The Fate of Phenomenology by William McNeill

Author:William McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786608925
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Published: 2020-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

A Question of Method?

The Crisis of Phenomenology and “The Origin of the Work of Art”

It is frequently claimed that in his groundbreaking essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger is giving a phenomenological account of art and the artwork.1 Nevertheless, there are good reasons to be suspicious of this claim, however self-evident it might appear to be. For one thing, there is the rather obvious fact that Heidegger himself never claims to be providing us with a phenomenological account of the work of art, nor does he appeal to phenomenology as the appropriate method for investigating art and its origin. The term phenomenology is never mentioned in any of the three versions of the essay to which we now have access.

Moreover, as we have seen, the publication of many of Heidegger’s lecture courses and seminars from 1927 to 1930 has shown that Heidegger appears to abandon phenomenology as the preferred method of uncovering Being as early as 1928. The term is rarely even mentioned in his lectures immediately following the course on The Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason from winter semester of 1927–1928, except in reference to other philosophers, most notably Husserl, Scheler, and Hegel. In his course on The Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger, as the title of the course indicates, claims to be giving a phenomenological interpretation of Kant, although he declines to specify directly what “phenomenological” means here, telling us instead that “what phenomenology is, is to demonstrate itself in the carrying out of the interpretation itself ” (GA 25, 6). The course indeed continues and extends the phenomenological interpretation of the essence of science as thematizing objectification of beings (positive sciences) or of Being (philosophy as science) that was developed the previous semester in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. With regard to the appropriateness of a phenomenological reading of the text in question, Heidegger notes the following:

The method of the Critique is, in its fundamental stance [Grundhaltung], that which, since Husserl, we understand and enact and are learning to ground more radically as phenomenological method. For this reason, a phenomenological interpretation of the Critique is the sole appropriate one for Kant’s intentions, albeit not stated entirely clearly. (GA 25, 71)

Heidegger’s claim is based on Kant’s assertion in the first sentence of the introduction to the Transcendental Aesthetic, “thus the first sentence of the Critique proper,” that all knowledge is ultimately grounded in intuition (Anschauung) (GA 25, 82). It is this primacy of intuition that is discovered anew by Husserl’s phenomenology and made central to phenomenological method:

In the present day, Husserl, the founder of phenomenological research, has rediscovered independently of Kant this essential feature of knowledge in general and of philosophical knowledge. It is precisely this fundamental conception in phenomenology concerning the character of intuition pertaining to knowledge that contemporary philosophy resists. Yet every appeal to Kant contra phenomenology fails in principle with the very first sentence of the Critique. That knowledge is also thinking has never

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