Sorted by date | |||
page098from Building Ideas
“lived” experience and away from Husserl’s
abstract “essences”. The reason for this shift came from Heidegger’s overall
intention, to study the nature of being, not merely the nature of knowing. This
distinction caused the argument between Heidegger and Cassirer on the status of
art discussed in Chapter 2 and Heidegger felt Husserl had restricted his
thinking, by considering epistemology at the expense of ontology. It was this
larger preoccupation with the “meaning of being” that was to drive Heidegger’s
philosophy throughout his long and prolific career.
His
approach to this question has also proved influential in architecture, as he
set out to study the philosophical implications of the concrete experience of
everyday reality. He followed Husserl’s instruction to go “back to the things
themselves”, but this time as part of a larger historical context. Here emerges
Heidegger’s attempt at deconstruction, as we saw in Chapter 2, in terms of his “overcoming”
of Western philosophy. He blamed that tradition for suppressing these difficult
questions, partly by its insistence on the separation of the mind and the body –
expressed in philosophical terms as the split between the subject and the
object. This same split occurs in the debate between rationalism and empiricism
– or between the reliability of data from the senses versus the “pure” concepts
of the reasoning mind. This is the argument that phenomenology initially set
out to transcend, by its concentration on the link between the two realms of
the body and the mind. This overlap that occurs in the acts of perception and
cognition was the underlying theme of Heidegger’s study of the meaning of being
– seen in terms of the German word Dasein, or “being-there”. The first hints of
phenomenology as a “philosophy of bodily experience” are contained in the first
part of Heidegger’s major book, Being and Time (1927). This book, which has
since become a founding document for phenomenology, was published at the same
time as he was editing another book with Husserl. The influence of his master’s
teaching is clear from his overall intentions, but his detailed concerns are
directed more towards the description of everyday experience. The focus on “being-there”
as the concrete counterpart to “being-as-such” was Heidegger’s means of
overcoming the abstractions of
|
|||
|
|||
|