, one does not need to abandon the concept of a philosophy as rigorous science, understood in opposition to Weltanschauung-philosophy, which purports to be a doctrine of beings.20 Admittedly, phenomenology is no positive science. That follows from the fact that it does not posit beings and carries out its research within this restraint—that is to say, it follows from the fact that phenomenology stands fundamentally within the epochē, and indeed not in a restricted one, but a general one. For that reason, it can also be called, albeit paradoxically, a science of the nothing. For the object of philosophy is indeed nothing of which one can say “it is” [es ist] (a being); rather, “there is” [es gibt] this object; it is this “there is” itself.21
With such a conception, one is certainly capable of something that the Husserlian conception of the ground of the “new, unheard-of science” of phenomenology was not capable of: finding a justification in life itself for the fact that something like the epochē is possible. For Husserl, this act of freedom comes “as though shot from a pistol” and is itself a grounding ground, one that cannot be further grounded. Heidegger’s treatise “What is Metaphysics?” sought to accomplish this [further] grounding.
The epochē may not be a negation, a denial. All the same, it belongs to those attitudes that are of a negative nature. It is a nonaffirming and a nondenying, a limbo, a mode of comportment grounded in nihilating.
To what extent is the epochē a nihilating comportment? To the extent that it is a non-use of theses. A freedom, a nonboundedness through beings, is experienced. Prior to the unfree judgment-comportment, which is dependent upon beings, a sphere is discovered where beings do not rule, where they compel neither affirmation nor denial. How would such a comportment, a freedom of this kind, be possible if an experience of the fundamental possibility of distance from every activity, even judging, were not at its basis? The epochē starts with a characteristic of the thesis, with its nonobligatory characteristic. The possibility of an epochē and its limbo is inherent in the experience of nihilation. Only on the basis of this limbo can a new interest awaken, an interest in that which is precisely not a being.
One could summarize in the following way: On the one hand, it is not the epochē that establishes the limbo upon which the phenomenological reduction is built up, but rather the epochē presupposes the experience of the limbo, the nihilation, to which every repelling (negative) attitude refers as its origin.
On the other hand, the limbo of the epochē must remind us of the transcendence of Dasein and of that which must not be spoken of as a being [seiend] (and thus must be spoken of as a nonbeing [also als nichtseiend]).
Like logical denial, the epochē is also native to the sphere of logical acts and comportments. For that reason, it cannot count as the proper origin of what it pretends to unveil. What it does unveil is a “region,” a “plane,” which stands outside of that which is the object of a thesis and which can accordingly be called a being [seiend]. Husserl himself called this region “pre-being” [Vorsein] and identified it with transcendental consciousness because he did not bring the epochē to its conclusion and believed he had to insist upon a subjective basis because otherwise there would be no object for a theory that could be called rigorous science.
In fact, the epochē is only evidence of nihilation and the possibility, even in the theoretical realm, of proceeding through the presence of nihilation up to the brink where one can and must leave the territory of beings. The epochē tends toward the purely theoretical performance of a “step back” behind beings.
The origin of this “step back,” however, cannot be grounded in the epochē itself, for the epochē presupposes the dominance of logic in the “general thesis,” that is in the interpretation of the original relation to beings as thesis, and as such as a logical positing, as assertion. Phenomenologically viewed, the “thesis” of the world as universe of beings is not a possible act since the universe of beings must first be presented, which is however impossible, and the world as horizon is precisely not an object and as such also cannot be an object of a judgment thesis.
The “general thesis” is thus a problematic concept: it means either a logical thesis, in which case it cannot be carried out; or it means an attuned disclosure, in which case it is not a thesis. By way of contrast, the situation is clarified if one does not insist that the primary relation to the world is a thesis, something theoretical involving objects, but rather sees instead that it is contained in an affective finding oneself so [Sich-Befinden], that is, in the “sphere of feeling,” and that this is where the disclosure of beings as such and as a whole originally takes place.
This limbo brought about by the epochē suffers from the difficulties introduced above: (1) it cannot be performed without restriction, or else it leads in nihil; (2) as theoretical, it cannot be initiated, since one never reaches “the whole” as an object. The difficulty with the epochē—that it is a theoretical act capable of bringing beings into limbo—can be remedied by revealing the limbo brought about by the epochē as a nihilating comportment. This nihilating comportment is grounded in the original “nihilation” and opens access admittedly not to a being (of whatever sort), but to an “open district” of what has been cleared, of what can “withstand” Dasein who understands being. Thus, what Husserl intended as transcendental, as absolute consciousness is, in the proper sense, no such thing but something perfectly distinct from every objective (present-at-hand) as well as subjective being [Seienden].
From these considerations, if they are cogent, it seems to follow that an interpretation of “What is Metaphysics?” is possible that can implicitly be characterized as a confrontation with the Husserlian epochē as the core of the reduction. Or it can be interpreted as, among other things, containing such a confrontation. Husserl’s attendance at the inaugural lecture makes it probable that questions ought to have been addressed there that most profoundly concern both phenomenological philosophies. Husserl’s fundamental problem was to ground philosophy upon the epochē and reduction as a phenomenologically rigorous, but positive, science. Husserl claims to ground phenomenological philosophy, as a positive science that justifies all the theories of the individual sciences, upon said methodological procedure, and in this way also to arrive at a metaphysics (metaphysics of mind) that will finally be able to come forward as science. To this claim Heidegger opposes his conception of phenomenology grounded upon the nihilation of the nothing. This conception cannot accept the traditional dominance of logic in philosophy (philosophy as doctrine of reason), which begins in modern times with Descartes. The Husserlian epochē certainly initiates the surmounting of this dominance, but cannot radically and consistently execute it, instead coming to a halt at the indeterminacy of the thought of the natural attitude’s “general thesis.” By contrast, Heidegger attempts an all-out attack on the dominance of the logical by attempting to show that one of the presuppositions of logic—negation—is grounded in the pre-logical, in Dasein’s openness to being, specifically in nihilation. The idea of philosophy as a positive science proves to be a vestige of Cartesianism in phenomenology.
The starting point of the whole lecture shows already that the horizon of the entire investigation is philosophy in its relationship to positive science, and thus also the concept of philosophy as rigorous science. According to Husserl, philosophy as rigorous science should flow into a metaphysics that comes forward as science. Metaphysics is thus that which is initially asked about. As proper philosophy, metaphysics ought not be presented by talking about [Besprechen] its subject matters but by giving voice to [Aussprechen] them. It is characterized (provisionally) by the fact that each of its questions encompasses the whole of its “field” and that the questioner is herself put into question at the same time. This putting-into-question of the questioner turns into the putting-into-question of the scientist, which, of course, Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” also considered. It was Husserl himself who strove to anchor the sciences in their essential ground at a time when their fields had come far apart through specialization. It is established in agreement with him that this anchoring is today “dead.” Phenomenology wanted precisely to renew this anchoring. The entrance into phenomenology was nonetheless the reduction and its core, the epochē—a much more “negative” attitude than every negation, a way into the philosophical beyond every science of the world, beyond every science of actual beings. The sciences are without exception primarily characterized through this relation to the world: whether exact or historical sciences, they pursue beings in order to approach the essence of the things in question. Science answers to the thing [Sache] itself (one of Husserl’s requirements, which he also demands of philosophy), and, in bondage and subordinate exclusively to the thing, it wants to help the thing come into its own [zu ihr selbst verhelfen]. For the thing is not capable, as it were, of being itself on its own [von sich selbst]. In short, there is talk of an “irruption” of the being “human” into the whole of beings (into the universe) in order to allow a being to “emerge” into what it is and how it is. The thing itself needs this irruption and emergence [Einbruch und Aufbruch], which cannot come to it from itself, for so far as it is not akin to Dasein’s type it is not capable of coming into a relationship to its own being, and so far as it is akin to Dasein’s type it is not capable of coming into an explicit relationship to its own being. This irruption can occur, however, only on the basis of what exists as an original relationship not toward beings but toward being—something therefore that is no being and for that reason also precisely is not, thus, from the standpoint of beings, toward non-beings [Nichtseienden]. But this relationship is the ground of the appearing of what appears. Appearing is thus, in its ground, to be sought outside of beings. This ground, being, however, is the object of metaphysics. Since it is not a being, it must be, regarded from the point of view of beings, a nothing. This now mobilizes the question of the lecture: What about this nothing?
Upon first glance this characterization (science wants to know all beings in the world and nothing further; the scientific attitude takes its lead from beings and nothing further; it grapples with beings and nothing further) seems to be something superfluous and gratuitously added. In actuality, that which lends to science the power of the irrupting emergence of beings is expressed in the “nothing.” The discussion of the concept of the nothing that then follows is at one and the same time a confrontation with logic. Is it an accident that this took place in the presence of the great phenomenologist, who in his most radical endeavor of thought (the reflection on the epochē in Ideas I) remains subject to the dominance of this logic to such an extent that he downright recoiled before the nothing? In the face of the thinker, that is, who for this reason remains a prisoner of the subject-object relation (in a transcendental version) and a transcendental idealism?
In any event the investigation now takes a detour where it is shown how logic fails when faced with the concept of nothing, how it is incapable of formulating this concept and for that reason can only repudiate it. Yet is this repudiation proof that there is nothing of issue with the nothing [dass es mit dem Nichts nichts an sich hat]? Certainly, the nothing is not a being to which a concept in the proper sense always refers within a context that must have already been illuminated. In the case of the nothing there is nothing of the sort, and the concept itself says as much. What, then, is the use of the concept? Logic certainly cannot use it, but is that a proof against the nothing? “The nothing” is after all a logical objectification. Logic is capable of circumscribing the nothing in no other way than by such an objectifying operation. For it, the nothing is the utter negation of the totality of beings. With that, the nothing is subordinated to a logical operation; it derives from negation. Such an operation, however, is not at all achievable; it is an empty intention. It conflicts with the essence of fulfillment, which in canceling [a thesis] always presupposes a partially positive thesis. One can “realize” a negation only on the basis of something positive. Moreover, the totality of beings can never be positively realized—that conflicts with the necessarily horizonal givenness of the individual.
In spite of this, the information provided by logic, the denial of the totality of beings, is not entirely devoid of sense. It suggests a confusion of two concepts of wholeness: wholeness as the sum of beings (something unrealizable), and a whole as the phenomenon without which appearing as such is not possible, the condition of the possibility of appearing. This whole is what is open in appearing, the “world” in the sense of a district that must already be opened to Dasein if Dasein is to understand and perceive [vernehmen] beings. This whole is thus no being but beyond beings. It is felt as a whole, opened up in accordance with mood. This mood holds together even that which is most disparate and fragmented in our activities and makes them always into something derived from, and first disclosed by, a whole.
That implies that what appears in any given case can address us if we relate to it through an antecedent disclosedness, if we find ourselves attuned within it. There is, however, a fundamental mood that refuses and closes off each and every address whatsoever. Nevertheless, this mood still bears the characteristic of the “as a whole.” No comportment that stands in the open, no taking care of something [Besorgen], and no concern [Fürsorge] is possible here, nor a pure looking at and assimilating in a beholding that is interested in the pure look. All and everything that turns up in this “disclosedness” has the characteristic of repulsion [Abweisung]: one can strike up nothing with it. No possibility presents itself. This mood offers the experience of the nothing, of nonaddress, of no possibility. While material denial can only be fulfilled through a replacement, there is no alternative here, no replacing, but a pure dwindling. It can also be put like this: beings offer no possibility of a “halt” here, no target; they slip away as soon as the attempt is made to touch them. One learns through this experience that our customary being-in-the-world is a matter of supporting ourselves upon things we have seized—a supporting of ourselves that here fails.
The negation of the totality of beings is impossible; the slipping away of beings as a whole, by contrast, is a fundamental occurrence of Dasein. What is this slipping away more specifically? Nothing other than the unveiling of Da-sein as such. Da-sein is not a being that is simply there but a being that understands others and itself, that is, a being to whom beings appear. In the slipping away of beings, which repels us and says nothing, the following becomes clear: Only on the basis of something that is not a being [etwas Nichtseiendem] could beings appear to us. Only by “transcending,” by taking the “step back” behind beings, does Dasein understand beings and do things and it itself appear to it. In the “step back,” then, Dasein learns that it is fundamentally “uncanny” [unheimlich], that it is “not at home among things.” It experiences that which is strange [die Fremde], the strangeness [Befremdlichkeit] of beings as such, that is, the strangeness of their being. In this way, in the presence of the nothing, it gains experience of being, and without the possibility of this experience it is precisely not Dasein, not understanding, something to which beings stand open, to which beings reveal themselves, something itself open.
It is thus the nothing of beings, as experience of the being of what is experienced, that forms the constant point of relation from out of which the lucid comportment toward beings that stands in the open can unfold. What is not a being [das Nichtseiende], being [itself], is that point of support around which a light, open district forms itself within which the appearing of beings is possible. This district is the how and what of beings that can address us; yet being itself is only present in refusing itself, and that means that being withdraws itself by indicating beings to us and referring us to them. The district of the open, within which beings open up, is thus necessarily linked with the self-withdrawal of being that intrudes in the form of the nothing.
Since, however, being is the condition of the possibility of understanding, of the projection of possibilities and thus also of appearing, the human being or its “mind” can never be grasped as something purely “positive,” as a light that approaches things and illuminates them with its rays. Nor [can it be grasped] as a light that “constitutes” objectivity. Thus, one fundamentally cannot get by with the concepts of “consciousness,” even when it is defined through intentionality. Even when we disregard the fact that the kind of being of consciousness remains undetermined or is even (when it is grasped in pure, inner reflection) something constituted, present-at-hand, “consciousness” remains a thoroughly positive being, incapable of yielding a surmounting and so also incapable of yielding an appearance, the emergence of the “there is” [es gibt] in its fundamental strangeness. Or, more precisely, either “consciousness” implies, without itself suspecting it, the transcending toward that which is not a being [zum Nicht-Seienden], in which case it is, however, in its positivity a misleading concept (and it is in this way that, for example, even Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity seems to vacillate between a transcending and a traditional-positive concept of consciousness). Or consciousness is (as it was, for example, for Brentano) a being without transcendence, in which case, however, the problem of the appearing of beings has not even been posed, much less solved.
And this would also be the place to go into the question as to why Heidegger did not go the way of an explicit confrontation with the epochē and reduction, but instead went this indirect way that is so difficult to penetrate.
The answer is contained in part, I believe, in the lectures The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which have now been made available.22 Here, three components of the phenomenological method are distinguished which we can now understand, specifically from the perspective of a confrontation with Husserl: (1) the reduction, concerning which it is stated:
We call this basic component of phenomenological method—the leading back or re-duction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to being—phenomenological reduction. We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent. For Husserl, phenomenological reduction … is the method of leading phenomenological vision … back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).23
(2) construction, the projection just mentioned; and (3) the destruction that belongs to the reductive construction, that is, a “process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.”24
But why did Heidegger retain the title “reduction,” when it could have led to disastrous confusion? In light of what has been presented above, were there not two determining reasons for this choice? First, in spite of what is ultimately the starkest of material differences, there is nonetheless in both procedures something common, namely that which we designated as the “step back from beings,” the limbo of the nonemployment of theses of beings. Second, because at the time of Basic Problems, which is also the time of Being and Time, the hope of a common procedure still existed, Heidegger sought an ontological interpretation of the material achievements of phenomenology. This is probably also the meaning to be found in the remark on page 38 [MH] of Being and Time,25 which, Heidegger would later explain, was the proper justification for the dedication of the work to Edmund Husserl.26 There, Heidegger talks about how his own investigation should be seen as “steps forward in disclosing ‘the things [Sachen] themselves’ ”27 and how this is owed above all to Husserl. Does that not hint clearly enough at the fact that the one standpoint (of ontology as the matter [Sache] of phenomenology) was acquired in a reflective confrontation with the Husserlian approach? Here we have simply endeavored to discover how this reflection could have gone.
I have commented above concerning “construction” and “destruction” when I discussed the “fundamental ontology” of human Dasein.
The charge is occasionally raised against some of Husserl’s students that they have interpreted Husserl by way of Heidegger, without respecting the former’s own scientific intention; this, so the charge goes, did not consist in establishing a new metaphysics (this is maintained in spite of Husserl’s numerous statements to the contrary) but in developing the method of a historically bound, “topical” reflection on the conditions of the possibility of the respective naively objective approach. It is curious that precisely Heidegger emphasizes so strongly the methodological characteristic of phenomenology and connects this with a fundamentally historical reflection. A critique of Heidegger’s procedure must before all else be oriented toward his relationship to Husserl’s fundamental concepts and the manner in which they have resulted from thinking through Husserl’s fundamental starting point with the concepts of the general thesis, the epochē and the reduction.
A question that has caused much confusion may now be clarified: is there in Heidegger a reduction or at least the epochē? The Heideggerian concept of construction, of the projection of the being of beings in view of these beings, presupposes, we believe, an epochē, but not a reduction in the Husserlian sense. That Heidegger does not explicitly mention the epochē, however, stems from the fact that he saw it as a nihilating comportment grounded in something that lies deeper, namely, nihilation, which delivers itself originally before the being of beings as a whole.
Now would be an opportune moment briefly to address the following question in a positive way: what does phenomenology mean for us? What has lifted it to the singular position that distinguishes it in the thought of the present? Phenomenology is neither an academic philosophy dedicated to fostering a scholarly tradition,28 nor is it a philosophy that wants to assert its vitality by helping to change the world, that is, a philosophy that is or wants to be revolutionary. It is a reflection, specifically a reflection on crisis. It must investigate the crisis of humanity down to its first origins, for it wants to lay bare positive science and scientificity in general in their roots. That, however, demands a path to origins of a radical kind and a striving for an impartiality that also must remove the prejudices of the positive sciences from the path of its reflection. In this radicality there is nothing else to match phenomenology, and it goes in the opposite direction of everything else that has occurred, in obfuscated naivety, as science and philosophy. The discoveries that offer themselves up along this way are manifold, but there is one that is of paramount importance, and both luminaries, Husserl as well as Heidegger, have worked on it in common: the discovery of the essential Cartesianism of our entire epoch, if one—to employ the Heideggerian terminology—views Cartesianism as the aggregate of the ontic consequences of the ontological approach of substance dualism, that is, Descartes’s doctrine of the two thingly modes of being. The endeavor to offer a searching way in opposition to the fundamental concept of modernity that has here been exposed—that is phenomenology.
Translated by Hayden Kee
NOTES
1. [Reading “nie mehr” instead of “sie mehr”—HK.]
2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927), 27 [translated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 26].
3. Heidegger, 34–35 [32–33].
4. Heidegger, 37 [35].
5. [Reading “Philosophie” instead of “Phänomenologie”—HK.]
6. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 3 [translated by F. Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), xvii]. Hereafter referred to as Ideen I.
7. Husserl, 3 [xvii].
8. Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) [translated by Lee Hardy as The Idea of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999)].
9. A. J. Bucher, H. Drüe and T. M. Seebohm, eds., Bewusst sein—Gerhard Funke zu eigen (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975), 76–78 [Patočka is here referring to his contribution to this volume, titled “Epochē und Reduktion: Einige Bemerkungen”—HK.]
10. Husserl, Ideen I, 65 [60—Patočka’s citation corrected and Kersten translation modified—HK].
11. Husserl, 6–7 [xx–xxi].
12. Husserl, 3 [xvii].
13. Husserl, 8 [xxii].
14. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B VII–XV [translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood as Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–110].
15. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft; Naturalistische Philosophie, Abteilung IV. Cf. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1910–11): 289–341 [translated by Quentin Lauer as Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1965), 71–147].
16. Husserl, Ideen I, 174 [171]. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. F.-W. von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), 175 [translated by Alfred Hofstadter as Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 124–125].
17. Husserl, Ideen I, 171 [174].
18. Gerhard Funke, Phänomenologie—Metaphysik oder Methode (Bonn: H Bouvier Verlag, 1966), 176 [translated by David J. Parent as Phenomenology: Metaphysics or Method (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987)].
19. Cf. Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 453 [318–319].
20. Heidegger, 17 [12–13].
21. Heidegger, 13–14, 18 [10, 13–14].
22. Heidegger, §5: “The character of ontological method; The three basic components of phenomenological method.”
23. Heidegger, 29 [21].
24. Heidegger, 31 [23].
25. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 38n1 [36n5].
26. Spiegel-Interview with Martin Heidegger [September 23, 1966], published as “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel 30 (Mai, 1976): 193–219 [trans. by William J. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (New Jersey: Transaction, 1981), 45–67].
27. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 38 [36; trans. modified].
28. [Reading “Schulphilosophie” instead of “Schalphilosophie”—HK.]