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.

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"