From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Heidegger”:
Viewed in relation to Being and Time, the central philosophical theme in these early years is Heidegger's complex critical relationship with Husserl's transcendental phenomenology… we find Heidegger arguing that Husserl's view, that philosophy should renounce theory and concentrate on the things given directly in consciousness, is flawed because such givenness is itself a theoretical construct.
Heidegger thinks that the direct perceptions of consciousness are not given (or self-evident), and they cannot be studied without a theoretical framework, because the way Husserl studied them had more assumptions (about categories and so on) than Husserl realized?
For the young Heidegger, then, it is already the case that phenomenological analysis starts not with Husserlian intentionality (the consciousness of objects), but rather with an interpretation of the pre-theoretical conditions for there to be such intentionality.
Why is “consciousness of objects” termed “intentionality”, which commonly has the meaning “to have a plan, goal or expectation”?
This idea will later be central to, and elaborated within, Being and Time, by which point a number of important developments (explained in more detail later in this article) will have occurred in Heidegger's thinking: the Husserlian notion of formal ontology (the study of the a priori categories that describe objects of any sort, by means of our judgments and perceptions) will have been transformed into fundamental ontology (a neo-Aristotelian search for what it is that unites and makes possible our varied and diverse senses of what it is to be);
So Husserl identifies the “components” of consciousness by observing - for example, that any given object has a color, a shape, a size, a texture, an identity, and so on, and therefore these must be aspects of the system of consciousness. Whereas Heidegger wishes to ask if there is any single thing uniting all things which are said to “be”?
Husserl's transcendental consciousness (the irreducible thinking ego or subject that makes possible objective inquiry) will have been transfigured into Dasein (the inherently social being who already operates with a pre-theoretical grasp of the a priori structures that make possible particular modes of Being);
Heidegger’s concept of a “self” or conscious being is someone who exists via a pre-endowed set of capacities for identifying things that exist, i.e., a cognitive system that can recognise objects? Unlike Husserl, Heidegger wants not to identify what the structure of conscious experience is but how the system of consciousness works to enable such a structure of experience?
and Husserlian intentionality (a consciousness of objects) will have been replaced by the concept of care or Being-in-the-world (a non-intentional, or perhaps pre-intentional, openness to a world).
Heidegger thinks that on the lowest level of consciousness there is no recognition of objects but there is still a kind of inherent sense of primitive existence, i.e. the consciousness of a microorganism for example?
On Heidegger's interpretation (see Sheehan 1975), Aristotle holds that since every meaningful appearance of beings involves an event in which a human being takes a being as—as, say, a ship in which one can sail or as a god that one should respect—
I don’t fully understand this. Aristotle means that every perceived and identified object is interpreted in some way, to have any kind of identity or characteristics, for example?
what unites all the different modes of Being is that they realize some form of presence (present-ness) to human beings.
Aristotle thinks that in spite of the wide variety of forms, of things that exist, what they have in common is the fact that they exist? Or does he mean they are perceivable by humans?
This presence-to is expressed in the ‘as’ of ‘taking-as’. Thus the unity of the different modes of Being is grounded in a capacity for taking-as (making-present-to) that Aristotle argues is the essence of human existence.
Same question, I don’t understand if Aristotle is trivially saying that what all Beings have in common fundamentally is that they at minimum exist, or if he means they have a special property relative to human consciousness, that they have to be perceivable or something.
For Heidegger, taking-as is grounded not in multiple modes of presence, but rather in a more fundamental temporal unity (remember, it's Being and time, more on this later) that characterizes Being-in-the-world (care).
So Heidegger rejects Aristotle’s situating of “presence” as the essential feature of “something existing” and instead prefers “temporal unity”?
Thank you
