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QUESTION, REFLECTION, AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD
neither with the apodictic description of the given, nor with the “altogether valuable” investigations into the “different levels of theoretical founding” pursued by philosophers from Lotze to Natorp and Husserl. Its task is to negotiate this “passage over the boundary from environing world experiencing to the primary objectification” contained already in the idea of givenness (GA 56/57:91).
But even if phenomenological method proposes to concentrate on pretheoretical world experience (significance), does it not presuppose the real (theoretically determined) world just the same? Will that not undermine its claim to be primordial science (GA 56/57:93)? Against this objection Heidegger offers a version of Husserl’s claim that phenomenology is presuppositionless, arguing that the notion of presupposition (Voraus-setzung), like the notion of givenness, makes sense only in the context of the theoretical attitude. A presupposition is something supposed in advance, posited in advance. While positing requires an attitude that explicitly objectifies, description of environing world experience reveals no such attitude; instead, “according to its essence,” it is not a function of “positing” or “supposing” at all (GA 56/57:94). Thus phenomenology, which is nothing but a recovery of this experience, can strictly speaking be said neither to presuppose anything nor to operate without presuppositions. Here Heidegger finds a way to acknowledge the circle in the idea of philosophy while sublating it by undermining the reasons one has for thinking it a difficulty. If philosophical beginnings are presuppositions, something posited as known, a primordial science that proposes to ground the possibility of knowledge cannot even begin without begging the question. If the beginning need not be construed as a presupposition, however—if it is such only for the theoretical attitude—then “the circularity is a theoretical and theoretically created difficulty” (GA 56/57:95). Philosophy need not remove, but only move within, the circle of its material beginnings.
But with the suspension of one difficulty, another emerges. Heidegger’s argument holds only if philosophy is something other than theory. Will it then still be a primordial science? What makes up its scientific character? Heidegger’s answer follows Husserl in seeing philosophical science as reflective clarification rather than theoretical explanation. In the Logical Investigations Husserl argued that
theory of knowledge, properly described, is no theory. It is not a science in the pointed sense of an explanatorily unified theoretical whole. . . . The theory of knowledge has nothing to explain in this theoretical sense, it neither constructs theories nor falls under any. Its aim is not to explain