Kuidas ennastnäitav nähtavale tuua? Husserl ja Heidegger fenomenoloogia alustest / How to Bring the Self-showing to Light? Husserl and Heidegger on the Foundations of Phenomenology

Abstract

Teesid: Fenomenoloogilise filosoofia alguses seisavad selle suuna kaks keskset suurkuju, Edmund Husserl ja tema õpilane Martin Heidegger. Mõlemad mõtlejad näevad fenomenoloogias ennekõike filosoofilist meetodit – viisi läheneda, mis aga saab suunised oma aineselt, fenomenilt ehk sellelt, mis end ise näitab. Käesoleva artikli eesmärk on välja joonistada, kuidas need kaks mõtlejat mõtestavad fenomenoloogiat, küsides, mida kujutab nende käsitluses endast fenomen ja kuidas sellele ligipääsu saavutada. Oma käsitluses rõhutame kahe mõtleja jagatud fenomenoloogilist põhihoiakut, ent toome välja ka aspekte, milles nende käsitlused lahknevad.

This article presents Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s take on phenomenology. In a critical dialogue with traditional approaches, Husserl and Heidegger demonstrated the possibility of a philosophy that captures human existence as it shows itself in a living experience. The article offers a reading of how Husserl and Heidegger conceived the concept of the phenomenon, i.e. the self-showing. It likewise elucidates how both thinkers interpreted the phenomenological method that ought to make the phenomenal sphere accessible for description and scrutiny. We highlight that while Husserl and Heidegger share the basic attitude, their approaches are also subject to disagreements and ambiguities.

The first part of the article dissects the methodological starting points of Husserl’s phenomenology against the background of the Cartesian axiom ‘I think, therefore I am’. Radicalizing Descartes’s idea of pure subjectivity discovered in methodological doubt, Husserl conceives phenomenology as an inquiry exclusively devoted to the realm of self-showing subjectivity. Based on the Cartesian insight into the unquestionable existence of subjective experiences, Husserl establishes phenomenology as a study of experiential modes of relating to objects, an endeavour Descartes failed to articulate. Furthermore, unlike Descartes, whose reasoning stems from a realist framework, opposing subjectivity to the independent external world, Husserl unfolds the notion of a transcendental subjectivity within which the sense of the world as existing and real is constituted and made possible to begin with. By suspending all questions and interest regarding the independent existence of the world, Husserl’s concept of the phenomenological method – the phenomenological epoché – reflects the imperative to focus solely on the inherent structures of subjectivity.

In the second part of the article, we explain that, while guided by the principle of principles formulated by Husserl, which requires focusing solely on what shows itself, Heidegger modifies Husserl’s phenomenology. Significantly, for Heidegger, Husserl fails to conceive the fundamental question of philosophy, which is the question of Being. According to Heidegger, phenomenology goes hand in hand with ontology, which gives phenomenology its theme. Accordingly, Heidegger emphasises that what must show oneself is not any being, therefore not a Husserlian subjectivity, but Being of that being itself. Furthermore, as Heidegger points out, Being is something which, first and foremost, does not show itself but rather is covered up or hidden in one way or another. Exploring how to reveal a phenomenon, which mostly stays hidden,  the article examines Heidegger’s phenomenological method. We unfold Heidegger’s phenomenological method through three methodological moments or aspects, drawing mainly on Heidegger’s early lecture courses preceding his magnum opus Being and Time: phenomenological destruction, phenomenological explication, and formal indication.

In short, phenomenological explication describes how one should approach a phenomenon. According to Heidegger, a phenomenon is a totality of sense in three directions of sense, and the task of phenomenology is to explicate the phenomena in these directions. This means inquiring into an experience with respect to its ‘what’ and ‘how’: what is experienced in the experience (content sense), what kind of relation is at work in the experience (its ‘how’, relational sense), and how the relational sense is further enacted (actualisation sense). Phenomenological destruction, on the other hand, is a methodological means to understand and bring out existing attitudes, including highlighting that the theorising focus on the meaning of the content has become the predominant way of approaching anything whatsoever and thus causing the hiddenness of the phenomenon. Finally, the formal indication is a methodological moment that aims to lead us out of hiddenness toward the possible articulation of a phenomenon. It has a twofold task. First, it warns us against following habitual tendencies and becoming stuck in an object-theoretical attitude. Second, it indicates the direction the phenomenological approach can and should highlight, i.e. the need to focus on the relational sense (or fundamental structures), which in turn must be defined in such a way that the concrete implementation (its actualisation) of the relational sense is always left open for fulfilment in a concrete situation. An example of a formally indicated phenomenon is Dasein, both as a notion and as a being, which Heidegger destructs and explicates throughout his Being and Time, articulating its tendencies and pointing to its fundamental structures.

Thus, we show that the autopsy of these methodological aspects helps us to understand the fundamental analysis of Dasein presented in Heidegger’s main work Being and Time. In addition, the analysis of Heidegger’s methodological moments enables us to shed light on his sometimes alienating use of language and related translation problems, which are well known to the Estonian reader.