Simon Calenge

Hans Lipps’s originality lies in a tension between his hermeneutical and existential philosophy on the one hand, and his analysis of themes belonging to classical logic, on the other. To understand this tension, it must be examined at its point of origin – when Lipps discusses Husserl’s philosophy. The purpose of this text is to explain the opposition between Lipps and his first Master. Lipps’s critique of Husserl concerns transcendental idealism, the transcendental reduction, and the concept of intentionality, which appear to Lipps as an escape from the realm of facticity. Husserlian idealism is then similar to Kant’s critical philosophy. Pursuing his inquiry from the perspective of facticity, Lipps refutes Kant’s and Husserl’s transcendentalism and their focus on the realm of representation. He tries nevertheless to analyse the classic problems of phenomenology and Kantian logic from the point of view of facticity.

According to Martin Heidegger and Hans Lipps, the hermeneutical approach of meaning describes the experience of the situation as the original place of signifiance, its home. Meaning doesn't depend on speech, but it exists before any linguistical phenomenon. In this way, the meaning isn't the simple theoretical content which is thought by consciousness with words. It belongs to the pragmatical structure of the situation. The things mean the possibilities of their use for a specific purpose which closes the situation where these things appear. Heidegger and Lipps criticize the idealistic concept of meaning, which is tackled by Husserl, Bolzano and Frege. This hermeneutical criticism seems to be really close to pragmatism. Heidegger's conception of speech nevertheless implies to go beyond this pragmatism. If meaning can only be a pragmatical meaning of things, language is then only the redundancy of the meaning which can be met in the empirical situation. According to Heidegger and Lipps, the word cannot be described as a useful thing, it expands over the pragmatical frame of the situation and closes it. The function of the word is to connect meaning of the situation to someone who understands and admits this situation in the same movement. The actual utterance of word is the way of closing and ending the openess and the incompletion of the meaning in situation. The meaning of the situation is closed by someone's decision. This decision set the word free, where the speaker exists. Heidegger's philosophy is first related to its phenomenological and neokantian origins by Edmund Husserl and Emil Lask. The husserlian basing of the meaning on a conscious-act is crossed to the laskian conception of the universality of meaning. These two thinkers allow the emergence of heideggerian concept of situation as a ternary structure which connects (Bezugssinn) an act (Vollzugssinn) to a phenomenal content (Gehaltssinn). The analysis of the word, which takes place in Sein und Zeit, shows that the function of language – which is impossible without an act understood as Vollzugssin – is to give someone to this situation, and, in this way, to close the situation on the Dasein. The word isn't the reflection of a meaning which exists without the language. On the contrary, the word appears as the keystone which completes the otherwise incomplete meanings. Language gives the meaning to someone who talks, and completes the meaning with this speech act. Lipps' continuation of Heidegger's thinking yet brings something new : an intersubjective determination of the word. According to Lipps, a speech act is always an answer to someone who calls the speaker to speak. The Other in the speaker's situation is the origin of the speech act, which makes the speaker exist as such.