The Significance of Heidegger’s Analysis of Death in His Advancement of Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology Towards the Question of the Meaning of Being in "Being and Time"

Abstract

This article draws attention to the relation between Husserl’s ‘talk of Being’ in the transcendental reduction in Ideas I (1913) and Heidegger’s re-orientation of Husserl’s idea of transcendental phenomenology towards ‘the question of the meaning of Being’ and its relation to Dasein in Being and Time (1927). It argues that Heidegger’s selection of ‘death’ as an ‘object’ for phenomenological elucidation challenges both the confines and the suppositions of Husserl’s ‘talk of Being’ in the reduction as the sole possibility for transcendental phenomenology. It also argues that Heidegger’s distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ talk about death in Being and Time radically challenges Husserl’s distinction between ‘authentic and inauthentic thinking’ espoused in the Logical Investigations (1900–01). This is why Husserl is correct to see, much to his disappointment and incomprehension, both overt and covert criticisms of his philosophical position in Being and Time by its author. Yet despite Husserl’s misgivings about Heidegger’s phenomenological credentials, Being and Time is a work in phenomenology because it is founded in the experience of finitude and it provides a conception of philosophy that is capable of subsuming Husserl’s reduction under its own grander conception of transcendental phenomenology as ‘fundamental ontology’