Q6. What is the difference between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology?

The advent of the book titled Logical Investigation of Edmund Husserl (1900-1901), inaugurated a
new movement in the history of Philosophy called Phenomenology. This movement was a return to
the objects and to essences. Phenomenology is only a method, which seeks to get to the things
themselves, viewing their essential contents through an intuition and analysis. It aims to set forth or
articulate what shows itself. Thus, the motto of the movement is: back to things themselves. The
adherents of this movement want to put an end to the violent procedures of systems which
frequently advanced their own position in a purely arbitrarily manner without allowing the reality to
speak for itself.

Heidegger’s Phenomenology

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Baden (Messkirch), West Germany of a devout Catholic family.
He began his early life as a Jesuit novice. In 1915 sometime after leaving the Jesuits he became a
lecturer in philosophy at the university of Freiburg. He got interested in mathematics and
philosophy. His main work is Being and Time (1927). He accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 1928.
In 1933 he was elected as the rector of the university and in the same year joined the Nazi party.
From 1945 to 1951 he was forbidden to teach. In 1952, after his retirement he continued with his
lectures. He died in 1976.

Heidegger’s Being and Time was aimed specifically at discovering the meaning of being itself, as
distinguished from any specific entities (beings). 'Being' is not something like a being.' Being,
Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already
understood." Heidegger is seeking to identify the criteria or conditions by which any specific entity
can show up at all.

If we grasp Being, we will clarify the meaning of being, or "sense" of being, whereby "sense" means
that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as this thing." According to Heidegger, as this
sense of being precedes any notions of how or in what manner any particular being or beings exist, it
is pre-conceptual, non-propositional, and hence pre-scientific. Thus, fundamental ontology would be
an explanation of the understanding preceding any other way of knowing, such as the use of logic,
theory, specific ontology or act of reflective thought. At the same time, there is no access to being
other than via beings themselves, hence pursuing the question of being inevitably means asking
about a being with regard to its being. Heidegger argues that a true understanding of being can only
proceed by referring to particular beings, and that the best method of pursuing being must
inevitably, he says, involve a kind of hermeneutic circle, that is, it must rely upon repetitive yet
progressive acts of interpretation. "The methodological sense of phenomenological description is
interpretation."

According to Heidegger it is the nature and vocation of man to ask the question: What is it “to be”?
or what is being? Heidegger holds that philosophers starting with Plato have gone astray in trying to
answer this question because they have tended to think of this question as property or essence
enduringly present in things. In other words, metaphysics of presence, which think of being as
substance. He asks the question how do entities come up to show as intelligible to us in some
determinate way? To begin with, he distinguishes between Being, Sein and beings Scineds. True
metaphysics should focus on the fact of existence and not on concretely existing things.

Since being does not manifest itself directly we must look for a path into it through one or other
manifestations of it (by means of some manifest beings). Thus the question Heidegger asks in the
introduction to Being and Time is: what is the being that will give access to the question of the
meaning of Being? It can only be that being for whom the question of Being is important. Heidegger
calls this being Dasein ("being-there"), and the method pursued in Being and Time consists in the
attempt to delimit the characteristics of Dasein, in order thereby to approach the meaning of Being
itself through an interpretation of the temporality of Dasein. Dasein is nothing other than "man".
Therefore, the analysis of being as human existence is declared as the starting point of investigation.

A person is not simply an object like a substance with its properties. According to him there is no
pre-given human essence. Human existence is not yet completely formed since human being is
always progressing. A human being’s existence lies in his choice of possibilities that are open to him.
Since these choices are never final, human being's existence is something indeterminate, it cannot
be terminated. Therefore, human existence cannot be defined, as it is still a potential being. A
human being exists in anticipation of his own possibilities. Human being is always reaching out
beyond himself; his very being consists in aiming at what it is not yet.

Husserls’ Phenomenology

Husserl was born in Prossnitz (Austria) on 8th April 1859 of a middle-class Jewish Family; and took
courses in Mathematics at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna. He received his PhD in 1882
from the university of Vienna. He continued to study philosophy with Franz Brentano. From 1887 to
1928 he held teaching positions in Halle, Gottingen and Freiburg. In 1900-1901 he published the
Logical Investigation, a founding document on Phenomenology. His other important books are: Ideas
pertaining to a Pure Phenomenological Philosophy, and Formal and Transcendental Logic. He died in
Freiburg in 1938.

At the core of Husserl’s philosophy we find the notion of essence. For him, essence is not what it was
for the old metaphysicians, a unity of being, but an objective unity of meaning of a logico-ideal kind.
He describes essence as the homogeneity of a thing, because it is the object itself, which constitutes
the essence. It is not constituted by the subject through his act of positing. The first goal which
Husserl sought to reach in his investigation is to safeguard the objectivity of an object against every
false subjectification. It was an attack on Psychologism, which began with the subject and his psychic
process instead of examining the object. The results of such psychological processes were Relativism
and Nominalism. In every judgement two aspects could be distinguished: The act of Thinking and the
objective content. The truth of a proposition is not based on the actual reasoning of the psyche; on
the contrary, every actual reasoning of the psyche must be based on objective truth of the
proposition.

To Husserl essence is not a generalised image, derived from the sense intuitions exclusively, but an
ideal meaningful unity, an ideal universal content (the intuition of essence). He explains the intuition
of an essence by saying that we bracket certain elements of a given phenomenon (the complete
reality as it appears in reality) and take no more interest in them. We bracket or eliminate the
accidental or incidental features of the object in order to exhibit its essence; for instance, we attain
the essence of ‘red’ by bracketing the incidental fact this is a the red of a particular rose, which
blooms in a certain garden at given time. There is a philosophical bracketing, the setting aside of all
presuppositions about reality, the world, man, the distinctions of primary and secondary qualities
the exterior and interior, etc. This activity focuses one’s attention on the essential structures of what
appears. The stress is precisely on appearance or mode of appearance. Husserl’s “intuition of
essence” is similar to the classical metaphysical notion of the intuition of ideas. He always regarded
essence as being purely immanent in man’s conscience. He regarded the essence grasped by the
mind as an “intentional object” and the grasped essence is intentionally related to object.
 Huserl's Basic approach was that for each one of us there is one thing that is indubitably certain,
and that is our own conscious awareness. Therefore, if we want to build our knowledge of reality on
rock-solid foundations that is the place to start (agreement with Descartes). As soon as we analyse
our awareness, we discover that it is always awareness of something. Consciousness has to be
consciousness of something, it cannot just exist by itself as an objectless state of mind. Furthermore,
we find in practice that we are never able to distinguish in experience between states of
consciousness and objects of consciousness, conceptually we can draw the distinction, but in actual
experience, however attentive, they are indistinguishable (agreement with Hume). Sceptics down
the ages have argued that we can never know whether the objects of our consciousness have a
separate existence from us, independent of our experience of them. Husserl points out that there
can be absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the objects of our consciousness do exist as
consciousness for us, whatever other existential status they may have or lack, and therefore we can
investigate them as such without making any assumption at all, positive or negative, about their
independent existence. This investigation can proceed in complete independence of unanswerable
questions about the separate existence of its objects. Such questions can simply be left on one side
(put in brackets). Phenomenology is the systematic analysis of consciousness and its objects. The
term phenomenology continues to refer to an analysis of whatever it is that is experienced,
regardless of whether there is any sense in which matters objectively are as we experience them.
Direct experience, of course, includes not only material objects but a great many different sorts of
abstract entity; not only our own thoughts, pains, emotions memories, and so on but also music,
mathematics, and host of other things. With all of them the question of their independent existential
status is bracketed, they are investigated exclusively as contents of conscious awareness, which
indubitably they are.

Thus, for Husserl, consciousness is intentional, meaning that consciousness is directed to a

‘something’, while Heidegger attempts to ‘dis-cover’ being using language and phenomenology of
the person.