ABSTRACT
Whereas Husserl’s intellectual origins lie in the domain of mathematics, Heidegger took up his philosophical enquiries after a prolonged engagement with theology. This theological background is evident in Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures, given as a Privatdozent from 1919 to 1923. Although Heidegger had gained an intimate familiarity with Husserl’s published work some years before, the latter’s move to Freiburg in 1916 naturally precipitated an intensified engagement with Husserl’s phenomenological enquiries. Heidegger’s lectures from the early Freiburg period attempt, thematically speaking, to integrate a basic concept of the historical into the phenomenological framework. However, it is clear that from the outset such integration is for Heidegger not simply a matter of filling a gap in Husserl’s account of experience. Rather, it involves a conversion from the base up of the Husserlian idea of phenomenology. Identifying some of the key features of this conversion forms a necessary preparation to following Heidegger’s thought through to his decisive encounter with Kant and the Kantian understanding of the imagination. An essential aspect of Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation of phenomenological research is an insistence on the explicit engagement with the philosophical tradition. The hermeneutical sense of phenomenology necessitates abandoning the idea of presuppositionless enquiry in favour of an effort to determine the suitability or otherwise of concepts taken over from philosophical history. As Heidegger puts it in 1920, it is a matter of recognizing ‘that it is naivety to believe one might today or some day begin over again in philosophy and be so radical that one dispenses with all so-called tradition’ (GA 59,1 p. 29).
