Husserl and Heidegger
The phenomenological turn
Venue: Heidegger, *Sein und Zeit* (1927, dedicated to Husserl); Husserl's marginal notes; correspondence; the Encyclopaedia Britannica article (1927–28); Husserl's later self-critical writings.
A master's reluctant recognition that his star pupil has reshaped phenomenology beyond his control.
Heidegger had been Husserl's student and was hand-picked as his successor at Freiburg (1928). *Sein und Zeit* (1927) was dedicated to Husserl "in friendship and admiration." But Husserl, reading the book carefully, recognised that Heidegger's "existential analytic of Dasein" had reoriented phenomenology away from the transcendental-egological project he had built. The fraught collaboration on the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on phenomenology (1927–28) made the gulf explicit. Husserl wrote sharp marginalia in his copy of *Sein und Zeit*: "anthropologism!" Heidegger's 1933 Nazi rectorship — and his apparent failure to defend Husserl, a converted Jew now harassed by the Nazi regime — made the personal break complete. The philosophical debate, however, has shaped phenomenology ever since: transcendental ego or being-in-the-world; intentional consciousness or thrown understanding; rigorous descriptive method or ontological questioning.
Historical Context
Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was Jewish by birth (though Protestant by conversion); the 1933 Nazi laws restricted his ability to teach and travel. Heidegger's public ambivalence and private silence in this period shadow the whole subsequent reception of the philosophical disagreement.
Parties
Phenomenology is a rigorous descriptive science of consciousness as transcendentally constituted; the epoché brackets the natural attitude to reveal the intentional structures of subjectivity. Heidegger's existential analytic is a regression into anthropology.
Key arguments
- Phenomenology must begin from the transcendental reduction; without it, phenomenology lapses back into the natural attitude it was supposed to bracket.
- The structures Heidegger calls "existential" (anxiety, care, being-towards-death) are anthropological-psychological, not transcendental-phenomenological.
- *Sein und Zeit*'s analytic of Dasein is interesting but does not deliver what phenomenology was for — a foundational descriptive science of consciousness.
- The being-question Heidegger places first is to be approached only via the constitutive structures of the transcendental ego.
Allied schools
The question of Being is more fundamental than the analysis of consciousness; the transcendental ego is itself a derivative formation. Phenomenology must become fundamental ontology, not remain a descriptive psychology of the conscious subject.
Key arguments
- Dasein is being-in-the-world, not a self-contained consciousness over against objects; "intentionality" is a derivative phenomenon of this prior worldedness.
- The transcendental reduction inherits from Cartesian-modern philosophy the very subject-object split phenomenology should have overcome.
- Anxiety, care, being-towards-death reveal Dasein's ontological structure, not just its psychology.
- The question of Being is the suppressed horizon of all Western metaphysics; phenomenology, properly radicalised, becomes the asking of it again.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Physicality and Agency: is the relevant unit of philosophical analysis a transcendental ego or an embodied being-in-the-world?
Verdict in retrospect
Phenomenology in the 20th century followed Heidegger more than Husserl in broad influence (Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Ricoeur, the existentialists). But Husserlian themes returned with force from the 1980s on, with renewed attention to descriptive phenomenology and to consciousness as a topic in its own right. Each tradition recognises the other as half of what phenomenology can be.
Related Debates
Sharing parties or aligned schools.
Related Experiments
Experiments that share dimensions and/or aligned schools with this debate.
Other Personas Aligned With This Debate
Ranked by declared-influence weight in the schools either party is allied with. The named parties themselves are excluded — they're already listed above.
Works Most Aligned With This Debate
Ranked by declared-influence weight in the schools either party is allied with.
Related Contemporary Dilemmas
Dilemmas that engage the same dimensions as this debate.
Further reading
- Heidegger, *Being and Time* (1927; tr. Macquarrie & Robinson, 1962)
- Husserl, marginalia and notes on *Sein und Zeit*, in *Husserliana* IX (1962)
- Crowell, *Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning* (2001)