Religion, Theology, and Philosophy on the Way to Being and Time ...

I. M. Fehér / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 99–131 107
itself, i.e., transcendental consciousness. 15 Th e world of lived experience knows
of no such duality as that between object <strong>and</strong> knowledge.
If we leap forward to Heidegger’s most detailed critique of Husserl’s phenomenology
as provided in the 1925 lecture course, we see that its central
theme is, once again, the delimitation of the specifi c research fi eld of phenomenology
itself, in other words, the self-concretization of phenomenological
philosophy out of its own initial principle or maxim. Th e basic issue is related
to whether <strong>and</strong> how phenomenology gets access to (comes to delimit) its own
research fi eld, whether the procedure thereby employed is phenomenologically
coherent or not. Over against the charges of dogmatism, as formulated
by Rickert, Heidegger comes to the conclusion, after detailed analyses, that it
is not intentionality as such that might legitimately be claimed to be dogmatic
but rather that to which intentionality gets tacitly linked, or bound, or tied,
that which is built under this structure—in other words, that of which it is
claimed to be the specifi c structure. In fact, intentionality is held to be the
specifi c structure of the psyche, reason, consciousness, etc. (rather than, say,
nature), all of which are ontological regions that are naively, i.e., traditionally
<strong>and</strong> therefore dogmatically, assumed rather than phenomenologically discussed
<strong>and</strong> delimited. Rather than an ultimate explanation of psychic reality,
Heidegger observes signifi cantly, intentionality is a way to overcome such traditional
ontological realities as psyche, consciousness, reason. 16
Th e question is whether access to that of which intentionality is declared to
be the structure is attained in a phenomenological way. Th e issue concerns the
delimitation of the “thing itself” in a phenomenological way, the question
of whether the linking of intentionality to pure consciousness, or to the transcendental
ego, is carried out phenomenologically <strong>and</strong> not simply by taking
over the leading idea of modern Cartesian-Kantian philosophy—a doubt that
proves to be well-founded. 17 Although Husserl claims to suspend, put into
brackets, “assertions concerning being” <strong>and</strong> thereby leaves the being of intentionality
obscure, he nevertheless tacitly links it to an ontological region called
transcendental consciousness. Moreover, he makes distinctions of Being like
the one between Being as consciousness <strong>and</strong> transcendent being—which he
15) See GA 20: 159, 178. For the same point in historical perspective going back to Descartes, see
GA 17, esp. 105.
16) GA 20: 62ff . “It is a question of underst<strong>and</strong>ing the subject on the basis of intentionality,
rather than underst<strong>and</strong>ing intentionality on the basis of preconceived ideas about the subject”
(Rudolf Bernet, “Husserl <strong>and</strong> Heidegger on Intentionality <strong>and</strong> Being,” Journal of the British Society
for Phenomenology 21 [May 1990]: 143).
17) See GA 20: 147.