Taylor Carman

Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, always insisted that philosophy is not just a scholarly discipline, but can and must aspire to the status of a ‘strict’ or ‘rigorous science’ (strenge Wissenschaft). Heidegger, by contrast, began his winter lectures in 1929 by dismissing what he called the ‘delusion’ that philosophy was or could be either a discipline or a science as the most disastrous debasement of its innermost essence. To understand what Husserl had in mind, it is important to begin by remembering that the word Wissenschaft has a wider extension than the word ‘science’. German distinguishes the Naturwissenschaften from the Geisteswissenschaften, or human sciences, which Husserl and Heidegger both believed could be perfectly ‘rigorous’ in their own way. Speakers of English, by contrast, tend to draw a threefold distinction among the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

Calvin Schrag’s Self after Postmodernity is a trim but ambitious book. In it Schrag sets out to correct, or at least to temper—sometimes seemingly to appease—what he regards as the excesses and distortions arising from contemporary assaults on the concepts of selfhood and subjectivity, arising particularly from recent French philosophy. In so doing, he tries to articulate a response to the problem of modernity as framed by Weber and Habermas, that is, in terms of the increasing mutual alienation of the cultural spheres of science, morality, and art. To these three Schrag adds a fourth, religion, and doing so affords him repeated—though not always fruitful—digressions into Kierkegaard’s account of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of existence.

After Modernity is a collection of fifteen short essays, ten of them previously published elsewhere, centering around interpretations of Husserl and applications of his phenomenology to large philosophical problems concerning time and the self. The volume is held together loosely by the author’s answer to the crisis of modernity, a crisis consisting in the apparent hopelessness of grounding norms in superworldly Platonic forms or the rational subject posited by Descartes and Kant. Mensch advocates returning to an Aristotelian position according to which “time is dependent on being” and “the subject is constituted by the world”. For Mensch, “it is precisely modernity’s attempt to understand temporalization as a subjective process which is the crucial error”. Far from abandoning the modern preoccupation with subjectivity, then, Mensch simply wants to deny that the subject dictates the terms of its own relation to the world. His response to the crisis of modernity therefore consists in a conception of what in the final chapter he calls “post-normative subjectivity.” The book also includes discussions of Plato, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, radical evil, Sartre’s conception of the self, John Searle and artificial intelligence, Nietzsche and Darwin, and finally multiple personality disorder.

Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being is an attempt to interpret, analyze, and ultimately discredit the whole of Heidegger’s thought. But Philipse’s reading of the texts is uncharitable, and the ideas he presents and criticizes often bear little resemblance to Heidegger’s views. Philipse relies on a crude distinction between “theoretical” and “applicative” interpretations in arguing that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation as a kind of projection is, like the liar’s paradox, formally self-defeating. But even granting the distinction, the charge of reflective incoherence is fallacious and question-begging. Finally, Philipse advances the astonishing “interpretive hypothesis” that the seemingly morbid existential themes in Being and Time were part of a deliberate “Pascalian strategy” to win converts to Heidegger’s own idiosyncratic “postmonotheist worship of Being.” In short, notwithstanding its nearly comprehensive coverage of Heidegger’s works, the book does not represent a sufficiently serious effort to understand the complexities and obscurities of Heidegger’s thinking

In Being and Time Heidegger advances a critique of Husserl's theory of intentionality by arguing that human understanding consists more fundamentally in an orientation toward practical activity than in mere cognition, for example deliberate perception or judgment. Heidegger criticizes Husserl for importing normative concepts drawn from logic into what purports to be a pure, presuppositionless description of consciousness. Above all, Heidegger is critical of the idealized conception of meaning that informs Husserlian phenomenology. The critique put forward in Being and Time consequently rests on Heidegger's own view of the nature of meaning, its role in everyday practice, and its constitution in discourse. For Husserl, just as the notion of the "noema" or intentional content amounts to a generalization of the concept of meaning, so too what he calls the "positing" character of intentionality, that is, its inherent validity claim or presumption of actuality, is a generalization of the semantic concept of illocutionary force, more specifically assertoric force. Heidegger's conception of meaning, by contrast, eschews traditional semantic concepts borrowed from logic, and instead draws on Heidegger's claim that things in the world originally figure into our practical activities not as "occurrent" or object-like but as "available" for use. Practice thus lies at the heart of everyday significance, and it is the expressive-communicative dimension of practice, what Heidegger calls "discourse" , that underlies linguistic articulation. Assertion amounts to a derivative mode of discourse, parasitic on pre-predictive forms of expression and communication. The traditional concept of meaning as a discrete occurrent entity rests on an overgeneralization of the logical concept of the truth-valuable content of a proposition or assertion. Heidegger's account of meaning and practice in Being and Time, then, is an attempt to trace the origin of assertions in linguistic practice and to show the impossibility of recapturing the phenomenon of intentionality by appeal to the impoverished concept of meaning drawn from the assertoric paradigm central to the semantic tradition. Finally, I argue that conformism, or what Heidegger calls "inauthenticity" , is an unavoidable artifact of discourse, since the ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation essential to discourse necessarily rests on an indifferent normative background underwritten by the anonymous authority of "the one"