1001Philosophers

Edmund Husserl vs Martin Heidegger

Husserl and Heidegger are the founder and most consequential heir of phenomenology. Heidegger was Husserl's student, dedicated Being and Time to him, and was selected by Husserl as his successor at Freiburg — but the relation broke down on both philosophical and political grounds.

At a glance

Edmund HusserlMartin Heidegger
Dates1859 – 19381889 – 1976
NationalityGermanGerman
EraContemporaryContemporary
Movements Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy, Existentialism
Profile Edmund Husserl → Martin Heidegger →

Where they agree

Both held that the right starting point for philosophy is the careful description of experience as it is lived rather than as construed by scientific or metaphysical theory, both rejected naturalist reductions of consciousness, and both took the analysis of intentionality as central. Both worked in painstaking conceptual detail and produced bodies of work that demand intensive close reading.

Where they disagree

Husserl held that phenomenology is a rigorous science of consciousness, with the transcendental ego as the source of meaning-constitution; the proper philosophical method is the phenomenological reduction, which brackets the natural attitude to disclose pure consciousness. Heidegger rejected the transcendental ego and the reduction: human existence is being-in-the-world, always already engaged with things and others, and consciousness is not the foundational philosophical category. Husserl's phenomenology aims at a science of essences; Heidegger's at the question of being.

Representative quotes

Edmund Husserl

  • “A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology , has developed within philosophy: This is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences. All philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure phenomenology, through whose development, and through it alone, they obtain their proper force.”

    Wikiquote

  • “To every object there corresponds an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.”

    Wikiquote

  • “... bloße Erfahrung ist keine Wissenschaft.”

    Experience by itself is not science.

Martin Heidegger

  • “Language is the house of Being.”

    Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.

  • “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”

    Letter on Humanism (1947)

  • “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”

    Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, dass wir noch nicht denken.

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