James Luchte: Philosophy

Heidegger’s Early Philosophy

The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality

Introduction

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Prologue: Toward an Understanding of Heidegger’s “Sein und Zeit” Project

One of the most significant gestures of the published fragment of Being and Time is that a radical phenomenological investigation must have an ontic, factical, ‘fundament’.  This gesture not only concerns the conditions of emergence for any self-interpretation of the being for whom being is an issue, but also intimates the irreducible thrown-ness and embeddedness of any philosophical inquiry.  In other words, the pretension that thought can extricate itself from temporality, existential spatiality, etc. – in a word, from finitude – is for Heidegger, an illusion “founded” upon non-original conceptions of existence and being. As Nietzsche expresses in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, such other-worldly hypotheses, in this case of the ‘good as such’, denies perspective, and thus, life itself.  An honest phenomenology cannot take refuge in idealist or realist ontologies without forsaking the significance of phenomenology as a desire for the truth of things themselves.  Dishonesty would entail a retreat from the phenomenon into a theory of consciousness and its objects, an escape that suppresses and conceals its own radical temporality.

It is within this horizon that I have approached Heidegger’s attempts to articulate a fundamental ontology – or radical phenomenology – in the 1920’s, and its transmutations to come.

To read the rest of this piece, please visit Heidegger’s Early Philosophy – Introduction.