Franco Volpi - Phenomenology as Possibility

Phenomenology as Possibility: ThePhenomenological Appropriationof the History of Philosophy in theYoung Heidegger

FRANCO VOLPI

Universit degli Studi di Padova

1. Was Heidegger a phenomenologist?

In an interview published in 1986 in an issue of Freiburger Universittsbltter,which was entirely devoted to the relationship of Heideggers thought to poli-tics,1 Max Mller spoke of his rst encounter with Heidegger at the beginningof the 192829 winter semester at Freiburg:

When I settled in Freiburg to complete my studies, he recalled, all I knewof Heidegger was his fame. Being and Time glowed with a kind of magicalenergy. In truth, I had not read the work, but I said to myself: I want to par-ticipate at least once in a seminar with this man. Heidegger began his activ-ity at Freiburg with an introductory seminar on Kants Foundations of theMetaphysics of Morals. I can still clearly recall looking for the classroom on the rst oor of the university in which he was to hold his seminar and that atthe Institute of Philosophy with its 20 or 25 seats, there was not enoughspace. A gentleman behind me, small of stature, asked me What are youlooking for? I said: Im looking for Heideggers classroom. So am I, hereplied, I am Heidegger. After consulting the map of the building, we n-ally found the room we were looking for and entered together. A number of students well known to Heidegger were present, but for the rst lesson hedid not want to interrogate those he knew. I was the one he questioned at

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length. At the end of the class, he oVered me an invitation: You should alsoattend my seminar on Aristotle. I said, Professor, I am going to sit for thestate exam, and two philosophical seminars like this are too much for me.He replied, Ah, thats surely just an excuse. Perhaps your knowledge ofGreek is insuYcient? And I said, Greek is the only thing I think I know wellenough. He insisted again, So come to the doctoral seminar. This doctoralseminar was an imposing aVair, and participants included both students and colleagues: Oskar Becker, a philosopher of mathematics who later be-came Professor at Bonn, Julius Ebbinghaus, who was later active at Marburg,Gustav Siewerth, Simon Moser, who subsequently became OrdinariusProfessor at Karlsruhe, Brcker and his future wife Kthe Oltmans, and nally Eugen Fink. Thus it was a splendid thing, and extremely demanding.This was how, in the most expeditious way imaginable, I came into a littlecloser contact with Heidegger.2

For the question I will treat in what follows, what is interesting is what MaxMller says with regard to the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl inthe rest of the interview. Recalling how on one occasion the conversation camearound to the father of phenomenology, Mller states (and I quote verbatim):

It was the last semester in which Husserl was giving a course with corre-sponding seminars: he was dealing with the phenomenology of empathy.As it happened, when we rst met, we spoke of Heideggers relationship with Husserl. I said, in eVect, and moreover, I understand nothing of phe-nomenology either, and you have listed in your syllabus some Phenomenolo-gical exercises on Aristotle. I have no idea what that may be. Heidegger replied:Ah, a lot of foolishness! Its a gesture for my master Husserl. No need foryou to be familiar with Husserls thought.3

For a number of reasons, which I will indicate, I believe that the statementattributed to Heidegger herean exceptionally malicious attribution, given that Heidegger had just been appointed as Husserls successormust be con-sidered as a projection onto the historical event rather than a reliable accountof what Heidegger actually said on this occasion. Even if Heidegger may wellhave thought that to read and understand Aristotle it was not necessary to be familiar with Husserl, we can justi ably doubt that he would have re-ferred to Husserl in the terms that Max Mller puts in his mouth, which seem highly unlikely when we recall that Heidegger was addressing a youngstudent who simply happened by (which was what Mller represented for him at the time).

In any event, Mllers projection is symptomatic: It represents, in eVect, arather widespread tendency to attribute to Heidegger an opportunistic attitudetowards Husserl and, at the same time, a low regard for Husserls phenome-nological position on philosophical problems. Mllers account thus providesthe opportunity to reexamine the relationship between Heidegger and Husserland, in particular, to consider a speci c question, which is the subject of my

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paper and which can be expressed in the following manner: Is the phenome-nological character that Heidegger attributes to his reading of the great clas-sical philosophers (especially Aristotle and Kant, but also Leibniz and, later,Hegel), against whom he pits himself during his rst years of teaching atFreiburg (19191923) and in his Marburg courses (19231928), merely nomi-nal, an external connotation articulated solely for academic opportunistic rea-sons, or is it a trait that helps de ne Heideggers interpretations in an intrinsic,essential way?

2. The transformation of phenomenology in Heideggers work

To begin in medias res, I will forego a general consideration of the relationshipbetween Heidegger and Husserl,4 and I will evoke only the general line alongwhich developed the profound transformation of phenomenology in the pas-sage from Husserl to Heidegger. After his initial adherence to Husserls teach-ing and to phenomenological terminology, as evidenced by his early writings,5

in the 1920s Heidegger attempted to radicalize the procedure of philosophy ofhis master and moved towards very diVerent solutions. As we can see, at thelatest in Being and Time, the meaning of phenomenological research is bent intoan obvious ontological torsion and is transformed into the idea of funda-mental ontology, which will lead Heidegger to a de nitive split from Husserland from the very idea of phenomenology.

Leaving aside the biographical aspects of this disagreement,6 we can say that from a philosophical point of view Heidegger publicly settled his score with Husserl in the beginning of the 1930s, when in the winter semester courseof 193031, he stated: Following Husserls last publication, which represents a vigorous departure from his former collaborators, we would do well to callphenomenology only what Husserl himself has created and what he will pro-duce. All the same, we have all learned from him, and will continue to do so.7

This statement signals the end of Heideggers philosophical dispute withHusserl. His subsequent observations on his relationship with Husserlian think-ingfor example, in the lecture The End of Philosophy and the Task of Think-ing (1964)8 or in the Zhringen Seminar (1973)9are merely historical retrospec-tives, which in essence refer back to previous arguments in order to intensifythe profound diversity of their positions: Husserls, concentrated on the ideal-istic-transcendental problematic of subjectivity and of its constitution in relationto the world, and Heideggers, which is, on the contrary, directed by an onto-logical perspective towards the problem of being. It is probably because of thisdiVerence, which is viewed moreover from the perspective of today, that manypeopleand Max Mller is only one eloquent examplehave believed thatHeidegger broke away from phenomenology much more rapidly than in factwas the case.


In reality, however early one may date the discovery by the young Hei-degger of his own original path of thinking, during the 1920s he was en-gaged in an un agging debate with Husserlian phenomenology, to the extentthat we can state that his philosophical position, as it is set forth in Being and Time, derives precisely from this debate as much as from the desire to rad-icalize from an ontological point of view the Husserlian understanding of phenomenology.

It is suYcient to read the texts of this period to realize that this is the case.The in uence can be seen as early as the Comments on Karl Jasperss Psychology ofWorldviews,10 written between 191921, in which Heidegger, in his program for a hermeneutics of facticity, on which he bases his critique of Jaspers, fol-lows the articulation of Husserls phenomenology. When he introduces into the analysis of phenomena the distinction between a content sense (Gehaltssinn ),an actualizing sense (Vollzugssinn ) and relational sense (Bezugssinn ), in fact he is simply reformulating the three directions of research in which Husserl dev-eloped phenomenological investigation, namely, the phenomenology of con-tents (Sachphnomenologie), the phenomenology of acts (Aktphnomenologie), and thephenomenology of the correlation between acts and contents (Korrelations-phnomenologie ).

This analysis could also be applied to the rst university courses at Frei-burg, which have been published, and in which we can note the profoundassimilation of the Husserlian problematic by Heidegger (who initially asso-ciates the phenomenological perspective to the Neokantism of Baden, and espe-cially to Emil Lask, but then soon separates it in his violent opposition toRickert): notably, the courses of Kriegsnotsemester 1919 The Idea of Philosophyand the Problem of Worldviews, and the summer term course of 1919 Phenomeno-logy and Transcendental Value-Philosophy, published as Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie(GA 56/57), the winter semester course of 191920 Grundprobleme Phnomenologie(GA 58), the summer semester course of 1920 Phnomenologie der Anschauung unddes Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen BegriVsbildung (GA 59), and the wintersemester 192122 course Phnomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles. Einfhrung indie phnomenologische Forschung (GA 61).

We should also take into consideration the critical confrontation with Husserlin the Marburg courses, almost all of which have been published: The wintersemester 192324 course Einfhrung in die phnomenologische Forschung (GA 17), in which Heidegger discusses in depth among other things Husserls art-icle Philosophy as Rigorous Science. The introductory section of the sum-mer semester 1925 course (published as Prolegomena zur Geschichte des ZeitbegriVs[GA 20] is also fundamental, in that it contains a historical reconstruction ofthe genesis of phenomenology, a penetrating exposition of its fundamental discoveries (intentionality, categorical intuition, and the importance of the a pri-ori ) and of the fundamental principle of phenomenology (zu den Sachen selbst!),

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and that leads to a statement of the need to radicalize and transform phenome-nology, beginning with its own speculative dynamic. And in the beginning ofthe winter semester 192526 course Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (GA 21),by way of an introduction to the analysis of the phenomenon of truth, we nd a reconsideration of Husserls critique of psychologism, which Heideggerhad previously examined in his doctoral thesis and which serves here as a pointof departure in order to go back all the way to the Aristotelian understand-ing of truthbecause if the Husserlian critique breaks the traditional asso-ciation between truth and judgment, the Aristotelian understanding of truth inturn represents the most wide-ranging explanation of this phenomenon,whether on the ontological plane or on the more limited plane of the proposi-tion. And again: in the introduction to the summer 1927 course on DieGrundprobleme der Phnomenologie (GA 24), Heidegger once more examines themeaning of the phenomenological method, which he no longer considersasdid Husserlas a philosophical passage from the natural attitude to the tran-scendental attitude, but rather as a veritable conversion of the gaze from theplane of beings to the ontological plane of the modality of being. Finally,Heidegger also quali es as phenomenological his interpretation of the Critiqueof Pure Reason in the winter semester 192728 course (GA 25). But beyond thesedetailed analyses, we nd in other courses more eeting references to phe-nomenology, which are not necessary to account for here, but which arenonetheless important.11

Thus while avoiding a comprehensive consideration of Heideggers con-frontation with Husserl during this periodno doubt the most intense time inthe relations between the twoI will limit myself to verifying the phenome-nological character that Heidegger attributes to his interpretations of Aristotleand Kant developed in the courses mentioned above. The thesis I wish todevelop is that this character connotes for this period, in an essential way, theHeideggerian appropriation of the history of philosophy. To demonstrate thisthesis, I will develop a number of observations on the following points:

1) The appropriative consideration of the history of philosophy derives froma kind of ontological torsion and from a radicalization of the phenomeno-logical method: Heidegger articulates that method in three fundamentalmoments, reduction, construction, and destruction; and he conceives it in anopenly ontological sense and not, like Husserl, in a gnoseologic-transcendentalsense.

2) The set of themes in which Heidegger pits himself against the principal gures of traditional ontology is the problematic characteristic of Husserlianphenomenology; in other words, the problematic of the constitution of sub-jectivity, which Heidegger takes up again in an appropriation that seeks toelicit the intrinsic speculative dynamic from it and produce a more radical onto-


logical formulation, folding it and reinterpreting it in terms of Daseinthisproblem determines the perspective from which Heidegger reads Aristotle andKant during the 1920s.

3. The ontological torsion of the phenomenological method and the genesisof the phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology

A preliminary aspect of the Husserl-Heidegger liation that must be con-sidered and that immediately separates their individual perspectives is the diVerent weight the history of philosophy has for each of them. As we know,Husserls interest in the subject was rather weak; for Heidegger, it became deci-sive. The divergence that opened up between them in this context created a profound rift. There were external reasons that urged Heidegger towards the study of the history of philosophical thought, for example: the fact thatHusserl himself, while planning a distribution of work within the phenomeno-logical school, directed one of his two assistants at Freiburg, Oskar Becker, toinvestigate regional ontologies of mathematic and natural sciences and directedthe other, Heidegger, towards the study of the regional ontology of history. Butwhat interests us here are not the external historical occasions. Rather, it is thesubstantial motivation, which compelled Heidegger to engage himself in this eld of inquiry and to state the necessity of what he calls in section 6 of Beingand Time the phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.

It cannot be overemphasized that this term is not used in a negative sense,except to the extent that he is designating an approach to the history of thoughtthat seeks to distinguish itself polemically from the historiographic methods in vogue in the philosophical culture at the beginning of the century, such asthe methodology of the history of the mind or the history of problems. Thusthe Heideggerian destruction does not amount to a simple refusal of the his-tory of ontology, but it strives to be a work of decomposition that exposes itsconstituent elements and its structures in its positive limitations and possib-ilities, and all of that with a view towards a veritable and radical reconstruc-tion and renewal of ontology.

But to grasp the beginnings of the Heideggerian destruction, we must askwhy the task is quali ed as phenomenological. A preliminary attempt at an answer could linger on the consideration that, in the context of the metho-dological explanations that Heidegger gives in the opening of his magnum opus, the elucidation of the meaning of he destruction of the history of phenomenology is tightly linked to the famous section of the phenomeno-logical method and that therefore the destruction must also be closely relatedto phenomenology. Although well-founded and legitimate, until now such aninterpretation, based solely on Being and Time, could not clearly account for the

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Heidegggerian interpretation being derived from the Husserlian theory. Now,the university courses published in the Gesamtausgabe show in detail howHeidegger conceived of the destruction of the history of ontology through anarticulation of the Husserlian method of reduction, and thus they provide anumber of reasons to call it a phenomenological destruction.

On this point, the transition from Husserl to Heidegger is clearly revealed in the beginning of the summer semester 1927 course Basic Problems of Phenome-nology (and thus contemporaneous with Being and Time, of which the course is acontinuation). In section 5 Heidegger clari es The character of ontologicalmethod. The three basic components of the phenomenological method.12

While preserving a transcendental approach, since he continues to conceive ofphilosophy as an aprioristic eld of knowledge in relation to other types ofknowledge, here Heidegger transforms, in an ontological sense, the Husserliantranscendental-subjective understanding and integrates the method of reduc-tion with the idea of destruction.

What is phenomenological reduction? For Husserl the concept denotes in principle the modality of the passage from the immediate natural attitude to the speci cally philosophical disposition conceived as a disposition of thegnoseologic-transcendental type; and this passage is determined by Husserl asthe shift from the natural consideration of the world to the analysis of the lifeof the constituent transcendental consciousness and of its noetic-noematic con-tents. (First of all, in the static perspective, the constitution concerns simpleobjects; then, in the genetic perspective, the constitution of objects is consideredin relation to the horizon of objects and nally in relation to the general hori-zon of any constitution, that is, the world as the horizon of horizons, which isthe correlative of the ego). Heidegger, on the contrary, even if he resumes theidea of a conversion of the immediate and natural consideration to a consid-eration of the philosophical kind, conceives of this latter not in a gnoseologico-transcendental sense, but rather in an explicitly ontological sense, that is, as aconversion of the consideration of beings to the consideration of the mode ofbeing. He writes:

Being is to be laid hold of and made our theme. Being is always being of beings and accordingly it becomes accessible at rst only by starting withsome being. Here the phenomenological vision, which does the appre-hending, must indeed direct itself toward a being, but it has to do so in sucha way that the being of this being is thereby brought out so that it may bepossible to thematize it. Apprehension of being, ontological investigation,always turns, at rst and necessarily, to some being; but then, in a precise way,it is led away from that being and led back to its being. We call this basic compo-nent of phenomenological methodthe leading back or re-duction of invest-igative vision from a naively apprehended being to beingphenomenologicalreduction. We are thus adopting a central term of Husserls phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent. For Husserl the


phenomenological reduction, which he worked out for the rst time expresslyin the Ideas Toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913),is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural atti-tude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things andpersons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading pheno-menological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).13

In this passage, the observation of the terminological point of contact and theconsciousness of the horizon of problems in common nonetheless combine withan eloquent indication of the diVerent tradition in which Heidegger situateshimself and of the diVerent direction in which he is urging his execution of phe-nomenological work: that is, the tradition of ontology. More speci cally, his isan interpretation which, as Heidegger himself states elsewhere, proposes toclosely link phenomenological thought to the tradition of Greek ontology, bypushing its dynamic to its most radical consequences. Phenomenological ques-tioning, Heidegger aYrms, in its innermost tendency itself leads to the ques-tion of the being of the intentional and before anything else to the question ofthe sense of being as such. Phenomenology radicalized in its ownmost possib-ility is nothing but the questioning of Plato and Aristotle brought back to life:the repetition, the retaking of the beginning of our scientic philosophy.14

Husserl had developed the idea of phenomenologys being linked to the tradition of transcendental thought. Heidegger reinterprets it in light of the tradition of ontology. These are two philosophical traditions that share a fun-damental problem, which is the requirement to delimit the philosophical con-sideration of the world to that of the natural, the everyday. Yet they areradically diVerent from one another because of the fact that, at the origin ofthis delimitation, they presuppose a diVerent fundamental motivation of thephilosophical attitude. In the tradition of transcendental thought, philosophy is delimited in relation to the doxagraphical knowledge of everyday know-ing and to the positive knowledge of particular sciences because of the spe-ci c character of the argumentation and of the understanding distinctive to it,and which constitute it as a well-founded knowledge in the sense that itaccounts for its presuppositions and is con gured as an analysis of the pos-sibilities of any other way of knowing. In the tradition of ontology, on the con-trary, philosophy distinguishes itself from everyday knowing and from speci cscienti c knowledge by the object of its understanding, more than by virtue of the speci c structure of its arguments and of its understanding, that is,because of the fact that it does not consider an aspect or a particular sphere of the being, but the totality of the being even as being.

Now, by linking himself to the tradition of transcendental thought, Husserl

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assigns philosophy the task of establishing the sciences in a rigorous manner by exposing the transcendental subjective functions and the noetic-noematiccontents that make possible the objective operations of understanding in gen-eral, and notably scienti c understanding. In this context, the epoch and thephenomenological-transcendental reduction are ctitious operations put intoplay by the philosopherin them the validity of assumptions and presuppo-sitions accepted by everyday knowing and by the sciences is temporarily sus-pended and bracketed, in order to be ultimately established in a genuinemanner, once its deep roots have been exposed and the critical-transcendentalknowledge bearing on the secret operations of constituent subjectivity has beenattained.

Heidegger, as we know, links himself instead to the tradition of ontology, and he asks of thought a single question, the question of being. But he does notassimilate it, as the tradition does, to the question of the totality of beings or ofthe highest being. On the contrary, at least in the period of Being and Time, heunderstands being as the mode of being of the being. This is why he disting-uishes his fundamental ontology, which thematizes being and which is thus ontological in a strict sense, from traditional ontology, which takes as its objectbeings and which thus halts its analyses on the ontic level. Consequently,Heidegger maintains a transcendental gap between the natural attitude and thephilosophical attitude, except that the diVerence is no longer, as for Husserl,the metadiscursive character of philosophy in relation to everyday knowingand to speci c scienti c disciplines, but the radical gap that philosophical consideration requires to the extent that it no longer contemplates either thebeing or the conditions of its intelligibility, but only its character of being. Thus Heidegger sees the conversion from the natural attitude to the philo-sophical attitude as a sort of torsion of the gaze that is turned away from thebeing as such and that is directed towards the modality of being of beings. ( Thethree modalities of being that he distinguishes in Being and Time are the Dasein,the Zuhandenheit and the Vorhandenheit ).

Hence upon close examination, Heidegger distinguishes his understand-ing of the conversion from everyday knowing to philosophy, whether it con-cerns transcendental philosophy and/or ontology (insofar as it is conceived astraditional ontology and not fundamental ontology). He distinguishes the conversion with regards to the transcendentalist tradition since he contrasts it to the original motivation of philosophy as a science of being; but he also distinguishes it from ontology, in its traditional de nition, since he states theneed to step back from the ontic consideration of the single being in order toreach the ontological consideration of the being of this being. And Heideg-ger anchors this conversion in existence in a deeper way than Husserl: Whilethe passage from one attitude to the other is a speculative exercise for Hus-serl, and thus a ction, even if it is necessary and even if put into play by the


professional philosopher seen as the servant of humanity, Heidegger does notreduce this conversion to a mental operation that may or may not be put intoplay, at will, by the subject who decides to do so. For Heidegger the conver-sion of our gaze from the ontic-natural consideration to the ontological-philo-sophical onethrough which, beyond beings, appears beingis anchored ina fundamental mood (Grundstimmung ) that arises at the moment one expects itthe least and that has a disorienting eVect, in the fundamental mood ofanguish, Angst. The conversion to the philosophical gaze thus becomes some-thing that can in principle reach every existence, by touching it in the depthsof its being that, prior to each theoretical or practical realization, resists anyappropriation as a hostile alterity.15 This is the reason why, in the passage I citeabove, where he distances himself from Husserl, Heidegger adds signi cantly:Scienti c method is never a simple technique. When it becomes one, itdemeans its own essence.16

But Heideggers use of the phenomenological method of reduction is char-acterized not only by the ontological rather than transcendental reduction.Heidegger adds a subsequent change to this modi cation, which is an arti-culation of the method that attempts to correspond to the interior logic of thephenomenological method; in this articulation, reduction is integrated by twosubsequent moments: construction and destruction. Based on the reduc-tion, Heidegger derives construction through the following argumentation:

Phenomenological reduction as the leading of our vision from beings to beingnevertheless is not the only basic component of phenomenological method;in fact, it is not even the central component. For this guidance of vision backfrom beings to being requires at the same time that we should bring our-selves forward toward being itself. Pure aversion from beings is a merely neg-ative methodological measure that not only needs to be supplemented by a positive one but also expressly requires us to be led toward being; it thusrequires guidance. Being does not become accessible like a being. We do notsimply nd it in front of us. As is to be shown, it must always be brought to view in a free projection. This projecting of the antecedently given being upon its being and the structures of its being we call phenomenologicalconstruction.17

Once he has clari ed the reciprocal inherence of reduction and construct-ion, Heidegger introduces the third element of the phenomenological me-thoddestructionby means of which he opens up phenomenology to theconsideration of the history of philosophical thought. In the horizon of the constitutions of historical-ontological meanings in relation to xed categoriesand the prejudices of tradition, the Heideggerian phenomenological destruc-tion ful lls a function analogous to that ful lled by the Husserlian reductionwith regard to objectivities and pregiven horizons in the constitution of experi-ence and knowing. Indeed, if philosophical research must begin with beings in

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order to reach being, it is, in this movement, always already conditioned by cer-tain epochal perspectives in which it is always already located; however, itsaccess to being is necessarily conditioned and even impeded or concealed by them. Here is Heideggers argument:

A glance at the history of philosophy shows that many domains of beingswere discovered very earlynature, space, the soulbut that, nevertheless,they could not yet be comprehended in their speci c being. As early as an-tiquity a common or average concept of being came to light, which wasemployed for the interpretation of all the beings of the various domains of being and their modes of being, although their speci c being itself, taken expressly in its structure, was not made into a problem and could notbe de ned. Thus Plato saw quite well that the soul, with its lgow, is a beingdiVerent from sensible being. But he was not in a position to demarcate thespeci c mode of being of this being from the mode of being of any otherbeing or non-being. Instead, for him as well as for Aristotle and subsequentthinkers down to Hegel, and all the more so for their successors, all onto-logical investigations proceed within an average concept of being in general.Even the ontological investigation that we are now conducting is deter-mined by its historical situation and, therewith, by certain possibilities ofapproaching beings and by the preceding philosophical tradition. The storeof basic philosophical concepts derived from the philosophical tradition is still so in uential today that this eVect of tradition can hardly be overesti-mated. It is for this reason that all philosophical discussion, even the mostradical attempt to begin all over again, is pervaded by traditional conceptsand thus by traditional horizons and traditional angles of approach, whichwe cannot assume with unquestionable certainty to have arisen originally andgenuinely from the domain of being and the constitution of being they claimto comprehend. It is for this reason that there necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, that is, to the reductiveconstruction of being, a destructiona critical process in which the traditionalconcepts, which at rst must necessarily be employed, are de-constructeddown to the sources from which they were drawn. Only by means of thisdestruction can ontology fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of thegenuine character of its concepts.18

This is how Heidegger comes to state and to justify the need for a conver-sation with the metaphysical tradition, through the articulation of the idea ofthe phenomenological method. It is thus a conversation that is not lateral, exte-rior, or alternative to the course followed by Husserlian phenomenology.Heidegger intends to show how one achieves it by following the demandsinherent to the phenomenological method itself, in other words, by pursuingthe internal dynamic of its problems to its root. The preference shown for thefoundational moments of ontology is a product of the nature of the problemthat phenomenological thinking takes as its own, notably the fact that the con-


version from the natural attitude to the philosophical one (through reductionperformed with a view to construction) is conceived as a conversion of the onto-logical type that leads from a being to being: it is with this goal in mind thatdestruction is given the task of freeing the prejudices concerning being that aretypical of the ontological tradition.

Heidegger can then summarize his articulation and his ontologization ofthe phenomenological method by the following aYrmation, which unam-biguously illustrates the positive and appropriative meaning of the critical-deconstructive access to tradition:

The three basic components of phenomenological methodreduction, con-struction, destructionbelong together in their content and must receivegrounding in their mutual pertinence. Construction in philosophy is neces-sarily destruction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts car-ried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a negationof the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, itsigni es precisely a positive appropriation of tradition. Because destructionbelongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the sametime, in a certain sense, historical cognition. History of philosophy, as it iscalled, belongs to the concept of philosophy as science, to the concept of phe-nomenological investigation. The history of philosophy is not an arbitraryappendage to the business of teaching philosophy, which provides an occa-sion for picking up some convenient and easy theme for passing an exami-nation or even for just looking around to see how things were in earlier times.Knowledge of the history of philosophy is intrinsically unitary on its ownaccount and the speci c mode of historical cognition in philosophy diVers inits object from all other scienti c knowledge of history.19

4. The problems of phenomenology as horizon for the interpretation of the history of philosophy (Aristotle and Kant )

The phenomenological derivation of Heideggers interest in the history of philo-sophy does not concern the methodological aspect alone. If we consider theinterpretations Heidegger developed in the 1920s, particularly those of Aris-totle and Kant, we can see how they are elaborated following the thread of aproblematic that itself springs from a deepening and a radicalization of theproblems of Husserlian phenomenology.

On several occasions Heidegger had acknowledged the decisive role ofHusserls phenomenology in his philosophical training, as is made clear by hiscitations of Husserl20 and the autobiographical accounts in which Heideggergladly remembers his youthful studies of the Logical Investigations.21 Thanks to theMarburg University courses, it is also possible to see how Heidegger acknow-ledges certain fundamental discoveries in Husserlian phenomenology, such as

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the discovery of intentionality and its essential characteristics, the fundamentaldistinction between sensible intuition and categorical intuition, the determina-tion of the function of the apriori, as well as the direction of philosophicalre ection towards things themselves.

However it is undeniable that in the same texts Heidegger stresses his distance from Husserl, developing the idea of phenomenology in the directionof an open and declared criticism of the position of his teacher, a position thatis transcendental, relies on consciousness, and is theoretical. The criticisms put forward by Heidegger, which concern central themes such as truth, being,and time, converge and concentrate on the focal problem around whichonthe occasion of writing the article on phenomenology for the EncyclopediaBritannicathe disagreement between the two became a rupture,22 that is tosay, the determination of transcendental subjectivity. This subjectivityeven if considered by Husserl as radically diVerent from other beings, because rela-tive to them it ful lls a constitutive functionis not determined in a suYcientlypositive manner in its ontological status and in its modality of being. Thiscomes from the factas Heidegger suggeststhat Husserl is thinking in thehorizon of an understanding that is essentially oriented towards the attitude of theory (in its modern sense) and that consequently privileges the hori-zon of presence and thus cannot grasp either the inmost ontological core ofsubjectivity or the entire articulation of attitudes and dispositions that arerooted there.23

It is thus a matter of calling into question the unilateral characteristics of the Husserlian understanding of the being of man in terms of subjectivity, andof attempting a more originary determination of the modality of being ofhuman life, by grasping the essential modalities and attitudes from which themodality of being emerges. It is precisely from the horizon of this problem that Heidegger approaches the study of Aristotle and then Kant, impelled by the tacit expectation of nding the solution to questions that, in his eyes, are not only unanswered in Husserlian phenomenology, but that also ran therisk of remaining concealed there.

Now, once he has set the problem of access in an ontologically original manner to human life, Heidegger is initially convinced that he can nd in Aristotle, notably in the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics, a complete phenomenology of dispositions in which, at the same time, the human soul(the Dasein ) can be found. These are the disposition of contemplation or of the theoretical consideration of beings (yevra), the disposition of produc-ing (pohsiw), and the disposition of acting (prjiw), which are respectively oriented by a speci c disposition and a speci c knowledge: wisdom (sofa), artor technique (txnh), and prudence (frnhsiw). They are according to Aristotle, the modalities in which the human soul (cux) is in the true (lhyeei).24


Heidegger interprets them in an ontological sense as the fundamental mod-alities of the uncovering and opening up character of Dasein in its relation with beings.

Along these lines Heidegger developed, beginning in 1919, a detailed inter-pretation of Aristotle that played a decisive role in the path of his thinking untilBeing and Time. It was certainly not a matter of grasping the historical truthabout Aristotle nor simply of exposing the philosophical problems that theAristotelian text sets forth. Aristotle represented rather a kind of specula-tive watermark that Heidegger used as a point of reference to elaborate thequestions he was working on after Husserl, notably the question of human lifein its facticity as well as the question of nding modalities adequate to grasp-ing it. It is thus thanks to the thing itself, and not as a gesture of externalhomage towards Husserl, that Heidegger quali es his interpretation of Aristotleas phenomenological and that he states, for example, in the course of thewinter semester of 192122, that such a phenomenological interpretation ofAristotle is simply an introduction to phenomenological research.25

As an indication that at the center of Heideggers interest was not so muchAristotle himself, but rather the task of understanding human life in its onto-logical structure, following the Aristotelian paradigm, we can consider the factthat Heidegger submits Aristotle to a critique in those areas where his think-ing does not seem, to Heidegger, to correspond to the original character-istics of human life, observed from the ontological perspective that is so closeto his heart. Indeed, although he chooses Aristotle as a guide to navigatebeyond the impasses of Husserlian phenomenology, Heidegger graduallybecomes convinced that even Aristotle is insuYcient to grasp what he in-creasingly envisions as his problem, that is, the unitary structure of the being,which he determines as originary temporality (originary because understoodin nonnaturalist terms). And he becomes convinced at the same time that theAristotelian phenomenology of the fundamental dispositions of Dasein, al-though inspired, remains a rhapsodic classi cation, because it cannot reach theunitary ontological ground upon which are based the three dispositions ofyevra, prjiw, pohsiw.

As to the reasons for this incapacity, the Aristotelian ontology of humanlife (which is how Heidegger interprets and ontologizes the Aristotelian con-cept of practical philosophy) cannot, for Heidegger, grasp the unitary groundof human life, because, by remaining tied to a naturalistic understanding oftime,26 it is not in a position to thematize the equation that Heidegger in-stitutes between the soul and time, between Dasein and temporality. The gen-eral horizon in which, in the end, Heidegger places these limits of Aristotelianthought is the horizon of the Greek understanding of being that privileges, without questioning it, the dimension of presence, attributing the maximal

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character of being to a being who appears in a stable manner. Accordingly,Aristotelian thought cannot conceive being in the horizon of the full articula-tion of time.

It is because of this that Heidegger, after having taken Aristotle as his guide,turns to Kant. He wrote to Jaspers that he was happy to have read Kant with-out ruining him through the glasses of todays commerce27 and to havelearned to like him in opposition to the Neokantians.28 The change of the historical referent is particularly obvious in the winter semester course of192526 (Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit ): after thoroughly examining the ques-tion of truth, following the thread of an interpretation of Aristotle, Heideg-ger suddenly and abruptly, without warning or any kind of preparation,changes the program announced at the beginning of the course and begins aclose explication of Kant. It is suYcient to consider the problem on which thisexplication focuseswhich is essentially an interpretation of Kants under-standing of the relation between the I think and time, between the trans-cendental apperception and the temporal autoaVection of the ego, between the personalitas transcendentalis and temporalityto understand why Heideggerhimself quali es even his interpretation of Kant as phenomenological. Aswith his interpretation of Aristotle, this commentary on Kant develops into anattempt to discover in the Kantian text the problem that preoccupiesHeideggers thinking as he distances himself from Husserl, that is to say, onceagain, the question of the fundamental attitudes of human life in their origin-ariness and in their unitary ontological determination (which Heidegger deter-mines as original temporality).

There is no doubt as to the Husserlian origin of this problem: indeed, inHeideggers eyes, it was Husserl who had rst dealt with it in his doctrine oftranscendental and constitutive subjectivity and its temporal structure (articu-lated as impression, retention, and protention). By making Husserls prob-lem his own, Heidegger also becomes aware of the limits in which Husserl had viewed and dealt with it. He exposes, in an increasingly resolute and openway, the unilateral characteristics of the gnoseologic-transcendental actuation of phenomenology in Husserls work andas he will state expressly on sev-eral occasions and will write at the end of section 7 of Being and Timehe isattempting to separate phenomenology from these characteristics in order todevelop it in its ownmost possibilities. These characteristics essentially con-cern the Husserlian determination of subjectivity, which remain conditioned by the theoretical and the gnoseological presuppositions involving con-sciousness, which Husserl neither observes nor questions. Hence his elucida-tion of the constitution of transcendental subjectivity remains insuYcient from the ontological point of view, as does the determination of its speci c temporality (conceived as belonging to lower intellection). In the end, Husserlremains within a metaphysical understanding of being as presence and within


an ontological dichotomy of Cartesian origin that separates being and thought.Such unquestioned presuppositions are clearly revealed to Heidegger as

he appropriates Aristotle, through whom he comes to a decisive turning pointin the development of this problem, without yet nding the solution. It is thenthat the star of Kant rises on the horizon of his re ections, and Heideg-ger greets him as the promise of a solution to the problem that he is formula-ting more and more as his own: What is the unitary ontological ground, theoriginary constitution of being, upon which are based the fundamental atti-tudes of yevra, pohsiw and prjiw, in other words the basic determinations ofDasein? And if this ground, the being of Dasein, can be determined as origi-nary temporality, what is the relation between being and time, and what is the way to grasp it in its originariness and its totality? In this context, in theabrupt transition from Aristotle to Kant in the 192526 winter semester course,Heidegger writes:

Once we have understood this problem of the inner connection of the under-standing of being with time, we have then in a certain way a light that allowsus to return to the clari cation of the history of the problem of being andthe history of philosophy in general so that it now receives a meaning. In thisregard we see that the only person who presented something about the con-nection of the understanding of being and the character of being with timewas Kant.29

Without going into the details of the famous and controversial interpretation of Kant that Heidegger set forth,30 it is suYcient to recall its main lines todemonstrate why it represents, together with the confrontation with Husserland the interpretation of Aristotle, the third major reference point in Hei-deggers assimilation and transformation of the idea of phenomenology and inthe development of the analysis of existence and why it must be legitimatelylabeled as phenomenological.

We know that through his interpretation of the Critique of Pure ReasonHeidegger intended to show that this work is not so much a theory of scienti cknowledge (mathematics and physics), as the Neokantians would have it, butrather a foundation of the possibility of knowledge in general, in the sense that it is an ontology of the subject. In the framework of this thesis, hebelieves he can perceive in Kants work an awareness of the problem of theunitary ontological root of the subject (at least as the subject of knowledge),notably in Kants eVort to probe the common origin of the two roots uponwhich our knowing is based: understanding as the spontaneous faculty of knowing and sensibility as the receptive capacity of intuition. At the peak of this eVort, that is, in Kants development of the relation of the intellect with objects (the deduction of categories) and in the doctrine of schematism and transcendental imagination, Heidegger also perceives the glimmer of asolution. It appears to him at the point where Kant, while underscoring the

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temporal character of transcendental imagination, seems to see in time thecommon root of the intellectual and sensible determinations of the subject. Byreturning to the traditional understanding of the subject, according to whichthe unity of its determinations can be found in the ego insofar as it is the poleof the acts of knowing, and reformulating it by the doctrine of I think (whichmust be able to accompany all my representations [B 131]), Kant seemed tomake a breach in the traditional understanding, because he saw in the syntheticfunction of transcendental apperception the autoaVection of time in its three-fold articulation, and he thus managed to conceive the essential connectionbetween the I think and time.

There is no need to emphasize that Heidegger highlights all of this while pro-ceeding well beyond Kants text. But his emphasis on this connection provideshim with the indispensable foothold to fully explore the equation of subject-ivity and temporality that he envisions. As structured according to time, tran-scendental apperception, that is, the activity by which the intellect can belinked, can be joined in turn, to the receptivity of sensibility of which time isthe form. This connection takes place in what Heidegger senses as the com-mon root of understanding and sensibility, thus the root of the two sources of our knowing, transcendental imagination: either the productive moment of spontaneity of the intellect or the receptive moment of the sensible intuitioncan join it, because transcendental imagination is itself structured according to time, and precisely in the universal form of the image of time, which is thusthe condition common to both of them. In eVect, time, on the one hand, con-ditions the synthesis of transcendental apperception and appears as the pureautoaVection of the ego; and on the other, it is the pure a priori form of sensi-ble intuition. Hence it represents the common homogenous form in which theunity of the knowing subject is constituted.

If, for Heidegger, the greatness of Kant consists in the fact that he under-stood as a problem the unity of the fundamental determinations of the sub-ject, delimiting their point of connection in the transcendental imagination, his limitation is in his inability to translate this fundamental insight into anexplicit thematization. In other words, even though Kant manages to see tem-porality as the framework in which the activities of the knowing subject are con-ceived, he does not develop his analysis far enough to explicitly think oftemporality as the structure of human existence.31 Once again, Heidegger sees the reason for this in the fact that the inspired Kantian elaboration of the problem gets bogged down because of its unconscious link to the traditionalidea of time and to the Cartesian dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa.

The ambivalence in Heideggers evaluation of Kant can be found as early asthe course of 192526, where his intense interest in Kant rst surges up andunfurls. Re ecting on his interpretation, Heidegger writes:

That this interpretation, which goes essentially beyond Kant, or rather which


goes back behind him, should not be considered completely outside the pathof the phenomenal connections, which Kant himself envisioned, is docu-mented in a characteristic of the I that Kant gives in the following passage(A123): The abiding and unchanging I (pure apperception) forms the cor-relate of all our representations. But this determination of the I is, almostliterally, the de nition of time, which for Kant is stable and remainsabsolutely so and which is in general the correlate of all appearances. Timeand the I think, where Kant attempts to investigate these phenomena, are brought by him as closely together as possible, so that the de nitions ofthese two phenomena coincide; and nevertheless Kant seizes upon thedogma, directive for him, that time and the I think are absolutely sepa-rated, so that it is a priori certain for him that their conjunction is quiteimpossible.32

What is interesting is that in the context in which Heidegger states this in-suYciency, the horizon of the problems from which he draws out his interpre-tation appears again, that is, the horizon of Husserlian phenomenology. Listento Heidegger himself:

What Kant missed is the phenomenological and categorical clearing of theground from which can grow these two stems and, all the more, that whichis to mediate them. The subsequent idealism had, all the more, to neglectthis task, since it no longer summoned up the sobriety and soundness of workthat Kant had exhibited. In its fundamental scope and universal signi cance,this task was seen and elaborated for the rst time by Husserl in his Ideas,which one would like to characterize as Kantian but which as to fundamen-tals is essentially more radical than Kant could be.33

Of course the Heideggerian location of these limits presents a good manyaspects that are debatable. But, once again, what is interesting about the the-sis Heidegger was developing, and moreover, about his interpretation ofAristotle, is not so much the speci c contents of the interpretation proposed,but rather the fact that this reading represents a privileged place to grasp, inits historical-philosophical genesis, the dynamic of the problems that led to Beingand Time. From this perspective, within the Heideggerian critique of Kantcomes to light the determining outlook that pre gured his interpretation andthat attempts to elicit from Kants work the derivation of the phenomenolo-gical problem of the temporal constitution of subjectivity, which Husserl hadalready envisioned and thematized and which Heidegger would develop in theterms of the existential analysis of Dasein conceived as originary temporality.

Returning to his interpretation of Kant in the summer 1927 course on theBasic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is increasingly aware of thelimits of the Kantian understanding of subjectivity, even if he continues to readKant from the point of view of phenomenology and even if he commits himself to a renewed attempt to appropriate the Kantian doctrine. What ismost interesting about this course is the fact that, beyond the personalitas

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transcendentalis that he had already examined previously, Heidegger here in-terprets the Kantian determination of the personalitas moralis. Returning to thethread he followed for his interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, heattempts to show how in this work as well Kant envisions the same problem,that of the fundamental ontological unity of the subject, which Heideggeracknowledgesmutatis mutandisas his own.

From a general point of view, the Kantian determination of the personalitasmoralis reveals, for Heidegger, the awareness of a problem that was lost afterKant, even in phenomenological thinking. In the horizon of his practical philosophy Kant feels the need to grasp the nature of the subject not only as it knows, but also as it acts, and speci cally in such a way that this will come back again to the general understanding of subjectivity in its unitarydetermination.34 This takes on a particular importance if we consider that adecisive reason for the speculative distance of the Husserlian perspective was,for Heidegger, the theoreticist determination of subjectivity that Husserl, whe-ther consciously or not, had chosen as the foundation of his construction andagainst which he rehabilitates the practical-moral determinations of human life. This correspondence revives Heideggers research for subsequent con-vergences with Kant in the ontological determination of human life, because in this research Heidegger, coming from phenomenology, believes he can identify with Kant as much as he had previously identi ed with Aristotle.

Thus he interprets the Kantian determination of the personalitas mora-lis, beyond the personalitas transcendentalis (the ego-subject) and the personalitas psy-chologica (the ego-object), as the most important dimension of man: what cons-titutes the humanity of man is neither his animality (Tierheit ) nor his rationality(Vernnftigkeit ), but precisely his practical-moral determination as personality(Persnlichkeit ), and this character of person also constitutes true spirituality(Geistigkeit ) which allows man to be called an intelligence (Intelligenz ).

But what is the moral personality? It is a modi cation of self-consciousnessthat has a character that is not theoretical but practical. It is a sort of non-sensible determination of the ego as subject that acts. As such, practical self-consciousness cannot appear either in an experience of the empirical-sensibletype or in a knowledge and an understanding of the theoretical type. It may beexperienced in the moral feeling of respect (Achtung ), which must be radicallydistinguished from any other form of feeling of the empirical-sensible type. It is this feeling that constitutes, according to Heidegger, the heart of the Kantiandetermination of the moral personality. Even more, for Heidegger, it wouldrepresent the most radical moment in all of the Kantian understanding of man.And establishing the epicenter of the Kantian determination of the subject not in the theoretical-observational domain, as Husserl had done, but in thepractical-moral domain, Heidegger sees in Kant a con rmation of the direction


in which he was seeking. Indeed, Heidegger interprets the outcome of theKantian analysis, that is, the determination of the practical ego as person and as end-in-itself, and the delimitation of the determination of things as means,as a distinction of principle between ichliches Seiendes and nichtichliches Seiendes. Inother words: he attributes to Kant the desire to rigorously distinguish betweenthe way of being of a being that is ego from that of a being that is not ego,thus anticipating the distinction between a being that is Dasein (daseinmigesSeiendes) and a being that is not consonant with Dasein (nicht daeinsmigesSeiendes), as theorized in Being and Time.

One point in Heideggers interpretation of the Critique of Practical Reason con rms this. Heidegger especially directs attention to the indeed surprising fact that Kant, who sets forth an open critique against the empirical founda-tions of ethics based on the moral sense, ends up attributing a decisive reveal-ing function to a moral feeling, that of respect. Heidegger resolves theapparent contradiction, stressing the radical diVerence between the moral feel-ing and any other sensible feeling. Yet Kant admits that respect has some-thing analogous with the two structural moments of feeling in general (Gefhl ),which are inclination (Neigung ) and fear (Furcht ). Heidegger sees in this Kantianpoint a signi cant correspondence with the problem of rejiw, which Aristotletreats in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics: rejiw, which is structured in thetwo moments of pursuit (dvjiw) and eeing (fug) and which in man is closelylinked to dinoia, represents in Aristotelian thinking the correspondent of the Kantian Gefhl.35 If, in light of this analogy, we consider the Heidegge-rian understanding of care (Sorge)structured in the two moments of Drang and Hangas the fundamental unitary determination of Dasein, in which itspassivity and its activity are rooted, its Bendlichkeit and its Verstehen, we can imagine this Heideggerian existential as the third term of a threefold cor-respondence, which links Heideggerin his critique of Husserlto Aristotleand Kant.

Then we can understand why Heidegger in the winter 192526 course, loca-ting in care the fundamental modality of being of Dasein, signi cantly asso-ciates this discovery with the name of Kant. The phenomenon connoted by the term care, he writes, is a structure par excellance of Daseinall de-pends on the correct philosophical interpretation. What is decisive is not theassertion that Dasein is concerned with its Being, but the interpretation of this phenomenon in the direction of a primary understanding of being. Kanthas obviously this very fact in mind when by means of traditional ontologicalcategories, he says that the human belongs to things, whose existence is an end in itself ; or rather as he formulates it one time: The human exists as an end in itself ; or elsewhere: Something, whose existence in itself has anexistence has an absolute value. These determinations, which Kant gives in

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the second section of his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Akademie-Ausgabe Bd. IV, 428), are for Kant the basis and the properly metaphysical,that is, ontological condition of the possibility for [a categorical imperative].36

Of course, in Heideggers view, who during this period is contemplating the unitary ontological ground of Dasein, Kant has not yet attained a suY-ciently radical determination of subjectivity, remaining a prisoner of the metaphysical horizon and unconsciously assuming the Cartesian separationbetween res cogitans and res extensa. Having demonstrated the depth of Kant, who even from within the metaphysical horizon manages to see beyond it,Heidegger distances himself from what he perceives as the limit of the Kantianperspective:

Thus there is unveiled an essential aw in the ego-problem in Kant. We are con-fronted by a peculiar discordance within the Kantian doctrine of the ego.With regard to the theoretical ego, its determination appears to be im-possible. With regard to the practical ego, there exists the attempt at an onto-logical de nition. But there is not only this discordance of attitude towardthe theoretical and practical ego. Present in Kant is a peculiar omission: he fails to determine originally the unity of the theoretical and practical ego. Is this unity and wholeness of the two subsequent or is it original, priorto both? Do the two originally belong together or are they only combinedexternally afterward? How is the being of the ego to be conceived in gen-eral? But the ontological structure of this whole theoretical-practical per-son is indeterminate not merely in its wholeness; even less determinate is therelation of the theoretical-practical person to the empirical ego, to the soul,and beyond that, the relation of the soul to the body. Mind, soul, and bodyare indeed ontologically determined or undetermined for themselves, andeach in a diVerent way, but the whole of the being that we ourselves are,body, soul, and mind, the mode of being of their original wholeness, re-mains ontologically in the dark.37

The Kantian solution to the problem of subjectivity, in its unitary ontologicaldetermination, implies, according to Heidegger, an ambivalence: its merit is todecidedly take the direction of research in which a deeper exploration that goesbeyond the traditional horizon becomes possible; at the same time it does notattain an understanding of being that would allow it to grasp originary tempo-rality as the root of subjectivity. Heidegger summarizes his critique in veessential points:

First. In reference to the personalitas moralis, Kant factually gives ontologicaldeterminations (which, as we shall later see, are valid) without posing thebasic question of the mode of being of the moral person as end.Second. In reference to the personalitas transcendentalis, the I think, Kant showsnegatively the nonapplicability of the categories of nature for the ontical cog-nition of the ego. However, he does not show the impossibility of any otherkind of ontological interpretation of the ego.


Third. Given this divergent position of Kants on the ontology of the ego, itis not surprising that neither the ontological interconnection between the per-sonalitas moralis and the personalitas transcendentalis nor that between these twoin their unity, on the one hand, and the personalitas psychologica, on the other,not to say the original wholeness of these three person-determinations, ismade an ontological problem.Fourth. The free I act of the being that exists as an end, the spontaneity ofintelligence, is xed as the speci c character of the ego. Kant employs theexpression intelligence as well as end; he says: There exist ends andThere are intelligences. Intelligence is not a mode of behavior and a prop-erty of the subject but the subject itself, which is as intelligence.Fifth. Intelligences, persons, are distinguished as mental substances from natural things as bodily substances, things [Sachen].This then would be our view on Kants interpretation of the distinc-tion between res cogitans and res extensa. Kant sees clearly the impossibility ofconceiving the ego as something extant. In reference to the personalitasmoralis he even gives positive ontological determinations of egoity, but with-out pressing on toward the fundamental question of the mode of being of the person.38

This interpretation, in which Heidegger underscores how Kant grasps theimpossibility of determining the ego through traditional categories, withoutthereby coming to a positive determination of the ego, and which is outlinedin the winter semester course of 192526 and continued in the summer 1927course, is resumed and carefully developed in the winter 192728 semester andagain in the summer 1930 course. In spite of certain shifts of emphasis, in allof these courses the essential part of the interpretation remains the same, somuch so that we can forego taking them into consideration here. But we mustat least cite a passage from the 192728 course, entirely devoted to the phe-nomenological interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the conclusion ofthis interpretation that, along with the 1929 book on Kant, marks the apogeeof the encounter with Kant in the 1920s, Heidegger writes:

When some years ago I studied the Critique of Pure Reason anew and read it,as it were, against the background of Husserls phenomenology, it opened my eyes; and Kant became for me a crucial con rmation of the accuracy of the path on which I carried out my search.39

5. Conclusion: Phenomenology as possibility

The thesis I proposed in the beginning thus takes on a consistency that I hopeis convincing. There can be no doubt that by following the thread of the problem of the fundamental ontological determination of subjectivity, deve-loped with Husserl as the starting point, that Heidegger comes to see Aristotleand Kant as the salient points of metaphysical thinking in which the questionis grasped and treated in its most distinctive dynamic, even though in the

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framework of traditional concepts that prevent an explicit and fully transparentthematization.

It is due to full recognition of Husserl, rather than in a regard that remainsoutside his work, that the interpretations of Aristotle and Kant that accompanythe Heideggerian path can be termed phenomenological. The substantialityof this characterization is corroboratedas we have shownby the fact thatHeideggers historiographic interest in Aristotle and Kant, and in general in the tradition of ontology, is engendered and rooted in the ground of the Heideggerian assimilation of the phenomenological method to an ontologicalperspective.

What remains naturally open is the true problem behind which even themalicious exaggeration of Max Mller might be legitimized, that is, the deepambivalence that is smoldering in Heideggers attitude with regard to Hus-serlian phenomenology at this time. In the apparent assimilation of the fun-damental principles and discoveries of phenomenology, through the admitteddesire to radicalize its intrinsic dynamic, Heidegger in fact de nes phenome-nology in a meaning that is rather diVerent from that of Husserl.

An important distillation of this ambivalence can be found in the well-knownpassage at the end of section 7 of Being and Time in which, after clarifying themeaning he intends to give to phenomenology, Heidegger states: Our eluci-dations of the preliminary concept of phenomenology show that its essentialcharacter does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical movement. Higherthan actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely byseizing upon it as a possibility.40

Confronted with this quote I would not hesitate to say, in conclusion, that inthe gestation of his speculative relationship with Husserl, Heidegger has demon-strated an extraordinary example of philosophical bravura.

Translated by Victor ReinkingSeattle University

NOTES

1. Martin Heidegger. Ein Philosoph und die Politik, Freiburger Universitbltter 92 ( June 1986).2. Ibid., 1415.3. Ibid., 15.4. I have examined it in the articles Heidegger in Marburg: Die Auseinandersetzung mit

Husserl, Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger 37 (1984): 4869, and La Trasformazione della fenom-enologia da Husserl a Heidegger, Teoria 4 (1984): 12562.

5. Notable in the doctoral thesis Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus (1913) and in the thesis to


obtain accreditation for university teaching Die kategorienund Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus(1915), collected in Frhe Schriften, vol. 1 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann,1978), (hereafter GA); as well as in the rst Freiburg courses.

6. They are discussed by K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik. Denk-und Lebensweg E. Husserls (Denhaag: NijhoV, 1977); see also by the same author Zu Heideggers Spiegel-Gesprch berHusserl, Zeitschrift fr philosophische Forschung 32 (1987): 591612.

7. Martin Heidegger, Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. I. Grland, GA 32: 40. Husserls lastpublication to which Heidegger refers here is clearly the Nachwort to the Ideen, whichappeared in the Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomnologische Forschung 11 (1930): 54970.

8. Heidegger, Das Ende der Philosophie unde die Aufgabe des Denkens, in Zur Sache desDenkens, (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 6180.

9. Now in GA 15: 372400.10. Now in Wegmarken, GA 9: 144.11. Very important, because it signals detachment with regard to Husserl, is a brief comment-

ary on the Vorlesungen zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins by Husserl (of which Heideggerwas the editor in 1928) that can be found in the summer 1928 course MetaphysischeAnfangsgrnde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (GA 16: 25556).

12. GA 24: 2632.13. GA 24: 2829.14. Cf. GA 20: 184.15. We should analyze here how the distinction between the natural attitude and the philoso-

phical attitude intersects the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. AfterHeidegger, we know that Dasein has an inertial tendency to inauthenticity: however, it hasthe possibility, by listening to the appeal of conscience (Gewissen, frnhsiw), of ful lling its most distinctive possibilities, and of assuming an authentic attitude. Hence we should askwhether the true philosophical dispositionsay, for example, that of the author of Being andTimere-presents an excellent possibility of authentic existence, or whether it is possible, asa neutral exercise of knowing, even outside of authenticity. I have the tendency to believe,based on many passages, that Heidegger thought the rst hypothesis was true. Given theextensive presence of Aristotle in Heideggers thought at this timecf. my monographHeidegger e Aristotele (Padova: Daphne, 1984), the main points of which can be found in Frenchin the article Dasein comme praxis. Lassimilation et la radicalisation heideggerienne de laphilosophie pratique dAristote, in F. Volpi et al., Heidegger et lide de la phnomnologie (Dor-drecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1988), 141it would be interesting to show how the stateof things that Heidegger envisions corresponds to the relationship that subsists, in practicalAristotelian philosophy, between the disposition of one who possesses practical science(Aristotle himself ), the behavior of the prudent man (for example, Pericles), and nonprudentbehaviors (which are numerous, as Aristotle states, observing that martnein comes pollaxw, while katoryon, authenticity, can only be reached in one way monaxw ([Nic. Eth.2, 5. 1106b 28 f.]).

16. GA 24: 29.17. GA 24: 2930.18. GA 24: 3031.19. GA 24: 3132.20. See the well-known note at the end of section 7 of Being and Time.21. Cf. Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12: 86.22. Cf. the relative texts (including the important letter from Heidegger to Husserl of 22 October

1927) published in E. Husserl, Phnomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. W. Biemel, Husserliana 9 (Den Hagg: NijhoV, 1962). According to Heideggerbased onwhat he said in the interview Nur noch ein Gott kann uns rettenthe motivations of the

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rupture were not only the Nachwort in the Ideen but also the lecture Husserl gave in 1931,Phnomenologie und Anthropologie (the text of which was published posthumously in Philosophy andPhenomenological Research 1 [1941]: 114). As for Husserl, his point of view becomes clear in thefamous marginal notes to Being and Time and in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik ( preserved in the Husserl archives of Louvain and now published as E. Husserl, Notes sur Heidegger (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1993) and in a few manuscripts from the beginning of 1931, in which heengages in a debate with Heidegger (the most important is the B I 32 manuscript, leaf 1850,in the Husserl Archives of Louvain; see also B I 9, leaf 2332). See also the well-known let-ter to A. Pfnder of 6 January 1931.

23. For an analysis of Heideggers critique of the Husserlian determination of transcendental consciousness (conceived as immanent, absolute, as that which nulla re indiget ad existendum and aspure), see the previously cited article, La trasformazione della fenomenologia da Husserl aHeidegger.

24. Such is the sense that Heidegger gives to lhyeein of the cux that Aristotle treats in theNic. Eth. 6.3.1119b15.

25. The title of the course is in eVect: Phnomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles. Einfhrung in diephnomenologische Forschung (GA 61).

26. This in spite of the inspired nature of Aristotles understanding of time, which Heideggerexamines and brings to light in Being and Time (section 81), but especially in the summer 1927course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24, section 19 a), where he stresses how Aristotleexplicitly poses the question of the relationship of the soul with time by asking: if the soul did not exist, would there still be time (Phys. 4.223a1629). And again: in a passage from the 1926summer course, The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, Heidegger seems to attribute to Aristotlethe discovery of temporality as a distinctive characteristic of the human soul, and Heideggerreads a passage of the De Anima (3.10.433b7) in which Aristotle attributes to man alone theperception of time (asyhsiw xrnou).

27. M. Heidegger, letter to K. Jaspers, 20 December 1925 in Briefwechsel 19201963, ed. WalterBiemel and Hans Saner Frankfurt a.M.Mnchen: KlostermannPiper, 1990, 59.

28. M. Heidegger, letter to K. Jaspers, 26 December 1926 in ibid., 71.29. GA 21: 194.30. Please see my article, Soggettivit e temporalit: considerazioni sullinterpretazione heideg-

geriana di Kant alla luce delle lezioni di Marburgo, in Kant a due secoli dalla critica (Brescia:La Scuola, 1984), 161179.

31. Cf. GA 21: 3637.32. GA 21: 406.33. GA 21: 28384.34. Cf. GA 24: 19294.35. Cf. GA 24: 19293.36. GA 21: 22021.37. GA 24: 207.38. GA 25: 2089.39. Heidegger, Phnomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. I. Grland, GA

25: 431. The rest of this passage is also signi cant: Certainly, an authority as such is nevera justi cation, and something is not true just because Kant said it. Nevertheless Kant has the immense signi cance in education for scienti c, philosophical work; and one can trust himfully. In Kant as in no other thinker one has the immediate certainty that he does not cheat.And the most monstrous danger in philosophy consists in cheating, because all eVorts do nothave the massive character of a natural scienti c experiment or that of a historical source. But


where the greatest danger of cheating is, there is also the ultimate possibility for the gen-uineness of thinking and questioning. The meaning of doing philosophy consists in awaken-ing the need for this genuineness and keeping it awake.

40. As we know, this assertion is repeated by Heidegger, but this time with each ambiguity beingdissipated at the end of My Way into Phenomenology (1963).

Franco Volpi - Phenomenology as Possibility

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