Reflective and Relucent Phenomenology: The influence of Husserl in Heidegger’s Frühe Vorlesungen, 1919–1925

Abstract

My primary goal in this article is to provide a principled account of Martin Heidegger’s concept of reflection and a defensible account of its scattered elaboration in the Frühe Vorlesungen, 1919–1925. Disagreement regarding the meaning and validity of Heidegger’s use of reflection has been sustained by its apparent resistance to assimilation into his phenomenological project, especially one that encompasses the canonical arguments of Being and Time. In the received view, Heidegger rejects Edmund Husserl’s concept of Reflexion, renouncing the tradition of theoretical knowledge whereby self-awareness and the primacy of consciousness are privileged over practical and historically embedded understanding (Verstehen). This view is unsatisfactory because it creates a problematic opposition between reflective phenomenology and fundamental ontology. Recent exegetical work following the received view replicates this inadequacy and fails to improve discussions on the complexity of Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl and the tradition of phenomenology. While critical of Husserl’s fraught concern for certainty and the formation of phenomenology as a theoretical science, I argue that Heidegger appropriates Husserl’s concept of Reflexion rather than outright rejecting it. In my view, an understanding of Being (Seinsverständnis) depends on a reflective mode of access that brings pre-ontological experience into thematic givenness. Through this reflective thematization, the analytic of Dasein becomes available for explicit articulation in terms of its constitutive existentials.

Keywords: Reflexion, Reluzenz, Heidegger, Husserl, Natorp, Formal Indication