Philosophy Notes36

Husserls Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and on a Phenomenological Philosophy
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher who was born in Prossnitz,
Moravia. He taught philosophy at the universities of Halle, Gttingen, and Freiburg.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was among his students and succeeded him as professor
of philosophy at Freiburg after his retirement. Husserl had an important influence on
Heidegger, on existential phenomenology, and on the philosophy of mind. He died in
Freiburg in 1938. His writings included Logische Untersuchungen (Logical
Investigations, 1900-01), Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und
phnomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy, 1913), Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and
Transcendental Logic, 1929), andMditations cartsiennes (Cartesian Meditations, 1931,
based on lectures that he delivered in Paris in 1929).
Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931) defines phenomenology as a

descriptive analysis of the essence of pure consciousness. Husserl defines pure or
transcendental phenomenology as an a priori (or eidectic) science (a science of essential
being). He distinguishes between pure phenomenology and empirical psychology (and
between transcendental and psychological subjectivity), saying that phenomenology is a
science of essences, while psychology is a science of the facts of experience. He criticizes
"psychologism" (the theory that psychological analysis may be used as a method of
resolving philosophical problems), and he says that only an a priori science can define the
essential nature of being.
The Ideas are divided into four sections: (1) "The Nature and Knowledge of Essential
Being," (2) "The Fundamental Phenomenological Outlook," (3) "Procedure of Pure
Phenomenology In Respect of Methods and Problems," and (4) "Reason and Reality."
The first section describes how the realm of essence differs from the realm of facts. The
second section describes how phenomenological reduction may be used as a method of
philosophical inquiry. The third section describes how noesis and noema may be defined
as phases of intentionality. The fourth section describes the relation between
consciousness and noematic meaning.
Husserl distinguishes between phenomenology as a science of pure consciousness and

psychology as a science of empirical facts. For Husserl, the realm of pure consciousness
is distinct from the realm of real experience. Husserl explains that phenomenology is a
theory of pure phenomena, and that it is not a theory of actual experiences (or of actual
facts or realities).
According to Husserl, essential being must be distinguished from actual existence, just as
the pure ego must be distinguished from the psychological ego. Essences are non-real,
while facts are real. The realm of transcendentally reduced phenomena is non-real, while
the realm of actual experience is real. Thus, phenomenological reduction leads from
knowledge of the essentially real to knowledge of the essentially non-real.
Phenomenological reduction is a process of defining the pure essence of a psychological

phenomenon. It is a process whereby empirical subjectivity is suspended, so that pure
consciousness may be defined in its essential and absolute being. This is accomplished by
a method of "bracketing" empirical data away from consideration. "Bracketing" empirical
data away from further investigation leaves pure consciousness, pure phenomena, and the
pure ego as the residue of phenomenological reduction.
Phenomenological reduction is also a method of bracketing empirical intuitions away

from philosophical inquiry, by refraining from making judgments upon them. Husserl
uses the term epoche(Greek, for "a cessation") to refer to this suspension of judgment
regarding the true nature of reality. Bracketed judgment is an epoche or suspension of
inquiry, which places in brackets whatever facts belong to essential being.
Bracketing is also a neutralization of belief. "Doxic positing" (the positing of belief) may
be actual or potential. Doxic positing may occur in every kind of consciousness, because
every consciousness may actually or potentially posit something about being.
Facts or realities are the objective data of empirical intution, says Husserl, but essences
are the objective data of essential intuition. Empirical intuition may lead to essential
intuition (or essential insight), which may be adequate or inadequate in terms of its
clearness and distinctness. Empirical or non-empirical objects may have varying degrees
of intuitability, and empirical or non-empirical intuitions may vary in their clearness and
distinctness. Non-empirical intuitions may apprehend objects that are produced by
fantasy or imagination.
Husserl describes consciousness as intentional insofar as it refers to, or is directed at, an

object. Intentionality is a property of directedness toward an object. Consciousness may
have intentional and non-intentional phases, but intentionality is the property that gives
consciousness its objective meaning.
The cogito ("I think") is the principle of the pure ego. The pure ego performs acts of
consciousness (cogitations) that may be immanently or transcendently directed.
Immanently directed acts of consciousness refer to objects that are within the same ego or
that belong to the same stream of consciousness. Transcendently directed acts of
consciousness refer to objects that are outside the ego or that belong to a different stream
of consciousness. The objects of consciousness (cogitata) are the embodied or
unembodied things that are perceived and consciously experienced.
The difference between immanent and transcendent perception reflects the difference
between being as experience and being as thing.1 Things as they exist in themselves
cannot be perceived immanently, and they can only be perceived transcendently. The
difference between immanent and transcendent perception also reflects the difference in
the way in which things are given and presented to consciousness. Givenness may be
adequate or inadequate in terms of its clearness and distinctness, and in terms of its
intuitability.
Immanently perceived objects have an absolute being insofar as their existence is

logically necessary. The existence of transcendently perceived objects is not logically
necessary, insofar as their existence is not proved by the being of conciousness itself.
Consciousness itself is absolute being, but the spatial-temporal world is merely
phenomenal being.
Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is concerned with the essence of whatever is

immanent in consciousness, and that it is concerned with describing immanent essences.
To confuse the essences of things with the mental representations of those essences is to
confuse the aims of phenomenology and psychology. Phenomenology is a descriptive
analysis of being as consciousness, while psychology is a descriptive analysis of being as
reality. The difference between being as consciousness and being as reality is also the
difference between transcendental and transcendent being.
Every actual cogito has an intentional object (and is a mode of thinking about something).
The cogito itself may become a cogitatum if the principle that "I think" becomes an
object of consciousness. Thus, in the cogito, the act of thinking may become an
intentional object. However, in contrast to the Cartesian principle that "I think, therefore I
am" (cogito ergo sum), the phenomenologically reduced cogito is a suspension of
judgment about whether "I am" or whether "I exist." The phenomenologically reduced
cogito is a suspension of judgment about the question of whether thinking implies
existence. Thus, phenomenology examines the cogito as a pure intuition, and as an act of
pure consciousness.
Husserl describes noesis and noema as two phases of intentionality. Noesis is the process
of cogitation, while the noemata (or cogitata) are that which is cogitated. Every
intentional experience has a noetic (real) phase and a noematic (non-real) phase. Every
noetic phase of consciousness corresponds to a noematic phase of consciousness. Noesis
is a process of reasoning that assigns meaning to intentional objects. Both noesis and
noema may be sources of objective meaning. The noetic meaning of transcendent objects
is discoverable by reason, while the noematic meaning of immanent objects is
discoverable by pure intuition. Noetic meaning is transcendent, while noematic meaning
is immanent. Thus, noesis and noema correspond respectively to experience and essence.
FOOTNOTES
1Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by

W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931), p. 133.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W.

R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931.
...................
What is Existential-Phenomenology?
What is Phenomenology?
"As good a place to begin as any is the meaning of the term phenomenology itself. It is
derived from the two Greek words: phainomenon (an "appearance") and logos ("reason"
or "word," hence a "reasoned inquiry"). Phenomenology is indeed a reasoned inquiry
which discovers the inherent essences of appearances. But what is an appearance? The
answer to this question leads to one of the major themes of phenomenology: an
appearance is anything of which one is conscious. Anything at all which appears to
consciousness is a legitimate area of philosophical investigation. Moreover, an
appearance is a manifestation of the essence of that of which it is the appearance.
Surprising as it may sound, other philosophic points of view have refused to make this
move."
--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology , p. 3
"...one can characterize phenomenological philosophy as centering on the following basic

themes: a return to the traditional tasks of philosophy, the search for a philosophy without
presuppositions, the intentionality of consciousness, and the refusal of the subject-object
dichotomy."
"For Husserl , phenomenology was a discipline that attempts to describe what is given to
us in experience without obscuring preconceptions or hypothetical speculations; his
motto was 'to the things themselves'--rather than to the prefabricated conceptions we put
in their place. As Husserl saw it, this attempt offered the only way out of the impasse into
which philosophy had run at the end of the nineteenth century when the realists, who
affirmed the independent existence of the object, and the idealists, who affirmed the
priority of the subject, had settled down into a stalemated war. Instead of making
intellectual speculations about the whole of reality, philosophy must turn, Husserl
declared, to a pure description of what is. In taking this position Husserl became the most
influential force not only upon Heidegger but upon the whole generation of German
philosophers who came to maturity about the time of the First World War."
--William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy , pp. 190-191
"...Husserl's logic is one bound to the immediacy of all experience itself insofar as
phenomena are understood as givens in their immediate and irreducible presentative
force. Most simply, Husserl is after the formal qualities of the concrete reality which
human beings recognize as their experience, but from here means the essential immanent
in the particular: the truth of the given. The history of Husserl's development as a
philosopher supports the thesis that throughout his life he was, at various levels,
searching for an architectonic of thought . . . which would express and uncover the
specificity of the world. If the term 'logic' be understood in its philosophic sense as a
grounding discipline for all reflection, then phenomenology as a logic treats the genesis
and development of phenomena from their most primordial roots in prereflective
consciousness to their most reflectively sophisticated exemplification in science."
--Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," In M. Natanson (Ed.),
Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, pp. 4-5
"Phenomenology is a science of 'beginnings.' The genuine beginner is an adept, not a

novice. To begin, in this sense, is to start from the primordial grounds of evidence, from
onself as the center (not the sum) of philosophical experience. Such self-centeredness is
the opposite of philosophic hubris; it is a confession of humility: the admission that,
unless the inquirer has turned to himself in full awareness of his life, he cannot claim to
have sought, let alone found, the truth. . .
The genuine beginner is, then, the most sophisticated of all thinkers, for, beyond honoring
the Socratic injunction, he is unwilling to admit as taken for granted that which impinges
most heavily on his outlook as a man in the world: the root assumption that, though we
may be ignorant of philosophic truth, we are, after all, beings in a real world in which
philosophic doubt emerges as something worth bothering about."
Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, p. 6-8
". . .one learned what phenomenology is step by step, through reading, discussion, and
reflection ... What is needed is rather simple: to learn what is mean by the natural attitude,
to practiceepoche, to attempt descriptions of presentations without prejudicing the results
by taking for granted the history, causality, intersubjectivity, and value we ordinarily
associate with our experience, and to examine with absolute care the fabric of the world
of daily life so that we may grasp its source and its direction . . .
There is a legitimate sense in which it is necesary to say that one must become a
phenomenologist in order to comprehend phenomenology."
Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, pp. p. 8
". . . at the end of his career, Husserl admitted that the first result of reflection is to bring
us back into the presence of the world as wel lived it before our reflection began
(Lebenswelt)."
--Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," In M. Natanson
(Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, p. 54
"During the whole career of Husserl . . . the struggle is on two fronts. On the one hand it
is a struggle against psychologism and historicism, in so far as they reduce the life of man
to a mere result of external conditions acting on him and see the philosophizing person as
entirely determined from the outside, lacking any contact with his own thought and
therefore destined to skepticism. But on the other hand, it is also a struggle against
logicism, in so far as this is attempting to arrange for us an access to the truth lacking any
contact with contingent experience. Husserl is seeking to reaffirm rationality at the level
of experience, without sacrificing the vast variety that it includes and accepting all the
processes of conditioning which psychology, sociology, and history reveal. It is a
question of finding a method which will enable us to think at the same time of the
externality which is the principle of the sciences of man and of the internality which is
the condition of philosophy, of the contingencies without which there is no situation as
well as of the rational certainty without which there is no knowledge."
--Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," In M. Natanson
(Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, p. 57
"The first step in phenomenological philosophy is reflection on the meaning or essence of

the experience of consciousness. 'Phenomenological positivism' beings with the facts of
experience and is followed by reflection, intuition, and description of the phenomena of
consciousness. Husserl sought by the study of the phenomena of consciousness to find
the roots of reason in our human experience. So understood, phenomenology as a
philosophy is the science of the sciences, providing the principles which validate, a priori,
all the sciences.
The concept of the 'intentionality of consciousness' is the foundation of

phenomenological philosophy . . . Husserl adopted Brentano's notion of intentionality and
refined it.
Husserl distinguished between the act of knowing (noesis) from the object (noema),
whether existent or imaginary. To be conscious is to experience an act of knowing in
which the subject is aware of an object. A conscious act is an act of awareness in which
the subject is presented with an object.
Husserl distinguishes further between perception and intuition. One may perceive and be
conscious of the fact that one perceives an object without understanding its essence, what
it is, its principle of being and identity. Intuition of the essence of an object is the source
of meaning and intelligibility of the particular phenomena. Eidetic intuition
(Wessenschau) is insight into essences through the experiencing of exemplifying
particulars. Such particulars may be given in either perception or imagination."
--David Bidney, "Phenomenological Method and the Anthropological Science of the
Cultural Life-World," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences ,
Volume 1, p. 57
"There are two fundamental moments in Husserl's phenomenological epoche which,

although they are correlated, can be distinguished: 1) the reduction to the sphere of
immanence, and 2) the movement from fact to essence. The first of these . . . requires
suspension of the natural attitude and placing in abeyance all belief in the existence of the
transcendent world. The second, sometimes call the eidetic reduction, requires a shift to
consider things not as realities but as instances of idealities, as pure possibilities rather
than actualities. For Husserl, this second reduction is necessary to fuflill the conditions
for genuinely rigorous science. Thoser conditions, already announced by Descartes under
the heaing of clarity and distinctness, already are apodicticity (that is, the certainty that
requires absolute transparency) and univocity (that is, absence of ambiguity). When
science is conceived this way, its objects are no longer worldly things, but rather
essences: meanings, categories, ideal types, and laws. For Husserl, rigorous science
operates exclusively within the sphere of ideality--and must do so in order to meet the
standards of atemporality embodied in what he conceives as the very idea of science.
Although it is not identified as such by Husserl, this is an ancient idea which is generally
attributed to Parmenides: only that can be known which is, and that which genuinely is
excludes coming into being and passing away. The objects of rigorous science must be
atemporal essences whose atemporality is ensured by their ideality.
This Eleatic strain in Husserl's thought culminates in the standpoint that meaning (Sinn)
in general is timeless and ideal. The ancient question of how atemporal meanings become
instantiated in the flux of everyday actuality can be addressed by calling upon a central
distinction in Husserl's theory of intentionality: the distinction between the act of
intending (noesis) and the meaning-content (noema) of the object intended. The noetic act
is real in the sense that it is a temporal even in which hyletic data (or "sensory contents")
are synthesized and apprehended by consciousness as an intentional object. The noema,
on the other hand, is ideal: it conveys the atemporal meaning which provides the form
(morphe) according to which consciousness synthesizes its mattery or sensory data
(hyle). Thus, every intentional act (noesis) is an actualization or realization of a timeless
meaning."
--M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology , p. 71
Summary:
Phenomenology, beginning with Edmund Husserl , urges that the world of immediate or
"lived" experience takes precendence over the objectified and abstract world of the
"natural attitude" of natural science. Science as such, thus, is secondary to the world of
concrete, lived experience. Phenomenology, therefore, engages in a process known as
"bracketing" in which the "natural attitude" is placed aside such that the researcher may
begin with "the things themselves," as Husserl said or, in other words, in the
phenomena as they show themselves in experience. In Heidegger's terminology,
phenomenology involves letting things "show themselves from themselves in the very
way in which they show themselves from themselves." By definition, phenomenology
never begins with a theory, but, instead, always begins anew with the phenomena under
consideration. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's famous description of phenomenology is quite
instructive; as he writes, the phenomenologist returns "to the world which precedes
(scientific description), (the world) of which science always speaks, and in relation to
which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is
geography in relation to the countryside."
In Husserlian phenomenology, consciousness is understood as fundamentally intentional.

In this sense, Husserl is, in part, indebted to Franz Brentano's "Act psychology," which
held that all mental acts are characterized by "intentionality." Consciousness as an act,
that is, is always positing a world; in other words, it is always "of" or "about" something.
Following Brentano, Husserl holds that consciousness is never directed toward itself, but,
rather, is always directed toward phenomena in the world. It follows, therefore, that any
abstraction is ultimately based on phenomena in the world, and, thus, are secondary to the
primary lived experience of phenomena as they "show themselves."
Husserl brings to this understanding something unique, his phenomenological method,

which is characterized by Husserl's "epoche." As mentioned previously, "epoche" is a
"bracketing" of the "natural attitude" so that one can attend to a phenomenon as it shows
itself. Once the "natural attitude" is "bracketed," one can then attend to what, according to
Husserl, are the two poles of experience, noema and noesis. Noesis is the act of
perceiving, while noema is that which is perceived. Through this method, for Husserl,
one can perform an "eidetic reduction." Noema can be reduced to their essential form or
"essence." Husserl's phenomenology, in this sense, is a form of idealism, since it aims
toward discovering the ideal form of phenomena, the essence or Eideia(such as with Plato
and Hegel). Further, Husserl shares with the idealist a tendency to stress a priori
conditions of knowledge (such as with Plato and Kant).
What is Existentialism?
"Existentialism is well known in this country both as a literary and philosophical

movement, but its roots in phenomenology are not as widely understood. Historically, the
roots of existential philosophy can be traced to the nineteenth-century writings of Soren
Kierkegaard , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Fyodor Dostoyevsky . Central to the work of
this figures was an emphasis on the existing individual, and a call for a consideration of
man in his concrete situation, including his culture, history, relations with others, and
above all, the meaning of personal existence."
"The very notion that existentialism is something that can be defined in a catch phrase,
orthat one can merely know about it without understanding it from within, has made it,
for some people, into an intellectual fad and robbed it of its proper seriousness. Yet
existentialism is not merely a fad any more than it is a single, well-defined movement
within philosophy. It is a powerful stream, welling up from underground sources,
converging and diverging, but flowing forward and carrying with it many of the most
important intellectual tendencies and literary and cultural manifestations of our day. . .
'Existentialism' is not a philosophy but a mood embracing a number of disparate

philosophies; the differences among them are more basic than the temper which unites
them. This temper can be described as a reaction against the static, the abstract, the purely
rational, the merely irrational, in favor of the dynmaic and concrete, personal
involvement and 'engagement,' action, choice and commitment, the distinction between
'authentic' and 'inauthentic' existence, and the actual situation of the existential subject as
the starting point of thought. Beyond this the so-called existentialists divide according to
their views on such matters as phenomenological analysis, the existential subject, the
intersubjective relation between selves, religion, and the implications of existentialism for
psychotherapy. . .
Insofar as one can define existentialism, it is a movement from the abstract and the
general to the particular and the concrete. . .
The root of 'existentialism' is, of course, 'existence.' That might seem to include just about
everything, and by the same token to say nothing, were it not for the traditions in the
history of religion and the history of philosophy which have tended to look away from the
'passing flux' of existence to a realm of pure 'Being,' unchanging and eternal, a world of
ideal essences or a formless absolute beyond these essences, in comparison with which
the particulars of our earthly life are seen as merely phenomena--the shadows in Plato's
cave which at best reflect in wavering and unsteady fashion, and more usually obscure,
that essential reality which is not directly accessible to man through 'the life of the senses'
...
Insofar as any philosopher has turned away from the tendency to locate the really real in a
separate metaphysical sphere of essences in favor of the greater reality of personal
existence in the here and now, he stands for an existentialist trend within the history of
philosophy . . .
It is in [the] emphasis upon the existential subject that the crucial distinction is found
between existentialm and the various brands of empiricism, positivism, and
instrumentalism that also emphasize the particular, the concrete, and the here and now.
For these latter the particular is still seen from without, from the standpoint of the
detached observer, rather than from within, from the standpoint of lived life."
--Maurice Friedman, The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader , pp. 3-9
Summary:
The origin of existentialism is typically attributed to the work of Kierkegaard . However,

the precursory thinkers who influenced this school of thought are varied, including Pascal
, Hegel ,Nietzsche , and Dostoyevsky , to name a few. One can just as well point
back to the Greeks as influences, since Heidegger emphasized a return to the central
themes in philosophy questions pertaining to Being (the ontological) as opposed to
beings (the ontic). Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that Kierkegaard is the "father" of
existentialism.
Kierkegaard was a critic of the Christian churches of his day, which he felt had
contributed to a forgetfulness of "existence." By "existence," Kierkegaard meant the
particular form of human existence which is unique. Each "individual" human being is
cast into the world unfinished and finite, yet, nevertheless, must take responsibility for his
or her choices. Responsibility as such is the result of the "individual's" free choice, yet,
characteristic of human beings, these choices are always made in the face of the
unknown, our finititude, and, therefore, they lead to "dread." "Dread," in this sense, is the
recognition that one's choices our one's own, despite the fact that one can never know for
certain whether these choices will bear out in the end. Kierkegaard held great contempt
for those who relied on the "crowd" to take responsibility for individual choice. For
Kierkegaard, one must answer to God as an individual, naked and apart from the
"crowd." Thus, ultimately, our faith must involve a "leap," since the human being is
precluded from finality and certitude.
Existentialism, as such, is actually a 20th century movement, despite its roots in

Kierkegaard and others. While Kierkegaard philosophized existentially, which influenced
the existentialists of the 20th century, he did not hold to the existential axiom that
"existence precedes essence," as Sartre asserted. With all of the existentialist thinkers of
the 20th century, there are common themes, despite great diversity. Whether one looks to
Heidegger, Sartre, Buber , Merleau-Ponty , or De Beauvoir , to name a few, one finds
a basic attitude, despite the major differences among these thinkers. These commonalites,
which bind these theorists together, can be flushed out and this, in essence, is what one
may call "existentialism." There is some justifiable irony in the fact that most of these
thinkers rejected the term "existentialism." This tendency to reject any simple definition
is descriptive of existentialism as a whole, since existentialism, as a movement, resists
simplistic categories and abstraction. For the existentialist, truth' is found "in-the-world"
and, thereby, always begins with the concrete; that is, in existence. And grounded in
existence as such, this means that one's thought must necessarily be perspectival and
limited. Despite these limitations, the common themes of existentialism include:
1. The human being is a "being-in-the-world." That is, the human kind of being is always
already involved in meaningful projects with others and alongside things. As Heidegger
would say, the human being is "there being" (Dasein) -- meaning that the human being
exists as the projection of possibilities which open up as a world. In this sense, the human
being is not "in the world" like a match is in a matchbox. Rather, the human being is "in-
the-world" in the sense that one is in trouble' or in a relationship.'
2. As "being-in-the world," the human being is "thrown" into that "world" such that she
finds herself in the midst of the givens' of existence. One does not choose one's parents,
the place of one's birth or the fact that one will die, yet, despite these circumstances, the
human being is faced with the freedom to respond to these givens' of existence. In this
sense, human beings can be said to be response-able.'
3. As "being-in-the-world," the human being is always "with others." Even being alone
can be said to be a mode of being-with-others, since one cannot be alone unless this is
first understood secondarily as a being-away-from-others. Moreover, our being-with-
others is always as a relationship of some sort, and, being so, we are both shaped by
others and shape those others with whom we relate.
4. Human beings are always "in-the-world" alongside things. Things, in terms of

existence, are not mere extension in space. Rather, things exist as meaningful entities
which, in one form or another, call to the human being as significant in terms of the
human being's projection of possibilities. A thing is a thing when it matters to me in one
form or another when, as a thing, it enters into the clearing by which I am either
helped or hindered on my way toward realizing my projects "in-the-world."
5. Human beings are not things. A thing does not exist as a "being-in-the-world," since, as
a thing, it has no world. For a thing, nothing matters. Things can only matter for a human
being, since it is only in the world of the human being that things can have meaning.
Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to treat human beings as things,' such as with biology.
To provide an example: A corpse is a thing. A dead person is not a thing, but rather a
human being who no longer lives. One can treat a corpse like a thing, but not a dead
person. This is clear in terms of our relating to others. When I am with another human
being, I fully recongize that I exist as an other to the other person. However, with a thing,
say a rock, I do not exist for it for I fully recognize that the rock does not exist in the
sense that a human being exists. The rock is not "in-the-world."
6. Human beings are finite. As a "being-in-the-world," we recognize that death is a "not-

to-be-outstripped" (inevitable) possibility. Death as such is the possibility of the end of all
possibilities. Existence, therefore, is not limitless, but inevitably must face up to the
mystery of the "nothingness," that which lies beyond what can be known as a "being-in-
the-world." As a "being-towards-death," as Heidegger would say, the human being
becomes aware that she cannot have all the possibilities. Faced with the recognition of
one's finitude, one also recognizes that one is always faced with choices. In making a
choice, I simultaneously eliminate thousands of other possible choices. And, yet, making
such a choice, I can never know with absolute certainty that I have made the right'
choice. With this freedom to choose, I am faced with the responsibility for my own
existence.
7. Faced with such freedom, responsibility and finitude, I am confronted with anxiety and
guilt. I am anxious in the face of the fact that my choice may render a death to my world.
Further, in recognition that with my choice I eliminate other choices, I am guilty.'
8. Immediate experience has priority over theoretical assumptions.
9. All experience is both physical and mental: How this is so varies greatly from thinker
to thinker.
What is Existential-Phenomenology?
"Failure to see [the] intimate connection between phenomenology and existentialism will
result in thinking of existentialism as only a subjective reaction against systematic
thinnking and not as a philosophic movmenet with its own set of problems and methods."
"Whereas Husserl saw the task of transcendental phenomenology to be that o describing

the lived world from the viewpoint of a detached observer, existential phenomenology
insists that the observer cannot separate himself from the world. Existential
phenomenologists followed out more rigorously the implications of the doctrine of
intentionality of consciousness. Since consciousness is always consciousness of . . ., the
world is not only the correlate of consciousness but that without which there would be no
consciousness. Consequently, for existential phenomenology, the modalities of conscious
experience are also the ways one is in the world. This shift of the notion of the
Lebenswelt (lived-world) to the emphasis upon being-in-the-world expanded
phenomenology in a way that allowed it to consider the totality of human relationships in
the world in terms of the individual's concrete existence.
The very terminology itself, being-in-the-world, is existentialism's attempt to avoid

reference to human reality in terms either of a thinking substance or a perceiving subject
closed in upon itself facing physical objects which may or may not be knowable. Being-
in-the-world refers exclusively to human reality in contrast to nonhuman reality, and
although the specific terminology has varied among existentialists, common to all is the
insistence that human reality is situated in a concrete world-context. In short, man is only
man as a result of his actions which are worked out in the world. But there is still the
reciprocal relationship that phenomenology insists on: The total ensemble of human
actions--including thoughts, moods, efforts, emotions, and so forth--define the context in
which man situates himself. But, in turn, the world-context defines and sets limits to
human action.
Also central to an understanding of being-in-the-world is the existentialist insistence that

this is not a concept that arises only in reflection. Even prior to reflection upon one's
awareness of being-in-the-world there is already a prereflective grasp of the basic
modalities which are his ways of being-in-the-world. In prereflective experience, the
subject and world are not distinct; they are rather the givens of concrete experience which
can only be separated by a process of abstraction. Any reflection--whether theoretical or
practical--already assumes man's prereflective experience of the world and his activity in
the world. The word existence is usually used by existentialists to refer only to human
reality, for what it means to exist is to be always engaged in tasks in the world."
--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology , pp. 64-65
"Soren Kierkegaard is the founder of existentialism, but one could hardly call him a
phenomenologist. Husserl launched phenomenology, but was not an existentialist. Thus
there was a time when a distinction needed to be made between existentialism and
phenomenology. Today, however, we also speak of existential phenomenology or
phenomenological existentialism. So the question may be asked: what is the difference
between existentialism and phenomenology, and how did the unified movement of
existential-phenomenological thinking arise?
Let us point out first of all that there exists a certain harmony between Husserl and
Kierkegaard. It manifests itself in their common resistance to the atomistic way of
looking at man and things human. Man is not more or less like an atom. The way in
which Kierkegaard and Husserl resisted that view differs: Kierkegaard speaks of man,
while Husserl practically limits himself to consciousness or knowledge. Kierkegaard
conceived man as 'existence,' as a subject-in-relationship-to-God. Man is not a self-
sufficient spiritual 'atom' but, as a subject, is only authentically himself in his relationship
to the God of revelation. According to Kierkegaard, 'existence' is absolutely original and
irrepeatable, radically personal and unique. His emphasis on the uniqueness of 'existence'
implies that a thinker's assertions are applicable only to the thinker himself: in principle,
they do not claim validity for others. Thus, Kierkegaard's position is deliberately
anti-'scientific': it cannot do justice to the dimension of universality claimed by any
'science' (we do not use the term here in the sense of positive science). As a matter of
principle, Kierkegaard's way of thinkiing cannot go beyond monologue, the 'solitary
meditation.'
Kierkegaard's followers resolutely countered the reproach of being 'unscientific' by

saying that existentialism may not be a 'science.' Their objection to being called
'scientific' appeared to be largely based on a particular sense of the term 'scientific' as
used with respect to man. In scientism and in the philosophy of Hegel--man was
'scientifically' discussed in such a way that the original and unique character of human
subjectivity simply disappeared under verbiage. Yet this kind of speaking was supposed
to be 'scientific' par excellence. The need to reject a particular conception of 'scientific'
thinking, however, does not entitle anyone to claim that philosophical thinking about man
must not be 'scientific' in any sense whatsoever. The philosopher can hardly avoid the use
of universal and necessary judgments to indicate the universal and necessary structures of
man. In this sense he is 'scientific.'
This difficulty hardly existed for Husserl. Originally a mathematician and physicist,
Husserl, like Descartes, was disturbed ty the confusion of language and the welter of
opinions existing in philosophy. Clearly, philosophy was 'not yet a science,' and this made
Husserl launch his phenomenology as an attempt to make philosophy also a 'rigorous
science.' He was clever enough to avoid the trap of ascribing to philosophy the same
scientific character as belongs to the positive sciences. Philosophy cannot allow physics
or any other positive science to dictate its methods, for the simple reason that philosophy
is not a positive science. It has to become scientific in its own way in its expression of
intersubjective and objectively general truth.
To realize this ambitious plan, Husserl investigated man's consciousness or knowledge.

He conceived consciousness as intentional, oriented to something other than itself.
Whereas Husserl addressed himself to problems in the theory of knowledge, Kierkegaard
tried to answer theological-anthropological questions. The distinction between
existentialism and phenomenology consisted primarily in the different directions of their
concern.
The two streams of thought merged in Heidegger's Being and Time , where they served
as the foundation of the philosophy now known as 'existential phenomenology.'
Heidegger's philosophy of man does not lapse into the illusions of either idealism or
positivism. Influenced by the phenomenological theory of knowledge, existentialism gave
up its anti-scientific attitude. Phenomenology, on the other hand, enriched itself and
developed into a philosophy of man by borrowing many topics from Kierkegaard's
existentialism. In this way there arose the unified movement of existential-
phenomenological thinking of which Heidegger, Sartre--though not in every respect--
Merleau-Ponty and the Higher Institute of Philosophy of Louvain are the principal
exponents."
--William A. Luijpen & Henry J. Koren, A First Introduction to Existential
Phenomenology , pp. 18-21
"Heidegger accepts Husserl's definition of phenomenology: he will attempt to describe,
he says, without any obscuring preconceptions, what human existence is. But his
imagination could not let the matter go at this, for he noted that the world 'phenomenon'
comes from the Greek. The etymologies of words, particularly of Greek words, are a
passion with Heidegger; in his pursuit of them he has been accused of playing with
words, but when one realizes what deposits of truth mankind has let slip into its language
as it evolves, Heidegger's perpetual digging at words to get at their hidden nuggets of
meaning is one of his most exciting facets. In the matter of Greek particularly--a dead
language, whose whole history is now spread out before us--we can see how certain
truths are embedded in the language itself: truths that the Greek race later came to forget
in its thinking. The world "phenomenon"--a word in ordinary usage, by this time, in all
modern European languages--means in Greek 'that which reveals itself.' Phenomenology
therefore means for Heidegger the attempt to let the thing speak for itself. It will reveal
itself to us, he says, only if we do not attempt to coerce it into one of our read-made
conceptual strait-jackets. Here we get the beginning of his rejoinder to the Nietzscean
view that knowledge is in the end an expression of the Will to Power: according to
Heidegger we do not know the object by conquering and subduing it but rather by letting
it be what it is and, in letting it be, allowing it to reveal itself as what it is. And our own
human existence too, in its most immediate, internal nuances, will reveal itself if we have
ears to hear it."
--William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy , pp. 191-192
Summary:
In ways that, perhaps, are already clear to the reader, existentialism and phenomenology
lend themselves to one another quite nicely. With Heidegger, phenomenology, as the
study of mental acts (noesis) and their intentional correlates (noemata), becomes
grounded in his ontological analysis of Dasein (the human kind of being) as a "being-in-
the-world." Ultimately, Heidegger breaks from the Cartesian, subject-object split, still
operative in Husserl's thought; as Macann (1993) writes:
"In place of the Husserlian procedure which moves from the world of the natural attitude
up to a higher, transcendental plane with a view to bring to light the transcendental
structures constitutive of the objectivity of the entities encountered in the natural attitude,
we find an alternative procedure which moves from the ontic level down to a deeper,
ontological plane with a view to bringing to light the ontological structures constitutive of
the being of the entities in question." (From Macann's (1993) Four Phenomenological
Philosophers , p. 63).
Heidegger, like Husserl, begins with the human being's pre-reflective, pre-ontological,
lived understanding of the world, but, rather than seeking the essence of the phenomona,
like Husserl, Heidegger is concerned with the ontological ground of the phenomena; that
is, what makes the phenomena possible. With this methodology, Heidegger aims to ask
the question of Being, theontological, though he must begin with beings, the ontic.
Heidegger's method, therefore, is hermeneutic rather than transcendental. He holds that
the human being always already understand the meaning of Being, yet this has been
forgotten or "covered over." Beginning with the pre-ontological, Heidegger aims to
discover what the human being already knows pre- reflectively, yet which must be made
explicit through the method of phenomenology.
What is the relationship between hermeneutics and existential-phenomenology?
"Hermeneutics [is] the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that
starts with questions or interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly with
interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance in its historical
development and finally beame a philosophical position in 20th century German
philosophy. There are two competing positions in hermeneutics: whereas the first follows
Wilhelm Dilthey and sees interpretation or Verstehen as a method for the historical and
human sciences, the second follows Heidegger and sees it as an 'ontological event,' an
interaction between interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood.
Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native 'really' meant is the
typical problem for the first approiach. The interpretation of the law provides an example
for the second view, since the process of applying the law inevitably transforms it."
--Robert Audi (Ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy , p. 323
Methodological hermeneutics:
Methodological hermeneutics refers to hermeneutics as a human science, originating in

the work of Schleiermacher and Dilthey.
"Schleiermacher's analysis of understand and expression related to texts and speech

marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology.
This emphasis on methodology continues in 19th century historicism and culminates in
Dilthey's attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation, understood
as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of
others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge
of human beings not accessible to empiricst inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology
for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the 19th century
was the recognition of "the hermeneutic circle," first developed by Schleiermacher. The
circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the interpretation
of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular
in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the circle
of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped."
--Robert Audi (Ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy , pp. 323-324
Ontological hermeneutics:
Ontological hermeneutics finds its expression in the existential-phenomenological work

of Martin Heidegger, and is elaborated on by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer .
"In Being and Time, Heidegger attacked Dilthey's view that hermeneutics is one among a
variety of methods. In Heidegger's philosophy hermeneutics is constitutive of human
being (Dasien). 'The phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutic in the primordial
significatiuon of this word" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 62). Or as Charles Guignon (1983 ) has
put it:
In our everyday lives we grasp entitites in terms of a tacit understanding of what it is to

be, and we are constantly driven to make that understanding explicit and revise it on the
basis of passing encounters and collisions. The hermeneutic approach to fundamental
ontology, far from being a technique for uncovering meanings in an alient text, is just a
more rigorous and explicit version of the kind of movmenet toward clarity and depth
which makes up life itself. (p. 71)
. . . In the course of the existential analytic of Dasein, Heidegger (1962) advanced the
thesis that scientific activity takes place within a context of preunderstanding that derives
from a certain situatedness in the life-world and from participation in various activities
that include practical dealings with tools and implements. Such practical dealings and
understandings are achieved in the course of various customary, everyday transactions
with the environment. These occur within a taken-for-granted cultural and historical
background that consists of practices, habits, and skills, but cannot be spelled out
explicitly and comprehended because it is so pervasive that we cannot make it an object
of inquiry. This is the lived-world of what Heidegger called 'Everydayness.'
Heidegger argued that the fundamental mode of human existence--that on the basis of
which all other modes must be understood--is not detached knowing but rather, engaged
activity. In his view other modes of experience, like the disinterested contemplation of the
scientist or the phenomenologist, are preceded, both temporally and logically, by
everyday situations of involvement with the world. Thus, for Heidegger everydayness is
not just a possible mode of existence; it is a primordial foundation from which other
modes derive. And, according to him, a careful, unprejudiced investigation of a typical
everyday situation of activity shows the untenability of certain philosophical assumptions
that have pervaded Western philosophy at least since the time of Descartes, and have
persisted, albiet in disguised form, in the transcendental (as opposed to hermeneutic)
phenomenology of the philosopher Husserl. One of Heidegger's standard illustrations of
everydayness is the situation of a carpenter hammering a nail.
For Heidegger, the paradigmatic object in the human world is something like the
carpenter's hammer--that is, not a mere physical thing or a sensation or an idea
contemplated from a position of scientific or philosophical detachment (as the empiricist
philosophers would have it), but a tool that is used. Such a tool seems to occupy a kind of
middle realm that defies the traditional Cartesian and Platonic polarities. That is, it cannot
be equated with either the 'subject' or the 'object' of Cartesian philosophy, nor with the
'quality' or 'substance' of Platonic philosophy. Such objects of equipment are termed by
Heidegger ready-to-hand. An entirely different ontology is involved here. An object of
equipment that is ready-to-hand is the locus of both subject and object, self and world,
quality and substance. Thus, a hammer is not a 'hammer' by virtue of its place in the
human world. Nor is its quality of 'hammerness' something that comes from some
subjective inner space and gets 'projected' onto a material or sensory substrate. Thus, in
Heidegger's account both the subject-object distinction and the distinction between
quality (or meaning) and substance (be it material or sensory) turns out to be misleading.
In the lifeworld of engaged human activity, according to Heidegger, the hammer's
'hammerness' is experienced as out there in the world, inseparable from the substance it
imbues, and the external world is 'always already' imbued with human purpose and
meaning. The ready-to-hand mode is contrasted with another form that Heidegger called
present-at-hand. An object that is present-at-hand is not in a unified, integrated, field-like
relation with a subject, but rather corresponds to the isolated perceptual object that is
studied by a detached, uninvolved observer.
Just as the unity of subject and object is crucial to readiness-to-hand, so too is the quality
of complete interrelatedness. Heidegger emphasizes that a particular item of equipment
can never be understood in isolation from other objects that are ready-to-hand, since it
only exists as such in a purpose-imbued context of other equipment and their respective
uses. Thus, Heidegger emphasizes that the objects in one's world are not separate entities
but constituents of a unified field, a field that is itself constituted by the essential unity of
subject and object: A hammer is what it is because it fills a slot in the 'equipmental
context' of the human lifeworld.
In Heidegger's view, then, human being [Dasein] involves what might be called an
implicitly sensed 'ground,' 'horizon,' or 'clearing,' which is the context or totality within
which experience occurs. This horizon, which undercuts the Cartesian opposition of
subject and object, is in a sense the most important aspect of human existence, for it is the
very condition or possibility of anything at all appearing or being known. Moreover, it is
the only place where the being of either 'man' or 'world' is disclosed.
The Heideggerian view of human existence is, at its deepest level, opposite to that of the
early Dilthey, who took for granted the essential self-transparency or intelligibility of
consciousness. In the Heideggerian view, the conscious experience of another person or
culture cannot be ascertained in any objective sense. The horizonal character of Dasein
makes it impossible to retain faith in the transparency and certitude of phenomenological
description. Dasien can known its own being only in an approximate, tentative, and
indirect way--not by taking its own ordinary self-understanding at face value, nor through
some quasi-scientific method of direct intuition with access to certain and foundational
data. For on this view experinece is a kind of text-analogue that needs to be interpreted
(hence, Heidegger's is a hermeneutic phenomenology), an intrinsically obscure object
with which one must adopt an approximate and metaphoric, rather than quasi-scientific
mode of description."
--Robert L. Woolfolk, Louis A. Sass, & Stanley B. Messer, "Introduction to
Hermeneutics," In Messer, Sass & Woolfolk (Eds.), Hermeneutics and Psychological
Theory , pp. 12-18
What is the relationship between ontology and existential-phenomenology?
In his 1941 lecture, Grundbegriffe (Basic Concepts), Heidegger discusses the

"ontological difference" that is central to his thought.
Here it is summarized by Ernesto Grassi :
"Heidegger explains the essential difference between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes).
This is what is referred to as the 'ontological difference.' He demonstrates this essential
difference by pointing out the impossibility of speaking about Being (Sein) in the form of
a being (Seiendes) (in the sense of some object). Every attempt to define Being in this
way leads to contradictions.
An initial definition of Being, Heidegger observes, must maintain that Being is that which
is most 'empty' since it is predicated of all beings and, hence, is what is most common to
all things. The Being of each being is asserted with the verb 'is.' We say of a stone that it
'is,' of an animal, of a house, and of an attitude that it 'is.' Only by virtue of such an
'emptiness' is it possible for us to find Being in everything there is. Being does without
any particular distinction in order to appear within every being. In contrdiction to this
initial definition of Being as empty and common to everything, we are also forced to
recognize that Being can be defined in the opposite way, that is, as 'singular and one.' For
we are concerned only with the 'Being' of all the many different things that are. Each such
thing is to be understood in terms of 'Being.' Hence, instead of characterizing Being as
common the way we did before, Being is also the opposite of this, namely singular,
because Being is everywhere, among beings, 'the same.'
A second definition of Being, according to Heidegger, purports that Being is 'what is most
understandable' of all to us because it is only upon the basis of Being that beings can be
conceived of or spoken about at all. Wherever and whenever beings are experienced, we
also take account of Being because Being is connected with our understanding of beings
everywhere and at every moment. In this way Being proves to be what is most readily
understood. But here too we are faced with a contradiction because we must confront this
definition with the fact that Being is also waht is 'most hidden or concealed' (das
Verborgenste). Every attempt to say what Being is forces us to define it as a being among
other beings which means that we necesarily fail to say what is is asBeing. Being remains
hidden as Being and this 'staying hidden' belongs to Being itself.
Heidegger's third definition of Being is directed to the insight that Being is what can be
'most relied upon' (das Verlaeslichte). For how are we even to doubt particular beings in
any way, if it is not already certain that we can rely on what it means to be? We refer most
frequently to Being since it is named in every noun, adjective, and verb. This expression
of what is, is not an expression of an agreement (Zu-sage) to each particular situation, but
rather something that 'must already be given before' (Vorgabe) because it is only by virtue
of this expression that it is possible to name beings.
This definition of Being is also connected to the opposite insight that Being is what is
most abysmal (das Abruendigste) and as such is 'waht is least of all reliable' (das
Unverlaesslkichtste). Every attempt to define Being--and so to logically fixate it--fails.
Being, therefore, does not stand firmly as something upon which we can build. Moreover,
Being is what is 'most silent' (das Verschwiegenste). Every assertion about Being goes
astray becuase, by the very process of assertaion, Being is relegated to the status of 'a
being.' This going astray is unavoidable. On the other hand, Being is what is 'most often
expressed' in language since, in every assertion about beings, Being is also spoken about.
It is therefore the wod that breaks the silence.
According to Heidegger's fifth definition of Being, it is what has been 'most of all
forgotten,' because the questions that man has raised are directed to beings and not to
Being, that is, they are directed to nature, man, and all of those things that affect us
directly and urge themselves upon us. But even this definition is contradicted insofar as
Being is actually that which is 'most of all remembered.' For if Being were completely
eradicated from our recollection, then beings could neither be met with nor asserted as
Being. That urgent necessity that we meet with in the experience of things is rooted in the
claim that Beings make upon us (in language: Anspruch des Seins).
Finally, Being turns out to be involved in one last contradiction, for it proves to be
simultaneously 'what is most necessitating' (Noetigendste) as well as what is 'most
liberating' (Befreiendste); it is only by virtue of the claim of Being (Anspruch) that the
Being of beings is revealed. Since the subject and object are both beings, they therefore
confront each other only through the liberation of Being, that is, through the freedom of
Being. More specifically, man comes to himself as a subject in relationship to an object
through the liberating action of Being."
--Ernesto Grassi, Heidegger and Renaissance Humanism , pp. 31-35
What is the difference between Heidegger's "ontological difference" and negative

theology?
"The essential different between Heidegger's philosophy of unhiddenness and negative

theology as found in Dionysius and John of the Cross consists in tehir completely
different starting points. They understand divine Being as a Being in and for itself,
outside of history, so that it emerges primarily through the theophany of a mystic.
Heidegger, however, claims that Being emerges through the 'clearing' of different, purely
historical spaces in which particular gods, institutions, and arts appear historically. For
negative theology, as well as for Heidegger, Being (God) is 'sublime,' but in a
fundamentally different sense. In negative theology the sublime and elevated nature of
God is defined in the sense that it finally can be made visible only by relinquishing those
capacities (rational knowledge, memory and will) that make possible the 'day' of rational
life.
For Heidegger, too, Being is not exhausted by beings and so Being is sublime and
elevated in this sense for him. It remains hidden in its essence in its revelation of beings.
But for Heidegger the rational process of thought remains necessary in the sphere of
beings--where Being reveals itself--insofar as this process 'fixes' the order of beings. The
giving of grounds establishes and defines beings as the particular things found here and
now that announce Being. Beings belong to the revelation of Being and must be 'held to'
in their particular historical form, but always in the sign of the 'opening' of Being. Only
by remembering Being is the way to the 'new' open, the way to hope.
Our success or failure to hold ourselves open to the new gives us the possibilities for
beginning or ending historical process. 'When the unhiddenness of Being does not present
itself, it dismisses the slow disappearance of all that can offer healing to beings. This
disappearance of what heals takes with it the openness of the holy. The closed nature of
the holy darkens the luminescence of the divine' (Heidegger, Nietzsche, pt. 1 , p. 394)."
--Ernesto Grassi, Heidegger and Renaissance Humanism , pp. 90-91
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Heidegger vs Husserl: Phenomenological choices
In the course of my research towards developing a framework for a Visual

Communication Phenomenological Methodology, I have now followed literature back to
Nursing sources. Several recommended papers have been useful, and in turn they have
also pointed to other possibly useful nursing sources.
Lopez and Willis (2004) help to clarify the different philosophical underpinnings to a
Phenomenological study, and the importance of positioning the study clearly within one
of the two philosophical schools of Phenomenology.
I'm basing my study on Moustakas' (1994) guidelines, but those are merely generic and
non-partisan. As Lopez and Willis state "implementing a method without an examination
of its philosophical basis can result in research that is ambiguous in its purpose, structure,
and findings" (p726). So I will need to position my research methodology firmly within
either the eidetic or hermeneutic schools.
Eidetic Phenomenology is descriptive of the phenomena, and is Husserlian in its

philosophical roots. Hermeneutic Phenomenology is interpretive and owes its
philosophical roots to Heidegger, a student of Husserl. Where the importance of choosing
the philosophical school for a study resides is in how its findings are generated and used.
Both schools deal with this differently. Hence the importance of not being generic in the
design of the methodology, but philosophically specific.
In Eidetic (Husserlian) research it is important for the researcher to absolutely 'bracket

out' prior personal knowledge and biases, to achieve "transcendental subjectivity". This
results in the researcher holding in "abeyance ideas, preconceptions, and personal
knowledge when listening to and reflecting on the lived experiences of participants"
(p728). From these lived experiences features or essences that are common under
Phenomenological scrutiny emerge that represent the phenomena's true identity. This is so
so that a generalised description can be made, through a foundationalist approach, with a
belief (reflecting scientific values) that these essences "can be extracted from lived
experiences without a consideration for context" (p728).
In the Hermeneutic philosophical school (or even movement) its application has
predominantly been in Theology, and its purpose is to go beyond mere descriptions of
core concepts, or essences, "to look for meanings embedded in common life practices"
(p728) to bring out what is normally hidden in human experience. Its focus therefore is
on what humans experience rather than know within what Heidegger termsbeing-in-the-
world. This situates the experience within a context of alife-world, which all sounds
comfortably similar to what Dourish (2004) and Suchman (1987) discuss in part of their
respective theses.
As Lopez and Willis discuss "Heidegger asserted that humans are embedded in their
world to such an extent that subjective experiences are inextricably linked with social,
cultural, and political contexts" (p729). In Hermeneutic Phenomenology its foundational
aspect is on the "interpretation of the narratives provided by participants in relation to
various contexts" (p729), meaning that unlike Eidetics, the context remains crucial to
understanding through interpretation. A fundamental divergence in approaches between
the two schools lies in the act of 'bracketing'. In Hermeneutic Phenomenology making
any preconceptions on the part of the researcher explicit and explaining their use within
the research has a long tradition. Absolute 'bracketing out' that prior knowledge is
inconsistent with an interpretive approach. This is a crucial difference I need to build into
MY methodology.
Finally Lopez and Willis summarise that an interpretative approach is "useful in

examining contextual features of experiences that might have direct relevance to practice.
Moreover, a critical hermeneutic framework can enable the researcher to bring to light
hidden features of an experience that would be overlooked in a purely descriptive
approach" (p734). They urge for careful consideration of which school to choose to
inform the analysis. Naturally I feel my framework approach to the methodology is more
interpretative, and that will be more useful within design (more on this in a future post).
References used:
DOURISH, P. (2004). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
LOPEZ, K.A., and WILLIS, D.G. (2004) Descriptive Versus Interpretive
Phenomenology: Their Contributions To Nursing Knowledge. Qualitative Health
Research, 14(5), pp726-735.
SUCHMAN, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
................
Is Heidegger's departure from Husserl due to Heidegger's turn to metaphysics? If so,

doesn't that make Heidegger's critique of Husserl irrelevant?
Husserl makes it quite clear that phenomenology is not metaphysics, and as such Husserl
only tends to the structures that idealism provides, and the incorporation of real
experience into said structures that could lead us towards a transcendental
intersubjectivity. Husserl's phenomenological reduction allows existence to be whatever it
may be, and it would not change the structures of such consciousness. So Heidegger's
metaphysical tendencies makes his criticism completely irrelevant since it comments on
Husserl's science as though it were a philosophy, when pure phenomenology is designed
and intended not to be a philosophy, but rather the science of philosophy which is a world
of difference. Or did I get this all wrong?
Very briefly: for Heidegger, being is as it appears, therefore phenomenology is the same
as ontology. For Husserl, the correlation between phenomena and reality is a problem that
does not exist for Heidegger. It is not true that Husserl merely describes the contents of
consciousness: he brackets the natural attitude that adscribes an external correlation to
phenomena and hopes to regain the outside through a study of pure phenomena (eg, The
Idea of Phenomenology); therefore Husserl does have ontological aims. Both Husserl and
Heidegger have ontological aims, and have a radical disagreement on whether
being=phenomena.
Apr 21, 2014
Ronnen Paytan
Ronnen Paytan Independent Researcher
Hi Mathew,
The bottom line first: I believe that the words 'departure' and 'turn' do not necessarily
reflect the true nature of the penomenological perspectives on phenomenology of Husserl
and Heidegger in their final form. The word may be more reflective of the natural need to
differentiate and label in order to avoid complexity.
As Heidegger once said, we need to be very selective in our use of words as, rightly or
wrong, they frame our mindset and tunnel our thinking. You used in your question the
words 'departure' and 'turn' that are part of the natural scholarly attitude toward
phenomenology, at least from the historical 'who said what to whom' perspective. As
suggested by Fink, Husserl's latest student, and practically embraced by Husserl in his
last years and by Heidegger after the war, phenomenology in its core is the transcendence
of methodology regardless its scientific, mathematical, philosophical, religious, cultural,
political, and/or artistic origins. This means that phenomenology and phenomenological
discussions are better off applying phenomenological practices on themselves. As
Heidegger mentioned in the last pages of being and time, phenomenology is well suited
to vicious circle type problems, we just need by trial and error to find the entry point.
Furthermore, as documented by Gdel in his philosophical oriented works, unlike
mathematically-oriented methodologies that break by necessity when applied on vicious
circle problems, phenomenology excels when applied on itself and from the perspective
of this discussion, it would be better to conduct a phenomenological investigation on
phenomenology in order to get to an acceptable answer.
This cannot be done here and must be done individually by each interested individual, but
here is the rudementary and incomplete set of cues that I can provide to the discussion
following my own 5 years journey:
1. Husserl's and Heidegger's works should be regarded in their whole as part of the
scholarly milieu of their time and not as isolated components.
2. Both had initial fallacies or incompletenesses that were discovered in later iterations
and refinements of applying their emerging views of phenomenology on the views
themselves: Husserl got into phenomenology while researching the mathematical natural
attitude and Heidegger was initially interested in the theological natural attitude from a
Germanic perspective - both, for different reasons, expanded gradually their horizons of
interest.
3. The books that they published reflected their views at specific times and were partly
shaped by and were subject to the political and sociocultural turmoil of the first half of
the 20th century - in some cases their notes may better representatives of their thoughts
than their books.
4. Heidegger's and Husserl's major disagreement of the 1920s-1930s regarding the

interrelation between the natural and the transcendental attitudes faded as both scholars
understood the need for continuous process of forming and unforming applied on a
specific topic of interest while maintaining simultaneous awareness of the transcendental
and the natural.
5. Heidegger's critique of Husserl in his die grundprobleme der phnomenologie in 1927

relates to the early purely transcendental views of Husserl and not his more mature views.
6. I recommend for further reading the following books: (a) Husserl: 'analyses concerning
passive and active syntheses', 'the sixth cartesian meditation' (edited/written with/by Fink
and therefore controvertial, but nevertheless very important), 'the fifth' and 'the crisis'
(read again after the previous books were read); and (b) Heidegger: 'the basic problems',
'what is called thinking', 'the principle of reason', and 'identity and difference'.
Not sure if it is clear enough, 100 years of phenomenology prove that, unless inhumanly
complex structures are used, words are limited in their ability to express concepts of
being.
HTH,
Ronnen
Jul 9, 2013
ALL ANSWERS (27)
Mathew Cohen
Mathew Cohen The University of Calgary
Because Husserl makes no claims to existence and starts with what we know, how is it
possible that anyone - namely Heidegger/Sartre - can refute this position? After all, isn't
any claim or knowledge about existence-of-being presuppose one to abide by the 'logic'
that Husserl is uncovering? To refute anything that Husserl says by ontological reasoning
one first has to show how one is able to arrive at said 'knowledge' from a sound base?
Husserl's sound base is Descarte's "I think therefore I am" for any doubting of this claim
presupposes the very claim it means to object hence rendering itself to contradiction and
thus false.
Any claims about existence no matter how convincing they are, no matter how obvious
the axioms, have to follow a particular structure of relations of consciousness between the
noematic-noetic phases, the doxic, modalities and so forth. i believe Husserl means to say
that it is based on this structure of consciousness that one can be made aware of
existential features and arrive at existential claims, and therefore because it rests on these
structures that were built apodeitically it serves only to show the flexibility and strength
of pure phenomenology not its weakness.
To speak of existence here and now is to point to something that can only be known in
terms of something ideal, and thus anything truly KNOWN follows a phenomenological
construct. And in order to do that, Husserl's phenomenology has to be expanded upon
from where he left off.
Anyways, since I am reading the above works independently it is hard for me to get
feedback on whether I understand it well enough or not, so I had put forward these
questions to the community to help verify or challenge my understanding. So by no
means do I assume I am an expert. In fact, I believe myself to be the opposite, and I am in
need of direction.
Jul 3, 2013
Herman Schurmans
Herman Schurmans Werkgroep 18e Eeuw
Show metaphysics out by the door, the metaphysical reenters by the window.
Jul 4, 2013
Neal O'Donnell
Neal O'Donnell Fort Hare University
I wonder if it could be seen to be the child going off in a new direction. While Heidegger
and the later phenomenologists may be seen to be refuting the master, is this the case, I
ask. Is it not more a question of adding new dimensions to Husserl's groundbreaking
work?
Jul 4, 2013
Ken Casey
Ken Casey Independent Researcher
I know just enough about Husserl to be dangerous--however regarding Edith Stein and
some of the phenomenological school--I am on better ground. I think Husserl's position is
ever evolving and that many of his early students Stein, Reinach etc felt that Husserl's
abandonment of metaphysical realism (sometime between Ideen 1 and Ideen 2 which
Stein was helping to edit) was the cause of a big philosophical break with many of
Husserl's students. I learned a lot from Alasdair MacIntyre's book on Edith Stein--it is
more about ealry phenomenology than it is about Edith Stein.
I guess what I am saying is that the presupposition of your question fails to distinguish
between early and late Husserl. Early Husserl may have been a metaphysical realist and
saw phenomenology as having a complex dialectical relation to metaphysics.
Jul 4, 2013
Jozef Piacek
Jozef Piacek Comenius University in Bratislava
Herman issue is important in terms of otherness Husserl's and Heidegger's philosophy:
both are metaphysical philosophy in the traditional sense, each one is different, original.
Heidegger's philosophy was an original philosophy, although Heidegger came from
Husserl. The problem is a criticism to be replaced by syncriticism, i. e. by nonreductive
bringing both philosophies in relationship. Heidegger by his critique of Husserl only
made oneself distinguished from Husserl; Heidegger created a different philosophy and
sense has only to compare the two.
http://www.jozefpiacek.info/2013/06/syncriticism-summary/
Syncriticism (summary) | Pomocn slovnk filozofa
slovenska filozofia, synkriticizmus, kultura, civilizacia, kriza civilizacie, kriza, laska,
smrt, vychova, bezcasie, atemporalita
Jul 4, 2013
Anatoli Tchoussov
Anatoli Tchoussov Lomonosov Moscow State University
it seems to me that this question needs to define an ontological (and ontical - too)
difference between physics and metaphysics;
such a difference can be made by a definition of sorts of givenness (Arten der

Gegebenheiten);
it's a pity, but those differences (and differances too) were not explicitly stated nor by
Husserl nor by Heidegger (imho)
Jul 4, 2013
Mathew Cohen
Right, but by the very admission that you and Arten der Gegenbenheiten indicate that the
difference can be made by sorts of givenness, is parallel to the very noema that Husserl
talks about as arising out of its noetic correlate. In other words, whatever meaning that is
given from a particular phenomena is based on a particular, or a set of particular, noetic
phases that allow it to be meant as 'such and such'. Each 'givenness' has its manner in
which it is given. So while one may say that Husserl is making an existential claim as to
the relationship between the noetic and noema, I believe Husserl would say that they only
exist insofar as they are built upon other noetic and noematic relationships that ultimately
can be deconstructed to ego cogito ego sum and the manner which this is experienced.
And while I agree that Husserl does not explicitly state these ontilogical differences
between physics and metaphysics (from my preliminary assessments of reading L.I, Ideas
I, and Cart Med, and Phantasy, Image Cons, and Memory - I have yet to read his other
books) I feel it is because he has to spend the bulk of his time like Moses "mapping out
the desert" so to speak, and is unable to precisely to lead us into the "promised land". So
much time is spent defending and articulating what he means that he fails to make
progress in bringing us to the familiar terrain of philosophy and empirical sciences.
So basically I am saying that Husserl would probably agree with you that he doesn't
spend a lot of time on this, but I believe he would also say that his sole purpose was to
show that the difference CAN be become "known" by phenomenology. Thus if even
existence may contradict our facts, Husserl would have little care whatsoever about this,
because he is only interested in understanding what we can and how we can KNOW (ex:
how we can know of metaphysical propositions), which is different from knowing what
exists. [And while this threatens to position him ever so dangerously close to the dualism
that he objects to, I acknowledge that it does and that I lack the ability to articulate myself
out of this conundrum to the same level of conviction that Husserl is able to do.]
All in all, I guess, I make the argument: that anything that bases itself on a metaphysical
premise cannot be considered to be a phenomenology (as by Husserl's standards). And I
am looking for either affirmation or criticism regarding this because I believe my entire
understanding on Husserlian thought rests on this. And as I get sucked into more of my
own world and ways I would like to know if I have been navigating the terrain accurately
or if I am way off course. Much thanks to all of your contributions so far. I look forward
to reading more.
Jul 4, 2013
Anatoli Tchoussov
Anatoli Tchoussov Lomonosov Moscow State University
@Mathew: m.b., in a development of a Rickert's direction, the early Heidegger (1915)
had distinguished 3 realms of being (such ideas routed also in L.I. (1900-1901) but are
more explicitly made in L.I.(1912));
imho, the main purpose of Husserl and Heidegger was laid in a sphere of construction of
a world (as an unique construction);
but their constructions - for me - are non-satisfying (but very important)

Jul 4, 2013
Yuling Yeh
Yuling Yeh Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages
I have a neuroscience doctor friend who once told me, she would never marry to a
personal who also possess a PhD degree because 'too much opinions" simply about
everything and non-sense!, or, she perhaps would be willing to marry to a PhD guy who
obtains totally different academic specialty.
Jul 4, 2013
Ananda Mishra
Ananda Mishra Banaras Hindu University
One must not judge a philosopher by what he claims but only by what he actually does.In
spite of all their claims Husserl or even Sartre were trapped into metaphysical
speculation.A clear idealistic tendency is visible everywhere in Husserl's later
works.Similarly contrary to his claim Sartre remained realist throughout his career.
However, Heidegger-Sartre objections to the Husserlian phenomenology are valid I think.
Husserl presupposes "the ghost of Ego" which is fully illegitimate as phenomenoly
claims to centre only on that which appears to consciousness and not to that which
grounds from within.It was in fact a return to the old metaphysical speculation.On the
other hand Heidegger's fundamental ontology could better explain that the the theory of
intentionality does not permit us to bracket any thing which is given to our
consciousness.And hence the worldly existence cannot be bracketed.
Jul 5, 2013
Herman Schurmans
Herman Schurmans Werkgroep 18e Eeuw
Joseph, I assume we all have to learn from a master. This relationship is much as one
between father and son. Do we have to kill the father to take his place? But it often
hapens in philosophy, and elswere. A good fat(her wishes to be surpassed by his son. This
is a most tragic task for most uf us. So we can be a good son, and a good or bad succesor.
The kind of philosopher you are depends on the kind of man you are (Fichte) . .
Jul 5, 2013
Neal O'Donnell
Neal O'Donnell Fort Hare University
this is turning out to be a rather interesting debate. I agree with Herman in that there is a
sense of satisfaction in watching a son (or daughter, in my case) do better. I also agree
with Ananda: it is extremely difficult to enter into true 'epoche'; however, being conscious
of one's background is helpful in being open to the discussion, it is also a huge learning
curve, as I found when doing psychotherapy with sexually abused women.
In my Heideggerian studies (on the relevance of care in medicine and nursing) I am
finding that it is essential to read Husserl and his students (Stein, for instance) in order to
'see' what Heidegger is on about. But reading Husserl does not necessarily entail studying
him. It is background like reading Brentano and Nietzsche.
Jul 5, 2013
Mathew Cohen
So would I be correct in generalizing most of the answers here as saying: "Mathew, you
cannot have such a restrictive umbrella that determines what is and is not
phenomenology. Phenomenology is like everything else. It grew out of a set of thoughts,
and gives birth to another set of thoughts, which in turn go on and on and on. Husserl
arrived at his position because of his history and ethos, and therefore his phenomenology
does not deserve privilege amongst the rest. To try to excise out only that which is his
phenomenology is like brain surgery and will likely cause damage to both what is
phenomenological, and all its surroundings since they are all attached. It is simply part of
a body of work, and therefore the question about distinguishing his from others is both
trivial (insofar that everyone's can be expediently distinguished from others) and is also
invalid in itself (since in truth it bares the DNA of its sire and cannot be separated
therefrom) ."
If this is the meaning that everyone seems to be articulating then it is one that I can fully
respect, and slowly coming to agreement with - (notwithstanding, there being a hesitation
I feel, as though I am missing some other argument). Thank you all for your participation
and help. Please do not hesitate to continue to respond. I have gained so much, and look
forward to more of your insights and experience.
Jul 5, 2013
William Springer
William Springer University of Texas at El Paso
Merleau-Ponty, I think, had it right. What Husserl's epoche (bracketing) shows is that it
cannot be done. It reminds me of Bertrand Russel's address to his fellow philosophers--
he is convinced that solipsism is true, but out of respect for his listeners he will believe
that they are listening to what he is saying. I think as Heidegger did say, that the scandal
of philosophy is not that it tried and failed to solve the problem of the external world but
that it regarded it as a problem. The very fact that I continue to write what I am writing
right now assumes that I am doing something that others will be able to read and discuss.
Humans do communicate hence they can share their thoughts. I believe that his apparent
mystery is generated by philosophy.
We try to understand vision as if it were caused by "impressions" for example. We do not
realize that this is the beginning of a pseudo physics, which will not provide us with any
real understanding . I am as certain that my visual consciousness EXISTS as I am that it
would be a calamity for a me if I were blind. Visual consciousness is visual being-in-the-
world. This is the human condition and I think it seems mysterious because we try
unwittingly to understand it as if it were explainable as part of physical nature .
Consciousness is as consciousness does-- my visual being-in -the-world is simply a
natural condition of a living human being. If this is metaphysics, then we are
metaphysical beings. To deny the reality of visual consciousness is a world historical
absent mindedness.
Jul 7, 2013
Mathew Cohen
Thank you for your post, as it raises some important questions, but unfortunately the
questions that it invokes in me threaten to vere the discussion way off course (not that
your comments were off course, but rather the questions I now have will spur new
discussions, and as I would like to learn from all the contributors here I would like to
keep the discussions linear so that I know what subject/question people are referring
if/when they answer). So you should be able to find and answer these questions through
my profile. I look forward to hearing your opinion on the questions below.
Question (1): What is the point of Husserl's epoche? how is it supposed to accomplish
this?
Question (2): Is it possible to perform Husserl's epoche? and why/(not)?
... not to sound to repetitive, but for those who wish to continue to contribute to this
discussion please do, but know that i have two other threads now as well.
Jul 7, 2013
William Springer
William Springer University of Texas at El Paso
I would comment as follows: Question (1): What is the point of Husserl's epoche? how is
it supposed to accomplish this?
Question (2): Is it possible to perform Husserl's epoche? And why/(not)

To question (1) I would comment :My Husserl scholarship, if it can be called that , is very
rusty. I have not read him for years so when I venture to say anything about the epoche I
may be speaking nonsense. As I recall Husserl was adamant about trying to put all
presuppositions on hold. As I understood it he regarded any presuppositions not only a
danger to his pure phenomenology but an outright rejection of it. If I am not mistaken the
terms bracketing and reduction" are other names for this suspension (epoche) of
presuppositions. Husserl believed he was starting something radically new in philosophy.
Since Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and so many others owe so much to him, and
hence to much philosophy in the western world he was probably right.
To Question (2) I would comment: In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty makes some acute observations about the reduction. What I gathered
from what he said there is that the reduction is anything but a return to idealism for
instead of making the world immanent to the subject it teaches us be filled with wonder at
its being there for us. Most memorable sentences for me in that preface were that the
most important lesson which the reduction teaches is the impossibility of a complete
reduction. and above all that Heideggers being-in-the-world appears only against the
background of the phenomenological reduction .
I would put it this way. The natural attitude is that the world is there just as I find it, and
the epoche done effectively brings to our attention that the astonishing fact is that being a
human being is being someone who makes the world be seen, and heard , and touched,
and tasted and cared about, and known. Human beings are an uncanny animal that are
barely beginning to know what they are. Human embodied consciousness is a tremendous
reality-- awesome, grand, noble, pathetic, brutal. Sadly, for the most part Dasein ist
Verfallen as Heidegger observed which is the truth at the heart of that the myth of the
Fall. Can humanity save itself?
Jul 8, 2013
Ronnen Paytan
Hi Mathew,
The bottom line first: I believe that the words 'departure' and 'turn' do not necessarily
reflect the true nature of the penomenological perspectives on phenomenology of Husserl
and Heidegger in their final form. The word may be more reflective of the natural need to
differentiate and label in order to avoid complexity.
As Heidegger once said, we need to be very selective in our use of words as, rightly or
wrong, they frame our mindset and tunnel our thinking. You used in your question the
words 'departure' and 'turn' that are part of the natural scholarly attitude toward
phenomenology, at least from the historical 'who said what to whom' perspective. As
suggested by Fink, Husserl's latest student, and practically embraced by Husserl in his
last years and by Heidegger after the war, phenomenology in its core is the transcendence
of methodology regardless its scientific, mathematical, philosophical, religious, cultural,
political, and/or artistic origins. This means that phenomenology and phenomenological
discussions are better off applying phenomenological practices on themselves. As
Heidegger mentioned in the last pages of being and time, phenomenology is well suited
to vicious circle type problems, we just need by trial and error to find the entry point.
Furthermore, as documented by Gdel in his philosophical oriented works, unlike
mathematically-oriented methodologies that break by necessity when applied on vicious
circle problems, phenomenology excels when applied on itself and from the perspective
of this discussion, it would be better to conduct a phenomenological investigation on
phenomenology in order to get to an acceptable answer.
This cannot be done here and must be done individually by each interested individual, but
here is the rudementary and incomplete set of cues that I can provide to the discussion
following my own 5 years journey:
1. Husserl's and Heidegger's works should be regarded in their whole as part of the
scholarly milieu of their time and not as isolated components.
2. Both had initial fallacies or incompletenesses that were discovered in later iterations
and refinements of applying their emerging views of phenomenology on the views
themselves: Husserl got into phenomenology while researching the mathematical natural
attitude and Heidegger was initially interested in the theological natural attitude from a
Germanic perspective - both, for different reasons, expanded gradually their horizons of
interest.
3. The books that they published reflected their views at specific times and were partly
shaped by and were subject to the political and sociocultural turmoil of the first half of
the 20th century - in some cases their notes may better representatives of their thoughts
than their books.
4. Heidegger's and Husserl's major disagreement of the 1920s-1930s regarding the

interrelation between the natural and the transcendental attitudes faded as both scholars
understood the need for continuous process of forming and unforming applied on a
specific topic of interest while maintaining simultaneous awareness of the transcendental
and the natural.
5. Heidegger's critique of Husserl in his die grundprobleme der phnomenologie in 1927

relates to the early purely transcendental views of Husserl and not his more mature views.
6. I recommend for further reading the following books: (a) Husserl: 'analyses concerning
passive and active syntheses', 'the sixth cartesian meditation' (edited/written with/by Fink
and therefore controvertial, but nevertheless very important), 'the fifth' and 'the crisis'
(read again after the previous books were read); and (b) Heidegger: 'the basic problems',
'what is called thinking', 'the principle of reason', and 'identity and difference'.
Not sure if it is clear enough, 100 years of phenomenology prove that, unless inhumanly
complex structures are used, words are limited in their ability to express concepts of
being.
HTH,
Ronnen
Jul 9, 2013
Cj Nev
Cj Nev Northwestern University
Useful and excellent synopsis, Ronnen, thank you. What I believe would simplify
your/the admittedly "inhumanly complex structures," would be (under publication in
2014) the very self-referential or iteration, fractal structure of nature or of all (yet-to-be
proven) phenomena, for which Husserl has laid the groundwork on the method, drawing
transcendentally from both the sciences and philosophy as no one ever has before or
since. Further expounded upon, a fractal approach would then allow for a valid, even
concrete/tangible, so-called entry point (again to be published in 2014), which I have
found Heidegger has unfortunately only naysayed and then unoriginally redundantly in
merely a scholarly fashion gone off (setting back I am sorry to say) in the usual self-
fulfilling vicious circles with no entry point to add.
Jul 9, 2013
Mathew Cohen
Ronnen,
Thank you for your analysis, and recommended readings. I had Fink in mind for my next
reading, but also Husserls Arithmetic. And I have Crisis on my shelf but will do as you
recommend and read it afterwards.
I am in complete agreement with what you spoke about regarding doing it individually,
and nor do I deny that my use of "departure" to explain Heidegger's position represents
the naturalistic attitude. My own "crisis", and reason for asking this question, came about
in reading up on phenomenological research and being confounded by the methods that to
me seem so far removed. As you said, phenomenology is to be conducted individually.
Understanding this, but reading contradicting research studies like Giorgi and Ashforth I
felt compelled to bring this discussion forward. Moreover, to compound my confound,
since Giorgi and Ashforth seem to prefer Heidegger's "rendition" of phenomenology, I
thought I would read into Heidegger a bit more (Being in Time - quite quickly however)
and instead of finding the Husserl and Heidegger in opposition, I found they were really
not incompatible at all. It seemed that Ashforth and Giorgi (among others) seemed to be
reading into Husserl's statements and Heidegger's criticism from a metaphysical stand
point. Thus the word "departure" and "metaphysical" in the question only served to bring
to a head what I felt was the interpretation of thinkers in line with the above researchers.
So, this is a long way of saying your critique brings me relief.
Lastly, your comments regarding the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl make
sense to me. I will continue to hold those points as a frame of reference as I continue to
study their work ( I have so much more to go). And your words about using
phenomenology for self-referential matters resonates deeply with me. It is out of a
process I have created called the Dendrite Process that I am now back in school to
formally develop it. It was in trying to find a theoretical framework that included the
merits of geometry, topology, and n-euclidean space that I fell in love with Husserl.
And with that said, CJ, I'm quite fascinated with fractals for perhaps similar purposes.
Can you recommend any readings by any chance?
Thanks for both your contributions and help.

Jul 9, 2013
Cj Nev
Mathew, Because fractals are new on the scene (1970s), the literature is sparse and
gradually growing here and there, so off the top I would recommend references you may
already be familiar with:
(a) PBS Nova-Fractals-Hunting the Hidden Dimension at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemPnZn54Kw
(b) The father of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot, website

http://users.math.yale.edu/mandelbrot/ or http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/
(c) Challenging yet hugely worthwhile, Manfred Schroeder's "Fractals, Chaos, Power
Laws"
(d) Also, an excellent comprehensive account -- Kenneth Falconer's "Fractal Geometry:

Mathematical Foundations [of] and Applications"
(e) Lastly, for a primary source I should not fail to mention Benoit Mandelbrot's "Fractals
and Chaos"
The field of fractals needs to be expanded upon for solving problems present maths
cannot cohesively solve (e.g., see Reimann Hypothesis at claymath.org, Lecture by Jeff
Vaaler at the University of Texas (video)). I look forward to reading your views and
findings as you pursue the topic, as true it is most fascinating.
Jul 10, 2013
Ronnen Paytan
Hi Cj,
Husserl described phenomena at 3 levels: the constituted world (subconscious/conscious

passive/active structures of awareness stemming from specific life experience of a
specific individual), the structures of the lifeworld (superposition of constituted worlds
within a specific sociocultural network), and the natural attitude (superposition of all
lifeworlds in specific distinctive aggregate of sociocultural networks). This fairly
complex superstructure is hard to explain and grasp, and its best partially equivalent is the
current concept of unstructured big data clusters. If you are interested in the analysis of
the lifeworld, I would refer you to the notes of Schutz who developed them in interaction
with Husserl. I have an unedited text for a book or series of articles on the subject.
nevertheless, I will be interested to learn about your suggested application of fractal

theory as a representation/visualization means. Yet, I encourage you to learn more about
previous attempts from Husserl to present time to use mathematical methods in areas they
inherently cannot address (i.e. Gdel's work). The dimensional modeling, either fractional
(fractals) or natural (integer multidimensional) most probably falls under this category
Thanks for the note,
Ronnen
Jul 10, 2013
Cj Nev
Dear Ronnen, Refreshing to hear your derivation of Husserl's work, which will prove
helpful to me and I will use (print and place with Husserl's 'stuff') when I return to
include him in construction of a publication I am working on presently, due out in 2014.
Thank you as well for pointing out Husserl's efforts concerning time that I will also
incorporate as I go, corresponding fractals with, as you well explain, Husserl's third level
of phenomena: "The natural attitude (superposition of all lifeworlds in specific distinctive
aggregate of sociocultural networks)." Thanks also for your reference to the notes of
Schutz and for appreciating/your interest and encouragement in the possible connection
between fractals and Husserl's I consider breakthrough work. The "fractal theory" would
not stop there, it is merely a viable means that supports concrete/tangible unification of
many in fact all seemingly dichotomous phenomena.
Jul 14, 2013
Germn Bula
Germn Bula Universidad de La Salle
Very briefly: for Heidegger, being is as it appears, therefore phenomenology is the same
as ontology. For Husserl, the correlation between phenomena and reality is a problem that
does not exist for Heidegger. It is not true that Husserl merely describes the contents of
consciousness: he brackets the natural attitude that adscribes an external correlation to
phenomena and hopes to regain the outside through a study of pure phenomena (eg, The
Idea of Phenomenology); therefore Husserl does have ontological aims. Both Husserl and
Heidegger have ontological aims, and have a radical disagreement on whether
being=phenomena.
Apr 21, 2014
Rachel Anne Kornhaber
Rachel Anne Kornhaber University of Tasmania, Rozelle Campus
Nazism and Heidegger did influence the state of play during Nazi Germany and the role
that the University of Freiburg played in anti Jewish sentiment and what influence this
played in phenomenology.
May 7, 2014
Carlos Eduardo Maldonado
Carlos Eduardo Maldonado Universidad del Rosario
Well, certainly Heidegger is strongly inclined to metaphysics - something that is already
clear since his doctoral dissertation and almost immediately afterwards with his
habilitation thesis (on Duns Scoto).
However, the real turn away from Husserl was "discovered" later when in 1979 were first
published his "Prolegomena zur Geschcihte des Zeitbegriffs", a seminar Heidegger gave
in 1925 (summer semester). Only then was it clear that it was exactly the interest on time
what created a distance between Heidegger and Husserl.
(I shall not mention that Husserl gave Heidegger his text: "Zur Phnomenologie des
Zeitbewusstseins" (from 1905) in order to be published and Heidegger kept it for himself
for a long while before he published it, eventually).
Heidegger's critique of Husserl is not irrelevant, at all. Let me, en passant, tell you this
anecdote:
Husserl was invited to give a lecture in London. Heidegger accompanies his professor
and friend to the train station in Freiburg. As the were walking, Husser was telling
Heidegger what he was planning to teach in London (namely, the Cartesian Meditations).
Then, suddenly Heidegger asks Husserl: "Dear Professor, and what about history?". And
Husserl replies: "Oh, history! I forgot about it!".
I worked for five years on these subjects while being in Leuven (at the Husserl Archives),
some years ago...
Jun 18, 2014
Gordon Gates
Gordon Gates
Thank you for your wonderful post, Carlos; it brings philosophy to life.
No one's critique of anything is irrelevant; we all have something to say that adds to the
discussion. Ronnen says in his initial post above that "unless inhumanly complex
structures are used, words are limited in their ability to express concepts of being." I
would agree that words are inadequate to express concepts of being; more than that, being
may be impossible to capture in concepts. I would also add that the more structured,
conceptual, and linear the articulation the further from being the words take us. That is
why I prefer the work of Merleau-Ponty to Husserl or Heidegger, although Merleau-
Ponty would not be the same if it were not for the thinkers who came before him. I prefer
work that not only argues and articulates, but also evokes.
....................
Between Husserl and Heidegger

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Idealism, Noesis/Noema, and Goodbye to Husserl
Solicitation, Dasein and World
Heidegger and Phenomenology
October 10, 2007 by jonathanziemba
Class on October 10th Welcome back from break, everyone. Today we started
Heidegger, sections 8-12 of The History of the Concept of Time. John began by a quick
introduction to Heidegger himself. As we learned when we began Husserl, Heidegger was
Husserls prize student, and was taken under his wing as the greatest second-generation
phenomenologist. Heideggers Being and Time (1927), released in Husserls yearbook
(like an academic journal) was perceived by Husserl as a betrayal of the principles of
phenomenology, and hurt their academic and personal relationship. This was only
aggrivated when Heidegger, after having joined the National Socialist Party in 1933,
removed Husserl, a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, from the University. Whether
Heideggers philosophy is reflective of, or can be understood within, a Nazi ideology is a
point of contention in Heidegger studies.
Despite this tension, indeed break with Husserl, Heidegger was rooted in
phenomenology. Any critique of phenomenology materializing in the few pages we have
read is not a critique from without, that is, an attack on phenomenology from outside of
its own bounds and with an alternative philosophy in mind, but instead an immanent
critique. Heidegger tells us : We are making no deduction from the idea of
phenomenology but are reading the principle from its concretion in the research work.
and later, in part b of 8, that the understanding of phenomenology comes from the
research itself, in the direction of its ownmost maxim, to the matters themselves So
we see that Heidegger understands phenomenology in its deformalized form, its
concrete aspects. This implies a notion of habitation, as John mentioned, that is crucial
to the notion of understanding and interpretation in Heidegger, and will be present in
almost all of the texts we read (especially the What is Metaphysics? lecture of 1929). This
is also important in understand the Abbau and its logic, the destruction of the history
of philosophy that is called for in Being and Time.
We mentioned the maxim to the things themselves! As John noted, we are working
with the German word Sache here, not Ding. This is better translated as matters. I
think this distinction is important if we want to keep the World of the phenomenologist
open; Husserl doesnt limit the objects of phenomenological study to things out-there
in the world, but addresses matters, all things that can be objects of consciousness,
from a tree to freedom to ethnicity. What are these matters for Heidegger? Well, they are
phenomena, as the title of our science indicates. Phenomenology seems to mean the
science of phenomena, if we break up phainomenon and logos, the two Greek
words that make up the name. But Heidegger, following his logic of habitation, sees an
obscurity in the translation of logos as science of, and recaptures what he sees as a
more original translation: legein meaning making manifest or letting be seen.
Aristotle, Heidegger claims, understands legein as discursive, making manifest what is
talked about to another party (I have a cold Look at this dot) Heidegger, however,
doesnt want to get hung up on words and the voice as the essence of logos, and orients
himself to the making manifest that is implied in the Greek discursive meaning of the
word. He doesnt want to think of logos as necessarily leading to the theoretical
apprehension of an entity by an utterance, but wants to study the very self-
presentation/manifestation required for such an apprehension. So, when Heidegger talks
about logos apophantikos versus logos semantikos (the two names in Greek in the section
beta of part a of 9), he claims that the former is the sense most proper to the logos of
phenomen/ology, as pointing out and letting be seen. Apophansis has a wider meaning
than simply verbal propositions; Heidegger takes it to mean a certain approach that
allows an encounter with beings. On the side of phenomenon, phainesthai, the Greek
verbal root of phainomenon and phenomenon, Heidegger interprets as showing itself,
making the phenomenon that which shows itself. Showing can mean several things, as
we discussed in class, and most noted among its meanings are the seemingly opposed
definitions of manifestation and semblance. Is appearing in the phenomenal sense of the
word merely a semblance of something that lies behind the scenes? Heideggers answer is
clear: only because phainesthai means showing itself can it also mean merely
showing itself as, only looking like. Only insofar as something in its sense makes a
pretense of showing itself can it pass itself off as (p. 81) Since Heidegger does not
take the road of epistemology, which, for him lives off the confusion between
appearance and semblance, he tasks himself exclusively to understanding the
phenomenon as that which presents itself.
Phenomenology is therefore letting the manifest in itself be seen from itself. (85) This
letting-be and self-revelation implies a covered up phenomenon, one that must be let
seen by itself, from itself, and how it is in itself. Heidegger works with such a covering
up, as we will see in the essay on the Essence of Truth, where he claims that all
revealings are also concealings. Phenomena can be totally undiscovered or buried. This
latter sense of concealement is where Heidegger begins his Being and Time, in which he
claims that the sense of the word Being has been forgotten, covered up, across the history
of philosophy. Phenomenology, if we can understand it in the Heideggerian sense we
have just established, is the way of unfolding, breaking apart, and, ideally, revealing what
is concealed about this, or any other, phenomenon.
Like this:
Related
Solicitation, Dasein and World
Fink!
Descartes, World, Vor- and Zu-handenheit In "Heidegger"
Posted in Heidegger , Husserl | 5 Comments
5 Responses
on October 11, 2007 at 1:33 pm | Reply noah37
Im unclear on precisely how Heideggers conception of phenomena

differs from a Husserlian one; and I assume this is an important site of Heideggers
departure from Husserl.
Partly, this uncertainty is because Im not sure that I fully understand what Heidegger
means in claiming that phenomena show or dont show themselves to us. The
language makes it sound as if phenomena not only have some degree of autonomy in and
of themselves, but also that they have a certain agency or even agenda to allow or not
allow themselves to be seen. (If this is what Heidegger claimsthough Im not convinced
it isthen it seems quite counter-intuitive to me.)
Would it be correct to say that Husserl, on the other hand, doesnt give such a degree of
autonomy to phenomenon? But how does he account for them? Does this have to do with
the inseparability of fact/essence? Does Husserl want to say that a phenomenon is merely
constituted by its fact/essence relationship, and thus the phenomenon cannot be
conceived of as autonomous from our bestowal of sense upon it? But then doesnt his
concept of Noema bestow some autonomy on objects/phenomenon (are these
synonyms?): the object is one thing that can be thought of in many different ways and
that persists amidst our noetic changes (to quote from Jonathans 10/4 post)?
on October 15, 2007 at 7:24 pm | Reply Desire
I didnt notice your comment until just today, Noah, but maybe its not too late.
Anyway, the way I see it, the difference between Husserl and Heideggers conception of
phenomena is pretty much exactly how you articulated it in your comment. That is to say,
in Husserls world, objects have no autonomy whatsoever: we (via sense-bestowal)
determine the meanings of objects. For Heidegger, I think a certain kind of sense-
bestowal exists AND objects/phenomena also have autonomy. The concept of it gives
is useful here because, for Heidegger, objects/phenomena reveal their meaning inasmuch
as we give them their meaning.
What interests me about your question is that, for you, Husserls account of how we give
meaning to things in the world is more intuitive. Could you elaborate on that a bit? I was
just thinking earlier this morning about the question of which view makes more intuitive
sense (and, I think intuitive sense matters since, you know, we all participate in this
lived experience thing we should have some sort of account of what it is like). I had
previously read Heidegger for another class, and, at that time, it made perfect intuitive
sense. And then, after reading Husserl, like you, I was more inclined to believe that I
alone determined the meaning of objects. In any case, I dont have any commitments
yet. But, I am wondering: if, for Heidegger, objects can give meaning to me, does that
mean that he has a hidden commitment to some sort of metaphysical claim about how
objects are (in an objective sense) in-the-world? I suppose for me, there is some
(obvious) tension between what Husserl claims the aim of phenomenology is and how
Heidegger re-figures that claim.
on October 19, 2007 at 7:28 pm | Reply noah37
Yeah, it does seem that Heideggers autonomous objects are in some sense
metaphysically objective, at least as long as were talking about physical objects (Im not
sure if anyone could make a plausible case for the objectiveness of the contents of my
memory, for instance.) But, upon further consideration, such a status of physical objects
does seem more intuitive to me. This comes from the consideration that we cant (unless,
perhaps, we try really hard) bestow any sense upon any object (which in this view would
itself be merely a bestowed sense); we dont fabricate the world around us from
*nothing*. And it is not that our experience of the world is *only* a product of our
collective or individual conditioning either. Such a view just couldnt account for the fact
that (I assume) there has been a fairly standard vocabulary to describe color in every
language ever. Unless somebody has a really smart alternative story to tell (though please
no brain-in-a-vat-s), this would show that the difference between the blue and red is
something objective; not just an arbitrary sense that we have decided to bestow. In this
sense, objects that are blue and objects that are red give this sense of themselves to us.
(Perhaps some of us, like our beloved professor, have an impaired faculty for receiving
such senses.) And this seems right. But does Husserl really think that we can make blue
red?
on October 20, 2007 at 7:10 pm | Reply demographer
Dreyfus at Cal is podcasting his undergrad course on Heidegger, if

readers are interested:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978475
on October 24, 2007 at 10:55 pm | Reply Desire
Noah, I largely agree with you but to your question, Does Husserl really
think that we can make blue red? is interesting. Im hoping to address this issue in my
paper not the specific example of course, but how/why Husserl might say that we can
have similar accounts of the same phenomena even though we all bestow our own
accounts of objects unto them. I dont think hed give objects any autonomy the way
Heidegger does, but as far as I can tell, he does seem to think that there is, in fact, some
sort of Objectivity out there and he seems to locate that in OthersI could be totally
mistaken about this, of course, but Ill have more to say later.
..................
2014.07.35
Search
FRIEDRICH-WILHELM VON HERRMANN

Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl on the Concept of Phenomenology
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl
on the Concept of Phenomenology, Kenneth Maly (tr.), Toronto University Press, 2013.
xxx + 152pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781442640092.
Reviewed byThomas Nenon, University of Memphis

This book consists of three essays in which the author presents Heidegger's "hermeneutic
phenomenology" (in contrast to what he calls Husserl's "reflective phenomenology"), as
developed in two early lecture courses that have now been published as Volumes 56/56[1]
and 17[2] of the Gesamtausgabe and in 7 of Being and Time[3]. The first, by far the
longest, essay is a reading of the 1919 lecture course; the second relies on the 1923/24
lectures; the third is an interpretation and commentary on the Heidegger's well-known
description of phenomenology in the "Introduction" to BT.
In each of these essays, the guiding theme is the contrast between Heidegger's
phenomenology, which is an enactment of lived experience itself as "the a- and pre-
theoretical domain, which keeps itself closed off when we are theoretically oriented"
(13), and Husserl's phenomenology. It recounts how Heidegger's hermeneutic
phenomenology takes as its starting point the concrete involvement of what will come to
be called Dasein in the world as a significant whole in contrast to what von Hermann
calls reflective phenomenology, which he describes as still trapped within the prejudices
of traditional modern philosophy that is oriented primarily toward theory, which
culminates in scientific knowledge and hence focuses primarily on perception as opposed
to the fullness of engaged practical life. Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology is
introduced in each of the essays by way of contrast to Husserl's reflective
phenomenology with a slightly different emphasis in each of them, while they all at the
same time follow Heidegger in acknowledging the key role that Husserl's
phenomenology played for Heidegger in the development of his own positions.
In the early 1919 lectures, as laid out in the first essay, such hermeneutical
phenomenology is described as a form of "understanding looking" (21) that is
fundamentally different from "theoretical knowing, whose known is only things, what is
reified, or what is ob-jectified" (21), including consciousness itself as an object of
reflection. What makes Heidegger's phenomenology hermeneutic is the fact that
"Understanding lookingaccompanies the sense of enactment of living-experience and is
thereby capable of interpreting the pre-theoretical essence that is own to lived-
experience" (22). It is attuned to the things with which we concern ourselves as they
present themselves to us against the backdrop of lived experience that is the most basic or
original "event" or "Ereignis" from which hermeneutic phenomenology proceeds.
The contrast is then drawn to Husserlian reflective phenomenology that (a) remains
oriented on theory and thereby misses the crucial practical dimensions of lived
experience (20, 67), so that it (b) assumes that the primary access to the things around us
is perception upon which all of the other ways in which we encounter things are founded
(32-33, 36, 50), and (c) is enacted by a "pure ego pole" that "ob-jectifies" instead of
living in the acts of lived experience as consciousness (30, 51). The positive example of
such a lived experience that von Herrmann uses is Heidegger's description of the lectern
that I recognize as such immediately upon entering the classroom. I do not see first of all
a brown object of a certain size and shape and then later, in a subsequent act, add a layer
or practical relevance to it, which is what he says Husserl's phenomenology would
suggest, but rather, in lived experience, I recognize it immediately and from the outset as
the lectern, a recognition that it is not founded upon some previous and independent act
of (theoretical) perception, but rather precedes any subsequent abstractive focus on its
physical properties as presented in perception.
The second essay contrasts Heidegger's notion of phenomenology as one that takes a
different path than Husserl's phenomenology does in his middle period where it "has de
facto become descriptive, eidetic science of transcendentally pure consciousness" (91).
Husserl's phenomenology, von Herrmann says, with reference to a quote from
Heidegger's text, is guided, "by the predominance of an empty and thereby fantastical
idea of certainty and evidence" (93). The basic issue, according to Heidegger, is not
something specific to Husserl but to Western philosophy in general, going back not just to
Descartes, but to Aristotle, namely whether the starting point for investigations into being
should be oriented primarily on beings that do not have the character of the "possibility of
Dasein for a human life" (GA 17, 42) or Dasein itself. This anticipates, of course,
Heidegger's claim later in BT that the history of philosophy is characterized by a kind of
self-forgottenness of Being due above all to the mistaken starting point in the search for
the structure of being in terms of categories that apply specifically to things that Dasein is
not. He proposes instead that phenomenology should begin with the experience of our
own existence and derive the structures of that existence, existentials, from it in order to
see how Dasein's understanding of the kinds of beings that it is not depends above all on
its own self-understanding and how the fundamental structures of those kinds of beings
must rather be explicated in terms of temporality as Dasein's most fundamental
possibility.
In fact, von Herrmann himself points out that Hussserl's Logical Investigations represent
more a breakthrough than a simple continuation of the unquestioned orientation on
certainty and evidence as pursued by the tradition (94). Husserl's contribution was to
address very directly and refute naturalistic tendencies in interpreting consciousness, for
instance in his well-known essay "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" from 1911, but
Heidegger finds Hussserl's refutation of historicism in the same essay lacking. Von
Hermann cites Heidegger's observation that, because of Husserl's preoccupation with
securing valid knowledge, "human Dasein as such is excluded from the possibility of
being encountered" (97). By contrast, hermeneutic phenomenology, as what Heidegger in
1919 had called "the pre-theoretical primordial science of living and living-experience"
and in the 1923/24 lectures is now called "the scientific origin of factical life, ontological
phenomenology, and hermeneutic of facticity" (101), is directed squarely to human life
and its concerns as such in its very historical being. Von Herrmann follows Heidegger in
acknowledging the crucial role and positive role that Husserl has played in opening up
the possibilities of phenomenology as Heidegger pursues them, but in this brief essay von
Herrmann still associates Husserl more with the tradition than with the new direction
Heidegger is taking. Particularly with regard to this essay, in order to show just how
much Heidegger's emphasis is on the continuities instead of the differences, it would have
been helpful to quote Heidegger's unequivocal statement that what is called "reflection"
in Husserl is far different from what Descartes or others in modern philosophy mean by
it: Heidegger notes that,
One must pay attention to what reflection is about: about consciousness with the
fundamental character of intentionality. Reflection is not about psychic [i.e.,
mental, TN] events but rather about ways of relating to the objective world. It is
therefore a fundamental confusion to characterize Husserlian phenomenology as a
transcendental psychology, as Scheler does . . . . Phenomenology is directed not to
acts in the old sense, but to new domains, to the way one relates oneself to things
so that that to which the self-relating is directed is present in it (GA 17, 262).
Moreover, this "way of relating oneself to things" is nothing other than what Heidegger
will call "comportment" in BT.
What Heidegger does object to, but does not emphasize in his recognition of Husserl as
opening up phenomenology as a possibility, is the way Husserl intends to develops it as a
"science of reason," (GA 17, 263) that still preserves too much of the legacy of the
scientific orientation on evidence, even for the most basic kinds of truths, like "the truths
of religion or art," where truth is something much more basic than adequacy (GA 17, 98).
Von Herrmann alludes to this point when he notes that, even in Husserl's final work on
the Crisis of European Sciences,[4] Husserl still reserved a special place for human
beings as rational agents (102).
Most of the third essay follows Heidegger's own lead in 7 of BT in describing the
continuities as much as the differences between their approaches to phenomenology,
while at the same time emphasizing just how significant those differences are. Heidegger
follows Husserl much of the way in his explanation of the nature of phenomenology as a
philosophical method. Where they depart, as von Herrmann recounts it, is in Husserl's
determination of phenomenology not only as a method, but also as related above all to a
specific topic. Von Herrmann describes Husserlian phenomenological philosophy as an
analysis "at first . . . of lived-experiences of pure consciousness, then phenomenology of
lived-experience of transcendental consciousness, namely, transcendental subjectivity"
(110). Heidegger, he says, accepts Husserl's formal conception of philosophy as a method
but differs in two main ways. The first is related to what von Herrmann sees as the
consequences of Husserl's conception of subjectivity. It is not something that Heidegger
says directly, but von Herrmann reads Heidegger's emphasis upon allowing the things to
show themselves as they are in themselves as a rebuke of what von Herrmann has
referred to in the first two essays as Husserl's failure to overcome the modern
assumptions associated with science as a theoretical enterprise. Von Herrmann states,
"The thematic object of Husserlian phenomenology is the life of consciousness with its
lived-experiences, namely acts, and with that which in the acts of consciousness are given
objectively in consciousness" (125), and he reminds the reader that,
According to his basic approach, Husserl comprehends the pre- and outside-
scientific ways of access as those which he in summary calls simple sense
experience (also life-world experience): the present-related and making present
perception and its presentiating modifications of the present-related memory of
the present, the past-related recollection, and the future-related anticipation
(expectation). In contrast, Heidegger, on the basis of his Dasein-approach, calls
for, as pre-scientific ways of access, that which he designates terminologically as
comportments of circumspect caring-for -- of the caring dealing with beings near
which we always reside. (117)
The second main difference is closely related and is one that Heidegger is himself very
explicit about in 7. It concerns not the method but the appropriate subject-matter for
phenomenology. Von Herrmann describes it as Dasein in "its existential constitution of
being and of the self-related-ecstatic-horizonal disclosure of being in general" (135), even
though these are not the words Heidegger uses in this section yet, since these are terms
that will be subsequently introduced only in the course of the work itself. What
Heidegger in this early section does say is that the proper topic of phenomenology is
precisely that which for the most part does not show itself and is most properly in need of
elucidation, namely not beings but the Being of beings (SZ 35) that for the most part
remains concealed. As we have noted above in our discussion of von Herrmann's second
essay, Heidegger comes to the view early on that the kind of Being that, for the most part
and precisely, we do not face is our own Being, that of Dasein, and the project of BT is to
show how Dasein's Being is above all and most basically a form of self-relation that is
normally concealed to us but is at the same time the ground of how everything -- we
ourselves and the beings within the world that we are not -- shows up for us.
In this essay, von Herrmann refers to these structures more than he explains them, and he
assumes that the reader is familiar with at least the basic outlines of the analyses that
Heidegger presents in BT just as the other two chapters focus more on presenting
differences between Husserl and Heidegger than on explaining to the uninitiated what the
various terms mean that Heidegger introduces along the way as he attempts to avoid
pitfalls associated with standard philosophical terms like "objectivity," "subjects,"
"knowledge," and "consciousness," with which most philosophical readers are more
familiar. So, although these studies will be clear to scholars already steeped in
Hussserlian and Heideggerian terminology and familiar with their basic positions, they do
not serve as ready introductions to the texts and topics they discuss. Other books by this
author that the translator cites in his introduction serve that purpose much better.
There is no doubt that von Herrmann is one of the world's most knowledgeable scholars
and careful and sympathetic readers of Heidegger. I should also note that I learned much
from his thoughtful readings of Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant in many seminars he held in
Freiburg that I had the privilege of attending. Hence it is no surprise that his presentations
of Heidegger's project and the steps along the way in its development as traced out in
these essays are accurate and compelling. However, his readings of Husserl are a little
less charitable than Heidegger's own statements about Husserl in the texts that von
Herrmann interprets in this book. I use the term "charitable" advisedly because the nature
of Husserl's work lends itself to so many different interpretations. Husserl's work is
pivotal not just in the sense that it had a great impact on so many subsequent thinkers in
twentieth century philosophy, including perhaps most notably Heidegger, and because his
starting point was traditional in just the ways that von Herrmann outlines, but it is also
pivotal in the sense that there are important turning points within his thinking as he
constantly expands the range of the topics his phenomenology addresses and introduces
new distinctions and refinements along the way that end up taking him in a very different
direction than the tradition he began with. Heidegger himself was well aware of this. So,
for instance, it is true that Husserl in the Logical Investigations presents his work as
exercises in the grounding of science, and the model is clearly the natural sciences.
Throughout his early work, he continues to present phenomenology as the philosophical
basis for an Erkenntnistheorie, an epistemology or theory of knowledge whereby the kind
of knowledge that is meant here is theoretical knowledge and the most powerful example
of it is the kind of knowledge produced in modern natural sciences. The most common
examples of knowledge he presents not just in his early works but throughout his career
are descriptions of perceptions of physical objects ("Dinge" or "things," as he calls them).
So when von Herrmann points to Husserl's phenomenology as still in the sway of modern
philosophical assumptions about knowledge, perception, and objectivity, he has more
than enough passages in Husserl's works to which he can point. Moreover, even in his
latest work, Husserl retains the traditional language of subjectivity, consciousness, and
reflection that at the very least bring with them the connotations and assumptions from
the history of modern philosophy that Husserl himself often finds himself struggling to
work against. Heidegger from the very outset has decided to avoid these terms and
attempt to come up with new ones that better fit the phenomena as he sees them.
On the other hand, though, Husserl's phenomenological investigations took him in

directions fundamentally different from those of modern natural science as he began to
take seriously some of Dilthey's insights into the differences between the natural and the
spiritual (geistige) worlds. By the time Husserl was composing the manuscripts that
would be published only after his death as the Ideas II,[5] he had come to see that in the
attitude in which we live our daily lives, the "personalistic attitude," the things we
encounter within the "surrounding world (Umwelt)" are encountered not primarily in
terms of their bare perceptual properties, but rather in terms of their relevance, their uses
and values to us. The surrounding world of our daily lives is a world in which a person is
not primarily interested in theoretical knowledge for its own sake, but rather
conducts himself as an acting human being in practical life, makes use of the
objects of his Umwelt, shapes them to his purposes, and thereby evaluates them
according to aesthetic, ethical, utilitarian viewpoints, or in which he engages in a
communicative relationship to his fellow human beings, talks to them, writes
letters to them, reads about them in the newspaper, associates with them in
common acts, makes promises to them, etc. (Ideas II, 181-2)
It contains
not mere things (Dinge), but use-objects (clothes, household utensils, weapons,
tools), works of art, literary products, items used in religious or legal actions
(seals, official necklaces, coronation insignia, ecclesiastic symbols etc.); and it
contains not only individual persons: the persons are rather members of
communities, of higher-order personal unities that lead their lives as a whole,
maintain themselves as individuals, continually enter or leave the communities
across time, which have their own communal characteristics, ethical and legal
orders, their own ways of functioning, their dependencies on circumstances,
orderly patterns of change, their ways of developing or remaining constant over
time depending on the circumstances. (Ideas II, 182)
One could easily include lecterns here as well.
Hence the differences between Husserl's phenomenology in the Ideas II and Heidegger's
descriptions of our encounters with things around us in lived experience are at this stage
not nearly as great as the first essay would suggest, and since Heidegger had access to the
manuscripts on which the subsequent publication was based, he knew this. This is
perhaps why Heidegger himself refers to Natorp, Rickert, and Windelband much more
often and critically than to Husserl in these lectures. He does say that Husserl would
describe the experience of the lectern any differently than he does.
In the Ideas II, Husserl still does employ the notion of Fundierung and says that cultural
objects like lecterns and tools and that persons are founded upon physical aspects of those
objects. However, this does not mean that we encounter them first independently in terms
of their perceptible properties and only subsequently recognize them as tools or people,
but rather that we must see something with some specific shapes and sizes consistent with
being a hammer or being a human being if we are going to recognize them as tools or as
persons, but not that what it is to be a tool or a person is in any way reducible to the
physical properties of those things. The perceptible properties are strata, moments, non-
independent components of the experienced things that are nonetheless an essential part
of experiencing them, even if we never experience them on their own except through
abstraction.
Husserl is also very clear that the process of "naturalizing" objects, "objectifying" them in
the sense of modern science is just such an "abstraction" (Ideas II, 25) from the concrete
experience of a thing that includes, instead of excluding, their practical and aesthetic
characters prior to this abstractive process. In this sense, the naturalistic attitude is not our
natural attitude, but rather an abstraction from it. This is also consistent with fundamental
themes from Heidegger's work. Why then does Heidegger, especially in the 1923/24
lecture, continue to criticize Husserl's over-reliance on perception as a model for our
comportment not just in the theoretical sphere, but in the axiological and practical spheres
as well?
I do not think it is because he believes that Husserl holds the view that the only genuine
properties of things are their physical, perceptible properties. I also do not think it is
because he believes that Husserl does not recognize the priority of the practical and
evaluative aspects of experience in our daily lives. Rather, I think the answer is that
Husserl continues to use the model of intention and fulfillment/disappointment through
intuitions according to the model of perceptual experience in his grounding of values and
goods. Husserl's relatively recently published lectures on ethics from 1920 and 1924[6]
-- precisely the period in which Heidegger was holding his own lecture courses in
Freiburg as well -- make this point very explicitly. So when Heidegger recognizes that
Husserl's conception of evidence "is vastly superior to everything else that has ever been
said about it" (GA 17, 272) and acknowledges that Husserl sees that each domain of
objects, including values and goods, has a specific evidence corresponding to its content
(GA 17, 273), he still thinks that there is a problem because Husserl's orientation on
confirmation and facts about these kinds of issues along the lines of the perceptual model
misses "understanding life itself in its authentic Being and responding to thequestion
concerning the character of its Being" (GA 17, 274-75), not as a series of position-takings
to be confirmed or disconfirmed through intuitions, as Husserl would have it, but as a
project a self-relation in which Dasein projects itself in a way that facts-of-the-matter
cannot ground, as a being with Existenz as its basic form of Being. This is a genuine
difference between Heidegger and Husserl,[7] and I think that this is the real point that
Heidegger is aiming at both in the 1923/24 lecture and in 7 of BT.
In sum, then, I think that von Herrmann is correct in the way he outlines how Heidegger
is attempting to chart out an entirely new course for phenomenology that is indeed
different from Husserl's, even on the most charitable reading of Husserl, and that the
contrast between Heidegger's phenomenology and many of the most basic assumptions of
modern philosophy is indeed as stark as von Herrmann portrays it. However, I also think
that Husserl's phenomenology in many ways in his middle and later periods was also well
on the way to overcoming some of these assumptions on its own, and that Heidegger was
able to recognize this in spite of what he maintained were nonetheless crucial limitations
that Husserl himself was ultimately never able to overcome.

[1] Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: Frhe Freiburger Vorlesungen,
Kriegsnotsemester 1919 und Sommersemester 1919, in Gesamtausgabe, Volume 56/57,
ed. Bernd Heimbchel. Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1987. References to the
Gesamtausgabe will be cited as GA followed by the volume, then the page number.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Einfhrung in die phnomenologische Forschung: Marburger

Vorlesung, Wintersemester 1923/24 in Gesamtausgabe, Volume 17, ed. by Friedrich
Wilhelm von Hermann. Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1994.
[3] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Niemeyer: Tbingen, 1972. The page numbers of
this and subsequent editions of this work are included in the margins of the translation of
this work into English as Being and Time and in its publication as Volume 2 of the
Gesamtausgabe, so this work will be cited as BT followed by the page number.
[4] Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phnomenologie,Husserliana, Band VI (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff
1962). Translated by David Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1954).
[5] Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen

Philosophy. Zweites Buch. Husserliana, Band IV (den Haag: Nijhoff 1952). Translated by
R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1991). Citations will follow
the page numbers of the German edition, which are listed in the margins of the English
translation.
[6] Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1925,

Husserliana Volume XXXVII, edited by Henning Peucker. Dordrecht: Kluwer 2004.
[7] For a fuller treatment of this point, see: Thomas Nenon, "Martin Heidegger and the
Grounding of Ethics," in: Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (eds.), Husserl's Ideen.
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp. 176-193.
.......................
Phenomenology - Martin Heidegger
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world self dasein mind
Martin Heidegger (18891971) was a student of Husserl. Before that, he was a theology
student, interested in much more concrete matters of human existence than his teacher,
and his questions concerned how to live and how to live "authentically"that is, with
integrity, in a complex and confusing world. His use of phenomenology was subservient
to this quest, although the quest itself soon transcended the phenomenological method.
Heidegger's phenomenology is most evident in his first (and greatest) book, Sein und Zeit
(1927; English trans. Being and Time, 1962). Like his teacher Husserl, Heidegger insists
that philosophical investigation begin without presuppositions. But Husserl, he says, still
embraced Descartes's basic picture of the world, assuming that consciousness, or "the
mind," was the arena in which phenomenological investigation took place. Such a
philosophy could not possibly be presuppositionless. So Heidegger abandons the
language of mind, consciousness, experience, and the like, but nevertheless pursues
phenomenology with a new openness, a new receptivity, and a sense of oneness with the
world.
Heidegger's early work is defined by two themes: first, Heidegger displays a profound
anti-Cartesianism, an uncompromising holism that rejects any dualism regarding mind
and body, any distinction between subject and object, and the linguistic separation of
"consciousness," "experience," and "mind." This also demands a reconsideration of the
Cartesian thesis that our primary relationship to the world is one of knowledge. Second,
Heidegger's early philosophy is largely a search for authenticity, or what might better be
described as "own-ness" (Eigentlichkeit), which we can understand, with some
qualification, as personal integrity. This search for authenticity will carry us into the now
familiar but ever-renewed questions about the nature of the self and the meaning of
human existence.
To ensure that we do not fall into Cartesian language, Heidegger suggests a new term (the
first of many). Dasein (literally, "being-there") is the name of this being from whose
perspective the world is being described. Dasein is not a consciousness or a mind, nor is
it a person. It is not distinguished from the world of which it is aware. It is inseparable
from that world. Dasein is, simply, "Being-in-the-World," which Heidegger insists is a
"unitary phenomenon" (not being the world). Thus, phenomenology becomes ontology
(the nature of being) as well.
Being-in-the-World is not primarily a process of being conscious or knowing about the

world. Science is not the primary concern of Dasein. Dasein's immediate relation to the
world is better captured in the image of the craftsman, who "knows his stuff," to be sure,
but might not be able to explain it to you nor even know how to show it to you. What he
can dowhat he does dois engage in his craft. He shows you that he knows how to do
this and that by simply doing it. This knowing how is prior, Heidegger tells us, to
knowing that. In effect, our world is essentially one extended craft shop, a world of
"equipment" in which we carry out various tasks and only sometimesoften when
something goes wrongstop to reflect on what we are doing and look at our tools as
objects, as things. They are, first of all, just tools and material to be used, and in that
sense we take them for granted, relying on them without noticing them. Our concept of
"things" and our knowledge of them is secondary and derivative.
Thus the notion of Dasein does not allow for the dualism of mind and body or the
distinction between subject and object. All such distinctions presuppose the language of
"consciousness." But Heidegger defends an uncompromising holism in which the self
cannot be, as it was for Descartes, "a thinking thing," distinct from any bodily existence.
But, then, what is the self? It is, at first, merely the roles that other people cast for me, as
their son, their daughter, their student, their sullen playmate, their clever friend. That self,
the Das Man self, is a social construction. There is nothing authentic, nothing that is my
own, about it. The authentic self, by contrast, is discovered in profound moments of
unique self-recognitionnotably, when one faces one's own death. And so Heidegger's
phenomenology opens up the profoundly personal arena of existentialist phenomenology.
Read more: Phenomenology - Martin Heidegger - World, Self, Dasein, and Mind - JRank
Articles http://science.jrank.org/pages/10640/Phenomenology-Martin-
Heidegger.html#ixzz42bJ4Sy5Z
....................
Phennomenological Heidegger & Husserl
Updated on October 18, 2011
Phenomenology is a method used by Husserl and then his student Heidegger to carry out
philosophy. Their approach though is extremely different. Husserl, like Rene Descartes,
thinks we need to start philosophy from a firm foundation without presuppositions; from
there we can gain universal knowledge. Husserl is focused on epistemology. Heidegger
believes that ontology is more fundamental. To analyze things-in-themselves and being
first. Phenomenology is the study of the origin of phenomena (things) in our lived
experience. Husserl thinks we are capable of being unbiased, neutral and impartial when
we study things. Heidegger believes this to be impossible. For Heidegger, humans always
have an interest, words already carry a world of meaning, and thus we are always in a
context.
Husserl
Husserls definition of phenomenology is a descriptive theory of the essence of pure

transcendental experiences which has its own justification., (Macann, Christopher. P.
31.). Thus for Husserl the phenomenological method is a method of transcendental
reflection, and a considerable amount of time is spent establishing and justifying the
relevant concept of reflection., (Macann, Christopher. P. 31). Reflection in the sense
where the self becomes an object of reflection. In phenomenology we are then to look at
our looking. We do not just look at the object, but look at our looking at the object.
Scientists do not look at their presuppositions and biases. This attempt to find how to
know involves consciousness. He is referring to the fact that consciousness is
consciousness of something. Consciousness is the foundation of reality in its entirety.,
(Macann, Christopher. P. 32). Consciousness is always directed towards something and it
is always an act. Thus we must look at the nature of consciousness and how it directs
itself and at the interrelationship between subject and object.
We can look at things in the external world, try to be objective, describe its
characteristics and properties. The important use of phenomenology is that it goes one
step beyond that and looks at how we are looking; looks at how the acts of consciousness
works. Any act of consciousness can be looked at whether it be memory, perception or
dreams. In regards to memory, phenomenology would be the bringing to light the
meaning-bestowing activity of remembering rather than focusing on the memory as
such. (Macann, Christopher. P. 34).
I ask myself how the object in question comes to be posited with the meaning which
adheres to it as an object I make the act of imagining or remembering the object of a
specific phenomenological investigation with a view to specifying the essence of
imaginative or memorial consciousness.
This involves the epoche; a state of suspension, bracketing and setting aside all
presuppositions. It is the ego which, while it suspends all beliefs about the reality of the
world on the grounds that these are not indubitable, discovers itself as the only
apodictically certain being., (Paris Lecture, p. 4). The phenomenological epoche is the
methodology through which I come to understand myself as that ego and life
consciousness in which and through which the entire objective world exists for me.
(Paris Lectures. P. 8). Everything in the world, all spatio-temporal being, exists for me
because I experience it, because I perceive it, remember it, think of it in any way, judge it,
value it, desire it. (Paris Lecture. P. 8).
Starting with an absolute foundation seems only logical. That this foundation is the ego
also makes sense since it is really hard to deny that which basically creates existence for
us. Without consciousness there would be no I and thus nothing else. Therefore it is
important to acknowledge the I as the interpreter of all things, you cannot escape the
fact that it is your subjective person that thinks about anything. If we can take anything
from Descartes, it is the idea that the I is fundamental and undeniable. Husserl also has a
valid point that consciousness is an intentional act. This appears to be an adequate
description of how the consciousness is, and it is vital that we look at these acts as objects
as well when considering how we know things at all. Of course the ego that we are has
been socialized and has naively absorbed vast amounts of interpretation given to us, has
may presupposition and biases. The phenomenological reduction then is vital to look at
things more clearly. The attempt to eliminate all presuppositions, biases and so forth is
very important when looking at anything. However, it does not seem conceivable that we
could eliminate all of them, as we could not possibly be aware of all of them.
Nevertheless, the process is important in eliminating all the clutter and letting us become
as objective and neutral as possible.
This is contrast to everyday existence which Husserl states is nave for it is the
immersion in the already-given world and consists of experiencing, thinking, valuing,
acting. (Paris Lecture. P. 36). All of which do not explain the intentional acts from
which ultimately everything originates. (Paris Lectures. P. 36). In the natural attitude,
experience is taken to be a presentation of the object (or the world) as it is in itself, that is,
of the object as a substance possessing properties of one kind or another. (Macann,
Christopher. P. 33). We can see then when it comes to knowledge and to the gaining there
of (for the sciences) Husserls phenomenological method makes us look at how he know
things, and makes us acknowledge and bracket presuppositions to be more objective.
Thus phenomenology according to Husserl is useful in gaining any knowledge. It is
refining our ability to reason, and expanding it to reflect on our own thought process.
Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Routledge Classics)
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Heidegger
Heideggers phenomenology is concerned with ontology. It has no real application in

improving the method of how we gain knowledge, because Heidegger believes the
question of Being is more fundamental than how we know things. For Heidegger
phenomenology is to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in
which it shows itself from itself. (Macann, Christopher. P 69). All ontology of the past,
no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains
fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the
meaning of Being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.
(Being and Time, p. 53). Most ontology theories start with an assumption of Being and go
from there, and never really delve into Being itself. According to Heidegger most
ontology theories cover over Being, to the point that Heidegger states Ontology is
possible only through phenomenology. (Being and Time, p. 84).
To relate to this question of Being though he believes we must look at it through our own
being-there or Dasein. Since questions are a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction
beforehand from what is sought (Being and Time,p. 45), the questions also say something
about those who ask them. An important aspect of our Dasein is that fact that we
question. Dasein is ontologically distinguished by the fact that in its Being this being is
concerned about its very being. (Being and Time, p. 54). In our average-everydayness
we have a pre-understanding of Being because we are part of it. This natural attitude is
here our starting place.
In place of the Husserlian procedure which moves from the world of the natural attitude
up to a higher, transcendental plane with a view to bringing to light the transcendental
structures constitutive of the objectivity of the entities encountered in the natural attitude,
we find an alternative procedure which moves from the ontic level down to a deeper,
ontological plane with a view to bring to light the ontological structures constitutive of
the being of the entities in question. (Macann, Christopher. P. 63.)
Part of our being-in-the-world is throwness. We find we are always in a context which
already has meaning attached to it, a particular time, place and so forth. It is important to
Heidegger to look into the structures that make us human. Only when the fundamental
structures of Dasein are adequately worked out with explicit orientation toward the
problem of Being will the previous results of the interpretation of Dasein receive their
existential justification. (Being and Time, p. 60).
Heidegger begins by looking at our average everydayness, to reveal how Dasein is in-the-
world. Dasein is unique in that it has death awareness and therefore has the perception of
time. Death being the possibility that cancels all possibilities which then causes fear and
anxiety. In response to this we alienate ourselves and let ourselves become detached.
Technology as a way of revealing being brings us farther away from ourselves and thus
from Being. Heidegger, unlike Husserl, thinks Descartes helps Being become hidden with
the centre focused on I.
Inspecting our Dasein and how we live is a useful thing to do. Out of this analysis comes
his ideas on how we relate to technology, art and the environment. Art reveals Being, but
reflects our being as well. For Heidegger we cannot be completely objective and get out
of ourselves. Later Heidegger realizes that looking through Dasein might not be the way
to find Being, but it does help us understand ourselves. He then talks about how we
should let Being reveal itself to us, as in through art. Like a poem that speaks to you.
We fall into everydayness when we hide from Being. What we should be doing is living
in Care. Being at home in our environment, and taking care. This element as stated
above is rather existential in nature; mostly because he does talk about how we are in the
world. Death awareness gives our awareness of time. This being aware of the future and
looking to the future makes us have concern or Care for it. Things that disrupt us out of
everydayness and make us wonder about things are the failure of tools, certain moods,
and death awareness. We can probably all relate to these as being accurate to our human
nature. It is part of our nature (instrumentality) to just use tools. I for instance use a
computer directly for all my papers. I choose to do so, because typing flows with my
consciousness, (Heidegger would point out that we should not limit our possibilities when
we choose a piece of technology). When my computer fails (as it did recently) this
startles me out of my flow of awareness. Death awareness, as when someone you know
dies or when you are confronted with an ailment that makes you aware of your mortality
naturally that is when fundamental questions smack you in the face. As do moods;
depression makes almost anyone philosophical. All these make you step back and reflect
on things. This is not like Husserls transcendental reflection though, you dont pull
yourself out of being and look down at yourself objectively. You are startled out of your
everydayness and feel the need to re-evaluate everything.
In this evaluating of lived experience Heidegger outlines what is authentic and

inauthentic. Authenticity is recognized in our temporality and anxiety and moving into a
mode of caring as a result. Inauthenticity gets caught up in time, flees as a result of
anxiety and falls into everydayness. When one is in the mode of caring one recognizes the
possibility of choices out there and has concern over how to interact in the world. When
one is caught in everydayness, they take the meaning given to them, and fall into
calculative thinking which does not have a concern for the environment around them.
Thus we can see how technology in everydayness can have negative consequences as
opposed to taking a caring approach where one is naturally concerned with the
environment, as it is their environment, their home. This comes out in his notion of
dwelling, which he uses the word in away that brings out the aspect of our making
ourselves at home. It is not really impractical, in that these are both modes that we take;
both are possibilities. Sometimes it is easy to agree that technology, fixed ideas, and
abstract entities bring us away form lived experience. They almost kill the lived
experience. Thus talking in the way Heidegger does through our lived experience,
describing what is common to Dasein reveals more about how we actually are than does
flat theories. On the other side though, as pointed out above, Husserls phenomenology
aides us in broadening the way we gain knowledge, and to look at that whole process.
One tells us about how we are, and the other how we know. The fact that we do not find
Being should not disillusion us, since the searching itself reveals our being (as does art,
poems, music). And reflection on our being aids us in how we live and relate to other
beings. Which is important in that we are always in relation to other beings.
Also an important element in Heideggers phenomenology is language and the analysis

thereof. It is an example of how we are born into a context, all the words we use to
describe thing have a set meaning, and a personal meaning to ourselves that evolves.
Thus it is an important process to understand how we use these words and what there
meaning is. So Heidegger is very particular of the words he chooses, and there history.
Being and Time (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)
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Conclusion
Both Heidegger and Husserl use the phenomenological method, but each for a different
purpose and going in different direction. One, however, really does not have to
exclusively choose epistemology over ontology or vice versa. They can be done together,
and thus both reveal interesting valid views. Both describe what they are discussing;
Heidegger describes the nature of Dasein, and Husserl the nature of consciousness. Both
carry out an analysis of these aspects quite well. Both are going through lived experience,
looking at things-in-themselves, and view things thus empathetically. Husserl diverges
into a more detailed into the theory of intentionally, the acts of consciousness as that is
his base. And a main difference is Husserls belief in the eidetic reduction, which
Heidegger think is not possible. Heidegger as Dasein is his base, goes more into Daseins
nature. He thinks the reduction is useless since we are already in a world we must look
through ourselves to see what makes us the way we are. Thus both are useful in
broadening the perspective in different areas. Phenomenology, as a method, is useful in
that it looks through things as the lived experience. And really, we must acknowledge that
how we see things and how we know things comes from our being or our ego; therefore it
is only logical that we look through things that way. But while looking though our
humanness, we must be aware that we are doing so. Phenomenology is great for looking
at things in a more useful angle, and broadens our perspective on things. It can be used
for any human experience. Its only limitation and our limitation anyway, are that it cannot
claim to evaluate anything out of our human experience. We cannot claim to know for
instance what it is like to be a tree, like some environmentalists claim to attempt (They
criticize people for being to anthropocentric.). It really is the only way we can view
things whether we like it or not. Any theory we create is created from our lived
experience, and then logically stretched to the rest of the universe- which is an
assumption. Phenomenology merely recognizes the limitation and does not stretch its
analysis beyond it. It also though pays critical attention to its own process to prevent such
assumptions.
"Phenomenology, a 20th century philosophical movement dedicated to describing the

structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness, without recourse to
theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines such as the natural sciences. ...
What Husserl discovered when he contemplated the content of his mind were such acts as
remembering, desiring, and perceiving, in addition to the abstract content of these acts,
which Husserl called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be
directed toward an object under a certain aspect; and such directedness, called
intentionality, he held to be the essence of consciousness. "
"Literally, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: appearances of things, or things

as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings
things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as
experienced from the subjective or first person point of view."

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Husserls Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and on a Phenomenological Philosophy

Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931) defines phenomenology as a

Husserl distinguishes between phenomenology as a science of pure consciousness and

Phenomenological reduction is a process of defining the pure essence of a psychological

Phenomenological reduction is also a method of bracketing empirical intuitions away

Husserl describes consciousness as intentional insofar as it refers to, or is directed at, an

Immanently perceived objects have an absolute being insofar as their existence is

Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is concerned with the essence of whatever is

1Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W.

"...one can characterize phenomenological philosophy as centering on the following basic

"Phenomenology is a science of 'beginnings.' The genuine beginner is an adept, not a

"The first step in phenomenological philosophy is reflection on the meaning or essence of

The concept of the 'intentionality of consciousness' is the foundation of

"There are two fundamental moments in Husserl's phenomenological epoche which,

In Husserlian phenomenology, consciousness is understood as fundamentally intentional.

Husserl brings to this understanding something unique, his phenomenological method,

"Existentialism is well known in this country both as a literary and philosophical

'Existentialism' is not a philosophy but a mood embracing a number of disparate

The origin of existentialism is typically attributed to the work of Kierkegaard . However,

Existentialism, as such, is actually a 20th century movement, despite its roots in

4. Human beings are always "in-the-world" alongside things. Things, in terms of

6. Human beings are finite. As a "being-in-the-world," we recognize that death is a "not-

8. Immediate experience has priority over theoretical assumptions.

--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology , p. 63

"Whereas Husserl saw the task of transcendental phenomenology to be that o describing

The very terminology itself, being-in-the-world, is existentialism's attempt to avoid

Also central to an understanding of being-in-the-world is the existentialist insistence that

Kierkegaard's followers resolutely countered the reproach of being 'unscientific' by

To realize this ambitious plan, Husserl investigated man's consciousness or knowledge.

What is the relationship between hermeneutics and existential-phenomenology?

Methodological hermeneutics refers to hermeneutics as a human science, originating in

"Schleiermacher's analysis of understand and expression related to texts and speech

Ontological hermeneutics finds its expression in the existential-phenomenological work

In our everyday lives we grasp entitites in terms of a tacit understanding of what it is to

What is the relationship between ontology and existential-phenomenology?

In his 1941 lecture, Grundbegriffe (Basic Concepts), Heidegger discusses the

What is the difference between Heidegger's "ontological difference" and negative

"The essential different between Heidegger's philosophy of unhiddenness and negative

Back to Existential-Phenomenology Page

Webmaster: Brent Dean Robbins

Heidegger vs Husserl: Phenomenological choices

In the course of my research towards developing a framework for a Visual

Eidetic Phenomenology is descriptive of the phenomena, and is Husserlian in its

In Eidetic (Husserlian) research it is important for the researcher to absolutely 'bracket

Finally Lopez and Willis summarise that an interpretative approach is "useful in

Is Heidegger's departure from Husserl due to Heidegger's turn to metaphysics? If so,

4. Heidegger's and Husserl's major disagreement of the 1920s-1930s regarding the

5. Heidegger's critique of Husserl in his die grundprobleme der phnomenologie in 1927

such a difference can be made by a definition of sorts of givenness (Arten der

but their constructions - for me - are non-satisfying (but very important)

Question (2): Is it possible to perform Husserl's epoche? and why/(not)?

Question (2): Is it possible to perform Husserl's epoche? And why/(not)

4. Heidegger's and Husserl's major disagreement of the 1920s-1930s regarding the

5. Heidegger's critique of Husserl in his die grundprobleme der phnomenologie in 1927

Thanks for both your contributions and help.

(a) PBS Nova-Fractals-Hunting the Hidden Dimension at

(b) The father of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot, website

(d) Also, an excellent comprehensive account -- Kenneth Falconer's "Fractal Geometry:

Husserl described phenomena at 3 levels: the constituted world (subconscious/conscious

nevertheless, I will be interested to learn about your suggested application of fractal

Thanks for the note,

Between Husserl and Heidegger

Idealism, Noesis/Noema, and Goodbye to Husserl