At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand, Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others before Being-alone. We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it — we are ‘thrown’ here. And ‘thrownness’ must be our starting point.
    Or, as his biographer Rüdiger Safranski has put it, Heidegger ‘states the obvious in a way that even philosophers can grasp’.
    EdmundHusserl did not fail to notice that, despite the words of dedication and praise, Being and Time was partly directed against him. He read it several times to be sure. After his first perusal he took it to Italy’s Lake Como on holiday in the summer of 1929 and worked through it in detail, making incredulous notes in the margins: ‘But that is absurd’. He made frequent use of ‘?’, ‘!’ and even ‘?!’ But when he complained, Heidegger seemed to think his interpretation of the book as an attack on him was ‘Nonsense!’
    In private, Heidegger was becoming ever more dismissive about Husserlian philosophy. Even while Husserl was writing glowing letters of recommendation to help him get a job, Heidegger was telling other people that he considered his mentor‘ludicrous’. To Karl Jaspers, whom he had now befriended, Heidegger wrote in 1923, ‘He lives with the mission of being the founder of phenomenology . No one knows what that is.’ (Since Jaspers had long ago admitted that he did not know what phenomenology was, he could hardly help with that.) Their differences were clear by 1927. When Husserl and Heidegger tried to collaborate on an article on phenomenology for the Encyclopaedia Britannica early that year, they had to give up. For one thing, each felt that the other had problems expressing himself clearly. They were not wrong there. A more serious problem was that they now disagreed on almost every point in the definition of phenomenology.
    Husserl took Heidegger’s rebellion to heart. He had imagined it so differently! They had talked of how Heidegger might take overHusserl’s Nachlass — his legacy of unpublished manuscripts — and carry his philosophy into the future. Having helped him to get the Marburg job, Husserl also helped him to take up his own job in Freiburg when he retired — hoping, as he admitted later, that this would bring Heidegger back into the fold. Instead, with Heidegger installed, Freiburg became the City of Two Phenomenologies. Husserl’s version looked less and less exciting, while Heidegger’s was becoming a cult.

    (Illustrations Credit 3.5)
    Heidegger gave a long speech at Husserl’s seventieth birthday celebrations on 8 April 1929, with slightly insulting subtexts in the guise of a tribute, stressing how Husserl’s philosophy ought to lend itself to rethinking and changes of direction. In his speech of thanks, Husserl said that it was true that he had set out to accomplish a task, but that most of it was not completed. Another subtext there: he was on the right path, despite what Heidegger thought, and everyone should join him to get the job done.
    Heidegger’s behaviour was ignoble, but Husserl was expecting too much. His desire to mould Heidegger into a mini-Husserl for the next generation must have been suffocating. There was no reason to think that Heidegger should follow him without question; that is never how philosophy develops. In fact, the more revolutionary a philosophy is, the more it is likely to be revolted against, precisely because it sets dramatic challenges.
    But Husserl did not see himself as some sort of old guard, from whom the new generation must naturally diverge and grow. On the contrary, he thought that he was becoming ever more radical while the youngsters were not keeping up. He saw himself as ‘an appointed leader without followers, that is, without