Phenomenological reduction in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit: A new proposal (original) (raw)
Related papers
Disentangling Heidegger's Transcendental Questions
Continental Philosophy Review, 2012
Recapitulating two recent trends in Heidegger-scholarship, this paper argues that the transcendental theme in Heidegger’s thought clarifies and relates the two basic questions of his philosophical itinerary. The preparatory question, which belongs to Being and Time , I.1–2, draws from the transcendental tradition to target the condition for the possibility of our openness to things: How must we be to access entities? The preliminary answer is that we are essentially opened up ecstatically and horizonally by timeliness. The fundamental question, which belongs to the unpublished Being and Time , I.3, and the rest of Heidegger’s path of thinking, is accessed by means of the first. In a turn of perspective, it targets that in terms of which we relate to the givenness of being. Heidegger first attempts to handle this question using the transcendental language of temporal horizon before happening upon the terminologically more fitting “event of appropriation” and thereafter criticizing transcendental terms. By reconstructing the preparatory question and its reversal, we can see that Heidegger’s later criticism of transcendence in fact relies on its initial success. The turn from timeliness to appropriation (initially by means of transcendental temporality) happens within the domain initially disclosed by the preparatory question.
Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy
Transcendental Inquiry Its History, Methods and Critiques, 2016
Heidegger engaged in a number of attempts to reformulate transcendental philosophy, such as in terms of fundamental ontology and world-disclosure in the second half of the 1920s, so as to break with it. An early attempt to disentangle himself from the transcendental tradition can be seen in his early post-war turn toward existence- and life-philosophy and hermeneutics, and also in his so-called “turning” (Kehre) in the mid-1930s. In this chapter I argue that, despite his anti-transcendental gestures and rhetoric, and Husserl’s view that he had betrayed transcendental philosophy for the sake of philosophical anthropology, Heidegger could not consistently abandon or overcome the problematic of transcendental philosophy through his displacement of the constitution of sense and meaning from the subject (Dasein) and its horizon of meaning to the event and openness of being (Sein), as advocates of his later thinking have claimed.
NDPR Review Heidegger's Shadow, Engelland (Heidegger and the Transcendental)
One way to understand the trajectory of Heidegger’s thought is as a series of engagements with the possibilities and the risks inherent in transcendental philosophy. This approach is the basis of Engelland’s book; as he elegantly puts it, the transcendental functions throughout Heidegger’s career as the ‘shadow’ which he cannot jump over, the hermeneutic situation out of which he writes (p.206 – all references of this format are to the text under review). Heidegger’s attitude to the transcendental evidently undergoes complex shifts, shifts mediated in part by his successive dialogues with Husserl, Kant, and others, but Engelland’s central argument is that this attitude is never purely negative: as he sees it, even the later Heidegger offers what is effectively a ‘transcendental critique of transcendence’ (p.172). In this, the text challenges the oft repeated view that the post-Kehre Heidegger rejects transcendental thinking. Authors such as Crowell and Malpas have recognized the inadequacy of that standard narrative, but, as they themselves admitted, were far from clear on how exactly an alternative reconstruction should proceed: [W]hile the idea of the transcendental is explicitly disavowed in Heidegger’s later thought, there still seems to be an important sense (though one that remains in need of clarification) in which that thinking retains a broadly ‘transcendental’ character.1 What Engelland effectively offers is the much needed clarification, exegetically and philosophically, of that ‘important sense’.
2016
This article explores the extent to which Heidegger promises a novel understanding of the concept of time. Heidegger believes that the tradition of philosophy was mistaken in interpreting time as a moveable image of eternity. We are told that this definition of time is intelligible only if we have eternity as a point of departure to understand the meaning of time. Yet, Heidegger believes that we are barred from such a viewpoint. We can only understand the phenomenon of time from our mortal or finite vantage point. Contrary to the tradition of philosophy, Heidegger argues that time does not find its meaning in eternity, time finds its meaning in death. The article takes Heidegger's position to task. It argues that it is not evident why Heidegger's account of time should in any way be superior to the traditional conception of time. Drawing on the criticism raised by Lévinas and Blanchot, that death-like eternity-is never at our disposal to understand the phenomenon of time, it shows that although Heidegger is aware that death is never an event in our life, he nonetheless claims that it is the awareness of our finitude that informs our understanding of time. Yet if Heidegger does not see it as a problem that death is never at our disposal, then it becomes questionable whether Heidegger's initial critique launched against the tradition of philosophy still holds, because it is no longer evident why it matters that eternity, as a point of departure, is never at our disposal to understand the phenomenon of time.
NDPR Review of Braver (Ed.), Division III of Heidegger’s Being and Time
Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit is, famously, an unfinished work, rushed in to print in the face of awkward questions from an appointments committee about Heidegger’s lack of publications (Ga14:99). Until the 7th edition in 1953 the published text was labelled as the “first half” of the work, and yet a glance at the plan set out in SZ shows how optimistic even this was (SZ: 39-40). The entire of Part 2 is missing; this was intended to be an exercise in the “destruction”, in Heidegger’s distinctive sense of that term, of “traditional ontology”. But so is the third Division of Part 1, a Division whose title would have been “Time and Being”. It is this omission which is philosophically more significant. Thanks to published texts such as the Kant book, Ga3, and the many historically focussed lecture courses, we have a good idea of what Part 2 might have looked like. Yet the status of Division III of Part 1 is less clear. There is, of course, the 1962 lecture “On Time and Being”, but this is separated from SZ by more than thirty years and a vast array of conceptualistic and stylistic shifts: as Harman observes, it is “nearly comically different in tone” from Sein und Zeit (p.118).1 A much more plausible surrogate is the 1927 lecture course Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, which claims to provide at least some of the missing material (Ga24:1). However, as we will see, matters are not so simple. There are deep internal problems with Ga24 itself. More broadly, this is a period in which Heidegger’s work starts to undergo the multiple methodological and philosophical changes that mark the development and ultimate abandonment of the Sein und Zeit project. Reconstructing Division III is thus not simply a matter of piecing together what it might have contained, but of making sense of why it failed to appear, and why, how and when Heidegger realised that it could no longer function as originally envisaged. Thinking through the fate of Division III thus brings one into direct contact with the key issues that both span and divide Heidegger’s early and later work: consider, for example, his suggestions that Sein und Zeit failed due to its reliance on “the language of metaphysics” or its dependence on a transcendental framework (Ga9:327-8; Ga65 250, 305 468; Ga71:§181). In other words, by understanding Division III, we can come to better understand both Heidegger’s own intellectual trajectory and the merits, or otherwise, of his legacy
The Three "Fundamental Deceptions" of Being and Time: Heidegger's Phenomenology Revisited
Research in Phenomenology, 2023
In his private notes written in 1936 (now published as GA82), Heidegger enumerates three "fundamental deceptions" at play in Being and Time (1927). The thrust of these deceptions is twofold: that Dasein is something given and that the task of phenomenology is to describe Dasein in its givenness. These are deceptions, Heidegger claims in 1936, because Dasein is not something given, but can only be reached in a leap, and because the task of phenomenology is not to describe Dasein in its givenness, but to bring about Dasein and the "there," the site of Being's happening, through a creative leap-in. Scholars might be inclined to read these deceptions as further evidence for the view that Heidegger in the 1930s abandons phenomenology understood as a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness. This paper argues, to the contrary, that phenomenology for the young Heidegger was never a descriptive enterprise oriented toward givenness, but always, however obliquely presented throughout the 1920s, a way of participating in the creative unfolding of the site of Being's happening.