Plato, Aristotle and Hegel

Right away he mentions that Being was a theme for Plato and Aristotle and from them on in the Western tradition it became a theme of special investigation within the tradition all the way down to Hegel’s Logic.

“And what they wrested with the utmost intellectual effort from the phenomena, fragmentary and incipient though it was, has long since been trivialized.”

It is becoming clear that Heidegger does not mention Aristotle and Hegel at the very beginning for no reason. He is the student of Husserl. He has the problem of producing something different from the phenomenology of his teacher Husserl. To do that he has two strategies as far as I can see. One is to go back to the Phenomenology of Hegel for inspiration (but we will notice that he is always critiquing Hegel and thus covering his trail when it comes to the borrowings from Hegel. But also recent commentaries point out that his going back and reading Aristotle phenomenologically is the biggest impetus for the structure of B&T and its difference from both Husserl and Hegel’s phenomenologies. So this is one of the themes we want to follow through B&T. How does Hegel and Aristotle come into the work. Interestingly he interprets Plato via Aristotle because he claims that he cannot understand Plato directly. So this is really an Aristotelian work, which means an Analytical work, which makes us wonder why it is so incompressible to Analytically inclined philosophers. and the answer that immediately comes to mind is that it is too sophisticated for them even though it is analysis, it is the existential analysis of Dasein. Dasein is Heidegger’s name for the Transcendental Subject of apperception in Kant. Heidegger here at the beginning is a very strict Kantian. And we can say that he is going back to Kant via Aristotle, though a confrontation with Hegel. But the whole reason for this is to stand back from Husserl’s phenomenology and to try to get some perspective on it from other points of view friendly to phenomenology in the tradition. So in a sense Heidegger is widening the meaning of Phenomenology at the same time as rooting his work in the later Husserl’s discoveries like the horizon of the World which supersedes bracketing. It has only come out recently in the work of Welton that Husserl had this idea first in his later genetic phenomenology.

The New Husserl: A Critical Reader (Studies in Continental Thought): Donn Welton: 9780253216014: Amazon.com: Books
The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology (Studies in Continental Thought): Donn Welton: 9780253215581: Amazon.com: Books
Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy): Anthony J. Steinbock: 9780810113206: Amazon.com: Books