Volume 63, Issue 5

Phenomenology may be considered the systematic science of subjective experience and its basic structures of intentionality, embodiment, temporality and intersubjectivity. Thus it is assigned the crucial task of defending subjective experience against reductionist claims raised by proponents of naturalism or physicalism. Nonetheless, phenomenology is far more than a mere science of consciousness which it maintains as an impregnable, but sterile citadel. On the contrary, as a science of embodied and extended subjectivity, it touches the fields of empirical sciences and enters with them into a productive dialogue. This is shown in three areas of science: (1) by the crucial role of phenomenology for the paradigm of embodied and extended mind in cognitive neuroscience; (2) by the phenomenological concept of primary social cognition as intercorporeality; and (3) by the phenomenological psychopathology of embodiment, in particular in schizophrenia.

Against the still prevalent assumption according to which Kant’s moral philosophy does not, at least for sensuous rational agents, provide a satisfactory answer to the problem posed by their need of happiness, the present paper develops the following argument: The subject must be able to interrupt her pursuit of happiness - precisely in order not to game away her happiness. Within the horizon of Kant’s doctrine of moral incentives as well as in a secular reading of his conception of the highest good, one can see, first, that the possibility of a morally motivated interruption of the pursuit of happiness is a necessary condition precisely for the happiness of finite but rational agents; second, that sensuous satisfaction must be understood as an integrative component of the highest good and, as such, as a second necessary condition for happiness. Kant’s notion of the highest good, thus, conceptualizes the coincidence of virtue and lust as a sufficient condition of happiness, by which a morally mediated lust becomes possible that not only provides sensuous satisfaction, but also makes us happy.

Following Kant’s idea of a “prolegomena” to any future metaphysics, the paper asks the methodological question as to how our current understanding of the Schwarze Hefte might change our habits of reading Heidegger’s philosophy in the future. The paper focuses on a certain interpretative dilemma. It has been a customary strategy for defenders of Heidegger’s philosophy to distinguish between its arguments and its history. But if one treats Heidegger’s work primarily as a set of arguments that can be abstracted from their own historical and cultural- political milieu, one commits precisely that gesture of “deworlding” the world (Entweltlichung der Welt) which Heidegger himself diagnosed as a species of rationalistic neutralization. Those who defend Heidegger in the customary fashion therefore appeal to the very ideal of a dehistoricised and atemporal truth that Heidegger saw as part of the tradition of metaphysical error. To defend Heidegger is therefore to betray him. The paper suggests that this gesture of betrayal cannot be avoided, and it concludes that Heidegger’s philosophy should now be understood not as an integrated or holistic “doctrine” but should rather be read in fragments from the ruins of the philosophical tradition.

This article examines the continuities between Martin Heidegger’s anti-Semitic statements already known in his letters and seminars and those recently brought to light with the publication of his first Black Notebooks in the Complete Works. It takes its distances from the attempts to elevate that anti-Semitism to a level that is metaphysical, or inscribed in “the history of being,” and shows that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, like his conception of the “German essence,” his fear of a “deracification” (Entrassung) of Germanity, and his statements about the “self-extermination” of Judaism all participate in the National-Socialist worldview and find forms of expression that are in keeping with the historical and military events of the years 1938-1946.

One of the most important issues in Heidegger research after the publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014 and 2015 is the discussion of Being and Time: Do the intrinsic connections between Nazi-typical and anti-Semitic statements and Heidegger’s philosophy in the latest publication of the Gesammelte Werke have negative consequences for our judgement of the so called first “Hauptwerk”? This article brings Heidegger’s own comments on the relationship between the work of 1927 and his philosophy a few years later into play. Contrary to many of the defenders of Being and Time, it is neither its emphasis on “praxis” nor that on existence in the sense of Kierkegaard that Heidegger judges to be the most crucial topics. He stresses the continuity between both phases of his thinking in regard to posing the “Seinsfrage” and to his defining man as Dasein. So it becomes very clear that Heidegger rejects his early attempt to answer the “Seinsfrage” through philosophical theory by attempting instead to initiate a new meaning of being through philosophy and politics. Following this line of argument, a critical discussion of Being and Time has to pay attention to its claim of delivering an ontology of Dasein and of Being. The question has to be asked whether this ontology can be defended against Heidegger’s own criticism or whether it is itself problematic. The article cannot answer this question, but it will unfold its ramifications in terms of tasks for further research.

According to Trawny, Heidegger’s Black Notebooks show that his thinking could be “contaminated” by National Socialism and anti-Semitism only between 1931 and 1944/1945. However, in this paper it is argued that already in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger had made a case for National Socialism, which he discovered in 1938 − the ‘true’ National Socialism -, and that Trawny’s main criterion is false. Heidegger’s case is compared with Max Scheler, who, because of Hitler, turned from the right to the centre. In addition, alternatives to Trawny’s detailed interpretations of three of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks are offered, and the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s history of Being are presented.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks demonstrate that there have been serious misconceptions about the status and aim of his philosophy and language. They show this to be a result of intentional misdirection which finds a twofold expression in his language: For one, an exceptional ‘few’ are addressed rather than the reader or listener in general. Being is seen as struggle of intuitive insight against common rationality, and communication must, thus, be intentionally ambivalent. Secondly, for the selected few the understanding and guiding of our Being is a matter not of human emancipation but a process of völkisch ‘awakening’ and ‘perception.’

The posthumously published text was presented by Laszlo Tengelyi on July 11th 2014 in the context of a conference dedicated to him on his 60th birthday. He died on July 19th 2014. The essay proposes that modern philosophy does not necessarily lead to a metaphysics of subjectivity but can be developed as a thinking of the world. Tengelyi defines philosophy as such as a thinking of the world in the sense of a science of „beings in a whole“. The whole of the world differentiates itself today into nature and history and is, furthermore, marked by openness towards the infinite. Following Kant’s notion of the world, Rickert’s heterological principle, Duns Scotus’ disjunctive transcendentals, Heidegger’s transcendental principle of world-openness and especially Schelling’s philosophy of the Ages of the World, Tengelyi sketches the philosophical task of a scientific thinking of the world, which takes its starting point in freedom as a capacity of transcendence and determines nature as the past, history as the present, and the infinite as the openness of the world towards the future.