Martin Heidegger 1889–1976 · Edmund Husserl 1859–1938
Where the lectures set Heidegger and Husserl side by side, as Marci Shore presents them: 6 links between their claims. Of these, 2 carry an idea forward, 4 break with it. In every case Heidegger is the later thinker, answering Husserl.
Each entry shows the earlier claim and the later one that answers it. The handwriting names the link. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
Read down. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
HusserlIntentionality is the structure of consciousness: always reaching for its object, like a magnet on a string. Neither subject nor object comes first; their relation does, bridged by intentionality. L11 · 40:21
HeideggerDescartes starts from thinking and Husserl from thinking about an object; Heidegger starts from existing. That I am comes before anything I think: being precedes knowing. L12 · 20:46
Reverses the order: being precedes thinking, so the "I think an object" already presupposes an I existing in the world.
HusserlStrip away the contingent particulars distinguishing empirical egos and a transcendental ego remains: the deepest, most essential I, yet universal and identical in everyone, as H2O underlies all water. L11 · 34:29
HeideggerHeidegger drops the words subject, consciousness and human being in favor of Dasein, literally being-there. Whatever remains of the subject is an entity that is somewhere. L12 · 18:35
Dasein is the next move in overcoming the notion of subjectivity that the transcendental ego began to unsettle.
HusserlIntentionality is the structure of consciousness: always reaching for its object, like a magnet on a string. Neither subject nor object comes first; their relation does, bridged by intentionality. L11 · 40:21
HeideggerThe subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists. L12 · 25:27
Husserl bridges subject and object by intentionality; Heidegger denies there is any gap to bridge.
HusserlThe phenomenological reduction jolts us from the natural attitude, where the world's existence is taken for granted, into reflection on consciousness; the reality question is bracketed, suspended rather than doubted. L11 · 30:57
HeideggerOur first and usual relation to things is using them, not looking at them: the hammer is ready-to-hand. Only when it breaks does it turn into present-at-hand, something to contemplate. L12 · 27:26
Shore calls ready-to-hand breakdown another variation on Husserl's question: when do we really see?
HusserlWhere Freud locates the essential self in what is most hidden, the transcendental ego is pure light: nothing in it stays concealed, and knowing is a matter of clear seeing. L11 · 45:42
HeideggerHusserl's transcendental ego is wholly transparent to itself; Dasein never is. Forever up to something, evading something, tempted toward inauthenticity, it stays partly hidden from itself, closer to Freud. L12 · 46:01
Dasein occupies the transcendental ego's privileged place but is never transparent to itself.
HusserlPhenomenology, both in Husserl's conception and largely in its later development, is more method than theory: an account of how we ought to go about understanding the world. L11 · 30:57
HeideggerWriting to his wife during the war, Heidegger rejected Husserl's phenomenology as "too narrow and bloodless": no such method could be made absolute, because life outruns it. L24 · 7:00
Phenomenology as method is too confined and lifeless for life's richness