Translated by Pete Ferreira
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To focus his attention on the problem of truth, Heidegger reaches for a fusion of Husserl and Aristotle, blending phenomenology and ontology, a combo whose traces are evident in the first of the Marburg courses available today, namely, that of the summer semester 1925, published as Prolegomena to a history of the concept of time9.
Heidegger's attention is here mainly concentrated on the critical confrontation with Husserl. Nevertheless, with a frequency that could not be casual, we find obvious signs of the previous Freiburg interpretation of Aristotle, accompanied often by the mission statement of the need to broaden the confrontation to all key areas of philosophical questioning and connect systematically the results of this broader engagement with the problems arising from the critical appropriation of phenomenology.
The introductory part of the course, which is dedicated to illustrating the sense and the tasks of phenomenology, makes some very significant steps in this regard. At first, in the context of a general explanation of the meaning and importance Husserl's discovery of categorial intuition, Heidegger touches on the problem of truth, and specifically on the question of the distinction and characterization of the ontological understanding of truth as opposed to the purely epistemological understanding. Now, in dealing with this problem, Heidegger notes that "phenomenology (...) breaks with the restriction of the concept of truth to relational acts (beziehende Akte), to conclusions", and too "Without being explicitly conscious of it, phenomenology returns to the broad concept of truth whereby the Greeks (Aristotle) could call true even perception as such and the simple perception of something."10.
This break and this return are for Heidegger the necessary consequence of the Husserlian thesis, according to which not only predicative acts (in Aristotelian language acts of synthesis and diahairesis), but also 'simple' acts, i.e. uni-directional or self-referencing (einstrahlig), such as the perception of a color, can be 'identified' (Ausweisung) and, therefore, can have the character of truth. In Heidegger's eyes this implies an ontological enlargement of the concept of truth opposed to the traditional epistemological understanding, according to which the truth would instead be only in the synthesis and separation of representations, as had been argued especially by Rickertian neo-Kantianism. Heidegger, then, wants to emphasize for Husserl's benefit the fact that he restores the idea of a pre-categorical, ante-predicative truth; and this is the idea of truth that Heidegger sees affirmed for the first time in Greek thought and, in particular, in Aristotle.
9 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1925 hg. von P. Jaeger, Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M. 1977 (= GA 20). On the matter of the course in general see W. Biemel, Heideggers Stellung zur Phänomenologie in der Marburger Zeit, in E.W. Orth (Hg.), Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger in der Sicht neuer Quellen (Phänomenologische Forschungen, 6/7), Alber, Freiburg-München 1978, pp. 141-223. On the Heideggerian terminology in this course see Th. Kisiel, Der Zeitbegriff beim früheren Heidegger, in E.W. Orth (Hg.), Zeit und Zeitlichkeit bei Husserl und Heidegger (Phänomenologische Forschungen, 14), Alber, Freiburg-München 1983, pp. 192-211.
10 GA 20, 85, 87. [The quote is from History of the Concept of Time, 55 (GA 20, p. 73)] On Heidegger's relationship with Husserl allow me to indicate my study "La trasformazione della fenomenologia da Husserl a Heidegger", in Theoria, 4, 1984, nr. 1, pp.125-165.