Heidegger’s failure to overcome transcendental philosophy

Abstract

Heidegger engaged in a number of attempts to reformulate transcendental philosophy, such as in terms of fundamental ontology and world-disclosure in the second half of the 1920s, so as to break with it. An early attempt to disentangle himself from the transcendental tradition can be seen in his early post-war turn toward existence- and life-philosophy and hermeneutics, and also in his so-called “turning” (Kehre) in the mid-1930s. In this chapter I argue that, despite his anti-transcendental gestures and rhetoric, and Husserl’s view that he had betrayed transcendental philosophy for the sake of philosophical anthropology, Heidegger could not consistently abandon or overcome the problematic of transcendental philosophy through his displacement of the constitution of sense and meaning from the subject (Dasein) and its horizon of meaning to the event and openness of being (Sein), as advocates of his later thinking have claimed.