Being human and being open: Heidegger’s radicalization of the transcendental after Husserl

Keane, Niall

Abstract

Heidegger was well aware of the importance of separating thematically the world of human experience from the conditions of its manifestation. Yet as phenomenologist he also recognized that the way of being of the human is itself constitutive of such manifestation. Because of this insight, he identified the inconsistency, naturalistic misconception, and reductionist approach of psychologism in its attempts to give an epistemological account of experience by appealing not to the givenness of things in experience but rather to the factual psychological connections by which one apprehends these things. Whereas Husserl’s rejection of psychologism hinges on his concern with protecting the ideal from being reduced to the factual or causal empirical, as well as his resistance to forms of all-encompassing naturalism, Heidegger’s concern is with the human being’s practical, worldly and historical situatedness. Yet, in many ways, Heidegger endorses Husserl’s critique of psychologism. For instance, in 1925, he writes that “[t]he meaning of the principle of contradiction is not at all related to the framework of mental events. That is, its validity is completely independent of a possible change in the mental nature of human beings.”1 In this move to ensure that logical validity is kept distinct from the factual structures of psychological life, there is to be found an attempt to protect truth from becoming a mere psychological achievement and subsequently to conceive anew the human being and its relation to truth. The critique of psychologism thus paves the way for rethinking the grounds of human rationality, which, according to Heidegger, had been “locked off from various regions of being [. . .] blind to them, cut off from them and locked up in one specific area of being, that of the empirical nature of the physical and mental.”

Citation

Keane, N. (2022). Being human and being open: Heidegger’s radicalization of the transcendental after Husserl. In I. Farin, & J. Malpas (Eds.), Heidegger and the Human

• Publication Date: Oct 3, 2022
• Deposit Date: May 15, 2023
• Series Title: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
• Book Title: Heidegger and the Human
• Chapter Number: 6
• ISBN: 9781438490496; 9781438490489
• Keywords: Continental Philosophy, Religion, Literature, History Of Philosophy, Cultural Studies
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10502349
• Publisher URL: https://sunypress.edu/Books/H/Heidegger-and-the-Human