Dasein and World: Heidegger’s Reconceiving of the Transcendental After Husserl

Abstract

Abstract The following examines Heidegger’s analysis of world and Dasein from a transcendental perspective. It is argued that Heidegger’s reflections on the interconnected themes of world and Dasein reveal the tensions that exist between the transcendental claims before and after Being and Time and the analysis of worldliness. It begins by looking at Heidegger’s early analysis of Husserl’s critique of psychologism and naturalism, assessing what this tells us about Heidegger’s analysis of world and nature. It subsequently addresses Heidegger’s transformation of Husserlian phenomenology, and intentionality in particular, arguing against interpreters who claim Heidegger’s interconnected concepts of Dasein and world are reducible to one another and hence phenomenologically problematic. In order to respond to this reading, the article examines the twin themes of, on the one hand, transcendental constitutive analysis in Heidegger’s work, Dasein as disclosive and ‘world entering’, and, on the other hand, the centrality of the world and the realm of nature as always more than Dasein’s constitutive relationship to it. In order to understand what Heidegger means by worldliness, the article will look at Heidegger’s reflections on nature as the world’s other, which nonetheless needs to be understood on the basis of worldliness.