The Fate of Phenomenology
Heidegger's Legacy
By (author) William McNeill Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University
Publication date:
22 July 2020Length of book:
168 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
227x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781786608901
It can be easily argued that the radical nature and challenge of Heidegger’s thinking is grounded in his early embrace of the phenomenological method as providing an access to concrete lived experience (or “factical life,” as he called it) beyond the imposition of theoretical constructs such as “subject” and “object,” “mind” and “body.” Yet shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking work Being and Time, Heidegger appeared to abandon phenomenology as the method of philosophy. Why? Heidegger was conspicuously quiet on this issue. Here, William McNeill examines the question of the fate of phenomenology in Heidegger’s thinking and its transformation into a “thinking of Being” that regards its task as that of “letting be.” The relation between phenomenology and “letting be,” McNeill argues, is by no means a straightforward one. It poses the question of whether, and to what extent, Heidegger’s thought of his middle and late periods still needs phenomenology in order to accomplish its task—and if so, what kind of phenomenology. What becomes of phenomenology in the course of Heidegger’s thinking?
The storm around Heidegger's legacy rages on unabated. At stake is the fate of philosophy and its power to influence the fate of a world seized by the enigmatic essence of technology. In this remarkable intervention, McNeill (DePaul Univ.) chronicles Heidegger's role in bringing philosophy to an end by twisting phenomenology (philosophy's last word) free from Husserl's effort to establish a rigorous philosophical science. Heidegger radicalized phenomenology's critique of science and technology by stepping back into a more elemental engagement with Dasein's "being-in-the-world." Phenomenology persisted as Heidegger's watchword for the dismantling of metaphysics' delusory notions of originary ground and signaled the need to affirm and await a still unthinkable origin. McNeill tracks Heidegger's alternating proximity to and distance from the word phenomenology as a way of questioning whether Dasein's quasi-transcendental experience of a world was anything but error and affirming the need "to let Being be," to step back into a pre-phenomenological poetic thinking. To survive in a nocturnal clearing, confronted by phenomenality's concealed essence, demands phenomenophasis, Heidegger's last word for preserving the remnants of Dasein's world through words that name the unnamable that lies beyond and before ontological difference. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.