Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

• Heidegger was born in Baden to Catholic parents who desired him to become a Jesuit priest.
• He attended the seminary in 1909 but was discharged because of heart problems.
• During this time, Heidegger encountered the work of Brentano.
• Brentano was an Aristotelian scholar who believed all knowledge originates from the senses.
• Brentano was also an early professor of Freud.
• Heidegger then studied theology and scholastic philosophy at the University of Freiburg.
• In 1911, Heidegger shifted his focus to modern philosophy and Edmund Husserl's work, specifically "Logical Investigations".
• He graduated with a thesis on psychologism and worked closely with Husserl.

Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology

• Husserl is credited with founding phenomenology, described as "a return to things in themselves."
• Phenomenology intends to overturn:
  • Cartesian metaphysics
  • Ontological dualism

Descartes and the Cogito

• In "Meditations," Descartes employs radical doubt, questioning everything he thinks he knows.
• Descartes rejects the evidence of his senses.
• Descartes states the only thing of which he can be certain is the cogito, "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").
• This provides no reliable information about the outside world, so Descartes turns to God, who confirms the certainty of mathematics.
• The only things regarded as being true about the external world are those that are quantifiable, with everything else considered subjective.

Cartesian Dualism

• Cartesian Dualism involves the split between subject and object.
• It posits two types of substances:
  • Res cognitas (thinking, perceiving)
  • Res extensia (extended, physical things)
• Cartesian Dualism states that neither substance type can account for the other
• A division exists between subjective and objective reality.
• Senses do not provide direct access to the world but are an illusion.
• This division is at the core of the modern scientific worldview.

Phenomenology - A Return to Things in Themselves

• Husserl contends that all knowledge of the world comes only through perceptual and conscious experience.
• The goal is to directly experience the Lebenswelt (life-world), which is the world as it is actually experienced.

The Phenomenological Reduction

• Through phenomenological reduction, Husserl seeks a return to the phenomenally given, renouncing theory and metaphysical construction.
• It connects closely with the epoche, which involves cleansing our palette, suspending all knowledge, and returning to the senses.

Consciousness

• Consciousness is intentional; it is always about or intends an object.
• When conscious, it is always a consciousness of another object, something of which one is aware and that stands apart.

Epoche - Phenomenological Reduction

• In Ideens, Husserl attempts to discern the structures of consciousness through the epoche.
• The epoche involves suspending judgment about the natural world to focus on the experience itself.
• The next step is to bracket out assumptions and focus only on what is given in the experience.

Universal vs. Local Epoche

• Husserl distinguishes between universal and local epoche bracketing.

Husserl's Phenomenological Project

• Husserl envisioned phenomenology as a science.
• He thought that it would require many phenomenologists diligently applying phenomenological reduction to every element of existence.
• The Nazi party did not welcome his project because Husserl, though converted to Christianity, was of Jewish birth.

Heidegger and Husserl

• Heidegger became Husserl's assistant in 1923.
• They had different approaches to phenomenology:
  • Husserl viewed phenomenology as a science that could re-establish the grounds of science as its discipline.
  • Heidegger had a more poetic temperament.

Being and Time

• In 1927, Heidegger published Being and Time.
• Heidegger was appointed to the Husserl Chair at the university, which he dedicated to Husserl.
• Husserl disagreed with Heidegger's approach.

Heidegger's Rectorate and Nazi Affiliation

• Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg in 1933.
• He joined the Nazi party soon after.
• There were rumors that he had Husserl's library card taken away because Husserl was Jewish.

The Heidegger Controversy

• The Heidegger Controversy is a recurring question about whether Heidegger was a Nazi.
• In 1933, Heidegger became a Nazi party member.

Heidegger's Resignation and Continued Party Membership

• In 1934, Heidegger resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi party until the party's dismantling.
• Some believe that Heidegger protected his Jewish friends and students.

Heidegger after 1945

• Heidegger was charged because of his official position in the Nazi regime as rector of the University of Freiburg.
• He was dismissed from the university and described as Nazism by the State Commission for Political Purification.
• In 1951, he was reintegrated, given emeritus status.
• He continued teaching until 1976.
• Heidegger had many Jewish students.
• Heidegger never recanted his Nazism or apologized.
• Some believe that Heidegger's choice was based on the times and opportunities, and some believe that he was more devoted to it.

Heidegger Against Nazis

• As rector, Heidegger refused to display anti-Jewish posters and forbade a planned book-burning.
• Nazi officials expressed doubt over his loyalties.

Heidegger's Refusal to Apologize

• Heidegger repeatedly refused to apologize or account for his actions in the war.
• Personal notebooks have been held as evidence of antisemitism (cultural, not biological).

Heidegger's Later Works

• "Letter on Humanism" was written in 1946.
• "What is called thinking" (introduction of the fourfold) appeared in 1954.
• "The question concerning technology” was written in 1957.
• Some suggest these later works represent a departure from his early works, becoming more mystical.
  • Analytical philosophers are not very interested in these.
• In his last interview with Speigel, Heidegger says that "only a god can save us!" and is pessimistic toward the technological paradigm.
• Heidegger was rebaptized as Catholic.

Being and Time: Fundamental Ontology

• The fundamental question is: What is the meaning of being?
• The question is the most basic, fundamental, and essential question humans ask.
• It is a question for everyone, not just philosophers.
• The question is seemingly abstract.
• Heidegger asserts that the struggle to uncover the answer to this question is fundamental to human existence and is a central dimension of human existence and life.
• The answer is found in everyday existence, not on a mountaintop.
• Heidegger believes everyone already has some understanding of the being of entities.
  • Dualistic mentality exists today such that there are:
    • Materialist things
    • Consciousness

Pre-Ontological Understanding of Being

• Everyone has a sense of what things are (ontology), which may be vague, unformulated, and is the basis for philosophical reflection.
• Upon entering a room, understanding is manifested regarding door knobs, doors, and rooms prior to explicit reflection.
• This pre-reflective know-how is usually tacit and difficult to make explicit.
• Asking the question involves conceptualizing and clarifying an understanding of things and how they matter, become significant, and relate.
  • This often complicates implicitly known and understood concepts that are hard to put into clear words.
  • It relates to Hegel's simplification of the phenomenological debate due such that Heidegger believes the ontology of things is simple.

Forgetfulness and Being

• Heidegger argues that while there is a prereflective grasp of this question of being, modern science and its objectified view of reality restrictively shapes the answer.
  • Heidegger is not anti-science but means to show how scientific worldviews frame the approach to everyday life.
    • Confusing for those viewing consciousness as computational.
• The universe is seen as an aggregate of material objects in causal relationships lacking meaning and value.

Scientific Worldview and the Subject/Object Distinction

• The distinction is challenged, to the degree of its meaningfulness in daily life.
• Objective reality consists solely of material objects interacting with strict causal efficiency.
• External reality is mechanistic
  • Meaning and value are subjective and unrelated to the external world or objective reality.
• Subjective beings attempt to understand the world correctly to function efficiently, emphasizing the distinction between internal and external reality.
• Access to the world is only through internal representations or ideas.
• Heidegger considers this scientific worldview an abstraction, with actual experiences being the most real.
• Science presents the scientific worldview as the most real understanding of reality.
  • These models can distort fundamental understandings of reality.
  • An example is the computational understanding of consciousness and reality.
  • These scientific models can be mistaken for reality.

Return to the Everyday

• In criticizing dualism, Heidegger wants to return to how reality is experienced non-abstractly.
  • The world is learned about through practical engagements.
• Language should challenge familiar usages and understandings.

Being in the World

• As agents, we are already in a world confronting and engaging us in practical necessities where the objects of the world are at hand.
• The mind is involved in a mutual relationship with material objects and the world.
  • The self/world distinction and the Cartesian problem of knowing the world are pseudo-problems.

Dasein

• Dasein transcends self and world, existing in the world.
• The entity of Being and the world are interrelating sides of the subjective process.
• The subject/object division is regarded as a false division.
• The world is how one understands themself.

Dasein's World Existing

• Dasein is not a thing but a clearing, a space where the meaning of things shows up.
• The clearing appears when thinking.
• Dasein is how the world is experienced.
  • Structure and understanding are not imposed on the world but is revealed by it.

Being as Care

• Care in this context is investment in life.

Heidegger on Nihilism

• Heidegger would say that investment in life reflects the care we have about who or what we are.
  • We cannot be neutral about the kind of life we want.

Humans

• Humans are what they do, reflecting Kierkegaard's view
• Humans have no fixed essence and are self-interpreting or self-constituting based on the course of active lives.

The Self as Event

• The self is defined by continued action, not essence.
• Identity consists of who "I am what I become in living out my life-story as a whole”.

Thrownness (Geworfenheit) - Facticity

• Thrownness refers to the arbitrary nature of Dasein's experience with:
  • Birth into a specific family
  • Given moment of human history
• There is no control or direction over the conditions of thrownness.

Thrownness

• Thrownness as embedded in a broader culture and historical context describes one's throwness into the context of body, abilities, and specific culture and time period.
• Thrownness as facticity and project describes the experience as a task, in which one is delivered over to themself as something to be.
• Thrownness as futurity characterizes people's existing as ahead-of-themselves-as-already-in-the-world as future-directed.

Being-towards-Death

• Events in a story and a life gain meaning from contributions to the outcome.
• Actions must be understood in terms of their future implications regarding the kind of person one will become.

Authenticity

• Dasein is inherently social and historical.

Das Man of Being

• The broader public can negatively impact people's ability to recognize their individual project.
• The utilitarianism of everyday life can cause forgetfulness in people.

Falling

• Absorption into everyday affairs is called falling, causing the basic, existential condition to be forgotten.
• Heidegger wants people to be aware so that they do not waste their lives.
  • Life is short, family, community, and purpose matter.

Das Man

• There is a tendency in everyday projects to choose the easiest outcomes, abandoning the important projects.

Anxiety and Fallenness

• Anxiety indicates a face-to-face confrontation with the condition of emptiness.
• Social norms are tried by people to evade this condition.
• The message is individualistic, in which readers are encouraged to value what they believe matters, challenging social norms.
• Anxiety can disrupt these prescribed norms.
  • Anxiety is not always necessary, other life events can cause wake up moments in people.

Authenticity

• Authenticity recognizes responsibility and one's possibilities
• Authenticity does not entail any change in what you do, but it could transform people will live.

Authentic Historicity

• Lives are enmeshed within a community and a historical moment.
• Dasein relates to wider, historic moments of the community.
• Authentic historicity involves understanding a community's legacy or heritage, and a shared destiny.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

• His influence was hard to overemphasize in France and America after the war.
• His philosophy of absolute freedom and responsibility spoke to a generation influenced by compromises made during the occupation in France and the war with Nazi Germany.

Early life

• He was born in Paris as the only child to a naval officer and a nobel-prize winner, from a Bourgeoisie Family
• His father contracted an illness and died when Sartre was 2 years old
• His mother moved back into her parents’ house and was helped by his grandfather, a german who taught his math and classic lit. at an early age
• When he was 12, his mother remarried.
• He was frequently bullied back in La Rochelle, where his mother moved.

Sartre and De Beauvoir

• Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir in 1929.
• Both had numerous lovers and partners, but were in a partnership for 51 years, until Satres's death in 1980.
• They were unconventional with a free love vibe.

Military (Sartre)

• Military service in meteorology, lasting from 1929-1931, where he remained at the lowest rank
• He was appointed as a professor of philosophy at a high school before finishing his PhD in 1931

Sartre and Phenomenology

• Berlin Years
• Spent time in Berlin in 1933, where he experienced phenomenology
• Formed a close relationship with Husserl, and admired Heidegger.
• Heidegger did not admire Sarte due to how Sarte has misunderstood his philosophies
• Distinctions were between Sarte and Heidegger's subject/object distinctions
• There were tension between the French and German at the time

Post Berlin (Sartre)

• Transcendance of the ego was published in 1934
• Very Husserl-like
• Published the imagination in 1936
• He published nausea in 1938.
• In 1938-1940, published multiple articles on Nabakov, Faulkner, and Husserl
• Was called into military duty in 1939
• Made a war prisoner and brought to a camp in Germany
• Founded a short-lived resistance group in Paris called “Socialism and Liberty” and become active in the intellectual resistance in Paris in 1941

"Existsntialism is a Humanism” - Famous Speech (Sartre)

• Gave the introductory statements from the balcony of a parisian palace
• Meant to defend existentialism and not to suggest that someone could do whatever they want.
• Showed that it implied a respect for humanity and the other
• Defends against some charges that communism brought against it
  • The communist’s accusations against existentialism states that it is an action-averse and contemplative philisophy
• That it focuses on pure subjectivity, and ignores the interconnections, among projects

Christian's accusation

• Suggests that existentialism focuses on the negative, and that individualism destroys means, to condemn other actions

Sartre's intersubjectivity.

• States that a human subject is a continuously changing project, rather than an object

Ethical Stangely

• Says that everyone is responsible for all men, through their own way and actions
• Suggests that everything someone has should be good, and reflect a view of what is good for humanity
• Claims that all actions leads to anguish from bad faith

Abandonment (Satre)

• God does not exist to guide us in or lives

Ethical Student Choice (Sarte)

• Sartre tells the story about the choice of student between the battle front line and protecting someone close
• Each choice the students have should be of equal weight and valid action
• It it important to imagine what each student does and what each action implies

Sartian Existantialism

• A philisophy that implies that one'e existance supercedes someone's exstance

Sarte Paradox

• Expresses that only through our freedom and our responsibility can we absolve our anguish
• This implies that there is no god and that morality comes from a lack of nature and direction.
• This means that we control are own actions and responsibility

Basic Ontology (Sarte)

• The follow two categories exist in this statement
  • Self Conciousnes - Nihilation
  • Non- Conciousness - Object

Philosophy (Sarte)

• Only through our free will can we make the right action
• Free will depends on pure happiness in order to be sustained, not just free

Bad Faith (Sarte)

• Concepts traced to our notion of authencity and nothing else.
• Is a lie to yourself, and is not the true meaning of one true self

Sart's examples of faith

• There is one such example of a student who attempts to seduce another, in which the refusal is symbolic of a rejection of the other.

Solomo interpretation of Sarte Faith

• Bad Faith comes from each persons intention and not just from bad intention, which he argues the same Heideggarian beliefs
• Being can only exist from self and the ways we choose to transcend, which we have always been a part of

Sarte

• We might have facts about way of choosing to trancend them
• This comes together with Johnny Weissmuller
  • He refused to stay a victim from polio and instead trancended it
  • Bad faith is the denial of either one's facticity or one’s transcendence.
    • It is conceiving of oneself as nothing but one’s facticit

"Sarte Ends"

• The "Being and nothingness" account
• He promises it in an account of ethics
• There is some controversy that he did not give the account to ethis, only suggestions

We are free

• States that we are completely free, and responsible of whoever decides to listen