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impersonal, average everydayness of anonymous mass man, the “they” (das Man), so asto set itself on the path of authentic selfhood. For Heidegger, the “authentic” self was akind of heroic, radically individualiz<strong>ed</strong>, and guilt-ridden “solus ipse” capable of achievinggenuine selfhood only in a kind of voluntaristic, self-assertive, quasi-Promethean mannerand for whom “the Dasein-with of Others” had nothing to offer. (Cf. BT, sec. 40) Thisparticular view of selfhood or subjectivity (which was to be<strong>com</strong>e greatly accentuat<strong>ed</strong> inthe 1930s) was, in the eyes of many subsequent phenomenologists, extremely one-sid<strong>ed</strong>(and thus phenomenologically unsound 53 ), and it was inde<strong>ed</strong> one which would later <strong>com</strong>eback to haunt Heidegger in such a way as to lead him, in a kind of <strong>com</strong>pensatory overreaction,to turn away (in his famous “turning” or Kehre) from the human subject (Dasein)to concentrate more directly on Being itself, “Being-as-such (des Seins als solchen),”abandoning in the process the very notion of subjectivity (which he came to equate withthe unbridl<strong>ed</strong>, modernistic Will to Power extoll<strong>ed</strong> by Nietzsche). Later phenomenologistswould not follow Heidegger down this path but would, instead, attempt to conceptualize“authentic selfhood” in a less “subjectivistic” manner and would seek to view the phenomenonof intersubjectivity (our Miteinandersein, our being-in-the-world-with-others) in amuch more positive light -- discarding in the process not only Husserl’s “transcendentalsolipsism” but also Heidegger’s “existential ‘solipsism.’”For all that, Being and Time was the crowning work of Heidegger’s Existenzphilosophieand a foundational work for interpretive phenomenology. In this book,Heidegger sought to pursue further, with the “necessary tools” provid<strong>ed</strong> by Husserl (cf.BT, sec. 10, 75n.x), but in a more radical way, one might say, the over<strong>com</strong>ing of metaphysicsand modern epistemologism that Husserl had inaugurat<strong>ed</strong> (the book, one shouldnot forget, was d<strong>ed</strong>icat<strong>ed</strong> to Husserl “in friendship and admiration”). 54 However, in goingbeyond the framework of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness and in abandoning alltalk of a transcendental Ego, Heidegger was not, contrary to what many have said andwhat, inde<strong>ed</strong>, Husserl himself seems to have thought, turning away from transcendentalphilosophy and lapsing into a crude form of empiricism, into “anthropologism” and“irrationalism.” 55 As John D. Caputo rightly observ<strong>ed</strong>:If Being and Time practices a hermeneutic phenomenology, this is because Heideggerhas act<strong>ed</strong> upon certain suggestions of Husserl, exploit<strong>ed</strong> certain resources in Husserl’sown method, mov<strong>ed</strong> phenomenology in a direction which Husserl himself made possible.If the phenomenology of Heidegger is explicitly hermeneutic, Husserl’s phenomenologyis already in an important sense a “proto-hermeneutics.” 5653Some phenomenologists would argue that (appreciative) wonder is as basic (“equiprimordial”) areaction to the “thrownness” of our existence as is Heidegger’s (dreadful) guilt. In any event, Heidegger’s“resolve,” focus<strong>ed</strong> exclusively as it is on Non-Being (Nichts), has no praxial relevance to the question ofhow we should act in the world of everyday existence (which Heidegger equat<strong>ed</strong> with inauthentic being).(Interesting in this connection is the story told by Karl Löwith of one of Heidegger’s students who, uponemerging from a lecture of his, exclaim<strong>ed</strong>: “I am resolv<strong>ed</strong>! Only I am not sure on what” [see Spiegelberg,The Phenomenological Movement, 1:309n].)54That Husserl was unable to appreciate the genuinely phenomenological significance of Heidegger’swork is another matter: see, in this regard, Husserl’s 1931 Frankfurt lecture “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie”and Husserl to Alexander Pfänder (Jan. 6, 1935).55According to Lévinas, what Heidegger essentially did was to draw out the deeper, concrete, orexistential “consequences” of Husserl’s intellectualistic “theory of knowl<strong>ed</strong>ge”; in so doing, Heideggercontinu<strong>ed</strong> along the way trac<strong>ed</strong> out by his teacher (maître). (See Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 187, 218.56Caputo, “Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a ‘Hermeneutic’ Phenomenology,” 158.However, as Caputo also points out in this article, Husserl betray<strong>ed</strong> his own phenomenologicalhermeneuticinsights by subordinating them in the end to the Cartesian ideal of an absolute science.17

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