Formative Years - Husserl, Naturalism, Normativity

Safranski, BGE

On Husserl: "In Husserl's work Heidegger found a vigorous defense of the assertion of logic against its psychological relativization."

"Philosophy in about 1900 was in deep trouble. The natural sciences, in alliance with positivism, empiricism, and sensualism, were stifling it...The ancient and venerable philosophical question of "what something is" was no longer being asked. It was known to lead into infinity...the question of "how something functions" was much more promising...The naturalists of the psychic elevate this logic...into a natural law of thought, meanwhile overlooking the fact that logic does not empirically describe how we think if we wish to arrive at judgments with a claim to truth---which is, after all, what science claims for itself. By analyzing thought as a natural psychic event, science entangles itself in a tricky contradiction...In the wide field of the thinkable, logic appears not as a natural law but as something that applies if we allow it to apply...Husserl''s investigations aim at freeing logic from naturalism and bringing out once more its normative--that is, spiritual---character. Of course the logical takes place within the psyche, but it is a normative product of the psyche and not a natural law of a psychic process" 27


F.A. Lange, History of Materialism (1866)
"Neo-Kantianism...was likewise set in motion by Lange.//Lange's funadamental idea is the restoration of that neat Kantian differentiation between a world of phenomena which we can analyze by laws...and a world that reaches into us, which used to be called "spirit" and by Kant was called "freedom" with reference to the internal man, and the "thing in itself" with reference to the external world. Lange recalls Kant's definition of nature: nature in not where the laws which we call nature apply, but the other way about. To the extent that we view something from the angle of such "laws", we constitute it as the appearance of "nature"; To the extent that we view it from the angle of spontaneity and freedom, we are dealing with "spirit." Both viewing angles are possible and necessary, and most important, they are not convertible" 31


Neo-Kantians; Explanation v. Understanding - which already entails a difference disclosure based on the distance or disengagement we take towards an object - outside for explanation, remaining within for understanding.

"To the neo-Kantians, culture was the quintessence of the sphere of values. The material substance of a sculpture, for instance, can be analyzed physically, chemically, and so on, but one will not thereby have understood what that sculpture is, because it is what it signifies. This signification is valid and is realized by everyone who does not regard the sculpture as a heap of stones but as art...Nature and culture are not separate spheres, but nature becomes a cultural object to the extent that it is linked to values...A state of affairs thus becomes a "state of values." States of affairs are susceptible to explanation; states of value can only be understood."

H and Logic:

"By means of Logic H is hoping to snatch a corner of superindividual validity; this means a lot to him, as he wishes to believe in the objective reality of the spirit. The spirit should not be just a product of our heads. But he also wants to concede independent reality to the external world. It should not evaporate into a chimera of the subjective spirit, because anything like that would be the cognition-theory version of the "boundless autonomism of the ego" that he had criticized. H wants to avoid both the crash into materialism and the false ascension of subjective idealism"

SEP entry on Psychologism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychologism/

Formative Years - Brentano

Safranski, BGE

Re Brentano: "The question that agitated Brentano was the nature of God's existence. If there is a God, what does "there" mean? Is he an idea in our head? Is he outside in the world as its quintessence, as its highest being? In subtle analysis, Brentano discovers that there is a third category, between the subjective idea and the 'in-itself' of things - the 'intentional objects'. Ideas...are not purely internal, but are always ideas "of something". They are awareness of something that is...something that offers itself and presents itself to one. There intentional objects are something, on other words: they cannot be dissolved into the subjective actions through which we enter into relation with them. In this manner Brentano prepares an entire separate world of what is, a world occupying an intermediate position in the customary subject-object pattern" 24

SEP entry on Brentano:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brentano/

Formative Years - Monument to Abraham a Santa Clara

Safranski, Between Good and Evil

H writes in a conservative catholic weekly of the unveiling of a monument to Abraham a Santa Clara: 

"Young Heidegger argues against the "decadence" of his age...of a "stifling sultriness," of being a period of "outward culture," of "fast living," of an "all-overturning innovation mania," of "momentary excitements," predominantly of "the mad leaping over the more profound spiritual content of life and art"" (20)

"the great illusion of modernity, which hopes to bring the "I to unlimited development"

Truth is always personally difficult: an act of self-renunciation. Truth as such, is recognized by the fact that it "resists us, challenges us, transforms us" (21) "This argument is worth remembering, for Heidegger will be seen to adhere to it. Exaction and discomfort remain criteria of truth, even though later the supposed possession of truth under the tutelage of faith becomes to him an easy way out and hence a betrayal of truth. The difficult and unpalatable element that one should demand of oneself is therefore the (previously suspect) freedom that faces up to its metaphysical homelessness and has no need of protection by the rigid truths of a believing realism" (22)

Formative Years - Carl Braig

Safranksi, Between Good and Evil

Re Carl Braig, Freiburg Theologian at the Freiburg Theological Seminary (where H began his studies in 1909); "an illustration of the fact that one could be an antimodernist without becoming an obscurantist". Always referred to by Heidegger as "Teacher"; through whose work Heidegger familiarized himself with basic concepts of ontological tradition. 

"Braig criticized modern civilization for its lack of respect for the inexhaustible secret of a reality which we ourselves are a part and which surrounds us. If man arrogantly places himself at its center, he is ultimately left only with a pragmatic relationship to truth: Truth, in that case, is what serves us and what brings us practical success" 17