Heidegger's transcendentalism

Research in Phenomenology

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 29-54

  Dahlstrom, Daniel ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149431949     PISSN: 00855553     EISSN: 15691640     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/1569164054905483     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, 2. unveränderte Auflage (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 36 (hereafter cited as ZSD). For careful and critical reading of the final version of this paper, I am grateful to Ingvild Tørsen and Mahon O'Brien.
2. This despite Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Emerson and the ways that, as a result, Emersonian themes surface in Heidegger's thinking; see Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 33-63;
3. George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1992), 11, 30f, 63, 137, 200, 263f, 304, 308, 347f
4. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 4. unveränderte Auflage (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 28f;
5. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926), 590f 648
6. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, 4, Auflage (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 141f. (hereafter cited as Ideen I). I am indebted to Nicolas de Warren for assistance in interpreting these remarks.
7. Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Walter Biemel. Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 20, (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), 134, 139, 141f, 157.
8. Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), 35.
9. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), 189 (hereafter cited as Btr).
10. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 415.
11. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1978), 138 (hereafter cited as SvG).
12. See the articles by Scott, von Herrmann, and Vallega-Neu, in Companion to Heidegger's "Contributions to Philosophy, " ed. Charles Scott et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 9, 68f, 110ff.
13. A word about terminology: For the purposes of this paper, I use the term 'transcendentalism' in a broad sense for any philosophy that identifies some transcendent or transcendental sphere. By doing so, I follow Heidegger's strategy of cataloguing philosophies of transcendence together with those that style themselves 'transcendental'. This broad use of the term can be traced in part to the decision by English and German translators to adopt the term 'transcendental' to translate the medieval use of 'trranscendens'. One might object that lumping these philosophers together does not do justice to the difference between the realist intentions of ancient and medieval philosophers (Plato, Scotus) concerned with transcendences and the idealist pretensions of modern "transcendental" philosophers (Kant, Husserl). The objection is well taken, especially since Kant and Husserl insist on a difference, relative to their respective approaches, between the concepts of transcendence and the transcendental. However, the objection supposes a difference between realism and idealism (or, equivalently, the transcendent and the transcendental), the ultimacy of which Heidegger aims to call into question. Emulating Heidegger's attempt to exploit family resemblances among the various uses of these terms in different philosophical traditions, I intend to explore the extent to which analogous uses inform Heidegger's allegedly post-transcendental thinking; hence, the title: "Heidegger's Transcendentalism. " For helpful criticism of my strategy, I am grateful to Lillian Alweiss.
14. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 11, 13, 14f. (hereafter cited as SZ).
15. SZ, 37.
16. SZ, 38.
17. The parallel is inexact since dre supposed a priori knowledge that is dre object of transcendental knowledge in Kant's case is that of theoretical geometry and theoretical physics; see Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig: Meiner, 1944), B25 (hereafter cited as KrV). By contrast, in Heidegger's case the object of the transcendental knowledge (fundamental ontology) is the existential structure "alwavs already" constitutive of being-here and disclosive of its being and that of other entities.
18. So Heidegger can later say that his notion of transcendence has nothing to do with the Scholastic notion; see Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, 6. Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), 42 n. 59.
19. Heidegger continues this theme in his 1928 lectures, emphasizing the necessity of clarifying "the specific distinctiveness of the being of being-here," the essence of which consists in having a transcendence- constituting understanding of being; see Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, ed. Klaus Held, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 26, (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 188f. ;
20. see also Vom Wesen des Grundes, 38f.
21. Vom Wesen des Grundes, 41, 47f.
22. SZ 365f.
23. KrV, B382f, 384;
24. Husserl, Ideen I, 68, 142, 298.
25. Btr, 208f;
26. Plato, Heidegger notes, was a realist, not an idealist, in the traditional philosophical sense of the term; see Btr, 215.
27. SZ, 212.
28. SZ. 208.
29. Btr, 31. ;
30. Btr, 169, 186, 373, 388.
31. Btr, 185-88.
32. Btr, 171, 184f.
33. Btr, 172.
34. Btr, 176; see, too, 253f.
35. Btr, 182f, 193.
36. Btr, 209f. ;
37. Martin Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 45, 2. Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992), 60-71.
38. Btr, 212.
39. Btr, 326.
40. Btr, 217f. , 355.
41. Btr, 218.
42. Heidegger speaks of recovering the original sense of the term (Btr, 217) and later contrasts the construal of transcendence as "supersensible" (Über-sinnlich), presumably an aspect of the second sort of transcendence, with the construal of it as a "surpassing" (Überstieg);
43. see Btr, 322; see also, 176, 252.
44. Btr, 34f. , 239, 304;
45. Btr, 228, 233f. , 305.
46. Btr, 216ff. , 322, 337;
47. Martin Heidegger, Wegmarktn, 2. Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 375;
48. ZSD, 31-34, esp. 34.
49. Btr, 252ff. , 93ff. ;
50. ZSD, 47f, 50.
51. Btr, 250.
52. Btr, 250f.
53. Despite these criticisms, Heidegger does not seem to think that the ontological difference has completely outlived its usefulness; for a positive take on it, see Btr, 258, 287.
54. Yet the link of transcendental drinking with the ontological difference is reiterated in ZSD, 36.
55. Btr, 250f. ;
56. see also 3221. The criticism of transcendental philosophies is not a passing fancy; see Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, 174f,;
57. SvG, 133-37, 149;
58. and ZSD, 50f.
59. See Btr, 318 for Heidegger's criticism of dre misleading way drat drrownness is characterized in SZ. Here, too, lies one of the likely sources of pragmatist misreadings of the existential analysis of SZ, namely, Heidegger's construal of Verstehen as one basic existential among others (notably, Befindlichkeit), on the one hand, and his characterization of Seinsverständnis, in general, on the other. To conflate the two, Verstellen as Entwerfen with Seinsverständnis, invites a construal of fundamental ontology as a study of Da-sein coping widr what is zuhanden: a dualism of being-here and being-a-tool, the dynamics of which are governed by social practices.
60. Btr, 251; see, too, 254, 262
61. Btr, 254, 255, 260, 286, 289, 331, 342.
62. Btr, 251-61.
63. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 130f.
64. Wegmarken, 301;
65. see, too, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 116.
66. In the Introduction to What is Metaphysics?, he makes it clear that, while not satisfied with metaphysics, thinking the truth of being "tills the ground and plows the soil for this root," with the prospect of transforming it (Wegmarken, 363;
67. see, too, ZSD, 32). And in the concluding lines to Zeit und Sein, Heidegger observes that what he has been attempting to say is "not even something new but the most ancient of ancient [mattere] in Western thinking" (ZSD, 25).
68. SvG, 150.
69. ZSD 25, 27.
70. ZSD, 24; Hempel's covering law model of explanation seems a good fit for what Heidegger has in mind here.
71. ZSD, 2, 35f.
72. Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, ed. Petra Jaeger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 51,2. Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991), 2: "Das, was alles be-gründet und allem den Grund gibt, ist selbst der Grund. " In my translation of Be-gründung (with a hyphen) as "especially grounds," I have tried to convey the particularization and intensification, surplus, or fecundity that the prefix 'be-' often provides a verb.
73. ZSD, 14;
74. SvG, 145.
75. Btr, 183.
76. ZSD, 15.
77. ZSD, 16, 40.
78. ZSD, 17.
79. Btr, 447; see, too, 71, 252, 256, 303, 375.
80. Btr, 261f. ; see, too, 341
81. and SvG, 155.
82. Here one might note three further analogies with Heidegger's transcendental predecessors: first, the relation between the epochal transformations of being and its withdrawal has a kind of necessity that is not causal (ZSD, 35, 56); second, there is no experience opposite thinking that awakens from the oblivion of being and to the enownment (it is a Sache des Denkens; see ZSD 32, 37f, 41, 56f. );
83. and third, by eschewing any talk of transcendence independent of the relation of being and being-here, Heidegger iterates transcendental philosophy's self-restriction to the finitude and immanence of its subject matter and its disavowal of speculative metaphysical claims to transcendence (ZSD, 38; the operative terms: Vorläufigkeit und Endlichkeit).
84. Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame und Ina Saame-Speidel, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 27, 2. Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2001), 210.
85. ZSD, 29f, 48f.
86. SvG, 90, 93;
87. Btr, §189;
88. see, too, Heidegger's question: "Above all, how do matters stand with the determination of being as ground?" (ZSD, 36).
89. SvG, 1842
90. ZSD, 25.
91. ZSD, 75.