Between Worldview and the World

Abstract

As the twentieth century opened, the unified vision of the world prized by philosophy disintegrated and shattered into a multiplicity of worldviews. Karl Jaspers and Heidegger both focused on this phenomenon in 1919. Husserl made an attempt to restore the lost unity of the world based on a new phenomenological transcendentalism. This unity in his system does not arise from a synthesis of the multiplicity of private aspects of our perception but from the dependence of the world on a kind of integrity in the ego, an instance of living through those aspects which unites them as one. This transcendental ego is an arena for and bearer of these experiences, which are located beyond any representation and hence are not under the sway of the relational but are absolute. Heidegger replaced Husserl’s transcendentalism with a hermeneutic ontology which condemned any kind of absolute as illusory. Absolutes make sense only as our response to the finitude of our existence. This article considers why Husserl was so persistent in trying to go beyond our particularity and finitude, while Heidegger made them the basis of his philosophy. Of the many possible answers, the article argues that Husserl’s Jewishness consigned him to exclusion from “organic” communities and inclined him to explore pure transcendental rationality, whereas Heidegger sought out the rootedness and concreteness of existence and Dasein that were readily available to him in Germany.