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 --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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