File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0307, message 89


Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 16:46:08 +0800
Subject: Re: devastating page on Husserl?
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>


Hi David,

> BTW: **MALCOLM**, I've (finally) finished my thesis now...
> Accordingly, if by private email you could send to me a link to the
> PDF copy of your thesis, I would be very grateful, as I am anxious
> to dig back into that material.

Ok, it's at 
http://www.soca.ecu.edu.au/school/staff/members/riddoch/documents/

I'm in the middle of building the website so disregard the Heidegger 
photo and futurist quotes on the whois page as I haven't got around to 
editing them yet. This link should stay as is though and you are 
welcome to use it as a resource, so feel free to quote from it if you 
find anything useful.

I'm kind of overwhelmed by work at the moment and semester starts again 
next week... but I have been reading the Heidegger list as it comes in. 
Regarding Rene's 'devastating page on Husserl' I have found nothing 
even remotely devastating in either Heidegger's personal diatribes or 
his superficial critique of Husserl.

> Categorial intuition, says Heid., is Husserl's great achievement,
> and new over against Kant and neo-Kantianism. In all perception, says 
> Kant,
> is self-awareness, or rather: it must be there, if an object is to be
> known. (a paragraph title of the deduction reads: What objective unity
> of the apperception is) But Husserl stresses that I see a THING first, 
> in
> originary *intuition*, and that that thing cannot be a construct out 
> of sense
> data.

In my opinion the structure of ecstatic temporality is Husserl's great 
achievement, one that the phenomenological Heidegger was both utterly 
indebted to and yet apparently completely oblivious of... as for 
categorial intuition Heidegger makes a lot of the 6th investigation 
right through to his later years but said virtually nothing about 
Husserl's account of time. It's this deafening silence and the totally 
ingenuous subjectivist parody of Husserl, along with the dreadful two 
faced personal relationship on Heidegger's part, that makes me read 
these personal letters in a very cynical vein. On a personal level 
Heidegger went out of his way from very early on to pay homage to his 
masters face yet ruthlessly cut him down behind his back until he 
inherited Husserl's seat at Freiburg after which Heidegger simply turns 
his back on his old master, and then the grotesque Nazi episode 
completely alienates them both. What research I've done here has 
convinced me that (1) Heidegger's writing does not stand alone and (2) 
his commentary on other philosophers in relation to his own rather 
exalted self-image should be taken with a large boulder of salt.

As far as neo-Kantianism goes Heidegger's entire early period is an 
excellent example of just that, right through to the Kant book. Natorp 
and Dilthey both loom large here, and much of the structure of Being 
and Time and its relation between self and world is heavily influenced 
by Natorp and his Marburg neo-Kantians. Heidegger's Kant isn't even 
Kantian, but it's very phenomenological with regards to time, which 
means it's neo-Kantian. Much of Husserl's Logical Investigations were 
worked out in response to Natorp's criticisms, and while Husserl and 
Heidegger both develop their own phenomenologies I think these 
developments are produced from out of a German neo-Kantian millieu that 
has its provenance in reaction to late 19th century empirical 
psychology and post-Hegelian thinkers amongst others. The overarching 
problem of time is the common factor here.

But that's just me... and all I'm saying is that there are 
philosophical continuities between all these thinkers that far outweigh 
any simple general distinctions between them. Yet Heidegger is still 
perhaps the most important of them all in that he took a very tangled 
mass of problems and focused them into the simple question of being. 
However, to suggest that his philosophy is a work of individual genius 
utterly without precedent ignores the soil from which his thought 
springs, even if that's precisely what Heidegger would have us believe.

So in one sense the Seinsfrage develops out of a number of 
'neo-Kantian' problematics, and as far as any 'naive and neutral 
(faggot) notion of objectivity' goes, I think Natorp is an important 
precursor to the radical critique of subjectivity that is developed in 
both Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenologies. Bruin Christensen at 
Sydney Uni is currently working on an interesting paper detailing these 
links and I would be happy to discuss them with you, time permitting...

But for now, back to the grindstone... must eat... must have shelter.

Cheers,

Malcolm

















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