Husserl Studies 17: 125–148, 2001.

© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 125

Review Essay

The Husserl-Heidegger Confrontation and the Essential

Possibility of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl,
Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and
the Confrontation with Heidegger1

BURT HOPKINS
Department of Philosophy, Seattle University, Seattle, WA 98122-4340, USA

The Text

Gathered together in this superbly edited and overall excellently translated

volume are: Husserl’s four drafts of his Encyclopaedia Britannica Article
(hereafter, EB); Heidegger’s notes and comments on the first two drafts; the
pages that Heidegger contributed to the second draft; Heidegger’s October 22,
1927 letter to Husserl about the second draft; the full draft of Christopher
Salmon’s condensation and loose translation of Husserl’s final draft (which
was further condensed by the editors of the EB); Husserl’s “Amsterdam Lec-
tures” (which he considered to be an “expanded version” of the EB article);
Husserl’s marginal remarks on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit2 and Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik (including the passages of Heidegger’s texts that
Husserl’s remarks appear to be responding to); Heidegger’s brief speech
honoring Husserl at the combined celebration of his seventieth birthday and
retirement from Freiburg University; Husserl’s January 6, 1931 letter to Al-
exander Pfänder which remarks extensively upon his personal and philosophi-
cal relationship to Heidegger; and Husserl’s lecture “Phenomenology and
Anthropology” which – without naming Heidegger – takes sharp issue with
the putative anthropologism and psychologism underlying the building up of
phenomenological philosophy “entirely anew from out of human Dasein.”
All of the contents of this volume appear here in English for the first time,
with the exception of Heidegger’s contribution to the second draft of the EB
article, Husserl’s final draft of the EB article and his lecture “Phenomenol-
ogy and Anthropology, and of course Salmon’s text, which is, however, pub-
lished here in its entirety for the first time. The translations of the volume’s
previously published contents have either been updated and substantially re-
vised or, in the case of Heidegger’s contribution the second draft of the EB
article, completely redone. In addition to the translations and publication of
new material, the volume includes several excellent introductions. Sheehan’s
General Introduction to the professional, philosophical, and personal relation-
126
ship between Husserl and Heidegger (1) charts the former’s courtship of the
latter on all three counts, (2) documents the close interweaving of all three
dimensions of the relationship between the two that ensued for a number of
years, and (3) highlights the role of the ill-fated collaboration in the writing
of the EB article that hastened the total breakdown of any kind of relationship
between these two giants of German philosophy and twentieth century phe-
nomenology. Sheehan also provides a history of the redaction of the EB article
whose thoroughness and critical scholarly apparatus supersedes everything
written thus far on the topic; the result is what will no doubt remain the defini-
tive Redaktionsgeschichte for the foreseeable future. Palmer’s introductions to
Husserl’s “Amsterdam Lectures” and his marginal comments on Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik3 nicely situate the former in terms of its development
of the themes of the EB article and the latter in terms of Husserl’s discovery of
Heidegger’s distance from and critical posture toward his own philosophy.
In addition to making available in English these all important texts for
understanding both the history and systematic development of phenomenol-
ogy, the second – collaborative – draft of the EB article presented here (des-
ignated as Draft B) amounts to a “critical” edition of this text, since it has been
edited (by Sheehan) to conform exactly to the original texts contributed by
Husserl and Heidegger. As a result, Husserl’s corrections to Heidegger’s sec-
tions, which are printed in Husserliana IX4 as if they stemmed from Heidegger,
have been removed from the text and are now given in the footnotes. Like-
wise, Husserl’s revisions of his own text on the basis of Heidegger’s com-
ments now appear in the footnotes rather than in the body of the text as they
do in Husserliana IX.
The editors have thus assembled together in one place excellent transla-
tions of all the texts relevant to the direct confrontation between Husserl and
Heidegger over the essential possibility of phenomenology. In addition, a
number of these translations, i.e., Salmon’s EB text, Husserl’s marginal notes
to Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s collaborative (the second) EB draft, now represent the definitively
edited versions of these texts. Finally, the volume’s General Introduction pro-
vides what is, to date, the definitive account of the history of Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s philosophical and personal relationship.

Συµϕιλοσοϕει
ΣυµϕιλοσοϕειÍÍν

By all accounts, Husserl’s notion and praxis of “philosophizing together”

placed great demands upon the one who was to assume the role of his philo-
sophical “other.” His well-known style of thinking with his pen resulted in
over 40,000 pages of manuscripts, most of which were written in Gabelsberger
stenography and which, in both Husserl’s and his assistants’ judgments, were
 127
unpublishable in their extant condition. (The arduous task of transcribing
Husserl’s manuscripts was for many years assumed by his wife, and then later
on by his assistants, Edith Stein, Ludwig Landgrebe, and Eugen Fink). Ro-
man Ingarden reports how Husserl “repeatedly proposed to his various young
friends the ‘elaboration’ and ‘adjustement’ (sic) of this or that bundle of
manuscripts,”5 a task that given their undeveloped and fragmentary status
would surely require all the philosophical energies of its “adjuster.” In addi-
tion, there was Husserl’s belief, recorded by W.R. Boyce Gibson in 1928, that
“there is no such thing as spiritual possession” and that he “gives all his stu-
dents the full benefit of his ideas.” This belief, however, was curiously coun-
terbalanced by his “strongly object(ing) to any other man taking spiritual
possession of his (Husserl’s) ideas and saying ‘I am the founder of a com-
pletely new order of Ideas’ and so forth, when all the time he is a borrower
rather than an originator.”6 And finally, there is Husserl’s confessed difficulty
in following the thought of others.7
When there is added to these idiosyncrasies of Husserl his view of himself
“as an appointed leader (Führer) without followers, that is, without collabo-
rators in the radical new spirit of transcendental phenomenology” (481), it is
perhaps understandable that Husserl’s co-philosophizers would find them-
selves in a difficult situation should they be moved to profess fundamental ideas
of their own that were at variance with those of the Master. That Heidegger
proved to be just such a philosophical interlocutor and then some is hardly a
matter for debate. Unlike Husserl’s assistants and collaborators Fink and
Landgrebe, who apparently were able to satisfy the understandable need for
independence of both youth and thinking while yet remaining faithful to and
on good terms with their teacher Husserl, Heidegger, for whatever reasons,
was unable to do so. In a letter to Karl Löwith in 1923 he writes: “I publicly
burned and destroyed the Ideas (in his seminar of winter semester 1922–23)
to such an extent that I dare say that the essential foundations for the whole
[of my work] are now clearly laid out. Looking back from this vantage point
to the Logical Investigations, I am now convinced that Husserl was never a
philosopher, not even for one second in his life. He becomes ever more ludi-
crous” (17). In another letter to Löwith (May 8, 1923) he writes that his lec-
ture course Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität “strikes the main blows
against phenomenology. I now stand completely on my own feet. . . . There
is no chance of getting an appointment [with Husserl’s help]. After I have pub-
lished, my prospects will be finished. The old man will then realize that I am
wringing his neck – and then the question of succeeding him is out. But I can’t
help myself” (ibid.). And, finally, to Karl Jaspers a few months later he writes:
“Husserl has come entirely unglued – if, that is, he ever was ‘glued,’ which
more and more I have begun to doubt of late. He goes from pillar to post,
uttering trivialities that would make you weep. He lives off his mission as the
‘Founder of Phenomenology’, but nobody knows what that means” (ibid.).
128
Word of course got back to Husserl that “Heidegger’s phenomenology is
something totally different from . . . [his, and that Heidegger’s]8 university lec-
tures as well as books are, on the contrary, open or veiled attacks on . . . [his]
. . . works, directed at discrediting them on the most essential points” (481).
Husserl reports that upon relating this to Heidegger “he would just laugh and
say: Nonsense!” (ibid.). Heidegger was clearly wrong in his personal judg-
ment of how the “old man” would react to his public “burning” and “destruc-
tion” of Husserl’s thought and “wringing of his neck,” however, since Husserl
supported Heidegger professionally to the very end, viz., he supported him
as his successor for his Chair at Freiburg. Other questions, nevertheless, re-
main: was Husserl, despite his personal disappointment in Heidegger, wrong
in the personal judgment he had made of him in 1918, when he wrote the
following?: “. . . yours [Heidegger’s] is a true and authentic youth that can
still well up and throw itself at the world, full of feeling and with clear vision,
and absorb a true image of that world deep in your soul – and then speak it-
self forth in honest language and forge its own particular way of expressing
the image it has formed. . . . It is impossible to imagine you ever betraying
that for some silly gains or frittering it away . . . to lose all that in the drive to
become some pompous, self-important ‘famous philosopher’ – no, it’s un-
thinkable” (13). Was he wrong in his philosophical judgment that “Heidegger’s
criticism, both open and veiled, is based upon a gross misunderstanding; that
he may be involved in the formation of a philosophical system of the kind
which I have always considered it my life’s work to make forever impossi-
ble” (482)? And finally, was Heidegger’s philosophical judgment of Husserl’s
thought, to the effect that it was a “ ‘sham [Schein] philosophy’,” (2) any more
accurate than his judgment of how Husserl’s person would respond profes-
sionally to his (Heidegger’s) philosophical attacks?

Untangling the Philosophical from the Personal

To even begin to address these questions, it seems to me imperative that clar-

ity be achieved at the outset regarding what is philosophically at stake in the
confrontation between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies. The ever
present temptation to get caught up in the personal dimension of this confron-
tation, which dimension I would suggest extends even to the respective self-
understandings of the issues in dispute evidenced by the two protagonists
themselves, must be overcome if genuine philosophical insight into these is-
sues is to be made possible. And I would argue in this connection that the
“received views” of the terms of the so-called Husserl-Heidegger debate, as
expressed both by the partisans belonging to each side as well as by those
attempting to mediate these standard views, have a genesis that is “personal”
rather than “philosophical.” To wit, the Husserlian view of Heidegger’s phe-
 129
nomenology – as lapsing back uncritically into the natural attitude of an-
thropologism and ontologism – is as little based in die Sachen of Heidegger’s
thought as the Heideggerian view of Husserl’s phenomenology – as basically
an extension of Descartes’ epistemological project – is rooted in die Sachen
of Husserl’s thought. The texts collected in the volume under review here pro-
vide the basis for showing how both of these views are basically caricatures
stemming from what one well-placed witness to their controversy, Eugen
Fink, characterized as “a certain ‘foreshortening’ ”9 with which Husserl and
Heidegger saw one another.
The possibility of seeing these received views as caricatures that are ulti-
mately rooted in Husserl and Heidegger’s personal issues hinges of course on
the possibility of philosophical commentary or critique transcending the do-
main of the “personal” – be it the personal distortions that colored Husserl
and Heidegger’s assessments of each other’s thought or the personal per se
that from philosophy’s beginnings has been recognized as standing in the way
of the “truth” (the remark “amicus Plato magis amica veritas” attributed to
Aristotle and reinscribed by Husserl in his copy of Sein und Zeit seems to me
relevant in this regard). W. R. Boyce Gibson’s bon mot that “Husserl is the
Plato to Heidegger’s Aristotle”10 captures well in my opinion the archetypal
nature of the textual, systematic, and philological challenges that confront
such an attempted commentary or critique. Textually, there is the absence
in Husserl’s published writings of a single explicit reference – critical or oth-
erwise – to Heidegger’s philosophy, an absence that corresponds to Plato’s
“published” silence on Aristotle. With the publication of Heidegger’s lecture
courses, and their numerous references – for the most part critical – to Husserl’s
philosophy, there is the analogue to Aristotle’s lack of reticence in criticizing
his teacher. Systematically, there is the putative “otherworldliness” of both
Plato’s and Husserl’s thought vis-à-vis the likewise putative “concreteness”
of Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s thinking. And philologically, there is the ten-
dency to grant – on the basis of the propinquity of Aristotle and Heidegger to
their teachers – a privileged status to the students’ interpretations of their teach-
ers’ doctrines by those who attempt to come to terms with the matters involved
in what inevitably shows up as their controversy.
Successfully negotiating these challenges, then, does not appear to me to
be an in fact attainable goal but rather a task whose merit is best measured in
terms of how well a story can be told that renders compelling the source of
the “foreshortening” of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s understanding of each oth-
er’s thought, a story that simultaneously would disclose the nature of the cari-
catures underlying the received views of their philosophical relationship.
Identifying or otherwise uncovering the “source” in question here should also
prove tantamount to the opening up of a dimension of the phenomenological
problematic that is situated beyond the limits of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s
self-understandings of what is essentially possible for phenomenology.
130
Our story has of course both ontological and methodological plot lines.
Ontologically, the issue is whether die Seinsfrage has a place in phenomenol-
ogy. Methodologically, at issue is whether “reflection” functions to uncover
or conceal the originary phenomena or phenomenon that is the quarry of
phenomenology. Then there are the subplots: the influence of Husserl’s math-
ematical background11 on his formulation of phenomenology; the influence
of Heidegger’s theological interests on his appropriation of Husserl’s phenom-
enology and his philosophical development in general.12 Added to this are the
plots within plots: the putative “worldless” status of the transcendental ego
for Husserl and the concrete whole of human Dasein which includes the world
as a structural moment according to Heidegger; the fundamental status of the
phenomenon of intentionality in Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s
attempted immanent critique of its originality; Husserl’s commitment to de-
scriptive and apodictic evidence and Heidegger’s claim that “the methodical
meaning of phenomenological description is interpretation”; Heidegger’s
claim that the ordinary phenomenon of “now-time” (which, by implication,
is the time at issue in Husserl’s phenomenology) covers up the phenomenon
of “original” time. And finally, there are the plot reversals: Heidegger’s charge
that the “natural attitude” characterized by Husserl’s phenomenology is not
natural at all but in effect the detritus of the latter’s uncritical modern rational
“theoretical attitude”; and Husserl’s counter charge that Heidegger’s “doctrine
of the essence (Wesenslehre) of human being’s concrete worldly Dasein” (485)
as the “true foundation of philosophy” (ibid.) represents a “complete reversal
of phenomenology’s original [i.e., “transcendental”] standpoint” (ibid.).
When both Heidegger’s contributions to the EB article (including his all
important letter of October 22, 1927) and his lecture courses on phenomenol-
ogy are carefully considered within the context of what Husserl had commu-
nicated to the world about his phenomenology at the time of the writing of
this article, one can see that Heidegger’s grasp of Husserl’s thought is truly
remarkable. The lecture courses document a thorough command of the fol-
lowing groundbreaking “discoveries” of Husserl’s Logical Investigations: the
relations of parts and wholes, categorial intuition, ideation, and the fundamen-
tally intentional character of “acts.” No less impressive is Heidegger’s por-
trayal in his lecture courses of Husserl’s development of these themes as well
as his introduction of new ones in the Ideas, viz., the eidetic reduction, the
immanent being of consciousness, the essential correlation between noesis and
noema, and the radical departure of the status of phenomenological reflection
from both its traditional and contemporary Neo-Kantian status. Regarding this
last point, Steven Crowell has insightfully noted that Heidegger correctly grasped
that for Husserl “reflection is not the basis for a ‘formal-ontological thesis’
(Descartes), nor is it concerned with ‘psychic occurrences’ (Natorp’s view!).”13
Heidegger, moreover, was aware of what even today few students of Husserl
– not to mention students of the genesis of Heidegger’s thought – are aware
 131
of: that the non-constructive exhibition of the a priori of phenomena accom-
plished by Husserl’s phenomenology, which exhibition itself presents phenom-
ena whose non-constructive status has remained totally inaccessible to modern
philosophy, takes place on the basis of an initially “pre-phenomenal” ground
that shows up to phenomenological reflection as “already there.” Thus Heidegger
correctly saw that the intuition of the pure phenomena of the eide disclosed
by Husserl’s eidetic reduction is “guided” by the incipient structures of the
“impure” factical (faktisch)14 pre-phenomenal ground that is initially secured
by Husserl’s phenomenological method. By recognizing Heidegger’s insight
into this matter, a major fulcrum becomes intelligible of the critique he ad-
vanced against Husserl’s formulation of the actuality of phenomenology.
Specifically, what becomes intelligible is the critique he directed at the point
of departure of Husserl’s phenomenology, namely, that the latter issues from
an emphatically unnatural self-understanding of the human as z%Í on. In
Heidegger’s view, such a self-understanding is unnatural because it mistak-
enly grasps the human as an entity whose mode of being is “just there”
(Vorhanden) in the world like an object of nature. Heidegger’s insight into the
initially pre-phenomenal ground from which Husserl’s phenomenology de-
parts is therefore what allows him at once to take issue with phenomenolo-
gy’s current actuality (i.e., Husserl’s formulation of its point of departure) and
yet still present his own thought as being consistent with the inherent possi-
bility of phenomenology. For after he has made his case for the more original
(than z%Íon) existentiell mode of being of human Dasein and therefore mode
of being of this initial pre-phenomenal ground (a mode of being whose mean-
ing of Being he characterized as Existenz), Heidegger no doubt did not see
any inconsistency in characterizing the method he would employ to yield the
non-constructive exhibition or disclosure of the phenomenal apriori of this
ground as “phenomenology.”
As Husserl’s marginal remarks to Sein und Zeit make clear, he was not
convinced by any of this. Heidegger’s attempt to walk him through a pared
down version of his “critique” in his letter referred to above was without ef-
fect. In the letter he granted Husserl their “agreement” (138) that the transcen-
dental constitution of entities cannot be accounted for by returning to entities
“in the sense of what you call ‘world’” (ibid., emphasis added). Heidegger
further argued that this state of affairs does not preclude but rather highlights
the problem of the “mode of being of the entity in which ‘world’ is consti-
tuted” (ibid.). Likewise without effect were Heidegger’s pointed comments
to Husserl’s second draft of the EB article, namely, that the transcendental ego’s
constitutive capacities were acknowledged by Husserl as “[s]omething posi-
tive” (131) and therefore a “possibility of the human being” (130). These
arguments were without effect on Husserl because for him all questions per-
taining to the being of the human are the concern of psychology and anthro-
pology. The attempt to ground phenomenology in either, as Heidegger no doubt
132
appeared to him to be doing in his critique, could only serve to confirm Husserl’s
own worst fears that Heidegger “. . . would surrender both the method of my
research and its scientific character in general” (480). And in the case at hand,
such a surrender would amount to embracing what Husserl had spent his whole
philosophical life combating: anthropologism and psychologism.
Is it any wonder, then, when no doubt looking back from the “results” of
the Daseinanalytik and consequent awakening of the question of Being ac-
complished by fundamental ontology in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger could main-
tain – perhaps without exaggeration in his own eyes – “that Husserl was
never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life”? After all, the
phenomenological “condition of possibility” for authentic philosophizing was
there disclosed in terms of the Augenblick achieved by an entity whose mode
of being Husserl had refused to grasp as philosophically problematic, let alone
to recognize the exceptional mode of the comportment necessary for its be-
ing able to live in the moment and thereby be available to philosophy.
Judging by Husserl’s published remarks about the deficiencies of philo-
sophical anthropology (which, without mentioning Heidegger, were of course
transparent criticisms of his thought), the scattered remarks about Heidegger’s
philosophy in his letters, and most notably the marginal remarks in his copies
of Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, it must be said
that Husserl’s grasp of Heidegger’s thought was no match for the latter’s
understanding of his own. Husserl’s peculiar reading habits,15 his bad eyes,
and the fact that he lacked first hand knowledge of the content of Heidegger’s
lecture courses (which, arguably, provide an indispensable context for grasp-
ing the new style of thinking presented in his magnum opus) no doubt con-
tributed to his deficiencies in this regard. But the real obstacle to Husserl’s
grasping Heidegger’s thinking seems to have been what apparently operated
for him as the sine qua non for his work to be intelligible to him: Heidegger’s
“continuation and improvement” (23) of his (Husserl’s) approach to phenom-
enology in line with his “general intentions” (24).
Husserl’s remarks in the margins of Sein und Zeit and Kant und das Prob-
lem der Metaphysik, which, as Ronald Bruzina has noted, “indicate what
Husserl found to be either of interest, not clear to him, or objectionable,”16
make it clear – and often painfully so – that Husserl did not grasp the “ba-
sics” of Heidegger’s thought.17 Heidegger’s articulation of the need for for-
mulating the question of Being in terms of the meaning of Being’s “own
conceptuality” is understood by Husserl in terms of the “formal generality,
the formal-logical conceptuality” (276), of the meaning of Being. As a result,
the question of Being is understood by Husserl to be “an eidetically universal
question” (277). The fact that for Heidegger the meaning of Being at issue in
the question of Being is most decidedly not a matter of its formal generality
is thus lost on Husserl. Heidegger’s account of the ontico-ontological “prior-
ity” of an entity, Dasein, for working out the question of Being is taken by
 133
Husserl in terms of the ascription of an unwarranted priority to “an instance”
(i.e., Dasein) [in eidetic analysis], which for him is something that should be
“precisely excluded” [in such analysis] (ibid.). Here Husserl can be seen to
miss Heidegger’s formulation of the factical priority of Dasein in terms of its
existential mode of being, which eo ipso rules out the attempt to grasp the status
of Dasein’s being an entity in terms of an “instance” of what is uncovered in
an eidetic analysis of a “universal question.” In response to Heidegger’s ar-
ticulation of the essence of Dasein’s ontico-ontological priority, i.e., its
distinctiveness as an entity residing in the very composition of its Being
(Seinsverfassung) having a relationship to this Being, Husserl remarks: “And
is this not puzzling at this point and, in the final analysis, throughout?” (282).
No doubt this is “puzzling” to Husserl because he, but not Heidegger, under-
stood phenomenology’s interest in ontology in terms of the theoretical con-
cern with what is posited as having Being. Husserl therefore could neither
follow nor appreciate Heidegger’s attempt to interrogate the pre-theoretical,
and in this sense “ontico-ontological,” priority of the entity (Dasein) that
understands Being. Finally, to Heidegger’s claim that Dasein’s essence can-
not be determined by “assigning a ‘what’ that indicates a content” but in terms
of its “always having to be its being [Sein] as its own” (283), Husserl writes:
“But that is absurd” (ibid.). This appears “absurd” to Husserl because for him,
but again, not for Heidegger, the essence of an entity is something that is
determined in terms of what is invariant (i.e., the eidos). Husserl is therefore
unable to recognize anything intelligible in Heidegger’s formulation of the
essence of an entity (Dasein) in terms of the very meaning of its Being being
something that is an (non-eidetic) issue for it.
Heidegger’s formulation of the meaning of Being at issue in die Seinsfrage
as indicating something more than the formal and regional “what of ‘entities’”
(280, cf. 283) was therefore rejected by Husserl as involving “no other con-
cepts of ‘being’ [Sein] here [than the formal and real], and thus [no other
concepts] [than the “essence” and “faktum”] of the structure of ‘being’ either”
(280). For Husserl, the genuine problems of the “constitution of the meaning
of Being” involved in Heidegger’s talk of ontology having as its aim the clari-
fication of the meaning of Being “do not have to do with a mythical Being,
but rather with the essential relationship between entities . . . as such and sub-
jectivity as such . . . for which it exists” (461).
That these judgments and interpretations of Heidegger’s thought stem from
its inability to pass the muster of building upon Husserl’s phenomenology is
shown even more clearly by the following. Heidegger’s text: the question of
Being is “the most basic and concrete question. . . .” Husserl’s marginal note:
“Yes, as a transcendental-phenomenological question about the constitutive
meaning of being [Sein]” (278). Heidegger’s text: “The questions about [the
structure of eksistence] aims at laying out what constitutes eksistence. We call
the interconnection of such structures ‘eksistentiality.’ The analysis of it has
134
the character of an eksistential (not an eksistentiel) understanding” (283).
Husserl’s response: “Heidegger transposes or changes the constitutive-
phenomenological clarification of all regions of entities and universals, of the
total region of the world, into the anthropological; the whole problematic is
shifted over: corresponding to the ego there is Dasein, etc. In that way every-
thing becomes ponderously unclear, and philosophically loses its value” (284).
Heidegger’s text: “Rather the kind of access and the kind of interpretation
[Interpretation] [of Dasein’s understanding of its Being] must be chosen in
such a way that this entity can show itself from itself. What is more, the ap-
proach should show the entity the way it usually and generally is, in its aver-
age everydayness.” Husserl’s comment:

In my sense, this is the way to an intentional psychology of the personality

in the broadest sense, starting from personal life in the world: a founding
personal type.
I have placed, over against each other, natural apprehension of the world
in natural worldly life (or, this worldly life itself) and philosophical, tran-
scendental apprehension of the world – hence a life which is not a natural
immersion in a naïvely pre-accepted world nor a matter of taking-oneself-
in-naïve acceptance as a human being, but which is the idea of a philosophi-
cal life determined by philosophy (287).

Heidegger’s text: a paragraph dealing with meaning (Sinn) as the “Woraufhin”

of projection and the “unthematisch” understanding of the Being of discov-
ered entities within-the-world (Sein und Zeit, 324). Husserl’s marginal note:
“What complicated formalities and unclarities, simply so as not to make use
of intentionality” (382). Penultimately, there is Husserl’s not so veiled assess-
ment of the sum and substance of Heidegger’s “phenomenology” within the
context of the “only one definitive philosophy, [the] only one form of defini-
tive science” (499), viz., “the originary method of transcendental phenomenol-
ogy” (ibid.):

Transcendental phenomenology uses intentionality to interrogate the

sources of that world’s (the one actual world) meaning and validity for us,
the sources that comprise the true meaning of its being [Sein]. That is pre-
cisely the way and the only way, to gain access to all conceivable problems
about the world, and beyond them, to the transcendentally disclosed prob-
lems of being [Sein], not just the old problems raised to the level of their
transcendental sense [Sinn] (498, emphasis added).

And ultimately, there is Husserl’s comment that Dorion Cairns recorded in

1931:

He said that neither Heidegger nor Becker nor Kaufmann understood the
phenomenological reduction. Of Heidegger’s analysis of the Sein des
Seienden . . . he said that he was tempted to use Kant’s title, ‘of a Discov-
 135
ery Which is Supposed to Make Transcendental Philosophy Unnecessary
(?). But it is his conviction that the most important thing about his whole
philosophy is the transcendental reduction.18

Heidegger’s personal assurances to Husserl that his work “was the continua-
tion of my own research” (Letter to Pfänder, 480), his steady denial “that he
would abandon my transcendental phenomenology” (same letter, 481), would
seem to render reasonable Husserl’s expectation that Heidegger’s published
approach to phenomenology would be intelligible in terms of his own phe-
nomenology. Likewise, Heidegger’s remarks in his lecture courses about
Husserl’s influence on his thought, were they to have gotten back to Husserl,
could have only served to reinforce this expectation. For instance, in 1923 he
said that Husserl “. . . gave me my eyes,”19 and in 1925 that “[i]t almost goes
without saying that even today I still regard myself as a learner in relation to
Husserl.”20 Yet the “indirection” with which Heidegger admitted to Jaspers
that he wrote “against . . . [Husserl’s] sham [Schein]-philosophy” (22) per-
haps excuses somewhat Husserl’s inability even to begin to appropriate
Heidegger’s thought on its own terms, in a manner similar to Heidegger’s
efforts at an “immanent” critique of Husserl’s thought. After all, regarding the
latter, Heidegger’s lecture courses surrounding the publication of Sein und Zeit
make it clear that the locus of this critique lay in what he saw as the failure of
Husserl’s phenomenology to interrogate both the mode of Being (Seinsweise)
of the intentional entity (i.e., the subject) as well as the meaning of Being that
guides the understanding of the subjectivity of this entity’s Being. The mani-
fest absence in Sein und Zeit of any reference to intentionality, let alone of
any attempt to situate the analytic of Dasein and fundamental ontology in terms
of the problem of intentionality, has, judging by the literature on the relation-
ship between the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, misled commen-
tators with far less personal investment in these issues than Husserl regarding
this all important focus of Heidegger’s critique.
All things considered, then, it is hardly surprising that Husserl would un-
derstand Heidegger’s preoccupation with the structures of the existence of hu-
man Dasein in terms of anthropologism and psychologism, and that he would
judge this to be a colossal step backwards from the advances made by his own
life’s work in combating the philosophical relativism implicit in these posi-
tions. Nor is it surprising that Husserl would diagnose Heidegger’s mistaken
linking of (a) the worldly Being of an entity (Dasein) to (b) the problem of
the constitution of Being, as a failure to appreciate the radicality of the tran-
scendental reduction and the phenomenological Being-sphere of transcenden-
tal subjectivity that it uncovers.
The fact that Heidegger understood Husserl’s thinking better than Husserl
understood Heidegger’s decides nothing, however, about the philosophical
basis of their “confrontation.” For what is at issue here is nothing less than
136
the issue of most appropriate formulation of the essential possibility of phe-
nomenology. This issue gives rise to the following questions. Can die Sache
of phenomenology be at once ontological in Heidegger’s sense and transcen-
dental in Husserl’s sense? Can the methodological access to this Sache be at
once reflective in Husserl’s sense and hermeneutical in Heidegger’s sense?
And finally, can the phenomenologies of either thinker recoup methodologi-
cally their respective criteria for distinguishing the philosophical from the non-
philosophical life?

The Essential Possibility of Phenomenology

The answers to these questions depend upon how one understands the essen-
tial possibility of phenomenology. If one ties the meaning of Being überhaupt
to formal ontology and understands the latter in terms of “the ‘formaliza-
tion’ which took place in mathematics (and philosophy) ever since Vieta and
Descartes paved the way for modern science,”21 as did Husserl, then the es-
sential possibility of phenomenology would of course be transcendentally
compromised were one to tie this meaning of Being to what Heidegger meant
when he characterized phenomenology as having “Being” as its guiding prob-
lematic. For as Husserl’s marginal notes to Heidegger’s texts referred to above
make clear, Husserl understood the meaning of Being überhaupt (which in
Sein und Zeit Heidegger claims has never been explicitly called into question
by the tradition, and therefore by Husserl) in terms of what is investigated by
formal ontology. Husserl’s division of ontology into its formal and material
dimensions does not change this, since he clearly did not understand the
material ontologies to be investigating the “meaning of Being überhaupt,” that
is, to be investigating Being in its greatest generality and universality. The task
of the latter is clearly something that Husserl assigned to formal ontology.
Thus, when Heidegger referred to the “meaning of Being überhaupt,” Husserl
mistakenly thought that Heidegger could only be talking about the formal
universality of Being; hence, Husserl could not help but find all of Heidegger’s
talk about Being “puzzling” and in the end “absurd.”
With respect to the issue of the essential possibility of phenomenology, how-
ever, there is no more reason to privilege the meaning of Being exclusively in
terms of its modern “formalization,” as did Husserl, than there is to privilege
the meaning of Being in terms of its meaning “prior” to the very different
“formalizations”22 of its meaning at work in the thought of both the Moderns
and Ancients, as did Heidegger. Once these ontological “biases” are acknowl-
edged in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s self-understandings of what is at issue in
the essential possibility of phenomenology, the way is prepared for an explo-
ration of this possibility in a manner that is not committed in advance to ei-
ther thinker’s formulation of it.
 137
Whether such an exploration of the essential possibility of phenomenol-
ogy must remain tied to Husserl’s transcendental formulation of its meth-
odology hinges of course on the following: Whether or not Heidegger’s
hermeneutic critique of the meaning of Being that guides Husserl’s self-un-
derstanding of the Being of reflective consciousness can still be maintained
once the ontological biases of each thinker are taken into account. Heidegger’s
critique of the uncritically operative ontology of “presence” in Husserl’s for-
mulation of the absolute (i.e., qua “immanence”) Being of consciousness is a
case in point. Were it the case that for Husserl the absolute Being of tran-
scendental consciousness is established on the basis of the reflected and re-
flecting Erlebnisse of the pure psyche being understood to belong to the same
Seinssphäre, Heidegger’s critique would have merit. For Husserl, however,
the “immanence” of the latter is not transcendental but psychological. It is
psychological because the immanent Being of what shows up in the reflec-
tively uncovered Erlebnisse of the pure Psychische (or Seele)23 still remains
within the unbracketed horizon of the taken for granted validity of the world.24
Husserl makes this clear from draft one of the EB article, by characterizing
the immanent Being of the pure psyche as relative. To wit: it is relative to
(a) the Being of the world that remains uncritically in play even after the
phenomenologically psychological reduction has disclosed the pure immanent
Being of the intentional essence of the psyche; and it is relative to (b) the
absolute Being of the transcendental subjectivity wherein the very appercep-
tion of something like a “psyche” first shows up as a transcendentally consti-
tuted Sinn.25 As is made clear by Heidegger’s comment to section 4 of Husserl’s
first EB draft, which discusses the reduction to the pure psyche, what for
Husserl were matters of eidetic psychology were for him “Transcendental
questions!” (93, n. 37).26
This comment has two important implications. One, it establishes that
Heidegger missed the “nuance”27 at issue in Husserl’s differentiation of psy-
chic from transcendental immanence: i.e., the inclusion of the phenomenon
of the world in the immanence of the latter and its exclusion from the im-
manence of the former. Husserl articulates the former as resulting from the
putting into parentheses (via the phenomenologically psychological reduc-
tion) “individual things in the world” (163), such that “the meaning of each
in consciousness [Bewußtseinssinn]” (163–164) becomes the theme of a pure
phenomenological psychology. The “transcendental question” of both the
world horizon within which the individual things in the world are apperceived
by psychologically pure consciousness and the pure psyche itself that is ex-
hibited by the latter, therefore, lies beyond the scope of the phenomenologically
psychological reduction (and the eidetic reduction accomplished on its ba-
sis). Thus, uncovering both “the apperception of the world and therein the
objectivating apperception of a ‘psyche [Seele] belonging to animal realities’”
(172) as transcendental phenomena given in transcendentally immanent ex-
138
perience, requires “an all-embracing parenthesizing” (172) whose scope in-
cludes the “world-constituting life-process” (171) that “was simply not avail-
able” to “[p]ure phenomenological psychology as eidetic science in positivity”
(174).28 (Related to this is the evidence this comment provides that Heidegger
did not completely grasp the meaning of the transcendental reduction for
Husserl.29 Far from excluding or disregarding the issue of the Being of the
world, it is precisely through this reduction – in contrast to the psychological
reduction – that the world for the first time becomes a phenomenon rather than
a taken for granted “validity.”) And two, the distinction of the intentionality of
both the reflected and reflecting Erlebnisse at issue in the phenomenologically
psychological reduction from the intentionality of the same (i.e., the reflected
and reflecting Erlebnisse) that are at issue in the transcendental reduction
is missed by Heidegger, with the result that the two radically different
intentionalities – the psychological and the transcendental – are conflated by
him.
Heidegger’s conflation of psychological and transcendental intentionality
renders problematic his interrelated hermeneutical critique of Husserl’s reflec-
tive methodology and his phenomenologically ontological critique of the
absolute Being of transcendental subjectivity. With respect to the former, the
“being-just-there” (Vorhandensein) of the reflected “object” to reflecting con-
sciousness only obtains for phenomenologically psychological reflection (and
even here, only for thematizing “acts”), and not for phenomenologically tran-
scendental reflection. That is, unlike the givenness of the Bewußtseinssinn of
individual objects that are the reflected phenomena of phenomenologically
psychological reflection, which can be said to exhibit a mode of givenness
that is “just-there” (Vorhanden), the mode of givenness of the horizon of the
world within which such objects are given is – in accord with an eidetic ne-
cessity – something that for Husserl is never simply “just-there.” In addition,
for Husserl horizonal “modes of givenness” whose “readiness to be perceived”
are in principle, i.e., again eidetically, incapable of being rendered present in
the mode of something “just-there,” are inseparable from the intentional struc-
ture of both psychological and transcendental “reflected” and “reflecting”
phenomena. Regarding the ontological dimension of Heidegger’s critique, his
claim that the pure ego for Husserl is “worldless”30 and therefore blind to the
structural whole of the phenomenon of Dasein as being-in-the-world also
misses the mark, since for Husserl only psychological, and not transcenden-
tal, immanence is “worldless.”31
Heidegger’s hermeneutical critique of the “reflective” character of Husserl’s
phenomenology is rendered even more problematic by the recognition that
his hermeneutical method involves a “reflective” dimension, albeit not a psy-
chologically reflective dimension but rather the self-referential awareness that
is necessary for counter-acting the “Ruinanz” or “fallenness” of the self-in-
terpretation of the Dasein that understands the meaning of its Being in terms
 139
of non-Dasein entities.32 With this recognition, it becomes clear that such a
reflective dimension is inseparable from Heidegger’s formulation of the “phe-
nomenon” of phenomenology precisely in terms of that which does not show
itself from itself and, therefore, that the access to this concealed phenomenon
is something that the self-referential dimension of the method of hermeneuti-
cal phenomenology is charged with the task of “securing.” The disjunction
between Husserl’s reflective phenomenological methodology and Heidegger’s
hermeneutical methodology therefore collapses on the basis of the recogni-
tion of this.33
With this collapse the issue of whether it is essentially possible for phe-
nomenology to methodologically recoup the criteria it employs for distinguish-
ing the philosophical from the non-philosophical life becomes acute. With
respect to Husserl’s phenomenology, what is at issue here is whether or not
the will to live the life of a radically scientific philosopher – in accord with
the infinitude of the tasks such a will entails – is consistent with or an impo-
sition upon the fullest expression of a meaningful life. And with respect to
Heidegger’s phenomenology, what is at issue here is whether or not the deci-
sion in favor of the philosophical life issuing from the “ownmost” possibility
inherent in the finitude of life is something that can be methodologically jus-
tified. For both Husserl and Heidegger the issues articulated here were never
really confronted as something whose outcome was ever in doubt or in ques-
tion. On the contrary, the phenomenology of each is already an expression of
what can only appear to those who follow the phenomenologies of both Husserl
and Heidegger together as the personal conviction of each thinker with re-
spect to these issues. Therefore, the answer to the question of whether or not
the essential possibility of phenomenology is such that it can recoup meth-
odologically the criteria for distinguishing between the philosophical and
nonphilosophical life is something that remains yet outstanding.
By suggesting that neither Husserl’s nor Heidegger’s articulations of phe-
nomenology has left us with a satisfactory methodological account of the
criteria they employ in order establish the coincidence with philosophy of their
formulations of phenomenology, I do not mean to suggest that neither has pro-
vided sufficient criteria for discerning the philosophical from the non-
philosophical life. For Husserl, this criterion is provided by the idea of living
the life of a scientific philosopher, of rooting one’s existence in the praxis
of philosophy as rigorous science, which he works out in terms of the
phenomenological method’s ability to provide access to the originary evidence
wherein the true meaning of anything whatever has its basis. For Heidegger,
this criterion is provided by the idea of philosophical existence, of rooting one’s
existence in philosophically authentic human Dasein, which he works out in
terms of the phenomenological method’s appropriation of the radical finitude
wherein the true meaning of the Being of entities, including human Dasein,
has its basis.
140
What is at issue in providing a methodological account that would be suf-
ficient to justify the criteria employed by each thinker in order to discern the
philosophical from the nonphilosophical life is not simply the attempt to jus-
tify the criteria that permit this distinction to be made. Rather, what is at issue
in such an account is the attempt to justify the respective guiding ideas which
function for each as the – unquestioned – basis for legitimating the employ-
ment of these very criteria. In my view, the task of methodologically recoup-
ing these ideas is something that cannot be undertaken on the basis of the
criteria that they engender. This is the case because these criteria presuppose
rather than establish the legitimation of the guiding ideas upon which they are
based. The fundamental phenomenological issue here, then, is not whether or
not the essential possibility of phenomenology is most appropriately char-
acterized in terms of the scientific or ontico-ontological formulation of its
method, but rather: how is the philosophical life to be most appropriately
characterized?; e.g., whether it is under the guidance of the idea of science
(episteme), or under the guidance the idea of authentic existence, or perhaps
under the guidance of some mixture of these two ideas; or, indeed, perhaps it
not under the guidance of an idea at all, but the response to a divine injunc-
tion that most appropriately characterizes the philosophical life.
If the election of the idea or the response to the divine injunction that is to
provide the guidance for articulating the criteria that will permit the discern-
ment of the philosophical from the nonphilosophical life is to have its basis
in something of other than personal factors, that which is to provide the guid-
ance in question must somehow engender or otherwise elicit some kind of
“necessity.” The sure sign of this would be that all who encounter it would be
compelled to adopt it by striving to live by its lights. It may be objected, how-
ever, that even this statement of the problematic already presumes too much;
i.e., it presumes rather than establishes that the philosophical life cannot – or
should not – be based on criteria whose legitimation is rooted in factors that,
being irreducibly “personal,” are incapable of disposing another to recognize
them as binding. In my view, the appropriate response to this objection is that
the very idea of “philosophy” appears to be inseparable from precisely such
a presumption. The “necessity” at issue in the idea of a philosophical life is
therefore not something that is established by merely encountering such an
idea, but rather, it is something that the encounter with this idea indicates or
refers to with the demand of an imperative. Now it seems to me that what is
imperative in the “necessity” indicated here is not that it is or has to be an “in
fact” achievable or realizable goal, but rather: that for the idea in question to
be meaningful its meaning must either find its satisfaction in such “necessity”
or else surrender its pretense to having any meaning at all.
At this point in the discussion both Husserl’s notion of “empty intention”
and Heidegger’s notion of “formal indication” become relevant. They become
relevant because these notions represent the attempt on the part of each thinker
 141
to articulate a matter for thinking that has the status of both a “promissory note”
and a rough “map” that points the way to what is promised. In the case of the
empty intention, what is promised is the intuitive “fulfillment” of the evidence
that is the source of the meaning that it does not “give” qua its “emptiness,”
but which it nevertheless indicates or refers to qua its being an intention. In
the case of the formal indication, what is promised is the original “accomplish-
ment” of the what and how of that which, qua the formality of the indication,
remains at a remove from the “concreteness” that is the mark of the “authen-
tic fulfilling of what is indicated.” Both of these notions are relevant to the
issue of the idea of philosophy under discussion, because each articulates
characteristics that are basic to its encounter: i.e., a “meaning” whose reali-
zation is recognized to be outstanding while yet providing directives for the
very realization that remains in question. This relevance notwithstanding, as
we have seen neither Husserl’s nor Heidegger’s articulations of the way in
which “phenomenology” is to provide the called for realization is sufficient.
And, again, they are insufficient because each assumes, rather than makes a
case for, the criterion whose satisfaction would establish the “necessity” at
issue in the realization of the idea of philosophy. Husserl therefore assumes
that this criterion must be “scientific,” while Heidegger assumes that it must
be “existential.”
Crowell has recently demonstrated not only the debt that Heidegger’s no-
tion of “formal indication” owes to Husserl’s notion of intentionality in gen-
eral and, specifically, to his notion “empty intention,” but also how Heidegger’s
notion diverges from its Husserlian source. 34 For anyone familiar with
Husserl’s articulation of intentionality, the debt is not hard to see. Less ap-
parent, however, is the divergence in question. Crowell argues – correctly in
my view – against the “received view” of this crucial issue,35 which means
that he does not identify this divergence in Husserl’s reflective and Heidegger’s
non-reflective articulation of the phenomena in question. Crowell therefore
shows that the divergence is not to be found in the following: (1) Husserl’s
articulation of the “reflective” character of the evidence wherein the empty
intention finds its fulfillment and (2) Heidegger’s articulation of the non-re-
flective “factical” character of the “deformalized” accomplishment of the what
and how of authentic life indicated by the formal indication. Rather, Crowell
convincingly shows that, for Heidegger as for Husserl, fulfilling the promise
of meaning that is indicated by the formal indication cannot avoid the appeal
to the structure of phenomenological reflection. Specifically, the authentic ful-
filling of this promise for Heidegger includes a “reference”36 to its being com-
prehended by the being who philosophizes, viz., by human Dasein.
Once the reflective character of Heidegger’s method is acknowledged, the
locus of its divergence from Husserl’s method must now be sought in terms
of how its reflective character differs from the reflective character of Husserl’s
method. Crowell’s analyses again provides indispensable guidance for resolv-
142
ing this issue. They suggest that for Husserl phenomenological reflection is
characterized by an essentially “theoretical” orientation that limits its access
to phenomenological self-experience “in the form of a reflective objectifying
act directed upon first-order objectifying acts.”37 The intentional structure of
such acts is maintained by Heidegger to be limited insofar as the reflective
thematization of the “object” of such acts conceals rather than facilitates ac-
cess to the original dimension of “factic life” that comprises the full meaning
of intentionality. For Heidegger, it is the reflexive comprehension of the “cat-
egories of life” that provides the key for securing methodical access to the pre-
theoretical, factical accomplishment of the authentic meaning of life, which
meaning the question of philosophy’s authenticity “is unavoidably tangled up
with.”38 Specifically, the categories of life are maintained by Heidegger to
originate not in the reflective thematization of self-experience, as is the case
of the origination of all meaning in Husserl, but in the more original life situ-
ation that such categories function to formally indicate. Securing access to the
fundamental experiences that are indicated in this manner, however, requires
explicitly recovering the meaning of such experiences via the movement of
deformalization that, qua its transition from the implicit to explicit compre-
hension of such meaning, exhibits “an opposition essential to Husserl’s theory
of philosophical evidence as reflective clarification.”39
Nevertheless, for Heidegger, Husserl’s articulation of this movement is
limited by the tendency to interpret the meaning of the self at issue in experi-
ence in terms of entities themselves, rather than in terms of the meaning of their
Being. This tendency toward Ruinanz or fallenness leads to the “objectification”
of the latter. According to Heidegger, objectification conceals the ecstatic
openness of the Being of the entity whose comprehension of the categories
of life holds open the possibility of being philosophically interrogated; and it
is only on the basis of such interrogation that the original meaning of both the
Being of this entity and the Being of life that is formally indicated by these
categories can “be de-formalized, interpretively accomplished authentically
on the basis of phenomenological evidence.”40 For Heidegger, such catego-
ries do not become visible on the basis of the adoption of a theoretical atti-
tude (as Husserl and before him the neo-Kantians thought), but only when the
taken for granted intelligibility of factic life breaks down via fundamental
moods such as anxiety. Only in the wake of this breakdown is factic life itself
“ ‘compelled to interpretation’,”41 such that the decision can be made in favor
of explicit self-interpretation in accord with the original meaning of factical
life that is formally indicated by the categories that come to light via this break-
down. It is here, then, that the necessity of the philosophical life emerges for
Heidegger, in the “repetition” of the original meaning of factic life from which
the theoretical “life” remains cut-off. Indeed, the intentio secunda character-
istic of the reflectively objectifying attitude of theoretical life can not only be
seen to be cut-off from the possibility of engaging in the repetition at issue,
 143
but also to prevent – in principle – the recognition of the need to have to make
a decision in favor of such engagement, i.e., in favor of “philosophy.” Hence,
Heidegger’s claim that Husserl “was never a philosopher.”
It must be asked, however, whether any of this is satisfactory. Does Heidegger
really establish the opposition between “theory” and the self-interpretation of
factic life upon which not only the deformalization of the latter’s categories
is maintained to hinge but also upon which the criterion of the philosophical
life is held to be rooted? And related to this, does Heidegger’s revision of
phenomenology establish how it is that the categories of factic life are able to
perform the work of formally indicating the original meaning of such life
which, qua its formally indicated status, must be recognized as something
whose status is, initially, only implicit? Hardly.
Theory can only be opposed to the self-interpretation of factic life insofar
as it is understood to involve the “objectification” of that which it is about.
For Husserlian phenomenology this is but one possibility of the mode of
awareness characteristic of theory. If by theory is meant the thematization of
what is comprehended in understanding, i.e., the rendering explicit of that
which remains implicit in understanding, it in no way follows that what is
implicit in understanding must always be an “object,” and that therefore all
thematization must be “objectifying.” Husserl’s “theory” and consequent
thematization of the non-objective (and objectifiable) horizon of the phenom-
enon of the world, or of the horizonal composition of time consciousness, ex-
poses the shortcoming of such a view of the matter. Husserl’s phenomenological
thematization of the meaning of such phenomena is no more objectifying than
Heidegger’s “thematic” rendering explicit of the implicit meaning of factic
life; or, if we accept Heidegger’s apparent equation of objectification with
thematization, the thematization of such meaning via his method is no less
the result of “objectification” than the thematization at issue in Husserl’s
method.
Regarding the ability of formal indications such as “life,” “existence,” or
even “philosophy,” etc., to point the way toward the accomplishment of the
original meaning that they indicate, it would seem that for such indications to
do their work the original meaning in question must somehow have already
been established in some sense. That is, the criteria by which such original
meaning – which meaning is presumably absent insofar as the indication re-
mains “formal” – is to be recognized as originally the meaning in question,
would appear to have to have been already accessible or otherwise adumbrated
in order for the explicit repetition of such meaning to be discerned as such.
But has Heidegger shown not only how this is possible but what the criteria
in question are? Again, hardly. What he has argued, but not shown, is that such
criteria cannot be “objective,” i.e., accessed through objectification. Once this
argument is shown to breakdown with the recognition of the thematization
that Heidegger himself cannot avoid appealing to in his account of repetition,
144
it has to be asked: what is Heidegger left with? He is not left with the sought
after criteria for recognizing the necessity of the non-theoretical self-interpre-
tation of the categories of factical life as the sine qua non for the philosophical
life, but only with the dogmatic insistence that such life cannot be “theoretical.”
Husserl’s appeal to the idea of philosophy as “rigorous science” of course
fares no better in this regard than Heidegger’s appeal to the idea of philoso-
phy as authentic factical life. It fares no better, however, for different reasons.
Rather than establish that the philosophical life must realize itself in a philo-
sophical science, Husserl’s arguments in connection with this simply presup-
pose that the idea of philosophy is coincident with the idea of science. Husserl
therefore presupposes that the “necessity” that is inseparable from the idea of
philosophy can only be realized in terms of the scientific necessity that has
its basis in rational self-responsibility. But here it must be asked: is this the
most radical kind of necessity that issues from “life”? I don’t think so. The
necessity of having to give an account of one’s own life can be seen to be not
only far older than the necessity at issue in scientific rationality but it also can
be seen as its precondition. Articulating not only how this can be seen, but
why it must necessarily be seen, however, is a long story that cannot be gone
into here. But, in contrast to Heidegger’s dogmatic articulation of the realiza-
tion of the necessity that is connected with the idea of philosophy that is in
question here, the following I think is relevant. Namely, that were one to fol-
low up in one’s thinking the reference to the original meaning of the philo-
sophical life that remains yet outstanding in Husserl’s attempt to establish its
ground in rigorous science, one would be led back to an original accomplish-
ment that takes place in the response to the divine injunction to “know thy-
self”; that is, one would be led back to an injunction whose necessity can only
be established in a life that recognizes that the fulfilling of the “empty inten-
tion” or “formal indication” of the idea of a philosophical life is something that
must remain outstanding for all mortals, and not just Husserl and Heidegger.

Notes

1. Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confron-

tation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Ri-
chard Palmer. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), xvii + 510.
2. It should be noted that the translator of Husserl’s marginalia to Sein und Zeit, Thomas
Sheehan, based his translation on Husserl’s copy of this book, and that as a result many
of the page-and-line references of the translation – along with the transcription of a number
of Husserl’s remarks – diverge from those of Ronald Breeur (“Randbemerkungen Husserls
zu Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit und Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,” Husserl Stud-
ies 11 (1994): 3–64.
3. The Introduction to Husserl’s marginal comments is drawn from Palmer’s “Husserl’s
Debate with Heidegger in the Margins of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,” Man
and World 30 (April–May 1997): 5–33.
 145
4. Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie, hersg. v. Walter Biemel (Den Haag:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1968).
5. Roman Ingarden, “Edith Stein on Her Activity as an Assistant of Edmund Husserl,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXIII, 2 (December 1962): 157.
6. W.R. Boyce Gibson, “From Husserl to Heidegger. Excerpts from a 1928 Diary by W.R.
Boyce Gibson,” ed. Herbert Spiegelberg, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenol-
ogy, 2 (May, 1971): 68. Gerhart Husserl’s ex-wife, Dodo Klein, reports that “Old Husserl
was terrible, absolutely terrible, this way, because somebody had said something, but he
had said it first.” The quote is from page 15 of a typed transcript of a tape recording of
memories of her second husband, Jacob Klein. The transcript (the tape recording is ap-
parently lost) is among Klein’s papers housed in St. John’s College Library, Annapolis,
Maryland.
7. See Husserl’s January 6, 1931 letter to Alexander Pfänder in the volume under review,
p. 480; cf. also the reminiscence of Herbert Spiegelberg: “Once when a member [of
Husserl’s seminar] raised a point, he [Husserl] interrupted: Please talk slowly; you
must know it is very difficult for me to transpose myself into the thought of others.”
Spiegelberg’s spoken words appear in “A Representation of Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938),” Ed. Lester Embree (Boca Raton: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenol-
ogy, 1988), VHS Videotape.
8. Here and throughout I will use square brackets to indicate my additions to quoted mate-
rial, except that the square brackets from pp. 174 and 280 of the reviewed work, [or illu-
sion], [no other concepts], are insertions by the work’s translators.
9. Fink’s quote is recorded by Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, ed.
Richard Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 25.
10. W.R. Boyce Gibson, op. cit., p. 72.
11. Husserl was granted a Ph.D. under Karl Weierstrass with a dissertation on variation cal-
culus titled Beiträge zur Theorie der Variationsrechnung. His dissertation was accepted
in 1882 and he received his Ph.D. in 1883.
12. Boyce Gibson’s diary records Husserl in 1928 as saying “Heidegger approaches Phenom-
enology from theology,” op. cit., p. 63. Also, Gadamer recently reported that Heidegger’s
development of Husserl’s thought was limited by the “basic topic” of his thought: “the
question of God.” (“Aber sein [Heidegger’s] Grundthema was eben doch die Gottesfrage.
Das hat ihn in seiner weiteren Entwicklung von Husserl in Abstand versetzt.” (Fax to the
author, September 21, 1998).
13. Steven Crowell, “Heidegger’s Phenomenological Decade,” Review of Theodore Kisiel,
The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Man and World 28 (1995): 446.
14. In this connection it should be mentioned that both Sheehan and Palmer are inconsistent
in their English rendering of “faktisch,” usually translating it as “factually” (e.g., 93, 153)
or “factual” (e.g., 169, 176) but sometimes also as “factical” (e.g. 114, 125).
15. Levinas reported to Boyce Gibson that “Husserl reads very little. He will start an author
and after 2 pages the impact on his own thinking will be such that he must put the book
aside.” Boyce Gibson, op. cit., p. 67.
16. Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), p. lxxi, n. 16.
17. Given Husserl’s reading habits mentioned above, which were no doubt compounded by
his poor eyesight, his intense study of Sein und Zeit, which included assistance from
Oskar Becker – who provided “a systematic summary of how the work unfolds and a
detailed explanation of its most important basic concepts and the basic doctrines they
designate” (24–25) – and Heidegger himself, attest that his shortcomings in this regard
did not stem from any lack of “will” on his part.
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18. Cairns, op. cit., p. 43.
19. Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) (Frankfurt am Main: Klos-
termann, 1988), p. 5.
20. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Being: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel
(Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 121.
21. Jacob Klein, “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” in Jacob Kelin Lecture and
Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s Col-
lege Press, 1985), p. 70. First published in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund
Husserl, ed. Marvin Faber (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940).
22. Jacob Klein has conclusively shown in Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra (trans. Eva Brann, New York: Dover Publications, 1992), that the “formalizations”
of the meaning of Being in Ancient Greek and Modern thought are literally “worlds”
apart. The former has its basis in the mathematical discovery of arithmetical ratios that
transcend the determinate gene of sensible entities, while the latter has its basis in the
mathematically symbolic representation of the conceptuality of entities that displaces
their sensible manifestation. Following this reading of both the historicity and the math-
ematical context which informs the problematic of “formalization,” Theodore Kisiel’s
ascription to Heidegger’s phenomenology of a process of formalization that amounts to
a sui generis emptying of all material content via the “es gibt,” and the likewise sui
generis availability to philosophical Dasein of “formally indicating” categories that point
the way to the genuine meaning of Being, appears – quite apart from the lack of com-
pelling textual evidence in Heidegger’s published and doxographical corpus – to be
farfetched. See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), pp. 51–53. In this connection, Heidegger’s phen-
omenological “account” of the genesis of the theoretical attitude of both Greek and
Modern science and the formal objectivity of their subject matters, on the basis of the
mere “staring” at broken or unavailable zuhandenen entities, which, qua such “staring,”
become “just-there” (Vorhanden) (Sein und Zeit, pp. 61, 363–364), is equally farfetched.
23. The frequent English rendering of das Psychische as “the mental” and Seele as “mind”
in the volume under review is misleading, since for Husserl the intentional essence of
the pure phenomenon of “the psychic” or the “soul” (or “psyche”) is such as to encom-
pass what in both the Modern Empirical and Rational traditions would be characterized
as mind and body – along with the putative “interiority” and “externality” of their re-
spective regions of being. In a note on the translation of these terms, Palmer expresses
the worry of the “associations in English of the ‘psychic’ with spiritualism and telepa-
thy” (160) as reasons for avoiding this term and its cognates. However, far more worri-
some in my opinion is the association in English likely to be made of the “mental” and
“mind” with an ontologically “inner reality,” since such an association effectively closes
off apprehension of the intentionality of das Psychische as something that at once tran-
scends and renders intelligible the sense of the very phenomena at issue in the “inner-
outer” distinction.
24. Eugen Fink has already pointed out this shortcoming of Heidegger’s understanding of
the transcendental reduction. See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, op. cit., pp.
46–47.
25. Husserl’s articulation of these two aspects of the relativity of psychic immanence marks
an important departure from his presentation of the absolute Being of consciousness in
Ideas I. There Husserl’s presentation of transcendental consciousness often overlapped
with problematics that in the EB article are clearly presented as belonging to the “pre”
transcendental discipline of phenomenological psychology. From the standpoint of the
EB article, then, the identification in Ideas I of the “absoluteness” of transcendental con-
sciousness with the aperspectival mode of givenness of lived-experiences qua lived-ex-
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periences is “transcendentally naïve” (170). Likewise transcendentally naïve from the
vantage afforded by the EB article is the articulation in Ideas I of the immanence of tran-
scendental consciousness in terms of a self-contained region of Being in contradistinc-
tion to the transcendence of the world. With regard to both of these points, see Eugen
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, op. cit., p. 44.
26. In Heidegger’s “defence,” something like the following might be noted: that the “rela-
tivity” of psychic immanence at issue here can only show up in contradistinction to the
non-relativity of transcendental immanence; therefore, the discernment of the relativity
in question appears to be tied to the uncovering of the transcendental and the questions
that are entailed by the latter. While this is no doubt the case, in my view it doesn’t fol-
low from this that once the transcendental problematic is articulated by Husserl in a
manner that allows it to be distinguished from the phenomenologically psychological
problematic, that the questions specific to the latter are aptly characterized as “transcen-
dental questions.”
27. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R.
Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1975), p. 9. (The quote is from Husserl’s “Au-
thor’s Preface to the English Tradition,” which he wrote after the breakdown of relations
with Heidegger).
28. The unavailability of the “world-constituting life process” and its correlative “world
horizon” to phenomenologically psychological Erlebnisse is rooted for Husserl in the
understanding of the “Being” of the psyche that guides both psychology as a “positive”
science and the modern philosophical understanding of the “mind” or “cogito.” Accord-
ing to Husserl, this understanding formulates the Being of the psyche in terms of its im-
manent Being vis-à-vis the transcendent Being of the world understood as the totality of
transcendent objects. The putative discovery that the meaning of the latter can only be
“given” in terms of the “interiority” of the meaning accomplishments of the former, gives
rise to what Husserl refers to as the “historical invincibility of psychologism” (174): i.e.,
to the “essential transcendental semblance [or illusion]” (ibid.) that the meaning of the
world is the constitutive accomplishment of psychological reality. Seeing through the
“illusion” at issue here entails for Husserl overcoming this “historical invincibility.” In
Husserl’s view, this is accomplished with the realization that a “transcendental circle”
characterizes psychologism’s attempt to account for the constitution of the meaning of
the objects of “every possible world” (171) on the basis of the immanent Being of the
psyche, an immanent Being that is – paradoxically – understood to belong ultimately to
a possible region of the world, i.e., to the region of psychological reality. With the reali-
zation of the untenability of this circle i.e., of the untenability of accounting for the con-
stitution of the meaning of the world on the basis on an entity that is, in the final analysis,
understood to be a “part” of the very world whose meaning constitution is in question,
the following obtains according to Husserl: the meaning of the world, or more precisely,
the meaning of the pregiven horizon of all possible worlds, is disclosed in terms of the
inseparability of its constitutive accomplishment from a subjectivity that can no longer
be understood to be worldly in this sense (i.e., as a “part” of the world), viz.: transcen-
dental subjectivity. That is, the constitution of the meaning of the world horizon within
which the meanings of all worldly objects, including the psyche, are constituted, is now
seen to issue from a subjectivity whose immanent Being must be distinguished – in ac-
cordance with an eidetic necessity stemming from the problematic of overcoming the
transcendental circle that proves to be at the basis of psychologism – from the immanent
Being of the psyche formulated in terms of its contradistinction to the transcendent Be-
ing of objects within the world.
29. Cf. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore
Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), where he refers to the “sense and
148
methodological task of the phenomenological reduction” in terms of “disregarding what
is really posited, by withdrawing from every real positing” (p. 109).
30. Sein und Zeit, p. 316.
31. That is, psychological immanence is “worldless” for Husserl insofar as phenomenological
psychology is concerned with the Bewußtseinssinn of individual objects and not the
world horizon within which these objects appear. The transcendental phenomenon of the
world horizon, as the apperceptive accomplishment of transcendentally immanent sub-
jectivity, is of course something that for Husserl can be uncovered only on the basis of
the transcendental reduction. Thus, the phenomenon of the world is not something that
Husserl thinks can be investigated by phenomenological psychology, because the psy-
chological reduction abstracts from the transcendent world to secure psychologically
pure immanence and to focus only on that. Hence, even though psychological imma-
nence is apperceived as worldly, its worldly character is not the thematic concern of
phenomenological psychology. Therefore, not only is the “pure psychological ego” in
this methodological sense “worldless” for Husserl, but for him it is so by design. The
central claim, therefore, is that Heidegger didn’t really have insight into the distinction that
Husserl drew between the phenomenologically psychological and phenomenologically
transcendental senses of immanence, and that as a result he missed the fact that for
Husserl the pure ego of transcendental phenomenology is not worldless, but is only given
precisely in correlation with the phenomenon of the world.
32. Steven Crowell has recently compellingly argued in this connection that “[i]n order to
make his point, Heidegger will perforce employ the structure of phenomenological re-
flection, though . . . it is not named as such.” “Question, Reflection, and Philosophical
Method in Heidegger’s Early Freiburg Lectures,” in Phenomenology: Japanese and
American Perspectives, ed. Burt C. Hopkins (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1999), p. 222.
33. This last conclusion does not represent a reversal of my claim elsewhere that the self-
understanding of phenomenology “cannot, at the same time, be both hermeneutical and
reflective.” There the “reflection” at issue was limited to its concept as Heidegger ex-
plicitly understood it in his hermeneutical critique of Husserl’s reflective-intentional
methodology; here, the “reflection” at issue is the phenomenon of transcendental reflec-
tion that emerges subsequent to seeing through the phenomenological “foreshortenings”
of both Husserl and Heidegger currently under discussion. See my Intentionality in
Husserl and Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 203. Cf. also
the entry in the previous footnote.
34. Crowell, “Question, Reflection, and Philosophical Method in Heidegger’s Early Freiburg
Lectures,” op. cit. pp. 219–225.
35. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Los Angeles: University
of California Press), 1993.
36. Crowell, “Question, Reflection, and Philosophical Method in Heidegger’s Early Freiburg
Lectures,” op. cit., p. 220.
37. Ibid., p. 225.
38. Ibid., p. 221.
39. Ibid., p. 224.
40. Ibid., p. 227.
41. Ibid., p. 223.