Heidegger and the Tradition: Repetition or Overcoming?

Moscow, LMSU June 2012


Transcendental Heidegger: from California to Paris


Hakhamanesh Zangeneh

CSU Stanislaus, Philosophy



1. The problem: the transcendental framework


While Heidegger's thought was always concerned with the history of thought, his approaches to that history and to the historicity of thinking varied greatly over the course of his writings, from Destruktion to Seinsgeschichte to Seinsgeschick, to name but a few of his tropes. In the period of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger does not yet have a thematic interpretation of the totality of metaphysics. What he does operate with however, is the history of ontology. Indeed, the task proposed in Sein und Zeit, is called “a Destruction of the history of ontology, following the guiding theme of time.” Of the many issues involved here, I would like to focus on one consequence: namely, that one of the objects to be 'destroyed' in that history, one of the targets of destruction has to be transcendental philosophy. But I will not focus here on the historical question concerning the place of Kant in Heidegger's interpretation of the history of ontology. Instead, I would like to consider the systematic question, or critique, concerning the very viability of a transcendental method, orientation, or Fragestellung in a fundamental ontology aiming to lead to a destruction. It suffices to recall Kant's most basic definition of a transcendental inquiry from the first Critique, to find concepts whose ontological foundation Heidegger would and did criticize.

And yet, within the reception-history of SZ, the question of the status of Heidegger's discourse has led commentators from different methodological presuppositions back to a re-investment in the notion of the transcendental.


2. The American Reception

3. Heidegger in France

The two authors I am interested in are Claude Romano and Alexander Schnell, both of whom teach at the Sorbonne. I will concentrate on Schnell since his work is focused on the question of the transcendental and I will only mention Romano's position. Romano is the author of what he calls a hermeneutical phenomenology of the event, or eventness. Despite expectations, his conception of events is not at all related to Heidegger's Ereignis. In fact, he claims that his notion of the event is inaccessible to Heideggerian thought because Heidegger remains limited by a transcendental framework. (Essentially, he opposes the Heideggerian notion of possibility to his conception of contingent event.) To establish this argument, he reads SZ, and claims essentially that in fundamental ontology we do not overcome the perspective of Dasein, and that Dasein does not overcome the doctrine of the subject. If the understanding of being is unique to Dasein, then Dasein is transcendental. And if Dasein itself is transcendence, then, as Romano infers, Dasein's transcendence is transcendental. Indeed, he claims that Dasein, in that work, occupies the position of the subject as a transcendental condition of possibility. This is again, a very general characterization, and one might react by asking very simply, yes but what do you mean by subject and what do you mean by possibility?

From here we can make a smooth transition to Schnell because for him, and based on a series of interpretations of classical German philosophy, especially Kant and Fichte, the notion of possibility becomes the focal point – or so it seems. I have said that Schnell is more careful than Romano, and much more than Blattner, and I would therefore like to sketch his position in more detail. While Schnell agrees in reading SZ as a transcendental philosophy, it must be noted that his conception of the transcendental is not as ordinary as the ones employed by Blattner or Romano.

To begin with, it must be noted that Schnell agrees that the subject, or the self, is not a primary ontological instance for Heidegger. He quite rightly emphasizes that, according to the argument of the text, the self is a notion which is not primary but one that is constituted, that the self or the subject has a genesis. Here, one need only turn to sect 64 of SZ, where Heidegger claims that Selbstheit, is based on Sorge and not vice-versa. The being of Dasein as Existenz, Faktizitat, Verfallenheit is neither based on, nor derived from an ultimate principle of self-hood and ipseity, the being of Dasein as Sorge is rather the ground of ipseity. Of course, the second half of SZ is entirely dedicated to the task of interpreting this fundamental structure more originally than Sorge. The title of Schnell's work is Beneath the Subject, and that points already to a break with traditional modern notions of the transcendental framework, by pointing to a ground beneath or before the self. What is beneath the subject for Schnell's Heidegger, is obviously temporality, and here he is simply drawing the consequences of the temporal interpretation of Sorge. So the subject emerges from or out of temporality. This would seem to indicate that the conception of the 'transcendental' that is going to emerge here is clearly not a classical one. It is not the self that functions as ultimate guarantor of possibility, rather, that task falls to originary temporality.