Phenomenology and the Question of Man

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Jan Patočka and Martin Heidegger regarding phenomenology and the question of human phenomena. According to Patočka, Heidegger is the thinker who realized Wilhelm Dilthey's idea of “understanding the human on the basis of the human” by starting from what separates the human from all other beings, without recourse to anything foreign to humanity. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger argues that humanism is a form of metaphysics, yet to understand the human in such a perspective is precisely not to understand the human on the basis of itself— that is, on the basis of a finitude that prevents the human from becoming master of truth. The chapter also considers Patočka's claim that phenomenality cannot be the work of our freedom.

Phenomenology and History

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger regarding the link between phenomenology and history. The philosophies of historicity developed in the climate of relativism that marked the failure of Hegelianism announce a new confrontation with G. W. F. Hegel and a new perspective on the relation of truth and history, which must not be confused with mere anthropocentrism. It is this new perspective on history that we see unfolding in the horizon opened by Husserl's phenomenology and prepared by certain aspects of “life- philosophy.” The chapter first considers Dilthey's concept of “historicity” before discussing the similarities of the Hegelian and Husserlian manners of thinking the subject of history. It also analyzes Heidegger's claim that finitude and historicity are essentially interconnected, with mortality constituting the hidden ground of the historicity of existence.

Temporality and Existence

This chapter brings Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whose different phenomenological styles are normally opposed, into dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's claim that temporality is not a contingent attribute of existence. According to Merleau-Ponty, consciousness and the world, the inside and the outside, sense and non-sense, are interdependent beings. For Merleau-Ponty, the problem of time is the problem of the subject's relation to time. The chapter examines how Merleau-Ponty's position in Phenomenology of Perception becomes the intermediary position between, on the one hand, the completion of the tradition and the fulfillment of modernity represented by Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and, on the other hand, the “new beginning for thought” that Heidegger wants to promote, insofar as he attempts to assume or take on metaphysics.

Worldliness and Mortality

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger regarding worldliness and mortality. For Fink, the problematic of finitude was inseparable from the problem of the worldliness of the world—that is, from the recognition of the non-thingly status of the world and of what he called “cosmological difference,” which is both different from and similar to Heideggerian ontological difference. Fink also developed the idea that death, along with work, the battle for domination, love, and play, properly characterize the humanity of humans. The chapter considers the difficulty of thinking the cosmological difference on the model of the ontological difference, along with Fink's argument that the relations to being and the relations to the world are not the same thing—in other words, cosmology must encompass ontology rather than the inverse.

Conscience: The Most Intimate Alterity

This chapter argues that what makes the character of moral conscience paradigmatic as the experience of alterity and passivity is that the dimension of affirmation originally constitutes it and is inscribed directly on it. It first examines Paul Ricoeur's claim that conscience is “the most deeply hidden passivity” in contrast to other passivities that belong to the experience of the proper body and the relation to the Other. It then considers Emmanuel Levinas's argument that the Other is neither “Being” nor a “being” easily grasped by a concept, along with Martin Heidegger's statement that “ontology” is always “practical,” always “engaged,” and therefore always includes an intrinsically ethical dimension. It also asks whether it is possible to think Being and the Other without opposing them before concluding with an analysis of the dialectic of alterity and ipseity that constitutes the most fundamental level of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self.

The Problem of Pre-Predicative Experience

This chapter examines the principal problems to be addressed by the total itinerary that Edmund Husserl proposes to follow and that leads him from pre-predicative experience to predicative thought and to general judgment. It begins with a discussion of the relation between the temporal and the supratemporal, arguing that it may be the problem that best allows us to understand the opposition between originary experience and the provision of knowledge. Husserl's concern is to take account of the irruption of the immanent but irreal and supratemporal moment of knowledge, which remains identical across all of its real repetitions. It is the operation of objectification, an active operation of the ego, that creates such an identity in predication. The chapter also considers how Husserl allows us to understand the supratemporality of the objectivities of the understanding as omnitemporality—that is, in the end, as a mode of temporality.

The “Last God” of Phenomenology

This chapter examines Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl's concept of God from a phenomenological point of view. Husserl is not content merely to recognize as the “principle of principles” the originary presence of the thing to consciousness; he also excludes the concept of a God who would escape the laws of intentionality. God is not only a limiting-concept for philosophy, but is also what is revealed to religious consciousness as an absolute transcendence. The transcendental reduction bears not only on the whole of the natural world, but also on all the products of culture, and in particular on custom, law, and religion. The chapter explores how Heidegger and Husserl approach the relations between phenomenology and religion.

The Phenomenological Gaze and Speech

This chapter examines how Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger become juxtaposed when it comes to the topic of “phenomenological gaze.” It is a known fact that Heidegger always includes himself in the phenomenological project, which thinks the relation of humans to the world on the basis of a seeing and in the mode of intuition. We cannot underestimate the importance that Heidegger attaches to what he calls the practice of phenomenological seeing that he had learned beginning in 1916 through personal contact with Husserl. The chapter also analyzes what Heidegger teaches us by calling the relation of the human to Being “hermeneutic”: to listen to the speech that orders all saying and all seeing, which have meaning and efficacy only in relation to the originary engagement in which we have always already staked our being.

The Logic of “Validity”

This chapter examines R. Hermann Lotze's interpretation of the theory of ideas and how it influenced the development of Husserlian phenomenology by offering a reading of Lotze's third book of his Logic. It suggests that, although he had assimilated Lotze's theory of validity (Geltung) and theory of ideas, Edmund Husserl proposes a theory of knowledge that is different from Lotze's. It argues that, as Martin Heidegger did in his Winter Semester 1925–1926 course, Husserl rejoins Aristotle's theory of the reciprocal opposition of the known and the knower, and thus begins to escape the impasse to which the modern notion of object leads at the level of the sixth of his Logical Investigations. For, as Heidegger claims, with the Lotzian theory of Geltung, the final stage of the decadence of the question of truth is not yet achieved.

The Phenomenology of Finitude

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Jan Patočka and Martin Heidegger regarding the phenomenology of finitude. It considers Patočka's reading of Heidegger by discussing three texts: the second volume of The Crisis of Meaning, which establishes a parallel between Heidegger and Tomáš Masaryk; a short manuscript entitled “Martin Heidegger, Thinker of Humanity”; and Patočka's Varna lecture from September 1973. The chapter also analyzes Patočka's own thought: the call to sacrifice as the most radical accomplishment of humanity, as the assumption of finitude, and as the revelation of effective freedom.