Bruno Cassarà

In this paper I examine the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics by reassessing the relationship between phenomenological and metaphysical transcendence. More specifically, I examine the notion of phenomenological transcendence in Husserl and the early Heidegger: Husserl defines transcendence primarily as the mode of givenness of phenomena that do not appear all at once, but must be given in partial profiles; Heidegger defines transcendence primarily as Dasein’s capacity to go beyond entities toward being. I argue that these divergent understandings of phenomenological transcendence have resulted in a significant difference in reception among French phenomenologists of religion. These thinkers assert that phenomenology, when properly conceived and utilized, can make room for the divine and its revelation, i.e., for a metaphysical transcendence. I further argue that these thinkers prefer Heidegger’s phenomenology to Husserl’s because they understand Heidegger’s transcendence as the subject’s openness to being, while they understand Husserl’s transcendence as a limit, as the inability to capture worldly objects. I take up Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness as a “case study” to illustrate this point. Finally, I argue that this preference for Heidegger over Husserl is misplaced and should be reversed. A close reading of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life shows that Dasein is confined to its own possibilities and cannot be open to a relationship with the divine. By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenology provides the radical openness necessary to welcome revelation. While Husserl cannot envision a “worldly God,” the structures of horizonality and temporality characterize a subject capable of an authentic openness to revelation.

Like Husserl, the young Heidegger was preoccupied with the a-priority of phenomenology. He also incorporates hermeneutics into phenomenology, though Husserl was convinced that the a-priority of phenomenology removed all interpretation from its analyses. This paper investigates how the early Heidegger is able to make hermeneutics a general condition of understanding while maintaining, in line with Husserl, that phenomenology is an a-priori science. This paper also provides insight into key debates in the history of phenomenology. I examine two places in which Heidegger departs from Husserl’s phenomenology – the doctrine of categorial intuition and the “as-structure” of understanding – to show that a-priority and hermeneutic understanding come together, ontically, in facticity as the only possible starting point for phenomenology. Ontologically, however, a-priority and hermeneutics come together in the co-affection of Dasein as understanding and being as pre-given. This co-affection is itself dependent on Temporality as “the condition of any possible earlier”.

The publication of Phenomenology in Italy: Authors, Schools, and Traditions is, to say the least, a breath of fresh air for the anglophone, especially American, philosophical community. This book is nothing less than the introduction of an entirely new phenomenological tradition into the international phenomenological conversation. For, though Italy has a long and rich phenomenological tradition that lacks nothing when compared to, for example, the French reception of Husserl and Heidegger, it has remained mostly unknown to English-speaking scholars and especially to those working in the United States. This collection features essays by Italian scholars on the most important figures of the Italian phenomenological tradition, from Antonio Banfi to Paolo Parrini, spanning three academic generations. Each essay tackles a different author and the order is, as much as possible, chronological. The result is a volume that should spark a curiosity analogous to that of the discovery of a new continent, for the Italian phenomenological tradition has taken phenomenology in directions that, outside of Italy, will result entirely novel. From aesthetics to political philosophy to philosophy of science and even mathematics, the contributions of Italian phenomenologists are sure to breathe new life into the discipline.

Costantino Esposito's recent book, The Nihilism of Our Time, has renewed public interest in nihilism. This paper explores a specific path of nihilism, one that begins with Nietzsche and ends with the dialogue between E. Jünger and M. Heidegger, and which Esposito critiques in his scholarly work. Jünger sees nihilism as a crisis requiring salvation, while Heidegger believes nothingness is intrinsic to being, with salvation found in commemorative thinking [Andenken]. Esposito notes the paradox in Heidegger’s position: salvation is both impossible and necessary. Starting from this insight, my paper questions if Heidegger’s conclusions are truly definitive and argues that his nihilism of the 1950’s is already present, albeit embryonically, in his interpretations of primordial Christianity from the early 1920’s. Heidegger’s adoption of an immanent model of subjectivity in the religion lectures isolates the human being and places an insurmountable abyss between the self and an authentic Alterity. I seek another path, one that leads not to isolation and nihilism, but to a relationality that leaves the subject open. Through an alternative reading of the lectures on Paul’s epistles and Augustine’s Confessions, I show that the sealed immanence of the Heideggerian subject depends on a peculiar form of “theological epoché” that doesn’t simply exclude theological or religious elements from his analysis, but brackets them and leaves them suspended, never again to return to them. But a full implementation of this epoché (which is ostensibly what Heidegger is seeking in these lectures) actually yields an account of factical life as a relational structure that consists in a fundamental desire. In this view, factical life remains inherently transcendent, just as Heidegger wants, but this transcendence consists not in pure self-relation as Heidegger concludes, but in openness to Alterity.