NEPONCIO, MICHELLE C.

SHSADT 11-5

Husserl vs. Heidegger

Edmund Husserl believed in the skeptics that for each of us, there is only one thing which
is indubitably certain, namely our own conscious awareness. However, our awareness and consciousness
must be aware and conscious of something, and we cannot distinguish from experience alone
between states of consciousness and objects of consciousness. We can never know whether objects of
consciousness have an independent existence separate from us.
Phenomenology is based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events (phenomena)
as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness, and not of anything independent of
human consciousness. Phenomenological reduction is a kind of reflection on intellectual content. If an
object under discussion really existed or not so long as he could at least conceive of the object and objects
of pure imagination could be examined with the same seriousness as data taken from the objective world.
Husserl concluded that consciousness has no life apart from the objects or phenomena it
considers. He called this characteristic intentionality (or object-directedness) and it embodied the idea
that the human mind is the only thing is the whole universe that is able to direct itself toward other
things outside of itself. He described the concept of intentional content -- something in the mind which
was sort of like a built-in mental description of external reality, and which allowed us to perceive and
remember aspects of objects in the real world outside.
Husserl was entirely convinced that he had discovered the undisputable truth of how to approach
philosophy, and it was this that Heidegger reacted against. Martin Heidegger completely rejected the
approach of Phenomenology when he considered specific concrete examples in which
the phenomenological subject-object relation appears to break down. His example was that of an expert
carpenter hammering nails, where, when everything is going well, the carpenter does not have to
concentrate on the hammer or even the nail, and the objects become essentially transparent (ready to
hand). Similarly, when we enter a room, we turn the door knob, but this is such a basic and habitual action
that it does not even enter our consciousness. It is only when something goes wrong (e.g. the hammer is
too heavy, the door knob sticks) that we need to become rational, problem-solving beings. The existence
of hammers and door knobs only has any significance and only makes any sense at all in the whole social
context of wood, houses, construction, etc. (Being in the world).
Heidegger's main concern was always ontology. He asked the deceptively simple question "what
is 'being'?", what is actually meant by the verb 'to be'. His answer was to distinguish what it is for beings
to be beings (Sein) from the existence of entities in general (Seindes), and concentrating on the being for
whom a description of experience might actually matter, the being for whom "being" is a question, the
being engaged in the world (Dasein). He said that time and human existence is linked, and that we as
humans are always looking ahead to the future. He then introduced the concept of authenticity. He
distinguished between farmers and rural workers, whom he considered to have an instinctive grasp of
their own humanity, and city dwellers, who he described as leading inauthentic lives, out of touch with
their own individuality, which in turn causes anxiety. This anxiety is our response to the

apparently arbitrary cultural rules under which we, as Dasein, become accustomed to living out our lives,
and that there are two responses we can choose: we can flee the anxiety by conforming even more closely
to the rules (inauthenticity); or face up to it, carrying on with daily life, but, without any expectation of
any deep final meaning (authenticity).