Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 00:40:11 +0800
From: Malcolm Riddoch <riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Heidegger on Husserl


>Cologne, 27 February 1998
>Malcolm ... There is no such thing as an
>=93intentionality of care=94, nor is there such a thing as =93intentionality as
>Verhalten=94, since Dasein as such is not intentional at all.

Well you might see things differently with a careful reading of the
'History of the concept of time' lecture course c.1925; according to Kisiel
it represents a preliminary draft of B&T free of the Kantian and
existential terminology that is a product of the final draft sometime
towards the end of 1925 early 26. This work deals explicitly with
Husserlian intentionality and the development of phenomenology from
Brentano through to Heidegger's own interpretation. Also interesting is the
'Basic problems of phenomenology' lecture course following on the
publication of B&T. In these works care is quite specifically given as the
ground of intentionality or Dasein's directedness towards beings as a
whole, and this directedness involves not only perceptions and objective
being (in HCT) but also of course practical comportments (Verhalten).

=46or instance, perception is "intrinsically intentional ... intentionality
constitutes the very structure of comportment itself" (History of the
concept of time, p. 31/40), and thus the intentionality of perception is
already intrinsically comportment as a 'directing-itself-toward'.

Heidegger doesn't here seem to have a problem with Husserlian
intentionality as such, he sees the notion of categorial intuition as a
'significant breakthrough' although only in a restricted sense. For the
intentionality of perception isn't the whole of the problem and so he
states that "categorial intuition is just a concretion of the basic
constitution of intentionality" (HCT, p. 72/98-99). The intentionality of
perception will become secondary to that notion of practical intentionality
within which it is founded; it will be subsumed within an intentional
comportment that lies beyond the ken of consciousness. Thus the "so-called
logical comportments of thinking or objective theoretical knowing represent
only a particular and narrow sphere within the domain of intentionality"
(HCT, p. 78/106-107).

Obviously perception is too narrow a focus to start with in dealing with
the problem of intentionality and this narrowness is related to the way in
which Husserl approaches the problematic. Heidegger thus has a
methodological rather than a descriptive problem with Husserlian
intentionality. The problem with Husserl's method arises in its starting
point, in the 'natural attitude'. Heidegger points out that Husserl does
not start with an analysis of intentionality as it actually gives itself
but immediately proceeds to its abstraction as an act of consciousness: "in
elaborating intentionality as the thematic field of phenomenology, the
question of the being of the intentional is left undiscussed" (HCT, p.
113/157). It is quite clear that Heidegger finds Husserl's emphasis on the
intentionality of perception too narrow and so he proceeds to introduce the
problem of practical comportments as that intentionality within which
perceptual consciousness moves ie the factical world, already set up as the
'stage' of consciousness, so to speak. Intentionality and the problem of
transcendence, ie how the sense of everydayness is constituted, thus moves
from perception and objective being to an openness to the equipmental world
and the sense of being within which perceptions can make sense...and so:

"I do not first need to ask how the immanent intentional experience
[Erlebnis] acquires transcendent validity, it is precisely intentionality
and nothing else in which transcendence consists" (Basic problems of
phenomenology, p. 63/89). That is, intentionality in general, as an
openness to the factical world within which consciousness can perceive
things, shifts the problem of transcendence from the ego process and
objective being to the being of Dasein, ie., towards the openness belonging
to practical comportments.

=46rom the perspective of HCT it seems clear to me that Dasein, care and
transcendence (and thus the existential analytic itself) are all intimately
related to the problem of intentionality which explicitly includes
perception amongst comportments in general.

>Husserl=92s
>understanding of transcendence is that of intentionality, to be sure, for the
>intentionality of the transcendental ego constitutes the object in its
>objectivity.

Not quite, for Husserl the intentionality belonging to the flow of
consciousness is first constituted in Zeitlichkeit and it is on this basis
that the unity of both the transcendental ego and of objects is
constituted. According to the phenomenology of time transcendence is
grounded in Zeitlichkeit, and there is in no sense whatsoever an ego-thing
that constitutes sense for itself. Nonetheless Husserl tried to explain
transcendence and its sense of everydayness solely in terms of objective
being or how the ego and its ideal temporal objectivities are constituted
in the originary self-constituting flux of Zeitlichkeit. In doing so he
works out the self-grounding temporal structure of the ego as process, a
structure that seems to be reiterated in Heidegger's ecstatic notion of the
self, but then runs into problems concerning the sense of eveydayness. He
works out the temporality of objective being as a unity in change but I
think transcendence obviously remains a problem for him as regards the
historical/factical world. His early problematic leading up to the 'Ideas'
is limited to the temporal constitution of physical things, ie scientific
objectivity, and from there to ideal forms and on to mathematics. Husserl
thought this emphasis on science and Cartesian modernity was enough to
ground phenomenology as fundamental philosophy but then Heidegger comes
along with his 'philosophical anthropology' and introduces facticity into
the equation, thus:

>Heidegger radicalizes the understanding of transcendence to
>being-in-the-world.

Yes, and so Dasein's self-projection remains open to a factical world
already set up in terms of the ready-to-hand totality. But this
self-projection still has the temporal structure of Husserl's
transcendental subject...and yet of course Husserl tried to solve the
problem of transcendence only in terms of the intentionality of this
subject as temporal process and neglected the practical world of care
within which it lives.

>The directedness which allows Dasein to direct its attention
>ontically to specific beings is derivative of Dasein=92s originary
>transcendence
>(which Husserl did not see at all; cf. the lengthy discussion of this in
>>GA26)....The difference in the conception of transcendence marks the rift
>in >thinking between Husserl and Heidegger.

Agreed, for early Husserl the problem of transcendence is concerned with
objective being and limited to consciousness, for Heidegger it is the sense
of being for which Dasein's self-projection is already open to facticity.
This is why transcendence and its relation to intentionality is the
emphasis of early Heidegger's phenomenological problematic. He solves
Husserl's difficulty without introducing the dubious notion of a
controlling ego by instead introducing the openness of Dasein to a world
that is already practically set up. Against an "erroneous subjectivizing of
intentionality" (BPoP, p. 64/89) which restricts it to consciousness and
perception Heidegger explicitly widens the notion of intentional
comportment to include the practical relations of the equipmental world.
And so instead of the centrality of perception "Dasein itself is the
transcendent" (BPoP, p. 323/460), where "transcendence means to understand
oneself from a world" (p. 300/425). The everyday sense of being is in this
practical sense "founded on transcendence" in that for Dasein "Openness
belongs to its being. The Dasein is its Da, its here-there" (p. 300/426).
It is as this practical openness that transcendence already grounds any way
of relating to being and beings in general. And here, the "original nature
of transcendence makes itself manifest in the basic constitution of
being-in-the-world" (p. 300/426) which of course includes the fundamental
existential structures of equipmentality and practical comportments.

And yet things get complicated at this juncture because it is not simply a
matter of introducing facticity and so doing away with Husserlian
intentionality altogether because firstly; straightforward perception as
noein still belongs to the existential analytic as the simple disclosedness
of the things themselves (as in Husserl) and secondly; the entire
existential structure of Dasein is grounded in temporality and the
self-projection belonging to ecstatic time.

Transcendence is specifically related to temporality (Zeitlichkeit) in that
the "ecstatic character of time makes possible the Dasein's specific
overstepping character, transcendence, and thus also the world.... The
transcendence of being-in-the-world is founded in its specific wholeness on
the original ecstatic-horizonal unity of temporality [Zeitlichkeit]" (p.
302/428). Thus, "temporality is the condition of the possibility of the
understanding of being" (p. 302/429) in the sense of the unity of the three
ecstatic horizons of Zeitlichkeit. The Dasein's self-projection and its
embodied practices both belong together within the constantly divisible
unity of ecstatic temporality and so Heidegger can say that temporality
(Zeitlichkeit) is "ecstatic-horizonal self-projection simply as such, on
the basis of which the Dasein's transcendence is possible. Rooted in this
transcendence is the Dasein's basic constitution, being-in-the-world, or
care, which in turn makes intentionality possible" (BPoP, p. 312/444).

Which is also strangely enough more or less what Husserl says as regards
the double intentionality of the flux of consciousness originarily founded
in Zeitlichkeit. The temporal structure of the ecstatic self is remarkably
similar to that of the intentional ego, and you can follow in =A764 the way
in which Heidegger calls into question first Descartes' and then Kant's
conception of the subject and follows this critique with the
phenomenological (ie temporal) conception of the ego as a relational (ie
intentional) process, albeit one that takes into account the wider problem
of care. It's at this level of the existential analytic that I'm trying to
'build bridges' as you say, cos I take as already given in Heidegger's
texts that intentionality as a whole belongs to Dasein. It's this question
of temporality in Husserl that I find fascinating and also rather
frustrating in that Heidegger throughout his career fails to explicitly
deal with it. And so in HCT we get this strange formulation of the
intentional ego presumably taken from Ideen:

"Acts are performed; the ego is the pole of the acts, the self-persisting
subject. This is certainly not the last step taken by Husserl in the
elucidation of the unity of the stream of lived experience. We shall
discuss this more appropriately first in the analysis of time under the
caption 'Stream of Lived Experience and Absolute Time-Consciousness'" (HCT,
p. 124/172).

This section (and the temporality of Dasein) is not dealt with in HCT (c.
mid 1925) but obviously an engagement with Husserl's work on time is
projected, in which the latter deals precisely with the intentional
(temporal) structures of this 'self-persisting' subject. The ego pole
notion is founded, in the phenomenology of time, on the self-constituting
intentionality of Zeitlichkeit. It is anything other than a cartesian
ego-thing, as Heidegger might seem to suggest above, but in all his later
analyses (eg. 'task of thinking') he elides the problem of Zeitlichkeit in
Husserl in favour of the transcendental ego as 'pure self-presence'...so
the matter of philosophy, in a very general sense, moves away from the ego
as temporal process (as in early Husserl) to its openness to the world,
first given in the equipmental totality (which becomes the problem of
Gestell and its technological setup) and then in the world historical
appropriation of Ereignis; and yet temporality remains central to the
problematic as a whole (from 'Being and time' through the 'Beitraege' to
'On time and being').

>If one is called by this thinking
>in any way, one has to decide at the outset whether one maintains an openness
>towards eventually gaining a well-founded insight into the ontological
>difference, or whether, on the contrary, one makes another small
>contribution to
>help cover up what has been brought to light for the first time in Western
>thinking.
>
>Regards,
>Michael

If you mean that what is needed here is good Heidegger scholarship then
obviously how else might one gain a 'well-founded insight into the
ontological
difference'? If by that you mean we must restrict ourselves to restating
Heidegger's system as if it were some sort of gospel handed down from on
high then if that works for you, fine. Heidegger's pedagogical tendencies,
however, don't particularly interest me. And beyond this initial foray into
the problem of intentionality I think you are still relying too much on an
appeal to the supposed incommensurability of the question of being that *in
some sense* exceeds all other philosophy. It's that incommensurability that
for me is always in question, and I don't think we should just accept
Heidegger's word on the matter. Moreover, I would also suggest that
critical thinking perhaps requires an openness to interpretive
possibilities, which also means an openness to styles of interpretation
other than the one that makes most sense to yourself. That aside, I must
say I'm enjoying this opportunity to work up these themes in the light of
your strident opposition Michael...who said dialectics has no place in
philosophy anymore? :)

Thanks,

Malcolm Riddoch

=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83=83

all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation - and this by
reason of its nature. Nor is this multiplicity of possible interpretations
merely the residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity which we
properly ought to strive for but did not attain. Rather, multiplicity of
meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be
strict thought (Heidegger, 'What is called thinking', p. 71).




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