Abstract

Even in the relatively recent literature on the issue of the philosophical relation between Husserl and Heidegger, some scholars recognize that despite a large number of very good accounts, the darkness surrounding the matter has not yet been totally lifted. In particular, we still lack a complete account of the exact influence that Husserl’s Phenomenology exerted on Heidegger’s project of a Fundamental Ontology. To use, e.g., Dahlstrom’s wording, until now, the available works on this subject “merely provide points of departure for an explanation of the relation between the two phenomenologists” (Dahlstrom 2001, 142 n. 103; emphasis added). The situation is, of course, somewhat awkward, since Heidegger himself not only admitted his debt to Husserl’s philosophy, but also sometimes tried to guide us through the inner itineraries of this debt. In his Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity (SS 1923), Heidegger admitted, in front of his students, that it was Husserl who gave him his philosophical eyes: “die Augen hat mir Husserl eingesetzt” (GA 63, 5). There are many occasions on which Heidegger thematizes his debt to Husserl’s Phenomenology. Two years later, in his Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time (SS 1925), he introduced his students to what he presented as the “three fundamental discoveries” of Husserl’s Phenomenology: intentionality, the doctrine of categorial intuition, and the phenomenological sense of the a priori, thereby publicly acknowledging his admiration for Husserl’s work. Both there and in BT, (1927) as well as in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (SS 1927), Heidegger constantly acknowledges the decisive dependence of his philosophy on Husserl’s thinking. [...] All the available textual evidence, then, makes clear that Heidegger considered the doctrine of categorial intuition, developed in the sixth LI, as the most decisive influence from Husserl on his own thought (with intentionality and the phenomenological a priori following closely). Now, what precisely is the meaning of this influence? How might that Husserlian doctrine have helped Heidegger shape the way in which he treated the sole concern of his entire philosophical career, namely the question of Being (Seinsfrage)?