Well obviously I should be spending my time doing real work, but a passion is a passion (and all that), and I found the first pages of this course to be on the whole enjoyable.
WARNING - TEXTUAL EXPOSITION FOLLOWS - CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN PERIL…
In the first paragraph, Heidegger undertakes his customary practice of defining the convoluted title which he has given to the course. Now this is sometimes not without irony or a touch of humour, as in for instance the introducion to the Beitrage. Which is to say, I can well imagine how funny Herr Heidegger might have been - that is, funny at least to German philosophy students in the 1920’s.
In any case, the title of this course is “Prolegomena to the Phenemenology of History and Nature”. This means, “what must be put forward in the beginning in order to be able to do a phenomenology of history and nature.” It is at the same time an echo and a response to Kant, and his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. The two thinkers connect most fundamentally on the concept of time, which forms the subject of this lecture series.
The relation of anticipation and fulfilment in the title is to be understood in a dialogical sense - Heidegger evidences recognizable Hegelian traits in the way he philosophizes - because, amongst other reasons, that is part of what ‘phenomenology’ is for Heidegger. Of course it is many other things, but I find it useful and productive to follow his thinking with a dialogical or ‘platonic’ schematic in mind.
In paragraph two Heidegger draws a distinction between the realms of history and nature, and the sciences by which we generally ‘access’ these realms. With this seemingly innocent distinction, Heidegger is then able to suggest that this thematization may be ‘restrictive’ on the disclosure of their objects. But why would this be the case, and how would we know it was the case? Heidegger suggests that there is a ‘necessary’ reason for this, one which however I will not dwell on here (neither does he). In any case the reason he gives is not an argument to ground his original supposition - we may ignore it for the moment and deal with the content of his description as it stands on its own.
He writes then that; “…it is not certain whether a domain of objects necessarily also gives us the actual area of subject matter out of which the thematic of the sciences is first carved.” The question which Heidegger feels it has become legitimate to ask is whether the science of history actually has the ‘authentic reality’ of history as its object.
In the third paragraph, Heidegger suggests that the practice of phenomenological description is what can ‘disclose’ the ‘reality’ of these domains, before they are objectivized by scientific enquiry. In his words then, this is necessitated because “…reality - nature as well as history - can be reached only by leaping over the sciences to some extent, this prescientific - actually philosophical - disclosure of them becomes what I call a productive logic, an anticipatory disclosure and conceptual penetration of potential domains of objects for the sciences.”
Now what sheds some light on the meaning of this passage is the one that immediately follows. Heidegger likens this procedure to the procedure of the “original logic” put forward by Plato and Aristotle. Logic for Aristotle has no definite subject matter, and is a sense then ‘universal’. This line of thought will form the basis of Heidegger’s understanding of logic as carrying within it an implicit ontology. For him logic is dialogic, dialectic. Phenomenology makes comprehensible the domains of subject matter which are then taken up by scientific treatment, and this means then, by dialogical inflection, that it makes comprehensible what this ‘scientific treatment’ is as well. This process of making comprehensible, understood in its turn, means articulating a logic which is at the same time an ontology.
Now as I said already, Heidegger explains that this has become necessary for a reason which is part of the essence of science itself. Continuing to pass over this assertion, I will give in any case the description of the state of science which Heidegger accompanies it with. He says that “the real crisis is internal to the sciences themselves, wherein their basic relationship to the subject matter which each of them investigates has become questionable.” The key word here, which should be emphasized, is ‘questionable’. Again what it means for Heidegger to ask a ‘question’, can only be understood in dialectical terms. A genuine question is a determinate moment in the continuum of tradition and history - a question which is not genuine has no object, in just the same way that we say the field of astrology has no object.
What is more, Heidegger says (prefiguring Kuhn) that “genuine progress in the sciences occurs only in this field of reflection”. In these moments, “scientific research assumes a philosophical cast”. Now at this point he gives a series of examples designed to support this thesis. One of them is from the subject of physics, where he discusses briefly Einstein’s theory of relativity. I find his description of the essence or ‘meaning’ of this theory to be quite good for the purpose at hand. He writes; “…(it has) no other sense than the tendency to exhibit the original interconnectedness of nature insofar as this is independent of any analysis and inquiry.” The emphasis in this sentence should be placed on ‘original interconnectedness’, and ‘independent of any analysis’. It is independent of analysis because the originary object which is being ‘recovered’ by this ‘revolution’, this ‘crisis’, is seperate from the way in which it has been thematized in scientific discourse up until that point. Or at least, it is this particular way of describing the ‘seperation’ in question which allows for the analogy that Heidegger seeks between Einstein’s revolution and his own explanatory thesis for which it is intended to serve as an instance and example. This is born out when he writes; “Relativity theory is a theory of relativities, a theory of the conditions of access and modes of conception, which are to be arranged so that in this access to nature, in a specific mode of space-time measurement, the invariance of the laws of motion are preserved. Its aim is not relativism but just the opposite.” It exhibits, in other words, a desire to fixate on the reality of the real, the in-itself of nature, which is analogous to what Heidegger seeks with his practice of phenomenology.
Now at this point we arrive at the second half of the introduction, where Heidegger explains what the concept of time has to do with his ‘prolegomena to the phenomenology of history and nature’. He writes; “We shall approach this task of laying out the actual constituents which underlie history and nature, and from which they acquire their being, by way of a history of the concept of time.” This chosen method of course is pursued for the seemingly mundane reason that both history and nature run their course through time, and are understood as such. What this means then is that time “already announces itself as the one ‘index’ for the differentiation and delimitation of domains of being as such.” Heidegger begins therefore by asking, why is this the case, and with what grounds of justification?
Now this focus on time splits out in two directions - the significance of the concept of time, as such, and the ‘history’ of this concept. Heidegger considers analysis of the latter to be not merely an “arbitrary historiological reflection”. What kind of reflection then is it? This is the point at which Heidegger turns to face the question of many a philosopher - especially in the analytic tradition - who wonder what is the point of studying the ‘history’ of philosophy, when conceptual analysis is what the ‘heart’ of philosophy really is. Heidegger argues that we cannot access the phenomenologically ‘pre-theoretical’ conception of time so long as we imagine it is accessible simply by running a ‘survey’ and collecting ‘opinions’ on what time is. We must come from the other direction, he suggests, already knowing what it is we are looking for, as it were, before we will find it - otherwise our methodology is lacking the radicality needed to avoid simply affirming whatever conception of time happens to be prevalent at the present, and then projecting this conception back onto the past, and indeed forward onto the future. The only manner in which we may successfully avoid this, Heidegger asserts, is through the use of phenomenological critique.
So what then is Heidegger’s response to those who believe ‘conceptual analysis’ is sufficient to this ends? he writes; "This attitude makes sense as long as the belief persists that a systematic philosophical discussion is possible in a radical sense without being historiological in its innermost ground." I would suggest, in addition to Heidegger’s own emphasis here, that one emphasize ‘radical’, pursuant to what I just said about the possibility of a suitably radical critique above. Heidegger suggests that the basic question of philosophical research, which is in one swoop phenomenology, entities in their being, the reality of the real, and the authentic history - compels us, requires us, to put aside for a moment the usual distinction between conceptual or ‘systematic’ analysis/knowledge, and that of the historiological variety, as the area of our research precedes, in an ontological sense, this distinction. This area then is neither one nor the other, neither systematic, nor historiological - but is rather phenomenological. We see here then the extent to which phenomenology is absolutely crucial to Heidegger’s endeavor.
Regards,
James
