Rephrasing Heidegger

Richard Sembera

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780776618296
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phänomenologie in der Philosophie

Richard Sembera introduces the reader to the essential features of Being and Time, Heidegger's main work in clear and unambiguous English. He dispels the nimbus of unintelligibility surrounding Heidegger's thought, a nimbus that Heidegger himself helped create and that has tended to confine serious Heidegger scholarship to closed circles.

This is not a work about the "existentialist" Heidegger, the "Nazi" Heidegger, the "gnostic" Heidegger, or the "mystic" Heidegger. Nor is it a "diluted" Heidegger for beginners. Rephrasing Heidegger interprets the philosopher on his own terms, covering all the main aspects of Being and Time, and is particularly interesting for its detailed analysis of the structure and contents of this epoch-making philosophical work.

Rephrasing Heidegger includes a unique glossary of technical terms which recur frequently throughout Being and Time whose translation is problematic or uncertain. It also includes a German-English lexicon which catalogues the translations of Heidegger's terms in the most important English translations of Being and Time.

This is the first detailed commentary in English by a Heidegger specialist trained at Heidegger's own university by the world-renowned Heidegger scholar Prof. F.-W. von Herrman, the editor of the most important volumes of Heidegger's collected works in German.

CHAPTER 1

THE ORIGINS OF PHENOMENOLOGY

1.1 THE HISTORY OF THE TERM
“PHENOMENOLOGY”

The term “phenomenology” is a compound word formed from the Greek roots phainomenon and logos. Phainomenon is frequently translated as “appearance,” while the meaning of logos varies depending on the context; typical English renderings are “word,” “argument,” or “reason.” We will discuss the Greek etymology in more detail in Section 2.4. For our present purposes, we can define “phenomenology” as “giving an account of appearances.”

The word “phenomenology” does not belong to the vocabulary of classical Greek. To the best of our knowledge it is a neologism entering common usage in 18^th century Germany. It first appears in print in the mystical and philosophical literature of the day.¹ The manner in which the term is introduced suggests that readers were expected to be already familiar with its meaning, so that we may conclude that “phenomenology” was already in current use by the middle of the 18^th century at the very latest. Heidegger himself² believed that the term originated among the followers of Christian Wolff (1679–1754), an early systematizer of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and the first important German philosopher to write extensively in German rather than Latin or French.³

One of the earliest and best known philosophical works to characterize itself as “phenomenological” is the Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Here the term “phenomenology” is intended to distinguish Hegel’s own “science of the experience of consciousness” from the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Although Hegel may or may not have been an inspiration behind Husserl’s appropriation of the term “phenomenology” as a label for his own philosophical enterprise,⁴ it is important to keep in mind that Hegel’s version of phenomenology differs markedly from Husserl’s in many important respects, as we shall soon see. We will begin with a brief outline of Kant’s position on the limitations of human knowledge in order to explain why Hegel felt that a “phenomenology,” or an account of appearances, was an appropriate methodological response to Kant. This outline will provide the historical background for the discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology in the following two sections.

The philosophy presented in Kant’s main work, the Critique of Pure Reason, is in essence an early form of what is now termed the philosophy of science. Kant’s main concern is to defend the Newtonian science of his day against the skeptical criticism levelled against it by David Hume (1711–1776), who denied that completely certain and reliable judgements concerning matters of experience were possible. In opposition to Hume, Kant maintained that the mathematics, geometry, and theoretical physics of his day were absolutely true, demonstratively certain, and completely informative concerning matters of experience. These disciplines, according to Kant, are able to arrive at necessary truths about our world despite the fact that they are based on reason alone and not on experience or experiment.

If, for example, I consider the statement that 7 + 5 = 12, its truth is immediately obvious. Known through reason alone, this mathematical truth is also true of the world of experience. It is true of any seven and any five objects in the world regardless of their nature. It is not necessary to actually consult experience to verify the truth of 7 + 5 = 12; in fact, the attempt to verify its truth by experimental means, such as repeatedly adding seven objects to five objects and then counting the resultant number of objects, is pointless and redundant. This is because we have an immediate intellectual apprehension [Anschauung] of the truth of such rational or a priori judgements, which obviates the need for any experimental or a posteriori verification.

How are such a priori judgements possible? We might be inclined to believe with the Hume of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that the judgement 7 + 5 = 12 simply expresses the same concept in two different ways. On this account, such a judgement is tautological because it says the same thing twice: 7 + 5 simply is 12, but stated differently. Thus 7 + 5 = 12 is true because 12 belongs to the definition of 7 + 5, just as the statement “a bachelor is an unmarried man” is true because the predicates “unmarried” and “man” belong to the definition of a bachelor. Kant calls such judgements analytic because they represent an analysis, so to speak, of the subject term.

Kant, however, denies that 7 + 5 = 12 is in fact an analytic a priori judgement. On Kant’s interpretation, the concept 7 + 5 contains nothing beyond the notion that 7 and 5 are to be added together. 7 + 5 is merely an instruction to perform the operation of addition on 7 and 5. This, Kant states, is categorically different from the concept 12, which specifies a given number of objects. While it is true that 7 + 5 also refers to a number of objects, it says nothing as such about the specific number to which it refers, and much less that this number happens to be the number 12. Rather than resembling the statement “a bachelor is an unmarried man,” 7 + 5 = 12, on Kant’s account, is much closer to a statement like “bachelors are carefree and jovial” (with the difference that the former is always true without exception whereas the latter is not). In the case of such statements essentially new predicates are added to the predicates already specified by the definition of the subject term. Accordingly, Kant calls such statements synthetic because they undertake a synthesis or conjunction of several initially unrelated terms.

The central problem of the Critique of Pure Reason is: “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” In plain English this problem can be restated as: “how is it possible to make true and informative statements about the world using reason alone, independently of experience?” Kant’s answer is that reason, or the faculty of intellectual apprehension, is like a mould into which the stream of experience is poured. Reason imposes its own structure on the world just as a stamp imposes its own form on soft wax. Our actual experience of the world is thus a hybrid product with two sources, one source being the matter of the experience, provided by the objects which stimulate our senses, and the other source being the form of all possible experience, the framework within which alone experience is possible. Reason is able to provide us with true and certain knowledge concerning matters of experience because reason itself imposes a rational order upon experience. Our minds reshape the world in the image of their own rational structure. Because of this spontaneous imposition of form upon the confused matter of the information we perceive through our senses, events in the world are experienced as happening in conformity with rational principles.

Why, then, is 7 + 5 = 12 true? Why is it true that any seven objects added to any five objects will result in twelve objects? Because our minds contain a fundamental mathematical structure which they impose upon our experience of the world, rather like a navigator who imposes latitudes and longitudes upon the globe and then finds that any point on the surface can be specified in terms of these parameters. Although in both cases the structure in question is a superimposition upon the world, in the case of the navigator a deliberate and conscious decision is taken to make use of latitudes and longitudes, whereas in the case of our minds and their acts of perception, the structure of reason is superimposed automatically and unconsciously, or as Kant puts it, “spontaneously.”

For Kant, geometry is founded in the pure intellectual apprehension of the rules of space. Similarly, mathematics is founded in the pure intellectual apprehension of the rules of time, because Kant conceives of numbers as the results of sequences (5 is “1 and then 2 and then 3 and then 4 and then 5”).⁵ The truths of geometry and mathematics are true of the world because our minds spontaneously superimpose the structure of space and time on our experience of the world. In short, space and time are conceptual overlays through which we interact with a world which is inherently not spatial or temporal, just as, returning to the example of the navigator, the globe is inherently not marked off into latitudes and longitudes. In order to account for other concepts such as cause and effect, Kant proceeds to argue for the existence of further such intellectual overlays which he terms “categories.” The further details of this argument do not concern us here. The important point is that in all cases Kant draws a distinction between the object of experience as such and the object of experience insofar as we experience it through a conceptual overlay.

The difference between “the object as we experience it” and “the object as such” is reflected in Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena.⁶ “Phenomena” or “appearances” are things as we are able to experience them. Phenomena are experienced by us within a spatiotemporal framework which, on Kant’s account, is overlaid upon them by our own minds. Thus the laws of space and time, and correlatively the truths of geometry and of mathematics, are indeed universally and necessarily valid when speaking of phenomena, just as any point on the earth’s surface can be specified by a particular latitude and longitude. However, this universal validity does not extend beyond the boundaries of human experience. Such laws hold true for phenomena and only for phenomena, only for objects as we experience them.

“Noumena,” a Greek word literally meaning “thought things” but used by Kant in the sense of “theoretically postulated entities” [Verstandeswesen] is Kant’s term for “things in themselves,” or things as they exist outside of our experience of them. As human beings, we have no other access to objects than through our own human experience. According to Kant, since we do have experiences of objects at all, it is reasonable to assume that they do in fact exist independently of our experiences of them. However, we can never say more of them than this; and even the assumption that they do exist independently of us can never be more than a theoretical assumption because our limited human faculties can never transcend the sphere of possible experience. Similarly, the navigator cannot use latitude and longitude to specify points which are not found on the surface of the earth.

Accordingly, the world view that emerges from Kant’s transcendental idealism is split into two distinct realms: a realm of phenomena, or the sphere of experience; and an utterly unknowable realm of noumena, which in some mysterious fashion — assuming that it even exists — underlies and maintains the existence of the realm of phenomena.

Kant’s aim, as he states in the preface to the second edition of the Critique, was to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith; but it is hardly surprising that not every philosopher wished to follow him in this. On a purely theoretical level it is hardly satisfying that Kant, on the one hand, wishes to prevent any speculation that transcends the limits of human experience, and yet on the other hand postulates the existence of a realm of noumena whose defining feature is that it does transcend the limits of experience. The early post-Kantian philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775–1854) were unanimous in their conviction that this was the weakest point in Kant’s system. They dealt with this theoretical problem by evolving alternative Kantian systems in which there was no need to postulate the existence of a “thing in itself” beyond the boundaries of human experience. For these philosophers, the founders of the philosophical movement now generally referred to as German Idealism,⁷ there simply was nothing beyond human experience. The world simply was the sum total of phenomena as they were encountered within the entire vista of human experience. We thus see that the immediate reaction of post-Kantian philosophy to the theoretical difficulties of the Kantian scheme consisted in a rejection of the realm of noumena or “things in themselves.” This amounts to an identification of reality with phenomena or the spontaneous products of mental activity.

The reduction of reality to phenomena undertaken by Fichte and Schelling does not amount to a claim that all reality is an illusion. Rather, it amounts to a claim that in some non-trivial sense reality is a product of mental activity, or of an activity which is mind-like in nature. The mind, in other words, imposes a form upon its own constituent “stuff,” not upon an unknowable noumenon foreign to itself. The phenomena of everyday life, though ultimately mental in nature, are not chaotic images, not disordered dreams or hallucinations. They are appearances with a regular structural pattern that observably follow certain well-defined laws. In modern terminology, we would call such appearances processes.⁸

Kant’s mistake, according to the post-Kantians, was to believe that phenomena required an existential anchor in an unknown and unknowable world of noumena. For post-Kantian philosophy, however, and for Hegel in particular, phenomena require no support outside of their own structural constitution. The attempt to grasp and articulate this structural constitution within a comprehensive system of philosophy is what Hegel terms phenomenology, or the science of the experience of consciousness. It is an attempt to give an all-embracing account of the mind-like laws that determine the essentially mind-like structure of phenomena. These laws, pertaining as they do to activity that is fundamentally mental or mind-like, are the principles of logic in the Hegelian sense.

In the dual forms of phenomenology and logic, which Hegel eventually combined and further developed in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, for much of the 19^th century the phenomenon-oriented approach of Hegel’s absolute idealism became the dominant philosophical current in Germany and a large part of the English-speaking world.⁹

1.2 THE “CRISIS” OF EUROPEAN SCIENCE

By the beginning of the 20^th century the influence of Hegelianism in Germany had waned significantly, and many dominant forms of philosophy in Germany were variants of Neo-Kantianism. The renewed interest in Kant’s attempt to secure a theoretical foundation for the sciences of his day was triggered by what Husserl was later to call a “crisis of European science.” The most obvious crisis and its resolution, namely the collapse of the Newtonian world view and its replacement with the physical theories developed from the work of Einstein, is a matter of common knowledge, in outline at least. However, the “crisis” to which Husserl refers occurred on a much broader front than that of the physical sciences. For the purpose of a brief introduction to phenomenology and the problems with which it was originally created to deal, it is sufficient to concentrate on the effects of this general crisis in a few main areas: geometry, mathematics, logic, and of course philosophy.

For several decades, it had been a common view among philosophers of science that Kant had secured a theoretically adequate — indeed, in Kant’s own estimation, absolutely certain — justification of Newtonian science and the traditional mathematics and geometry on which it was based. As later history has shown, however, the Newtonian scheme does not actually fit the observable facts about our universe. The practical application of a modern relativistic model, which fits the observable facts rather better, demands the use of non-traditional forms of physics, geometry, and mathematics. Unfortunately for Kant, whose philosophy apparently demonstrates that Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry, Aristotelian logic, and traditional mathematics are absolutely certain and incapable of improvement, the obvious implication is that Kant’s theory is wrong in at least some important respects.

The weaknesses in Kant’s basic assumptions begin to come to light with theoretical developments in geometry and mathematics. Kant, as we pointed out, had assumed that traditional Euclidean geometry was the sole possible geometry and therefore the only true geometry. Towards the end of the 19^th century i...