Fredrik Westerlund's "Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena" (Book Note)

 

Fredrik Westerlund's "Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena" provides a comprehensive analysis of Heidegger's evolving engagement with the phenomenological method inherited from Husserl, particularly focusing on the concept of phenomena. The study unfolds in three parts, each tracing Heidegger's shifting perspectives on phenomena. The first part scrutinizes Heidegger's early Freiburg lectures, highlighting the call for a heightened sensitivity to the pretheoretical, existential aspects of lived experience. The second part delves into the emergence of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, culminating in "Being and Time", informed by an acute awareness of human finitude, historicity, and the interplay with Dilthey's hermeneutics and the Aristotelian inquiry into being. The third part probes Heidegger's later works, where attention shifts from Dasein's receptivity to meaning to the "history of being" itself, emphasizing the dynamic of the event (Ereignis) that allows meaningful presence to be encountered. Westerlund concludes the study with a detailed epilogue, offering independent critical reflections on the implications of Heidegger's radical historicism for ethical normativity and truth.

 

Westerlund's work stands in line with classical phenomenological studies on Heidegger, placing it alongside renowned scholars such as William J. Richardson, Steven Crowell, Daniel Dahlstrom, Burt Hopkins, and Dermot Moran. Noteworthy is the meticulous attention given to Heidegger's early lectures, distinguishing this study and drawing parallels with Theodore Kisiel's seminal work on the genesis of "Being and Time." Westerlund's analysis navigates the entire corpus of Heidegger's oeuvre, unveiling a fundamental tension between the classical Husserlian phenomenological approach and Heidegger's evolving "radical historicism." This tension underlies Heidegger's dual identity as both Husserl's prominent disciple and the figure central to the hermeneutic-deconstructive tradition.

In the final section, Westerlund engages in a dual critique of Heidegger's historicization of meaningfulness. Ethically, he aligns with Levinas in asserting that Heidegger's prioritization of ontology over ethics neglects the infinite moral imperative embodied in the face of the other. Westerlund advocates for a universal ethics of love, emphasizing that the call to love and care for the other transcends historical values and norms. He contends that Heidegger's historicism overlooks the fundamental openness to the call of the other person, which forms an irreducible source of moral meaning. In terms of epistemology, Westerlund challenges Heidegger's contextualization of truth, asserting that our experience of phenomena is fundamentally directed towards realities that surpass our historical concepts. He argues that our conceptual preunderstanding does not rigidly determine the scope of meaningful experience.

In the culmination of his assessment, Westerlund contends that Heidegger's endeavor to supplant intuition-based phenomenology with historical reflection is ultimately destined to fall short. According to Westerlund, Heidegger's transformation of phenomenology into a historical mode of thought represents, in essence, a repudiation of phenomenology itself. He posits that the deconstructive logic embraced by later Heidegger and his followers, including Derrida, carries an inherent self-defeating quality, as it ultimately relies on some transhistorical principle of meaning-constitution, be it the Heideggerian event of Ereignis or the Derridean concept of différance. Westerlund contends that whenever we attempt to fathom the human experience, we invariably align ourselves with the phenomenological agenda of seeking foundational and universally applicable first-personal experiences. In sum, Westerlund suggests, "My suggestion is that in so far as philosophy takes as its task to understand our experience of ethical-existential significance it must primarily take the form of phenomenology"

 

The meticulousness and depth of Westerlund's exegetical scholarship, especially his thorough examination of Heidegger's early lecture courses spanning approximately 50 pages, is commendable. Westerlund largely aligns with prevailing approaches and interpretations in Anglo-American Heidegger research. However, there are certain points within this consensus that might be open to scrutiny. For instance, the established translation of Eigentlichkeit, a term denoting Dasein's awareness of the ontologically fundamental structure of its existence as finite, situated, and characterized by the three-dimensional flow of its temporality, as "authenticity" could be challenged. Westerlund's discussion of authenticity stems from and closely relates to a broader ethical emphasis. Like Levinas, Westerlund is concerned about what he perceives as the "egoism" and lack of altruism implied in Heidegger's portrayal of Dasein as existing for the sake of its own potentialities. An alternative approach might involve recognizing that, regardless of how selflessly and fervently I may be concerned for my fellow human beings, I remain incapable of orienting my existence toward their finite possibilities, simply because those possibilities are not mine. I may be capable of selflessly sacrificing myself for someone, but I cannot experience their death as my own. The singular temporal space allotted to me by my birth and death is uniquely my responsibility. This fundamental existential reality does not preclude caring for others, as Westerlund suggests, and it might be argued that Heidegger, in fact, underscores a form of ethics centered on self-responsibility, akin to Michel Foucault's exploration of an ethics of "self-care" in Hellenistic philosophy.

 

Westerlund's bold attempt to grapple with Heidegger's later thought, while more limited in scope compared to the extensive discussion of the early lecture courses, is commendable. His insights on Heidegger's "turn" in the 1930s, the dynamic of Ereignis, and the fundamental role of the fourfold  are, for the most part, highly laudable. However, I would challenge Westerlund's hesitance to categorize the later Heidegger as "phenomenological," despite Heidegger's own insistence to the contrary. Since Westerlund steadfastly defines phenomenology in terms of Husserl's emphasis on immediate intuitive access to meaningful givenness, it is perhaps unsurprising that Heidegger's characterization of his own thinking, particularly in his final 1973 seminar, as a "phenomenology of the inapparent"—a phenomenology focused on the implicit conditions of phenomenality, on the background context of meaningful presence or accessibility that is not immediately phenomenally accessible or present—fails to persuade Westerlund.

 

The question that arises here, in alignment with Heidegger, concerns the extent to which "phenomenological" thinking can be exhaustively defined within the parameters of Husserl's understanding of the term. To what degree, and according to what criteria, has the overarching project of Western philosophy not been inherently "phenomenological"? That is, an endeavor to elucidate the possibility and structures of the meaningful givenness of things, and our capacity to access them as meaningful through experience and thought. Westerlund places significant emphasis on "concrete phenomenological descriptions," that is, specific analyses of particular types of phenomena in terms of their first-personal meaningful phenomenality. Nevertheless, it could be argued that, as philosophy, phenomenology—much like all philosophy—essentially grapples not with this or that phenomenon or category of phenomenon, but with the structures and conditions of phenomenality itself, with the very accessibility and intelligibility of things. This is ultimately with the meaningful being of beings, where specific concrete descriptions may no longer suffice. Nonetheless, we will still be compelled to articulate our thoughts through concepts, and these concepts will inevitably draw, to some extent, from our background historical tradition.

 

Westerlund also dismisses Heidegger's effort, particularly in "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" (1964) and other late texts, to historically contextualize and situate Husserl's philosophical project. However, it is widely acknowledged that Husserl's project initially emerged as a response to a specific historical context—the ascent of antiphilosophical naturalism, particularly in the form of logical psychologism. According to its own self-understanding, Husserlian phenomenology sought to recover and salvage a form of "first philosophy" in order to prevent philosophy from devolving into a mere servant of natural science. Furthermore, Husserl saw himself as carrying forward the legacy of modern philosophical classics—the post-Cartesian emphasis on self-conscious subjectivity and the post-Kantian transcendental endeavor. In characterizing his own position as "transcendental idealism" and rejecting the Kantian notion of things-in-themselves, Husserl, often without explicit acknowledgment, comes remarkably close to certain positions advanced by the German idealists, such as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, as the later Heidegger repeatedly suggests. Thus, it might not be in Husserl's best interest to refuse acknowledgment that, like all philosophers, he grappled with questions and issues within a specific historical juncture, addressing these through concepts that were historically constituted and imbued with significance

What distinguishes Westerlund's work, above all, from a majority of Heidegger scholarship is his courageous stance in asserting an independent philosophical position that is openly critical of Heidegger. To fully honor this exceptional autonomy, I would like to conclude with some brief questions and remarks that primarily pertain to the foundational tenets of Westerlund's philosophy and are, in themselves, largely separate from his interpretation of Heidegger.

 

Initially, Westerlund advocates for a universal ethics of love, expressed in unequivocal and robust terms: "My claim is that the personal address of the other and the possibility of loving her is there in every historical situation—that is, regardless of the values and norms that happen to govern my society and my identity". Moreover, he asserts, "we are always already open to the understanding that all people, universally and without exception, claim our love and care". However, an opposing argument that readily comes to mind challenges the moral imperative of loving all human beings as persons, without exception. It posits that this imperative arises within a specific historical normative context, primarily that of Christian ethics. Additionally, there is the inherent ambiguity of the term "love" itself. The notion of love that Westerlund seems to work with here is evidently not the Greek erōs, denoting erotic desire and pursuit, nor philia, signifying affectionate attachment, but rather agapē, meaning charity or selfless benevolence—a concept predominantly used in ancient Greece to denote the love felt for immediate family members. It only expanded into the universal ethical injunction of "loving one's neighbor" within the context of Christian ethical teachings that advocate treating one's entire community as an extended family. If love, in the sense of such non-particularistic goodwill, genuinely transcends historical context, why is this concept conspicuously absent from the ethics of pre-Christian antiquity? Is the potential of this ethical concept to serve as a universal foundation for all ethics not somewhat diminished by its emergence from a very specific historical backdrop? Although many might argue otherwise, it remains challenging to assert that this notion of ethics is universally and transhistorically intuited.

The broader question at hand pertains to the very essence of "ethics." Levinas' charge of prioritizing ontology over ethics, a stance he attributes to Heidegger, is heavily contingent on a Kantian notion of an ethics rooted in duty, in universally binding moral principles that render ethics a matter of the will rather than of knowledge. This perspective ultimately traces back to a theological ethics centered on divine command. In the Aristotelian framework of knowledge, ethics was synonymous with ontology—a localized ontological examination of active human life, specifically of the "good life" in the sense of a life that optimally realizes humanity and most fully actualizes human potential. As many scholars have pointed out, including Volpi (1994), numerous aspects of Heidegger's "Being and Time" draw inspiration from Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," thereby characterizing fundamental ontology as an "ethics" in this classical sense.

 

These historical observations shed light on a fundamental challenge in Westerlund's intuition-based epistemic realism: its reluctance to grapple seriously with the notion that our "immediate" intuitions themselves bear the imprint of historical constitution. The ethical framework proposed by Westerlund, rooted in love and aligned with the wider Levinasian ethical perspective, is undeniably compelling. It resonates with many contemporary ethical intuitions. However, it becomes apparent that these intuitions are not uniformly held by all human beings across all eras. Instead, they seem to have been deeply ingrained into the Western intellectual tradition by its specific historical lineage, which encompasses two millennia of Christian thought and two centuries of Kantian and post-Kantian thought.

 

Westerlund asserts that "our concepts [...] offer themselves to us as possibilities to grasp or misinterpret matters that we experience irrespective of these concepts" . Nevertheless, philosophers since Plato have tended to take seriously the idea that we perceive matters as specific, determinate entities through the mediation of concepts. With the aid of concepts, we identify them as the distinct entities they are. Concepts are typically seen as the means by which we articulate and categorize reality into identifiable and discrete units or objects. Without them, reality might appear as an indeterminate, sensuous chaos lacking in permanence—a state akin to Heraclitean flux.

 

For a significant portion of philosophy's history, the conceptual framework of reality was perceived as fixed and universally applicable, as evident in Platonic and Hegelian dialectics. It is only in the modern era that Western thought has gradually come to accept that different linguistic and cultural systems possess fundamentally distinct and mutually incomparable conceptual frameworks. For instance, according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, even though the visible spectrum of color detected by the human eye remains more or less consistent across individuals, this spectrum can be divided into discrete colors in a practically limitless number of ways. Moreover, the quantity of color terms employed varies greatly based on linguistic and cultural context. It is not incorrect to assert that different cultures "perceive" as many colors as they distinguish through specific terms. This example vividly illustrates the extent to which our most elementary and primal intuitions—our immediate perceptions of color—are articulated and constituted by concepts that, in turn, rely on cultural context.

 

The recognition of the embeddedness of concepts within historically evolving natural languages coincided with an understanding of the historical situatedness of meaningful experience. Heidegger, as well as contemporary poststructuralism, inherit this Romantic tradition. While there exist valid grounds for critiquing this tradition and its overall approach, whether from a phenomenological perspective or otherwise, its principal insights cannot be summarily dismissed as irrelevant.