Abstract
At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl’s classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl’s discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on human persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans, but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency: on the one hand, the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings and on the other hand the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology.
Highlights
At the very beginning of the first part of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes his own Dasein-analytic and the new phenomenological hermeneutics that it motivates from Husserl’s classical phenomenology which, in Heidegger’s reading, is dominated by epistemological interests and misguided by takenfor-granted concepts
For Heidegger, the realization of our distinctive relation to being must serve as the transcendental basis for philosophical anthropology, as distinct from all empirical inquiries into human beings and their possessions, material and mental. Heidegger acknowledges that his contemporary philosophies of life and personhood involve implicit tendencies toward posing the question about our human way of being, but he argues that these philosophies never undertake this task properly, since they do not critically investigate the inherited philosophical terminology of persons, egos, souls and spirits, but take these terms as given: ‘ we are not being terminologically idiosyncratic when we avoid these terms as well as the expressions “life” and “human being” in designating the beings that we ourselves are’
Instead of the simple opposition that Heidegger’s early critique suggests, we find two alternative approaches that share the phenomenological-transcendental interest in clarifying the conditions of experiencing but divert on crucial matters that concern our experiences of human beings, ourselves and others
Summary
At the very beginning of the first part of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes his own Dasein-analytic and the new phenomenological hermeneutics that it motivates from Husserl’s classical phenomenology which, in Heidegger’s reading, is dominated by epistemological interests and misguided by takenfor-granted concepts. For Heidegger, the realization of our distinctive relation to being must serve as the transcendental basis for philosophical anthropology, as distinct from all empirical inquiries into human beings and their possessions, material and mental Heidegger acknowledges that his contemporary philosophies of life and personhood involve implicit tendencies toward posing the question about our human way of being, but he argues that these philosophies never undertake this task properly, since they do not critically investigate the inherited philosophical terminology of persons, egos, souls and spirits, but take these terms as given: ‘ we are not being terminologically idiosyncratic when we avoid these terms as well as the expressions “life” and “human being” in designating the beings that we ourselves are’ (Heidegger [1927] 1993, 46/71–72; cf GA20 124). The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology
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