Phenomenological Reduction in Heidegger and Fink

Abstract

From the time of his earliest phenomenological writings, Edmund Husserl took the task of grounding the natural and human sciences to be one of his leading missions. While opposition to naturalism and psychologism spurred his thinking, this in no way implied an anti-scientific strand in his philosophy. Rather, Husserl felt that the sciences fell into incoherence when they attempted to understand themselves in terms of their own positi vity such that they failed to bring out the issue of meaningconstitution which is sine qua non of their very existence. Whether it be through the notion of intentionality simpliciter or the notion of lifeworld, Husserl's whole philosophic career can be seen as the attempt to mine the origins of the production of scientific knowing. In the context of this attempt, Husserl's phenomenological reduction is to be understood as seeking to trace and lay bare the constituting sources that make the scientific endeavor meaningful such as will provide science and scientists with coherent sense of the true import of their endeavors. As such, while Husserl certainly understood his phenomenological insights as relativizing (by grounding) the mundane sciences, he also understood this relativization as heralding new Enlightenment that was as much for the benefit of scientists as philosophers. Husserl's faith in the capacity of phenomenological insight to enter and positively transform the mundane sphere was not one shared by all of his followers however.1 In what follows, I wish to explore this matter in relation to the treatment of the phenomenological reduction in me thought of Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger. On the face of it, there could not be two more different interpretations of the phenomenological reduction than those found in Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation2 on the one hand and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit,3 on the orner. While Fink claims that thorough unfolding of the reduction leads back to region of pre-being (Vor-sein) in which all human possibilities, including those of knowing and speaking, are ultimately constituted, Heidegger insists that, at bottom, me reduction discloses Dasein's Being-in-the-world as the ground behind which it is impossible to inquire. Thus, while Heidegger insists mat the performance of the reduction must ultimately be understood as human possibility, Fink wants to claim that the entire sphere of human possibilities and all concern with the meaning of being is to be understood against the horizon of the pre-being to which transcendental subjectivity ultimately refers. And yet, I would suggest that there is at least one point of contact between Heidegger and Fink which has to do with the capacity for communication between the phenomenological and mundane spheres. I will argue that while Heidegger in no way wishes to endorse Fink's radical break between the transcendental and mundane spheres - in fact he attempts precisely to bring them closer to one another by avoiding all talk of constituting ego pole - his version of me reduction as explored in the phenomenon of anxiety leads to disruption in which the insights garnered from the transcendental sphere struggle to be heard in the sphere of mundane existing. Phenomenological Reduction and the Split in Transcendental Life Let us begin with brief consideration of Fink's text and its implications for continuity between the transcendental and mundane spheres. The Sixth Cartesian Meditation was written as part of much greater co-operative project between Fink and Husserl in which tiie Cartesian Meditations, delivered as lectures in Paris in 1929, were to be reworked as more comprehensive introduction to Husserlian phenomenology.4 The text itself, described as a sketch of transcendental theory of method sets itself the task of bringing to light problems that are latent in Husserl's (SCM 1). Specifically, Fink is after the development of phenomenology of (SCM 8) as an investigation into the horizon against which the very activity of phenomenologizing is to be understood. …