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Phenomenology as Possibility: The

Phenomenological Appropriation
of the History of Philosophy in the
Young Heidegger
FRANCO VOLPI
Universit degli Studi di Padova

1. Was Heidegger a phenomenologist?


In an interview published in 1986 in an issue of Freiburger Universittsbltter,
which was entirely devoted to the relationship of Heideggers thought to politics, 1 Max Mller spoke of his rst encounter with Heidegger at the beginning
of the 192829 winter semester at Freiburg:
When I settled in Freiburg to complete my studies, he recalled, all I knew
of Heidegger was his fame. Being and Time glowed with a kind of magical
energy. In truth, I had not read the work, but I said to myself: I want to participate at least once in a seminar with this man. Heidegger began his activity at Freiburg with an introductory seminar on Kants Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals. I can still clearly recall looking for the classroom on the
rst oor of the university in which he was to hold his seminar and that at
the Institute of Philosophy with its 20 or 25 seats, there was not enough
space. A gentleman behind me, small of stature, asked me What are you
looking for? I said: Im looking for Heideggers classroom. So am I, he
replied, I am Heidegger. After consulting the map of the building, we nally found the room we were looking for and entered together. A number
of students well known to Heidegger were present, but for the rst lesson he
did not want to interrogate those he knew. I was the one he questioned at
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length. At the end of the class, he oVered me an invitation: You should also
attend my seminar on Aristotle. I said, Professor, I am going to sit for the
state exam, and two philosophical seminars like this are too much for me.
He replied, Ah, thats surely just an excuse. Perhaps your knowledge of
Greek is insuYcient? And I said, Greek is the only thing I think I know well
enough. He insisted again, So come to the doctoral seminar. This doctoral
seminar was an imposing aVair, and participants included both students
and colleagues: Oskar Becker, a philosopher of mathematics who later became Professor at Bonn, Julius Ebbinghaus, who was later active at Marburg,
Gustav Siewerth, Simon Moser, who subsequently became Ordinarius
Professor at Karlsruhe, Brcker and his future wife Kthe Oltmans, and
nally Eugen Fink. Thus it was a splendid thing, and extremely demanding.
This was how, in the most expeditious way imaginable, I came into a little
closer contact with Heidegger.2
For the question I will treat in what follows, what is interesting is what Max
Mller says with regard to the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl in
the rest of the interview. Recalling how on one occasion the conversation came
around to the father of phenomenology, Mller states (and I quote verbatim):
It was the last semester in which Husserl was giving a course with corresponding seminars: he was dealing with the phenomenology of empathy.
As it happened, when we rst met, we spoke of Heideggers relationship
with Husserl. I said, in eVect, and moreover, I understand nothing of phenomenology either, and you have listed in your syllabus some Phenomenological exercises on Aristotle. I have no idea what that may be. Heidegger replied:
Ah, a lot of foolishness! Its a gesture for my master Husserl. No need for
you to be familiar with Husserls thought.3
For a number of reasons, which I will indicate, I believe that the statement
attributed to Heidegger here an exceptionally malicious attribution, given
that Heidegger had just been appointed as Husserls successor must be considered as a projection onto the historical event rather than a reliable account
of what Heidegger actually said on this occasion. Even if Heidegger may well
have thought that to read and understand Aristotle it was not necessary to
be familiar with Husserl, we can justi ably doubt that he would have referred to Husserl in the terms that Max Mller puts in his mouth, which
seem highly unlikely when we recall that Heidegger was addressing a young
student who simply happened by (which was what Mller represented for
him at the time).
In any event, Mllers projection is symptomatic: It represents, in eVect, a
rather widespread tendency to attribute to Heidegger an opportunistic attitude
towards Husserl and, at the same time, a low regard for Husserls phenomenological position on philosophical problems. Mllers account thus provides
the opportunity to reexamine the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl
and, in particular, to consider a speci c question, which is the subject of my

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paper and which can be expressed in the following manner: Is the phenomenological character that Heidegger attributes to his reading of the great classical philosophers (especially Aristotle and Kant, but also Leibniz and, later,
Hegel), against whom he pits himself during his rst years of teaching at
Freiburg (19191923) and in his Marburg courses (19231928), merely nominal, an external connotation articulated solely for academic opportunistic reasons, or is it a trait that helps de ne Heideggers interpretations in an intrinsic,
essential way?

2. The transformation of phenomenology in Heideggers work


To begin in medias res, I will forego a general consideration of the relationship
between Heidegger and Husserl, 4 and I will evoke only the general line along
which developed the profound transformation of phenomenology in the passage from Husserl to Heidegger. After his initial adherence to Husserls teaching and to phenomenological terminology, as evidenced by his early writings,5
in the 1920s Heidegger attempted to radicalize the procedure of philosophy of
his master and moved towards very diVerent solutions. As we can see, at the
latest in Being and Time, the meaning of phenomenological research is bent into
an obvious ontological torsion and is transformed into the idea of fundamental ontology, which will lead Heidegger to a de nitive split from Husserl
and from the very idea of phenomenology.
Leaving aside the biographical aspects of this disagreement,6 we can say
that from a philosophical point of view Heidegger publicly settled his score
with Husserl in the beginning of the 1930s, when in the winter semester course
of 193031, he stated: Following Husserls last publication, which represents
a vigorous departure from his former collaborators, we would do well to call
phenomenology only what Husserl himself has created and what he will produce. All the same, we have all learned from him, and will continue to do so.7
This statement signals the end of Heideggers philosophical dispute with
Husserl. His subsequent observations on his relationship with Husserlian thinking for example, in the lecture The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking (1964)8 or in the Zhringen Seminar (1973)9 are merely historical retrospectives, which in essence refer back to previous arguments in order to intensify
the profound diversity of their positions: Husserls, concentrated on the idealistic-transcendental problematic of subjectivity and of its constitution in relation
to the world, and Heideggers, which is, on the contrary, directed by an ontological perspective towards the problem of being. It is probably because of this
diVerence, which is viewed moreover from the perspective of today, that many
people and Max Mller is only one eloquent example have believed that
Heidegger broke away from phenomenology much more rapidly than in fact
was the case.

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In reality, however early one may date the discovery by the young Heidegger of his own original path of thinking, during the 1920s he was engaged in an un agging debate with Husserlian phenomenology, to the extent
that we can state that his philosophical position, as it is set forth in Being
and Time, derives precisely from this debate as much as from the desire to radicalize from an ontological point of view the Husserlian understanding of
phenomenology.
It is suYcient to read the texts of this period to realize that this is the case.
The in uence can be seen as early as the Comments on Karl Jasperss Psychology of
Worldviews,10 written between 191921, in which Heidegger, in his program
for a hermeneutics of facticity, on which he bases his critique of Jaspers, follows the articulation of Husserls phenomenology. When he introduces into
the analysis of phenomena the distinction between a content sense (Gehaltssinn),
an actualizing sense (Vollzugssinn ) and relational sense (Bezugssinn ), in fact he
is simply reformulating the three directions of research in which Husserl developed phenomenological investigation, namely, the phenomenology of contents (Sachphnomenologie), the phenomenology of acts (Aktphnomenologie), and the
phenomenology of the correlation between acts and contents (Korrelationsphnomenologie ).
This analysis could also be applied to the rst university courses at Freiburg, which have been published, and in which we can note the profound
assimilation of the Husserlian problematic by Heidegger (who initially associates the phenomenological perspective to the Neokantism of Baden, and especially to Emil Lask, but then soon separates it in his violent opposition to
Rickert): notably, the courses of Kriegsnotsemester 1919 The Idea of Philosophy
and the Problem of Worldviews, and the summer term course of 1919 Phenomenology and Transcendental Value-Philosophy, published as Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie
(GA 56/57), the winter semester course of 191920 Grundprobleme Phnomenologie
(GA 58), the summer semester course of 1920 Phnomenologie der Anschauung und
des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen BegriVsbildung (GA 59), and the winter
semester 192122 course Phnomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles. Einfhrung in
die phnomenologische Forschung (GA 61).
We should also take into consideration the critical confrontation with Husserl
in the Marburg courses, almost all of which have been published: The winter
semester 192324 course Einfhrung in die phnomenologische Forschung (GA 17),
in which Heidegger discusses in depth among other things Husserls article Philosophy as Rigorous Science. The introductory section of the summer semester 1925 course ( published as Prolegomena zur Geschichte des ZeitbegriVs
[GA 20] is also fundamental, in that it contains a historical reconstruction of
the genesis of phenomenology, a penetrating exposition of its fundamental
discoveries (intentionality, categorical intuition, and the importance of the a priori ) and of the fundamental principle of phenomenology (zu den Sachen selbst! ),

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and that leads to a statement of the need to radicalize and transform phenomenology, beginning with its own speculative dynamic. And in the beginning of
the winter semester 192526 course Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (GA 21),
by way of an introduction to the analysis of the phenomenon of truth, we
nd a reconsideration of Husserls critique of psychologism, which Heidegger
had previously examined in his doctoral thesis and which serves here as a point
of departure in order to go back all the way to the Aristotelian understanding of truth because if the Husserlian critique breaks the traditional association between truth and judgment, the Aristotelian understanding of truth in
turn represents the most wide-ranging explanation of this phenomenon,
whether on the ontological plane or on the more limited plane of the proposition. And again: in the introduction to the summer 1927 course on Die
Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie (GA 24), Heidegger once more examines the
meaning of the phenomenological method, which he no longer considers as
did Husserl as a philosophical passage from the natural attitude to the transcendental attitude, but rather as a veritable conversion of the gaze from the
plane of beings to the ontological plane of the modality of being. Finally,
Heidegger also quali es as phenomenological his interpretation of the Critique
of Pure Reason in the winter semester 192728 course (GA 25). But beyond these
detailed analyses, we nd in other courses more eeting references to phenomenology, which are not necessary to account for here, but which are
nonetheless important.11
Thus while avoiding a comprehensive consideration of Heideggers confrontation with Husserl during this periodno doubt the most intense time in
the relations between the two I will limit myself to verifying the phenomenological character that Heidegger attributes to his interpretations of Aristotle
and Kant developed in the courses mentioned above. The thesis I wish to
develop is that this character connotes for this period, in an essential way, the
Heideggerian appropriation of the history of philosophy. To demonstrate this
thesis, I will develop a number of observations on the following points:
1) The appropriative consideration of the history of philosophy derives from
a kind of ontological torsion and from a radicalization of the phenomenological method: Heidegger articulates that method in three fundamental
moments, reduction, construction, and destruction; and he conceives it in an
openly ontological sense and not, like Husserl, in a gnoseologic-transcendental
sense.
2) The set of themes in which Heidegger pits himself against the principal
gures of traditional ontology is the problematic characteristic of Husserlian
phenomenology; in other words, the problematic of the constitution of subjectivity, which Heidegger takes up again in an appropriation that seeks to
elicit the intrinsic speculative dynamic from it and produce a more radical onto-

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logical formulation, folding it and reinterpreting it in terms of Dasein this


problem determines the perspective from which Heidegger reads Aristotle and
Kant during the 1920s.

3. The ontological torsion of the phenomenological method and the genesis


of the phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology
A preliminary aspect of the Husserl-Heidegger liation that must be considered and that immediately separates their individual perspectives is the
diVerent weight the history of philosophy has for each of them. As we know,
Husserls interest in the subject was rather weak; for Heidegger, it became decisive. The divergence that opened up between them in this context created
a profound rift. There were external reasons that urged Heidegger towards
the study of the history of philosophical thought, for example: the fact that
Husserl himself, while planning a distribution of work within the phenomenological school, directed one of his two assistants at Freiburg, Oskar Becker, to
investigate regional ontologies of mathematic and natural sciences and directed
the other, Heidegger, towards the study of the regional ontology of history. But
what interests us here are not the external historical occasions. Rather, it is the
substantial motivation, which compelled Heidegger to engage himself in this
eld of inquiry and to state the necessity of what he calls in section 6 of Being
and Time the phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.
It cannot be overemphasized that this term is not used in a negative sense,
except to the extent that he is designating an approach to the history of thought
that seeks to distinguish itself polemically from the historiographic methods
in vogue in the philosophical culture at the beginning of the century, such as
the methodology of the history of the mind or the history of problems. Thus
the Heideggerian destruction does not amount to a simple refusal of the history of ontology, but it strives to be a work of decomposition that exposes its
constituent elements and its structures in its positive limitations and possibilities, and all of that with a view towards a veritable and radical reconstruction and renewal of ontology.
But to grasp the beginnings of the Heideggerian destruction, we must ask
why the task is quali ed as phenomenological. A preliminary attempt at
an answer could linger on the consideration that, in the context of the methodological explanations that Heidegger gives in the opening of his magnum
opus, the elucidation of the meaning of he destruction of the history of
phenomenology is tightly linked to the famous section of the phenomenological method and that therefore the destruction must also be closely related
to phenomenology. Although well-founded and legitimate, until now such an
interpretation, based solely on Being and Time, could not clearly account for the

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Heidegggerian interpretation being derived from the Husserlian theory. Now,


the university courses published in the Gesamtausgabe show in detail how
Heidegger conceived of the destruction of the history of ontology through an
articulation of the Husserlian method of reduction, and thus they provide a
number of reasons to call it a phenomenological destruction.
On this point, the transition from Husserl to Heidegger is clearly revealed
in the beginning of the summer semester 1927 course Basic Problems of Phenomenology (and thus contemporaneous with Being and Time, of which the course is a
continuation). In section 5 Heidegger clari es The character of ontological
method. The three basic components of the phenomenological method.12
While preserving a transcendental approach, since he continues to conceive of
philosophy as an aprioristic eld of knowledge in relation to other types of
knowledge, here Heidegger transforms, in an ontological sense, the Husserlian
transcendental-subjective understanding and integrates the method of reduction with the idea of destruction.
What is phenomenological reduction? For Husserl the concept denotes
in principle the modality of the passage from the immediate natural attitude
to the speci cally philosophical disposition conceived as a disposition of the
gnoseologic-transcendental type; and this passage is determined by Husserl as
the shift from the natural consideration of the world to the analysis of the life
of the constituent transcendental consciousness and of its noetic-noematic contents. (First of all, in the static perspective, the constitution concerns simple
objects; then, in the genetic perspective, the constitution of objects is considered
in relation to the horizon of objects and nally in relation to the general horizon of any constitution, that is, the world as the horizon of horizons, which is
the correlative of the ego). Heidegger, on the contrary, even if he resumes the
idea of a conversion of the immediate and natural consideration to a consideration of the philosophical kind, conceives of this latter not in a gnoseologicotranscendental sense, but rather in an explicitly ontological sense, that is, as a
conversion of the consideration of beings to the consideration of the mode of
being. He writes:
Being is to be laid hold of and made our theme. Being is always being
of beings and accordingly it becomes accessible at rst only by starting with
some being. Here the phenomenological vision, which does the apprehending, must indeed direct itself toward a being, but it has to do so in such
a way that the being of this being is thereby brought out so that it may be
possible to thematize it. Apprehension of being, ontological investigation,
always turns, at rst and necessarily, to some being; but then, in a precise way,
it is led away from that being and led back to its being. We call this basic component of phenomenological method the leading back or re-duction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to being phenomenological
reduction. We are thus adopting a central term of Husserls phenomenology
in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent. For Husserl the

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phenomenological reduction, which he worked out for the rst time expressly
in the Ideas Toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913),
is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and
persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noeticnoematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of
consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may
be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being
of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).13
In this passage, the observation of the terminological point of contact and the
consciousness of the horizon of problems in common nonetheless combine with
an eloquent indication of the diVerent tradition in which Heidegger situates
himself and of the diVerent direction in which he is urging his execution of phenomenological work: that is, the tradition of ontology. More speci cally, his is
an interpretation which, as Heidegger himself states elsewhere, proposes to
closely link phenomenological thought to the tradition of Greek ontology, by
pushing its dynamic to its most radical consequences. Phenomenological questioning, Heidegger aYrms, in its innermost tendency itself leads to the question of the being of the intentional and before anything else to the question of
the sense of being as such. Phenomenology radicalized in its ownmost possibility is nothing but the questioning of Plato and Aristotle brought back to life:
the repetition, the retaking of the beginning of our scientic philosophy.14
Husserl had developed the idea of phenomenologys being linked to the
tradition of transcendental thought. Heidegger reinterprets it in light of the
tradition of ontology. These are two philosophical traditions that share a fundamental problem, which is the requirement to delimit the philosophical consideration of the world to that of the natural, the everyday. Yet they are
radically diVerent from one another because of the fact that, at the origin of
this delimitation, they presuppose a diVerent fundamental motivation of the
philosophical attitude. In the tradition of transcendental thought, philosophy
is delimited in relation to the doxagraphical knowledge of everyday knowing and to the positive knowledge of particular sciences because of the speci c character of the argumentation and of the understanding distinctive to it,
and which constitute it as a well-founded knowledge in the sense that it
accounts for its presuppositions and is con gured as an analysis of the possibilities of any other way of knowing. In the tradition of ontology, on the contrary, philosophy distinguishes itself from everyday knowing and from speci c
scienti c knowledge by the object of its understanding, more than by virtue
of the speci c structure of its arguments and of its understanding, that is,
because of the fact that it does not consider an aspect or a particular sphere
of the being, but the totality of the being even as being.
Now, by linking himself to the tradition of transcendental thought, Husserl

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assigns philosophy the task of establishing the sciences in a rigorous manner


by exposing the transcendental subjective functions and the noetic-noematic
contents that make possible the objective operations of understanding in general, and notably scienti c understanding. In this context, the epoch and the
phenomenological-transcendental reduction are ctitious operations put into
play by the philosopher in them the validity of assumptions and presuppositions accepted by everyday knowing and by the sciences is temporarily suspended and bracketed, in order to be ultimately established in a genuine
manner, once its deep roots have been exposed and the critical-transcendental
knowledge bearing on the secret operations of constituent subjectivity has been
attained.
Heidegger, as we know, links himself instead to the tradition of ontology,
and he asks of thought a single question, the question of being. But he does not
assimilate it, as the tradition does, to the question of the totality of beings or of
the highest being. On the contrary, at least in the period of Being and Time, he
understands being as the mode of being of the being. This is why he distinguishes his fundamental ontology, which thematizes being and which is thus
ontological in a strict sense, from traditional ontology, which takes as its object
beings and which thus halts its analyses on the ontic level. Consequently,
Heidegger maintains a transcendental gap between the natural attitude and the
philosophical attitude, except that the diVerence is no longer, as for Husserl,
the metadiscursive character of philosophy in relation to everyday knowing
and to speci c scienti c disciplines, but the radical gap that philosophical
consideration requires to the extent that it no longer contemplates either the
being or the conditions of its intelligibility, but only its character of being.
Thus Heidegger sees the conversion from the natural attitude to the philosophical attitude as a sort of torsion of the gaze that is turned away from the
being as such and that is directed towards the modality of being of beings. ( The
three modalities of being that he distinguishes in Being and Time are the Dasein,
the Zuhandenheit and the Vorhandenheit ).
Hence upon close examination, Heidegger distinguishes his understanding of the conversion from everyday knowing to philosophy, whether it concerns transcendental philosophy and/or ontology (insofar as it is conceived as
traditional ontology and not fundamental ontology). He distinguishes the
conversion with regards to the transcendentalist tradition since he contrasts
it to the original motivation of philosophy as a science of being; but he also
distinguishes it from ontology, in its traditional de nition, since he states the
need to step back from the ontic consideration of the single being in order to
reach the ontological consideration of the being of this being. And Heidegger anchors this conversion in existence in a deeper way than Husserl: While
the passage from one attitude to the other is a speculative exercise for Husserl, and thus a ction, even if it is necessary and even if put into play by the

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professional philosopher seen as the servant of humanity, Heidegger does not


reduce this conversion to a mental operation that may or may not be put into
play, at will, by the subject who decides to do so. For Heidegger the conversion of our gaze from the ontic-natural consideration to the ontological-philosophical one through which, beyond beings, appears being is anchored in
a fundamental mood (Grundstimmung ) that arises at the moment one expects it
the least and that has a disorienting eVect, in the fundamental mood of
anguish, Angst. The conversion to the philosophical gaze thus becomes something that can in principle reach every existence, by touching it in the depths
of its being that, prior to each theoretical or practical realization, resists any
appropriation as a hostile alterity.15 This is the reason why, in the passage I cite
above, where he distances himself from Husserl, Heidegger adds signi cantly:
Scienti c method is never a simple technique. When it becomes one, it
demeans its own essence. 16
But Heideggers use of the phenomenological method of reduction is characterized not only by the ontological rather than transcendental reduction.
Heidegger adds a subsequent change to this modi cation, which is an articulation of the method that attempts to correspond to the interior logic of the
phenomenological method; in this articulation, reduction is integrated by two
subsequent moments: construction and destruction. Based on the reduction, Heidegger derives construction through the following argumentation:
Phenomenological reduction as the leading of our vision from beings to being
nevertheless is not the only basic component of phenomenological method;
in fact, it is not even the central component. For this guidance of vision back
from beings to being requires at the same time that we should bring ourselves forward toward being itself. Pure aversion from beings is a merely negative methodological measure that not only needs to be supplemented by
a positive one but also expressly requires us to be led toward being; it thus
requires guidance. Being does not become accessible like a being. We do not
simply nd it in front of us. As is to be shown, it must always be brought
to view in a free projection. This projecting of the antecedently given
being upon its being and the structures of its being we call phenomenological
construction.17
Once he has clari ed the reciprocal inherence of reduction and construction, Heidegger introduces the third element of the phenomenological method destruction by means of which he opens up phenomenology to the
consideration of the history of philosophical thought. In the horizon of the
constitutions of historical-ontological meanings in relation to xed categories
and the prejudices of tradition, the Heideggerian phenomenological destruction ful lls a function analogous to that ful lled by the Husserlian reduction
with regard to objectivities and pregiven horizons in the constitution of experience and knowing. Indeed, if philosophical research must begin with beings in

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order to reach being, it is, in this movement, always already conditioned by certain epochal perspectives in which it is always already located; however, its
access to being is necessarily conditioned and even impeded or concealed
by them. Here is Heideggers argument:
A glance at the history of philosophy shows that many domains of beings
were discovered very early nature, space, the soul but that, nevertheless,
they could not yet be comprehended in their speci c being. As early as antiquity a common or average concept of being came to light, which was
employed for the interpretation of all the beings of the various domains
of being and their modes of being, although their speci c being itself,
taken expressly in its structure, was not made into a problem and could not
be de ned. Thus Plato saw quite well that the soul, with its lgow, is a being
diVerent from sensible being. But he was not in a position to demarcate the
speci c mode of being of this being from the mode of being of any other
being or non-being. Instead, for him as well as for Aristotle and subsequent
thinkers down to Hegel, and all the more so for their successors, all ontological investigations proceed within an average concept of being in general.
Even the ontological investigation that we are now conducting is determined by its historical situation and, therewith, by certain possibilities of
approaching beings and by the preceding philosophical tradition. The store
of basic philosophical concepts derived from the philosophical tradition is
still so in uential today that this eVect of tradition can hardly be overestimated. It is for this reason that all philosophical discussion, even the most
radical attempt to begin all over again, is pervaded by traditional concepts
and thus by traditional horizons and traditional angles of approach, which
we cannot assume with unquestionable certainty to have arisen originally and
genuinely from the domain of being and the constitution of being they claim
to comprehend. It is for this reason that there necessarily belongs to the
conceptual interpretation of being and its structures, that is, to the reductive
construction of being, a destruction a critical process in which the traditional
concepts, which at rst must necessarily be employed, are de-constructed
down to the sources from which they were drawn. Only by means of this
destruction can ontology fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of the
genuine character of its concepts.18
This is how Heidegger comes to state and to justify the need for a conversation with the metaphysical tradition, through the articulation of the idea of
the phenomenological method. It is thus a conversation that is not lateral, exterior, or alternative to the course followed by Husserlian phenomenology.
Heidegger intends to show how one achieves it by following the demands
inherent to the phenomenological method itself, in other words, by pursuing
the internal dynamic of its problems to its root. The preference shown for the
foundational moments of ontology is a product of the nature of the problem
that phenomenological thinking takes as its own, notably the fact that the con-

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version from the natural attitude to the philosophical one (through reduction
performed with a view to construction) is conceived as a conversion of the ontological type that leads from a being to being: it is with this goal in mind that
destruction is given the task of freeing the prejudices concerning being that are
typical of the ontological tradition.
Heidegger can then summarize his articulation and his ontologization of
the phenomenological method by the following aYrmation, which unambiguously illustrates the positive and appropriative meaning of the criticaldeconstructive access to tradition:
The three basic components of phenomenological method reduction, construction, destruction belong together in their content and must receive
grounding in their mutual pertinence. Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a negation
of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it
signi es precisely a positive appropriation of tradition. Because destruction
belongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the same
time, in a certain sense, historical cognition. History of philosophy, as it is
called, belongs to the concept of philosophy as science, to the concept of phenomenological investigation. The history of philosophy is not an arbitrary
appendage to the business of teaching philosophy, which provides an occasion for picking up some convenient and easy theme for passing an examination or even for just looking around to see how things were in earlier times.
Knowledge of the history of philosophy is intrinsically unitary on its own
account and the speci c mode of historical cognition in philosophy diVers in
its object from all other scienti c knowledge of history.19

4. The problems of phenomenology as horizon for the interpretation


of the history of philosophy (Aristotle and Kant )
The phenomenological derivation of Heideggers interest in the history of philosophy does not concern the methodological aspect alone. If we consider the
interpretations Heidegger developed in the 1920s, particularly those of Aristotle and Kant, we can see how they are elaborated following the thread of a
problematic that itself springs from a deepening and a radicalization of the
problems of Husserlian phenomenology.
On several occasions Heidegger had acknowledged the decisive role of
Husserls phenomenology in his philosophical training, as is made clear by his
citations of Husserl20 and the autobiographical accounts in which Heidegger
gladly remembers his youthful studies of the Logical Investigations.21 Thanks to the
Marburg University courses, it is also possible to see how Heidegger acknowledges certain fundamental discoveries in Husserlian phenomenology, such as

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the discovery of intentionality and its essential characteristics, the fundamental


distinction between sensible intuition and categorical intuition, the determination of the function of the apriori, as well as the direction of philosophical
re ection towards things themselves.
However it is undeniable that in the same texts Heidegger stresses his
distance from Husserl, developing the idea of phenomenology in the direction
of an open and declared criticism of the position of his teacher, a position that
is transcendental, relies on consciousness, and is theoretical. The criticisms
put forward by Heidegger, which concern central themes such as truth, being,
and time, converge and concentrate on the focal problem around which on
the occasion of writing the article on phenomenology for the Encyclopedia
Britannica the disagreement between the two became a rupture,22 that is to
say, the determination of transcendental subjectivity. This subjectivity even
if considered by Husserl as radically diVerent from other beings, because relative to them it ful lls a constitutive function is not determined in a suYciently
positive manner in its ontological status and in its modality of being. This
comes from the fact as Heidegger suggests that Husserl is thinking in the
horizon of an understanding that is essentially oriented towards the attitude
of theory (in its modern sense) and that consequently privileges the horizon of presence and thus cannot grasp either the inmost ontological core of
subjectivity or the entire articulation of attitudes and dispositions that are
rooted there.23
It is thus a matter of calling into question the unilateral characteristics of
the Husserlian understanding of the being of man in terms of subjectivity, and
of attempting a more originary determination of the modality of being of
human life, by grasping the essential modalities and attitudes from which the
modality of being emerges. It is precisely from the horizon of this problem
that Heidegger approaches the study of Aristotle and then Kant, impelled
by the tacit expectation of nding the solution to questions that, in his eyes,
are not only unanswered in Husserlian phenomenology, but that also ran the
risk of remaining concealed there.
Now, once he has set the problem of access in an ontologically original
manner to human life, Heidegger is initially convinced that he can nd
in Aristotle, notably in the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics, a complete
phenomenology of dispositions in which, at the same time, the human soul
(the Dasein ) can be found. These are the disposition of contemplation or of
the theoretical consideration of beings (yevra), the disposition of producing (pohsiw), and the disposition of acting (prjiw), which are respectively
oriented by a speci c disposition and a speci c knowledge: wisdom (sofa), art
or technique (txnh), and prudence (frnhsiw). They are according to Aristotle,
the modalities in which the human soul (cux) is in the true (lhyeei).24

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Heidegger interprets them in an ontological sense as the fundamental modalities of the uncovering and opening up character of Dasein in its relation
with beings.
Along these lines Heidegger developed, beginning in 1919, a detailed interpretation of Aristotle that played a decisive role in the path of his thinking until
Being and Time. It was certainly not a matter of grasping the historical truth
about Aristotle nor simply of exposing the philosophical problems that the
Aristotelian text sets forth. Aristotle represented rather a kind of speculative watermark that Heidegger used as a point of reference to elaborate the
questions he was working on after Husserl, notably the question of human life
in its facticity as well as the question of nding modalities adequate to grasping it. It is thus thanks to the thing itself, and not as a gesture of external
homage towards Husserl, that Heidegger quali es his interpretation of Aristotle
as phenomenological and that he states, for example, in the course of the
winter semester of 192122, that such a phenomenological interpretation of
Aristotle is simply an introduction to phenomenological research.25
As an indication that at the center of Heideggers interest was not so much
Aristotle himself, but rather the task of understanding human life in its ontological structure, following the Aristotelian paradigm, we can consider the fact
that Heidegger submits Aristotle to a critique in those areas where his thinking does not seem, to Heidegger, to correspond to the original characteristics of human life, observed from the ontological perspective that is so close
to his heart. Indeed, although he chooses Aristotle as a guide to navigate
beyond the impasses of Husserlian phenomenology, Heidegger gradually
becomes convinced that even Aristotle is insuYcient to grasp what he increasingly envisions as his problem, that is, the unitary structure of the being,
which he determines as originary temporality (originary because understood
in nonnaturalist terms). And he becomes convinced at the same time that the
Aristotelian phenomenology of the fundamental dispositions of Dasein, although inspired, remains a rhapsodic classi cation, because it cannot reach the
unitary ontological ground upon which are based the three dispositions of
yevra, prjiw, pohsiw.
As to the reasons for this incapacity, the Aristotelian ontology of human
life (which is how Heidegger interprets and ontologizes the Aristotelian concept of practical philosophy) cannot, for Heidegger, grasp the unitary ground
of human life, because, by remaining tied to a naturalistic understanding of
time,26 it is not in a position to thematize the equation that Heidegger institutes between the soul and time, between Dasein and temporality. The general horizon in which, in the end, Heidegger places these limits of Aristotelian
thought is the horizon of the Greek understanding of being that privileges,
without questioning it, the dimension of presence, attributing the maximal

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character of being to a being who appears in a stable manner. Accordingly,


Aristotelian thought cannot conceive being in the horizon of the full articulation of time.
It is because of this that Heidegger, after having taken Aristotle as his guide,
turns to Kant. He wrote to Jaspers that he was happy to have read Kant without ruining him through the glasses of todays commerce27 and to have
learned to like him in opposition to the Neokantians.28 The change of the
historical referent is particularly obvious in the winter semester course of
192526 (Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit): after thoroughly examining the question of truth, following the thread of an interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger suddenly and abruptly, without warning or any kind of preparation,
changes the program announced at the beginning of the course and begins a
close explication of Kant. It is suYcient to consider the problem on which this
explication focuses which is essentially an interpretation of Kants understanding of the relation between the I think and time, between the transcendental apperception and the temporal autoaVection of the ego, between
the personalitas transcendentalis and temporality to understand why Heidegger
himself quali es even his interpretation of Kant as phenomenological. As
with his interpretation of Aristotle, this commentary on Kant develops into an
attempt to discover in the Kantian text the problem that preoccupies
Heideggers thinking as he distances himself from Husserl, that is to say, once
again, the question of the fundamental attitudes of human life in their originariness and in their unitary ontological determination (which Heidegger determines as original temporality).
There is no doubt as to the Husserlian origin of this problem: indeed, in
Heideggers eyes, it was Husserl who had rst dealt with it in his doctrine of
transcendental and constitutive subjectivity and its temporal structure (articulated as impression, retention, and protention). By making Husserls problem his own, Heidegger also becomes aware of the limits in which Husserl
had viewed and dealt with it. He exposes, in an increasingly resolute and open
way, the unilateral characteristics of the gnoseologic-transcendental actuation
of phenomenology in Husserls work and as he will state expressly on several occasions and will write at the end of section 7 of Being and Time he is
attempting to separate phenomenology from these characteristics in order to
develop it in its ownmost possibilities. These characteristics essentially concern the Husserlian determination of subjectivity, which remain conditioned
by the theoretical and the gnoseological presuppositions involving consciousness, which Husserl neither observes nor questions. Hence his elucidation of the constitution of transcendental subjectivity remains insuYcient
from the ontological point of view, as does the determination of its speci c
temporality (conceived as belonging to lower intellection). In the end, Husserl
remains within a metaphysical understanding of being as presence and within

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an ontological dichotomy of Cartesian origin that separates being and thought.


Such unquestioned presuppositions are clearly revealed to Heidegger as
he appropriates Aristotle, through whom he comes to a decisive turning point
in the development of this problem, without yet nding the solution. It is then
that the star of Kant rises on the horizon of his re ections, and Heidegger greets him as the promise of a solution to the problem that he is formulating more and more as his own: What is the unitary ontological ground, the
originary constitution of being, upon which are based the fundamental attitudes of yevra, pohsiw and prjiw, in other words the basic determinations of
Dasein? And if this ground, the being of Dasein, can be determined as originary temporality, what is the relation between being and time, and what is
the way to grasp it in its originariness and its totality? In this context, in the
abrupt transition from Aristotle to Kant in the 192526 winter semester course,
Heidegger writes:
Once we have understood this problem of the inner connection of the understanding of being with time, we have then in a certain way a light that allows
us to return to the clari cation of the history of the problem of being and
the history of philosophy in general so that it now receives a meaning. In this
regard we see that the only person who presented something about the connection of the understanding of being and the character of being with time
was Kant.29
Without going into the details of the famous and controversial interpretation
of Kant that Heidegger set forth,30 it is suYcient to recall its main lines to
demonstrate why it represents, together with the confrontation with Husserl
and the interpretation of Aristotle, the third major reference point in Heideggers assimilation and transformation of the idea of phenomenology and in
the development of the analysis of existence and why it must be legitimately
labeled as phenomenological.
We know that through his interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason
Heidegger intended to show that this work is not so much a theory of scienti c
knowledge (mathematics and physics), as the Neokantians would have it, but
rather a foundation of the possibility of knowledge in general, in the sense
that it is an ontology of the subject. In the framework of this thesis, he
believes he can perceive in Kants work an awareness of the problem of the
unitary ontological root of the subject (at least as the subject of knowledge),
notably in Kants eVort to probe the common origin of the two roots upon
which our knowing is based: understanding as the spontaneous faculty of
knowing and sensibility as the receptive capacity of intuition. At the peak
of this eVort, that is, in Kants development of the relation of the intellect
with objects (the deduction of categories) and in the doctrine of schematism
and transcendental imagination, Heidegger also perceives the glimmer of a
solution. It appears to him at the point where Kant, while underscoring the

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temporal character of transcendental imagination, seems to see in time the


common root of the intellectual and sensible determinations of the subject. By
returning to the traditional understanding of the subject, according to which
the unity of its determinations can be found in the ego insofar as it is the pole
of the acts of knowing, and reformulating it by the doctrine of I think (which
must be able to accompany all my representations [ B 131]), Kant seemed to
make a breach in the traditional understanding, because he saw in the synthetic
function of transcendental apperception the autoaVection of time in its threefold articulation, and he thus managed to conceive the essential connection
between the I think and time.
There is no need to emphasize that Heidegger highlights all of this while proceeding well beyond Kants text. But his emphasis on this connection provides
him with the indispensable foothold to fully explore the equation of subjectivity and temporality that he envisions. As structured according to time, transcendental apperception, that is, the activity by which the intellect can be
linked, can be joined in turn, to the receptivity of sensibility of which time is
the form. This connection takes place in what Heidegger senses as the common root of understanding and sensibility, thus the root of the two sources
of our knowing, transcendental imagination: either the productive moment
of spontaneity of the intellect or the receptive moment of the sensible intuition
can join it, because transcendental imagination is itself structured according
to time, and precisely in the universal form of the image of time, which is thus
the condition common to both of them. In eVect, time, on the one hand, conditions the synthesis of transcendental apperception and appears as the pure
autoaVection of the ego; and on the other, it is the pure a priori form of sensible intuition. Hence it represents the common homogenous form in which the
unity of the knowing subject is constituted.
If, for Heidegger, the greatness of Kant consists in the fact that he understood as a problem the unity of the fundamental determinations of the subject, delimiting their point of connection in the transcendental imagination,
his limitation is in his inability to translate this fundamental insight into an
explicit thematization. In other words, even though Kant manages to see temporality as the framework in which the activities of the knowing subject are conceived, he does not develop his analysis far enough to explicitly think of
temporality as the structure of human existence. 31 Once again, Heidegger sees
the reason for this in the fact that the inspired Kantian elaboration of the
problem gets bogged down because of its unconscious link to the traditional
idea of time and to the Cartesian dichotomy of res cogitans and res extensa.
The ambivalence in Heideggers evaluation of Kant can be found as early as
the course of 192526, where his intense interest in Kant rst surges up and
unfurls. Re ecting on his interpretation, Heidegger writes:
That this interpretation, which goes essentially beyond Kant, or rather which

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goes back behind him, should not be considered completely outside the path
of the phenomenal connections, which Kant himself envisioned, is documented in a characteristic of the I that Kant gives in the following passage
(A123): The abiding and unchanging I (pure apperception) forms the correlate of all our representations. But this determination of the I is, almost
literally, the de nition of time, which for Kant is stable and remains
absolutely so and which is in general the correlate of all appearances. Time
and the I think, where Kant attempts to investigate these phenomena,
are brought by him as closely together as possible, so that the de nitions of
these two phenomena coincide; and nevertheless Kant seizes upon the
dogma, directive for him, that time and the I think are absolutely separated, so that it is a priori certain for him that their conjunction is quite
impossible.32
What is interesting is that in the context in which Heidegger states this insuYciency, the horizon of the problems from which he draws out his interpretation appears again, that is, the horizon of Husserlian phenomenology. Listen
to Heidegger himself:
What Kant missed is the phenomenological and categorical clearing of the
ground from which can grow these two stems and, all the more, that which
is to mediate them. The subsequent idealism had, all the more, to neglect
this task, since it no longer summoned up the sobriety and soundness of work
that Kant had exhibited. In its fundamental scope and universal signi cance,
this task was seen and elaborated for the rst time by Husserl in his Ideas,
which one would like to characterize as Kantian but which as to fundamentals is essentially more radical than Kant could be.33
Of course the Heideggerian location of these limits presents a good many
aspects that are debatable. But, once again, what is interesting about the thesis Heidegger was developing, and moreover, about his interpretation of
Aristotle, is not so much the speci c contents of the interpretation proposed,
but rather the fact that this reading represents a privileged place to grasp, in
its historical-philosophical genesis, the dynamic of the problems that led to Being
and Time. From this perspective, within the Heideggerian critique of Kant
comes to light the determining outlook that pre gured his interpretation and
that attempts to elicit from Kants work the derivation of the phenomenological problem of the temporal constitution of subjectivity, which Husserl had
already envisioned and thematized and which Heidegger would develop in the
terms of the existential analysis of Dasein conceived as originary temporality.
Returning to his interpretation of Kant in the summer 1927 course on the
Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is increasingly aware of the
limits of the Kantian understanding of subjectivity, even if he continues to read
Kant from the point of view of phenomenology and even if he commits
himself to a renewed attempt to appropriate the Kantian doctrine. What is
most interesting about this course is the fact that, beyond the personalitas

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transcendentalis that he had already examined previously, Heidegger here interprets the Kantian determination of the personalitas moralis. Returning to the
thread he followed for his interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, he
attempts to show how in this work as well Kant envisions the same problem,
that of the fundamental ontological unity of the subject, which Heidegger
acknowledges mutatis mutandis as his own.
From a general point of view, the Kantian determination of the personalitas
moralis reveals, for Heidegger, the awareness of a problem that was lost after
Kant, even in phenomenological thinking. In the horizon of his practical
philosophy Kant feels the need to grasp the nature of the subject not only
as it knows, but also as it acts, and speci cally in such a way that this will
come back again to the general understanding of subjectivity in its unitary
determination.34 This takes on a particular importance if we consider that a
decisive reason for the speculative distance of the Husserlian perspective was,
for Heidegger, the theoreticist determination of subjectivity that Husserl, whether consciously or not, had chosen as the foundation of his construction and
against which he rehabilitates the practical-moral determinations of human
life. This correspondence revives Heideggers research for subsequent convergences with Kant in the ontological determination of human life, because
in this research Heidegger, coming from phenomenology, believes he can
identify with Kant as much as he had previously identi ed with Aristotle.
Thus he interprets the Kantian determination of the personalitas moralis, beyond the personalitas transcendentalis (the ego-subject) and the personalitas psychologica (the ego-object), as the most important dimension of man: what constitutes the humanity of man is neither his animality (Tierheit ) nor his rationality
(Vernnftigkeit ), but precisely his practical-moral determination as personality
(Persnlichkeit ), and this character of person also constitutes true spirituality
(Geistigkeit ) which allows man to be called an intelligence (Intelligenz ).
But what is the moral personality? It is a modi cation of self-consciousness
that has a character that is not theoretical but practical. It is a sort of nonsensible determination of the ego as subject that acts. As such, practical selfconsciousness cannot appear either in an experience of the empirical-sensible
type or in a knowledge and an understanding of the theoretical type. It may be
experienced in the moral feeling of respect (Achtung ), which must be radically
distinguished from any other form of feeling of the empirical-sensible type. It
is this feeling that constitutes, according to Heidegger, the heart of the Kantian
determination of the moral personality. Even more, for Heidegger, it would
represent the most radical moment in all of the Kantian understanding of man.
And establishing the epicenter of the Kantian determination of the subject
not in the theoretical-observational domain, as Husserl had done, but in the
practical-moral domain, Heidegger sees in Kant a con rmation of the direction

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in which he was seeking. Indeed, Heidegger interprets the outcome of the


Kantian analysis, that is, the determination of the practical ego as person and
as end-in-itself, and the delimitation of the determination of things as means,
as a distinction of principle between ichliches Seiendes and nichtichliches Seiendes. In
other words: he attributes to Kant the desire to rigorously distinguish between
the way of being of a being that is ego from that of a being that is not ego,
thus anticipating the distinction between a being that is Dasein (daseinmiges
Seiendes) and a being that is not consonant with Dasein (nicht daeinsmiges
Seiendes), as theorized in Being and Time.
One point in Heideggers interpretation of the Critique of Practical Reason
con rms this. Heidegger especially directs attention to the indeed surprising
fact that Kant, who sets forth an open critique against the empirical foundations of ethics based on the moral sense, ends up attributing a decisive revealing function to a moral feeling, that of respect. Heidegger resolves the
apparent contradiction, stressing the radical diVerence between the moral feeling and any other sensible feeling. Yet Kant admits that respect has something analogous with the two structural moments of feeling in general (Gefhl ),
which are inclination (Neigung ) and fear (Furcht ). Heidegger sees in this Kantian
point a signi cant correspondence with the problem of rejiw, which Aristotle
treats in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics: rejiw, which is structured in the
two moments of pursuit (dvjiw) and eeing (fug) and which in man is closely
linked to dinoia, represents in Aristotelian thinking the correspondent of
the Kantian Gefhl.35 If, in light of this analogy, we consider the Heideggerian understanding of care (Sorge) structured in the two moments of Drang
and Hang as the fundamental unitary determination of Dasein, in which its
passivity and its activity are rooted, its Bendlichkeit and its Verstehen, we can
imagine this Heideggerian existential as the third term of a threefold correspondence, which links Heidegger in his critique of Husserl to Aristotle
and Kant.
Then we can understand why Heidegger in the winter 192526 course, locating in care the fundamental modality of being of Dasein, signi cantly associates this discovery with the name of Kant. The phenomenon connoted by
the term care, he writes, is a structure par excellance of Dasein all depends on the correct philosophical interpretation. What is decisive is not the
assertion that Dasein is concerned with its Being, but the interpretation of
this phenomenon in the direction of a primary understanding of being. Kant
has obviously this very fact in mind when by means of traditional ontological
categories, he says that the human belongs to things, whose existence is an
end in itself ; or rather as he formulates it one time: The human exists as
an end in itself ; or elsewhere: Something, whose existence in itself has an
existence has an absolute value. These determinations, which Kant gives in

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the second section of his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AkademieAusgabe Bd. IV, 428), are for Kant the basis and the properly metaphysical,
that is, ontological condition of the possibility for [a categorical imperative].36
Of course, in Heideggers view, who during this period is contemplating
the unitary ontological ground of Dasein, Kant has not yet attained a suYciently radical determination of subjectivity, remaining a prisoner of the
metaphysical horizon and unconsciously assuming the Cartesian separation
between res cogitans and res extensa. Having demonstrated the depth of Kant,
who even from within the metaphysical horizon manages to see beyond it,
Heidegger distances himself from what he perceives as the limit of the Kantian
perspective:
Thus there is unveiled an essential aw in the ego-problem in Kant. We are confronted by a peculiar discordance within the Kantian doctrine of the ego.
With regard to the theoretical ego, its determination appears to be impossible. With regard to the practical ego, there exists the attempt at an ontological de nition. But there is not only this discordance of attitude toward
the theoretical and practical ego. Present in Kant is a peculiar omission:
he fails to determine originally the unity of the theoretical and practical
ego. Is this unity and wholeness of the two subsequent or is it original, prior
to both? Do the two originally belong together or are they only combined
externally afterward? How is the being of the ego to be conceived in general? But the ontological structure of this whole theoretical-practical person is indeterminate not merely in its wholeness; even less determinate is the
relation of the theoretical-practical person to the empirical ego, to the soul,
and beyond that, the relation of the soul to the body. Mind, soul, and body
are indeed ontologically determined or undetermined for themselves, and
each in a diVerent way, but the whole of the being that we ourselves are,
body, soul, and mind, the mode of being of their original wholeness, remains ontologically in the dark.37
The Kantian solution to the problem of subjectivity, in its unitary ontological
determination, implies, according to Heidegger, an ambivalence: its merit is to
decidedly take the direction of research in which a deeper exploration that goes
beyond the traditional horizon becomes possible; at the same time it does not
attain an understanding of being that would allow it to grasp originary temporality as the root of subjectivity. Heidegger summarizes his critique in ve
essential points:
First. In reference to the personalitas moralis, Kant factually gives ontological
determinations (which, as we shall later see, are valid) without posing the
basic question of the mode of being of the moral person as end.
Second. In reference to the personalitas transcendentalis, the I think, Kant shows
negatively the nonapplicability of the categories of nature for the ontical cognition of the ego. However, he does not show the impossibility of any other
kind of ontological interpretation of the ego.

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Third. Given this divergent position of Kants on the ontology of the ego, it
is not surprising that neither the ontological interconnection between the personalitas moralis and the personalitas transcendentalis nor that between these two
in their unity, on the one hand, and the personalitas psychologica, on the other,
not to say the original wholeness of these three person-determinations, is
made an ontological problem.
Fourth. The free I act of the being that exists as an end, the spontaneity of
intelligence, is xed as the speci c character of the ego. Kant employs the
expression intelligence as well as end; he says: There exist ends and
There are intelligences. Intelligence is not a mode of behavior and a property of the subject but the subject itself, which is as intelligence.
Fifth. Intelligences, persons, are distinguished as mental substances from
natural things as bodily substances, things [Sachen].
This then would be our view on Kants interpretation of the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa. Kant sees clearly the impossibility of
conceiving the ego as something extant. In reference to the personalitas
moralis he even gives positive ontological determinations of egoity, but without pressing on toward the fundamental question of the mode of being of
the person.38
This interpretation, in which Heidegger underscores how Kant grasps the
impossibility of determining the ego through traditional categories, without
thereby coming to a positive determination of the ego, and which is outlined
in the winter semester course of 192526 and continued in the summer 1927
course, is resumed and carefully developed in the winter 192728 semester and
again in the summer 1930 course. In spite of certain shifts of emphasis, in all
of these courses the essential part of the interpretation remains the same, so
much so that we can forego taking them into consideration here. But we must
at least cite a passage from the 192728 course, entirely devoted to the phenomenological interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the conclusion of
this interpretation that, along with the 1929 book on Kant, marks the apogee
of the encounter with Kant in the 1920s, Heidegger writes:
When some years ago I studied the Critique of Pure Reason anew and read it,
as it were, against the background of Husserls phenomenology, it opened
my eyes; and Kant became for me a crucial con rmation of the accuracy
of the path on which I carried out my search. 39

5. Conclusion: Phenomenology as possibility


The thesis I proposed in the beginning thus takes on a consistency that I hope
is convincing. There can be no doubt that by following the thread of the
problem of the fundamental ontological determination of subjectivity, developed with Husserl as the starting point, that Heidegger comes to see Aristotle
and Kant as the salient points of metaphysical thinking in which the question
is grasped and treated in its most distinctive dynamic, even though in the

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framework of traditional concepts that prevent an explicit and fully transparent


thematization.
It is due to full recognition of Husserl, rather than in a regard that remains
outside his work, that the interpretations of Aristotle and Kant that accompany
the Heideggerian path can be termed phenomenological. The substantiality
of this characterization is corroborated as we have shown by the fact that
Heideggers historiographic interest in Aristotle and Kant, and in general
in the tradition of ontology, is engendered and rooted in the ground of the
Heideggerian assimilation of the phenomenological method to an ontological
perspective.
What remains naturally open is the true problem behind which even the
malicious exaggeration of Max Mller might be legitimized, that is, the deep
ambivalence that is smoldering in Heideggers attitude with regard to Husserlian phenomenology at this time. In the apparent assimilation of the fundamental principles and discoveries of phenomenology, through the admitted
desire to radicalize its intrinsic dynamic, Heidegger in fact de nes phenomenology in a meaning that is rather diVerent from that of Husserl.
An important distillation of this ambivalence can be found in the well-known
passage at the end of section 7 of Being and Time in which, after clarifying the
meaning he intends to give to phenomenology, Heidegger states: Our elucidations of the preliminary concept of phenomenology show that its essential
character does not consist in its actuality as a philosophical movement. Higher
than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology solely by
seizing upon it as a possibility.40
Confronted with this quote I would not hesitate to say, in conclusion, that in
the gestation of his speculative relationship with Husserl, Heidegger has demonstrated an extraordinary example of philosophical bravura.
Translated by Victor Reinking
Seattle University

NOTES
Martin Heidegger. Ein Philosoph und die Politik, Freiburger Universitbltter 92 ( June 1986).
Ibid., 1415.
Ibid., 15.
I have examined it in the articles Heidegger in Marburg: Die Auseinandersetzung mit
Husserl, Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger 37 (1984): 4869, and La Trasformazione della fenomenologia da Husserl a Heidegger, Teoria 4 (1984): 12562.
5. Notable in the doctoral thesis Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus (1913) and in the thesis to
1.
2.
3.
4.

PHENOMENOLOGY AS POSSIBILITY

6.

7.

8.
9.
10.
11.

12.
13.
14.
15.

16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

143

obtain accreditation for university teaching Die kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus
(1915), collected in Frhe Schriften, vol. 1 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann,
1978), (hereafter GA); as well as in the rst Freiburg courses.
They are discussed by K. Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik. Denk-und Lebensweg E. Husserls (Den
haag: NijhoV, 1977); see also by the same author Zu Heideggers Spiegel-Gesprch ber
Husserl, Zeitschrift fr philosophische Forschung 32 (1987): 591612.
Martin Heidegger, Hegels Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. I. Grland, GA 32: 40. Husserls last
publication to which Heidegger refers here is clearly the Nachwort to the Ideen, which
appeared in the Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomnologische Forschung 11 (1930): 54970.
Heidegger, Das Ende der Philosophie unde die Aufgabe des Denkens, in Zur Sache des
Denkens, ( Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 6180.
Now in GA 15: 372400.
Now in Wegmarken, GA 9: 144.
Very important, because it signals detachment with regard to Husserl, is a brief commentary on the Vorlesungen zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewutseins by Husserl (of which Heidegger
was the editor in 1928) that can be found in the summer 1928 course Metaphysische
Anfangsgrnde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (GA 16: 25556).
GA 24: 2632.
GA 24: 2829.
Cf. GA 20: 184.
We should analyze here how the distinction between the natural attitude and the philosophical attitude intersects the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. After
Heidegger, we know that Dasein has an inertial tendency to inauthenticity: however, it has
the possibility, by listening to the appeal of conscience (Gewissen, frnhsiw), of ful lling its
most distinctive possibilities, and of assuming an authentic attitude. Hence we should ask
whether the true philosophical disposition say, for example, that of the author of Being and
Time re-presents an excellent possibility of authentic existence, or whether it is possible, as
a neutral exercise of knowing, even outside of authenticity. I have the tendency to believe,
based on many passages, that Heidegger thought the rst hypothesis was true. Given the
extensive presence of Aristotle in Heideggers thought at this time cf. my monograph
Heidegger e Aristotele (Padova: Daphne, 1984), the main points of which can be found in French
in the article Dasein comme praxis. Lassimilation et la radicalisation heideggerienne de la
philosophie pratique dAristote, in F. Volpi et al., Heidegger et lide de la phnomnologie (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1988), 141 it would be interesting to show how the state
of things that Heidegger envisions corresponds to the relationship that subsists, in practical
Aristotelian philosophy, between the disposition of one who possesses practical science
(Aristotle himself ), the behavior of the prudent man (for example, Pericles), and nonprudent
behaviors (which are numerous, as Aristotle states, observing that martnein comes
pollaxw, while katoryon, authenticity, can only be reached in one way monaxw ([Nic. Eth.
2, 5. 1106b 28 f.]).
GA 24: 29.
GA 24: 2930.
GA 24: 3031.
GA 24: 3132.
See the well-known note at the end of section 7 of Being and Time.
Cf. Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12: 86.
Cf. the relative texts (including the important letter from Heidegger to Husserl of 22 October
1927) published in E. Husserl, Phnomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed.
W. Biemel, Husserliana 9 (Den Hagg: NijhoV, 1962). According to Heidegger based on
what he said in the interview Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten the motivations of the

144

23.

24.
25.
26.

27.
28.
29.
30.

31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

FRANCO VOLPI
rupture were not only the Nachwort in the Ideen but also the lecture Husserl gave in 1931,
Phnomenologie und Anthropologie (the text of which was published posthumously in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 1 [1941]: 114). As for Husserl, his point of view becomes clear in the
famous marginal notes to Being and Time and in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik ( preserved
in the Husserl archives of Louvain and now published as E. Husserl, Notes sur Heidegger (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1993) and in a few manuscripts from the beginning of 1931, in which he
engages in a debate with Heidegger (the most important is the B I 32 manuscript, leaf 1850,
in the Husserl Archives of Louvain; see also B I 9, leaf 2332). See also the well-known letter to A. Pfnder of 6 January 1931.
For an analysis of Heideggers critique of the Husserlian determination of transcendental
consciousness (conceived as immanent, absolute, as that which nulla re indiget ad existendum and as
pure), see the previously cited article, La trasformazione della fenomenologia da Husserl a
Heidegger.
Such is the sense that Heidegger gives to lhyeein of the cux that Aristotle treats in the
Nic. Eth. 6.3.1119b15.
The title of the course is in eVect: Phnomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles. Einfhrung in die
phnomenologische Forschung (GA 61).
This in spite of the inspired nature of Aristotles understanding of time, which Heidegger
examines and brings to light in Being and Time (section 81), but especially in the summer 1927
course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24, section 19 a), where he stresses how Aristotle
explicitly poses the question of the relationship of the soul with time by asking: if the soul did
not exist, would there still be time (Phys. 4.223a1629). And again: in a passage from the 1926
summer course, The Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, Heidegger seems to attribute to Aristotle
the discovery of temporality as a distinctive characteristic of the human soul, and Heidegger
reads a passage of the De Anima (3.10.433b7) in which Aristotle attributes to man alone the
perception of time (asyhsiw xrnou).
M. Heidegger, letter to K. Jaspers, 20 December 1925 in Briefwechsel 19201963, ed. Walter
Biemel and Hans Saner Frankfurt a.M.Mnchen: KlostermannPiper, 1990, 59.
M. Heidegger, letter to K. Jaspers, 26 December 1926 in ibid., 71.
GA 21: 194.
Please see my article, Soggettivit e temporalit: considerazioni sullinterpretazione heideggeriana di Kant alla luce delle lezioni di Marburgo, in Kant a due secoli dalla critica (Brescia:
La Scuola, 1984), 161179.
Cf. GA 21: 3637.
GA 21: 406.
GA 21: 28384.
Cf. GA 24: 19294.
Cf. GA 24: 19293.
GA 21: 22021.
GA 24: 207.
GA 25: 2089.
Heidegger, Phnomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. I. Grland, GA
25: 431. The rest of this passage is also signi cant: Certainly, an authority as such is never
a justi cation, and something is not true just because Kant said it. Nevertheless Kant has
the immense signi cance in education for scienti c, philosophical work; and one can trust him
fully. In Kant as in no other thinker one has the immediate certainty that he does not cheat.
And the most monstrous danger in philosophy consists in cheating, because all eVorts do not
have the massive character of a natural scienti c experiment or that of a historical source. But

PHENOMENOLOGY AS POSSIBILITY

145

where the greatest danger of cheating is, there is also the ultimate possibility for the genuineness of thinking and questioning. The meaning of doing philosophy consists in awakening the need for this genuineness and keeping it awake.
40. As we know, this assertion is repeated by Heidegger, but this time with each ambiguity being
dissipated at the end of My Way into Phenomenology (1963).

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