Seeing Things

The context for the claim about Heidegger is set by the two sentences previous to it. In the first of these MP suggests an apparent contradiction in Husserl’s method. The contradiction is between the claim that phenomenology is a “direct description of our experience as it is,” and the references in the last works to “genetic” and even “constructive” phenomenology. How can we be giving a “direct description” of experience if we are tracing its genesis and even constructing it? MP doesn’t answer this question, however, but in typical Merleau-Ponty fashion asks a different one. In French the question he asks is this: “Voudra-t-on lever ces contradictions en distinguant entre la phénoménologie de Husserl et celle de Heidegger?” I propose to translate the question thus: “Ought one to raise these contradictions in distinguishing between Husserl’s phenomenology and that of Heidegger?” If this is the right way to take the French, then the passage seems to indicate that the question MP is interested in is whether or not the existence of methodological inconsistencies is the key to the distinction between Husserl and Heidegger. “Ought one to raise these contradictions in distinguishing between the two?”

It is in answer to this question that MP writes about the relation between Husserl and Heidegger. As he says, “Mais tout Sein und Zeit est sorti d’ une indication de Husserl et n’ est en somme qu’ une explication du ” natürlichen weltbegriff ” ou du ” lebenswelt ” que Husserl, à la fin de sa vie, donnait pour thème premier à la phénoménologie…” The suggestion seems to be that because Heidegger is himself interested in late Husserlian phenomena like the Lebenswelt, we are not likely to find the distinction between him and Husserl to lie in Heidegger’s method being less “genetic” and more “descriptive” than Husserl’s. In this, at least, the two philosophers are alike.

I’m not sure whether this is a good reading of the passage, but I think something in the area is at least possible. Whether this is a good reading or not, however, it is certain that the Smith translation obscures it competely. To begin with, he turns the principle question into a rhetorical statement. Instead of asking “Ought one to raise these contradictions in distinguishing…” Smith proposes the following translation: “One may try to do away with these contradictions by making a distinction between Hu and Heid…” On this version the distinction between Husserl and Heidegger is proposed in an attempt to “do away with” [lever?] the methodological contradictions. In the original version, however, the question seems to be not whether the contradictions can be excised by drawing a distinction between the two philosophers, but rather whether the distinction between the philosophers - which admittedly exists - consists primarily in the presence or absence of methodological contradictions. If that is the real context of the passage, then the claim that “the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication in Husserl” - and indeed from an indication in late Husserl - shows not that Heidegger’s philosophical position is the same as Husserl’s, but that his project is every bit as much a genetic one (or perhaps Heidegger would say a hermeneutic one) as Husserl’s is. This seems to me not only a better reading of the French, but also quite possibly true.

What do you think?