File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0304, message 466


Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 02:53:41 +0800
Subject: Re: more Husserl on Heidegger
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



On Sunday, April 27, 2003, at 04:48  AM, Anthony Crifasi wrote:

> Malcolm, I was just reading Husserl's "Phenomenology and 
> Anthropology," and found a text that I really don't think you can get 
> around:
>
> "As Ego I am for myself not a human being within the world that is in 
> being; rather, I am the ego that places the world in question 
> regarding its entire being, and hence too regarding its being in this 
> way or that. Or: I am the ego that certainly continues to live its 
> life within universally available experience but that brackets the 
> validity of the being of that experience. The same holds for all 
> non-experiential modes of consciousness in which the world retains its 
> practical or theoretical validity."

I don't need to 'get around' this text cos I interpret it differently 
to you. All you've done here is demonstrate the same dogged persistence 
in interpreting Husserl your way rather than mine. Here he's just 
saying that rather than thinking of human being and 'world being' as 
two distinct things (ie the subject/object distinction) he's wants to 
call into question the validity of what we understand 'self' and 
'world' to mean. It's _the_ classic phenomenological move, and 
Heidegger's Seinsfrage starts out in exactly the same way... calling 
into question the traditional metaphysics of subjectivity, and who else 
can call it into question other than that being who questions?

We've been through this a million times already, and you will no doubt 
come back and just restate your same interpretation about bracketing 
'world existence' to mean... what exactly? Pure subjectivity in a 
radically traditional Cartesian sense? I don't agree with this view of 
Husserl, but you are welcome to it, and just to keep you happy Anthony 
here are a few notes:

> First, he explicitly says that the ego "places the world in question 
> regarding its ENTIRE BEING".

That's good isn't it? And that's what Heidegger also does in the 
'question of being' that calls all traditional notions of being, self, 
world, practice, theory etc into question. So we have no problems as 
yet:

> Secondly, he says that this holds also for PRACTICAL comportments.

Excellent, so for Husserl we also need to place into question the 
traditional understanding of both practice and theory, and Heidegger's 
Div 1 of BT is an excellent example of this same 'placing into 
question' followed by the classic phenomenological practical critique 
of Cartesianism. Ideas 2 also does this but much less systematically.

>  Both of these are in flat contrast to Heidegger's insistance that 
> Dasein is FUNDAMENTALLY being-alongside-entities-in-the-world, and 
> precisely in practical comportments is this most clear.

Now... this is where your monumental leaps of logic just completely 
lose me. You have no argumentation here whatsoever and I can see no 
logical connection with your previous statements, although I can piece 
together what you are implying here from the perspective of your 
subjectivist reading of Husserl. So your subjectivist conclusion 
already informs your critique of Husserl, and you arrive at this 
conclusion on the basis of logical leaps that only make sense from the 
perspective of your conclusion... a beautiful piece of tautology 
Anthony.

As far as Dasein and it's life world goes Husserl even states that 'I 
am the ego that certainly continues to live its life within universally 
available experience'... and I am free to interpret this as - there is 
no ego isolated from its intentional relation to the world, it is 
FUNDAMENTALLY part of the life world, but the validity of how we 
already understand what 'world' means needs to be called into question.

> So for Heidegger, the being of the world is constitutive of Dasein,

No, the temporality of Dasein's intentional structure is constitutive 
for how we understand both world and self. You seem to have this 
completely backwards, although that perhaps depends on what sense of 
'world' you mean here but you give me no definition.

> whereas for Husserl, the being of the world is not essentially 
> constitutive of the transcendental ego -

Agreed, according to Husserl what is truly fundamental is the originary 
temporality that constitutes both the empirical (as phenomenological) 
ego and its world together as the transcending unity of the intentional 
flux of lived experience.

>  hence the possibility of considering the ego quite apart from the 
> being of the world.

As such a unity there is no fundamental phenomenological sense 
whatsoever in which you can consider the intentionally structured 
phenomenological ego 'quite apart' from the intentional relation to its 
world that constitutes it in the first place. As also for Heidegger, 
the subject and object are intentional relations of sense, dynamic 
relations that are constantly constituted as one's own self and our 
world, in the unity of lived experience or one's own life.

In order to 'do' phenomenology, and this is again true of both Husserl 
and Heidegger, before we consider this rather difficult notion of 
originary lived time we need to formally call into question all 
possible interpretations of 'self' and 'world' that already inform our 
traditional understanding. This of course includes all anthropological 
misinterpretations (Cartesianism, psychologism, pragmatism etc) of the 
fundamental nature of human being which both Husserl and Heidegger went 
to great pains to critically dismantle. This 'criticism' (Abbau, 
Destruktion) is necessary as a constantly questioning self-critique of 
one's own positive interpretations. Phenomenology is a path of 
questioning, Husserl initiated this style in the Logical 
Investigations, and Heidegger lays this path out explicitly in the 
Basic Problems of Phenomenology and opens Being and Time with it.

And this is basically where we left off before, some months back. I see 
the bracketing of 'world existence' as the very first movement in 
questioning, as Destruktion... you see it as a radically Idealist 
solipsism, like a mirror of logical positivism. As I said then, we 
should agree to disagree on this one cos there's no way I can interpret 
Husserl in those subjectivist terms, I already tried it and it just 
doesn't work for me.

Regards,

Malcolm Riddoch



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