Professor Ronald Bruzina Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938 PDF

Yale Studies in Hermeneutics
Y A L E S T U D I E S
I N H E R M E N E U T I C S
Joel Weinsheimer, Editor
Editorial Advisory Board
Zygmunt Bauman
Robert Bernasconi
Gerald Bruns
Fred R. Dallmayr
Ronald Dworkin
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Clifford Geertz
Frank Kermode
Richard Rorty
Mark Taylor
RONALD BRUZINA
Edmund Husserl
& Eugen Fink
BEGINNINGS AND ENDS
I N P H E N O M E N O L O G Y,
Yale University Press

New Haven &
London
Published with assistance from the Ernst Cassirer Publication Fund.
Copyright 2004 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bruzina, Ronald.
Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink : beginnings and ends in phenomenology,
19281938 / Ronald Bruzina.
p. cm. (Yale studies in hermeneutics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-09209-1 (alk. paper)
1. Husserl, Edmund, 18591938. 2. Fink, Eugen. 3. PhenomenologyHistory
20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
B3279.H94B73 2004
193dc22
2004045523
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on
Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface xiii
Abbreviations xxi
Chapter 1. Contextual Narrative: The Freiburg Phenomenology Workshop,

19251938 1
1.1. Eugen Fink, Arrival in Freiburg 2
1.2. Fink as Assistant to Husserl, First Years: 19281930 10
1.3. Fink as Assistant to, Then Collaborator with, Husserl: 1930

1934 27
1.4. The Final Breakthrough: 19341937 54
1.5. The Ending, and Another Beginning 68
Chapter 2. Orientation I: Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary 73
2.1. The Phenomenological ReductionDone Only by Being Redone 75
2.2. Issues That Force the Move Beyond Preliminaries: 19271928 81
v
vi Contents
2.3. The Nature of Husserls System 83

2.4. The Question of Time and the Question of the Subject: Pushing
Noematization to the Limits 89
2.5. The Question of Time and the Question of Being 92
2.6. The Critique of Self-Conceptions 93
2.6.1. The Reduction Again: Husserls Own Critique of His Initiating
Presentation of Phenomenology 94
2.6.2. The Critique of Conceptual Schemata for Transcendental
Subjectivity: Reconsideration by Fink 96
2.6.2.1. Questioning the Basic Epistemological Schema
General Points 101
2.6.2.2. Critique for the Cartesian Meditations 105
2.6.2.3. Questioning the Epistemological SchemaPoints
for a Critique of Phenomenological
Idealism 109
2.6.2.4. Self-Conceptions and the Question of Being 112
2.6.2.5. The Un-Humanizing of Transcendental Subjectivity:
Further Demands 114
2.6.2.6. First Corollary of Un-Humanization: Critique of
the I 116
2.6.2.7. Second Corollary of Un-Humanization: Critique of
Psychological-Phenomenological Parallelism and
Coinciding 119
2.6.2.8. Third Corollary: Performance Consciousness as
Clue to the Transcendental 123
2.7. A Final Word: Continuing Phenomenology by Reradicalizing the
Issues 126
Chapter 3. Orientation II: Who Is Phenomenology? Husserl

Heidegger? 128
3.1. A Third Way Beyond Mutually Opposing Constitution and
Transcendence 132
3.2. Transcendence in Heideggers Fundamental Ontology 133
Contents vii
3.3. The Issues in Finks Critique of Fundamental Ontology 137

3.3.1. The Phenomenological Reduction and the Ontological
Difference; the A Priori Problem 138
3.3.2. The Basic Paradox Again, Now in Heideggers Analysis of
Temporality; the Move Beyond Being 145
3.3.3. The Ontological Unattainability of the Subject 152
3.4. Heideggers Positive Contributions 155
3.4.1. The I Am as Finite I Am in the World 160
3.4.2. Philosophical Explication as ConstructionEven in
Transcendental Phenomenology 161
3.5. The Term of A Priori Inquiry: Ground or Origin? 167
Chapter 4. Fundamental Thematics I: The World 174

4.1. Reconsidering Entry-Level Treatment; Spinning the Ariadne
Thread 178
4.2. The Pregivenness of the World within any Starting Point 181
4.3. Being Situated in the World: Captivation in the World 184
4.4. How the World Figures in Experience 188
4.4.1. Decentering the Object-Entititative Approach;
Horizonality 189
4.4.2. Horizonality and Awareness 193
4.4.3. Performance Consciousness and Its Delineation 197
4.4.4. Putting It All Together: Reading Kant and Reading the
World 201
4.5. Detailing the World as Horizonally Pregiven 206
4.6. Reections of Finks Critique Work in Husserls Crisis-
Writings 211
4.6.1. The Pregivenness of the World 212
4.6.2. De-Cartesianizing Phenomenology 213
4.6.3. From the Object-World for Cognition to the World-as-
Surround for Wakefulness 214
viii Contents
4.6.4. Identity and Difference between the Worldly and the

Transcendental 219
Chapter 5. Fundamental Thematics II: Time 224

5.1. Stage 1: Finks Study of Time and the Bernau Manuscripts 227
5.1.1. The Basic Time-Problematic 227
5.1.1.1. The Constitutions Carried On in Temporality
General Orientation 238
5.1.1.2. The Constitutions of Temporalitythe In-
Stances 243
5.1.1.3. Temporality and the Problem of Origin 248
5.1.1.4. Temporality and the Constitution of the
World 251
5.1.2. Stage 1: Finks First Revision Plan for the Bernau
Manuscripts 258
5.1.2.1. The First Revision Plan 260
5.1.2.2. Prime Elements in the Bernau Manuscripts for
Motivating the Move Beyond Them 265
5.1.2.3. Explorations into Time by Fink, 19301933 271
5.1.2.3.1. The Central Structure: The Horizontal
Complex of Presenting and De-
Presenting 275
5.1.2.3.2. Time and the Constitution of the World:
The Five Horizons of Time 278
5.1.2.3.3. Performance Consciousness as
Unthematic Horizon-Consciousness:
Wakefulness 280
5.2. Stage 2: Reconceiving the Revision ProjectThe Two-Part
Treatise 288
5.2.1. The 1934 Plan: Details 293
5.2.2. Husserls Time-Analysis in the C-Manuscripts 295
5.2.2.1. The Living Present as the Transcendental Proto-
I 295
Contents ix
5.2.2.2. Bringing the Living Present/Transcendental Proto-I

under Phenomenological Scrutiny 296
5.2.3. The Aporia of Time-Analysis: Reection Across the
Transcendental DivideFinks Proposals 302
5.2.3.1. Critical Points: Presentialism 303
5.2.3.2. The I as Wakefulness in the Horizonality of De-
Presencing 304
5.3. Stage 3: The Reversal and the Displacement 308
5.3.1. Reversal: The New Time-Book 309
5.3.2. Reversal Becomes Displacement: The Metaphysics of
Play 311
Chapter 6. Fundamental Thematics III: Life and Spirit, and Entry into the
Meontic 316
6.1. Life-Philosophy, and Life as an Idea in Phenomenology 319
6.2. Life-Philosophy and Phenomenology: Outline for an Essay 323
6.2.1. The Charges against Phenomenology, 1: Consciousness an
Abstract Concept 326
6.2.2. The Charges against Phenomenology, 2: Phenomenology Has
No Topos, No Where 327
6.2.3. The Charges against Phenomenology, 3: The Hubris of
Idealism 329
6.3. Explicating Phenomenology in the Context of Criticism 330
6.3.1. The Reduction as Precondition for Thematizing Life 331
6.3.2. Phenomenology as the Metaphysics of Life as Spirit 334
6.3.3. Life in Life-Philosophy, Life in Phenomenology 338
6.3.4. Life as Pathic: Nietzsche in Phenomenology 341
6.3.5. Philosophic/Phenomenological Reection as an Act of
Life 348
6.3.6. The Aporetic of Phenomenological Reection as an Act within
Life 355
6.4. The Double Truth of Ultimate Constitutive Explication as
Meontic 360
x Contents
6.5. Life, World, and Life-World: Husserl, Fink, and the Crisis-
Texts 368
Chapter 7. Critical-Systematic Core: The Meonticin Methodology and in

the Recasting of Metaphysics 375
7.1. General Points 376
7.1.1. The Logic of Origin, 1: Meontically Dialectical
Seinssinn 381
7.1.2. The Logic of Origin, 2: The Living Question 387
7.2. The Methodological Demands of Meontic Dialectic 388
7.2.1. Methodological Features 1: Formal Indication 388
7.2.1.1. Heidegger 394
7.2.2. Methodological Features 2: Speculation 397
7.2.2.1. Speculation: Hegel and Heidegger 403
7.2.3. Methodological Features 3: Construction 408
7.2.4. Methodological Features 4: Regressive and Progressive
Phenomenology; the Analytic and the Speculative 415
7.2.4.1. Supplementary Note: Internal and External
Treatment 417
7.3. Primary Issues Interpretively Recast in Meontic Integration:
Phenomenological Metaphysics 418
7.3.1. Phenomenological Metaphysics Is More Than Ontology 427
7.3.2. The Singularity of the World 428
7.3.3. Metaphysical Themes in the Crisis-Project 430
7.3.3.1. History 431
7.3.3.2. Human and Transcendental Subjectivity 434
7.3.3.3. The Pregiven WorldFinished and Done, or in an
Ever-Continuing Constitution? 441
7.3.3.4. God 444
7.3.3.5. Addendum: Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and the
Meontic 447
7.3.4. Transition: Transcendental Articulation 451
Contents xi
Chapter 8. Corollary Thematics I: Language 452

8.1. The Antecedency Status of Language 453
8.2. The Explication of Language as a Phenomenologically Speculative
Task: Internal and External Treatment 456
8.2.1. Language and the Ontological Experience 463
8.3. Ideality 468
8.4. Language as Transcendentally Ambivalent, That Is, Meontically
Paradoxical 476
Chapter 9. Corollary Thematics II: Solitude and Community

Intersubjectivity 482
9.1. Lessons in Meditation V for Beginning Again 485
9.1.1. Meditation V, a First-Stage Analytic 486
9.1.2. Limitations to Egological Meditation 489
9.1.3. Protomodal Limitations in Empathy 491
9.1.4. Modications of Protomodality 492
9.1.5. Complementary Indications on Openings beyond the
Protomodal 495
9.2. Complements from the Broader Critique Context 496
9.2.1. The General Horizontal Grounding for the Empathetic
Manifestness of Intersubjectivity 497
9.2.2. Two Prime Features in the Grounding of
Intersubjectivity 499
9.2.2.1. In-Stanciality, the Meontic Reading 502
9.2.2.2. The Performance-Awareness of Being With an
Experiencing Other in the In-Stance of Plural
Humanity 505
9.2.2.3. The Materiality of Performance-
Consciousness 508
9.3. Phenomenological Monadology 511
9.3.1. Transcendental Reective Thematization and Monadic
Egoity 512
xii Contents
9.3.2. The Transcendental Sense of Intersubjective Monadic

Plurality 514
9.3.3. History and the Transcendental Community 517
9.4. The Transcendental Sense of Human Solitude 518
Chapter 10. Beginning Again after the End of the Freiburg Phenomenology
Workshop, 19381946 521
10.1. Return to the University in Germany 526
10.2. Continuation: Renewing the Phenomenological Tradition of Edmund
Husserl 528
10.3. Critique and Continuation, with a Shift in Dimensional
Emphasis 533
Appendix: Longer Notations 545

Index 585
Preface
The ideas of philosophy may in some sense of the word lie on a level of
abstraction, but no philosophy actually comes about and develops in the ab-
stract; it is always a realization and an event in the life of someone doing
philosophy. This essential fact is what this book embodies, what lies at its very
origin, and what makes for the fundamental importance of the thinking that it
attempts to present.
To begin to see what this means, think about some simple cardboard boxes
full of folders of notes and odd sets of typed pages. Something like this made
up the concrete remains of the major part of Edmund Husserls lifes work
when he died in 1938: his manuscriptsthousands and thousands of pages by
a then almost outmoded philosopher whose Jewish origin made him ofcially
no better than refuse in Nazi Germany. That these manuscripts were rescued
and smuggled to Louvain in 1939 came about because of a chance visit by a
Belgian Franciscan come to Freiburg seeking materials for a doctoral disserta-
tion. As a result, for half a century now these materials have been mined for
the understanding of phenomenology, and continue to be so even now, all in
the interest of bringing the promise of fundamental insight from this remark-
able achievement to fuller realization, in an effort that has been pursued by
1. Chapter 10 tells briey of this, and refers to sources for more.
xiii
xiv Preface
hundreds of researchers and thinkers from all over the world. And yet, upon
how small a chance, one that might never have come, has it all depended!
Take now another set of simple cardboard boxes stored in a cellar that,
while not threatened with destruction as Husserls manuscripts had been in
1939, nonetheless had to go through invasion and the twentieth-centurys
Second World War, and survived, not by the efforts of a dedicated stranger but
by being kept by their own author as the concrete record of work that had
been vividly carried on in a time before that war and now irremediably past. In
these boxes were kept the notes and drafts that Eugen Fink had written in
the years he had spent working with Husserlmaterials somehow preserved
through that terrible period from 1938 to 1945, that no one knew about, that
none but Fink had read, but that in fact were an integral part of the nal
achievement of Husserls transcendental phenomenology. When Fink died in
1975, these cardboard boxes held the greater part of what that integral contri-
bution by someone other than Husserl had been. And they needed in turn an
accident of their own.
Guy van Kerckhoven was the rst to have looked into some of these papers,
in 1982, when he came to Freiburg in the early stage of editing the mate-
rials for the two-volume edition, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, published in
1988. I happened to be the second, come to Freiburg in 1983 to nish the
translation of that same Sixth Cartesian Meditation. I had the good fortune,
however, to be able to study all of them, one at a time, over the several
semesters of work in Freiburg in 1984 and 1985, and again in 1988. Here
were once more accidents that opened up the possibility of further study and
understanding.
But the mere fact that further work was thus made possible is not the
essential thing about the story; so far it is anecdote, however much the event
had aftereffects. Deposits of papers and letters are found all the time, of inter-
est to few or to many, as the case may be; but what if it were not a question
simply of more facts, or, in philosophy now, of more ideasof additional
interpretations, new proposals, intriguing criticisms, and so on, done by one
person in regard to what another philosopher had written? What if the mate-
rials found thus by accident made all the difference in the world for ones being
able to understand an entire research program in its essentials, here the phe-
nomenology of Edmund Husserl, one of the contributions that set twentieth-
century philosophy on a whole spectrum of new paths? That this is what the
materials in this second set of cardboard boxes contained is a realization that
came only after a long attempt to understand the thinking they embodied
2. See VI.CM, in the table of abbreviations below.

Preface xv
when placed in their intimate linkage with Husserls work in the period in
which they were written, when taken as the concrete remainder of an intense
dialogue and cooperative thinking that had gone on for nearly ten years. And
given that these ten years were the period of the nal achievement of Husserls
phenomenology, to come to see that the materials of this dialogue and coop-
eration from that very period made the essentials of phenomenology look
quite different from what one usually learns of them could only be a startling
realization. The point of the present book, now, is to convey this realization,
in the full extent of its essential implications, via a close reading and inter-
lacing of the actual text materials rather than in some kind of representative
summary.
The heart of the realization in question is far from being simply the opinion
of one man over against that of another; it reaches instead to the heart of the
program of phenomenology as such. Concisely put, what makes it so compel-
ling is that here an understanding is offered in terms of the integrated system-
atic of phenomenological investigation and transcendental phenomenological
philosophy that shows how Husserls beginnings get profoundly redone as the
program proceeds under the power of its instituting principles. Here we can
see explicitly (a) the specic principles and elements of phenomenologys
unique systematicmore than anything else, the phenomenological reduc-
tionthat govern the dynamic of Husserls seemingly unending phenomeno-
logical analyses. These principles, however, are now recognized (b) in the
methodological demands of self-critique that stem from them, namely, that the
ndings of Husserls immense investigative laborsin particular such well-
known phenomenological features as intentionality, subjectivity, consti-
tution, language, intersubjectivityhave to be recast and transforma-
tively reinterpreted, in view of (c) the difference in stages and levels on which
those investigations were conducted. More important than anything else,
however, is the realization (d) that all that work in all those stages and levels
remains preliminary until the nal sense of the ndings of that work can be
determined out of the ultimate level of analytic effort, namely, the inquiry into
temporality and temporalization. And at this level the question of method-
ological self-critique becomes crucial. All this, too, is what governs the legit-
imacy of drawing upon philosophic thinking beyond Husserl (a virtue Husserl
himself practiced), in critique and transformative recasting, whether it be
Kant, or Heidegger, or Hegel, or, yes, Nietzsche.
3. On all this, see 2.3 and the sections from 2.6 on; 3.3.3, 3.4.2, and 3.5; 4.1; 5.1.2;
and 6.4.
4. Thus one of the aims of chapter 5, carried on through chapter 6, and into chapter 7.
xvi Preface
In his later years Husserl was painfully conscious of needing a comprehen-

sive systematic way to integrate his enormous labors. By the chance that led to
his taking on Fink as an assistant, he soon found that he had someone with
him who could do just that. What he may not have realized is that this integra-
tive aim, worked out by Fink for him, would accomplish something Husserl
had once thought had already been happening, namely, advancing transcen-
dental phenomenology by means of the remarkable abilities of Martin Hei-
degger. Husserl came to see that Heidegger was not what he thought he was,
and he saw Heideggers thought as having no place in his, Husserls, program.
Finks work, now, showed that the integrative comprehensive reconsideration
that phenomenology needed would require the serious critique on phenome-
nological principles of Husserls own habitual way of presenting phenome-
nologyespecially as exemplied in his classic publication, Ideas Ino less
than of Heideggers brilliant lecturing and writing, in particular Being and
Time. This would also allow insights aplenty that could be legitimately drawn
from Heidegger, once they were critically recastnot to speak of the massive
substance of Husserls own work, which critical reconsideration, on transcen-
dental critique principles, would refashion and revalidate.
That so little of this huge undertaking, and virtually none of the critique and
reinterpretive labor it involved, came into public light is one of the conse-
quences of another conjunction of chance: Heideggers brilliance in thought
and presentation, the coming to power of National Socialism, and the depre-
dations of war throughout Europe, all of which led to the near total occulta-
tion of transcendental phenomenology in the public scene. How elements of
the achievement of the Husserl-Fink collaboration ltered through those
tragic events is indicated in some measure in the nal chapter, but the fuller
account of it remains to be given. What is presented in this book is the system-
atic composite itself from which those retained, subterranean elements would
derive their power, as the vagaries of history from 1938 through to the post-
war years allowed a partial return of some of these nal-period, dynamic
phenomenological elements that had been so vigorous before the monstrous
disaster of fascism and war.
One thing that should now be clear is this. Husserl indeed founded phenom-
enology, but phenomenology is a program that cannot be simply identied
with Husserl and his writings, massively important as they are. Phenomenol-
ogy is a program that in the culmination of its originative period, as the
present study attempts to demonstrate, was a joint enterprise. It is in this that
it displays its genuine character as the dynamic of principles that can only
5. See chapter 3.
Preface xvii
counter the contingency of human action if this dynamic is what is recognized

as governing the work of the individuals that dedicate themselves to itin the
present instance, Husserl himself and Fink, and in the aftermath, if we could
follow the story further, the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. This
book cannot take the study quite that far, but it proposes the fundamentals for
doing so.
A few words, now, have to be said about how the book proceeds. First of all,
the table of contents speaks for itself. Major themes in phenomenologyfor
example, world, time, lifeclearly mark the progression. The chapters that
follow these themes, however, do not represent a unidirectional line of se-
quential points. In inquiring into the phenomenological sense of die Sachen
selbst, no topic and no nding can stand alone. Every Sache is a knot of the
cross-weaving of many Sachen, and the tug along any thread of connection
will lead to endlessly many more. Every insight, proposal, or nding drawn
here from some one text can be found within many contexts, as the research
manuscripts of either Husserl or Fink show. Thus one distinctive character to
Finks notes has to be noticed: the repetitiveness in which the same points are
taken up over and over again. This is not just a matter of repeatedly thinking
over these ideas; it is just as much the taking up of them in many contexts,
where they become tested, nuanced, and amplied. And this reects one of his
main tasks, namely, the effort at critical integration. The richness of this man-
ifold interconnection can be only partly represented in the present treatment,
but it is abundantly manifest in the edition of the complete notes and drafts
currently being published.
One theme in particular, for example, the meontic, appears throughout,
rst being little more than mentioned, then building up through chapter 6 to
culmination in chapter 7. Here is the issue that brings nal, but paradoxically
nondenitive, interpretive recasting and determination to the sense that the
results of phenomenological inquiry on all previous levels and in all previous
stages must come to possess, including especially the outcome of the analysis
of temporality and temporalization. The idea of the meontic is the most elusive
and most difcult philosophical component of all, and the issue that Fink tries
most judiciously to present to Husserl in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation
which, one must carefully note, aims to present the basic elements of a tran-
scendental theory of method, as its subtitle unmistakably indicates. Only
when the impact of a truly transcendental methodological self-critique is
6. See EFM in the table of abbreviations, section 2.

7. E.g., at the end of 2.5 and in the last paragraphs of 2.6.2.2; again at the end of
5.1.1.4.
xviii Preface
grasped can the basic sense of the effort to analyze ultimate temporalization
(Urzeitigung), the living present (lebendige Gegenwart), be laid out, and
with it the determination of the genuine sense of every other thematic phe-
nomenological nding. If nothing else, the present book is meant to provide
guidance in reaching this stagenot the full achievement of this stage that
would make unnecessary ones own effort to work through the steps required
to get there, but rather the concrete display of the kinds of critical and radi-
cally reinterpretive movement that are needed to get beyond merely nave and
preliminary insights to the fuller realization of that grasp of profound realiza-
tion toward which the phenomenology that Husserl launched opened up the
way. It is in relation to this purpose, too, that the Sixth Cartesian Medi-
tation retains an unquestionable relevance to every chapter of the present
study, even if no focal treatment is given specically to it as such here. For
full treatment, both historically and in thematic exposition, Guy van Kerck-
hovens recently published Mundanisierung und Individuation bei E. Husserl
und E. Fink: Die VI. Cartesianische Meditation und ihr ,,Einsatz (Wrzburg:
Knigshausen und Neumann, 2003) is indispensable. Many elements of the
present study grew up on the groundwork of the rich assemblage of material
that twenty years ago Guy generously made available to me, and his book
shows how much that kind of material pertains to and helps to illuminate
every aspect of the lives and the thinking being presented here.
Two brief remarks will conclude this preface. One is that the treatment that
follows does not by any means cover all topics, and some quite important ones
are but briey, if at all, touched upon. There is no consideration of imagina-
tion, for example, or of neutrality-modication, despite their being the
topics of Finks rst phenomenological work, his dissertation, while both cor-
poreality and history are only sketched out in certain essential considerations
(9.2.2 through 9.2.2.3 and 7.3.3.1, respectively). Furthermore, though politi-
cal and social events played a devastating role in the work of phenomenology
in the period in questionnot to mention on the whole of Europe in all
aspectsthe political is not touched upon here, despite the increasingly more
frequent notes on society and the political that Fink made as Nazism consoli-
dated its power. The question of the political is an issue of a far-reaching
character that has to await being taken up.
Second, an expression of thanks needs to be made. The personnel of the
Husserl Archives in Louvain, beginning with the directors of the archives
there, Dr. Samuel Ijsseling earlier and now Dr. Rudolf Bernet, have been exem-
8. See, e.g., Hermitry: Aphorisms from a War Journal, in EFM 4.

Preface xix
plary in their patience and helpfulness during my many short visits, always an
addition to the manifold tasks they have to accomplish. To Dr. Dieter Lohmar
of the Husserl Archives branch in Cologne I owe special gratitude for his
extensive help in coordinating references to the Bernau manuscripts and the
C-manuscripts in chapter 5. It is also with the permission of Dr. Bernet of the
Husserl Archives that portions of the C-manuscript texts are quoted there
before their actual publication in the Husserliana series. In Freiburg the Pd-
agogische Hochschule, where the Eugen-Fink-Archiv is housed, has been gen-
erous in putting its resources at my disposal for the several years of work on
Finks Nachlass. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities graciously extended funding to support my
lengthier stays in Freiburg, while additional travel support came from the
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and on numerous occasions from
the University of Kentucky and the Southern Regional Education Board. Fi-
nally, two people stand foremost in the gratitude I owe them: Ferdinand Graf,
former student of Finks and director of the Eugen-Fink-Archiv in Freiburg
now sorely missed owing to his untimely death in 2001and Mrs. Susanne
Fink, Eugen Finks widow. In addition to friendship, encouragement, and
help, each provided a unique privilege during my time in Freiburg. For while
the primary object of this book is the philosophic work that transcends indi-
viduals, there is a personal reality beneath the marks of rigorous thinking
traced on a page of paper, and this is what I was able to grasp, in different
ways, through conversation and comradeship with these two people who had
been so close to Eugen Fink himself.
Abbreviations
Note: (1) When the title of a now published work (or a shortening of it) is given in
quotation marksfor example, Cartesian Meditations, Crisis-textsthis marks its
being dealt with in the stage of its preparation or revision, rather in its published nality.
(2) In general, footnote references to original typescript or original edition pagination,
often given in marginal numeration in editions, will be placed within brackets (e.g., in
EFM; and a special case is explained in 5.1.2.3.3, footnote 205 in the appendix). (3) Se-
mester designations as practiced in the German academic system will be used in footnote
specics: SS = summer semester; WS = winter semesterfor example, for MH-G.
Works
I. EDMUND HUSSERL
Bw Briefwechsel. Edited by Karl Schuhmann with Elisabeth

Schuhmann. 10 vols. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1994.
BIng Briefe an Roman Ingarden, mit Erluterungen und Erinn-
erungen an Husserl. Edited by Roman Ingarden.
Phaenomenologica 25. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1968.
xxi
xxii Abbreviations
Hua Husserliana: Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. 1950

Hua I Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortrge. Edited
by S. Strasser. 2d ed. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
Hua III/1,/2 Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnome-
nologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Ein-
fhrung in die reine Phnomenologie. New edition by Karl
Schumann. 2 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.
Hua IV Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnome-
nologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch: Phnome-
nologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Edited by
Marly Biemel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952.
Hua V Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phno-
menologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch. Edited by Marly
Biemel. Reprint. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.
Hua VI Die Krisis der europischen Wissenschaften und die trans-
zendentale Phnomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phno-
menologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. 2d
edition. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962.
Hua VII Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Erster Teil: Kritische Ide-
engeschichte. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Mar-
tinus Nijhoff, 1956.
Hua VIII Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil: Theorie der
phnomenologischen Reduktion. Edited by Rudolf Boehm.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959.
Hua IX Phnomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommer-
semester 1925. Edited by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Mar-
ZB (Hua X) Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewussteins (1893
1917). Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1966.
Hua XI Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, Aus Vorlesungs- und For-
schungsmanuskripten 19181926. Edited by Margot
Fleischer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.
Hua XIII Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt, Texte aus dem
Nachlass, Erster Teil: 19051920. Edited by Iso Kern. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
Hua XIV Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt, Texte aus dem
Nachlass, Zweiter Teil: 19211928. Edited by Iso Kern.
Abbreviations xxiii
Hua XV Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt, Texte aus dem

Nachlass, Dritter Teil: 19291935. Edited by Iso Kern.
Hua XVII Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik
der logischen Vernunft. Edited by Paul Jenssen. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.
Hua XXIII Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Ph-
nomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwrtigungen,
Texte aus dem Nachlass (18981925). Edited by Eduard
Marbach. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980.
Hua XXVII Aufstze und Vortrge 19221937. Edited by Thomas
Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp. Dordrecht, Boston, Lon-
don: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
Hua XXIX Die Krisis der europischen Wissenschaften und die tran-
szendentale Phnomenologie, Ergnzungsband: Texte aus
dem Nachlass 19341937. Edited by Reinhold N. Smid.
Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1993.
Hua XXXII Natur und Geist, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927.
Edited by Michael Weiler. Dordrecht, Boston, London:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.
Hua XXXIII Die Benauer Manuskripte ber das Zeitbewusstsein
(1971.18). Edited by Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar.
Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2001.
LU Logische Untersuchungen: IProlegomena zur reinen
Logik; II/1Untersuchungen zur Phnomenologie und
Theorie der Erkenntnis; II/2Elemente einer phno-
menologischen Aufklrung der Erkenntnis. 5th edition.
Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963. The volumes in the Hus-
serliana series containing these texts are XVIII, XIX/1, and
XIX/2.
EU Erfahrung und Urteil, Untersuchungen zur Geneologie der
Logik. Edited by Ludwig Landgrebe. Hamburg: Claassen
Verlag, 1964.
JPpF Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomenologische For-
schung. 11 vols. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 19131930.
LI Logical Investigations. Translation of LU by J. N. Findlay.
2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
xxiv Abbreviations
CMe Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenol-

ogy. Translation of Hua 1 by Dorion Cairns. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1960.
Ideas I Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phe-
nomenological Philosophy, First Book. Translation of Hua
III/1 by F. Kersten. The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Mar-
Ideas I (B-G) Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
Translation of Hua III/1 in its original 1913 edition by
W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen and Unwin,
1931.
ZBe On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time (18931917). Translation of ZB (Hua X) by J. B.
Brough. Collected Works 4. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991.
Crisis The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Phi-
losophy. Translation of Hua VI by David Carr. Northwest-
ern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1970.
EJ Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Geneology
of Logic. Translation of EU by James S. Churchill and Karl
Ameriks. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenol-
ogy and Existential Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973.
. MARTIN HEIDEGGER
SZ Sein und Zeit. 10th edition. Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Ver-

lag, 1963. (Reedited as MH-G 2.)
KB Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. 2d edition. Frank-
furt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951.
Wgm Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1967, and MH-G 9. The pagination given is that of the
1967 edition, retained in the margins of MH-G 9.
MH-GA Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann.
MH-GA 2 Reediting of SZ by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,
1977.
Abbreviations xxv
MH-GA 3 Reediting of KB by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.

1991.
MH-GA 9 Reediting of Wgm by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.
1976.
MH-GA 20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Marburg SS
1925). Edited by Petra Jaeger. 1979.
MH-GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie (Marlburg SS
1927). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1975.
MH-GA 26 Metaphysische Anfungsgrnde der Logik im Ausgang von
Leibniz (Marburg SS 1928). Edited by Klaus Held. 1978.
MH-GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie (Freiburg WS 1928/29).
Edited by Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. 1996.
MH-GA 28 Der Deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die
philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart (Freiburg SS
1929). Edited by Claudius Strube. 1997.
MH-GA 29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphsyik. WeltEndlichkeit
Einsamkeit (Freiburg WS 1929/30). Edited by Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1983.
MH-GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die
Philosophie (Freiburg SS 1930). Edited by Hartmut Tiet-
jen. 1982.
BTst Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Trans-
lated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Series in Contemporary
Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1996.
MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translation of
MH-G 26 by Michael Heim. Studies in Phenmenology and
Existential Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1984.
. EUGEN FINK
EFM Die letzte phnomenologische Werkstatt Freiburg: Eugen

Finks Mitarbeit bei Edmund Husserl. Manuskripte und
Dokumente. Teil I19271938, Band 1: Doktorarbeit
und erste Assistenzjahre bei Husserl; Band 2: Bernauer
Zeitmanuskripte, Cartesianische Meditationen und System
der phnomenologischen Philosophie; Band 3: Letzte
phnomenologische Darstellung: die Krisis-
xxvi Abbreviations
Problematik. Teil II: 19391946Band 4: Finks ph-

nomenologisches Philosophieren nach dem Tod Husserls.
Edited by Ronald Bruzina. Eugen Fink, Gesamtausgabe,
Abteiling III, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Muenchen,
2005. (Only references to texts found in sections
Abschnitteother than the rst in these volumes will have
the section specied, for example, EFM 2, Abschn. 4.)
Studien Studien zur Phnomenologie, 19301939. Phaenome-
nologica 21. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.
VB/I Vergegenwrtigung und Bild, I, Studien, pp. 178.
VI.CM/1,/2 VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1: Die Idee einer trans-
zendentalen Methodenlehre. Edited by Hans Ebeling, Jann
Holl, and Guy van Kerckhoven. Teil 2: Ergnzungsband.
Edited by Guy van Kerckhoven. Husserliana Dokumente
II/12. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1988.
EH-K Die phnomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in
der gegenwrtigen Kritik, I, Studien, pp. 78156; orig-
inally in Kant-Studien 38 (1933): 32183.
ND Nhe und Distanz: Phnomenologische Vortrge und
Aufstze. Edited by Franz-Anton Schwarz. Freiburg and
Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1976.
EH-Ke The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl
and Contemporary Criticism. Translation of EH-K by
R. O. Elveton. In The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected
Critical Readings, edited by R. O. Elveton, 73147. Chi-
cago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.
CM6 Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental
Theory of Method; with Textual Notations by Edmund
Husserl. Translation of VI.CM/1 by Ronald Bruzina. Stud-
ies in Continental Thought. Bloomington and Indi-
anapolis: 1995.
N-EF Die Notizen Eugen Finks zur Umarbeitung von Edmund
Husserls Cartesianischen Meditationen. Edited by
Ronald Bruzina. Husserl Studies 6 (1989): 97128.
Abbreviations xxvii
OTHERS
KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by R. Schmidt, Phi-

losophische Bibliothek 37a. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag,
1976.
CPR Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Norman Kemp
Smith. London: Macmillan, 1958.
C-HF Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink.
Edited by the Husserl Archives in Louvain. Foreword by
Richard M. Zaner. Phaenomenologica 66. The Hague:
HChr Karl Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, Denk- und Lebensweg
Edmund Husserls. Husserliana-Dokumente I. The Hague:
MH-Ott/e Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. New York:
Basic Books, 1993. Translation by Alan Blunden of Martin
Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. Frankfurt and
New York: Campus Verlag, 1988.
ARCHIVES
HA Husserl-Archief te Leuven (Archives-Husserl Louvain),

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
EFA Eugen-Fink-Archiv, Pdagogische Hochschule Freiburg.
UAFbg Universittsarchiv Freiburg, Universittsbibliothek
Freiburg im Breisgau.
1
Contextual Narrative: The Freiburg

Phenomenology Workshop, 19251938
For me philosophy is not a matter of career, but of personal destiny.

Husserl to Gustav Albrecht, October 7, 1934
If thinking is your destiny, then revere that destiny with divine honor
and offer it what is best and dearest.
Aphorism by Nietzsche quoted by Fink
Philosophy is never done nowhere. If it is not the work of a particular

someone at a particular time and in a particular place, then it is not at all.
What we shall be looking into is the philosophy that was done in a special
place at a very special time in the history of the twentieth century, but the
question of the particular someone is precisely the matter that is at issue. For
it was not just one particular person who was involved; there was a sec-
ond particular someone engaged in this same philosophic endeavor. The two,
of course, were Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, working together in intense
1. Bw IX, p. 104.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, IX, Munich: Musarion, 1923 (Aus der
Zeit des Menschlichen, Allzumenschlichen, 1875/761879, Philosophie im Allge-
meinen), p. 366. Quoted in Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlham-
mer, 1960), p. 14.
1
2 The Freiburg Phenomenology Workshop
daily contact, in Freiburg, during a period of social and political upheaval.

The problems that were dened in this interplay very much determined the
character that phenomenology possessed in Husserls nal years, the phenom-
enology that broadened out from the Cartesianism of the 1929 Paris lectures
to the life-world-centered philosophy embodied in Husserls last writings, the
Crisis-texts.
This thinking, however, was not simply for that time and for that place. The
phenomenology that marked so much of postwar thinking in France, and then
that of an increasingly important sector of philosophic interest in North Amer-
ica in the 1960s and 1970s (and still today), was the product of the thinking
done at this particular time and in this particular place. Much of its vigor
derived from these same Crisis-texts of Edmund Husserls, via the work of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and in confrontation with the philosophy of Martin
Heidegger. What it is hoped will become evident as the present study proceeds
is that this subsequent following and studying of nal-period phenomenology
reawakenedwithout knowing itsome of the central problematics that lay
at the heart of the work going on in those last years of Husserls lifesome of
them; for there was much more to it than was generally thought as Husserl and
Fink wrestled with the problems they were engaged in. And this fuller complex
of issues and alternatives is what this book will try to lay out.
But we must know the time and the place better, and, of course, we must
know the particular persons involved better. Much is already familiar about
Husserls life, and so we should begin by following Finks entry into it in order
to see the difference that entry made.
1.1. Eugen Fink, Arrival in Freiburg

Eugen Fink became Husserls assistant in late 1928, before the beginning
of the very semester during which Husserl nally relinquished teaching. That
winter semester of 19281929 also saw the rst lecture course by Martin
Heidegger as Husserls successor at the University of Freiburg. The year 1928
was indeed pivotal, but we must begin the story a little earlier, in 1925, when
Fink rst arrived at Freiburg to begin his studies there.
It was not in fact in Freiburg that Fink rst attended university. Fresh from
passing the Abitur after the normal years of study at the humanistic Gym-
nasium in Konstanz, the city of his birth, Fink rst went to Mnster. There,
3. The Abitur is the examination that warrants a student is qualied to enter univer-
sity. The humanistisches Gymnasium in Konstanz was the same school that Heidegger
had attended for three years before changing to the highly respected Bertoldsgymnasium
The Freiburg Phenomenology Workshop 3
in the summer semester of 1925, he followed courses mainly in German lan-

guage and literature. The one course in philosophy that he took at Mnster,
the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant, was itself not the
rst study of philosophy that Fink had ever done. Several years earlier, when
Fink was in his sixteenth year, he was already a member in Konstanz of the
Kant Society and had begun a serious reading of philosophy. The earliest
books in Finks personal library, all dated 1921 (and all inexpensive pocket
editions), are by an impressive list of philosophic authors: Giordano Bruno,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer. During the next
three years, well before going to Mnster, he lled out his collection with more
titles of Nietzsches, one precritical work of Kants, some Hegel, and some
Hume (in German). There can be little doubt that when Fink reached Freiburg
for the winter semester of 1925, he was ripe for challenging exposure to the
serious living philosophic work that the university offered in the person and
teaching of arguably the leading philosopher in Germany at that point, Ed-
mund Husserl.
In the semester in which Fink came to Freiburg, Husserl had already been
Ordinarius there for nearly ten years. Named to the chair of philosophy that
Heinrich Rickert had vacated to go to Heidelberg to succeed Wilhelm Windel-
band, Husserl arrived in Freiburg in April 1916. There began the rst act of a
drama that would take more than twenty years to play out, the mingling of the
fate of Husserl and his phenomenology with the career of Martin Heidegger.
That is something to which we shall be returning frequentlyindeed, it is an
essential element in the place Fink would come to hold with Husserl.
In 1925, however, all was well. For Husserl, Heidegger was the most im-
portant among the rising generation, someone predestined to be a rst-
class philosopher, a leader moving beyond the muddles and inrmities of the
in Freiburg in 1909, to nish his program of studies there (Abitur, 1909). MH-Ott/e,
pp. 4755. Heidegger mentions that the same teachers in this Gymnasium had taught
both Fink and himself Latin and Greek (Fr Eugen Fink zum sechzigsten Geburtstag,
remarks by Heidegger to Fink dated March 30, 1966, in MH-GA 29/30, pp. 53336.)
4. The fourth son of Karl August and Hermine Fink, Eugen Fink was born on De-
cember 11, 1905, in Konstanz. (See Susanne Fink and Ferdinand Graf, Eugen Fink: Vita
und Bibliographie, Freiburg: Eugen-Fink-Archiv an der Pdagogischen Hochschule Frei-
burg, n.d., and the Lebenslauf 18. Dezember 1946, in EFM 4, Abschn. 4.)
5. Abgangszeugnis and Anmeldungsbuch, Westflsche Wilhelms-Universitt Mn-
ster, in the Fink Nachlass in Freiburg.
6. See Fink and Graf, Eugen Fink, p. 2, and EFM 4, Abschn. 4., Lebenslauf.
7. Here again, Ott narrates the salient developments, MH-Ott/e, pp. 89105, 114
18, 12229, and 17286.
present day. Moreover, it was Husserls support two years earlier that had
helped Heidegger obtain the position that he held at Marburg, which the
Marburg faculty was now moving to upgrade from Extraordinarius to Or-
dinarius (with an increase in pay, sorely needed in those times of rampant
ination). The facultys decision to do so was heavily inuenced by the fulsome
praise from Husserl, in the very words that have just been quoted. Moreover,
Being and Time was about to burst on the scene, under the pressure to publish
that the move to upgrade his position at Marburg imposed on Heidegger.
Although, with the publication of Being and Time in April 1927 in Husserls
Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomenologische Forschung, Heidegger -
nally received the promotion at Marburg, it ironically only came in October,
but a few weeks before Husserl began negotiations to retire from teaching with
the expectation that Heidegger would succeed him. Husserl was still convinced
that Heidegger was the only one who could take his place at Freiburg and carry
on his phenomenology, despite the fact that by now he had to wonder if
Heidegger was indeed what he had all this time thought him to be.
Husserls wishes here would be respected; Heidegger would be given the
offer to succeed him. Husserl was far too important a gure to be refused.
Proof of his philosophic eminence was shown in the summer of 1923, for
example, by his being offered the chair of philosophy at Berlin as the sole
candidate. That invitation had brought the Rektor (president) of the Univer-
sity at Freiburg, representatives of the education ministry for Baden, and a
deputation from the faculty to plead with him to stay. After several weeks of
consideration, Husserl declined the Berlin offer; but he won for himself further
advantages in Freiburg. One of these was the nancing of a research assistant-
ship, for which Husserl shortly afterward chose Ludwig Landgrebe and later
would select Eugen Fink.
In 1925, therefore, Husserl was an unquestionably powerful gure in Frei-
8. Husserls letter to the Marburg faculty, June 30, 1925, in reply to their inquiry
regarding Heidegger in connection with the promotion referred to in the next sentence.
See MH-Ott/e, p. 127 (translation modied).
9. On this whole situation see (1) MH-Ott/e, pp. 12229; (2) Theodore Kisiel, The
Missing Link in the Early Heidegger, in Hermeneutic Phenomenology: Lectures and
Essays, ed. by Joseph J. Kockelmans (Washington, D.C.; University Press of America,
1988), pp. 619; (3) Thomas Sheehan, Time and Being, 19251927, in Thinking
about Being: Aspects of Heideggers Thought, ed. by Robert W. Shahan and J. N. Mo-
hanty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 18083.
10. On the doubts Husserl had, see Karl Schuhmann, Zu Heideggers Spiegel-
Gesprch ber Husserl, Zeitschrift fr Philosophische Forschung, 32 (1978), 595603.
11. HChr, p. 270.
12. HChr, pp. 271 and 273.
burg, and to study with him was to hear philosophy in the living words of a
master at the height of his intellectual maturity. In the winter semester of
19251926 Husserls Basic Problems of Logic headed the list of courses that
the twenty-year-old student named Eugen Fink took in his rst year there. One
can imagine the impression Husserl would have made on someone like Fink.
The descriptions given by others suggest what it might have been: the profes-
sional gure held very erect, the compact head tilted back slightly in such a
way that one noticed less how short he was, the intense gray-blue eyes behind
small round glasses, the prominent forehead, the warm friendliness, the soft
Austrian accent. But Fink had also made an impression on Husserl, who in
fact did notice people, contrary to what one would expect of a lecturer reputed
to be oblivious to all but the course of his own train of thought. Jan Patocka
relates Husserls own account of how he rst noticed Fink in his lectures. Fink
sat there listening without taking any notes, and Husserl thought to himself,
Thats going to produce great results when he comes up for exams. But
when Fink appeared for his exams, he recited everything as if reading from a
book. Patocka goes on to comment: One instinctively thinks of how Plato
refers to a perfect memory as the rst condition for philosophical genius.
This phenomenal memory would later serve Fink well when working with
Husserl in the vast forest of Husserls endless packets of Forschungsmanu-
skripte that are the gloryand the baneof research in phenomenology; but
in this rst course in phenomenology Fink was already beneting from his
astonishing memory. If the story Patocka tells is true, then, while Fink may not
have taken notes during the lecture, he nonetheless wrote down what he heard
afterward. In 1932 he gave to Dorion Cairns, then coming to the end of study
in Freiburg, his own copy of his typed summary (Nachschrift) of that same
lecture course, his rst at Freiburg. It is in this typescript summary that one
can discern something of the rst impression Fink had of Husserl, not of the
person of the philosopher but of his thought. And that rst hearing of phe-
nomenology set into the philosophic matrix of the young mans mind a pattern
of themes and ideas composing, as it were, a visage that would take on a life
and expressiveness of its own in the years to come.
Here, for example, Fink rst heard discussion of the role of language in
13. See Helmut Plessner, Bei Husserl in Gttingen, and Herbert Spiegelberg, Per-
spektivenwandel: Konstitution eines Husserlbildes, in Edmund Husserl, 18591959,
ed. by H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 29 and
5758.
14. Jan Patocka, Erinnerungen an Edmund Husserl, in Die Welt des MenschenDie
Welt der Philosophie, ed. by Walter Biemel, Phaenomenologica 72 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1976), p. xi.
15. See appendix.
thought, of articulate consciousness explained as a pinnacle of self-aware

wakefulness in the larger movement of ones mute, even brute living, of the
intentionality of this whole life of consciousness, wakeful both in this full
egoic sense as well as in those peripheral yet crucially important dimensions of
ones being. A statement catches ones attention: There is no such thing as
absolute wakefulness. The explicit critical inection of the Cartesian ego
cogito at work is striking, against the more uncompromised appearance of it
in Husserls published worksIdeas I, and even the later Cartesian Medita-
tions. Here, too, Fink heard for the rst time about the body as the kinesthet-
ically, perceptually functioning body, about time as phenomenologically the
form of all objects and of the experience of them, about temporality as princi-
ple of individuation. And here was his introduction to the phenomenology of
the modalities of consciousness in the ow of time, perception as such, and
then recollection and expectation, these latter the topics that would gure in
his dissertation. It was an exceedingly rich mixture, this lecture course of
Husserls, which the text as now published reduces to a tighter logical co-
herence of topics, but which Finks Nachschrift captures in its comprehensive
impact. And it was only the beginning.
This was naturally not the only lecture course that Fink followed that rst
semester in Freiburg. He took Julius Ebbinghauss course on Kants Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, lling a bound booklet with his summary of it. He
followed a course in the philosophy of mathematics given by Oskar Becker
(without taking notes), two courses in German literature, one in political
economy, and one in journalism. Then, for reasons that are not indicated, Fink
spent the summer semester of 1926 in Berlin, studying philosophy, literature
and drama, and journalismwith one course in English. And then he was
back in Freiburg for the following winter, to remain there not only for the
rest of his studies but until 1939, the year after Husserls death. Fink would
take every course Husserl gave, mixing the study of philosophy with study
in a variety of other areas, mainly history and German language and lit-
erature.
16. See appendix.

17. Grundprobleme der Logik, respectively, pp. 23, 10, 4150; Hua XI, respectively,
pp. 13f., 312ff., 301f.
18. Grundprobleme der Logik, pp. 5070; Hua XI, pp. 65191, passim.
19. EFA U-I (not in EFM), entitled Freiburg WS 1925/26, Julius Ebbinghaus: Kants
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (aus ihren phnomenologischen Grundlagen dargestellt).
20. See the description of all Finks courses, drawn from his university Anmeldungs-
bcher (in the Fink Nachlass) in Guy van Kerckhoven, Mundanisierung und Individua-
tion: Die VI. Cartesianische Meditation und ihr Einsatz, Orbis Phaenomenologicus
(Wrzburg: Knigshausen und Neumann, 2003), pp. 6469.
There is every indication that Finks initiation into phenomenology was

swift and profound. But it was not simply by listening to Husserls lectures and
reading on his own that Fink found his way into the heart of phenomenology;
a far more fruitful opportunity presented itself as his third semester at Freiburg
was beginning. In May 1927, the Faculty of Philosophical Studies announced
an essay competition on the topic of imagination to be treated by strictly phe-
nomenological analysis. Fink responded by writing his rst lengthy philo-
sophical essay, giving it a title after the terms of the assigned topic: Contribu-
tions to a phenomenological analysis of the mental phenomena that are dealt
with under the expressions supposing that . . . , simply imagining some-
thing, phantasizing. Husserl would later say of Finks work here that,
since nothing gave the evidence of phenomenology like actual work on a
special problem, this competition essay saved Fink, because it set him to
work intensively on the problem of Neutralittsmodikation. Fink, of
course, had to engage himself actively in grasping the principles and essential
results of phenomenology from the lectures he was hearing and the only two
books of Husserls phenomenology then published, Logical Investigations and
Ideas I. But he had the additional advantage of being able to talk with
the renowned philosopher himself, an opportunity that some students ap-
proached with trepidation but that Fink seems to have carried off with appro-
priate philosophical boldness. That, at least, is what one can read from the
rst record of any discussions he had with Husserl, from December 1, 1927,
in his fourth semester of lectures at Freiburg. Admittedly this may well not
have been Finks rst meeting with Husserl; but what is striking about the
notes from this discussion, apart from the radical implications of the questions
Fink asks Husserl, is the tone of seless engagement with the issues in ques-
21. The prescribed topic is given in VB/I, p. 1, footnote 1.

22. See EFM 1, Z-I, Beil. I, the text of Finks prize essay.
23. August 13, 1931, C-HF, p. 11.
24. Hua III/1 and LU, respectively. In his prize essay Fink explicitly refers to chapter 5
of the Fifth Investigation in Logical Investigations (Z-I, Beil. I, p. [5], EFM 1), while some
of Finks working notes (Z-I 31a33a; EFM 1) refer to specic pages in chapter 4 of part
III of Ideas I.
25. See Jean Hrings brief tribute, Malvine Husserl (Philosophy and Phenomeno-
logical Research, 11 [1951], 61011), telling of the courage needed for him and a group
of fellow students to go and ring the bell at the Masters house, and then the con-
sternation to nd that the great philosopher who seemed to live in a superterrestial
world, was, as a matter of fact, married and the father of three children. This was in
1909, but the academically imposing status of Husserl would certainly not have been less
in 1927.
26. Z-I 23a24b, EFM 1.
tion. Deference is paid exclusively to those issues and to the thinking needed in
resolving them.
As with the rst lecture course Fink heard, the ones he followed as he was
preparing the competition essay covered a vast amount of ground in phenome-
nology, but detailed material on specic points relevant to his work was not
generally available. Finks notes on his essay give sparse indication of his
having referred to manuscripts on the themes pertinent to it that Husserl might
have let him study, although this was something Husserl often did for his
students, and would do for Fink too as he prepared his dissertation. Finks
work here, however, has elements of phenomenological analysis that he really
did in great part himself, although on the substantial basis of initial Husserlian
conceptions. Indeed, Husserl found the analysis Fink worked out to be thor-
oughly sound, and in its revision and expansion as a dissertation Husserl
would recommend it to others. At the same time Fink saw clearly that the
treatment he was making here could only be provisional; for inasmuch as it led
inexorably and directly to the ultimate level of problems, that of original time-
consciousness, it was only with the clarication of that level of constitution
that the real explication of imaginative presentation could be achieved. He
had projected three sections for his study, of which the third was to devote
itself to the question of temporality. But he was able to nish only the rst
section for the competition, writing it out in February of 1928.
There were two such competition essays submitted to the faculty, Finks and
one by another student of Husserls, Heinz Ropohl. In evaluating the essays
the faculty could not decide for one over the other. Both were incomplete, for
the two students had planned larger works and only written part of them
Ropohl half of his, Fink one-third. Ropohls was clear and smooth in style,
free of difcult terminology and readily intelligible, but a journeyman report
rather than a genuine, compelling investigation. Finks was not nearly as read-
able as Ropohls, used a demanding terminology, and was poor in use of
examples; but it was a stimulating and worthy example of true investigation in
remarkably difcult matters. In the end the competition prize was divided
evenly between the two, for neither ideally fullled the task set, as the ofcial
27. See appendix.

28. See Husserls letters to Ingarden, December 21, 1930 (Bw III, 270), and to Dietrich
Mahnke, January 8, 1931 (Bw III, p. 474).
29. See Finks plan for the Preisschrift, Z-I, Beil. I, pp. [1011], EFM 1.
30. The title page of the Preisschrift bears the handwritten note, Geschrieben im
Februar 1928. V-I 23 (EFM 1) is Finks draft of the explanation that illness forced him to
submit the essay in incomplete form. No such explanation was included in the Preisschrift
as submitted.
statement of evaluation explains. There is no indication who wrote this

evaluation of the two submissions, but there can be no doubt that Husserl was
well acquainted with it. Two months later, in May 1928, he mentioned in a
letter to Heidegger that, with his retirement imminentand with Heidegger
now ofcially approved as his successorhe had, against precedent, received
the extension of funding for an assistant for another two years. Landgrebe,
who had been serving in that position, would now be supported in his con-
tinued work for Husserl by a more generous stipend from the Notgemein-
schaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft; Husserl therefore had to choose someone,
as a second assistant, for the position Landgrebe was vacating. Of the two
who had submitted prize essays he chose Fink. A seemingly workaday deci-
sion, it would turn out to be momentous; for, as we shall see, what Husserl was
getting was precisely someone who, rather than displaying the straightfor-
ward secretarial skills that recommended the other essays author, Ropohl,
would become a remarkably challenging cothinker.
Here we must backtrack a bit to ll out somewhat more the second dimen-
sion of what was to become the new philosophical world at Freiburg. While
Fink was working on his competition essay, Husserl was involved in another
issue, one of major importance to him, the decision about his own retirement.
In May 1927, Husserl wrote to Heidegger about not yet having decided the
matter, for the most part because of uncertainty about how to calculate ex-
actly when he was actually eligible to retire. One of his concerns, too, was the
fact that normally on retiring he would lose his assistant (an issue that, as we
just saw, came to be resolved against precedent and in Husserls favor), and
remaining a little longer would make it possible to benet from an expected
general pay increase. At the same time, there was no question regarding Hus-
serls having decided upon Heidegger as his successor; we nd him writing, I
wish I could already install you here in the legacy that bets you. Within a
few months Husserls situation became clearer, so that by the end of 1927 he
had begun actual discussions regarding a successor, and the committee to
31. Gutachten ber die der Philosophischen Fakultt eingereichten Preisarbeiten,

Freiburg, March 10, 1928, given in EFM 4, Abschn. 4.
32. Letter from May 9, 1928, Bw IV, p. 154. See HChr, p. 332, on this being an
exception to the normal arrangement.
33. See Husserls comments on Heidegger in the letter just referred to (Bw IV, p. 154).
34. Letter from May 24, 1927, Bw IV, p. 142. Husserl says this in the context of
remarking on the difculties Heidegger was having in Marburg getting his promotion and
salary increase, a matter in which, as we saw earlier, Husserl had played a role. Otts
account makes it clear that Heidegger himself had had his sights set on the position at
Freiburg from well before his move to Marburg, MH-Ott/e, pp. 86105.
select one had been set up. In letters dated January 21 and 30, 1928, Husserl
writes to Heidegger that the committee decided to propose him as his suc-
cessor unico loco, exactly as Husserl had wished, and that the request would
be ofcially made to the faculty on February 7. On that day the faculty in fact
accepted the proposal unanimously: Heidegger was coming back to Freiburg,
and Husserl, emeritus, would yield his teachers post to his younger friend and
trusted colleague.
Of the discussions and arrangements that went on to bring the author of
Being and Time to Freiburg, Eugen Fink could not have known the details; but
he certainly did know that book. His personal notes clearly indicate his
having read Being and Time in 1927, while he was working on the competi-
tion essay; but they indicate as well that it was only after he had nished that
essay and was revising it as a dissertation that he really gained a philosophi-
cally appreciative and critical mastery of the book. It is clear that Fink
thought Heidegger tted into the philosophic world of phenomenology within
which he himself had begun to work, and which it was expected Heidegger
would expand and enrich precisely as the successor of Husserl.
1.2. Fink as Assistant to Husserl, First Years: 19281930

In August 1928 Ludwig Landgrebe began receiving support from the
Notgemeinschaft der Deutsche Wissenschaft for his work as Husserls primary
assistant, and Fink, accepting soon after the post that Landgrebe was now
vacating and that would continue under support from the education ministry
in Baden, became Husserls second assistant. This arrangement would last
for two years, after which Landgrebe would have to curtail his work for
Husserl and devote himself to his Habilitation. At that point Fink would
become Husserls only assistant. In the meantime, preparations were under
way for Heidegger to arrive in Freiburg. Husserls retirement was supposed to
35. See HChr, p. 326, and Husserls letter to Heidegger, December 8, 1927, Bw IV,
p. 148.
36. Postcard and letter, Bw IV, p. 151.
37. Husserls letter to Heidegger, February 7, 1928, Bw IV, p. 152.
38. Finks personal copy of the book is dated SS 1927.
39. V-I in EFM (Bd. 1) is a small bound notebook containing notes on part of Being and
Time (1518), followed by drafts and outlines for parts of the Preisschrift. Notes in Z-I
on Heidegger appear to have been written mainly during the stage of revision of the
Preisschrift, while those in Z-II certainly were (both in EFM 1).
40. See appendix.
41. HChr, p. 361, entry for Ende Mrz, 1930.
take effect at the end of the winter semester, 19271928, but Heidegger was
not able to begin at Freiburg until October. Husserl therefore agreed to keep
his position until then and to give a course in the summer semester of 1928.
In the midst of this Fink began reworking his competition essay to turn it into a
doctoral dissertation, a task in which Husserl became far more involved as
adviser and director.
It would be easy to cover this period of Finks rst two years of work as
assistant to Husserl with a few sketchy words and dates; but this would belie
the philosophical whirlwind in which Fink was caught up from the middle of
1928 to the middle of 1930, the excitement and force of which unmistakably
lay behind the vivid and creative notes he would write as he worked out the
framework of his own understanding of phenomenology. Here was Husserl
reaching the point of being free from university affairs and enjoying the high-
est honors both inside and outside Germany. For example, he had given a set
of lectures in Amsterdam in April 1928, and in July he had received an invita-
tion to deliver a similar series at the Sorbonne in Paris. Clearly it was not
reduced activity he was looking forward to in retirement but renewed dedica-
tion to his philosophical objectives in the remaining years of his life. And his
hand-picked successor was beginning his lectures in the rst chair of phi-
losophy at Freiburg. Here, then, was Heidegger, he of whom rumor had
spread throughout Germany about the startling energy and originality of his
thought, displayed now for all to see in the text of Being and Time published
a year earlier, which everyone seems to have understood as a radical shift in
the concept of how to do philosophy under the rubric phenomenology
everyone, that is, save Husserl himself. And around these philosophers and
their students was a land and nation struggling to reestablish itself in the
decade after its disastrous defeat in the Great War. Weimar Germany was
poised on the brink of 1929 and already in a maelstrom of social and eco-
nomic instability and uncertainty that would lead to twelve years of Nazi
dictatorship and a second world war vastly more destructive and disastrous
than the rst. Philosophy and philosophers, in particular, Husserl, Heidegger,
and Fink, would not be untouched by these events.
But in Freiburg, in the university, other things then held the mind. Take
Husserl, to begin with. In the summer and autumn of 1928 William Ralph
Boyce Gibson of Melbourne, Australia, on a six-month visit to Freiburg to
42. HChr, p. 329.

43. HChr, pp. 329ff.
44. Such is the stunning account Hannah Arendt gives, Martin Heidegger at Eighty,
New York Review of Books, October 21, 1971, pp. 5054.
follow philosophical developments there, discussed with Husserl his proposal

to translate Ideas I into English. This rst volume of Ideas, the closest thing
to a statement by Husserl of what phenomenology meant, was now fteen
years old, and the last book Husserl had published. In the course of the next
year Husserl would consider working through Ideas I with an eye to revising it
to the level of his present, more mature understanding; but in the end he did
not do this, instead limiting himself to providing an Authors Preface to the
English Edition, which, written by the end of 1930, he published rst in his
Jahrbuch as Epilogue to my Ideas. The question of the place of Ideas I in
the development of Husserls phenomenology, and, therefore, the question of
how it was to be interpreted, was clearly on the Husserlian agenda in these rst
years of Finks assistantship. It is no wonder, then, that critique of the presen-
tation of phenomenology in that book would be a theme of Finks own notes,
and thus a component of his own understanding of philosophy. It would not
be long before the general structure of critical retrospective proper to phenom-
enology would become clear, to form in fact the main frame of his work with
Husserl.
It was not only Husserls own evaluation and reconsideration of phenome-
nology, however, that was in ferment in 1928, for Heidegger had come back to
Freiburg. The thinking that produced Being and Time was now an actual
person and voice in the very lecture halls where Husserl had once stood; and
there in the rst week of November, inaugurating the winter semester of
19281929, one saw and heard an Introduction to Philosophy unlike any
Husserl had delivered. It began: Philosophy is something that belongs to our
very selves, we are not outside of it. Philosophy belongs to the essence of
human being [menschlichen Daseins], in so far as it exists. An animal cannot
philosophize, a God doesnt have to. Philosophy is a nite possibility in a nite
being. Inasmuch as human being exists, it also philosophizes. . . . In ordinary
life philosophizing is asleep in us, it is without movement. An introduction to
philosophy means to set philosophizing in motion, to introduce movement.
Philosophy is to be freed within us, to be grasped and chosen by us as a free
possibility. Heidegger goes on to say that the way to begin philosophy is to
45. For details see Karl Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phnomenologie II: Reine
Phnomenologie und phnomenologische Philosophie, Historisch-analytische Mono-
graphie ber Husserls Ideen I, Phaenomenologica 57 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1973), pp. 16368.
46. Authors Preface, Ideas I (B-G), pp. 1130. Nachwort zu meinen Ideen zu
einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, JPpF XI (1930),
pp. 54970 (Hua V, pp. 13862; Ideas II, pp. 40530).
47. From the opening page of Finks notes in summary of Heideggers course, EFA
U-MH-I, pp. 12 (not in EFM). Comparing them with MH-GA 27, 13, we see the way
set in motion the freeing of our existence, in the particular factic situation
of having citizenship in the university with the obligation of leadership
[Fhrerschaft] that it entails, the duty to an existence that understands
human possibilities more originally than others can, and therefore the care
for them that would set these others free and lead them as their model.
The voice, the style, the thought were decidedly different; but more than
that, as quickly became apparent as Heidegger continued his lectures, it was
also a critique of certain basic orientations in Husserls understanding of phe-
nomenology. The crisis in the sciences that questioned the whole idea of
science in postWorld War I disillusionment had to be understood in terms of
the way science was a possibility in our existence, and, far from being
accidentally conditioned by the times, belonged to the essence of science.
The problem of truth could not be resolved by theory of knowledge, i.e., by
starting with the subject-object relational schema; the problem of knowledge
can only be claried if it is rst decided what truth is. Constitution, rather
than being the basis of the account of primary establishings via intentional
analysis, is grounded in something more basic, in the basic openness of Da-
sein, whereby it is antecedently (and nonintentionally) being-with [Sein-
bei] and being-with-one-another [Miteinandersein]. A heady further
component of engagement, then, for someone like Fink pursuing philosophy
in Freiburg in 1928, was the problem of coming to terms with two powerful
philosophies for which coming to terms with each other was emerging as a
grave and sensitive matter. And Finks personal notes show this three-way
dialectic as a constant feature of his own thinking.
For Husserl, however, as the winter semester of 1928 began, this was not
really noticed as a problem; his own work was demanding all his attention. He
Heideggers line of thought struck at least this one hearer: the pivotal ideas are caught and
stated with force and clarity. This economy in expressing ideas is typical of Finks notes.
48. See the description of Heidegger lecturing in From Husserl to Heidegger: Excerpts
from a 1928 Freiburg Diary by W. R. Boyce Gibson, ed. by Herbert Spiegelberg, Journal
of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2 (1971), 7374.
49. In a letter to Alexander Pfnder, January 6, 1931, Husserl speaks of raising this
very issue with Heidegger in all friendliness. Heidegger simply laughed and said,
Nonsense! and there was no engagement on the level of philosophical critique. (Bw II,
p. 182.)
50. EFA U-MH-I, pp. 67; MH-GA 27, 8.
51. EFA U-MH-I, p. 15; MH-GA 27, p. 63 (11).
52. EFA U-MH-I, pp. 3032; MH-GA 27, p. 140 (18).
53. See the notes from 1928 and 1929 (mainly Z-IV and Z-V in EFM. Bd. 1) in
their many entries on Heidegger and Husserl in contrast, conict, and mutually critical
complementarity.
had begun a course of his own as emeritus professor, The Phenomenology of

Empathy, but as his own writing projects became more demanding he had
to discontinue it. The forum of determination for how philosophy was to be
done in Freiburg thus was left entirely to his successor, and as we shall see his
successor came to do just that. Husserl, however, had his assistants; and the
rst of these, Landgrebe, was working on editing texts of Husserls on logic.
These would eventually become Experience and Judgment, which would not
be published until after Husserls death, and only outside Germany, in Czecho-
slovakia, and then only to see all copies remaining in Prague destroyed by the
Nazis following the annexation of that country in March 1939. But this was
November 1928, and Husserl, stimulated by a portion of Landgrebes work,
sat down and wrote out his Formal and Transcendental Logic, in the kind of
burst of productive inspiration that amazed any who witnessed it. No sooner
had Husserl nished this composition (on January 23, 1929) than he had to
turn to preparing his lectures for Paris, the scheduled dates for which were fast
approaching. And there were other irons in Husserls re; he was not going
to be leaving his second assistant with nothing to do.
In July 1928that is, just as Husserl was considering his choice for the
position of second assistantthe volume of Husserls Jahrbuch (IX) that con-
tained his Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, with Heidegger
as nominal editor, was nearly ready. But for Husserl these texts, in great part
from lectures delivered in 1905, were far less important as an inquiry into time
and time-consciousness than others that he had written since then, during late
summer stays in Bernau in 1917 and 1918 in the Black Forest. This is what he
had explained to Roman Ingarden the year before, on one of Ingardens visits
during his month-long stay in Freiburg in the autumn of 1927. Husserl had
given Ingarden several recently typed writings for him to read and then come
back and discuss. One of these was the typescript of those 1905 lectures on
time, which Edith Stein had in fact worked up into acceptable form while she
was Husserls assistant ten years earlier. When Ingarden began speaking of
54. HChr, p. 338. Finks notes on Heideggers lectures for this same semester, Intro-
duction to Philosophy, show, barely one-quarter of the way through, criticism by Hei-
degger of the way empathy [Einfhlung] is approached by Husserlwithout naming
him. (EFA U-MH-132, corresponding to MH-GA 27, pp. 14042.) See Finks own long
note (Z-IV 87a88b) on both Heideggers and his own critique of Husserls analysis of
empathy. Elements of Finks ideas here anticipate the treatment sketched out for revising
Husserls Fifth Meditation (see VI.CM/2, Texts Nos. 1417).
55. See Editors Foreword to the 1948 Edition, EJ, pp. 38.
56. HChr, p. 341, entries for January 23 and 25, 1929.
57. See Husserls letter of July 13, 1928, to Ingarden (Bw III, 241).
58. See Ingardens account in BIng, Erluterungen zu den Briefen, pp. 15255, and
how important it was that these be publishedas they would be within the
yearHusserl, to his great surprise, simply said: I have something else far
more important. Come back tomorrow. And on the next day Husserl laid
before the astonished Ingarden ve hundred to six hundred pages of short-
hand manuscript, saying: That is my magnum opus. You shall get it ready for
publication for me. These were in fact the Bernau manuscripts on time-
constituting consciousness and the problem of individuationthe most dif-
cult problems in all of phenomenology, as Ingarden put it.
Deeply touched but distressed, Ingarden had to decline; it was an impossible
task unless he were to devote one or two years entirely to it in Freiburg, where
constant discussion with Husserl would be necessary. And Ingarden knew
from his correspondence with Edith Stein the difcult task it was to rethink
and revise into coherent form Husserls research manuscripts. No, it would
have to be someone else, someone able to work there with Husserl in closest
and continual contact. And it would have to be someone whom Husserl felt
sure had the abilities needed to do the job.
In mid-1928 the 1905 lectures on time-consciousness were in fact pub-
lished; but Heidegger at this point in his career, though the named editor for
that publication, had no interest in getting involved in real editing on fur-
ther time-manuscripts of Husserls. That, however, was exactly what an assis-
tant was for, and an assistant was on handEugen Fink, for whom time-
consciousness was the theme for the proposed third part of a competition
essay of his. By the beginning of the winter semester of 19281929 Husserl
had decided to turn over to Fink the task of reworking his Bernau manuscripts
to produce a coherent text for publication, and all signs indicate Fink must
have begun then. As the months progressed and Fink also worked on re-
working his competition essay into his dissertation, Husserl made other un-
published materials available to him; still, it is not surprising that the only such
Husserls explanation in a letter to Alexander Pfnder (January 6, 1931) for asking

Heidegger to stand as editor (Bw II, pp. 18182). See Boehm, Einleitung, Hua X,
pp. xxiiixxiv.
59. BIng, Erluterungen, p. 154.
60. Ibid. See also Husserls description of his work in Bernau in letters to Heidegger
(March 28, 1918; Bw IV, p. 130), to Adolf Grimme (June 8, 1918; Bw III, p. 84), and to
Ingarden (April 5, 1918). For further detail on the production and content of these
manuscripts, see Einleitung der Herausgebers in Hua XXXIII, pp. xxxxv.
61. See Roman Ingarden, ed., Edith Stein on Her Activity as an Assistant of Edmund
Husserl, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22 (1962), 15575.
62. See Z-I, Beil. I, p. [1011], EFM 1, Z-I for the outline in the Preisschrift of the entire
plan. See also Z-I, Beschreibung, for nding other outlines of the work.
63. See appendix.
materials to which Finks notes from this time refer are in fact Husserls trea-
sured Bernau manuscripts.
So far as manuscript editing was concerned, Fink could not have worked
terribly fast in his very rst months with Husserl, and the reason is simple. He
rst had to learn Gabelsberg shorthandand Husserls own adaptation of
it!before he could do serious work with those texts. There was not avail-
able then, as there is now at the Husserl Archives, an extensive glossary of
Husserls own gures in Gabelsberg for phenomenological terms. All Fink had
was a manual for self-teaching and whatever help he could get from Land-
grebe, or from Husserl himself, which Fink indicates he did receive. Even
so, it seems that Fink began fairly early in his assistant position with Hus-
serl to study the latters manuscripts and transcribe them. He may well
have impressed Husserl with his industry, for he early on received from him a
copy of the newly published Vorlesungen zur Phnomenologie des inneren
Zeitbewutseins.
When all the indications from Finks own notes are taken into consideration
here, together with Finks several autobiographical statements, it seems
likely that only by about mid-1929 had Finks study of Husserls Bernau
manuscripts given him a rm grasp of what they were as a whole and what it
would take to produce a coherent edition of them. Yet there are clear indica-
tions that he had sketched out a plan for them earlier. Already sometime
during or soon after January 1929 he had jotted down a tentative outline for
the basic organization of these texts, together with a few lines for the opening
of an introduction to an edition of the texts thus being worked on. In any
case, by the end of 1929, and certainly by the spring of 1930, Fink had a rmly
established plan for the revision and had full charge of the task of rework-
64. Z-I 95a, Z-II 45a, Z-IV 54a and 76a, Z-V V/2ab; V-I3840. The one exception is
reference to ZB (Hua X), in Z-I61a (EFM 1).
65. See appendix.
66. See Bericht ber die Transkription der Nachlassmanuskritpe Husserls, from
December 2, 1939, in EFM 4, Abschn. 4.
67. Several notes (Z-II 42a, Z-IV 35a, 36a, and 86a) from these early monthslate
1928 to mid- or late 1929are written on sheets that carry parts of typed lines that to all
appearances are portions of transcription.
68. In its separate publication (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1928), rather than that in JPpF;
in the Fink Nachlass.
69. See the explanation on these statements given with Finks Politische Geschichte,
in EFM 4, Abschn.4.
70. See appendix.
71. See appendix.
ing the Bernau manuscripts for publication; for that was when Husserl ap-
proached the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft Freiburg for nancial support for
precisely this work.
In the meantime, in 1929 two engagements dominated the attentions of
Husserl and Fink. For Husserl, nearing seventy years of age, a triumph seem-
ingly immune to diminishment awaited him in Paris, where on February 23
and 25 he was to deliver four lectures on his phenomenology in the Amphi-
thtre Descartes in the seat of French philosophy, the Sorbonne. It was time
to prepare what he would say. Fink, on the other hand, freshly turned twenty-
three in December 1928, and at the very beginning of his career, had to nish
his dissertation. Let us take Fink rst.
The parameters of his dissertation task were clear, and a good part of the
work had been done in the writing of the competition essay. Three features,
however, distinguished the dissertation task from that essay. The rst was that
the dissertation was given a full-edged Introduction, in which, in effect,
Fink gave expression to a theory of phenomenology that was much more
extensive and sharply focused than in the earlier essay. The signicance of this
will be dealt with in the next chapter, but here one striking feature at least
should be mentioned: it is clearly the product of Finks thinking of phenome-
nology as having to embrace fundamental elements from both Husserl and
Heidegger. In fact, quite apart from the clear implication of this double inu-
ence in Finks thematic scheme in this Introduction, he is quite explicit about
it in the brief autobiographical notice appended in the dissertation as pub-
lished separately. He writes:
It is with earnest and deep-felt appreciation that I wish to thank [Professor

Husserl] for his gracious assistance in my work, for his dynamic awakening of
philosophical interest, and not least of all for the rich education reaching to
ones very core that he granted me in innumerable discussions. That my grati-
tude not remain a matter merely of words will show in what I do in the future.
For decisive philosophical stimulus and a great part of my training I am
indebted to the lectures and seminars of Professor Heidegger. What I gained
from the study of his works cannot show its full effect in the narrow connes
of this present work.
It was clear to Heidegger that Fink was a student of Husserls, but it was also
clear to him that Fink was listening with great interest to his, Heideggers,
72. For this Lebenslauf see note 63 above. See also Z-I 143b and Z-VI 13a (EFM 1).
Cf. also the expression of gratitude to Husserl in the Vorbemerkung to the dissertation
(VB/I, p. 1).
thinking. Thus it was that for the defense of Finks dissertation on Decem-
ber 13, 1929, Husserl stood as Referent and Heidegger as Korreferent, the
only time these two together sponsored a doctoral candidate, and perhaps the
last time they would meet publicly in these years of Husserls retirement; for in
the course of that same year, 1929, and prior to this occasion, Husserl had
come to the conclusion that there was little in common between his philoso-
phy and that of the man who now stood in his place in Freiburg, Martin
Heidegger.
The second feature that marked the advance of the dissertation over the
competition essay was that now Fink had worked out what had been pro-
jected as section II of that essay but had not been actually written. This new
material, now entitled Preliminary Analysis of Image-Consciousness, was
added to section I as revised from the essay (under the title Preliminary
Analysis of Presentications) to constitute with the new Introduction what
was presented as the dissertation and published as Presentication and Image
(Part I). The still unnished part II, now given the title The Constitutive
Temporal Interpretation of Presentication and Image was to contain the last
and most important section of what had originally been planned as three
sections. This part II, though not nished and not submitted, was the third
feature in terms of which Finks work on the dissertation was a step of impor-
tant progress; for Fink now grasped far more fully the depth and complexity of
the question of temporality in its implications for adequate treatment of the
way the mind is a life of experience and awareness able to range over all facets
of itself in imagination, memory, and reective re-presentation. Thus in two
key paragraphs of programmatic centrality Fink briey announced that the
treatments in the whole of part I were simply preliminary and characterized by
a navet. The analysis conducted there of the experiences and mental phe-
nomena in question was necessarily done in terms of act-centered intention-
ality. But these same things had to be more radically considered, namely, by a
more original regress into the temporal constitution of acts themselves.
This, too, is how the work of Finks dissertation in fact intertwined directly
with the task that Husserl set him of revising his Bernau studies on temporality
73. See the remarks of Heideggers in the text from MH-GA 29/30, pp. 53334,
mentioned in footnote 3 above.
74. Again, this is the title in its publication in JPpF XI.
75. Titles all in VB/I, pp. ixx and 19.
76. VB/I, 27, p. 66.
77. VB/I, 7, p. 19.
and time-consciousness. Here, too, the completion of the dissertation de-

pended upon Finks seeing his way through the analysis of these two topics,
which would take him to the very foundations of the possibility of phenome-
nology not only as Husserl was practicing it but also as Heidegger was trans-
forming it. As this task grew, the completion of part II of the dissertation
continued as a project still under way.
On Husserls side now, in this same year, 1929, things of another kind were
happening that would soon lead to far closer contact with his young second
assistant. Husserl departed on February 20, 1929, for Paris, where he de-
livered his Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology in German on
February 23 and 25. Fink remained in Freiburg; he was still attending courses
at the university, and Heidegger was in his rst semester of lecturing there.
Husserls lectures in Paris were a great success and a signal honor. In his
opening remarks, Xavier Lon, of the Socit Franaise de Philosophie, one
of the sponsoring groups, lauded Husserl as the most eminent master in
German philosophy. Then, on the way back to Freiburg, Husserl spent
four days in Strasbourg, giving talks and holding discussions. Out of this de-
veloped the idea of translating the Paris lectures into French in an expanded
version; and on his return to Freiburg (on March 12) Husserl immediately
set to work on revising his text for this purpose. Over the next two months
he produced the version that has since become familiar under the title Carte-
sian Meditations, but not without a happy interlude in the midst of his
intense labors.
On April 8, 1929, Husserls seventieth birthday was celebrated in full for-
mality at an assembly in the university, at a private afternoon dinner, and by a
grand party that same evening. At the university gathering Heidegger gave a
long, rather involved address and then handed Husserl a volume of essays
78. See appendix.

79. In the remarks to Fink in MH-GA 29/30, p. 533, Heidegger recounts that at the end
of January 1929 Fink had helped him carry Heideggers desk into his new residence in
Freiburg.
80. Mditations cartsiennes: Introduction la phnomnologie, trans. by Gabrielle
Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas, Bibliothque de la Socit Franaise de Philosophie (Paris:
Armand Colin, 1931), Avertissement, p. v.
81. Op. cit., p. vii.
82. HChr, pp. 34144.
83. See appendix.
84. Ingardens characterization, Erluterungen, BIng, p. 161. The address is trans-
lated in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the
dedicated to him. Visibly moved, Husserl spoke briey and in deep earnest-
ness. One thing I cannot accept, and that is talk about what I deserve. There is
no deserving on my part. Philosophy was the mission of my life. I had to
philosophize, or else I could not live in this world. And, of course, Husserl
was soon back at work, drafting his revision of the Paris lectures.
Fink had surely been present at some of these festivities, the university
assembly above all; but at this point, and on this occasion, he does not seem to
have been part of the special circle that would be expected to share in the
private midday dinner. In fact, soon after Husserls return from France, and
at the end of the 19281929 winter semester, Fink went off to Davos in
Switzerland, where from March 17 to April 6, 1929, was held for the second
time a course of lectures designed to bring together in discussion on neutral
Swiss soil thinkers from France and Germany. (Recall that this was but a
decade after the First World War.) But while this cross-national encounter was
the aim, on this occasion the highlight of the program was in fact the debate
between two Germans, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. It is not clear
whether Fink attended the entire program at Davos, for his notes cover only
Heideggers lectures on Kants Critique of Pure Reason in the task of laying
the foundations for metaphysics, dated March 1727. In any case, Fink
was not in Freiburg for Husserls rst weeks of revision work on his Medita-
tions, but that soon changed. As Husserl neared completion of his revisions
Fink was brought in to help; and hereperhaps for the rst timeFink had
occasion to witness how the old master worked when philosophy was upon
Confrontation with Heidegger (19271931), ed. and trans. by Thomas Sheehan and
Richard E. Palmer, Collected Works VI (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 47577.
85. Festschrift, Edmund Husserl zum 70: Geburtstag gewidmet, Ergnzungsband zum
Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomenologische Forschung (Halle: Max Niemeyer,
1929). Included here, among essays by Husserls son, Gerhart, Roman Ingarden, Alex-
andre Koyr, Edith Stein, and others, is Heideggers contribution, Vom Wesen des
Grundes (pp. 71100).
86. Quoted in BIng, p. 161.
87. Ingarden recounts that those attending were Husserls family and mostly former
students from pre-Freiburg days (ibid.).
88. For an account of this meeting, see Pierre Aubenque, Prsentation, in Ernst
Cassirer, Martin Heidegger: Dbat sur le Kantisme et la Philosophie et autres Textes de
19291931, ed. by Pierre Aubenque, trans. by P. Aubenque, J.-M. Fataud, P. Quillet
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), pp. 716. The German text of the Davos debate is given in
MH-G 3, pp. 27496. Other materials supplementing the debate itself are given both in
Aubenques collection (material by both Heidegger and Cassirer) and in MH-GA 3 (ma-
terial by Heidegger).
89. EFA U-MH-I, pp. 15364 (not in EFM).
him. In a letter to Stephan Strasser shortly after the end of the war, in answer to
some questions Strasser had in connection with his editorial work on the
critical edition of Cartesian Meditations, Fink described Husserls method
of composing conference papers and texts for publication. Husserl wrote the
text in a continuous stretch, without outlining it beforehand and without
keeping an outline in front of him. This was a most astonishing phenomenon
and never ceased to amaze me: he wrote as if in a trance. Fink explains that
Husserls articulation of ideas was so well ordered that the later division into
sections was not all that difcult. This task is what Landgrebe did for Formal
and Transcendental Logic, giving it its sections and their titles, while Fink
provided the same for Cartesian Meditations, as just then revised by Hus-
serl, and later for the Crisis-texts. Of course Husserl always had to give his
approval, Fink adds.
Fink in fact did a little more than just work out a breakdown into sections
and give them titles; Strasser in his editorial explanations alludes to the many
improvements Fink made on the actual text itself. And then the revision was
done! . . . for the moment. Worn out from the work, Husserl left for a holiday
in Italy, instructing Fink, who remained in Freiburg, to send the typescript to
the translators in Strasbourg, which he did on May 17, 1929. Husserl was
content; the Meditations could count as his masterpiece, and he intended to
publish it now, as he wrote to Ingarden from Tremezzo a few days later.
Husserls next letter to Ingarden six months later would say something quite
different.
Husserl may have been on holiday in Tremezzo, and Tremezzo on Lake
Como was a long way from Freiburg; but there was still work to do. The proofs
for Formal and Transcendental Logic needed checking240 pagesand it
took much of Husserls time, not only in Tremezzo but also after his return to
Freiburg (on June 10). But in the midst of it he was able to take a few days to
read something that had been sent him back in May in honor, once again, of his
seventieth birthday: the rst part of a long study being published serially
entitled Life-Philosophy and Phenomenology: A Treatment of Diltheys Ori-
entation via Debate with Heidegger and Husserl, by Georg Misch. Misch had
90. Finks letter to Strasser, November 1, 1946, as the latter was preparing Hua I. See
EFM 4, Abschn. 3. Husserl himself, in a letter to Arnold Metzger (September 4, 1919, Bw
IV, p. 413), mentions writing Ideas I in six weeks, without outline or source material, as
if in a trance.
91. Einleitung, Hua I, p. xxvi, and Anmerkungen, p. 239 (to line 57/3).
92. HChr, p. 347.
93. May 26, 1929, Bw III, 24849.
94. HChr, p. 347f.
been invited to contribute an essay to the festschrift that had been presented to
Husserl at his birthday celebration. Misch very much wanted to do so, in
order to demonstrate from my side too the awareness of community with the
Dilthey circle that the invitation [from phenomenologists] expressed. And the
topic for my contribution was set of its own accord: Remarks on Heideggers
Being and Time, through which this community had become manifest. But
the material Misch was preparing grew far beyond the bounds of the originally
intended essay to become something quite different. What Husserl nally read,
then, in mid-June showed him something he had hitherto not realized: the way
his own position must look in the context of the scintillating philosophical
ascendancy of his successor, Martin Heidegger. The rst part of Mischs book
that Husserl had before him dealt only with Heidegger and Dilthey in conjunc-
tion; the next part to come would continue this treatment, and only in the last
part, yet a year away, would Husserls own position be fully discussed. Only
then would Husserl see in more detail how he himself was being looked upon
by an important part of the philosophical public.
At this point, however, the Heidegger that he saw represented in Mischs
treatment was not the Heidegger that Husserl had thought him to beor,
more accurately, had earnestly wanted him to be. It is no wonder Husserl wrote
to Misch on June 27 that he had read that rst part completely wrapped up in
it and concentrated on it, and todayagain taking a break [from proof-
reading]I have it in front of me. And Ive hardly yet even opened the Fest-
schrift, I dont even know the topics of the essays dedicated to me! A month
later, on July 24, Husserl heard Heidegger deliver the lecture What Is Meta-
physics? that ofcially inaugurated Heideggers position at Freiburg. The
issue could no longer be put off: he simply had to take the time now to study
Heideggers works closely, as he could no longer assume he knew what Hei-
deggers thinking really was. With Formal and Transcendental Logic nally
published at the end of July, Husserl returned to Tremezzo in August for three
weeks, and there, nally, he read Being and Time, carefully, intently, and then,
it appears, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which had just been pub-
95. Georg Misch, Vorwort (June 1930), in Lebensphilosophie und Phnomenologie:

Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl, 3d ed.
(Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1967), p. iii. The work appeared in three parts in Philosoph-
ischen Anzeiger over the course of more than a year: part I (pp. 1102) in the spring of
1929, part II (pp. 10373) later in the same year, and part III (pp. 175323) in late 1930.
96. Letter from June 27, 1929, published in the Nachwort to Lebensphilosophie und
Phnomenologie, p. 327, and in Bw VI, p. 275.
97. Fink was there too, as his one-page notes on this lecture attest: Z-IV 99ab
(EFM 1).
lished, and a copy of which Heidegger had sent him with kind regards.
(Fink had acquired his copy too during the summer.) The state of Husserls
mind when he nished reading them is best seen from his letter later in the year
to Ingarden. Writing him on December 2still in 1929, and but a week before
Finks dissertation defense, with Husserl and Heidegger togetherHusserl
explains, I came to the conclusion that I cannot count the work [Being and
Time] within the framework of my phenomenology, but also that to my regret I
must reject it entirely as to its method and in the essentials of its content. All the
more do I place importance on the full elaboration of the German version of
the Cartesian Meditations into my systematic magnum opus. Hopefully it
will be done by the end of 1930. . . . Here, then, we see not only Husserl
expressing the harsh shock of realization regarding Heidegger but also his
determination to provide a counterweight in something of his own that he
must put before the German public.
Husserl nally realized that instead of a follower, the Heidegger he had set
in place as his successor was an opponent! And an extraordinarily gifted one at
that, whose presence in the philosophic world was overshadowing his own in
the real sense of that word: Heideggers brilliance made Husserls own work
seem somber and dull. Husserl felt that, in a way, he had himself been his own
worst expositor. What he had published so far had not succeeded in represent-
ing the vivid insights that actually drove the phenomenology of his passion-
ately sustained reections. He had to if possible seize the opportunity offered
by the several publication projects then under way to achieve an effective
statement of his real thinking, or his lifes work would slip into disregard and
irrelevancy.
Landgrebe was working on his edition of Husserls studies on logic, for ex-
ample; but this would hardly provide the dramatic, comprehensive statement
98. On this study see HChr, p. 349. Husserls copies of SZ and KB, both in the
Husserl Archives, complimentary copies from Heidegger, carry remarks and markings by
Husserl from his reading. These are included in Psychological and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (19271931), trans. and ed. by
Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997).
99. Dated SS 1929, in the Fink Nachlass.
100. Bw III, p. 254. See also the extraordinarily frank expression of profound dis-
appointment in Husserls letter to Alexander Pfnder a year later, January 6, 1931 (Bw II,
p. 184).
101. That this was indeed a sudden shock of realization is indicated in the fact that,
immediately before this study of Heidegger, Husserl had left intact in the proofs for his
FTL reference to the coming publication (in autumn, he even says!) of the Cartesian
Meditations in their then existing form. Hua XVII, p. 11, note 1. (FTLe, p. 7, note 1.)
that was needed. Ideas I was being translated into English, and perhaps he
could revise that sufciently to overcome some of its limitations. After a try at
it, it became obvious it would take too much work to be done right; he
would have to content himself with an explanatory preface. Yet this at least
gave him a device for making an interim statement about his position to the
German public, the public in whose eyes he had just discovered the waning
appreciation of his phenomenology. So, while he sent his Preface to Boyce
Gibson with a letter to him dated October 23, 1929, he added several para-
graphs to its text for its publication in the next volume of his Jahrbuch. Here
we read the poignant admission by Husserl, in his seventieth year, that in
phenomenology, this science of beginnings, he must count himself nally a
real beginner.
Reading these materials in full we see clearly intermingled in Husserls out-
look a condence in the success of his endeavor and its discoveries, and a sense
of failure in its presentation to othersa conviction regarding unshakable
basic insights, and an uncompromising admission of incompleteness and in-
adequacy in communication. Here, nearing the end of his life and in what
ought to have been the fullness of his career, he must once morestillstand
at a beginning to make the beginnings of his science of origins clear to the
beginners that his audience will still be, and which they must in fact strive to
be. And so he turns to the last remaining project that he has been working
on, the newest one, his meditations after Descartes, and seizes upon it to
make it his chef doeuvre, the statement of statements about what his phenom-
enology is.
This, then, was the juncture at which Husserl began to draw Fink closer into
his own work. Here is where that development and deepening began for what
102. See HChr, p. 350, excerpt from a letter to Boyce Gibson, October 23, 1929 (Bw
VI, p. 135). In more detail, see Karl Schuhmann, III: Der Umarbeitungsversuch von
1929, in Die Dialektik der Phnomenologie II, pp. 16368.
103. Nachwort zu meinem Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomeno-
logischen Philosophie, JPpF XI (1930), pp. 54970 (Hua V, pp. 13865; Ideas II,
pp. 40530).
104. Epilogue, Ideas II, p. 429.
105. Husserls nal words are an admonishment for his reader not to be someone who
is already certain of his philosophy and his philosophical methodsuch as those who
appeal to the fertile bathos of experience in the usual sense, or to the sure results of the
exact sciences, or to experimental or physiological psychology, or to a constantly improv-
ing logic and mathematics. Rather, only someone who is struggling with the beginning
of a philosophy can bring to this book the interest and the effort it would need to be
understood. Epilogue, Ideas II, p. 162 (translation slightly modied).
106. See Husserl to Ingarden, December 2, 1929 (Bw III, p. 254).
Fink, in retrospect after the immensity of a decade of Nazism and war, would
call the most important thing that happened to me intellectually, namely,
the meeting and joining with Edmund Husserl, which, while being the
stroke of good fortune for my inner life, was at the same time political
doom and a menace for outward existence. From October 1929 Husserl
began having Fink more regularly in his home, for work or dinner. By early
January 1930, Fink was coming daily or nearly so. Yet for all the closeness
to Husserl that he was beginning to have, Finks interest in philosophyand
the circumstances of the academic settingrequired him to maintain contact
with Heidegger. Recall, for example, that the defense of Finks dissertation
took place right during this period, on December 13, 1929, in the presence of
Husserl and Heidegger together! Recall, too, that Fink had already nished
two semesters of Heideggers lectures and was in the middle of a third, one that
he deemed particularly signicant. He would in fact continue to follow
Heideggers lectures for at least another three semesters. His work, however,
was with Husserl, and the task at hand was Husserls pressing need to prepare
a comprehensive statement of phenomenology that would dramatically and
clearly present it to the German philosophical and intellectual world. As we
have seen, Husserl was hoping to revise his already once revised Cartesian
Meditations to serve this purpose, and for this task he was now going to
recruit Finks assistance.
At rst Husserl thought that, in order to explain the character of his phe-
nomenology in the context of the ascendant Heideggerian enterprise, he might
add a lengthy introduction to the Cartesian Meditations in their already
revised state, virtually ready for publication. But in the course of working
out topics and points that would be needed for the explanation he envisioned
107. Politische Geschichte meiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn, p. [1]. EFM 4,

Abschn. 4.
108. See the letters by both Edmund and Malvine Husserl to Elisabeth (Elli) Husserl
Rosenberg from October and November 1929 (Bw IX, pp. 370 and 372), as well as from
October 5 and November 5, 1929, but not included in Bw (in the Husserl Archives).
109. Letter from Malvine Husserl to Elli, January 16, 1930 (Bw IX, p. 374). Fink
comes daily, Malvine writes in a note to Elli from January 1, 1930, not in Bw but in the
Husserl Archives.
110. See Heideggers dedication to Fink of the text of his lectures from the WS 1929/
30, as MH-GA 29/30 (p. v).
111. Authors Preface, Ideas I (B-G), p. 30. See Iso Kerns narrative of Husserls work
during the period of his revision of the Cartesianische Meditationen, Hua XV, pp. xvi
lxv. See also Kerns explanation of the differences between the English version and the
German of this text, owing to Husserls rapid shift of plans in 1929 and 1930 (p. xxv, note
3). See also Schuhmann, Die Dialektik der Phnomenologie II, p. 168 and note 70.
he was soon led to believe that more than a mere Introduction was needed;
the Meditations themselves had to be extensively revised. This was behind
the remark to Ingarden, quoted a little earlier, that a wholesale reworking of
his Cartesian Meditations was under way, which he hoped would be ready
by the end of the next year.
Work on a large-scale reworking of the Meditations, however, had to face
interruption by other tasks and obligations. For example, Husserl had to go
over the texts that Ludwig Landgrebe was preparing for what would become
Experience and Judgment. On March 19, 1930, Husserl wrote to Ingarden
explaining that he was hard pressed right then to give the time needed to redo
the Meditations. I saw that I would still need 46 months of work for
what he considered to be the main work of my life, an outline of the philoso-
phy that has come to fruition for me, a fundamental work on methods and on
the problematic of philosophy. In contrast to the little French text, what
was needed for the German public was a more extensive exposition and fur-
ther elaboration right up to the highest metaphysical problematic. And he
added, Im working with full vigor and extreme concentration, [but] I wont
be nished with the book before autumn.
Finally, in this same spring or at the latest in the early summer of 1930
Husserl turned to the further reading of Mischs treatment of life-philosophy
and phenomenology in the conjunction of Dilthey, Heidegger, and himself. As
I mentioned earlier, Husserl had already in May 1929 received the rst part of
Mischs serially appearing work, and he now had the second part as well.
These two parts carried the subtitle A Debate with Heidegger; and what
Husserl now read may well have caused him to change his plans more radi-
cally. For Mischs treatment, even though it did not yet address Husserls
position focally, showed that the misunderstanding and critique of Husserls
phenomenology went farther than Heideggers criticisms and success. Misch
already represented Diltheys philosophy of life as standing in stark contrast to
Husserls philosophy as Misch understood it, not realizing how deeply this
theme of life touched upon matters at the core of Husserls thinking. Misch
emphasized in Diltheys program the theme of living historical movement in
human existence and thought, as against the absence of anything equivalent to
it in what he took to be the strongly logic-centered intellectualism of Husserls
112. Bw III, 262.

113. The last part, only published in November 1930, was termed A Debate with
Heidegger and Husserl. See Husserls letter to Misch on November 16, 1930 (Bw VI,
pp. 28283), and Kerns Einleitung, Hua XV, pp. xliixlviii, for the way Mischs book
affected Husserls thinking at that later date.
works. Equally distressing was Mischs linking of Heideggers analysis of

Dasein with this positive life-valuation in Diltheys position, and therefore
the ascription to Heideggers work of a value beyond Husserls. In view of this
representation Husserl realized he had to provide a far broader apologia of his
philosophy if his thought was to be properly understood, one that would show
his phenomenology to be at grips precisely with what was most deeply and
fundamentally concrete and originative in human life. For this, something
more than the Cartesian Meditations was needed.
It would not be enough, either, simply to produce individual studies of
aspects of human being as they were treated in Husserls transcendental phe-
nomenology. What was needed was a framework, a comprehensive plan in
terms of which the highest principles of phenomenological method and expla-
nation would be systematically linked with the most manifest and preoccupy-
ing features of real existence, so that one could see clearly and rigorously how
these features were given their true and full meaning in terms of the former.
Thus was conceived the monumental project of a wholly new System of
Phenomenological Philosophy, into which Husserl now threw his efforts.
With this a wholly new stage was entered in Husserls work, and with this the
role of Eugen Fink in the economy of Husserls nal period of productivity
emerged in its principal character.
1.3. Fink as Assistant to, Then Collaborator with, Husserl:

19301934
At the end of March 1930, Ludwig Landgrebe reached the end of the
two-year assistantship position that had been given him on Husserls retire-
ment, and it was time for him to prepare his Habilitation. At the same time,
the two-year extension for the second-assistant position held by Fink also
came to an end on the rst of April. Fortunately, however, Husserl learned that
Finks position was going to be supported for another year, so that, as Malvine
Husserl put it, he would not have to go begging around the Notgemeinschaft
and elsewhere to get nancing for his beloved Fink. And support for
114. See appendix.

115. See Kerns indication of the nature and extent of these studies at this time, Ein-
leitung, Hua XV, pp. xxxixxxiii.
116. See Husserls letters from the end of 1930, e.g., to Pfnder from December 6, 1930
(Bw II, pp. 17778), and a pair of letters to Misch himself, November 16 and 27, 1930
(Bw VI, pp. 28284).
117. HChr, page 361.
118. Malvine to Elli Husserl Rosenberg, May 31, 1930 (Bw IX, pp. 37576).
Finks work with Husserl would continue for two years thereafter, all thanks
to the help of a former student of Husserls, Adolf Grimme, who in February
1930 had just been appointed to head the Prussian Ministry of Education.
Sometime in the months between mid-1929 and mid-1930, while Husserl
was trying to overcome interruptions to work on the second stage of revision
for his Cartesian Meditations, Fink had sketched out some ideas on the
development needed in that revision. Of particular interest in these texts is
the way Fink projects two additional Meditations to the work as Husserl
had written it, beyond simply expanding the existing ve. Fink was thinking of
the Meditations in terms of the more comprehensive conception that Hus-
serl himself indicates in the concluding paragraphs (63 and 64) of the same
work, rather than in terms of further investigation into particular items need-
ing to be claried or included in the framework of the existing ve Medita-
tions. (Recall that Fink had introduced the divisions and sections into Hus-
serls rst revision, the revision nished in May 1929, and had given them their
titles.) This would certainly t with the decision Husserl had taken in the
second half of 1929 to expand the Cartesian Meditations into a more com-
prehensive work, and indeed Finks sketches correspond to the description
Husserl gave to Ingarden in March 1930. But not long after, as we have
seen, instead of trying to t a comprehensive plan into the format of his
Sorbonne lectures, Husserl conceived the idea of designing an entirely new
systematic presentation of his phenomenology on the basis of its intrinsic
principle and central dynamic. It must have been in the late spring, then, that
Husserl drew up a brief sketch for what such a new systematic presentation
might be: a study in ve books beginning with egological reection and ending
with the problem of God. And then it was for Fink to esh out this idea.
What Fink produced has been available now since the publication of the
most extensive drafts from his work for Husserl in the 1930s. The rst of
these drafts, written during the early summer on the basis of his now com-
119. See Husserls letters to Grimme from February 1, 1930, January 1931, March 5,
1931, February 3, 1932, and February 4, 1933 (Bw III, pp. 88, 8990, 9293, and 96);
also Malvines letter to E. Rosenberg from May 31, 1930 (Bw IX, pp. 37576).
120. See Z-X 16a18b, 20a, and Z-VI LVI/1a6b, all in EFM 1; also in N-EF, pp. 99
105.
121. See Husserls letter to Ingarden from December 2, 1929 (Bw III, 254), referred to
earlier.
122. See the letter of March 19, 1930 (Bw III, p. 262), referred to earlier.
123. The text of this outline is published in Kern, Einleitung, Hua XV, p. xxxvi,
together with an explanation of its origin and dating (p. xxxv, notes 2 and 3).
124. I.e., VI.CM/12.
prehensive knowledge of Husserls research manuscripts, namely, the Layout

for Edmund Husserls System of Phenomenological Philosophy, was ready
on August 13, 1930, for Husserl to take with him on the long working holiday
planned for Chiavari on the eastern Italian Riviera. There Husserl studied
it, surely discussing it with Fink, who reached Chiavari shortly after Husserls
earlier arrival with Malvine. It is a remarkable document, both for its scope
and in its detail, especially in comparison with Husserls conception in his
much briefer sketch for the same System. Indeed, the agreements and differ-
ences between the two conceptions is one of the main themes of the chapters to
follow here, agreements and differences that can in fact already be seen in the
document following this Layout in the same volume, Finks Draft for the
opening section of an Introduction to Phenomenology. Fink produced this
120-page typescript after his and Husserls return from Chiavari on Novem-
ber 4, 1930.
The sojourn in Chiavari itself turned out to be a disaster for Husserl. Before
the rst month was out, he had contracted bronchitis and was virtually inca-
pacitated for the rest of his stay. Fink had to work more or less alone, on their
joint projects as well as on his own research tasks, and his notes from these
months are rich and provocative. Fink was not at all working as someone
with a mind slavishly subordinated to the rubrics inscribed in Husserls own
texts; rather, he ranged freely and creatively in critique of Husserls standard
formulations in the interest of advancing his program. Husserl, for his part,
was only able fully to return to work after arriving back in Freiburg, but
125. VI.CM/2, pp. 39. See Malvine Husserls letter to her son-in-law, Jakob Rosen-
berg, July 28, 1930, describing Husserls work aim for the trip, and Finks role in it (Bw
IX, p. 382).
126. Husserl writes to Cairns from Chiavari, September 23, 1930: Im working with
my rst-rate assistant, Dr. Fink, on a new systematic outline of transcendental phenome-
nology (the problematic reaching all the way to ethico-religious, to the metaphysical
problems). Hopefully it will appear in 1931. (Bw IV, p. 25.) (Husserls more recently
found postcard addressed to Fink in Konstanz and dated September 2, Bw IV, p. 90,
corrects the entry in HChr, p. 367, stating that Husserl and Fink had traveled together to
Chiavari.)
127. VI.CM/2, pp. 10105. Entitled On the Beginning of Philosophy, the draft is of
section I of the projected book I: The Stages of Pure Phenomenology. Husserls annota-
tions are included in full.
128. One packet of Finks notes in Chiavari, Z-VII XVII/132 (EFM 1), is especially
rich. There are notes on the proposed large systematic work (Z-VII XVII/10a11b, 26a,
32b), on the continuation of Finks dissertation (Z-VII XVII/1a2b, 5a, 7a, 24ab), and,
correspondingly, on the phenomenological analysis of temporality (Z-VII XVII/4ab, 8a,
12a, 14a, 15ab, 18a, 29a, 30ab).
indications are that he had pretty well adopted the overall plan of Finks
Layout. In the middle of the weeks of Finks work on his typescript (his
Draft for the opening section, December 1930 and January 1931) Husserl
revealed his positive disposition toward Finks plan in a letter to Ingarden
written on December 21. A brief description of the systematic work on fun-
damentals in phenomenology shows him following the conception that Fink
provided him; and he adds, My most talented Fink is the vigilant helper in
this, without him I would be lost. What we see here, in addition to in-
dication of the programs and products of intellectual labors, is testimony to
the central role Fink was lling in the dynamics of Husserls nal work in
phenomenology. It is testimony that appears throughout Husserls correspon-
dence from now on, and we shall be following it as we give an account of
the concrete situation it relates to. In subsequent chapters we shall begin to
see more fully the substantive reason for this extraordinary trust, namely,
that Fink was attempting to elaborate within Husserls phenomenology the
special system-conscious self-critique and reinterpretation that Husserls own
work continually called for but had not yet explicitly and comprehensively
carried out.
Over the months from the spring of 1930 to the spring of 1931 Husserl pro-
duced a rich variety of Forschungsmanuskripten on such topics as the world of
human life and history, the owing live present as having ultimate consti-
tutive function, and nally the problem of intersubjectivity, which, in con-
trast to the treatment in his Cartesian Meditations, was analyzed here as
having a primordiality with the reecting monadic I. One context for
these studies was, as we have seen, the philosophic situation that turned Hus-
serl to the idea of the new comprehensive systematic presentation of phenome-
nology; but this was not the only task that he and Fink were laboring over. An-
other important undertaking was the still continuing rst assignment Fink had
received from Husserl, to bring the 19171918 Bernau time-consciousness
studies to coherent and intelligible form. Here we have to make clear one
feature of the context of work during this period that had a tremendous effect
on Husserls own productivity but has never been fully appreciated. Husserl
may have been a philosopher whose native thinking moved as the unfolding of
129. Bw III, pp. 269 and 270. The description in question is on pp. 6364. Kern draws
particular attention to the signicance of this description (Einleitung, Hua XV, p. xli).
130. Cf. Kern Einleitung, Hua XV, pp. xlivxlv, and especially the long listing of
MSS titles in note 1 on p. xlv.
131. Hua XV, p. xlvi and note 2.
132. Hua XV, p. xlviii, and especially the long text quoted on pp. xlviiil. See also
Husserls remark to Metzger quoted at the head of chapter 2 here.
some idea or insight held powerfully before his mind rather than in the active
exchange of dialogue with someone else, but nevertheless his reections were
also always sensitive to other philosophical currents, and he regularly derived
important stimulus from the thoughts of others. Discussions with colleagues,
for example, were a regular part of Husserls regimen, despite the reputed
monologue character of his dialogue. As Fink now began to do more for
Husserl, he also began to do more with Husserl, not in the sense of becoming a
second pole in a single thinking but rather as a second thinking in a single
program. Husserl discovered that Fink was a genuinely distinct other who
could focus on the same topic that he, Husserl, was investigating but could
see it differently and in this way offer an alternative, a complementarity, and
a critique that Husserl would have to take into account and think about.
The work of 1930 and after was marked by daily discussions between Husserl
and Fink, often on the regular walks in the Lorettoberg parkland near Hus-
serls home, and offhand remarking on it was a frequent feature in the family
correspondence.
Thus, for example, regarding again the matter of Husserls analyses of time-
consciousness, Finks working on the Bernau manuscripts was not something
done in isolation from Husserl. In a note from quite a bit later in his life Fink
refers to the many daily conversations with Husserland disputes tooin
which he presented the difculties he was having. What Husserl wanted
Fink to do was to produce not simply an edition of the work that lay histor-
ically now a dozen years in the past but rather a systematic investigation that
would begin on the basis of the Bernau MSS. And Husserl, closely following
the development of this investigation as it proceeded over the years, also
contributed key ideas. Here we have the ongoing motivation for Husserls
taking up again the question of time and producing a new set of manuscripts,
called the C group, which constitute a more radical stage of inquiry into the
whole issue.
133. A typical picture is that presented by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Philosophical

Apprenticeships, trans. by Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985),
p. 36.
134. See appendix.
135. Fnf lse Bltter 2ab, EFM 2.
136. Fnf lse Bltter 1a.
137. See Finks Bericht ber die Transkription der Nachlassmanuskripte Husserls,
vom 2. Dezember 1939, EFM 4, Absch. 4. On the C-manuscripts, see Klaus Held,
Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des Transzendentalen Ich bei Ed-
mund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik, Phaenomenologica 23 (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
It is the overall character of this situation, however, that we have to take

note of. On the one hand, there is the stimulus that Finks participation in
almost daily conversation with Husserl had upon Husserl, stimulus that went
beyond the problematic of time to move through the whole range of Husserls
phenomenological research. On the other hand, there is the fact that this
stimulus did not merely follow the contingency-driven shifts of interest on
either Husserls or Finks part; there was a program-driven pattern to it. The
frequent occurrence of the word system or systematic in reference to the work
that Fink was doing for and with Husserl was neither an accident nor a vague,
high-sounding descriptive term. What is pivotal about Finks 1930 Layout
for Edmund Husserls System of Phenomenological Philosophy is not sim-
ply that it covered the whole of Husserls phenomenology but that it was
organized by a conception of the special system-dynamic that was at work in
Husserls phenomenology. What this system-dynamic consisted of is one of
the main things to detail in the present study. At this stage, however, we can
say this: It is not enough to recognize the inuence of Husserl upon Fink as
unquestionable and profoundafter all, Fink learned phenomenology from
Husserl. Beyond that, if Finks work with Husserl was a matter of helping to
develop a dimension essential to the very program of phenomenology itself,
then Fink worked an intrinsic inuence upon Husserl in return. Succinctly put,
while Fink is clearly not intelligible without Husserl, reciprocally, in the last
decade of his work, Husserlthat is, Husserls phenomenologyis not expli-
cable without Fink. And this is the import, in Husserls correspondence from
1930 on, of his extraordinary testimony regarding the place Fink had in his
regimen of thinking.
As 1930 turned into 1931, it became apparent to Husserl that the scope of
work required by his desire to work out a System of Phenomenological Phi-
losophy would impose heavy demands. On February 16, 1931, he wrote to
Ingarden: Im working furiously. [But] unfortunately the new work will not
be ready for Jahrbuch XI, despite the breathless efforts of the whole last
year. . . . Im putting into the Jahrbuch the Cartesian Meditations (expanded
by Fink and if need be by myself) and the Bernau manuscripts on time, which
Fink by himself has already made into a unied text (rather a lot). Here, in
telling Ingarden that even while working on the new work he will get the
Cartesian Meditations out anyway, Husserl realizes he is faced with a di-
lemma. On the one hand, what was really needed, and what his own rich
138. Bw III, p. 273. Ingardens discussion of the situation regarding the Bernau time-
MSS in his note 52 to this letter (BIng, pp. 16773, in particular pp. 17173) are helpful
to the reader, who otherwise has little information available.
investigations really led to, was something broader in conception than the
Meditations; but to bring this projectembodied in the systematic plan
Fink had worked out for him in 1930to satisfactory completion was an
enormous task. There were serious grounds for doubt that it could actually be
done, given the demands it would place upon Husserl, especially in view of his
agehe was now in his seventy-second yearand the illnesses to which he
seemed too often to fall prey. On the other hand, the Cartesian Meditations
was a work that was basically nished and thus far closer to readiness for
publication. But if that book was to be brought up to the systematic level and
comprehensiveness of Husserls new realizations, it would need extensive re-
working; and the effort at reworking in turn would reveal the basic limitations
under which the overall conception of the Meditations suffered.
For the next three years Husserl tried to nd a way through this dilemma by
in effect choosing both horns, with now one, now the other more prominent in
his concerns; and the way to choose both was to have Fink do the major
part of revision for one of them. So it was that in early 1931, as indicated in the
passage from the letter to Ingarden just quoted, Fink was to work on revising
the Cartesian Meditations, with Husserl himself joining in directly at dif-
ferent times, and with the two of them talking everything over as the work
advanced. Yet before 1931 was out, Husserl would change his mind twice
over, taking on the Meditations himself and then returning them again to
Fink. The problem, of course, lay not in a lack of constancy of objective but
rather in achieving the best means to realize it. Again, it is in his letters that
Husserls awareness of his situation comes out most clearly, such as in one to
his oldest and closest friend, Gustav Albrecht, on December 29, 1930:
So this entire year Ive thought and thought, written and written, keeping
always before my eyes these times inimical to me, the younger generation
deluded by the collapse, how by what I would say I might make them gain the
ears that hear and the eyes that see. What is tragic in the situation is that,
while Im absolutely certain that in the last decade Ive brought my phenome-
nological philosophy to a maturity, to clarity and purity, to a breadth of
problems and methods encompassed that traces out the genuine meaning and
necessary path for philosophy for all the future, a new generation has come on
the scene that misinterprets the deepest sense in the fragments Ive published
and the incomplete beginnings Ive made, that propagates a supposedly im-
proved phenomenology and reveres me as the old dad who has now been left
behind. So I am once again alone philosophically, the way I was when I began;
and yet how fullled, how sure the future is! In the last year, in minute
139. For an account of the back-and-forth movement on Husserls part, see Kern,
Einleitung, Hua XV, pp. llxv. See also Translators Introduction, CM6, pp. xvff.
reections, in the most careful nal fashioning and lling out, everything has
been shiningly conrmed, but I am still not nished with the preparations, I
still have some difculties facing me, and especially what is now the hardest of
all, systematic presentation.
In this last remark we see one of the cardinal difculties for Husserl, namely,
the consolidation and integration of his mature phenomenology into a system-
atic presentationand one of the things that pertained directly to Finks role
in this period. Husserls manner of working was to pursue his detailed inves-
tigations in preparation for the blaze of synthesizing creativity by which in one
sustained drive he composed all his full-length writings. It was needed now,
given the complexity and scope it would have to have in the present instance,
but it was not coming.
The picture of Husserls working situation during these years comes to vivid
expression in another letter to Albrecht, from December 22, 1931. The issue, he
writes, is how to manage the immense labor of the consolidation of his pro-
lic manuscript studies. And he goes on to characterize the kind of achievement
that was just then in the making: There is really a whole philosophical system
that has emerged, but one of a wholly new meaning and style, precisely the sys-
tem of the method and problematic of an absolute science, one that is abso-
lutely grounded and directed to the Absolute, not the speculative construction
of a mystical Absolute but rather of that which from out of ourselves in the phe-
nomenological reduction is to be known as absolute and as primordial ground
of all that for us is existent. Isolated Husserl may feel himself to be, he writes,
and wholly severed from my students; but he is not working alone. The
greatest debt of gratitude I owe to my young collaborator, Fink. An incredibly
gifted man: without the daily discussions with him I could not carry out what I
want to do. When my memory wanes, his youth helps me, he has a command of
every turn taken by the many branches of my phenomenological expositions
(an untold number, so to speak, of microscopic cross- and longitudinal sections
and slides), and in conversation with him I often get the best ideas, suddenly I
see the long-sought connections, the intrinsic order in which everything ts
together beautifully. The systematic work on basics on which Im working will
be ready, if all goes well, by the end of 1932. Husserl hopes that with the
ordering of all the material in his mind the needed rush of inspiration like that
which produced Formal and Transcendental Logic and Ideas I will come of its
own. And so he has given the Cartesian Meditations over to Fink entirely, to
expand into the version that is needed for the German public.
140. Bw IX, pp. 7576.

141. See p. 21 above.
142. The two quotes and all the points are from this letter, Bw IX, pp. 7980.
This is not just the picture of a man working, it is also the picture of the
theoretical task he is straining to accomplish, in which someone elses help has
been indispensable. It turns out, too, that the description Husserl gives of this
task in the rst lines quoted here is virtually the formula for the ideas that Fink
was working out in his personal notes (as we shall see); and, again, the system-
conscious character by virtue of which everything takes on new and different
meaning is in the forefront. Finks central, even irreplaceable role in the project
at hand is unmistakable.
This same picture of joint work in the program of Husserls nal years
shows as well in a letter Husserl had written earlier, on March 5, 1931, to
Adolf Grimme in the Prussian Ministry of Education, expressing his deep
gratitude for Grimmes help in assuring another year of support for Finks
work with him. Husserl explains that without that help he would have no
hope of bringing the main results of his life-long philosophic effort to achieve-
ment in literary expression, for the largest and I believe the most important
part of my lifes work still lies in my manuscripts, hardly manageable because
of their quantity. It is Fink now who has a command of the whole breadth
and depth of phenomenological philosophy in all its complex difculties; for
he has studied all my sketches and drafts and now works under my direc-
tion. This crucial reliance upon Fink is in evidence as well in the writings
Fink was just then producing: the revisions of Husserls Meditations that
Fink wrote in the summer of 1931, and the fuller set done in the summer of
1932, all included in the two volumes of VI. Cartesianische Meditation.
The latter set in particular is an impressive achievement, more than three
hundred pages of text as printed in the two-volume edition, done in the six
months ending on October 21. The end result was to have been a joint publica-
tion: Husserls original Meditations together with Finks revisions, includ-
ing the new Sixth Meditation. (What is not clear is whether Finks revisions
would actually have replaced the affected portions of Husserls text, or would
be added as supplementary alternatives.)
These were the years, too, when Dorion Cairns spent the many months in
143. Bw III, p. 90. That Husserls real philosophic work lay in his manuscripts is
expressed already in 1922 to Paul Natorp. Husserl adds even then the idea that perhaps
he was working only for my Nachlass (letter of February 1, 1922, Bw V, pp. 15152).
144. On the elaboration of these two sets of revision texts, see Translators Introduc-
tion, CM6, pp. xv, xviixxi, and xxxvlix.
145. Both possibilities are allowed by indications in the texts themselves. For example,
they are termed both drafts for refashioning E. Husserls Mditations Cartsiennes,
and supplements to Edmund Husserls Mditations Cartsiennes. (Cf. VI.CM/2,
Textkritische Anmerkungen, p. 305.) One may suppose that a denitive formula was
never settled upon, since Husserl never nally brought them to actual publication.
Freiburg that are chronicled in his Conversations with Husserl and Fink (C-
HF), and which are so rich in representation of the workaday world of Hus-
serls and Finks philosophizing. Cairnss last entry is from November 15,
1932, in what would soon prove to have been near the last days of a philo-
sophic idyll. As the end of the year approached and passed, and 1933 began,
Husserl was deep in his reading of Finks Cartesian Meditation revisions.
This reading was serving very much as a philosophic tonic against the depres-
sion that had been induced earlier in 1932 by the long months of effort with-
out visible resolution in the form of publication-ready composition so ear-
nestly desired. It was particularly Finks Sixth Meditation that Husserl
returned to again and again. In fact, on Finks account the Sixth Medi-
tation was originally conceived to serve as well as a Habilitationschrift, pre-
sumably not in its garb as the sixth part of Husserls Cartesian Meditations
but as an independent piece under its substantive title, The Idea of a Tran-
scendental Theory of Method. Apparently early in 1933 Fink made at least
the informal approaches at the university to prepare the way for his Habilita-
tion, with not only Husserls approval but also his recommendation that he do
so. Larger events, however, were taking place just at that point, the effect of
which put Finks whole future in jeopardy. The Habilitationsschrift, essen-
tially ready by the end of 1932this was none other than the Sixth
Meditation became absolutely unacceptable, as Fink explains in one of his
later autobiographical statements. With the National Socialist upheaval of
1933 all hope was quickly brought to an end for me. A Habilitation was out of
the question so long as work with the philosopher proscribed because of his
Jewish origin, and therefore work that was deemed a political scandal, was not
broken off. This he would not do, though the offer was repeatedly made. I
always felt it a mark of distinction that I was given to know the fatherly
friendship of the aged philosopher and by remaining faithful to him to miti-
gate the bitterness of an old age lived in ostracism.
146. Cf. Kern, Einleitung, Hua XV, pp. lxlxii. Again, it is in letters to Albrecht from
the period that are so revealing.
147. See Translators Introduction, CM6, pp. xviixx.
148. The principle document for establishing this is Finks letter to Husserls son,
Gerhart, written on October 25, 1946 (in the Fink Nachlass), after the war, when Fink
nally succeeded in taking the Habilitation. See 10.2.
149. From Finks Lebenslauf from August 2, 1945, given in EFM 4, Abschn. 4,
appended to the Lebenslauf from December 18, 1945. No concurring documents
pertaining to Finks attempt to take the Habilitation are to be found in UAFbg. Either his
effort was only informal before being rejected, or whatever documentation may have
resulted is elsewhere.
So it was that Husserls retirement years were subjected to a second up-

heaval that carried Fink with it: the accession of Adolf Hitler to power and the
transformation of Germany into a National Socialist state. Within a scant few
months this upheaval would compound with the rst that Husserl had experi-
enced, his disappointment with Heidegger as pursuing a philosophic path
radically opposed to his own; for now Heidegger, his successor, would become
the agent, indeed the leader, of the National Socialist transformation of the
University of Freiburg.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler had been named chancellor of Germany. Then
came two months of furious consolidation on the part of the National Social-
ists: the Reichstag re on February 27, the election of March 5, following
which Hitler managed to patch together a majority of supporters in the Na-
tional Assembly, and, following that, the passage on March 24 of the Enabling
Act, by which Hitler via his cabinet could enact laws simply by declaring them.
The black, red, and gold ag of the Republic of Germany was now replaced by
the former black, white, and red banner of the old empire, recongured to
accommodate the swastika of the Nazis.
The change that all this effected can be dramatically chronicled in two
events. One week before Hitler was named chancellor, on January 23, Husserl
had celebrated the golden anniversary of his doctorate, with a delegation from
the university, the Rektor and deans, personally bringing the expression of
congratulations from the institution. Two and a half months later, on
April 14, Husserl received notice from the activist Nazi state governor and
party chief (Gauleiter) of Baden, Robert Wagner (one of Hitlers oldest and
most faithful followers), that Husserl, as a non-Aryan, was being for-
mally dismissed from the university. Wagners decree anticipated by one day
the national Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, of April 7, to the
effect that ofcials of non-Aryan descent are to be retired (art. 3, 1).
Wagners action, however, did not allow for the exceptions that the national
law allowed, namely, that it not apply to ofcials who have been in service
since August 1, 1914, or who fought in the World War at the front for the
150. HChr, p. 424.

151. Though born into a liberal Jewish family, Husserl converted to Protestantism
when he was 27, and lived as a Protestant the rest of his life. Cf. HChr, pp. 1 and 15.
152. HChr, p. 428. For a brief account of this whole episode, see Hugo Ott, Edmund
Husserl und die Universitt Freiburg, in Edmund Husserl und die phnomenologische
Bewegung: Zeugnisse in Text und Bild, ed. by Hans Rainer Sepp (Freiburg: Karl Alber,
1988), pp. 99100.
153. For the text of this decree, cf. Louis L. Snyder, ed., Hitlers Third Reich: A
Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981), pp. 11112.
German Reich or its allies, or whose fathers or sons fell in the War (art. 3,
2). As a result, the action affecting Husserl was rescinded on July 20, 1933,
on the grounds of the rst condition specied, Husserls having been in un-
broken service since August 1, 1914. Coldly, no mention was made of the fact
that Husserls eldest son, Wolfgang, had been killed in battle at Verdun in
March 1916. (Ironically, in the middle of all this, beginning already in late
February and nally reaching Husserl in early April, the long bureaucratic
process was under way to convey to him, via the German consulate in Paris,
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, and the Rektorat at the university in
Freiburg, a commemorative medal from the Acadmie des Sciences Morales et
Politiques in Paris, of which Husserl had been named a corresponding member
only the year beforethe rst German to be so honored since the war.)
Although the effect of the national Law for the Restoration of the Civil
Service did not apply to Husserl, it certainly did affect him, not to mention the
fact that it applied fully to his son, Gerhart, who had held a teaching position
in Kiel. Despite its exemptions, the decree meant indeed that those who were
not Aryan were no longer to be considered German; and the exemptions
would last but two years, until the Nuremburg Laws of September 15 and
November 14, 1935. No one could mistake the intent of Nazi governmental
policy. As he said to his friend, Albrecht, writing him at the beginning of July,
Husserl felt the temporarily suspended dismissal as the greatest insult of his
life, one he could scarcely get over. His whole household had been engaged in
the First World War in the cause of the German nation: two sons in the army
and his daughter serving as a nurse. And now he was to be denied his German
identity because of the policy of setting in opposition Germany and non-
Aryans. Yet that had not been all. On April 22 Heidegger had been chosen
Rektor of the university and had begun his public involvement in Nazi poli-
cies, as was signaled by his highly publicized entry into the party on May 1, the
Day of National Labor. Then on May 10 came the evening of the burning of
154. Ibid.
155. Notication to the Senate of the University of Freiburg from the Ministry of
Education in Karlsruhe (Nr. A.18814), copy in the Personalakten: E. Husserl, UAFbg.
156. HChr, pp. 413 and 428, and copies of the relevant documents from February 24
and April 3, 1933, in the Personalakten for Husserl in UAFbg. The letter to Husserl from
the Rektor of the University of Freiburg, April 3, 1933, conveying the award is given in
Bw VIII, p. 197. On the impact of Husserls election to the Acadmie des Sciences Mo-
rales et Politiques, as a sign that the French Academy nally wants to make peace with
the Germans, see the joint letter to Albrecht from Edmund and Malvine Husserl,
July 31, 1932, Bw IX, p. 87.
157. Letter to Albrecht, July 1, 1933, Bw IX, p. 92.
books in university cities around Germany, although rainy weather in Frei-

burg apparently discouraged it there. Finally Heideggers Rektors Ad-
dress of May 27 left little doubt that his idea of the university was conceived
in at least apparent harmony with Hitlers design for the political order,
namely, as an almost military-style regime of unied subservience under a
supreme leader who would embody the self-realization of the whole people.
Indeed, following the process of coordination (Gleichschaltung) by which
public institutions were to be brought into conformity with Nazi policy, a new
university constitution would take effect on August 21, in accord with Heideg-
gers hope to make Freiburg a model university for the nation. And shortly
after, on October 1, Heidegger himself, as Rektor, would ofcially be named
Fhrer of the university.
We need not speculate what Husserls feelings during all this might have
been; he tells us. In a letter of May 4, 1933, to Dietrich Mahnke, a former
student of his teaching at Marburg, Husserl describes the depression he cannot
prevent in view of these political developments, and then writes:
Finally, in my old age, I had to experience something I had not deemed possi-
ble: the erection of a spiritual ghetto, into which I and my truly worthy and
high-minded children (together with all their issue) are to be driven. By a state
law to take effect hereafter and forevermore, we are no longer to have the
right to call ourselves Germans, the work of our intellects [Geisteswerke]
is no longer to be included in German cultural history [Geistesgeschichte].
They are to live from now on solely branded as Jewish . . . as a poison
that German minds [Geister] are to protect themselves from, that has to be
extirpated.
I have had much that was difcult to overcome in my long, perhaps all too
long life . . . ; but here it touches my philosophical development, which for me,
in my uncertainty, in my unclarity, was a struggle over the life and death of the
mind [um geistiges Leben und geistigen Tod].
And in the course of talking about the way his students and followers simply
do not reach an understanding of what he himself is doing, and therefore only
158. Cf. MH-Ott/e, p. 189. Ott briey discusses the contradictions in the evidence for a
book burning in Freiburg. Another account of the incident atly states that it was an-
nounced but did not take place on May 10. It was then planned for June but was pre-
vented by rain. See Ernst Otto Brunsche, Werner Khler, Hans-Peter Lux, Thomas
Schnabel, 1933, Machtergreifung in Freiburg und Sdbaden, Stadt und Geschichte, Neue
Reihe des Stadtarchivs Freiburg i. Br., Heft 4 (Freiburg: Karl Schillinger, 1983), p. 49.
159. Cf. MH-Ott/e, pp. 19499. The old German university exists no more, from
now on it has a political meaning, writes Husserl to Ingarden, October 11, 1933 (Bw
III, p. 291).
partially offset his growing isolation, Husserl speaks of the effect Heideggers
role in all this was having upon him as the last and the worst in this whole
situation of the bleakest kind of personal experience, the worst because I had
put my trust not only on his ability but on his characterwhich I still just
cannot understand. Husserl describes the spiraling vortex of his disappoint-
ment with Heidegger, his breaking-off relationship with me soon after tak-
ing up the chair of philosophy as Husserls successor, his anti-Semitism
even toward those among Jewish students and in the faculty who were so
enraptured by himthe distortion of the radical fundamental scientic
meaning of my lifes work into its opposite, devaluing it as something com-
pletely pass which it was superuous to study any more, and lastly the
grand nale ending this would-be friendship, Heideggers demonstrative
entrance into the National Socialist Party on May 1. What these last months
and weeks brought struck the deepest roots of my being.
The only hope for relief at this point was for Husserl to get away, which he
did, spending most of the summer on the Schluchsee up in the Black Forest, for
rest and recovery. On July 1 he wrote to Albrecht that perhaps the high air,
the country solitude will help, away from other people who would only talk
again and again about the same things, which is totally pointless. As it
turned out, the weeks in the mountains were the most fruitful period of work
for Husserl that whole year.
It was Finks fate that the event of greatest good fortune in his young philo-
sophic life, his coming into association with Husserl, would be as well his
greatest misfortune, as he himself had put it. Yet his fate depended upon a
choice that he himself had to make: to stay with Husserl and forego the
possibility of a university careeror even of having a source of incomeor to
break with Husserl and leave what he saw as the only certain possibility of
doing genuine philosophic thinking. The events of the early months of 1933
were proof of the consequences of staying with Husserl. Just at the point
where Hitler was coming into power, Husserl had received assurance that the
160. Bw III, pp. 49193, any emphasis Husserls. To this extraordinarily revealing
letter of Husserls, Mahnkes reply itself is also extremely interesting in the optimism he
expressed that the racist policies coming into effect would not last, even on Hitlers part
(letter to Husserl from September 4, 1933, Bw III, p. 506). On Husserls sense of himself
as quintessentially German and as bringing historical German intellectual achievement to
a culmination, see Schuhmanns Einfhrung, Bw X, pp. 923.
161. Bw IX, p. 94.
162. Husserls letter to Albrecht, December 30, 1933, Bw IX, p. 97.
163. See above, p. 25, reference to the opening of his Politische Geschichte (EFM 4,
Absch. 4).
annual support for the assistantship Fink held was being renewed; but
within a short time that action was nullied. On May 20 Husserl wrote to
Cairns that support had been withdrawn and he could keep Fink only a few
months more. The anxiety this caused, together with the frustrations of the
difcult work in Husserls manuscripts, is reected in a letter Husserl wrote to
Finkone of only two extanton March 6, trying in the most solicitous and
kindly terms to encourage the young man to persevere and to be more open
with him, Husserl, about the difculties he was having. As a result, in July
Fink submitted a request to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft,
the same organization that had earlier supported Landgrebe, for a research
fellowship to work on the time-manuscript project. At this point Fink con-
ceived of the work as comprising two parts: part I the Bernau texts of 1917
1918 themselves, and part II the new material Husserl had produced on tem-
porality since his retirement (i.e., the C-group manuscripts). It was the second
set of materials that determined the direction the work must take now, for in
going beyond what the Bernau texts had done these later materials required an
understanding that explicitly pertained to and encompassed the whole of phe-
nomenology. Once again we nd the leitmotiv of the Husserl-Fink collabora-
tive effort sounded, the need for systematic and methodological consider-
ations, as Fink explains to the Notgemeinschaft what has to be done. What is
needed, writes Fink, is major comprehensive labor on the one hand to bring
the substantive content of published materials [i.e., as represented in the time-
consciousness lectures published in 1928] up to the level of Husserls present
philosophy . . . and then to work the phenomenology of time . . . into the whole
of the system of phenomenological philosophy and thus to give it the method-
ological transparency it needs. Two months later Fink learned that the
fellowship would be granted, but it had to be regarded as far from guaranteed.
Funds for it might not be available, and it was conditional upon there being no
other help received!
Husserl and Fink had no doubt that other options were going to be needed.
The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, had been approached for possible
164. Letter to Adolf Grimme, February 4, 1933, Bw III, p. 96.

165. Bw IV, p. 32.
166. Bw IV, pp. 9092.
167. Letter to eine Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft dated July 17,
1933, and the research plan that accompanied it, in EFM 2, Abschn.3.
168. Finks note of thanks to the Notgemeinschaft is dated October 5, 1933 (copy in
the Fink Nachlass, mentioned in EFM 2, Abschn. 3). See also Malvines portion of a letter
to Felix Kaufmann, August 19, 1933, Bw IX, p. 195, as well as Husserls letter to Kauf-
mann, October 15, 1933, Bw IV, pp. 19899.
assistance, and that would become more necessary in another years time; and
there was discussion about help from England. At the same time, while the
immediate concern was for nancial means to keep Fink going, a much more
radical solution to the intensifying difculties of the situation presented itself.
Husserl had received the offer of a position in the United States, at the Univer-
sity of California at Los Angeles! He would think long and hard about this,
and he would want to take Fink with him; but in the end he decided against it.
How could he, Edmund Husserl, after seven and a half decades of life in
German-speaking lands, in German thought and letters, in German ways and
expectations, how could he possibly live in any meaningful way in southern
California what would certainly be the last few years of his life, especially as he
could not speak English? And Fink was not especially inclined to go. Yet
would not America be better? What was left for them here in the rapidly ever
more Nazied life of Freiburg? In the end it was in great part for want of
fullling one of Husserls conditions, namely, that Dorion Cairns be given an
appointment as well so as to be able to work with him, that the negotiations
came to nothing.
What, indeed, could Fink expect now? Landgrebe, then working on his own
Habilitation, was less tied to Husserl in his daily work, having taken options
available in the German-speaking academic setting in Central Europe. He
moved to Prague in 1933 to nish his Habilitation under the Brentano scholar
Oskar Kraus at the German-language university there. Might Fink do the
same? On the other hand, what if he stayed in Freiburg? Fink himself was not
Jewish. His family was of Alemannic stock there in southern Germany and
169. See the letter from Malvine Husserl to Felix Kaufmann, October 21, 1933 (Bw IV,
p. 200), and Husserls letter to Albrecht, December 30, 1933 (Bw IX, p. 98). The Rocke-
feller Foundation would reject the request (see Husserls letter to Rudolf Pannwitz,
November 28/29, 1934, Bw VII, p. 222).
170. See Husserls letters to Cairns, November 15, 1933 (Bw IV, p. 33), and Albrecht,
December 9, 1933 (Bw IX, p. 96). See also the correspondence with UCLA in Bw VIII,
pp. 23132.
171. See appendix.
172. See Husserls letter to Cairns, May 18, 1934, Bw IV, p. 43.
173. See H. L. Van Breda, Laudatio fr Ludwig Landgrebe und Eugen Fink, in
Phnomenologie Heute: Festschrift fr Ludwig Landgrebe, ed. Walter Biemel, Phaenom-
enologica 51 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 2. Also Henri Declve, Patocka et
les signes du temps, tudes phnomnologiques, 1 (1985), 19. Already two years earlier
Husserl remarked that there were difculties at Freiburg for Landgrebe to get support for
his Habilitation work, one reason being that Heidegger favored the circle of his own
people, not wanting to be hemmed in by Husserl students (letter to Mahnke, January 8,
1931, Bw III, p. 475).
corresponded to what for the Nazis was pure. He could have left Husserl,
he might have pursued the normal steps of a career by proposing to take the
Habilitation, say, with Heidegger. There are no reections of Finks that speak
directly of this situation in his research notes from the period. Astonishingly,
the working writings of both Husserl and FinkHusserls research manu-
scripts and Finks folders of notes, in both cases written on whatever kind of
paper would come to hand say virtually nothing directly about the dif-
culties and problems of their practical lives. Yet one can detect the mark of
those difculties and problems in the lines of their philosophic thinking once
one knows what those difculties were. In the present context, for example,
one can see from the notes that Fink had indeed contemplated an alternative
Habilitationsschrift, presumably given the impossibility of using the Idea of
a Transcendental Theory of Method, the Sixth Meditation. There are
sketches and notes for a more independent study of his own on the concept of
the world, specically, the world as a totality and the consciousness of the
world, a study meant to be precisely the kind of composition required for the
Habilitation. Perhaps he hoped the political situation would be ameliorated
and he was anticipating alternate actions that might be possible should the
Nazis fall, although, far from giving signs of anything like that, the situation
was getting worse. On the other hand, the concept of the world was certainly
one that might be acceptable to Heidegger. Apart from Finks commitment to
Husserl, therefore, was there any reason to think he might contemplate work-
ing for the Habilitation under Heidegger?
Given the situation in 1933 and 1934, everything points to the conclusion
that the idea of taking the Habilitation with Heidegger at that time would not
have been feasible for Fink, despite the fact that for him, contrary to Husserls
view, Heideggers work, philosophically considered, was of fundamental im-
portance. There is, rst of all, the deep wound Fink saw Husserl receive
from his total disappointment with Heidegger. All Finks actions during and
174. Finks mothers family even came from the same village from which Heideggers
mother came, as Heidegger himself points out in the remarks honoring Fink published in
MH-GA 29/30, p. 533.
175. There is, for example, the slip of paper illustrating the results of a dental examina-
tion on Malvines teeth (F II 7/163), which Husserl used in writing down ideas for his
19221923 Kaizo article (Hua XXVII, pp. 5994); or the coffee-house receipt and table
napkin Fink used for Z-II 28 and Z-XI 64 (EFM 1 and Bd. 2, respectively). (I am indebted
to Hans Rainer Sepp for showing me the example of Husserls economizing.)
176. See EFM 2, Z-XIV II/1b and Z-XV 105a, and EFM 3, Z-XX 1a and 3b, and OH-
II 48.
177. See appendix.
after his years with Husserl indicate that personal devotion was an extraor-
dinarily strong factor, an absolute even, despite whatever philosophical differ-
ences between Husserl and himself would, and did, emerge. Secondly, Finks
notes for treating the concept of world indicate an independent framework,
one that rests upon a phenomenological problematic but follows neither Hus-
serls nor Heideggers way of raising the question. Both are unambiguously
drawn upon, but it is Kant who is most pronounced in Finks framing of his
study. (See 4.4.4.) Finally, there is the concretely played-out scene orchestrated
by Heidegger in 1933 and 1934 that stood in direct conict with Finks idea
and practice of philosophy. To begin with, the conception of intellectual regi-
mentation that Heideggers rst months as Rektor attempted to promote
could only have been repugnant to Fink. Then the experiment of the science
camp at Todtnauberg that Heidegger in the fall of 1933 organized in para-
military style after the Fhrerprinzip, clearly on National Socialist lines,
stood in appalling contrast to the intense, autonomous passionateness of the
pursuit of philosophy that was daily life with Husserl, however much there
were strains in it. Added to this was the effect upon life in Freiburg that
months of brownshirt agitation and bullying were producing, which Heideg-
ger, following his conception of how the intellectual pursuit of a university
should be concretely reoriented, seemed only to support by the numerous
declarations and addresses he gave as Rektor. There is little doubt that Fink
saw the only place in which it would be possible to do philosophy was with
Husserl. And with Husserl he stayed, to the end.
To return to the matter of Finks rst effort at the Habilitation, we have seen
how the Sixth Meditation was intended to serve as the required major
research composition. Whether it could do this in the form in which it was
written in 1932, namely, as the sixth of a series of Meditations mainly by
Husserl but revised by Fink with no further components, is not certain. What
is clear is that in the course of 1933 Fink composed an alternate form of
presentation for most of the ideas that had been laid out in the Sixth Medita-
tion, namely, the long article that carried the title The Phenomenological
Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism (EH-Ke) and
178. See MH-Ott/e, pp. 22434.

179. A remark of Husserls in a letter to Albrecht, May 19, 1934 (Bw IX, p. 100), is
telling here: [Fink] is an exceptional person, and he doesnt even want to take the
Habilitation (in his intractable desire for independence he of course cannot be a cipher in
a mass) in order to be able to live entirely for phenomenology, for the completion of my
manuscripts. Just how much or in what way Fink in fact wanted to work for the
completion of Husserls MSS is another question. Sections 10.2 and 10.3 also take up the
issue. See the discussion in Translators Introduction, CM6, pp. xxiiiff.
was published in Kant-Studien around the end of 1933. There are clear indica-
tions that neither this essay nor the Sixth Meditation was in the form in
which Fink rst sketched out main ideas to be incorporated into each; these we
nd in sketches for a treatment of The Phenomenological Philosophy of
Edmund Husserl in the fall of 1931, that is, after his rst try at revisions for
Husserls Cartesian Meditations. In any case, the recomposition that re-
sulted in this Kant-Studien article seems to have been part of another plan in
the ever-evolving situation, and something no one noticed before Finks re-
search notes came to light to show what had been intended.
The article as published carries a Roman numeral I just before the text
begins, indicating that what was appearing was only the rst part; but there is
no II, and hence no second part, further in the article. The second part was
obviously to come next. This is the way it was understood by Husserls former
student and colleague, Dietrich Mahnke, professor of philosophy at Marburg;
for he asked Fink precisely about this point in a letter to him on January 13,
1934. Beyond this, however, there are explicit indications in Finks notes
from 1933 regarding a sequel, which was to bear the specic title Life-
Philosophy and Phenomenology: The Phenomenological Philosophy of Ed-
mund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism II. It seems, then, that as part
of the recomposition that resulted in the Kant-Studien essay of 1933 and in
place of pursuing the Habilitation with the Sixth Meditation, Fink had
conceived a plan for confronting a range of interpretations criticizing Hus-
serls work beyond those addressed in the rst part; and, indeed, Husserls
distress at the treatment of his thought in relation to life-philosophy a little
earlier makes this perfectly intelligible. While unfortunately no such essay was
in fact completed, Finks notes give many sketches of ideas for treating the
themes of this sequel; and these will be taken up in chapter 6.
In any case, in the spring of 1933 Husserl read through the essay Fink had
recomposed as part I and wrote a brief foreword to it for its publication in
Kant-Studien, the closing lines of which are an extraordinary public subscrip-
tion to Finks treatment: At the request of the distinguished editorship of
Kant-Studien I have carefully gone through this essay, and I am happy to be
180. This may in fact be the original essay form of material that was rewritten at
Husserls request to serve as part of the German edition of the Cartesian Meditations,
as Fink speaks of it in the Prefatory Note to the Sixth Meditation (CM6e, p. 2;
VI.CM/1, p. 184). For a fuller discussion of the textual situation, see the detailed footnote
to Z-IX VII/1a in EFM 2.
181. VI.CM/2, Texts Nos. 12.
182. Letter in the Fink Nachlass.
183. Z-XI 25b (EFM 2).
able to say that there is no statement in it that I do not make fully my own, that
I could not explicitly acknowledge as my own conviction. In the context of
the events of 1933, this has to be seen as a remarkable statement on Husserls
part. A member of a class of persons that had now been declared undesirable
in, or, more accurately, inimical to, the kind of life that Germany was being
driven to adopt with astonishing efciency and relentlessness, Husserl clearly
wanted to authenticate Fink (and by implication, as everyone well knew, not
Heidegger) as a spokesmanif not the spokesmanfor phenomenology, and
he was doing so out of thorough familiarity with the thinking of Finks that
went into the article in question. He wanted to support Finks voice as equiv-
alent to his own, an action certain to reinforce the ofcial disrepute in which
Fink already stood because of his close association with Husserl. Fink in fact
knew well what Husserl was doing in writing the foreword; among his notes
from the period there is a scrap of paper with two brief paragraphs that are
obviously a draft for this very thing; but Finks brief statement is far less
assertive and unconditional than the one Husserl himself provided, and
Fink himself later recounted his surprise at Husserls forceful endorsement.
Finks decision to stay with Husserl, knowing the consequences, and Husserls
profound appreciation of it, are well indicated by this incident. This is any-
thing but doing philosophy in a vacuum.
The article for Kant-Studien was supposed to appear in 1933, but there was
a problem. For one of the major philosophical journals in Germany to publish
an article on non-Aryan thinking was a scandal. Kant-Studien was under-
going Gleichschaltung, the coordination that was turning all intellectual
institutions into entities in harmony with Nazi policies; and the appearance of
Finks article was being delayed. Indeed, though the article nally appeared
at the end of 1933, there seemed no possibility for getting the sequel to it
accepted by Kant-Studien, and it was never written. Moreover, on Finks ac-
count that one article created further difculty for him, as we shall shortly see.
But Fink did not stop identifying himself with Husserl. In 1934 he published
184. Vorwort von Edmund Husserl, dated June, 1933, Kantstudien, 38 (1933), 320
(Studien, p. viii). In a letter to Ingarden on December 13, 1933, Husserl says the same
thing much more succinctly: Watch for the new issue of Kantstudien with Dr. Finks
articleeverything just as if I had said it. (Bw III, p. 294.)
185. Z-XI 48a, dated May 27, 1933 (EFM 2).
186. According to Herbert Spiegelberg, Fink later spoke of his amazement at Husserls
acceptance of the article, seeming to miss the critical intent it carried. The remark from
Spiegelbergs Scrapbook is to be added in a revised edition of HChr (to p. 430, for June
1933, 1st edition).
187. See Finks Politische Geschichte, p. [3] (EFM 4, Abschn. 4).
188. See Husserls letter to Cairns, November 15, 1933 (Bw IV, pp. 3334).
another essay on Husserl, What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Hus-

serl Want to Do? copies of which, together with the article from Kant-
Studien, Fink sent off to various former students and associates of Husserls.
Finally, in 1935 he presented a paper entitled The Idea of Transcendental
Philosophy in Kant and in Phenomenology to the Kant Societywhose of-
cial organ was Kant-Studienin Dessau (on December 4) and in Bernberg (on
December 5). This paper, however, did not get published, nor did any-
thing else by Fink until after Husserls death and Finks own emigration from
Germany.
Finks behavior did not endear him to public ofcials, although there were
some for whom the philosophical value of his work with Husserl weighed
more heavily than governmentally enjoined racism. For instance, in 1934 Fink
applied again to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft for a re-
newal of the fellowship that had supported him for the preceding year and was
coming to an end on September 30. Once again he was requesting assistance to
complete the work on the study of time in Husserls phenomenology, again the
second stage of the task, the elaboration of the investigations beyond Husserls
Bernau manuscripts. Quite apart from the philosophically important expla-
nation Fink gives of the way in which further development of the inquiry
initially launched in Husserls manuscript studies has to be done, what is
signicant in the context of the social and political order that now ruled in
Germany is the fact that Fink uncompromisingly identies the project pre-
cisely as one carrying out the program of Husserls phenomenology. Surpris-
ingly, on October 8, 1934, a reply was written to Fink by the Notgemein-
schaft, awarding him the fellowship for another six months, while explicitly
excluding the possibility of further renewal and with the provision that it
could be repealed at any time. Nevertheless, it appears the fellowship re-
newal was in fact not actually implemented. Owing to the scandal caused by
Finks publications on Husserl, the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissen-
schaft . . . received the order to stop all payment immediately.
189. Was Will die Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls? (Die phnomenologische

Grundlegungsidee), rst published in Die Tatwelt, 10 (1934), 1532, reprinted in Stu-
dien, pp. 15778, English translation by Arthur Grugan in Research in Phenomenology,
2 (1972), 527.
190. See appendix.
191. Die Idee der Transcendentalphilosophie bei Kant und in der Phnomenologie,
published posthumously in ND, pp. 744.
192. Letter to the Notgemeinschaft, July 22, 1934, EFM 2, Absch. 3.
193. Also in EFM 2, Abschn. 3.
194. Politische Geschichte, p. [3] (EFM 4, Abschn. 4). See also Husserls letter to
Pannwitz, November 2829, 1934 (Bw VII, p. 222).
Support from this governmental agency, however, as was mentioned before,

was not the only option that Husserl and Fink had pursued to garner the funds
needed for Fink to continue. Obviously because the Notgemeinschaft had now
undergone coordination, renewal of the fellowship was not to be expected.
As October began Husserl had enough to keep Fink going for another three-
quarters of a year, thanks to some savings they had managed to put aside and
because a former Japanese student, Tomo Otaka, had made some funds avail-
able to them. In addition, Husserl had some expectation of getting help
from the Rockefeller Foundation, should the Notgemeinschaft refuse the re-
quest; and in 1935 the Cercle Linguistique de Prague, which at this point
was involved in the idea of setting up a research archive for Husserls manu-
scripts (to be discussed shortly), contributed support for a one-year period.
Fink spoke of support from the Moses Mendelssohn Society for the years 1933
to 1935, from the London School of Economics for 1936 to 1937, and, nally,
from America in 1938. The American support was a grant from the family
of a young American, Dorothy Ott, who had come to study with Husserl in
1936. Fink had given Ott a tutorial on Formale und transzendentale Logik
from November 1936 to February 1937, and she in fact was writing a disserta-
tion. The dissertation, on the problem of evidence, was never nished,
owing to the young womans untimely death in November 1937 during a
tourist visit to Istanbul.
The ease of recounting all this belies the fact that these arrangements were
not done easily, nor did the living of their hours in the adversity of the times
ow for Husserl and Fink as smoothly and integrally as does water over rocks,
unhindered in its movement. They were people whom those who ruled the
195. Thus Husserls letter to Albrecht, October 7, 1934, Bw IX, p. 105. Husserl men-
tions this also in his letter to Fink from July 21, 1934 (Bw IV, p. 94), again in an effort to
overcome Finks discouragement and anxieties (see immediately below). (In this letter,
too, Husserl recommends that Fink apply to the Notgemeinschaft, the date of this letter
being one day prior to the date on Finks 1934 application letter to the Notgemeinschaft.)
Otakas monetary gifts are also mentioned in Husserls letter to Ingarden, July 10, 1935
(Bw III, p. 303).
196. Letter of Husserls to Albrecht, December 30, 1933, Bw IX, p. 98.
197. Malvine Husserl to Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg, March 24, 1935, Bw IX, p. 452.
198. See appendix.
199. See Z-XXII (EFM 3). Not included in EFM is the copy, kept with it, of the
preliminary draft of Dorothy Otts dissertation under the title Das Problem der Evidenz
in der phnomenologischen Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Earlier that fall Fink had led
study sessions on Aristotles Metaphysics for Ott and one of Finks own close friends,
Alfred Riemensperger. The notes are in Z-XXI, in EFM 3.
public mind wanted to remove or suppress, and uncertainty and anxiety were
the emotions of the hour when these philosophers would return from the grip
of a thought or a discovery to the question of how they as human beings could
keep preoccupations alive. It is no wonder, too, that in this context the human
limitations specic to each would show, marring their work to a greater extent
perhaps than might otherwise have happened.
Husserl saw in Fink the fulllment of his own hopes and ambitions that
phenomenology could and would be completed just as he, Husserl, under-
stood it and fostered it. Fink found in Husserl the model of the philosopher,
but not someone who had the answer to all philosophic questions. Husserl
was a man near the end of his days, convinced of his program and habituated
to his pioneering. Fink was someone whose philosophizing awaited its fulll-
ing project, one that would have to be his own and not committed to a xed,
inherited task. So it was, for example, that, just as in 1933, in mid-1934
Husserl would again have to urge Fink to relax his anxieties and perseverein
this case, to push through to completion at least one task to which he had
committed himself and which had been under way for some time now, namely,
the analysis of time in phenomenology.
In the second of the two extant letters by Husserl to Fink, written on July 21,
1934, Husserl argues that the fact Fink has still not nished is not a tragedy,
and that he should feel freer to represent his difculties to Husserl. He urges
Fink to join him in Kappel, in the Black Forest, where he is spending the
summer, to relax and reinvigorate himself, and to hold again with Husserl the
philosophic conversations that by now have become a need for me in order to
keep regularly going. And Husserl goes on to say: You have been for years
now no longer my assistant, you are not my secretary, not my intellectual
servant. You are my collaborator, and, in addition, my seminar, my teacher-
ship [Lehrttigkeit]. It was Fink himself that Husserl wanted to see, not the
work Fink was doing on the manuscripts. I would not even have been in a
position to read it. In the meantime I have become convinced that work on my
old manuscripts to improve them is very important, but that I must totally
relinquish systematic elaborations. It will therefore be the difcult and, hope-
fully, fruitful work that prepares things for you (if youre still going to be
taking over my Nachlass). Husserl had research tasks on specic issues to do,
rather than take on integration and synthesis; and even if he did produce some
further material on time, it was not as a part of the book Fink was working on
but as material for Fink to treat as he saw t. That Husserl did further work on
time, of course, only complicated Finks task; Fink had to take such further
200. This and subsequent lines in this paragraph are from Bw IV, pp. 9394.
work into account, for reasons that we shall see later, namely, that the reso-
lution of ultimate issues involved in time was radically problematic. Still,
Husserl tried to assure Fink that putting it all together, synthetically, inter-
pretivelyeven critically, we may presumewas Finks work, and Husserl
would stay away from it; he would only read it through after the nished
product was in print.
There are many remarkable things about this letter of Husserls to Fink, but
in particular there is Husserls clear awareness of the character of his manu-
scripts and what was lacking in them even when individually worked over and
improved, namely, integrating elaboration in systematic form. This task is
what those who come after him must do; and it is what he explicitly envisages
for Fink. The distinction between the manuscripts and the philosophic treat-
ment to be made out of them is a crucial for reading and interpreting these vast
materials of Husserls, in which, as he would say, the largest and, as I also
believe, the most important part of my lifes work still lies. Husserls limit-
ing of his energies represents an important shift in his thinking; he seems to be
giving up on producing a comprehensive systematic statement of his phenom-
enology himself. Yet within a months time the impulse will be set in motion
for Husserl to do precisely what he thought he was no longer capable of: pro-
duce one more, nal, systematic presentation of phenomenology. But before
we see that, one further point in this letter must be commented on: the repre-
sentation it gives about Finks place in Husserls regimen of philosophizing.
In the rst place, Husserls extraordinary testimony to Fink himself about
Finks position with himcollaborator, not secretaryhas to be under-
stood in its full context. It represents both a specic description and praise.
For example, in one of Finks biographical notices, from August 2, 1945, he
writes: Already in 1932 Husserl had converted the assistant relationship to
one of collaborator, in recognition of the independent and productive work I
was doing in the elaboration and in part redoing of his manuscripts. The
terms assistant (Assistent) and coworker or collaborator (Mitarbeiter) are
technical terms for a position in the academic hierarchy of assignments and
work. Although they are sometimes used more or less interchangeably, they
201. Again from Husserls letter to Fink, July 21, 1934 (Bw IV, pp. 9394). A year later
(July 10, 1935) Husserl would remark to Ingarden that unfortunately I cannot join him
in fashioning the literary presentation of the study on time, which in Finks plan in-
cluded historical-critical treatments. (Bw III, p. 303; BIng, p. 94.)
202. Husserls letter to Grimme from March 5, 1931, Bw III, p. 90.
203. EFM 4, Abschn. 4, supplement from this Lebenslauf given with the Lebens-
lauf of December 18, 1945.
regularly designate different levels of ofcial capacity. Beyond this, however,

the second term can be taken as more straightforwardly descriptive, indicating
true independence and responsibility, that is, genuine collaboration. This is the
sense primarily in force here. The sense of parity in respect to philosophic
engagement with the issues at hand that Husserl and Fink felt characterized
their work in phenomenology is consistently expressed by Husserl in his letters
after the rst years of Finks service.
For example, in March 1933, again in the early months of the upheaval
in Germany, Husserl wrote to another gure in his vast correspondence, Fa-
ther Daniel Feuling, describing how Fink for ve years now had been in
almost daily contact with me. All the sketches and drafts (old and new) and
horizons of my thinking I have talked through with him, and we think to-
gether: we are like two communicating vessels. He has been trained to take
over my vast Nachlass and get it into nished literary shape. Husserl men-
tions Finks attending Heideggers lectures, but Fink, though Heideggers stu-
dent academically, was so never in a philosophical sense. And Husserl goes
even further: What Dr. Fink, and only he, says, therefore, is absolutely au-
thentic, and when . . . he speaks of the stages of development of phenomenol-
ogy, that has unconditional precedence over everything that my earlier lis-
teners are able to sayexcellent thinkers as they have become, but now going
their own ways, and so sincere critics (as dear old friends). The image of
two communicating vessels, compelling as it is, represents the relation-
ship in the philosophic dimension of the activity of Husserl and Fink; it cannot
be taken to mean the mores of behavior one would have seen when visiting the
two, the mores of behavior expected between a professor of Husserls stand-
ing, on the one hand, and a young doctorate holder who had not yet done the
Habilitation, on the other. The limitations on liberties or familiarities either
man could take in manner of address, in conventions of respect and deference,
would not be overcome by their sense of genuinely mutual contribution and
intellectual exchange, despite the fact that these were the center of their life.
Nor did the equality in question mean that Husserls position as originator and
principal researcher of phenomenology was ever challenged. It meant some-
thing else, which can be seen from other characterizations by Husserl of Finks
204. See appendix.

205. Curiously the phrase two communicating vessels [zwei kommunizierende Ge-
fe] is reminiscent of the title of a book by Andr Breton, Les vases communicants,
published in 1932. There does not appear to have been a German translation at the time
of Husserls letter to Feuling.
role: that Fink was the resonance Husserl needed in order to continue his
work, that, far from being a mere mouthpiece, he was an incompara-
bly intense cothinker.
Fink, in turn, describes his philosophical relationship with Husserl in con-
cordant terms. From an initial stage of subordinate assistant activity, it
had become one of independent productive cooperation, and then nally a
unique intellectual symbiosis. But, once again, it was not that Fink had
acquired the role of a co-originator of phenomenology but was rather a
cothinker of it in this advanced stage of critical reconsideration, reformula-
tion, and deepening. Fink writes: Husserl, far from training me to be for him
a march-in-step disciple, valued my work with him above all for its strongly
critical tendency. During the years together Husserl acknowledged my intel-
lectual independence precisely by always seeking my productive contradiction
and my criticism, which he needed as a stimulus to bring his creative thinking
to objective realization. During this period of some of the most extraordinary
of Husserls manuscript studies, when Husserl sought to bring in the harvest
of his long life of investigation, I acted, as it were, as an intellectual catalyst for
him.
There was, however, a negative side to this, a serious limitation inversely
related, as it were, to the impressive talent for which Husserl valued Fink so
highly. Fink displayed what Husserl took to be an unsteadiness and difdence
in working at his tasks, reected not only in the two letters from him to Fink
that have already been cited but also in the following remark to Albrecht, from
a letter written on October 7, 1934: Fink is extraordinary as a collaborator,
useless as an assistant, and labile in his psychological structure. This is where
there is deep and serious worry. On him depends the future of phenome-
nologynamely, he is the only one who has an exhaustive knowledge of my
manuscripts, who can really understand and work them out, and doing that
means having not just a schoolboys mind but one that productively thinks
with you, that lls in gaps and understands how a development is going,
etc. Malvine Husserl too found Fink to be at times unreliable and listless,
especially in the immediate aftermath of Husserls death, and much can be
206. See Husserls letter to Felix Kaufmann, September 11, 1933, Bw IV, p. 197.
Husserl recommends to Kaufmann Finks Kantstudien article and the then still antici-
pated book about time.
207. See appendix.
208. Letter to Felix Kaufmann, October 29, 1931 (Bw IV, p. 184).
209. Finks expressions in his Politische Geschichte, p. [1] (EFM 4, Abschn. 4).
210. Politische Geschichte, p. [2].
211. Bw IX, p. 105.
attributed to that circumstance. On the other hand, psychological traits are

not automatic mechanisms that univocally override all else; they have their
working within the experiences and perceptions that a person has about the
things that ll his or her life. In Finks case (as indeed with Husserl and Heideg-
ger and countless others) the pervasiveness of philosophy in his life was not
only a context but also a motivation. How he acted in working with Husserl
should be expected to be very much a function of how he viewed the issues of
importance to phenomenology, what they were and how they might be re-
solved. In other words, the limitations in Finks behavior as Husserl saw them
would not have been simply psychological; philosophical matters mattered as
much. As the present study progresses, then, we shall be focusing on this
philosophical side of the problems Fink had, and Husserl had with Fink,
perhaps thus making Finks behavior during these Husserl years more under-
standable even in its limitations.
Finally, one has to see Husserls view of his relationship to Fink in the
context of Husserls overall longing to have fellowship and collaboration in his
dedication to the philosophy he had founded and developed. A word that
Husserl used frequently for this earnestly desired goal was cophilosophize
(sumfilosofein), and it is one he used in his warm and hopeful letters to
Heidegger in those early years in Freiburg when he saw in the young Dozent
someone who could join with him in the noble task. Heidegger, as we have
seen, turned out not to fulll Husserls hopes, and Husserl transferred them to
Fink: in Fink Husserl felt he had found the associate he had long wanted. The
question of whether his hopes were fullled this time or not is one that can
only be answered at the end of the present study, but before then some com-
parison can be made. For example, one of the points Husserl mentions regard-
ing Heidegger is that, while Husserl laid out to Heidegger as fully as possible
his projects and ideas, and thereby felt that Heidegger grasped his intent and
was joined with him in the effort, Heidegger himself regarding the formation
of his own ideas was quite vague or silent. A similar complaint of Husserls
212. Malvines letter to her daughter, Elisabeth, March 24, 1935, comparing Fink to
Landgrebe (Bw IX, p. 453). Her letter to Gerhart, June 3, 1938 (in the Husserl Archives,
but not in Bw), is quite severethough, once again, the effect of Husserls death on
everyone certainly must be a mitigating element in assessing the way both Fink and
Malvine Husserl acted then.
213. Letters to Heidegger from January 30 and March 28, 1918, Bw IV, pp. 129 and
130. See MH-Ott/e, pp. 1025. See also Husserls usage of the termfrom Aristotles
Nichomachean Ethics (IX, 12 1172a5)with Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, and Hel-
mut Khn (Bw IV, pp. 187, 483, and 239).
214. Husserls letter to Pfnder, January 6, 1931, Bw II, p. 181.
regarding Fink seems to be indicated in his two letters to Fink (from mid-1933
and mid-1934), already mentioned. In Finks case, however, this was not a
general silence on Finks part about his own ideas but rather a reticence to
admit to Husserl the difculties that were preventing the work under way
from being nished (although it must be pointed out that Fink was having
fundamental theoretical problems here, as we shall see in chapter 5). Pruden-
tial reticence there may have been on Finks part, but the predominantly one-
way communication that Husserl felt in the case of Heidegger was not at all
typical of Finks place with Husserl, as one can see in Cairnss Conversations
as well as in Husserls many remarks in his correspondence, not to mention the
telling collection of materials Fink laid before Husserl from 1930 to 1932 (i.e.,
VI.CM/12).
Husserl knew well a vast amount of what Fink was himself thinking and
doing, and the overlapping of Finks work with his own formed the very
ground on which their collaboration was carried out. Yet perhaps Fink did not
tell Husserl absolutely everything, and how much of his own mind lay beyond
the areas in which his thinking and Husserls overlapped will be seen as the
present study develops. In the end, too, Husserls desire led him to believe that
more identity in form and denition obtained between his own thinking and
that of his assistants than was ever actually realized, in Heideggers case with-
out an adequate basis in reality, in Finks case with considerable justication,
but not perhaps in regard to the full extent of Finks challenging radicality. The
question, however, remains this: Did Finks differences with Husserl stand in
relation to particularities in the thinking of Husserl the individual human, or
in relation to the phenomenology that Husserls individual human thinking
had launched, that is, more precisely, this phenomenologys constitutive dy-
namic? And could following that constitutive dynamic mean the necessity of
recognizing some limitations in a particular humans achievements in phe-
nomenological thinking, even if that individual was Husserl himself, the
founder of phenomenology? Surely in the end this is a possibility allowed by
the radicality to which the human individuals Husserl and Fink were dedi-
cated, surely this possibility lay at the heart of their work together during these
years. This in fact is what we shall nd to have been working itself out, as
manifested in the conjunction of written materials that these two, Husserl and
Fink, left behind from their work together.
1.4. The Final Breakthrough: 19341937

We must pick up the narrative again and cover the nal years of work on
Husserls part and Finks contribution to it. By 1934, despite several years of
effort, Husserl did not yet have the statement of his phenomenology that he
felt was needed in that time of continual disappointment and upheaval. All he
had to offer concretely was the most recent nished statement of his thought,
the 1929 revision of his Cartesian Meditations, supplemented by a set of im-
provements and additions by Fink (complete except for those for the Fifth
Meditation), plus Finks fully new Sixth Meditation. Even so, this at least
was something Husserl could share with the circle of philosophical colleagues
with whom he kept in extensive contact through correspondence. So, for
example, in Vienna Alfred Schtz and Felix Kaufmann, both dedicated fol-
lowers of his work, read the 1929 revision and Finks Sixth Meditation,
while Ingarden in Lwow (Lvov), then part of Poland, studied the French trans-
lation together with Finks Kant-Studien article; Husserl even offered Ingarden
a copy of the German version if he needed it. In Prague Landgrebe kept in
continual contact with Husserl, and Patocka came when he could to keep up
on Husserls and Finks work, as, for example, during the Christmas holidays
of 1934. Students who camefrom beyond Germanys borders, of course
to study with Husserl were set to reading these Cartesian Meditations,
which Husserl now viewed more as a learners textbook than as a denitive
statement of his phenomenology. Finally, the arrival of Gaston Berger in
Freiburg to visit Husserl in mid-August 1934 also brought the Meditations
texts to the fore. This was the rst time Berger and Husserl (and Fink) had
met, and Husserl was quite impressed. Berger also struck a sympathetic
note with Fink, because he returned to Marseille with Finks own carbon copy
of the Sixth Meditationfor some reason with the exception of the last
section, 12. (It was subsequently via Bergers possession of this copy that var-
ious French philosophers were able to read Finks text, in particular Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Tran-Duc-Thao. One of the aims of this book is to
provide the basis for the so far untold account of the character and extent of
215. Letter of October 11, 1933, Bw III, p. 291. The complex story of the movement of
these texts to Vienna and of the copies made there of the 1929 revision is detailed by Guy
van Kerckhoven in two notes in his unpublished Vorwort to VI.CM/12 (note 3 to
p. viii, and note 31 to p. xiv). See also van Kerckhovens Mundanisierung und Individua-
tion, pp. 2013.
216. See his letters to Ingarden, November 2 and 20, 1933, Bw III, p. 292.
217. Berger had written to Fink in connection with an offprint of an article that Fink
had sent him, Was Will die Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls? Berger wanted to
discuss with Fink positions and solutions taken by phenomenology on certain problems
in the theory of knowledge. At the same time, he asked if it were possible to meet with
Husserl. (Letter from June 25, 1934, in the Fink Nachlass). Soon after Berger wrote a
brief review of Finks article in Les tudes philosophiques, 8 (1934), 4445.
218. See his letter to Albrecht, October 7, 1934 (Bw IX, pp. 1056).
219. See appendix.
the inuence that Finks treatment of transcendental phenomenology had

upon the French interpretation of Husserlespecially in its focus on the nal
period work.)
For Husserl, having only these Cartesian Meditations to show others was
an unsatisfactory situation. Not only were they inadequate as they stood, they
were still not available to the public in their original German. The still urgent
necessity to bring out a statement of Husserls position that would be faithful
to the true deeper insights of his thinking in both comprehensiveness and
concreteness, and in that way would be effective in the context of the times,
had not yet been met. In a time of revolution when turmoil becomes the
normal thing, as Husserl describes it, he had to get on with his lifes
workand he was now seventy-ve years old. But getting on with his work
now meant mainly preparing his Nachlass for the future. Already in the latter
part of 1933 this had become the matter of principal importance. The
project of producing a systematic work on time was entirely in Finks hands,
even if the latest manuscripts Husserl had produced in connection with it
would have to be taken into account. Husserl hoped to see this material ready
in the next year, but progress was extremely slow, and Husserl had repeatedly
to write in the course of 1934 that it was still not ready. As the months
passed both the state of affairs in Germany and Husserls age and frequent
inrmity could not but make the fate of his massive and ever-increasing collec-
tion of manuscripts the main concern. By October 1934 discussions were
under way and steps were being taken to establish an archive somewhere to
ensure the survival and study of Husserls manuscripts. But simultaneously
with all this there nally came the breakthrough in Husserls own thinking, the
breakthrough to a way to prepare a comprehensive statement of the sort he
had been hoping for, one that, to some extent at least, would reect the critical
consolidation of his phenomenology that had been under way in the turbulent
years since his retirement. These two interconnected developments lead di-
rectly to the situation in which phenomenology would nd itself after Hus-
serls death and, later still, after the fall of the Nazi Reich.
At the beginning of August, Husserl received an invitation to contribute an
address to the International Philosophical Congress being held in Prague from
220. See the nal paragraphs of 10.3, and note 70 there.

221. Letter to Albrecht, May 19, 1934, Bw IX, pp. 1001.
222. See his letters to Ingarden, October 11 and November 2, 1933, Bw III, pp. 291
and 292.
223. Letters to Cairns, May 18, 1934, Bw IV, p. 43, and to Albrecht, October 7, 1934,
Bw IX, p. 105.
224. See Husserls letter to Albrecht, October 7, 1934, Bw IX, p. 105.
September 2 to 7, under the general heading the problem of the crisis of

democracy. Husserl, receiving an invitation to contribute a paper by mail,
was asked to address the question of the present task of philosophy. This he
did, sending it with a letter summarizing his thoughts and dated August 30,
1934. Because of difculties with his paperrst with regard to numerous
typing mistakes, and then out of dissatisfaction with its contentsHusserl
very soon after withdrew it; but his letter was apparently read at the meeting
and then published in the proceedings. One of the results of the congress was
the founding by a number of Czech philosophers of the Cercle Philosophique
de Prague pour Recherches de lEntendement Humain, with Jan Patocka as
Czech secretary (jointly with a German secretary). Patocka had been an
increasingly devoted follower of Husserls and had kept in contact with him
ever since hearing him for the rst time at the Paris lectures of February 1929;
and he had seen the paper Husserl had sent to the Prague congress. Indeed,
Patocka had been the one whom Husserl had asked to get the paper back to
him without its being presented there.
One of the rst tasks that the new Prague Cercle Philosophique thought it
could take on was to help preserve and make available materials from Hus-
serls vast manuscript studies. One of the founders, Professor J. B. Kozak, who
was also a member of the Czech parliament, managed to get some modest
government funding for the project. Finally, the idea was conceived to invite
Husserl to Prague at some point, both to lecture and to work out the arrange-
ments. Before that invitation would come in another years time, however,
Patocka spent several weeks with Husserl at Christmas 1934, and in March
1935 Landgrebe journeyed to Freiburg to work for three weeks with Fink in
the ordering of all Husserls manuscript materials. Landgrebe would have
225. See Patocka, Erinnerungen an Husserl, in Die Welt des Menschen, p. xiii, and
his brief account of what the meeting was like, especially on the interweaving of philo-
sophical battles with the defense of free expression.
226. See the account in Hua XXVII, pp. xxvxxix, together with Husserls letter to the
congress and the paper he sent. Fink drew up a proposal for Husserls address, Z-XIX
IV/12ab (EFM 3).
227. See Declve, Patocka et les signes du temps, tudes phnomnologiques, 1
(1985), 20; and Patocka, Erinnerungen, pp. xiiixiv.
228. See Husserls letter to Albrecht, December 29, 1934, Bw IX, p. 113.
229. See HChr, p. 458, for a rsum of the documentary indications of Landgrebes
visit and purpose. It was during the three weeks of their work on Husserls MSS that
Finks notes on conversations with Landgrebe in Z-XIX (EFM 3) were made. To be kept
in mind is that almost twenty years earlier Edith Stein had already put a large portion of
Husserls MSS into an organized system, during her year and a half of work for him as his
assistant. See Marbachs brief discussion in Hua XXIII, p. 601.
to return for a few weeks in January and February 1936 for the completion of
the task, and their organization of the collection is the one still followed at
Louvain. In addition, it was decided to take a whole set of manuscripts to
Prague for the purpose of transcribing and publishing them there, under the
direction of Landgrebe.
In the meantime, Husserl was working over the paper he had meant for the
International Congress, slowly turning it into a new approach to his phenome-
nology. And the occasions for presenting the realizations he was reaching were
about to materialize. In that same March of 1935 Husserl received an invita-
tion from the Wiener Kulturband to present a paper, and on May 7 he would
do so. In May, too, Husserl was elected to honorary membership in the Cercle
Philosophique de Prague, but the Prague visit, rst expected in May as well,
had to be postponed because of the conict with the Vienna trip. In early July
the visit to Prague was set for November, with the result that what had orig-
inally been intended for Prague was given in Vienna as Philosophy and the
Crisis of European Humanity. Husserl had to work out something new for
Prague. That visit, which nally took place on November 14 and 15, saw
Husserl giving an entire set of lectures under the title The Crisis of European
Sciences and Psychology. These two appearances, in Vienna and in Prague,
were a tremendous success for Husserl, especially in Prague, where he spoke to
several groups and held numerous informal discussions over a weeks time.
The contrast of all this to his position in Germany could only have been
intensely felt. On March 13, 1935, Husserl had to sign an acknowledgment of
his having been informed of a statute requiring that for all state employees on
all occasions, ofcial and nonofcial, the form of greeting had to be the Ger-
man hail: Heil Hitler! said with the right arm held outexcept in cases of
disability, when the left arm was to be used! It is hard to imagine a more
230. See the letter from Malvine Husserl to Patocka, March 8, 1936 (Bw IV, p. 432);
other indications from family letters not included in Bw IX are indicated in HChr, p. 473.
From this visit also Fink has notes of his discussions with Landgrebe, Z-XX XX/12, and
21 (EFM 3). Unfortunately, Professor Landgrebe was not able from his own recollections
to ll out Finks outlines of these discussions, or those from March 1935. (Authors
conversations with Landgrebe, May 12, 1986.)
231. Letter to Ingarden, July 10, 1935, Bw III, p. 302. Husserl gives a glowing descrip-
tion of his lectures in Vienna in this letter.
232. For the heavy speaking schedule Husserl had in Prague, see HChr, pp. 46970,
and Malvine Husserls letter to Ingarden, January 14, 1936, Bw III, p. 305. On Husserls
sixteen days in Vienna and the rousing success he met with there, see his letter to Land-
grebe, Bw IV, p. 331.
233. Copy in the Personalakten: E. Husserl, UAFbg.
shaming picture than that of Husserl being compelled thus to hail Hitler, but
there seems to be no record that he was ever seen to do it. On September 15,
1935, the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship were decreed. Article 2 (1) stated:
A citizen of the Reich may be only one who is of German or kindred blood,
and who, through his behavior, shows that he is both desirous and personally
t to serve loyally the German people and the Reich. This was followed on
November 14 by the Supplementary Decree on Race, article 4 (1): A Jew
cannot be a citizen of the Reich. The 1933 exclusions were now to be
applied without exception. Under this new exhibition of facist racism, Husserl
contemplated abandoning Freiburg and Germany, perhaps even returning to
the land of his birth, no longer part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it was
when he was born seventy-six years earlier but now simply Czechoslovakia;
Prague, indeed, had much to offer. Yet he stayed, perhaps because he was in
the middle of a fever of productivity and could not afford the total disruption
that uprooting himself from Freiburg would cause. As of January 15, 1936,
Husserls right as emeritus to teach at the University of Freiburg was ofcially
annulled, and as of the summer semester of that same year his name was
stricken from the roll of faculty members. By the end of 1936 Husserls son,
Gerhart, and his son-in-law, Jacob Rosenberg, Elisabeths husband, had gone
to the United States, soon to be followed by their families. We old ones
remain behind alone, Husserl remarked to Ingarden; how we envy the chil-
dren, even though they have to start in humble state all over again.
These were the circumstances in which Husserl wrote what are now known
as the Crisis-texts. They took shape in the spring of 1935 as, starting from
the 1934 writings for Prague, he worked eight to nine hours a day, in a
veritable paroxysm of work, as he himself put it in a letter to Albrecht. But he
234. Taken from Snyder, Hitlers Third Reich, pp. 21112.

235. Letter to Gerhart, September 21, 1935, Bw IX, pp. 24647. Toms Masaryk, rst
president of Czechoslovakia and in ofce until his retirement in 1935, had been a student
with Husserl in Leipzig, a relationship Husserl fondly recalled in these less felicitous
times. See Patocka, Erinnerungen, Die Welt des Menschen, p. xv.
236. See the letter to Gerhart referred to in the previous note.
237. Copy of the document Nr. A.23, January 15, 1936, in the Personalakten: E. Hus-
serl, UAFbg. As an emeritus Husserl had hitherto been free to give any lectures and
seminars he might have wished.
238. HChr, p. 472.
239. Letter to Ingarden, December 31, 1936, Bw III, p. 309.
240. Husserl describes his work as a kind of mania (letter to Elisabeth, April 10, 1935,
Bw IX, p. 455). See the other indications from Husserls correspondence given in HChr,
p. 460.
had no choice. I cannot simply repeat old ideas and just put them together in a
higher-level textbook-like treatise; . . . I am drafting a substantially deeper train
of historical-philosophical thinking, but I dont want to stop with that. . . . I
want to work out a fundamental text on the phenomenological reduction
based on my many investigations of it, and thus prove to myself and to the
world that I do not by far belong to the past. At this time, too, in the few
weeks before the Vienna trip, Husserl reread Finks Kant-Studien article, nd-
ing it still of value to him. And Fink helped more directly as well. For
example, for the Vienna lecture Fink apparently expanded Husserls original
shorthand manuscript text by about a third, while Husserl in turn introduced
further changes into Finks revisional typescript. Then just before Husserl
left for Vienna, Fink sent him a one-page proposal for the closing of the lecture,
which Husserl in fact included in the actual lecture, although he spoke in part
extemporaneously, not feeling that the text he had brought with him dealt
adequately with the main points. Subsequently, on July 13, 1935, as Husserl
was preparing the Prague lectures, Fink gave him a six-page typed draft of a se-
quence of ideas entitled History as a Philosophical Problem. On Au-
gust 14, Fink brought yet another short proposal for the Prague lectures,
conceived as a set of three lectures under the general title The Problem of
Humanity.
What Husserl was doing, however, was more than just preparing a couple of
lectures for one city; he was following the unfolding dynamic of the philosoph-
ical consolidation he had been hoping for. On June 19 he wrote to Cairns that
he was working passionately now on the lecturethe one I gave in Vienna,
really a full double lecture . . . [and] the manuscript gets bigger and bigger! . . .
My old head is all taken up now in historical-philosophical meditations, really
a further level in concretizing the whole of phenomenology, whereby ultimate
matters, the anticipated teleology and the marginal problems, only now being
touched upon, are coming into grasp. I really would like to make the phenom-
enological reduction the main presentation, and proceed from there to work
241. Letter to Albrecht, April 11, 1935, Bw IX, p. 117.

242. HChr, p. 460.
243. See Hua VI, Textkritische Anmerkungen, p. 547.
244. Eugen Fink, Vorschlag fr Schlustze zum Wiener Vortrag E. Husserls, in
M-III, No. 9 (EFM 3, Abschn. 2). See Husserls description to Ingarden, July 10, 1935,
Bw III, p. 302.
245. M-III, No. 7, EFM 3, Abschn. 2.
246. M-III, No. 8, EFM 3, Abschn 2. See also Z-XVIII 3a and V/1a4b, in EFM 3.
out the true system of meditations (instead of the Paris lectures). Were think-
ing of having the Vienna lecture lead the way as the introduction.
The Prague lectures in mid-Novembera portion of this ferment of think-
ingwere a triumph; and after recuperating from a totally exhausting frenzy
of activity during the days there, Husserl took up again the task of putting this
material in a form suitable for publication. Before the end of January 1936
Husserl sent off the rst half (parts I and II as now published) to the editor of
Philosophia, Arthur Liebert, and then began work on the second half (which
would eventually turn into parts IIIA and B in the Husserliana text). Liebert,
however, had to wait impatiently while Husserl developed his ideas ever fur-
ther, and the remaining half swelled to ever increasing size. In late February
Husserl wrote to his son, It has become a major work, and I am not yet quite
nished. . . . I almost think that it is the most important writing of my life, one
that reaches the greatest depth. But there were interruptions. Landgrebe
came in late January to work further with Fink on ordering Husserls manu-
scripts. Then, far more seriously, Husserl contracted pleurisy in March, and he
could not work for almost two months. In mid-April Husserl went to
Rapallo on the Italian Riviera east of Genoa to convalesce, from where he
wrote to Fink: I cannot recall on my annual holiday trips having ever had so
absolutely thinking-free an eight days as these last have been. Yet he did not
like being idle; and he wondered how after his complete exhaustion he could
concentrate his energies again for the work that awaited completion. Hus-
serl returned to Freiburg apparently well again; but he had little more than a
year before the same serious illness would recur, from which, that next time,
he would not recover.
The composition process for the Crisis-texts is not easy to establish
denitively, although much about it has now been painstakingly pieced
247. Bw IV, pp. 5051.

248. On the whirl of activity during the Vienna visit and its aftermath, see Husserls
letter to Albrecht, December 22, 1935, Bw IX, pp. 12224.
249. Letter to Gerhart, February 20, 1936, Bw IX, p. 250. Husserl describes the kind of
sustained rapt concentration that characterized his earlier compositions Ideas and For-
mal and Transcendental Logic: Here, involuntarily, as if by itself, an introduction to
transcendental phenomenology in the grand manner has come about. He had exerted
himself to an incredible degree, and all at once it took form. See Reinhold Smids
Einleitung, Hua XXIX, p. xvi, on the circumstances of this letter.
250. HChr, p. 474.
251. Postcard to Fink from Rapallo, April 26, 1936 (Bw IV, p. 95). For other details see
HChr, pp. 47475.
together. The proof sheets for parts I and II reached Husserl in early Sep-
tember 1936; but rather than simply checking them for accuracy he made
signicant changes and additions, most importantly the entirely new ten-part
section on Galileo (Hua 9). The whole thing was then typeset again and sent
back by the end of September. Then even though the second proof sheets
were in turn signicantly modied when Husserl went through them in mid-
December, this rst installment (parts I and II) was nally done and run off by
early January 1937. In the meantime, Husserls work on the second install-
ment (part III) had produced a full-scale typescript that he sent as well to the
editor of Philosophia, only to request immediately afterward that it be re-
turned. It was not quite ready to be published, it needed a Conclusion and
drastic modications. The sketch of it that he gave to Ingarden in a letter
of December 31, 1936, shows that he meant to keep to the plan of the type-
script (followed in the Husserlian edition), but it was by no means ready.
Another years worth of work! he exclaimed.
The second half of 1936 and the rst half of 1937 thus saw Husserl nishing
parts I and II, and working steadily on part III against both disruptions
and disappointments. In the late months of 1936, for example, an invitation
by mile Brhier, president of the International Philosophical Congress sched-
uled for Paris from August 1 to 6, 1937, had pressed Husserl to participate in a
place of honor; for the congress was to be devoted to Descartes. But it was
only many months later, on June 8, 1937, after repeated requests on Husserls
part, that the Imperial and Prussian Ministry for Science, Education, and the
Formation of the People sent notice that permission to participate was de-
nied. Once again, the contrast between oppression in Germany and the
252. See Smids Einleitung, Hua XXIX, pp. xxivlxiv.

253. Smid, Einleitung, Hua XXIX, pp. xlviliv.
254. Smid, Einleitung, Hua XXIX, pp. lviilviii.
255. Einleitung, Hua XXIX, pp. xxxviixxxix, where Smid quotes the draft of a
letter Husserl intended for the editor, Arthur Liebert, from which these characterizations
are taken.
256. Bw III, pp. 30910.
257. See Smid, Einleitung, Hua XXIX, pp. xxxixlxiv.
258. See the entry from H. L. Van Breda in HChr, p. 486; also Husserls letter to the
Rektor of the university about his request for clearance to go, February 4, 1937, Bw VIII,
p. 200.
259. Document in the Personalakten E. Husserl, UAFbg. Husserl had made his request
already in late October 1936, and he repeated it twice (Bw VIII, pp. 199201), always
through the Rektor of the university.
honors Husserl received from beyond his own country stood out starkly.
Another example: In February 1936 Husserl had received an invitation to
become a member of the governing committee of the Institut de Coopration
Philosophique Internationale at Pontigny, also in France, and he wished to be
able to attend the meeting of the committee scheduled for the summer of 1937.
This request never was acted on; it was left to languish. Finally, at the end of
June 1937, for racial reasons, Husserl had to move from his apartment on
Lorettostrae 40, on the south side of the city, where he had lived ever since
arriving in Freiburg twenty years earlier, to Schneckstrae 6, on the east side
of the city. He went up into the Black Forest for two weeks, to Breitnau,
while Malvine took care of the move. Unfortunately, owing to bad weather
Husserl caught a severe cold. Then, not long after returning from Breitnau
into his new residence, he had a severe fall and had to take to his bed. That,
however, soon led to a recurrence of the pleurisy he had contracted the year
before, so that it was only intermittently that he could do much. For all
practical purposes work on the Crisis-texts was at an end; it would remain a
work one could only read unnished.
What Fink contributed to the writing of the Crisis-texts, now, can only be
determined within certain limits. To begin with, there is the question of sub-
stantive conceptual contribution. This is a matter needing considerable com-
parison of Husserls work before his retirement with that done after, together
with a study of Finks own notes as well as the drafts of ideas he prepared for
Husserl. The interpretation that would result could be denite in some re-
spects, tentative in others, and a matter of argument throughout. In fact, one
260. On July 15, 1936, Husserl had been named a Corresponding Fellow of the British
Academy. See the letters from the British Academy to Husserl (Bw VIII, p. 9) and Hus-
serls letter informing the Rektor at Freiburg of the honor (Bw VIII, p. 199).
261. A statement from the Rektors ofce at Freiburg dated May 14, 1937, reminding
the national ministry of Husserls requests for Paris and Pontigny, observes that a deci-
sion on these applications has not yet come in. (Document in the Personalakten: E. Hus-
serl, UAFbg.) Three weeks later the ministry acted on the Paris request, negatively, while
ignoring the matter of Pontigny. See Husserls ofcial letter of request for the Pontigny
conference in Bw VIII, p. 200.
262. Sister Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt, O.S.B., a close family friend, mentions racial
reasons as necessitating the move, but does not specify what they were, in her memoir
Conversations with Edmund Husserl, 19301938, translated by Marcus Brainard, in
The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 1, edited by
Burt Hopkins and Steven Crowell (Seattle: Noesis Press, 2001), p. 343.
263. See HChr, pp. 48687.
264. HChr, p. 487.
of the aims of the present work as a whole is to offer some basis for this needed
interpretation, although more is needed than can be given here. Neverthe-
less, some proposals will be made specically with respect to the Crisis-texts
in chapters 4, 6, and 7 below. Apart from that, from the standpoint of the
documents themselves, Finks most visible contribution was his typing out of
the text from Husserls original shorthand working manuscripts. This, how-
ever, introduces its own uncertainty, namely, the extent to which Fink revised
and amplied Husserls originals in the course of his typing, a responsibility
with which in fact he was charged precisely as Husserls collaborator. Only
some of the originals for parts I and II have been found in the Husserl Ar-
chives, used as notepaper for further reection writing on Husserls part. The
originals for part III have not been found at all. The fact that Fink had
expanded the Vienna lecture when typing it suggests, however, that he would
have done the sameand would have been expected to do sofor these
Crisis-texts; but whereas in the former case this can be determined precisely
by comparing the typescript with Husserls stenographic originals, in the pres-
ent instance it cannot be determined from the documentation in any substan-
tive measure. This makes it particularly important, therefore, on the one hand,
to learn as much as possible of the thinking that Fink brought to, and pursued
during, his work with Husserl and, on the other, to realize just what the work
of an assistant and, more, a genuine collaborator really was. Something fur-
ther must be said about this now.
We have seen Husserl in his 1934 letter to Fink making explicit reference to
the distinction between individual research manuscript studies and their fur-
ther elaboration in such a way as to form a systematic, integrated whole. We
have also seen how the latter work was very much an important part of Finks
task with Husserl, although it was not his only charge; and Husserl himself
accomplished some of the same task when in the grip of consolidating inspira-
tion, as, for example, in the writing of the Crisis-texts. It is also eminently
265. For example, a comparison and correlation of Husserls research manuscripts

with Finks drafts, from the point of view of both content and dating, is beyond the scope
of the present study and the present capacity of the author. A survey and indexing of
Husserls research manuscripts in connection with Finks Sixth Meditation, however,
has been done by Guy van Kerckhoven, and it is hoped that he will be able to return at a
future date to the analysis and exposition of the Husserlian material he has thus set in
correlation.
266. See Biemel, Zur Textgestaltung, Hua VI, p. 519.
267. Besides the following treatment, see also EFM, Einleitung des Herausgebers I,
section A. Die Schriften, pp. xxviiixxxiv.
268. See above, 1.3.
clear that many of the things Fink produced for Husserl, both the typed drafts
of ideas as well as the proposals represented in his personal notes, were pre-
cisely sketches for systematic, integrative conceptions. Thus we have, earlier,
both Finks dramatic 1930 comprehensive Layout (see section 1.3 above)
and his plan for the revision of the Cartesian Meditations as a series of
seven Meditations. For the Crisis project he had drafted proposals for
the overall plan as well as for its continuation beyond the stage reached by
mid-1937 (i.e., part III), and the proposals for the Prague and Vienna lec-
tures were mentioned a little earlier. None of this was unusual practice on
Husserls part, to permit, and expect, his assistants to work up his manuscripts
into more coherent and systematic statements. Edith Stein did just this when
she was Husserls assistant nearly twenty years earlier, as did Landgrebe,
although Heidegger apparently did not. Fink, however, worked in this capac-
ity more continuously and more comprehensively than Husserls previous
assistantsespecially in having a clear systematic grasp even if no n-
ished product fully displaying that collaboration with Husserl ever reached
publication.
All in all, the circumstances leading up to and the situation of the produc-
tion of the Crisis-texts necessitate our taking these texts as representing this
very collaboration, even if, unlike the aborted revision of the Cartesian Medi-
tations (now available in VI.CM/12), this collaboration is not visible in
such direct documentation. The problem is, therefore, to understand how that
collaboration is substantively there, despite the less direct documentation.
The discussion to come here will point to the elements of that substantive
collaboration.
269. I.e., VI.CM/2, pp. 39.

270. See the beginning of 1.3.
271. M-III, No. 6 (EFM 3, Abschn. 2). Finks proposal for the continuation of Crisis
is given in Hua VI, Beil. XXXIX, but his proposals for an overall plan and for insertions
at specic points in the typescript, also in M-III, No. 6, are not included there.
272. I.e., M-III, Nos. 79, EFM 3, Abschn. 2. Fink had also sketched out ideas for the
initial Prague address, Z-XIX IV/12ab, EFM 3.
273. See Ingardens introductory remarks to his article Edith Stein on Her Activity as
an Assistant of Edmund Husserl, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 23
(1962), 15561, especially 157f.
274. See Landgrebes Foreword to EJ, p. 7.
275. See Hussels letter to Helmut Kuhn, February 4, 1937 (Bw VI, p. 242), recom-
mending that Fink be invited to Pontigny in Husserls stead, as Fink is an excellent
speaker, and has a command of the systematic whole of transcendental phenomenology
almost better than I do, in any case he is better at presenting it than I am at my age.
At the same time, despite the fact that working for and with Husserl took a
great amount of time, especially in view of the signicant dependency on Fink
that Husserl had developed, Fink had other things he wished to do and was in
fact doing right in these years of Husserls nal effort on the Crisis-texts.
Fink, for example, had written and delivered his lecture on Husserls phenom-
enology and Kant in Dessau and Bernburg in early December 1935, a paper
that very much represents his orientation in phenomenologyin terms of an
ontological interpretation, and even an ontogonic metaphysics, one of the
features of the dimension of the speculative in phenomenology. Husserl
had read and annotated this paper, though minimally and without taking
exception to it, which, as we saw earlier regarding Finks work on the time-
project, was something Husserl was now exceedingly loath to do. What be-
comes clear when Finks notes are taken into account along with the typescript
materials he produced for Husserl is that, while faithful to Husserl to the end
both personally and in continuing the dynamic thrust of Husserls philosophy,
Fink did not see himself to be a Husserlian, i.e., a disciple who did philosophy
by rigorously applying some set of formulaic principles, by, as it were, adopt-
ing and following a compendium of positive doctrines.
This will become clear in later chapters, yet some concrete indication of this
independence has to be at least mentioned here; it was an integral part of
Finks work with Husserl. For example, in his personal notes Fink lists from
time to time what he had to work on for a particular year. Thus in 1934 the
sequel to his dissertation, Presentication and Image II, stands at the head
of the list; but then he sketches out some other things to work on at the
same time:
2. System of philosophy in summary: a rst compilation, stocktaking, and

conrmation of my own thinking;
3. Consciousness of world and world: rst philosophical work;
4. Life-philosophy and phenomenology;
5. Edmund Husserls phenomenology in Heideggers critique. (The Differ-
ence between the Husserlian and Heideggerian Systems of Philosophy.)
Each item on this list is intriguing: number 2 seems clearly to be a parallel to

the massive project Fink had sketched out for Husserl in 1930, only this time
as strictly his own; number 3 is Finks alternative idea for a possible Habilita-
tionsschrift; number 4 is the sequel to his Kant-Studien article; and in num-
276. ND, p. 43. Later chapters will treat the nature of this speculative dimension.
277. Z-XIV II/1ab, EFM 2.
ber 5 Fink gives a provocative adaptation of the title of Hegels famous early
work on Fichte and Schelling. (Each of these will gure importantly in subse-
quent chapters here.) For 1935 Fink lists no less than fourteen items on a list of
plans, including all those in the 1934 list, but now putting in the rst place the
time-project in its two parts. Finally, and more self-revealing, in a note from
early 1936 Fink, rather than speaking of projects and planned studies, writes
as follows:
What has become manifest in my 30th year as to the philosophy that may
perhaps lie in my life is
1. the metaphysics of play;
2. the idea of transcendental philosophy as questioning beyond being
into the space in which transcendental relations are at play;
3. ontology and philosophy of reection in exposure to critical light
(distance from Husserl and Heidegger);
4. the concept of the nature of philosophy as taking possession of oneself
(seeking ones home, and experimental existence).
These are only hints, and what is hinted at is not what one would think of
as orthodox Husserlian themes. Moreover, as the earlier portions of the
booklet from which this list is taken show, one important philosopher with
whom Fink here is rethinking his critical understanding of phenomenology is
that early companion of Finks philosophical education, Nietzsche; and when
Nietzsches thinking is appreciated for suggesting issues that need to be
raised in assessing and reconceiving what phenomenology may fundamentally
be, then one knows the philosophic power at work is not to be identied
exclusively with Husserl the individual. There are clear antecedents here to
what will become Finks thinking in the decades after the war, especially as
seen in the books by which he would then be best known, the book on Nietz-
sche and that on play. Nevertheless, while any discussion of Finks devel-
opment after 1945 is not the aim of this book, treatment of the antecedents
of that development is indeed necessary here precisely because they would
organically emerge within the work he was doing with Husserl. That, how-
ever, is to come in the chapters to follow. Here we must conclude the narrative
of the years of Husserls life when Fink was working with him, now coming to
an end.
278. OH-II 4850, EFM 3.

279. OH-VII 50, emphasis Finks (EFM 3).
280. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), and Spiel als
Weltsymbol (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960).
1.5. The Ending, and Another Beginning

On February 24, 1938, Malvine Husserl wrote to Ingarden about her
husbands deteriorating condition: in the previous August, Husserl had be-
come seriously ill with Pleuritis exsudativa, and despite slow improvement,
had grown worse at the years end. His weakened state is indescribable, and
my heart is full of concern and worry. You will understand if I only write these
few lines. She would send three more brief notes to Ingarden. The rst two
would say that Husserls condition had become worse still, to the point that, in
the second of these, on April 21, only the deepest life of the spirit remained
in him, which he could but rarely put into words. What lay on him now was
nothing earthly, the patience of heaven. The last message would be the
announcement card that on April 27, 1938, Edmund Husserl had died.
Today with antibiotics pleurisy may be easily treated, but the weakening
that advancing in age brings is still only postponed, not removed. Husserl,
now weakened, could not keep inrmity from conquering him. Only a few
months before his fall in early August 1937 and the onset of his nal illness, he
had rebounded vigorously from a period of debilitation through a new diet
and the sharp reduction in his use of tobacco. Yet he was seventy-eight years
of age when he had that fall, and the pleurisy set in again, and he had just
passed his seventy-ninth birthday when his life ended.
Prior to Christmas 1937 he was well in control of his faculties, alert and
active mentally, reading, engaging in conversation, though unable to work in
his regular way and able to receive only the occasional visitor. Fink was one
who could still come. As the new year came and the weeks passed, however,
Husserl slipped into periods of unawareness or confusion that became longer
and longer. In moments of lucidity he spoke of regret for his failures, or of his
wish for but a year or two or three in which to complete his work, or of how
time and memory were so unsteady; he recalled verses from the Psalms, or
sometimes tried to express strange moving moments that took him beyond his
281. Bw III, p. 312.

282. Bw III, p. 315; BIng, p. 104. The gaunt, haunting face of Husserl in the photo-
graphs taken during the last months (in the Husserl Archives) reect the description
Malvine gives here.
283. BIng, p. 104.
284. Malvines letter to Ingarden, April 15, 1937, Bw III, pp. 31011. Malvine blames
Husserls use of tobacco for considerable harm to his health. On the stimulant effect of
the use of tobacco for Husserl, see Schuhmann, Einfhrung, Bw X, pp. 3839.
285. Malvines letter to Elli, October 13, 1937 (Bw IX, p. 497).
present place. Ive made many mistakes, but it can still all turn out well (Feb-
ruary 12). Philosophy has to be built up all over again from the beginning
(February 13). Im swimming in the River of Lethe and have no thoughts
(February 12). Once or twice in February he even talked of Americato the
doctor, In America they dont yet see the bigger problems, and to his
daughter, Elli, about perhaps going there if he recovered.
Landgrebe managed to come from Prague once to see him, and Husserl was
able to talk well with him, but some of Husserls clearest and longest
stretches of mental vigor were his conversations with Fink. On February 3
Fink came to see him: I only want to see you briey. And Husserl replied: It
means a lot for me just to see you. The conversation lasted ten minutes, lucid
and forceful, as if a bequest, and Fink was totally shaken. Earlier that same
day, at different moments, Husserl had said of him: The greatest phenome-
non of phenomenology for me is Fink. And: In twenty years Fink will be a
great man; My life is unintelligible. Perhaps you can explain it with Fink.
In the very last weeks Finks presence was still a stimulus to Husserl to try
doing philosophy, even when he would pass most of the day in a confused
state; and it would be lucid and proper philosophizing, not just feeling-laden
ruminations. I am very grateful to you, I shall never leave you, he said to
Fink once, in earnest friendliness, a scant month before he died. It is no
wonder that Fink hoped against reality that Husserl would recover. After one
of these last lucid philosophical conversations with Husserl, Fink revealed to
Elli on a walk on the castle hill overlooking Freiburg behind Husserls apart-
mentas once he would have so regularly gone with her fatherthat, given
that Husserl showed not the slightest lessening of mental clarity, Fink still
believed that Husserl could recover, despite the startling frailty that now held
286. From Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg, Aufzeichnungen aus Gesprchen mit Ed-
mund Husserl whrend seiner letzten Krankheit im Jahre 1938, in the Husserl Archives,
copy in the Fink Nachlass.
287. Aufzeichnungen, entry for February 8.
288. Aufzeichnungen, entry for February 15. Elli, who had left her family in the
United States to come to Freiburg, had to leave before her fathers death.
291. Letters of Elisabeth to her husband, March 13, 1938; also to Elsbeth Jensen,
March 10, 1938. Elsbeth Jensen and her family were close friends of the Husserl family;
she was the sister of the well-known classical philologist Karl Reinhardt, who had studied
with Husserl in Gttingen. (Letters in the Husserl Archives.)
292. Aufzeichnungen, entry for March 16.
the old philosopher. It was clear to Elli that Fink had a hard time indeed facing
up to the loss that from all signs was inevitable. And when that death came,
Fink earned scornful remarks from Malvine because of the seeming break-
down of his interior stamina and dependability.
Yet Fink was not so undone as Malvine may have thought. His eulogy at
Husserls cremation is a moving testimony to the man who had stirred him so
deeply philosophically, and events were coming that would demonstrate
resources of energy and determination enough on his part. His loyalty to
Husserl would hold, and his endeavor to ensure the philosophical relevance
of Husserls work would hold, even if that endeavor would have an unor-
thodox character. Details of that, however, lie in the chapters ahead.
Husserl died as he lived, peaceful and clear, without bitter thoughts. I think
he considered his mission completed. So recounts one of Husserls faithful
Freiburg friends, Martina Stieler. Even his funeral I felt to be harmonious,
since the only participants present were those who had known him not only
for his philosophy, but as a man. Those present that April 29, besides Mal-
vine and Fink, and the minister who held the service, were few indeed: Pro-
fessor of Economics Walter Eucken and his wife, Edith, Professor of History
Gerhart Ritter, Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy Georg Stieler and
his wife, Martina (just cited), and the two nuns who had cared for Husserl in
his illness, Sister Klara Immisch and Sister Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt. None
293. Letter from Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg to her husband, March 13, 1938 (in
the Husserl Archives.). She also mentions Finks disinclination to accept Husserls com-
ing death owing to the fact that the second part of the treatise would still have to
be written, would really have to be. This must refer to the Crisis writings, but it is
not named.
294. Lackadaisical, she says to Elli in a letter of June 2, 1938, slovenly and unreli-
able, October 23, 1938, and an unreliable sheep, May 19, 1939. Not long after she
would again have complimentary things to say, but the fact remains that Fink was not in
her eyes as stalwart during those difcult months as she thought he should have been.
(Letters in the Husserl Archives, not in BW.)
295. Totenrede auf Edmund Husserl, in M-III, No. 1, EFM 3, Abschn. 2.
296. Erinnerungen an Geheimrat Husserl (c. 1959), mimeograph narrative in the
possession of the family of Professor Ferdinand Graf, p. 12. The next few items of infor-
mation here come from this document as well. See also the memoir by Sister Adelgundis
Jaegerschmidt, Conversations with Edmund Husserl, pp. 34550.
297. Eucken and Ritter, both prominent members of the Freiburger Kreis of re-
sistance to National Socialist policies in Freiburg, would play important parts also in
postwar restoration, especially in the University of Freiburg. Both were also staunch
opponents of Heidegger. See MH-Ott/e, passim.
other; and no spy showed up, Martina Stieler adds, only familiar faces. But
war was near.
Six weeks earlier, on March 12, 1938, Austria had been annexed by Hitler:
Austria is a state of the German Reich, the ofcial proclamation read,
even if the plebiscite conrming the move would not come until April 10. On
September 29 the Munich agreement was signed, and parts of Czechoslovakia
passed into that same new German empire. In March 1939 German troops
marched into Prague, and, after its brief twenty years of life, Czechoslovakia
in effect disappeared. On November 9 and 10, 1938, had come the Night of
Crystal, as it was euphemistically termed, the pillaging of Jewish establish-
ments and the brutalizing of Jewish residents throughout Germany. Finally, on
September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II began. Husserl
himself was spared all this, but those who survived him and held his legacy
were not. What recourse was there for them now?
Only outside Germany could there be any hope, even if that would prove
short-lived. The general lines of the story are well known, how the Belgian
Franciscan, Father Herman Leo Van Breda came to Freiburg in late August
1938, to inquire into materials for his doctoral work, and ended up negotiat-
ing for the transfer of the entire Husserlian Nachlass to Louvain and the rescue
of Malvine Husserl; how Fink emigrated from Freiburg and Landgrebe
from Prague to join together in Louvain in hopes of pursuing there a career in
philosophy and to work on Husserls manuscriptshopes cut short by the
German invasion of Belgium on May 10, 1940. The continuum of thinking in
the phenomenology that Husserl had begun decades earlier had already been
cut clean through in Germany; now it was entirely gone there. In its new home
of exile in Louvain it was now taken underground. It would not be totally
suppressed, but it would be strained and diminished, and it would be changed.
That, however, is a story to be taken up briey in chapter 10. It is time to end
our effort here to reconstitute some of the features and esh of the human sub-
stance that was the life of phenomenology in the last years of Husserls doing
of philosophy with Fink at his side. This phenomenology, though an enterprise
that marked so strongly the rst half of the twentieth century, became in the
298. Article 1 of the Law for the Promulgation of Anschluss, in Snyder, Hitlers Third
Reich, p. 280.
299. See Van Breda, Le sauvetage de lhritage husserlien et la fondation des Archives-
Husserl, in Husserl et la pense moderne, Actes du deuxime Colloque International de
Phnomnologie, Krefeld, 13 Novembre 1956, ed. H. L. van Breda and J. Taminiaux,
Phaenomenologica 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 142.
second half rather uncharacteristic; it had tried too purely, and too paradoxi-
cally, to move in the human beyond the human, whereas today the human that
remains all-too-human (and sometimes remains less) perhaps has the greater
draw. Reactions like this, however, had already been felt in the very years that
we have just been reviewing.
In 1934, as the circle of oppression was closing tighter around Husserl and
Fink even while recognition of them owered beyond Germany, one of those
who had heard Husserl in Strasbourg in that distant 1929 day of triumph,
Abb mile Baudin, had written to Fink in response to Finks having sent him
a copy of his article What Does Husserls Phenomenology Want to Do?
Baudin had found Finks essay very helpful, but he had also found it difcult.
Despite his admiration for phenomenology as he saw Fink expound it, he had
to confess that he felt himself to be still too much someone captivated by the
world [Weitbefangener], someone who recoiled from the expedition into
the Sahara of phenomenology, into the light and the emptiness in which one
discovers so naked a self [Selbst]. Such indeed had seemed the challenge of
Husserls Denkweg, and such is what we must now try to understand better as
Fink, his closest companion in search of human tracks through the forbidding,
seeming emptiness of the absolute, took up that quest with him.
300. Letter from May 20, 1934, in the Fink Nachlass. Baudin uses the two German
words given here in his otherwise all-French letter. In his remarks he mingles Finks use of
the image of Platos cave with this metaphor of the Sahara, the land of the absolute of
light and exposedness. See Husserls remarks on these metaphors in his letter to Baudin,
May 26/June 8, 1934, in Bw VII, pp. 1617. See also Husserls part in Finks composition
of the essay as revealed by the manuscripts published in EFM 2, Beil. I to Z-XIII.
2
Orientation I:
Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary
Naturally you can absorb only what you have worked out for your-
self, what you have most deeply made your own; and a living soul can
rethink the thoughts of others only by thinking for itself and thus carry-
ing thought further.
Husserl to Metzger, September 4, 1919
There are errors into which the author himself lapses much more easily
than the younger people who follow him. Manners of thinking whose
irrationality he has exposed no longer do not come to be for them habits
of thought, while in him, by contrast, they are still operative as incul-
cated dispositionsdispositions to relapses.
Husserl, Draft of a Preface to Logical Investigations, 1913
1. Bw IV, p. 409. Translation as in Arnold Metzger, Freedom and Death, selections

from Freiheit und Tod, ed. by Paul Senft and trans. by Ralph Mannheim, Human Con-
text, 4 (1972), 246. Metzger, Husserls assistant from 1920 to 1924 (ibid., p. 244),
also had almost daily conversations with Husserl, as he mentions in a letter to Senft
(p. 249).
2. Edmund Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations, ed. by Eugen Fink,
trans. by Phillip J. Bossert and Curtis H. Peters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975),
p. 33 (translation modied).
73
74 Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary
Unlike those of us today who wish to study the philosophy of Edmund

Husserl, Eugen Fink did not gain his understanding of phenomenology pri-
marily from texts. Whereas we are faced with the massive collection of manu-
scripts in the Husserl Archives at Louvain and the continuing publication of
selections from them in the Husserliana series, Fink listened to Husserl him-
self, spoke with him, thought with him. It was not the written line of what
Plato called dead discourse but the living speech of Husserls own teach-
ing that he followed. Roman Ingarden has given a description of how Hus-
serls lectures were always research meditations, the laying out of the results
of his ongoing inquiries, so that the listeners were able to come into contact
with living, developing science. Both there and in the seminars Husserls
offerings were never analyses of writings. Even when some classic philosophic
textof Descartes or Hume, for exampleformed the starting point of his
considerations, his thought was always focused on issues and problems in
the matters at hand, not on the wording of texts. His own published works
were few, and his working manuscripts, despite their ever increasing mass,
remained studies in progress, not statements ready for wide distribution. In
Husserls living word in lectures and discussions, then, Fink entered phenome-
nology by drawing from the real source for learning what phenomenology was
aboutthe only source, Ingarden says.
To speak of a source, however, is not yet to characterize things correctly,
and there was in fact a kind of living word in Husserls manuscripts. Finks ac-
cession to phenomenology was the engagement of one living thinking with an-
other, whether in the lecture hall, in conversation during daily walks, or in
poring over manuscripts that were themselves the continual movement of Hus-
serls thinking in the scripting movements of his hand. And far more than mere
formulation and composition, what was at work in the thinking Fink found
before him was a dynamic system of principle-led reinquiry, not simple additive
progression, but ever renewed return to already pursued inquiries in order to
reconsider and recast the meaning of their ndings and to extend their compass.
The way this was manifested in Husserls now mature work of the middle
and late 1920s in Freiburg was in the retrospective taken continually upon his
earlier work, such as Ideas I, a self-assessment that was at once the prospective
for what was to be done and was now itself under way. This is what was given
expression in Husserls startling insistence in 1930, in his seventieth year, that
3. Phaedrus, 276a; translation by R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato,

ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (New York: Pantheon,
1961), p. 521.
4. BIng, pp. 11112.
5. Ibid.
Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary 75
only now had he nally reached the state of being a true beginner. But Hus-
serls beginning in this late and nal period of his life was nevertheless not
that of the rank beginner; it was rather a beginning radically renewed, a
beginning undertaken again out of a profound and critical realization of what
the beginning as it had been announced programmatically in his earlier pub-
lications actually demanded. In the living teaching of Husserl the philosopher,
this is what Fink caught in the words of the lectures and seminars, and what he
began practicing as he came into direct contact with Husserl the thinker him-
self. In his Political History of My Scientic Career Fink makes a point of
mentioning, as a characteristic of Husserls philosophical integrity, the tena-
cious and steadfast persistence of questioning and searching, the uncondi-
tioned disregard for any of the positions that one might oneself have already
reached. This may not be so manifest in the texts of Husserls lectures as we
are able to read them now, and certainly not in any one of his writings or
manuscripts taken on its own; but when any such material is seen as being one
of many attempts to rework and rethink some same issue, i.e., when it is
placed back in the context of Husserls everyday manner of workingthe
seemingly endless writing and rewriting of his research thinking-textsthen it
is not the ascertainable idea-content of the text(s) as such that takes on fore-
most importance but rather that which drives this continual rethinking, this
repeatedly, radically renewed beginning.
This, now, is the force that one can see operating in Finks own notes even
from his earliest contact with Husserl, that is, both in his notes from Husserls
courses and seminars and, with more pronounced effect, in the notes in which
he sketches out his own reections. By conjoining these notes with the nished
(or seminished) pieces he producedfor example, his dissertation of 1929,
Presentication and Imageone comes to see that Finks beginning in phe-
nomenology took place within a dynamic of thinking well past adherence to the
preliminary stage that most of us, with considerable navet, tend to take to be
fundamental and virtually nal. Fink began phenomenology at the level of the re-
alization of how relentlessly, transformatively radical in principle the ideas were
with which Husserl began his program, in particular, the idea of the reduction.
2.1. The Phenomenological ReductionDone Only by Being

Redone
A remark of Husserls made in the last semester of his teaching at Frei-
burg, the winter semester of 19281929, neatly sums up the sense of the
reduction that had gripped Fink in the rst years of his study with him. In
6. Politische Geschichte, EFM 4, Abschn. 4, p. [2].

October Husserl, though now retired and with his successor, Heidegger, giv-
ing his own rst lectures as holder of the chair that Husserl had passed on to
him, began a course on the phenomenology of empathy [Einfhlung]. As
usual Husserl also conducted seminar discussions on the topic at the same
time. In one of the early sessions of this seminar (which, together with the
course, Husserl soon discontinued) Fink noted down the following point:
Phenomenological method as a circle, as the constant overhauling of itself,
this ontic bearing back upon itself is based in the antecedency of the ontic over
the action of knowing, in the historicity of the phenomenological situation.
There is no assurance that these are exactly Husserls words rather than a
rephrasing according to Finks own understanding. Indeed, the way the term
situation is used corresponds to that in 5 of Finks dissertation, The Situa-
tion of the Reduction. The whole context, however, indicates that Fink took
the point just cited to be Husserls point, not simply his own; and it is this
point that in fact becomes one of the key ideas of the Introduction with
which Fink opens his 1929 dissertation.
The idea of phenomenological method as the constant return upon both
initiating and ongoing operations to clear away the presuppositions and na-
vet that must unavoidably accompany ones initiating endeavors in a new
enterprise is an old idea in Husserls thinking; it is the famous zigzag spoken
of in the Introduction to volume 2 of his Logical Investigations (6), and a
point Husserl would regularly mention both in published works (e.g., Ideas I,
65) and in his lectures. At the same time, however, this general principle of
self-correction takes on a more specic form when Husserl repeats the point in
his lectures on the theory of the phenomenological reduction in the winter
semester 19231924. As we enter phenomenology via the reduction, Husserl
explains, we may well in principle aim to set aside the viewpoint of children
of the world, no longer simply following natural knowledge in all its dog-
matic and natural forms; but there can also be a transcendental navet
parallel to natural navetwhich, however, now receives a special mean-
ing. . . . What is naive in this second sense is . . . the cognition carried out on the
basis of transcendental subjectivity, so long as this cognition too is not submit-
7. U-IV 44 (EFM 1).

8. Normally Fink puts comments of his own in brackets in his notes of Husserls
courses. That no brackets are found here is an indication that the text is meant to give the
gist of what Husserl had said.
9. It comes immediately after, though separated from, a quotationa comment in
quotation marks, and presumably Husserls: Formulation: epoch = to make no use of
any experience as it is effected naturally.
ted to an apodictic critique. . . . Husserl is clearer yet in a working manu-

script on this same issue from approximately the same time. He points out
how one can only proceed by systematically describing essentials in accord
with a naive evidentness, an evidentness straightforwardly taken . . . and then,
by overhauling and reecting on what has been done, one has to make sure
the extent to which undisclosed presuppositions lie in the way those straight-
forward descriptions proceeded, the extent to which their disclosure leads to
new subjective descriptive ndings through which the import of those descrip-
tions can be claried and circumscribed. Transcendental subjectivity, in
attempting to know itself thematically, has to bear within itself the system
whereby, beginning in naive description and progressing systematically, it has
to get necessarily to that kind of description in which all navet is removed.
This, then, requires the critique of its own procedure, its justication
through practice at the same time that its import is circumscribed, and nally
an all-inclusive description of the systematic sequence of levels in which the
navet has to be countered in descriptions of a higher kind that determine
the range of import of those various levels. In other wordsand Husserl
frames the point in terms of the paradigm theme of the pure egothere is
(1) the phenomenology of the pure ego that is naive and straightforward,
and then there is (2) the reective phenomenology on a higher level: the
theory and critique of phenomenological reason (critique of the phenome-
nologizing I) or of phenomenological method, or a critique of phenomenologi-
cal evidentness.
Here we see the principle of phenomenologys self-critique presented and
exemplied in general terms, without much detailing of the methodological
issues or of specic application. However, while methodological declarations
of the principle like this on Husserls part are a regular feature of his work,
actually working out the theory and critique of phenomenological reason
remains undone in Husserls own writings, published or unpublished. The rst
explicit treatment of this sort of thing is in fact the one Fink eventually wrote,
namely, the Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory
10. Hua VIII, pp. 16971, emphasis Husserls. This course (19231924) was taught
before Fink came to Freiburg, but Landgrebe had made a transcription of it by the
summer of 1924. (See Textkritische Anmerkungen, Hua VIII, p. 511.) Eventually Fink
read this text (along with all of Husserls manuscript writings), but perhaps not this early.
Boehm reports that Husserl did not make it available to anyone (Einleitung, p. xii).
Nevertheless, by the time Fink wrote his dissertation he had very likely read this text, and
others. The point is, however, that the principle of critical return was already well in place
in Husserls program.
11. Hua VIII, pp. 47778, emphasis all Husserls.
of Method (VI.CM/1). That an explicit elaboration of the critique of phe-

nomenological reason and of the phenomenologizing I only gets done in
1932, and not by Husserl, manifestly does not mean that its necessity was a
new need. Finks whole entry into phenomenology was conditioned by the
press of this necessity, a necessity that became all the more urgent as Husserl in
his nal years realized he had to bring phenomenology to culminating integra-
tion and full philosophical coherence. What the present book is meant to
document and demonstrate is the extent of the contribution to that end that
Fink made within Husserls phenomenology, a contribution without which it
would in fact be the vast assemblage of fragments it too often seems to be.
Regarding the need for methodological critique, the material of Husserls I
have just been summarizing shows one necessary and common feature in the
way we reach this awareness. In lectures on the phenomenological reduction
Husserl gets to the point about the need for a critique of initial navet only
near the very end of the course, in the fty-third of fty-four lectures. A lot of
investigative, conceptual, and expository work rst has to be done before the
signicance of methodological critique can be realized, in a sequence that
Husserl regularly follows. For example, in Formal and Transcendental Logic
(which in fact was being written very close in time to Finks note in Husserls
seminar, cited above), it is in the very last section, just before a brief Con-
clusion, that Husserl mentions the need for a criticism of those evidences
that phenomenology at the rst, and still naive, level carries on straightfor-
wardly. Or again, when, six months later in the spring of 1929, Husserl was
nishing his rst revision of the Cartesian Meditations, he wrote of the stage
of phenomenological self-criticism in two sections, in 13 of the Second
Meditation and in 63 of the Conclusion, making clear each time that this
self-criticism is distinct from the work of straightforward investigation, which
the Meditations are presenting and which has to be done rst. Yet it is with
the criticism of transcendental experience and of all transcendental cogni-
tion that phenomenology would nally become philosophical in the full
sense, a character that the investigating stage does not yet possess (13).
Fink builds in the awareness of the dimension of self-critique as an explicit
feature of phenomenology from the beginning. His dissertation opens with an
explicit and concise discussion of various dimensions of the retrospective cri-
tique that the procedures and ndings of initial phenomenological analysis and
description must ultimately undergo. He thus serves explicit notice that the
detail-work, which phenomenological studies such as those that his book is
about to provide, needs to be seen as necessarily preliminary until the second
12. FTL, 107c.

stage of further inquiry and critical reinterpretation is performed; and this

caution has to be in force from the beginning, or else the descriptions and
analyses offered are likely to be taken as nal and doctrinaire when they cannot
be. But that next-level investigation and reinterpretation had not yet been done
when the dissertation was submitted for the degree and for publication; in the
form in which he presented it, it remained explicitly preliminary in character. It
would be, then, in the work yet to come that the post-preliminary stage of
phenomenological self-critique and reinterpretation would be accomplished.
Still, Fink makes a number of critique elements very clear in the Introduc-
tion to the dissertation. First, while he presents the reduction in the basic
form in which it was introduced in Husserls Ideas I, nevertheless, his treat-
ment of it in this Introduction is based as much on more recent materials of
Husserls on the reduction, specically Formal and Transcendental Logic,
Husserls lectures, and unpublished manuscripts on the phenomenology of
the phenomenological reduction. Moreover, Finks Introduction does
not just give a general statement of these demands. The six paragraphs of his
explanation amount to a quite comprehensive though summary interpretive
theory of the phenomenological reduction, in which specic interrelated as-
pects of next-stage work are indicated. For example, in the next to last para-
graph Fink picks up the very points that Husserl expresses in the text referred
to from Erste Philosophie II (Hua VIII). Phenomenological analysis is pre-
liminary, he writes; it is always carried out on a particular level under the
application of the reduction. The eidetic determinations that it yields always
have limits to their relevance, always have a particular range of import.
Their at rst hidden anonymous horizon of validity and range of import only
become clear in a transcendental self-critique; the phenomenological na-
vet of simple description is critically relativized by reection on that
encompassing horizon. This relativity and essential preliminariness makes
phenomenological analysis an individual investigation that is always one-
sided. Fink, however, does not leave the relativity of a particular investiga-
tion merely stated in general; he shows explicitly what this relativity is in the
title themes of the dissertation itself, namely, in regard to presentication
and image.
There are two overarching elements Fink explicitly mentions in which one
sees this relativity affecting the work: (1) the status of the distinction between
noesis and noema, and (2) temporality. Regarding the rst: Phenomenology in
13. VB/I, p. 10, note 1. Fink does not specify which manuscripts, but we may presume
they are at least some of those in Hua VIII.
14. VB/I, p. 16. See also pp. 1314.
its classic presentation in Ideas I takes its clues, its starting points for investiga-
tion, from objects, that is, from already nished and given unities of inten-
tional focus. Husserls initial ndings, then, are formulated in terms precisely
of the distinction basic to the presentation of an object, the noetic-noematic
distinction. This is also the approach that would govern the way one starts to
inquire into presentication and image, namely, by specifying the noet-
ically determined noematic character that objects respectively have when
presentied or when imagic. But Fink then asks: With the transforma-
tion of the world into noematic phenomenon is the guarantee already secured
that the noematic objective senses to which all constitutive clarication is
oriented are already suitably determined? And he answers, Clearly not.
The orientation to objects that typies phenomenologys beginning has been
drawn from the base in naive, pre-reduction experience as that base is repre-
sented in the tradition-given epistemological schema of subject-object. But
making use of the concept of noema because ones study begins by focusing on
objects, and thereby laying out the eld of phenomenological description in
terms of objects as noematic, do not ipso facto already make clear what the
condition of being noematic really means. A further stage of one kind or
another is needed to investigate the constitutive sense of the noematic as such.
Until then, the noetic-noematic study of presentication and image will
remain preliminary. (Thus, part of Finks treatment of image was eventually
to take up, at least in some measure, this question of noematic sense, but this
had not yet been done.)
Temporality gures into the study of any phenomena of conscious life, such
as presentication and image, by virtue of the fact that all such phenomena
transpire in time. But presentication in particular involves temporality more
deeply as well; it is temporal as trading in temporality, so to speak. It makes
present what no longer really is; it presents what once was, what is yet to be, or
what only may be. Unless temporality, then, is itself claried, the dissertation
study of presentication must remain preliminary. And, indeed, in a com-
prehensive analysis of constitution, the status of presentication turns out to be
simply that of a starting point for the investigation that would go beyond it. So
it is that Finks dissertation was originally to include a second part that would
deal specically with temporality, that would provide a constitutive-temporal
interpretation of presentication and image. But, again, this part had not
been worked out by the time the dissertation was submitted for the degree.
15. VB/I, pp. 1718. See also Finks remarks on noematization on pp. 1213.
16. See VB/I, p. 18.
17. VB/I, p. 19.
Astonishingly, the idea of this kind of critical questioning on Finks part

came even earlier, in the competition essay completed in February 1928, the
basis for the dissertation, and for very much the same basic reasons. Already
in that essay Fink had a clear grasp of the fact that he had to go beyond the
limitation in individual studies and reach for an understanding of time, the
level of reduction that yields the horizon of all possible clarication of
the constitutive function of presentication. At that level too he would have
to work out a nal methodically integral understanding, only possible in
the framework of an all-encompassing phenomenology, in an integration of
all previous work in structures of totality whereby systematic sense and
signicance could be ascertained. Without this the essay would be simply
preliminary, and since he never got to the third part that was to undertake it,
the essay remained preliminary.
These systematic and methodological points come at the end of the intro-
ductory remarks that preface Finks essay, but they also express an idea that
had not long before been impressed in Finks mind by none other than Husserl
himself.
2.2. Issues That Force the Move Beyond Preliminaries: 1927

1928
On December 1, 1927, in his fourth semester of courses with Husserl at
Freiburgin the midst of preparation for writing the competition essay
Fink went to see Husserl with two questions that deal with the very issues that
he highlighted in order to circumscribe the preliminariness of his dissertation.
The rst question Fink asked Husserl concerned the methodological status of
the noema-noesis correlation: whether there were limits to its appropriateness
in phenomenological analysis; and the second question asked directly about
temporality. Actually Finks concern was the same in both questions, namely,
the manner in which ultimate constituting process ought to be approached for
analysis; for this was the level of inquiry that would reveal to the fullest how
all hitherto positive descriptive ndings had to be qualied as preliminary, and
would therefore provide the basis for determining the nal meaning of what
those same ndings had yielded.
We shall leave Finks rst question of Husserl aside for the moment and take
18. Beitrge zu einer phnomenologischen Analyse der psychischen Phnomene, die

unter den vieldeutigen Ausdrcken: sich denken, als ob, such nur etwas vorstellen,
phantasieren befasst werden, i.e., Finks Preisschrift, EFM 1, Z-I, Beil. I, 2.
19. Beitrge . . . , p. 11.
20. In fact, only the rst of three parts of its original conception was done. See 1.1.
up the second question, about temporality, which, we recall, Fink included in

the plan for the competition essay that he was preparing at the time he went to
see Husserl. Husserl had already made clear in Ideas I that ultimate constitut-
ing process begins to be touched upon when owing lived experience itself is
analyzed as temporalization (81). The problem is that certain features of the
temporal ow of consciousness as we humans experience it do not seem read-
ily applicable to that which is supposed to be the originating process itself, that
originating temporality whose constituting action structures human experi-
ence itself as a phenomenon within the world. Fink asks Husserl: Does the
pure stream of lived experience [Erlebnisstrom] have a beginning, an end?
Does worldly talk of death and birth coincide with the problem of the begin-
ning and end of transcendental time-consciousness? Husserl replies (very
cautiously, Fink notes!) that self-constituting temporality cannot begin and
cannot end. More than that one cannot easily say. Here, in Husserls reply,
one sees how various lines of phenomenological investigation come to be
mutually related. In particular, Husserl continues, here one has to ask: Is the
stream of egological lived experience as such to be taken up for consideration
wholly independently from transcendental intersubjectivity, must not the ba-
sic genetic aporias be investigated in connection with the all-encompassing
structures of totality?
To see what is involved here, the following consideration will help, drawn
from Finks own reections in notes on the point from that same period.
Suppose we analyze ultimate constituting temporality in terms of the primary
features of the humanly experienced streaming of lived experience. In the
structuring of the ow in terms of past, present, and future, items of denite-
ness and identity shift their presence-value from not yet to now to no
longer. In the course of this, however, and against the direction of the ow,
one can always re-present some item that has moved into the no longer, the
action Fink, after Husserl, calls presentication (Vergegenwrtigung); and
one can do this again and again, on items farther and farther back in the no
longer. Human consciousness, however, cannot thus go on forever with this
iterability of its own experience, re-presenting an endless past. The tem-
poral horizon within which this iterability is performed is open and without
limits, but the items thus repeatable within it are not, that is, for any individual
human they compose an actual nite whole within that horizon, even if it be
one that may in practice be impossible to determine specically.
21. Z-I 24a. EFM 1.

22. See the note in Z-I 167a (EFM 1) about what a rst perception or a rst fantasy
might be.
To conceive of ultimate constituting temporality as having a beginning or

end would mean conceiving it as within that horizon of repeatability, whereas
it is the process of origination for that horizon of repeatability. On the other
hand, to conceive of temporality as a repeatability having no beginning and no
end is no less to consider it precisely in terms of that same horizon, only this
time with the addition of a second difculty, namely, considering it as if it
composed an actual sequential whole that was innite. Neither of these op-
tions is legitimate. Regarding the whole issue, therefore, Fink remarks: Hus-
serl rightly says, the pure stream of lived experience cannot begin and end, but
this has transcendentally a quite different meaning from that of an objectively
innite stretch of time.
What meaning, then, does it have to say that this pure stream of lived
experience cannot begin and end? What meaning does totality have for
this pure stream? Husserls reply to the question Fink asked him in the
December meeting gives little hint; but in the note just quoted, from not too
long after that meeting, Fink adds a most telling parenthesis to the sentence
just cited, indicating the understanding of it that he himself follows. He writes:
The connection with the Kantian doctrine of the antinomies is something
that we cannot here show. The Kantian factor in phenomenology, and in
Finks thinking, will be a continual theme in the present study, as will the
whole methodological issue of determining the nature of the fundamental
horizons of experience and consciousness. We are already forewarned, how-
ever, that one has to be very clear-sighted regarding the extent to which re-
course to the concept of totality may inadvertently subsume reection on the
stream of constituting subjectivity into a framework appropriate only for the
stream of human lived experience in its specically intraworldly constituted
character.
2.3. The Nature of Husserls System

It was clearly an advantage for Fink to begin his study of phenomenol-
ogy when it was far enough along for the dimension of self-critique to be both
amply demonstrated in Husserls practice and clearly announced at strategic
places. Yet it was not only Husserl who stated the principle, nor was Fink the
23. Z-I 64ab, EFM 1. See also Z-I 123a (also CM6, pp. 6162) and Z-VI 30ab (also
in EFM 1). Finks considerations here are direct background to the approach he takes in
his revision of Husserls Fifth Cartesian Meditation, in CM.VI/2, pp. 23975. On the
mortality of the empirical, the mundane I in contrast to the irrelevance of death for the
transcendental I, see one example of Husserls treatment in Hua XI, Beil. VIII, section 10,
pp. 37781.
only one who, learning phenomenology from Husserl, recognized the essential
place of self-critique within it. Heidegger too grasped the import of this meth-
odological issue, and he brought it explicitly into the foreground in the book
that helped place him in the very chair that Husserl had made famous in
phenomenology. Being and Time was published in early 1927, and Fink read it
in the summer of that same year. There can be no doubt that in this seminal
work, which Fink at this point had every reason to consider a contribution to
phenomenologys program, he grasped the signicance of Heideggers meth-
odological discussions in 2, 7, 32, 45, and especially 61 and 63. Set in
the midst of what was itself a manifest reorienting of phenomenology, these
paragraphs indicated the way of doing phenomenology was a redoing of it,
that is, that it progressed by reworking fundamental ndings in view of the
openings to more radical meaning that critical notice of presuppositional con-
ceptuality could disclose against the latters occlusion.
Normally these paragraphs in Being and Time are read as initiating some-
thing quite new, a hermeneutic phenomenology in contradistinction to the
directly intuitive Husserlian kind. But the matter is not so simple as that. The
distinctive focus that Being and Time takes for its phenomenology puts a
special stamp on its method, or, one could also say, on its adaptation of
Husserlian method. To begin with, the character of the method as Heidegger
presents its structure is directly dependent upon the unique status of the mean-
ing of being, as the opening paragraph, 1, forcefully announces. Being as
such cannot in principle be set within the parameters of entitative determina-
tion, so that determination by genus and denition cannot characterize the
conceptuality for being as such. The strategy of Being and Time, then, is to
approach the meaning of being as such by way of an explication of the struc-
ture of one particular kind of being, namely, that being named Dasein, but it
must be the explication of the structure of precisely this beings being, not of
the specics of its entitative property determinations. But to explicate the
being [das Sein] of Dasein means to explicate its ways of being rather than
its constituent whats, that is, its So-sein rather than its entitative property
determinations. The essence of this being, its Was-sein, must be conceived
of precisely in terms primarily of its Seinand, Heidegger remarks in cau-
tion, insofar as one can speak of it at all. What is unusual, then, is that the
ways of being of Dasein will have to be positive determinations, yet not
categories of property content; they must remainas much as possible
structural particularities of this beings being and therefore, since this be-
24. See the last paragraph before 1.2.

25. SZ, p. 42, my emphasis; translation that of BT-st.
ings being receives the technical designation existence [Existenz], they are
termed existentials. The existential articulation of the So- of this beings
being accordingly displaces any Was- that might pertain to it, even if the
positive structural determinations of So-sein mimic the way Was-sein is
conceptually articulated (e.g., analogously to a pattern of the more general
genus: existentialand the more specicspecies: being-in). The effect
of all this is, now, that these existential conceptual determinations remain
strictly formal, i.e., determinations of form-ways of being, not of property
whats. Later (in chapter 7, in particular 7.2.1) we shall see more specically
what requires them to remain formal.
This gives a special relevance to Heideggers characterization of the method
followed in Being and Time as determined by Daseins hermeneutical situa-
tion. Lodged within this situation itself, an investigation of the sort that
Being and Time isthat is, inasmuch as it is phenomenologicalcan only
begin if it can set some determination of what is to be investigated, with some
anticipation of the special way the investigandum will be inquired into. But
this means that the conceptualization of that which is to be investigated can-
not be considered already to settle denitively what the investigation is sup-
posed to yield as results. That investigation-guiding conceptualization can
instead only indicate the investigandum in a formal way. Normally this
feature of anticipatory specication that the investigation itself, as it proceeds,
explicates by and in its ndings is what expositors focus on, although it
tends to be put as the way the ndings give further interpretation to what is
already rmly in hand. But this way of understanding it fails to take seriously
the import of designating the anticipatory conceptualization as formal and
as an indication, as if, rather than suggesting the minimum of material
determination needed for the guidance of the investigation, formal indica-
tion has already done the job of providing the perhaps sketchy but nonethe-
less true determination in its essentialsin seeming disregard of the way the
explication will certainly not have been accomplished in a single trajectory
of inquiry moving directly and with little complication from anticipation to
nal investigational results.
To understand formal indication as in fact a feature of genuine inves-
tigation, by which investigation the thing itself [die Sache selbst] under
26. Heideggers inquiry into the ontological structure of Dasein certainly did not get
done in one go, as the lecture courses preceding the publication of Being and Time
demonstrate. See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993). His method is that of continual overhauling,
writes Fink of Heidegger in late 1928 or early 1929 (U-IV 49; EFM 1).
investigation comes to its explication, to its Auslegung, has two effects. On the
one hand it brings Heideggers conception of formal indication into meth-
odological parallel to Husserls self-critical return of investigation upon the
matters already designated for looking into or already inquired into to some
extent; that is, it is parallel in form and function to Husserls zigzag move,
especially when this zigzag is revalued in its pattern by Husserls realization of
the manifold levels on which specic matters can be investigated. On the
other handand quite other than in Husserls handlingthe above under-
standing of formal indication allows compatibility with the unusual charac-
ter of conceptualization when it is being that is to be articulated in differentiat-
ing determinacy or, more specically, when it is existence, in Heideggers
sense, that is to be articulated. That is, the formal character of the designa-
tions for the structures of the being of Dasein is and must remain formal
precisely because of the very character of that kind of being; and if the den-
ing of the existentials is carried on perhaps too much in the manner of the
differentiation of property content, the formal character of the conceptualiza-
tion will guard against the conversion of existentials into essentials of a
materially entitative sort.
More will have to be said about the character and function of formal
indication in phenomenology, since it becomes a term that Fink admits freely
into his work as designating homologously the demand for moving from a
preliminary to a radically self-critical understanding in the program of phe-
nomenological investigation. More will also have to be seen of the problem-
atic status of inquiry into being in phenomenology and the way this changes
everything. For all this see chapter 7 (7.17.2.1, and 7.2.1.1). The point now is
to recognize that Fink saw Heideggers work as opening dimensions of self-
critique that methodologically were solidly legitimate for phenomenology
even if, and even precisely in that, they moved beyond the measure of self-
critique that Husserl deemed sufcient. In a word, Finks learning of phenome-
nologys program found self-questioning and self-critique as integral to the
work of investigation, and his own early practice in phenomenology was a
persistent questioning and critique.
Thus it was that everything led to Finks having to see that at the very core of
phenomenology was its operating in this circle of anticipatory conceptual
guidance, material inquiry, and self-critical return upon the whole enterprise,
upon initiating conceptual guides and anticipations as well as upon actual
investigations and their many-leveled results. This return and critique is also
what we see already in his notebooks from the time of the prize essay and the
dissertation; yet it was in the course of working on the Bernau editing that he
came to formulate the conception of that practice as key to the kind of system
Husserls phenomenology was.
Fink understood that he could not simply attend to the analyzed particulars
of these Husserl manuscripts; they could only be explicated within the meth-
odology of progression intrinsic to phenomenology, namely, within the dy-
namic of theme-particularity and totality-structures, the dynamic of prelimi-
nariness and second-level interpretive critique. It was this that governed any
proper conception of how what phenomenology was achieving had a system-
atic structure. Husserl frequently spoke of the systematic character of phe-
nomenological work (as, for example, in the long passage from the 1923
1924 lectures quoted earlier), but the sense of this for him remained fairly
general in meaning more or less orderly completeness without any connota-
tion of rigid determinacy among components. Fink discerned, however, the
more specic, distinctive functional sense in which phenomenology was sys-
tematic, and he sketched out ways of expressing this as essential to introduc-
ing the edition in which Husserls most radical and fundamental investigations
were to be presented, those on time-consciousness and temporality.
The two note-texts that express this merit citation in full: With Husserl, his
system grows out of the individual analyses. The paradoxical situation, that
the concreteness of phenomenological philosophy lies in the manuscripts,
which, however, rst make possible the general systematic projections. On the
other hand, it is only in the light of these projections that the more comprehen-
sive relevance of the analyses can be seen. These systematic anticipatory per-
spectives guided things for Husserl. Work done following them sees itself
referred to presentations of universal scope. From the same set of notes,
here is the same thing said again in a slightly different way: The peculiarity of
Edmund Husserls way of working is that all systematic projections are not
constructions that precede concrete investigations, rather they develop in the
analyses. But that lled-out analyses are made possible also results in the
systematic projected design being broken open again, to gain thereby the char-
acteristic of mobility. This is a fundamental characteristic of phenomenol-
ogydespite all its rigor [it is an] open system. There are many ways in
27. Hua VIII, pp. 47778.

28. See, for example, his remark to Paul Natorp, February 1, 1922, where he speaks of
the universal systematic ideas that are called for by all my detailed investigations, in Bw
V, pp. 15152. See also Finks compact representation given in one of his tutorials for Van
Breda in 1939 and 1940, Z-XXX LVI/7a (EFM 4). One of the main features of the system
concept Husserl developed is the distinction of levels of analysis on the one hand, and
stages of advance in analysis on a particular level on the other (see 7.3.3.2, especially the
last pages).
29. B-I 40a, EFM 2, Abschn. 2. The syntactic incompleteness of the second sentence is
not untypical of Finks notes.
30. B-I 22a, emphasis Finks, insertion in brackets mine. In more general expression,
which Husserls phenomenology was essentially a system of dynamic return

and self-critical reconceptualization. While these will be shown at various
points in the present study, a summary indication would be helpful here.
On the one hand, the demand for recourse to matters themselves is itself
the demand that the navet of pre-reduction conceptions and stances be neu-
tralized and set out of action. On the other hand, the explication of matters
themselves has to be kept in integral relationship with the context or hori-
zon within which they maintained their validity. There are, then, a number of
ways in which overarching designationssystematic projections, as Fink
puts it in the above quotations, or higher descriptions that Husserl speaks of in
the Erste Philosophie text cited earlier have to be specically considered in
the articulation and interpretation of matters themselves. One is the way that a
given general thematic designation could have a different sense depending
upon the level of presupposition-correction that is in action in a given discus-
sion; and investigations could differ considerably in how radical each was in
this regard. Another is the extent to which the reductive move to constitutive
origins approachesor reachesthe level of ultimate constitutive process.
(Here it is only with temporality that the ultimate would be reached.) Yet
another is the way in which phenomena have to be treated in terms of totalities
in which they are constitutively integrated, one example of which is expressed
in the 1927 discussion Fink had with Husserl where the question of a begin-
ning and end for an individual human life necessitates bringing in intersubjec-
tivity. Finally, there is the matter of the specic critique of the nature and
character of cognitive operations as transcendental phenomenological reason
and science.
Signicant in this regard is the fact that the very rst piece of draft writing
that Fink produced for Husserl was the 1930 outline for Husserls System of
Phenomenological Philosophy (see 1.3). The occasion for this may have been
a conjunction of circumstances to which a response was needed (see the nal
pages of 1.2), but in its essential legitimacy it was the detailing of the working
of the dynamic that instituted and governed phenomenology as a distinctive
investigative program. Here we see laid out the various stages and levels of
inquiry and ndings in an outline of how they integrate in critique and rein-
terpretive radicalization. Accordingly, what Fink offers to our reading of Hus-
serls phenomenology is not a plan of additions onto Husserls ndings and
see also CM6, pp. 78. See the statement of the zigzag principle in Crisis, 9 l, p. 58
(Hua VI, p. 59), there regarding the relation of origin to sense-tradition but striking in its
analogy to the present point.
31. Hua VIII, p. 478. See 2.1.
views that come from the outside but contributions organically developed in
principle within the methodological systematics of phenomenology itself.
The character of our study is also therefore set. It is not a matter of compar-
ing and synthesizing, of cutting and pasting elements from the opinions held
by different individuals in order to produce some kind of comprehensive phe-
nomenological doctrine. Neither will some individualHusserl or Fink, or
Heideggerbe sanctioned as privileged in access to the truth. What we
shall be doing is instead to follow the way in which the dynamic process of the
system of phenomenology was working in and as the collaboration that
Fink was doing with Husserl, precisely as the endeavor to aim at die Sachen
selbst so as to bring them to fullest explication, beyond the limitations of
any pregiven or adopted framing, whether of tradition-given conceptuality or
of an individuals capacities and mental schemata and perspective. In other
words, we shall be following the working of the system itself in the main
writings at hand (Husserls and Finks); here we shall nd the individual phi-
losopher de-absolutized as a font of truth, even while we attend to the living
action of philosophizing and phenomenologizing, which, paradoxically, will
be actual only and always in and as a particular philosophers thinking. It is in
this sense that, before this study is over, we may nd that phenomenology may
systematically have to go farther than Husserl, or even develop differences
from Husserls assertions, and yet still belong to the phenomenology that
Husserl founded.
The integrated activation of the critique dimension necessary to phenome-
nologys working within Finks early study and writing has already been intro-
duced in the context of discussion with Husserl (2.2 above). It is time to return
to this and to take up the matter of the other question Fink posed to Husserl,
namely, regarding the methodological status of the noema-noesis correlation.
2.4. The Question of Time and the Question of the Subject:

Pushing Noematization to the Limits
On that rst day of December 1927, the rst question Fink put to Hus-
serl was whether the phenomenological structural analogue to the subject-
object relation, namely, the noesis-noema correlation, was one restricted to the
entry-level analysis found in Ideas I, or one to be found at all levels, includ-
ing the deepest, namely, the level of the proto-impression (Urimpression).
Husserl answered: The parallel is one found absolutely throughout, and is
properly the parallel between constituting manifold and constituted unity,
which on its side functions as a moment of a constituting manifold. He then
pointed out that, of course, in Ideas I the whole deeper lying constitution that
goes under the title temporality did not get considered. Nevertheless, de-
spite the fact that, when one would consider it, the noetic-noematic situation
would have to be somewhat qualied for that level, which Husserl went on to
explain, there is still an issue here regarding accession to the deeper lying
level that was not addressed in Husserls reply. At that level, in our attempt
to explicate ultimate temporality, necessarily conducted on the basis of our
experience of the time of our own human consciousness, the elements of time
are represented to us not in their actual ow but through retention, through
objectication; and reection upon thus retained/objectied elements of
temporal ow is carried on in noetic-noematic form. What we thematically
know and analyze may necessarily be set into this schema by our reection
upon it; but the question is whether the elements as themselves, in their inte-
gral native ow as ultimate temporality, function and relate structurally ac-
cording to that schema. The question is whether the way temporal structures
appear in reection, and the way the coinciding identity of reecting con-
sciousness and lived temporal ow reected upon is conceived and asserted,
namely, in terms of noetic-noematic distinction, is ultimate. Husserl asserts
that the thoroughgoing relativism of noesis and noema cancels itself out at
the ultimate level; but the question is, is it the relativism of the schemai.e.,
the subordination involved in the distinction of the two poles, one determin-
ing, the other determinedthat is canceled out, or the schema of distinction
itself that must be annulled?
This question Fink did not pose to Husserl in his discussion with him, but
Finks work shows that he took it with full seriousness as something that needed
to be pursued; it did not stand as something already settled. We have seen this
indicated in the Introduction to the dissertation, but in his notes Fink
makes the point far more explicitly: What are the intentions of the disserta-
tion? (1) Loosening up the rigid concept of the noetic-noematic correlation.
(2) Determining the kind of being transcendental consciousness has. (3) Strug-
gle against rationalism. Not reason, but time is the essence of human being [des
menschlichen Daseins]. Further, the struggle against the presentialism of Hus-
serls analytic of time. Each point is the requestioning of an element that
possesses a paradigm constancy in Husserls work but which now, in the anal-
ysis of temporality, needs to be reconsidered in its validity as perhaps not quite
32. Z-I 23a24a, EFM 1. See Z-I 16a, a brief reection of Finks on this same topic.
33. See the reference near the end of 2.1 to VB/I, pp. 1718.
34. Z-I 92ab, EFM 1. See also Z-I 155a and Z-VI 40a on the the pure stream of lived
experience as that in terms of which to understand both consciousness and the
essence of human being.
ultimate. And the issue that presses this reconsideration is this: Is the manner in
which reecting consciousness casts temporalityconstitutes itin its thema-
tization of it, namely, in the noesis-noema schema, in principle valid as neces-
sarily adequate to the status of temporality as ultimate constitutive process? In
his notes Fink calls this thematizing cast proto-noematization [Urnoemati-
sierung], the way consciousness in its own special way comes about as tem-
poral process [die eigentmliche Zeitigungsweise des Bewutseins], whereby it
constitutes its own being [Sein] for the rst time and construes its own constitu-
tion as itself something existent [eine seiende]. Is there not reason, however, to
realize that in principle antecedent to every ontic mode of consciousness lies a
non-ontic mode? Is not proto-noematization a kind of construal of ultimate
temporal coming-about in the form of something ontic in character, a deep-
lying constitutive self-conception that can be called ontication? Might it
not be more correct to acknowledge that the anonymous I is never thematized,
but disclosed in a proto-noematization?
Here we see the import of taking the methodological lifeblood of Husserls
phenomenology to be the push of counter-presuppositional radicality in the
self-understanding of human consciousness in the world. Under the rubric of
the reduction temporality itself has to be approached with a realization of the
critical limits of the noesis-noema schema, so that the seeming heuristic pri-
macy of a subject-object correlation becomes itself questioned both method-
ologically and theoretically. And this is done explicitly under the rubric of the
reduction, as the Introduction to Finks dissertation already asserts: With
this transformation of the world as sum of ontic objects into noemawhat we
term noematizationthe phenomenological reduction is not yet exhausted,
especially since the meaning of transcendental subjectivity remains completely
in the dark. The work of analysis enjoined by the reduction, then, re-
quires specically oriented effort against prematurely closing the question.
Fink writes: The reduction is not only noematization, but just as much the
undoing of self-construals; and while these self-construals will be rst em-
pirical, transcendental self-conceptions as well retain a navet. Simply work-
ing reective regress to transcendental life is not enough; it also has to be
regress behind specic self-construals of transcendental life.
35. Z-I 51ab, EFM 1.

36. Z-I 53a.
37. Z-I 65b. Finks emphasis.
38. See appendix.
39. Z-IV 77a (from 1928 to 1929), EFM 1. For Selbstauffassungen here one could
equally well give self-conceptions instead of self-construals.
40. Z-VI 52a (from 1929), EFM 1.
2.5. The Question of Time and the Question of Being

Before we turn to further specics in the countering of both pre-
phenomenological and intra-phenomenological self-construals, one more
aspect of Finks earliest work with Husserl must be indicated. When we take
the points of critique in Finks Introduction to his dissertationespecially,
for example, on the question of the difference and identity between subjec-
tivity as mundane and subjectivity as transcendental in 5 and put this in
the context of his notes for the dissertation work, what becomes unmistakable
is the way Fink recognizes the fundamental importance of the question of
being for transcendental phenomenology, in the form, namely, of the question
of the mode of being of transcendental subjectivity. Here is one of the
prime issues that the nal section of the dissertation was to take up, clarica-
tion in terms of the horizon of the kind of being that absolute transcendental
subjectivity has. In preparing his dissertation ofcially for the doctorate,
and realizing something of the delicacy of the situation then already develop-
ing between Husserl and Heidegger (see 1.2), Fink no doubt felt the need to be
diplomatic in posing the issue; for there he stood between, on the one side, the
emeritus Professor Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, his mentor
and Referent for the dissertation, and, on the other, the Korreferent for the
defense and approval of Finks doctoral work, Professor Martin Heidegger,
successor to Husserl in the rst chair of philosophy but acknowledged by all
including now Husserl himself, to his own painful disillusionmentto be in
sharp disagreement with Husserl. Yet Fink had not hidden the nature of the
question in his dissertation, though in his notes the issue is put with greater
force and acuity, as before long it would come to be in his work for Husserl
himself.
What is more directly stated in Finks notes, however, is his having learned
the place of the question of being in phenomenology from Heideggerwhich
does not mean at all that Fink found Heidegger to provide the answer to the
question. How that is so will become clear as we move through chapters 3 to
7. But in anticipation, since the matter comes up throughout Finks work here,
one note will serve to characterize the overall way, already in his dissertation,
that Fink proposed the issue: In the dissertation the terminology transcen-
dental subjectivity is never to be used, but rather always only transcendental
41. See also VB/I, p. 9.

42. Z-III 35a, EFM 1.
43. Z-I 98a, EFM 1.
44. See Z-VI 15a, which, with its continuation in Z-IV 94a, is a draft for 2 of the
Introduction to the dissertation (both in EFM 1).
subject. . . . What basically has to be said is this: The determination of the

subjectivity of the transcendental subject is not a possible task for an ontologi-
cal philosophy, since this determination is not the working out of the kind of
being of that subjectivity, but is the goal of a meontic integration. As long as
subjectivity is a being, to which a specic kind of being is betting, it [i.e.,
subjectivity] is nothing other than man. But man is the pregivenness of subjec-
tivity for itself, the pregivenness that forms part of the pregiven world. This
is a huge and comprehensive issue, and the elements that will treat and resolve
it will be introduced progressively in the chapters to come. Right now we have
to turn rst to some of the details concerning the way presuppositions lying in
the specic self-conceptions that allow phenomenology to begin as a pro-
gram are countered by the very investigations for which they serve as theme-
setting guides.
2.6. The Critique of Self-Conceptions

To do phenomenological investigation means to reinterpret the familiar
and unquestioned, to thematize the taken for granted, to transform routinely
accepted appearances so that the genuine and ultimate sense of them shows
through. But this means that phenomenological reection must begin at the
point in historical existence where one already is, and in the actuality of the
kind of existent one already takes oneself to be. The problem then will be to
see if the presuppositional construals binding this condition for beginning can
be undone so that ones reach for disclosure free of their grip can attain the
fundamentals that will clarify the proper sense lying hitherto unrecognized in
the way those same initial construals expressed the actuality within which
one naively began. However, not only must the naive conceptions that guide
everyday life be identied and countered, the navet of philosophical self-
conception too must be recognized and overcome; and this may be the more
tenacious kind of presupposition by virtue of its already exercising an action
of countering taken against a rst order of navet. The self-critical moment of
phenomenology must then be a redoubled and repeated action, and this kind
of continual requestioning effort is demonstrable perhaps in no better instance
than in the way the very conceptions and actions of critique that founded
Husserls transcendental turnthat is, the phenomenological reduction, in-
troduced in that still seminal but deeply problematic work, Ideas I of 1913
themselves had to be reconsidered. It is Husserl himself who shows the need
for this necessary critique and reconsideration.
45. Z-V VII/7a, emphasis all Finks, phrase in brackets mine (EFM 1).
2.6.1. The Reduction Again: Husserls Own Critique of His

Initiating Presentation of Phenomenology
In the decades after Ideas I Husserl came to realize full well that some-
onealways I myselfreecting phenomenologically should not suppose
too quickly that I have reached the transcendentally proper when I turn
reectively upon my own consciousness as the inner stream of experiencing
that is distinguishable from objects and their combination into a milieu, and
that is mine alone. For even when I abstract my psychic life from its engage-
ment intentionally with things, that life remains an entity belonging properly
to the world, except that now it seems to be considered exclusively in terms of
its immanence to itself, rather than as intrinsically relating to that world. Even
when I exercise the phenomenological epox to inhibit every objective judg-
ment (dja), about real things as well as about my own and anyone elses
body, Husserl asks, Does my psychic life then, and I in this life as the ego in
ego cogito, remain left over? And he replies to his own question: But my
pure psychic life is also still existent in the world. To perform a reduction to it
would only be to abstract out within the world the stratum of the psychic.
What I want to gain is rather the transcendental pure I and I-life. Every
objective apperception is to be inhibited, even that of myself as an egoic hu-
man [Ich-Mensch], as a psyche [Seele].
As Husserl explains, the acceptance-value [Geltung] of this very appercep-
tion of myself as a human person has to be included in the reduction. The
reduction thus signies reduction to pure consciousness, come forth from
the purifying of my humanity and in particular of my psyche, reduction to
the pure something [das Reine] of the psychic side of the object, I as man,
which holds good for me in the natural attitude. What Husserl is concerned
about in this manuscript text is that the move of regress to the pure some-
thing (eventually to be seen as the genuinely transcendental) not be taken as
reduction simply to my inner self, to my private self-consciousness in its inti-
mately felt coherence and distinctness. What Husserl is arguing to himself is
that the very concept of a phenomenological residuum, so dramatically
expressed in Ideas I (49), is better avoided, as also is talk about bracketing
the world. It easily seduces one into thinking that the world henceforth falls
out of thematic phenomenological concern, and that instead only subjective
acts, modes of appearance, etc., that refer to the world, would be thematic ma-
46. Hua VIII, pp. 43233. The manuscript text here in Beilage XX was apparently
written in 1924 as Husserl was working over his lecture text for possible publication.
47. Hua VIII, p. 433. The words in angle brackets are insertions by the editor of the
text, Rudolf Boehm, in the interest of smoother intelligibility.
terial. When the reduction is rightly understood, when all-encompassing

subjectivity in its full universality, namely as transcendental, is given its right-
ful standing, then on the correlate side the world is found in it as rightfully
existent, in all that it in truth is: an all-encompassing transcendental in-
quiry thus holds in its thematic embrace the world itself too, with all its true
being. . . . Indeed, it is not the world in some general way that is found
correlate to and within transcendental subjectivity, but rather the world as on
the one hand a unitary primordial nature, nature in the objective sense,
and as on the other hand including others.
Working out in convincing concrete analysis the way these phenomena of
nature and of fellow humans are found to be intrinsically related to transcen-
dental subjectivity as the cogitata of an ego cogito is another thing,
particularly this question of others in intersubjective community. But that
is not the issue right now. Here the issue is determining just how far I have to
go in purifying my humanity and in particular my psyche [Seele] so as to
get to that which, within my humanity and my egoic psychic life, is transcen-
dentally pure in a full and radical sense. To begin with, Husserl himself
emphatically recognizes that the turn of reection upon the life of ones own
consciousness, which, put into operation under the epoch, is meant to reach
the pure subjectivity at work within it, is far from being a natural action. It is
rather a wholly unnatural attitude and a wholly unnatural consideration of
oneself and of the world.
But just what does the unnaturalness here consist in? Is it simply a change
in reective attribution, or a change of value, so that what once was seen
as actually existent in itself is now taken simply as phenomenoni.e., so
that one sees the same matters differently? Or is it a change in the content and
structure of that which is discerned, so that now one sees different matters in
the same phenomena? Actually, it is both. By the epoch one now indeed sees
all the same matters differently, as pure phenomena, but in additionand
this is the whole point of the regressive dimension of the phenomenological
48. Hua VIII, p. 432. In the main text of the lectures as well Husserl argues this same
point about bracketing (Hua VIII, pp. 11011). Even before Ideas I, Husserl was
aware of how easily one could confuse phenomenological and psychological immanence,
assuming the latter to be the very same as the former without more ado. See Hua XIII,
p. 154.
49. Hua VIII, p. 432.
50. Hua VIII, pp. 436ff. The parallel here to Ideas I 29 is obvious.
51. The massive collection of texts in Hua XIII, XIV, and XV attests to this.
52. Hua VIII, p. 121.
53. Ideas I (Hua 3/1), 31, p. 59.
project, of the re-ductionone also now has the aim of accounting for that
phenomenality in its coherence and continuity by investigating the processes
of intentional constitution that produce it; and these processes will be matters
quite different from anything hitherto encountered in ordinary experience.
The unnaturalness, therefore, is both in the stance taken and in the positive
discoveries made within that stance.
In one way, however, the positive discoveries made are not entirely un-
natural. In contrast to the kinds of things one encounters as objects in the
surrounding world of physical nature, the phenomena of ones psychic life are
themselves already recognized to be different; they are nonphysical imma-
nent phenomena, namely, movements of mind and will and feeling, and
especially of self-awareness. We know ourselves in terms of a rich set of names
for such immanent phenomena; and when phenomenological investigation
wishes to analyze the processes of intentional constitution, in order ultimately
to disclose transcendental originative processes, naturally it is with this whole
rich set of names for these familiar psychic experiences that it begins, else it
could not begin at all. It is here, now, that the next stage of critical reinvestiga-
tion is under way, that is, where the phenomenology of the 1920s was redoing
beginnings beyond the preliminariness of rst treatment and formulation. And
this is where Fink enters the work of phenomenological requestioning.
2.6.2. The Critique of Conceptual Schemata for

Transcendental Subjectivity: Reconsideration by Fink
As has already been indicated in representing Finks dissertation work,
two issues stand in the foreground for critically determining the proper frame-
work for the phenomenological effort to disclose the transcendentally pure
ultimate of constitutive action. The rst of these is to reconsider whether the
54. That the matters to be found are themselves different Husserl makes clear in the
pages that follow the quote just given, viz., Hua VIII, pp. 12124. He says, for example,
that the phenomenological analysis towards which one sets out is not in any way at all
an analogue to an objective thing-oriented analysis, and that the subjectivity to be found
is something absolutely unique, which can in no way have its like in the world of non-
egoic objects, and we rise to the realization that in fact a phenomenological analysis has,
both in method and in content, a totally different sense from natural-objective analyses of
natural matters (p. 124).
55. In Hua VIII, therefore, Husserl shifts from a conception of the reduction as a move
of disengagement from the study of objects to a conception of the reduction as a move
that transforms psychological self-study (pp. 126ff.)
basic epistemological schema of subject and object is or is not proper to phe-

nomenologys post-preliminary analytic aim, the second is to grasp the way
the question of being focuses the explication of the ultimate phenomenologi-
cal meaning of transcendental constituting subjectivity.
As background to this, however, we have to take note of the full accord on
Finks part with Husserls critique of the residuum proposal in Ideas I of
1913. This is exemplied, for example, in several instances in Finks work
after his completion of the dissertation (in December 1929) owing to his now
increased involvement in Husserls own labors. The rst of these, coming in
December 1930 after he had completed the Layout and during the very
same weeks in which he was working out a full-scale treatment of the rst
section of the massive new plan (see 1.3), was Finks private instruction to
several Japanese philosophers who had come to Freiburg to study with Hus-
serl. Finks notes for this tutorial give a concise representation of the overview
he had on Husserls phenomenology precisely at this time of reorientation in
Husserls thinking, namely, regarding the need for a full-scale systematic pre-
sentation of his phenomenology either as an entirely new work or as a whole-
sale revision of the Cartesian Meditations. One of the main orientation
points in the retrospective portion of this instruction is that the rst stage of
introduction to phenomenology, represented above all by Ideas I, holds the
danger of being taken absolutely instead of as an early, initiating step in the
whole program of inquiry. Fink explains that what is gained by the rst step
of the reduction is to take the world as noematic correlate, namely, as the
objective world. This in turn determines the concept of egology: the world
as world-phenomenon is the world for me. The world-phenomenon is the
phenomenon of the objective (universally holding) world. The analytic of
egology does not take into regard the internal structural reference of the
world-phenomenon. Fink emphasizes that the entire correlation, I-world,
as laid out in Ideas I (and other writings of Husserls, including Formal and
Transcendental Logic and Cartesian Meditations), can be (and has been) pre-
maturely taken as the denitive representation of what results from applying
the phenomenological epoch, rather than as simply preliminary and intro-
ductory. What is particularly dangerous is that this rst presentation of the
epoch allows one to interpret it as applying mainlyor even exclusively!to
the object-side of the correlation in question, viz., that of subject-object,
56. VI.CM/2, pp. 10105.

57. Z-VII XVI/15 (EFM 2), also in EF/CM-HS, pp. 10510.
58. Z-VII XVI/2a.
of experiencer-experienced, of immanence-transcendence, so that, with the

epoch not being so explicitly applied to the subject-side, one can conclude
too quickly that one has reached the pure immanence to which constitutive
action may be attributed without more ado. But not only must the epoch be
applied with equal rigor to both sides but in addition the object focus of the
conception of the epochs efcacity and application must be seen as a limita-
tion; for this object-focused conception overlooks both the internal structure
of the world as such (beyond the terms set for it by the structural conditions of
the noematic object correlating to a noetic subject) and the internal structure
of subjectivity precisely as constituting agency (which the analysis of tem-
porality is eventually to disclose more radically than in terms of object-aiming
noetic-noematic act-intentionality).
The other instances to mention as offering this same caution about how to
read Ideas I were the several occasions on which Fink carried on correspon-
dence for Husserl with the latters colleagues. In late 1932 Fink wrote to both
Felix Kaufmann and Alfred Schutz to comment on the reviews of Husserls
Mditations cartsiennes (published just the year before) that each was prepar-
ing for publication. In both letters Fink gives unambiguous expression to this
caution about the limitations of the treatment in Ideas I, although in his
briefer remarks to Schutz he directs his clarications more to the reading of the
Cartesian Meditations. Finks insistence on the double direction of phe-
nomenological disconnection (that is, bracketing both transcendent and
immanent being)required also, as we saw, by Husserl himselfis one of the
major themes Fink works into his second set of revisions for the Cartesian
Meditations, written in the summer of that same year. The opening section he
proposed for the Second Meditation in fact carries the title The Double
Performance of the Phenomenological Reduction.
In this revision it was clearly Finks concern that also in the Cartesian
Meditations too little attention had been given to the way the phenomenologi-
cal reduction must affect the subjective component of the integral phenomenon
of the world. The main weight of the phenomenological epoch lies in the dis-
connection of ourselves as subjects existing in the world, in the conversion of
ourselves into the transcendental subject, more precisely, in self-recognition as
this subject. Only with the performance of self-bracketing does the meaning
59. See appendix.

60. Finks letter to Kaufmann, EFM Abschn. 4, Text No. 2.
61. VI.CM/2, Text No. 4, pp. 192219. See also the 1930 Draft for the Opening
Section of an Introduction to Phenomenology, VI.CM/2, on pp. 73ff.
of the phenomenological epoch become evident and completely explicit in

the unique character which it in principle possesses, and recognizable in its
fundamental distinction from a stance of belief enacted in the world. But the
real question is whether this self-bracketing is at all possible. This question
suggests difculties, Fink writes, only as long as we move in the naive unques-
tioned presupposition that the real agent performing the phenomenological
epoch is the meditating human-I [Menschen-Ich] that is an I-in-the-world.
To counter this, application of the epoch has to be shaken from preoccupation
with the sphere of objects so as to affect equally the sphere of the subject itself.
Only if it is possible to remove the worldly shape of the interiority sphere of
our life as an apperceptive meaning-structure, to separate it as a covering and
concealment from a subjectivity that is only brought into the open by this
removal, . . . only then does self-bracketing have a putative sense.
Here one might note also Finks explanation of the way epoch and re-
duction do not mean quite the same thing, even if they are often used inter-
changeably because of their intimate connection. It is a point Fink makes in
the letter to Kaufmann referred to earlier, where he writes that in Ideas I the
reduction is really described only as epoch, and the specically reducing
element, the act of leading back into transcendental subjectivity, remains un-
considered in its methodology. This latter deciency is discussed in much
more detail in the Sixth Meditation that Fink had written just a few months
before. There we see that the epoch is really only a preparatory action upon
the eld to be considered, it is the action of re-valuing, of bracketing or
turning-off (disconnecting); but it is not ipso facto the move that posi-
tively attains the properly transcendental itself. That is done by a leading
back, by a move of re-ductive re-gress behind the featuring of subjectivity
that is already given in and as human self-apperception back to that agency
that in actuality is supposed to be constitutively responsible for everything
thus bracketed, everything already found formed, in place, and accepted as
holding in the entire eld of investigation to which the epoch has already
been applied, the eld, namely, that is the world, the all-encompassing unity
62. VI.CM/2, p. 164. The phrases in angle brackets are Husserls insertions (annota-
tions 151 and 152).
63. VI.CM/2, p. 164.
64. VI.CM/2, p. 170. Finks image for explicating the transcendental while in fact
retaining worldly self-conceptions is that it would be like trying to jump over ones own
shadow; Draft for an Opening Section, VI.CM/2, pp. 6061.
65. Letter of December 17, 1932, EFM 2, Abschn. 4.
66. See CM6, pp. 3942, especially pp. 4041 (VI.CM/1, pp. 4345, especially 44).
of psychological transcendence and psychological immanence. In sum,

epoch and the action of reduction proper are the two internal basic mo-
ments of the phenomenological reduction, mutually required and mutually
conditioned, namely, (1) the abstention from belief applied to the whole of
consciousness in the world to which reection turns, i.e., both internal and
external phenomena; and (2) the recognition of the constitutedness of self-
conceptions about human being in the world as that through and beyond
which one has to try to grasp in its own proper terms the transcendental sub-
jectivity that is responsible for constitutive action and its constituted results.
We have reached a pivotal turning point, evident in the very pages in Finks
Sixth Meditation just referred to. Fink recasts the central point Husserl
made earlier, that the reduction signies reduction to pure consciousness,
the purifying of my humanityand especially of my psycheto the
pure something of the psychic side of that object, I as man, which holds
good for me in the natural attitude. The question now has to be, Just how
extensive is this purifying, just what all falls under it, and what happens to it
in this purication? Equally important is a second question, Who or what is
it that accomplishes this purication, who is doing the reection in which all
this is realized? In answer to both questions Fink replies: This purication
nullies man himself; man un-humanizes [entmenscht] himself in performing
the epoch. In addition, in performing this epoch, in following the tran-
scendental tendency that awakens in man and drives him to inhibit all accept-
ednesses, there also emerges the function of transcendental onlooker who
both performs this epoch and reects upon that performance; and this on-
looker is also actual in the person of the very same human who is attempting
to exercise the epoch and reduction, and yet is the one whose humanness the
epoch places under annulment. In a word, the humanness (a) of the human
object that is being reected upon, and (b) of the action of thought that
exercises the epoch and then (c) turns to reect methodically and critically
upon the whole action of phenomenological disclosure, is to be, in some meth-
odologically robust way, undone.
One has to read as well the changes Husserl writes into the text drawn from
67. From Finks revision for the First Meditation, VI.CM/2, p. 170. The expressions
in angle brackets are Husserls insertions (annotation 187). For their point see the inser-
tion (annotation 188) Husserl makes in the very next sentence.
68. CM6, p. 41 (VI.CM/1, p. 44).
69. Once again, Hua VIII, p. 433 (see 2.5.1 above).
70. See CM6, pp. 3940 (VI.CM/1, pp. 4344), emphasis all Finks.
here. While conrming and nuancing Finks statement of the situation, Hus-
serl (1) gives a personalized orientation to the action of un-humanization,
namely, as taking place in myself as actual, living reecting agent, and (2) un-
derscores the suspension of acceptance of the being of the human entity that I
normally am. But while Husserl here supports Finks terming the reduction an
un-humanizing, Fink nds his subscribing to it has a certain ambiguity, in
that more than anything else it is the countering of a naturalistic conception of
the human, a conception that takes the human as an object in nature alongside
and equivalent to all others in being adequately dealt with in natural science.
This is what he remarks on two years after the Sixth Meditation, writing in
his notes that for Husserl the reduction is basically only an un-naturalizing of
spirit. And the reason Husserl maintained that limitation is that, on the one
hand, he worked his analysis of the world in too restricted a concentration on
the world as the universe of objective things [das All des objektiven Dingen],
and on the other he did not recognize the way the ontological nature of
knowing had to be exploredand this precisely because phenomenologi-
cally the action of knowing had to be explicitly seen in its fundamental deter-
mination in terms of world-inherence. In other words, the cognitive act
remained dened exclusively in terms of the correlation of subject and object
in an equivocation that collapsed together the ordo essendi and the ordo
cognoscendi.
The rst of these two critical points regarding the limited scope of Husserls
counternaturalist un-humanizing, viz., regarding how the world is analyzed
under the governance of the reduction, will be taken up in chapter 4. We shall
turn now to the remaining point of the criticism.
2.6.2.1. Questioning the Basic Epistemological Schema

General Points
For Fink as for Husserl, Ideas I achieved the rst breakthrough to
what Husserl eventually characterized as transcendental idealism and was
not, under that designation or under any other, the nal accomplishment of
phenomenology. Nevertheless, because Ideas I became the standard statement
71. CM6, notation 112 on pp. 3940 (VI.CM/1, notation 112, p. 43). See also CM6,
pp. 4647 (VI.CM/1 pp. 5153), and CM6, p. 120, notation 416 (VI.CM/1, p. 132).
Husserl reects this un-humanizing in Crisis, p. 183 (54a).
72. OH-I 89 (EFM 3), emphasis Finks. Fink remarks that this amounts to an on-
tological method that misunderstands itself as absolute idealism. The notes from this
booklet are from after November 1934.
of transcendental phenomenology and is still taken as basic, the specic form

that this breakthrough took in that book has to be properly understood in
its specic initiating efcacy, and in its limitations. Fink writes: The constitu-
tive relationship between pure consciousness and world in Ideas is mainly
and in necessary abstractiondeveloped in terms of object-intentionality, in
the course of which the whence of intention and the wherein of objects re-
mains undisclosed. He continues: It is the remaining task of phenomenolog-
ical inquiry to broaden and deepen the kind and rank of the cognition that is
termed constitutive. . . . The underdetermination of the relationship between
subject and world as well as of the members in that relationship is a necessary
and preliminary underdetermination. To work out the conception of con-
stitution that would go beyond its preliminary presentation, beyond its un-
derdetermination in Ideas I, means perhaps more than anything else to in-
quire precisely into whether or not the correlational conception of cognition,
the main schema in Husserls regular presentation of phenomenology, is to
stand as unqualiedly appropriate and essential to constitution precisely as
transcendentally pure.
Fink nds, for example, that the underdetermination in question, typical of
Husserls work, especially in its published form, is characterized by a two-
fold narrowing down of the eld of inquiry. It rst of all restricts itself to
the foreground mode of constitution, viz., object-constitution, and then
within this object-constitution it restricts itself still more narrowly to the
mode of the present. But it is not only in his research notes that Fink looks
at the matter this way. Recognizing the restrictedness of this presentialist
focus in Husserls classic presentations of the analysis of constitution is one of
the critical points in Finks revision proposals for the Cartesian Medita-
tions, while the subject-object relation is explicitly treated as intraworldly
in the Sixth Meditation. And Husserl in his annotations takes no issue
whatsoever with either point. Clearly the lesson of this is that reconsidering
the subject-object correlation itself as not necessarily denitive in the con-
ceptualization of the transcendental is in principle admissible in Husserlian
phenomenology.
The full compass of this critical push beyond the epistemological subject-
object schema is manifest in several sets of Finks notes written at the time of
his preparing the Kant Society lecture of December 1935, The Idea of Tran-
73. Z-IV 98ab (EFM 1).

74. Z-XV 34ab (EFM 1), from 1930 or soon after.
75. VI.CM/2, pp. 25758, in Text No. 17.
76. CM6, pp. 151 and 15758 (VI.CM/1, pp. 16869 and 177).
scendental Philosophy in Kant and in Phenomenology (that is, after the proj-
ect of revising the Cartesian Meditations was effectively set aside). Here
once again the distinction between a rst and second stage of phenomenology
is stated rather more explicitly than Husserl had stated it in the 1920s. Fink
explains the character of the rst level of phenomenology as the laying bare of
latent subjectivity in the method of intentional interrogation. This is where
all questions of being are questions of correlation. At the second level,
however, one has to take the correlation itself as the problem. Correlational
treatment is of immense value in that it rst discloses the phenomenological
character of any existent by nullifying the xation on things, showing them
to be identities consisting really of latent subjective manifoldness. But this
is only the preparation for allowing the properly transcendental problem to
come forward. This latter task is what Fink is primarily working on.
We cannot fail to see the effect of the inuence of Heidegger here in Finks
critical limiting of the subject-object correlation to a role primarily in rst-
level realization. Not only was this theme one of the prime points of Being and
Timewhich Fink realized already in reading this book in 1927but the
lecture courses Heidegger subsequently gave in Marburg and then in Freiburg
repeated and reinforced the idea of the nonultimacy of the subject-object
relation, that it is a derivative structure rather than the one in terms of which
to account ultimately for origination. Nevertheless, as we shall see in the
next chapter, the thrust of this critical point in Finks theoretical handling of it
becomes quite different from what it is for Heidegger. The fact remains, how-
ever, that there is a formal similarity to Heideggers phrasing in the way Fink
problematizes the subject-object intentional relation as such. (We shall fre-
quently have to point out critical points that Fink drew from Heidegger in his
understanding of how Husserls transcendental phenomenology must develop
to attain philosophical completion.)
The basic problem of the subject-object correlation is the equivocation lying
in the presentation of this correlation in Ideas I that was neither recognized
77. See chapter 1, 1.3, pp. 4647, and 1.4, pp. 6566.
78. Z-XVI VIII/3b, emphasis in quoted material Finks; cf. also OH-V 3847. (Both
folders in EFM 3.)
79. See Heideggers Einleitung in die Philosophie (WS 19281929), MH-GA 27,
referred to in chapter 1, 1.2. It should not be overlooked that Finks intense reading of
Kant and Nietzsche before coming to Freiburg must have introduced him to the tension
between a subject-object reection-centered philosophy and its radical critique. The
philosophic conjunction of these two kinds of thinking is a part of phenomenologys
historical situation that Husserl was not so well acquainted with.
80. See appendix.
there nor subsequently critically considered. As a result, in texts following

Ideas I the schema of structure and relationship appropriate for a preliminary
stage, and for a quite specic moment of consciousness, namely, reection,
came to be taken as properly descriptive of the basic and more pervasive mode
of consciousness, that of fundamental constitutive action itself. Consequently,
the transcendental pure something to be reached in phenomenological re-
gressive inquiry was characterized in terms of this structure of the epistemo-
logical subject. Transcendental origination was presented as the intending act
of a reective egoic subject-self, while that which is constituted by this
agency, namely, everything that is for transcendental subjectivity, was con-
ceived simply and fundamentally as having the structure of objectness. Since
being was essentially constituted being, it seemed to be simply equated with
objectness; the whole manifold of the constituted was tted out in terms of the
schema of just one moment within it, albeit an extremely prominent and
important moment, viz., the epistemological relation of subject to object.
There was, however, a second limitation in critical discernment and a second
equivocation, namely, the failure to distinguish the ontological interpretation
of cognitive action and relationship from the gnoseological structure of this
same action and relationship. In the Cartesian regress to the ego cogito
that was being followedbasically the argument of the philosophy of reec-
tion the ordo essendi is equated with the ordo cognoscendi, so that
the character that the apodicticity of the ego has in the order of cognition
turns into an absolute positing of the ego ontically. When in addition it is
recognized that there is no being at all that is independent of consciousness
and that being is in principle the correlate of cognition, it follows that being-
in-itself is a ctitious concept, and being simply means being-an-object, in utter
dependence, in its being, upon the egoic subject.
What both the uncritical acceptance of correlation as such and the ontologi-
cal interpretation of cognition have in common is the tendency to disregard
the radical distinction that institutes the whole phenomenological project,
namely, the fundamental difference between (a) the transcendental order, in
which ultimate grounds and origins are to be found, and (b) that with respect
81. See Z-XIV II/4a (EFM 2) for Finks characterization of the philosophy of reec-
tion. This will be treated in more detail in chapter 6.
82. These phrases and those that follow in the present paragraph are drawn from OH-
VII 78 (EFM 3), emphasis all Finks. See also the pages preceding and following (i.e.,
OH-VII 17 and 911). See also OH-I 2829, OH-IV 2031, and OH-V 3847 (EFM 2)
and Z-XVII 2a, 5b, 13a14, and Z-XX 19ab, 10ab (EFM 3).
to which this order is dened as transcendental, namely, the order of the

worldly-structured (the structurally mundane). More seriously yet, Fink
nds that the distinction in principle between the gnoseological order and the
ontological is one that lies within the order of the mundane. Both the gnose-
ological examination of cognition and its ontological explication are part of
the theory of knowledge precisely as the analysis, in world-bound terms, of
world-bound phenomena. That is, both the phenomena studied and the study-
ing done on them are held within the conditions that result from transcenden-
tal constitutive processes.
While this point will lead to the basic criticism Fink will take on Heidegger
(see chapter 3), here it is the application to Husserl that concerns us. When the
equivocation between the order of knowing and the order of being is over-
looked, it becomes all the easier to fall into the second equivocation just
indicated, namely, to take an innerworldly determination of structure as the
structure of transcendental constituting. But one cannot simply assume that
the objectness of an object is its being-character and that, because the being-
character correlates with an intending on the part of a subject, discovering this
correlation is ipso facto to disclose the transcendental status of both object
and subjectthat is, that both correlationally and ontologically the object is
the result of a subjects act of intending the object, and that this action is
transcendental constitution itself. One has to recognize the underdetermina-
tion of taking the order of knowing for the order of being in regard to
subjectivity, and then to realize that both orders lodge essentially within the
framework of being in the world, rather than in epoch-disengagement from
it. (Again, the level on which transcendental constitution ultimately will
have to be explicated is located further, namely, in the analysis of temporal-
ityas Fink is well aware, and all the considerations we have been following
here are oriented toward just that task.)
2.6.2.2. Critique for the Cartesian Meditations

If the distinctions that we have been piecing together from Finks notes
are fundamental to the critical reconsideration of phenomenology that he saw
Husserls program demanded, then it should be no surprise to nd them being
83. See appendix.

84. See OH-I 38; also OH-V 3843both in EFM 3.
85. The limits of ontological philosophy (i.e., one that understands being) lies in the
impossibility of jumping over the situation of being in the midst of being. Undistanced
from it, ontology asks about being, so to speak, from the inside. OH-IV 30 (EFM 3).
applied in his revision work for Husserl on the Cartesian Meditations; for
Husserls aim in his second revision for his Meditations, that is, subse-
quent to his rst 1929 version, was to try to make them a more comprehen-
sive, a more fully systematic statement of his phenomenology. The self-critical,
deeper-explicating analysis for that purpose is precisely what Fink undertook.
And it is exemplied in perhaps the pivotal point of critique worked into his
revisions.
In Finks revisions for the First Meditation, at the point where the apodic-
ticity of the I am in the Cartesian cogito is questioned as the appropriate
starting point for phenomenology, the concept of gnoseological antecedency is
explicitly decoupled from that of ontological necessity, i.e., from the concept
of necessary being. Here the being of the self-certain reecting subject is un-
qualiedly asserted to be contingent, despite its undeniable cognitive antece-
dency. Moreover, the whole possibility of this self-certainty on the part of a
reective I is conditioned upon the structure of the world as already holding; it
is possible only within-the-world. Finks argument, then, is that, rather than
beginning with egoic self-certainty, phenomenology in its mature restatement
must take, as the phenomenon with which to begin, the pregivenness of the
world.
Now, Husserls own notations on this passage, far from disputing this direc-
tion in Finks treatment, register the shock of realizing its implication, namely,
that the Cartesian path is simply confused! About the way of restoring the
idea of science as the grounding of knowledge of the world in regress to the
apodicticity of the I am that Husserls approach had taken in the Medita-
tions, Fink writes, this whole path now seems to have been the wrong way
to go.* As a result, the rst serious effort upon this path has raised some
fundamental doubts, which set the whole aim of the Meditations totter-
ing. What Husserl writes in comment at the point indicated by the asterisk
is: So it was! A sheer muddle, and wrong-headed as a course of reection.
Nevertheless, we must not take this to mean that Husserl therefore fully
agreed with the direction Fink himself took to resolve the muddle. Indeed,
Fink attests to quite the opposite. In the retrospective statement from 1945,
when he nally was able to submit his Sixth Meditation for his Habilitation
86. VI.CM/2, pp. 15358, specically p. 155.

87. VI.CM/2, pp. 15658.
88. VI.CM/2, pp. 15556.
89. VI.CM/2, p. 155, notation 111. See Husserls comments to Cairns probably before
he studied Finks revisions in detail. C-HF, pp. 71 (May 4, 1932) and 80ff. (June 2, 1932).
(see chapter 10), Fink makes explicit the issue that was at stake in the critique
that guided his revisions, namely, the new navet which consists in uncriti-
cally transferring the mode of cognition that relates to something existent
[Seiendes] into the phenomenological cognition of the forming (constitution)
of the existent. To put it another way, the issue was the uncritical trans-
ference of the mundane schema of cognition to the transcendental level as
proper both to the structure of constitution and to the nature of transcenden-
tal phenomenological reection. And on this issue, Fink unambiguously ac-
knowledges a basic difference between Husserl and himself. In the preface he
drafted at the very time the Sixth Meditation was composed Fink writes:
Husserl nds the antithesis between the constituting and the phenomenol-
ogizing I to be too strongly emphasized, that is, the antithesis that prevented
the structure of the actually acting agent of reection from being taken as
essentially transcendental in its character. Instead Husserl defends the con-
cept of the philosophizing subject as individual against its reduction from the
philosophizing subject that begins as individual spirit, to the deeper life of
absolute spirit that lies prior to all individuation. . . .
For Fink it was one of the ironies of Husserls position that Husserl could
not see how uncompromisingly radical the implications of his phenomenolog-
ical reduction were, while for Husserl Finks push beyond beingwhat we
shall see as Finks meontic, though never named as such in the revision texts
laid before Husserlseemed excessive. And yet Husserl not only listened to
Finks critical recasting and reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenol-
ogy, he announced publicly that a detailed statement of Finks interpretation
of phenomenology was one to which he, Husserl, himself fully subscribed!
Even if it is a small divergence from the course of our treatment here, we must
consider this for a moment.
We quoted earlier Husserls statement of approval written as a foreword to
Finks Kant-Studien article of 1934. In the context of the declarations of
Finks that we have just seen, when we read the many statements in this same
vein in his article The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and
Contemporary Criticism, we have to wonder just how fully Husserl really
90. CM6, p. 2 (VI.CM/1, p. 184).

91. CM6, p. 1 (VI.CM/1, p. 183).
92. See Z-XII 10b, EFM 1.
93. See 1.3, pp. 4546.
94. Examples of these punctuate the last fourth of the article (Studien, pp. 13456;
EH-Ke, pp. 12645).
understood what Finks position was, or whether it was for strategic reasons,
in the context of the events of 1933, that he was investing Finks article with
an authority that went beyond what he in actuality took as his very own
thinking. Or was it a situation that embraced both these possibilities? As
argued elsewhere, the most satisfactory explanation seems to be this third
way. Although a conclusion regarding this cannot be persuasively argued
before the present study is concluded, nevertheless the following can provi-
sionally be said.
Inasmuch as the differences from Husserls thinking that emerge in Finks
work result precisely from this effort of comprehensive self-interpretation and
reconception under the impact of critical reection on principles, these differ-
ences are far more differences between levels or phases of phenomenologys
self-development than differences between rival positions championed by dif-
ferent proponents. And this kind of, as it were, organic difference is not only
endemic to philosophy as such, it is both eminently typical and an intrinsic rule
of Husserls own philosophical growth. In other words, the differences be-
tween Husserl and Fink represent genuine issues within transcendental phe-
nomenology, issues arising from the demands of the critical integration of phe-
nomenologys manifold levels and stages, rather than objections and charges
that antagonistically confront or undercut it from the outside. That such prob-
lems and critiques are raised as those Fink formulates is, therefore, as things
should be for true Husserlian phenomenology.
Paradoxically, then, Husserl could, as he did, subscribe in principle to what
Fink was writing, even though he might not fully gasp the depth of implication
it had, or the radicality with which, within phenomenology itself and out of
its own intrinsic dynamic, fundamentals were being challenged and needed
critical reconceiving; or, more strongly, even though he might dispute to Fink
himselfand didsome of the content of Finks assertions. Husserl could
state that Fink understood phenomenology as no other did, and he could
accept the plausibility of Finks points, yet miss the wider implications or even
argue with him to reject them. Husserl had been doing something like this for
himself with himself for his entire career. Now, however, the himself with
whom Husserl was in debate was a very decidedly other himselfthe young
philosopher Eugen Fink.
95. See Translators Introduction, CM6, pp. xxxxxxii.

96. Richard Zaners remarks about Husserls insistence on continuous transcendental
self-criticism are apt here (Foreword to C-HF, p. xi).
97. See appendix.
2.6.2.3. Questioning the Epistemological SchemaPoints for

a Critique of Phenomenological Idealism
We have seen now two points raised regarding cognition by a critique
that puts the epistemological correlation itself into question:
(1) Intentionality and constitution have hitherto been conceived paradigmat-
ically as object-intentionality and object-constitution.
(2) Because of this, both (a) the object conceived of for this intentionality
and this constitution and (b) the subject that is the purported agent of
it are insufciently explicated, that is, are explicated only at a prelimi-
nary and seriously restricted level; they are, therefore, left conceptually
underdetermined.
There is a third point, now, that has to be brought out, namely, that beyond
conceiving intentionality principally as act-intentionality, it must be looked
into further as an intentionality of process, and this precisely in a radical
investigation of constitution as such in the most proper terms possible.
We have already seen how Finks early realization of the critique dimension
of transcendental phenomenology turned on the pivot of temporality. This
issue now gets sharply formulated: How will temporality gure into the phe-
nomenological systematic precisely as a topic to be ultimately explicated oth-
erwise than in terms of act-intentionality focused on objects? At the same time,
and, more importantly, temporality is also the topic whose analysis will show
the reason for the preliminary status that the explication of act-intentionality
or object-constitution comes to have. This is already clear in the period of
work for the dissertation (i.e., before November 1929). For example, Fink
takes seriously the objection raised against the reduction, understood in its
cast as noematization, that the correlation of object and experiencing
consciousness is, to begin with, an ontic correlation, that the certainty of the
life of the I for itself is precisely the ontic self-certainty of that existent some-
thing which I myself precisely am, and that this is in no way sufcient for the
idealistic thesis of the precedence of the I to that which is other than the I;
for this objection forces one no longer to conceive the reduction as primarily
noematization but rather as a regressive move behind subjectivitys own self-
98. In keeping with explanations in note 83 above (in the appendix), one could more
strictly say here gnoseological correlation.
99. As represented earlier (2.4.1 above), noematization means the reective transfor-
mation of anything to be considered into a noema, into pure phenomenon in the form of
noematically determinate objectness, that is, after the paradigm of something taken to be
objectively there in the objectively given world.
apperceptions, as precisely an un-humanizing. To take the reduction seri-

ously means correspondingly to have to radicalize it. Again from the same
period, Fink in another note concedes that Heidegger is correct in asserting
that Husserl in fact underdetermined the concept of subjectivity precisely in
representing transcendental life as primarily constitution of objects. But it
must be recognized as well that the intentionality that brings about the con-
stitution of objects (intentional experiences [intentionale Erlebnisse]) in the
sense in which this is taken in Ideas I) is not the only, and not even the
fundamental, intentionality of transcendental life, which is indeed precisely
a life of intentions. The primary intentions are the time-intentions, of which
intentional experience is a modication.
By 1930, then, while formulating his detailed outline, the Layout, for the
grand new systematic work Husserl was proposing, Fink unambiguously af-
rms that the equating of intention and act-consciousness is a narrowing
down of the original signicance of intention; intention is fundamentally
broader than act-consciousness, is the mode of subjective life as such. How
in particular Fink sees the consciousness of horizonsspecically that of the
temporality and spatiality of the worldnot as an inection of the conscious-
ness of objects but as an awareness of its very own order is something we shall
be taking up in chapters 4 and 5.
This is one of the pivotal points in the critical reconsideration of that struc-
tural feature that is nearly synonymous with phenomenology, intentionality.
Even when the positive signicance of intentionality in phenomenology is
interpreted with acuity as countering a dogmatism of self-enclosed imma-
nence, it tends to be taken in too restricted a sense, namely, as object-aiming
consciousness. Yet object-aiming consciousness is able to be activated only out
of antecedent horizonal conditions, namely, out of the ow of temporality
and the horizonal whole of the world to which consciousness is antecedently
already open before any object-aiming acts. It is to the explication of these
antecedent conditions and of the kind of antecedent consciousness wherein
100. Z-V VII/11a, EFM 1, emphasis Finks.

101. Z-IV 8b (EFM 1), emphasis Finks.
102. Z-VII IX/6a, EFM 1. Z-VII IX/16 deals specically with temporality and modes
of consciousness appropriate to it.
103. See Z-VII IX/6a.
104. As an example, Hans-Georg Gadamer gives Husserl credit for overcoming the
dogmatism of an immanent consciousness by demonstrating that consciousness is
exactly intentionality, which means that we are in the matter and not simply enclosed in
ourselves. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Man and World, 17 (1984), 318, emphasis
Gadamers.
these conditions are already at play in awareness that the reduction is precisely
to lead, and one stops short when one does not make that move of further
explication.
This radical shift in the analytic program that is required when one moves
beyond act-intentionality within a subject-object schema to the conditioning
horizons and ultimate constituting process that underlie and sustain that act-
intentionality was one of the main considerations that had to be worked into
the revision of Husserls Cartesian Meditations. The new Sixth Medita-
tion as well made explicit that the transcendental theory of elements, as
regressive phenomenology, was an inquiry back from the living unities of
the transcendental experience of the world, from acts, into the deeper con-
stituting strata of transcendental life. And in the Kant-Studien article the
statements of the fundamental necessity of this shift are even more pointed.
For instance, the multileveled character of phenomenology is underscored,
i.e., that the problem of constitution does not lie on only one methodological
level, and certainly not on the rst, that of egological actsa point not made
in Ideas I or in almost all of Husserls published writings. Thus the act-
intentional analysis of transcendental life [is] a necessary intermediate stage
which, however, must be surmounted; for the coherent whole that is an
act of intending is constituted within the depths of the intentional self-
constitution of phenomenological time, a constitution which, however, does
not proceed by means of acts. These explicit statements are, however, only
the summary tip of a massive return again and again to the issue in his notes.
One theme recurs: one cannot take the ontic structure of human action in the
world as providing the transcendental schema of constitution.
The point bears repeating (as Fink does in his notes). Easily misinterpreted
phenomenological expressions only acquire their genuine intelligibility when
analysis penetrates to the ultimate stratum of the phenomenological problem-
atic, time. The apparent ontic activity of phenomenological terms (which
suggest to the supercial reader the view of subjective idealism) has to be
transformatively perceived in relation to true transcendental activity, which
means in the unique fundamental function of temporality, the fundament-
level movement of temporalization as such. If this is recognized, and the
105. See Z-V VII/13ab, EFM 2.

106. CM6, p. 11 (VI.CM/1, p. 12); see also p. 50 (pp. 5556).
107. EH-Ke, p. 132 (EH-K, pp. 14041).
108. EH-Ke, p. 133 (EH-K, p. 142).
109. EH-Ke, p. 137 (EH-K, p. 376).
110. Z-IV 110a111a, emphasis Finks.
specics of the critique of the mistakenly absolutized preliminary frameworks

of Husserls presentation of phenomenology are followed, then the whole
issue of Husserls idealism gets transposed. When constitution is discovered
to have a double effectnamely, upon both elements of the oppositional
relation of experience [Erfahrung] to the object of experience then Hus-
serls assertions of idealism and his use of idealistic schemata are countered out
of what his own work can yield. The conception of phenomenological imma-
nence is not to be modeled upon the immanence of human self-reection, that
is, as an immanence standing in opposition to the transcendence of objects in
the world and then (seemingly) absolutized in that opposition. This is a princi-
ple that, preeminent in Finks labors in the Freiburg workshop, gets sharpness
and urgency through Finks doing for Husserl what Heidegger failed to ac-
complish, namely, introduce the question of being integrally into Husserls
transcendental phenomenological program.
2.6.2.4. Self-Conceptions and the Question of Being

It is a historical fact that Martin Heidegger was an essential gure in
the philosophic scene in Freiburg during the years of Finks work with Husserl,
as chapter 1 recounted; and in the next chapter we shall be looking more
thoroughly into the place Heideggers thinking had both as source and as
target for the critical reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology that
constituted so much of Finks labor with Husserl. Here, however, we must at
least briey indicate and underscore the linkage to Heidegger that Fink nds
within the issue of the pregiven conceptions that condition both the beginning
and the progress of radical phenomenological reection. The public acknowl-
edgment that Fink made of Heideggers contribution to his doctoral disserta-
tion has already been noted, but an alternate draft for this acknowledgment
in Finks notes makes explicit the present issue in his intellectual debt to Hei-
degger. For the study of Heidegger provided Fink with the decisive stimulus
for the issue that drove his rst real work: the phenomenology of self-
conceptions. Signicantly enough, in this brief sketch for an acknowledg-
ment Fink refers also to the last section (7) of the Introduction to his disser-
111. Z-VII III/3ab; see also Z-VII III/1a2b. (EFM 2.)

112. See 1, p. 17.
113. Z-I 143b. Z-VI 13a is another draft of a possible acknowledgment of Heideggers
inuence, making explicit reference to Being and Time, especially where the problem of
ontological-existential interpretation is touched upon. Z-VI 12ab makes clear that
Fink is reading Heidegger specically in an attempt critically to probe the sense of pre-
given conceptions of the psychical in human being. All in EFM 1.
tation, a section that explicitly speaks of the provisional yet necessarily initial
focus of phenomenological investigation on act-intentionality, which in turn
will yield to a more original move back into the temporal constitution of acts
themselves. In another note from his dissertation work Fink gives a long
list of items and issues integrated into his study for which acknowledgment
of Heidegger should be made, concluding again with the question of self-
conceptions and existential analytic; but here he immediatelyand most
importantlyadds, Defense of the Husserlian position: self-conceptions as a
constitutive problem. This is a hint of the critical stance Fink will take
toward Heidegger, again matter for the next chapter.
Here, however, we should make clear the exact way in which what Fink
learned from Heidegger in regard to the question of being focused the ques-
tion of self-conceptions. As Fink thinks phenomenology with Heidegger, fun-
damental ontology as a form of explicating human being has one overriding
effect: it reinforces the push past the supposedly privileged interior forum of
Cartesian self-reection as standing autonomous with respect to the world
external to it, in order to recast the meaning of the psychical more funda-
mentally as the place of the understanding of being (i.e., as transcen-
dence out to and within the world); it is to shift the privilege accorded human
being from dichotomy-inspired immanent self-certainty to human beings un-
derstanding of being in the economy of being-in-the-world.
The question of being, then, is raised as the question of how the human kind
of being, always as a being that is in-the-world, is precisely the projective
understanding of being, again always as an understanding-in-the-world. But if
ontology is the interpretation of the kind of being a being-in-the-world has,
whereby being as such is shown to count for that being in that beings way of
being precisely as being-in-the-world, then ontological investigation as such is
bound to the in-the-world condition of this being that is only as in-the-world.
Fink must therefore ask, Is ontological interpretation philosophically ade-
quate, or does a discussion remain already held up to a question that sets aside
ontology as such? In other words, does ontology, specically as recast (or
renewed) by Heidegger, remain in principle subject to the phenomenological
114. VB/1, p. 19.

115. Z-I 111a. Other thinkers named here whose ideas Fink has to take into account
are Oscar Becker, Felix Kaufmann, Ludwig Landgrebe, Hermann Cohen, Descartes,
Plato, Kant, Hegel.
116. Z-VI 15a, EFM 1.
117. Z-VI 15ab is the rst page of a text the second page of which is Z-IV 94ab,
comprising together a sketch for 2 of VB/1. The sentence quoted here is broken off in the
middle at the end of Z-VI 15b and continued in Z-IV 94a.
reduction? Does ontology lie within the framework of conditioning disclosed

by the reduction, or does it transcend the whole operation of reduction itself?
Finks answer is clearly indicated, though here it will only be summarized.
Raising the question of being in terms of the ontology of Dasein can only be
validly pursued within the conditions that the reduction discloses, not as a
regulative challenge from beyond them. The orientation Heidegger had tried
to lay out for Husserl in the exchange of letters over the article that Husserl
was preparing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica does not escape just this crit-
ical subjection, however much it was meant to stand as the source of what
Husserl asserts as transcendental constitution. In other words, Fink saw Hei-
deggers position to display with dramatic clarity how deeply the ontological
structure of human being was rooted in the world. Fink sums it up neatly in a
remark from 1930 or 1931: The ontology of the subject refers in principle
to the mundane subject; even if this be not taken hold of in the everyday
averageness of its existence but rather in its deepest, most unfathomable
essentiality, still this worldly subject, even qua that which makes being possi-
ble by its understanding of being, is a constitutive result, i.e., is that from
which the phenomenological retro-inquiry begins its movement into the con-
stitutive origin of that same point of departure. These minimal indications
of Finks Husserlian critique of Heidegger will have to sufce for the pres-
ent, since this whole issue will be taken up in the next chapter. Their purpose
here is to show how deeply the move of un-humanizing cuts even in the way
the question of being is raised in the still phenomenological phase of Heideg-
gers work.
There are, now, some further specic themes prominent in Husserls phe-
nomenology that also must at least be mentioned as falling under this same
radical move of un-humanizing.
2.6.2.5. The Un-Humanizing of Transcendental Subjectivity:

Further Demands
The treatment we have been laying out here contrasted Husserls repre-
sentation of the reduction as an un-naturalizing with Finks as an un-
humanizing; we also saw how this un-humanizing was worked into the
Sixth Meditation. In fact, interpretively radicalizing the reduction to mean
un-humanizing already governed Finks work on the dissertation several
118. Z-XV 19a, EFM 2. The phrase in quotation marks is not a direct quote from
Being and Time, though it conforms to the ideas of 27; the bracketed semicolon is my
insertion.
years before the Sixth Meditation, both as a context for the dissertation, and
as a matter to be treated in its second part. In the sequel to the dissertation,
Presentication and Image II, this matter of un-humanization was to be
addressed more directly and explicitly. For, when the provisionalness of the
rst part would be lifted in the reinterpretation made possible by the analysis
of temporality, then the whole issue of how human being in its total constitu-
tion must be situated within the situation of the natural attitude could be
explicitly raised. Only then could it become clear that the reduction must in
principle be the radical thrust beyond human being. Finks notes from the
dissertation period (1929) are explicit about this. Again, the transcendental
theory of method was not a task that he took up simply because Husserl
assigned it to him; it already formed the core of his own reections.
Specically, the radicalizing of the reduction as un-humanization was a
constant in the years of Finks work with Husserl. This is dramatically shown
in notes from the pivotal year, 1930, when Fink prepared the plan for the new
comprehensive systematic presentation of phenomenology that Husserl had
contemplated as a replacement for the Cartesian Meditations. It shows
again in the 1932 revision work on those same Meditations, and then as
1932 turned into 1933 and Hitler came to power in Germany. For example, in
a brief sketch of a treatment of the phenomenological reduction from 1933
Fink writes of the phenomenological reduction as taking the human right
down to the ground. But is this kind of radical countering of all conception
of the human possible, does it not demand something a human thinker cannot
really do? Is it not simply the catastrophe of human existence? Fink re-
marks: Therein lies the basis for the impossibility of a demonstrative presen-
tation. The summons character of talk about reduction.
This is nothing less than the whole problem of what exactly is possible as a
reduction to the radically transcendental in phenomenology, a matter that will
be pursued continually throughout this book in the measure of clarity that
119. See VB/1, p. 13.

120. Z-V (EFM 1) is a rich sequence of complex reection on this very point. See also
Z-X 9ab (EFM 2).
121. See, for example, Z-V III/3a and Z-II 39a (EFM 1).
122. See, e.g., Z-VII XIV/1a (EFM 2), XVIII/9b and /11a, and XXI/5a and /12a
(EFM 3).
123. The expression in the note here (Z-XII 20c, EFM 2), zu Grunde richten, in
normal usage means to wreck or destroy. However, Fink means it in the more literal
way reected in the translation here, as other contexts indicate, for example, CM6, p. 32
(VI.CM/1, p. 32).
124. Points and quotes from Z-XII 20ad, emphasis Finks (EFM 2).
Fink was able to achieve for it. It has at least now been introduced; but there
are a few other specic themes corollary to the critique of the subject-object
schema that need to be introduced now that will also be taken up as the study
progresses.
2.6.2.6. First Corollary of Un-Humanization: Critique of the I

In the revision texts Fink wrote for Husserls Meditation II one of the
questions broached is precisely the matter of the I. It is raised, however,
within the more comprehensive issue of determining not only the appropriate
conceptuality for explicating the transcendental subjectivity disclosed by the
phenomenological reduction but also, and more importantly, the very status
of the transcendental as in some way given to reection. How, indeed, is
transcendental subjectivity there for me as phenomenologically reect-
ing I, not to mention the question, What is this I thus reecting? As Fink
frames the question: Is transcendental life, as the thematic object of the phe-
nomenologizing, theoretical I, given in a way analogous to an object in the
world, so that its most general type of being is already familiar? And together
with that is an all-inclusive dimension of being thereby also open? Do we have
at our disposal right from the start forms of apperception that already illumi-
nate transcendental givenness? Does the object, transcendental subjectivity,
confront us from out of an encompassing region of world, or from something
analogous to it? Fink sees that it is of absolute necessity that any condi-
tions for the work of phenomenology that presuppose world-structure in any
way as the actual frame for that work itself be explicitly brought under critical
consideration; for as preconditions proper to the structure of the world, their
legitimacy as conditioning determinations meant to hold on the transcenden-
tal level can hardly be simply presumed. He therefore immediately moves to
specify some of the forms of apperception that we automatically presuppose
when trying to determine what transcendental subjectivity might be, asking
if here, too, we may simply be presuming the openness of the eld of being,
in a way analogous to what is necessary for the givenness of some single
being. That is, do we not here too take for granted for the being of tran-
scendental subjectivity a horizon-frame in terms of which to determine what
within it is individual being? But is the worldly principium individua-
tionis also a transcendental principle? More specically, in what way
125. VI.CM/2, p. 213.

126. Ibid.
are such conceptual determinations as I, subject, and life different from

other pregiven conceptualizations, such as man and animal, that fall un-
der the reduction, i.e., that cannot be simply assumed to be perfectly proper to
characterize the transcendental in its thematic disclosure in reection? In other
words, in what way do the former designations have a transcendental right
and legitimacy that the latter do not? The question is crucial, for these
conceptionssubject, I, and lifeare the indispensable Husserlian
characterizations for transcendental subjectivity that from the beginning are
taken as consummately apt for designating it.
There are two issues intertwined here. One is the question of the kind of
givenness and presentedness to reection that transcendental subjectivity
might possess, and the other is the question of the way conceptions born in and
appropriate to the natural attitudei.e., all conceptions with which the phe-
nomenologist beginsmay have legitimate transcendental meaning. Both
issues are main themes precisely of the transcendental theory of method,
which is a necessary task for phenomenology at an advanced level, and both
are directly addressed in Finks Sixth Meditation. The way Fink resolves
these two issues will be considered later; for the present we shall have to be
content simply to see how the question is raised.
It will not do, however, to leave these issues indeterminate, as in fact it was
not in Finks mind to leave them so. In his notes from the period of writing his
dissertation, Fink makes clear the key idea that will determine the specics of
the treatment that the I will receive. Husserl himself already points out the
precedence of passive constitution before active constitution; but what this
means further, Fink remarks, is that there is also a precedence of I-less
constitution over egoic constitution. True, the turn of attention, thematic
grasp, and deliberate reection are specic spontaneities of the I, but they
always have a space for the play of their freely operating mise-en-scne, a
space that is constituted in passive genesis. Nevertheless, this is not at all
simply to eliminate any relevance of the concept of I or ego for the explication
of transcendental subjectivity. The de-egoing of I-ness (absolution) is not
127. Ibid.
128. The explication of the being that devolves from the reduction places us before
difculties that must be taken seriously and have not been. All concepts in which we make
assertions and explications originally have a natural-worldly meaning, the meaning of
their original coining in the worldly life-situation of human being exercising its under-
standing. VI.CM/2, p. 216.
129. The following phrases are taken from Z-IV 24ab (EFM 1).
attainable by a mundane annihilating of the I, but rather by the radicalizing of

I-ness. And just so also for de-temporalizing.
Here we meet up again with the issue that we have already seen in Finks
concerns from early on, in the question of whether the primordial stream of
transcendental temporality has a beginning or an end (see above, 2.2). Put in
general terms, it is the question of how anything could stand as a proper
designation for the ultimately transcendental if it is necessarily structured in
the framework of the result of transcendental functioning; it is also the ques-
tion of how anything that was essentially structured within temporality could
be identied as responsible for the constituting action of temporality itself. In
the present context, the question can be sharpened further: Is an I possible
that in the midst of time is not in time? Is it a contradiction to conceive of an
I that is in time and at the same time not in time? And what of the I of
(supposedly) transcendental reection, the I doing phenomenology within the
reduction, especially if it turns to the exploration of the stream of temporality
itself as the level of origins? Is a splitting of the I conceivable, so that the I that
in reecting takes the step of division is partly in, and partly not in, time?
After all, any reecting that the I in question does is necessarily carried on in a
duration of some kind; it begins and ends. How, then, can it carry out an
inquiry into origins beyond its own conditioned streaming, which is precisely
what it blithely seems to go on to try to do? Fink remarks: The question of the
origin of time is transformed into the question of the possibility of the reec-
tive onlooker that does not stand in world-time.
The question of the transcendental I, then, becomes, in Finks phrasing, the
exemption crucis of ontological philosophy. Ultimately it leads to the
unresolvability of the question of what that I is in terms of explications that
require a setting within temporality and the world; there is a fundamental
ontological unattainability of the I, an ontological opacity, that has
to be recognized instead of the simple underdeterminacy Heidegger charges.
Fink has to face the lesson that neither an ontological nor an epistemological
approach seems to sufce, nor will a simple complementing of one approach
with the other so as to make up together for the lack that each alone repre-
130. Z-XV 117a, EFM 2. This note could be from as late as 1934, although the
placement of the note in the entire set permits dating it as from 1931.
131. OH-I 6, EFM 2. This booklet opens with the date November 14, 1934.
132. OH-I 6, EFM 3.
133. OH-I 36, EFM 3.
134. Ibid.
135. The phrase rst occurs in Z-V VII/10a (EFM 1), and is repeated later in Z-XIV
IX/1b /2a; Z-XV 31b, 100b, and 109a (EFM 2). See also VB/1, p. 9.
sents. He has to consider seriously that the only solution that can make any
sense is one that maintains precisely the paradox just spoken of, namely, that
of an ultimate of origins lying somehow prior to temporality and world, and
therefore prior to being, yet taking on the form of an agency functioning
within both temporality and world and projected as a being, the I of the
reecting philosopher. The ontological opacity is not an underdeterminacy,
but rather a necessity in principle. In the framework of the question of being
the substantial subject is man attainable [therein] (even if not ultimately com-
prehensible), but never the transcendental subject, i.e., the subject that tran-
scends being: the Absolute epkeina thw ousaw. It is too early yet in our
study to explain the meontic perspective that is broached here; too many
pivotal matters have yet to be dealt withspecically, the question of the
world (chapter 4), of temporality (chapter 5), and of life (chapter 6)before
this can be the focus of direct treatment (chapter 7). However, that critically
reassessing the status of the I in transcendental phenomenology is an issue of
astonishing radical openness rather than a closed question is at least now
indicated.
2.6.2.7. Second Corollary of Un-Humanization: Critique of

Psychological-Phenomenological Parallelism and Coinciding
We are beginning to see some of the Freiburg workshop background to
the strongly critical characterization that Husserl himself, in his last work, the
Crisis, made of his presentation of phenomenology in a Cartesian orienta-
tion. In that last work Husserl acknowledges a great shortcoming in his own
Cartesian way, namely, it leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it
were. The problem with this is that it brings this ego into view as seemingly
empty of content; one is at a loss, at rst, to know what has been gained by
it. Hence also, he continues, as the way people took my Ideas showed, it is
all too easy right at the very beginning to fall back into the naive-natural
attitude.
The image Husserl uses here, that of the transcendental being reached in
one leap, as it were, is the very image Fink used in his 1930 Draft for the
136. OH-I 3638, EFM 3.

137. Z-XV 109a, EFM 1 (word in brackets my addition); probably from 1931.
138. Crisis, p. 155 (43), translation modied. A seemingly small matter to note here is
the word placed in angle brackets in this text; it is one of the many additions that Fink
wrote on the extant typescript of the Crisis text, though Husserls modications to this
typescript are far more numerous. Both kinds of modication are incorporated into the
text in Hua VI.
opening section of an Introduction to Phenomenology, as well as in an

earlier reection in his notes. But the idea should not be thought to originate
so unequivocally with Fink. Husserl had himself ruminated about the very
same shortcoming in his 19231924 lectures on the theory of the phenomeno-
logical reduction. There he considered an alternative to the Cartesian way,
which he characterized as reaching transcendental subjectivity in the sheer
character of apodicticity, without critically examining what all goes into
apodicticity and without considering how undetermined the pure subjectiv-
ity thus claimed still was. The new way to the ego cogito that Husserl now
sketched would proceed in steps, so that the ego cogito would not remain
an empty word. The actual steps Husserl indicated there were not those
Fink developed in either the 1930 Draft or his revisions for the Second
Meditation. Nevertheless, the idea that a supposedly instant accession to the
transcendental gets us to a station that is empty of specics, to a kind of formal
placeholder for the transcendental, rather than to the transcendental itself in
positive and concrete determinateness, is in Husserls text and accords with
the image of movement to the transcendental in a single leap. Whether this
expression is of Finks coining or comes from a remark of Husserls, their
agreement on the critical sense of the limitations in the Cartesian way is clear.
What agreement on this point introduces, however, is a much broader gen-
eral critical principle that we nd Fink consistently follows in his working out
of the critique stage of transcendental phenomenology, namely, that features
of the I that one is familiar with as oneself in in-the-world experience are clues
or starting points for regressing to the transcendental, rather than achieved
paradigms of the transcendentals own proper structures. As Fink puts it in
his Kant-Studien article, the world is not understood in its transcendental-
phenomenological meaning as long as one directly identies the ego living
within the belief in the world with the ego exercising the epoch, so that the
same ego is posited as rst actively involved with the belief in the world and
then as inhibiting this belief by bracketing.
The problem here, then, is to determine in principle the proper sense and
139. VI.CM/2, p. 26.

140. Z-V I/1a, EFM 1.
141. Hua VIII, p. 126. Boehm in his Einleitung (pp. xviiixix) draws attention to this
very passage as an anticipation of 43 of Crisis. Fink, not yet in Freiburg when Husserl
delivered these lectures, could well have seen the idea represented in the later courses of
Husserls that he did attend. On Finks access to Husserls manuscript materials, see 2.1
above, note 10. Cf. the parallel in Husserls remarks in FTLe, at the beginning of 106
(Hua XVII).
142. EH-Ke, pp. 11415 (Studien, p. 121).
status of the concepts that unavoidably have to be used in designating the

transcendental, but the primary sense of which is psychological. This task of
determination is all the more necessary in the new way that Husserl pro-
poses to remedy the deciencies of the Cartesian way, in that this new way
is to work step by step through structures of subjectivity that are psychologi-
cal. Fink characterizes the difculty as that of avoiding the confusion
wherein one would retain primarily psychological concepts in the easy fa-
miliarity of their worldly meaning and yet attempt the decisive transforma-
tion they receive by the performance of the reduction. More dramatically
put, How are we to understand Husserls frequently repeated assertion of a
perfect parallel, a perfect coinciding, between the features of transcendental
subjectivity and those of psychological subjectivity?
Husserls insistence on this is well known. He expressed it unambiguously in
the lectures he gave on Phenomenological Psychology in 1925, in large part
repeated in WS 19261927 and SS 1928, which is when Fink heard them; but
the best-known, even more forceful statement of it is given in his preface to the
1931 English translation of Ideas I. There he speaks of the remarkable thor-
oughgoing parallelism between a correctly executed phenomenological psy-
chology and a transcendental phenomenology, such that to every eidetic, as
well as to every empirical, constatation on the one side, a parallel must corre-
spond on the other side. And he even speaks of how the same content that
in natural attitude psychology is utterly non-philosophical gets taken up in
the transcendental attitude to become an achievement of a transcendental
phenomenological philosophical science.
Finally, one might think that this parallel is retained even in the Crisis-
texts, for example, when Husserl writes that everything mundane has its tran-
scendental correlates. The context there, however, is quite different, be-
cause there Husserl is speaking of the way in which, because of the peculiar (and
still insufciently explicated) identity between the human and the transcen-
dental egos, the reections of the transcendental ego are transformed, by es-
sential necessity, into an enrichment of the content of the human soul, in this
way adding new determinations to man in the world. We shall gradually
get acquainted with the issues Husserl is confronting in this passage in the
143. Hua VIII, 46 and the entire fourth section (4754).

144. EH-Ke, p. 117, translation modied, emphasis Finks (Studien, p. 124).
145. Hua V, pp. 14647 (Ideas II, p. 414).
146. Crisis, p. 264, in 72 (Hua VI, p. 268).
147. Ibid. See also Finks Outline for the Continuation of the Crisis, Crisis, pp. 397
400 (Hua VI, Beil. XXIX), for a clear sketch of the context.
Crisis in the course of our study, and so discussion of it must be postponed

until later. (See 7.3.3.2.) What we have to do here is situate this thesis of psycho-
logical/transcendental-phenomenological parallelism, under its usual interpre-
tation, in the program of critically reconsidering the pervasively mundane-
human character of conceptions used to designate the transcendental.
The guiding principle here is quite straightforwardly given us by Fink in
his revisions for Husserls Cartesian Meditations. The analyses that yield
phenomenological-psychological description, the kind meant to stand as
stepping-stones to a conception of the transcendental-phenomenological, rep-
resent in principleespecially in their centering on a monadic egoa rst and
still naive stage, the entry-stage for regression to constitutive study. And it is
this rst stage of the transcendental analysis of the ego that coincides in
content fully with the psychological exposition of human interiority. Ad-
mittedly, as Fink points out, the phenomenological reections conducted un-
der the epoch are not supposed to be simply reections by a human self upon
itself as human; but the fact remains that all the conceptuality used in the still
incipiently transcendental phenomenological analysis is directly borrowed
from that same human self-acquaintance. This is particularly trueand most
convincing in its aptnesswhen the analysis of consciousness is restricted to
object-constitution. Then, Fink writes, the thesis of the conversion of
internal psychology into phenomenology is intelligible. And this re-
calls the issue of noematization, which again correlates with the main focus
of much of Husserls published work (at least) upon object-thematic act-
intentionality.
It is clear to Fink that the move from the natural or navely mundane to
the transcendental, at a stage of understanding well beyond that of initial
entry, is not simply a change in sign or value. It cannot be a mere change in
an acceptance/validity quotient, a withholding of positional belief or assent;
it is as well a transformation of contentand not only of content-particulars
but of the whole order of content-possibility. A deeply problematic theoretical
issue lies at the heart of the principle of a parallel between positive psychologi-
cal content and positive transcendental content. In anticipation of later treat-
ment of the matter (especially in chapter 7) we can cite a passage in Finks notes
from Husserls 19271928 seminar, concerning Ideas I, where the question of
148. VI.CM/2, p. 237 (Finks emphasis), a text to replace part of 34 in Cartesian

Meditations; see also pp. 22022, a new 23, to bring the Third Meditation into
conformity with the texts Fink had written for the rst two Meditations.
149. Z-XV 5ab (EFM 2), probably from mid-1931. See also Z-VII XVIII/9b (EFM 2),
from 1930, and VB/1, p. 10.
the parallelism was discussed. Fink writes: The doubling of phenomenology

into the psychological and the transcendental attitudes involves a transcenden-
tal semblance [transzendentalen Schein]. Here again is a matter that Fink
thought of including in the sequel to his dissertation, and an issue explicitly
indicated in his Introduction, where he emphatically warns that the relapse
of transcendental assertions into mundane-ontic conceptuality is the constant
temptation for phenomenology, given that all available concepts have from
the start a worldly meaning. In the sequel he planned to treat the matter in
terms of the unavoidable necessity of using concepts whose native seating is in
the world, in order to treat matters that in principle stand beyond the world,
i.e., the necessity of transcendental semblance, of an appearance that, tran-
scendentally viewed, is the semblance of and not genuinely the transcendental
itself. While his same issue will be taken up in chapter 7 (7.2.1 and 7.3.3.2),
the point is now clear how non-denitive the parallel in question must be,
critically considered. It awaits yet the critique-guided reinterpretation of the
perhaps paradoxical way in which the radically world-transcendent realizes
and recognizes itself in the world-immanent.
2.6.2.8. Third Corollary: Performance Consciousness as Clue

to the Transcendental
A nal point in the critique reconsideration that phenomenology beyond
the preliminaries focuses on remains to be briey sketched out. Here, too,
there is a double necessity. On the one hand, one has to identify and delimit
the mundane-human content of conceptions used to articulate the structure
of transcendental subjectivity; but on the other hand, since no concepts but
mundane-human concepts are available, if any analysis is to have some value it
must be that some concepts are more appropriate than others for the pur-
pose. Given the critique of the classic epistemological schema that Fink
150. U-IV 15. EFM 1. Fink goes on to mention a second doubling that is an early ref-
erence to the issue of transcendental phenomenologizing subjectivity, in its psychological-
transcendental station, the overall theme of the Sixth Meditation.
151. VB/1, p. 13. See also Finks remark on Husserls notion of the parallelism as
difcult to see through in its deepest meaning (VB/1, pp. 910), referring to the treat-
ment of it in FTLe, 99, pp. 25455 (Hua XVII, p. 262). See also Z-I 121c (EFM 1),
indicating that the discussion in 5 of his Introduction was in effect a discussion of
transcendental semblance.
152. See Z-XV, 56ab (EFM 2), and Z-V VI/24b (EFM 1).
153. As we shall see later, to argue for greater appropriateness is not to relegate the
less appropriate to the status of entirely inappropriate; for even the more appropri-
has seen it necessary to make, more appropriate concepts would seem to

have to be those that rather than being drawn from the schema of egoic object-
thematizing act-intentionality would instead identify structures in conscious-
ness that condition such object-centered intentional acts, that is, non-act or
non-agent structures of intentionality. This is the approach Fink takes in his
notes.
The rst step here is this: Instead of taking reection as simply a repetition of
object-thematization, whereby the subject becomes an object to itself,
Fink wants to consider another option for characterizing it, namely, that reec-
tion would not be a reversal of a thematic consciousness or an an iteration
of thematization but rather the move to an expression-mode of performance
consciousness [Vollzugsbewutsein]. In a word, reection would not na-
tively be simply object-thematizing-and-presencing. To frame the matter
a little differently, one can ask what thematization means in regard to subjec-
tivity, the sort of action performed routinely in the human sciences. Finks
proposal is quite straightforward: Inner experience is not a thematic experi-
ence: [it is] performance experience, which however is subject to a certain de-
interiorization [Ent-innerlichung], an object-ifying [Ver-gegenstandlichung].
Ordinary reection is not a reversed thematic stance. Husserl, for his part,
makes the distinction between an anonymous and a thematic action of
consciousness; but to understand this distinction itself, Fink points out, one
has to clarify the nature of the move from the rst to the second, i.e., what the
condition for the possibility of the thematizing of the hitherto anonymous
is. Any such thematization of this anonymous process presupposes an antece-
dent having, a performance experience of it. And with this we enter the
whole question of temporality as anonymously proceeding constitutive pro-
cess; for not only does any process take place as temporal, but how something
is or becomes present (or presented) to consciousness is a matter of a mode of
temporality. And with inquiry into temporality, as we hardly need reminding,
ate is still in principle not-proper and not-adequate. See 7.3.3.2, the treatment of ideas in
the correspondence with the Rev. E. W. Edwards.
154. Z-XV 67a (EFM 2), all quoted phrases Finks with his emphasis, from 1930 or
1931.
155. Z-V X/1ab (EFM 1), from 1929, emphasis Finks, additions in brackets mine.
(See also VB/1, p. 5.) The qualicationa certain de-interiorizationin this earlier
note of Finks is strengthened in those coming soon after, e.g., Z-VII XVIII/1a (EFM 2),
where Fink states quite unequivocally reection is never a thematizing (object-ifying) of
so-called immanent life, but is a particular mode of the intensication of performance
experience [Vollzugserfahrung].
156. Z-VII XXII/7a, EFM 2.
we would reach the fundamental level of the phenomenological analysis of

constitution, where the grounds lie for determining the conditions under which
conceptualization of the transcendental is or is not proper and adequate.
At this point we can give only a minimum indication of what is involved,
postponing more detailed consideration until chapter 5. Take, for example, the
way an early remark of Husserls has to be reconsidered. In Ideas I Husserl gives
a characterization of origin-level consciousness of time as functioning like
perceptual consciousness. But he goes on to explain that it is not in the
theme-focused taking of an object as presented that the likeness holds. It is in
the already in play potential for thematic taking that one has to look for the
specic kind of process in which all-embracing temporalization is ipso facto
temporal awareness. In short, consciousness of time is obviously not a con-
tinual immanent perceiving, one that would be continually actually and the-
matically positing itself in its awareness; and this is just the point that Fink
wants to focus on. He nds it necessary to go one step further and to explore the
kind of awareness that thus has to be already operative pre-thematically in
order for a thematic awareness to set in subsequently. Fink explains his ap-
proach: The present [die Gegenwart] is always in awareness in the very per-
formance of it [vollzugsmig bewut], even if a-thematically. Perception
breaks down into an objective intentionality, consciousness-of, and the time-
intentionality of making-present [Gegenwrtigen]. Only on the basis of
making-present can thematic intentionality be established. (See Heideggers
doctrine of transcendence.) Objects themselves are never present [ gegenwr-
tig]. The present is not a property of an object, as is, for example, coloredness,
etc. It is not because objects are present that there is the present, but the reverse:
because the present has taken place as temporalization [gezeitigt ist], objects
can be present. Fink nds Husserl to have generally subsumed the whole
area of the non-thematic dimension of conscious experience to the subject-
object schematization that dominates both published statements of phenome-
nology and much of Husserls manuscript work, leaving unconsidered the
question of its appropriateness for characterizing the transcendental. Fink in
contrast had projected taking up this matter of non-thematic experience in the
sequel to his dissertation, and we shall consider various elements of this
fundamental topic in later chapters. Here at least the common thread is now
indicated: the analysis of ultimate constituting process will not take its clues
157. Ideas I, p. 265 (Hua III/1, p. 229, 113).

158. Z-VII XVII/30a (EFM 2), emphasis all Finks, from 1930. See also Z-V III/9a
(EFM 1) and Z-IX 18a (EFM 2).
159. See Z-V IV/4a, EFM 1.
exclusively or primarily from subject-object thematic intentionality; it will take

them from non-thematic performance experience, from such things as wakeful-
ness and sleep, from an intentionality that is not focus-aimed but eld-
dimensional, horizonal; and this intentionality will be a manner of the very life
and being of the human entity, rather than simply a thematic action it under-
takes and leaves off by its own will and agency.
2.7. A Final Word: Continuing Phenomenology by

Reradicalizing the Issues
It is clear from reading texts of Finks together with those of Husserls on
the same issues in these Freiburg years that Husserl was far ahead of Fink in
subtlety and detail in his exploration of the complexity of mental phenomena.
On the other hand, reading Finks rsums of Husserls lecture courses and
studying his personal notes, one sees another kind of ability at work. Fink had
a condensing lens of a mind, one that focused many rays of detail to bring
them together at a burning point of essentials, not the essentials of a doctrinal
position but the essentials of an issue that lay at the heart of an analysis and its
results. In his 1935 paper on Kant and phenomenology Fink speaks of what is
involved in interpreting a philosophy. It does not mean to get its doctrine free
from misunderstandings and in an objectively valid report. Rather, before all
else it is the endeavor . . . to take a leaping step into the fundamental question
of a philosophy and to do its questioning along with it. It is to be swept up
by the original power of a questioning that puts our whole natural world into
question. That one begins to grasp something of the thing itself that is at
issue for the being [Dasein] that is doing philosophy. The aim of the pres-
ent study, then, is not merely to show that some individual named Fink was
offering interesting alternatives to Husserls statement of ndings in phenome-
nology, and doing it alongside Husserl himself, all of which might make for
good historical reading. The aim has been rather to esh out in detail the
dimension of questioning that Fink found Husserls own program to require as
intrinsic to its reaching the stage of completness and integration. Far from
thinking of transcendental phenomenology as a preset schema for xing doc-
trinal answers, Fink takes Husserls work to open up a new and radical ques-
tioning, and accordingly to institute a new order of intelligibility; and it does
this by virtue of the radicality of the problem that initiates phenomenology
itself as philosophy.
This is no more than to say that the system of phenomenology is the mode
160. ND, p. 13, emphasis Finks. See also Z-XVI III/1a, EFM 3.
of progression taken by its radical questioning. But it is not enough merely to

state in general terms the general features of this progression, for example, to
observe that naive conceptions have to be critically reviewed, that individual
investigations may lie on different levels of penetration, that interpretative
integration over differences of level and differences of topics has to be worked
out, that higher descriptions or more general, overarching concepts have to
be continually claried on the basis of the particular investigations. The actual
work of systematic comprehension has to be done, or those general statements
remain merely formal; and any such general statements are merely aids to
the realization of what is being accomplished in the work itself. There is, thus,
a paucity of actual discussions of the nature of the phenomenological sys-
tem by either Husserl or Fink; we nd instead brief indications, not treatises.
It is within the way the detail work itself is done that we shall see the critique
and interpretive recasting that is the renewal of questioning and the mark of
phenomenological radicality. The systematic will lie in the doing of phenome-
nology, not in a doctrinal summary of it.
This is what the present chapter is meant to be the rst example of. Not the
simple juxtaposition of doctrinal theses identied by two names, Husserl and
Fink, nor the raising of hypothetically possible options or points of criticism, it
is a study of the actual documents, the actual material of the systematic pro-
gression of critique, reinterpretation, integration, and question-renewal that
was at work in Freiburg in the last ten years of Husserls life. That is, it is at the
same time historical and theoretical, showing what went on in fact as imposed
by the demands of principle. So it is that we nd Fink compelled to enter the
work of phenomenology in such a way as to take Husserls criticism of Hus-
serls own thought further, even when it would require Husserls thought to
come to terms with something that Husserl feltregrettablyto be totally
alien to it, namely, more than anything else, the thinking of Martin Heidegger.
161. Fink himself regularly characterizes statements in the Sixth Meditation as

merely formal; see CM6, pp. 50 (VI.CM/1, p. 55), 53 (58), 64 (72), 67 (75), 72 (81), 143
(158), and 151 (168). The more specic sense of terming a conceptualization as method-
ologically formal will be taken up again in consideration of formal indication. See
7.2.1.
3
Orientation II: Who Is Phenomenology?

HusserlHeidegger?
Before thus reading Heidegger he [Husserl] had often said to Heidegger:

You and I are phenomenology.
Dorion Cairns, Conversations
In the end the relationship of Husserl and Heidegger is to be compared

to the argument between two men, each of whom declares of the other
that hes putting the bridle on the wrong end of the horse. Or: Husserl
begins with the analysis of ontical knowledge, Heidegger with ontologi-
cal knowledge. Husserl is blind to transcendence, Heidegger is blind to
constitution.
Eugen Fink, Z-X 15a
The years 1929 and 1930 saw Fink in an extraordinary philosophical

situation. Here was Martin Heidegger, lecturing with stunning originality and
insightfulness, the chosen successor of Husserl openly taking issue with his
once indispensable patron. And here was Husserl, model of intense, meticu-
lous phenomenological study, shocked into recognition that his Heidegger
1. C-HF, p. 9, entry for August 13, 1931.

2. EFM 2.
128
Who Is Phenomenology? 129
was a man other than he had thought him to be and a gure whose philosophi-
cal development was a profound challenge to all that Husserl had thought was
the secure foundation of his lifes work. And there stood Eugen Fink, fresh
with his doctorate gained while listening to both men, compelled to do his
thinking in the maelstrom of their differences.
On the one side were Heideggers lectures, from which Fink took detailed
notes for six semesters from 1928 to 1931and of course there was Being
and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. On the other side lay
Finks four years of following Husserls courses, two years of working with
him in increasing closeness, the reading of mounds of manuscripts of both
lectures and research writingsand the now daily conversation with the in-
tense seventy-year-old thinker. In November 1930 Fink was about to work out
a 120-page draft for the rst part of Husserls monumental project for a new
comprehensive statement of his phenomenology (see 1.3), at the same time
that he was beginning another semester of following Heideggers lectures,
Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. Simultaneously with this, Fink gave pri-
vate tutorials to some scholars from Japan who had come to study under
Husserl; the main tutorial was nothing other than a seminar on Hegels Phe-
nomenology of Spirit ! It is in this context, in this heady mixture of Husserl,
Heidegger, and Hegel, that a most revealing note of Finks gives his thinking
on how to understand the now ssioning phenomenology of his training, how
to take together those two so different thinkings in phenomenology that had
so deeply inuenced his own.
Phenomenology is not a trend [Richtung] but a substantive form of
philosophy itself. It is not, however, a mere science of consciousness, that is,
eidetic investigation of the structurings that constitute consciousness; in its
innermost thrust it is a new transformation of the concept of philosophy
insofar as the latter is dened as ontology, as the question of being. And this
transformation is: that philosophy is the un-nihilating of the Absolute, the
free production of it, true theogony. With Husserl phenomenology is indeed
unspeculative, i.e., in it what gets developed is rst and foremost the serious-
ness needed for the nal struggle, the most difcult of all to begin. Husserl
gave phenomenology the dignity and rank of the rigorous striving of the
concept; Heidegger gave it critical-speculative lan. In Heidegger phenome-
nology comes to its rst truth.
3. Finks notes from this course are in EFA U-MH-VI (not in EFM), corresponding to
MH-GA 32.
4. See Z-VIII (EFM 2) Notes for another tutorial on Husserls phenomenology are in
Z-VII XVI/15, December 3, 1930 (EFM 2), also in N-EF, pp. 10610.
5. Z-VII XIV/4a, EFM 2.
130 Who Is Phenomenology?
The thinking throughout the subset of notes from which this one is taken is in
keeping with the tenor of these lines. Fink grapples with the question of how
phenomenology is a movement that binds seeming opposites together in a
single enterprise that would take philosophy to its uttermost limits. Thinking
in phenomenology could not be a matter of school adherence to a specic
gure, be it Husserl or Heidegger. The philosophy at work in phenomen-
ology must embrace both these menand others, as here Hegeland move
through and beyond them, being furthered by them in different ways. Beyond
reaching rst truth, phenomenologys full truth, then, is not to be identied
with either Edmund Husserl or Martin Heideggeror Eugen Fink.
What Fink was working to achieve was a way in which the basic difference
dividing Husserl and Heidegger in their own eyes could be linked in one
dramatically convergent way, right in the contrast indicated in the lines above,
viz., the contrast between Husserls analytic rigor of substantive eidetic artic-
ulation focused on die Sachen selbst and Heideggers powerful speculative
probing and redening of fundamental meaning focused on the question of
being. The relentlessly self-critical moment of Husserls investigations was
the methodological exigency driving Finks work for him; but needed in that
drive was something Husserl did not provide, the critical-speculative lan in
which Heidegger excelled, not just in abstract general terms but in the way this
question of being could be articulated from within the concrete investiga-
tion of human being. It was by some integration of these two moments that
Husserls system could become genuinely philosophic, could reach its rst
truth; only if the critical-speculative moment worked as strongly as analytic
rigor in concrete attention to die Sache selbst could the loosening of the bond
of starting-point conceptualities be achieved and the full sense of phenom-
enological ndings be articulated. But following this critical-speculative
thrust might mean as well the exigency to move beyond even ontology as
Heidegger refashioned it, toward handling the question of the absolute that
gured as centrally for Husserl . . . and for the Hegel of the engagements that
held much of Finks attention as the 19301931 winter semester began.
This is the rst thing to take note of in Finks confronting of Husserls work
with that of Heidegger: just as the Husserl to take into account is the Husserl
of the whole program of his phenomenology in those Freiburg years, so also
Heidegger is the Heidegger not just of Being and Time but of his now ongoing
lecturing as well. For example, as Heidegger came to the close of Introduc-
tion to Philosophy, his rst course as new holder of the First Chair of Philoso-
phy in Freiburg, he made clear that rethinking past philosophiesor, indeed,
following Heideggers own rethinking of themwas far from simply repeat-
ing those earlier ideasor hisin slavish devotion. For Heidegger to assert as
he did now unambiguously, as Fink noted down, that the unitary problematic
of philosophy is the problem of transcendence meant, in Heideggers explicit
words, that doing philosophy was simply itself a transcending. To do philos-
ophy was at one and the same time (a) to take up the problem of being and the
problem of the world and in them to bring transcendence . . . to conceptual
explicitnessi.e., to take the stance that held transcendence up from its
ground, to be ground-bearing purely and simplyand (b) to break open
the freedom of play that would allow Dasein to gain stance. In a word,
philosophizing is the freeing of Dasein for itself . . . i.e., for intimacy with
beings and with its own being. . . . Fidelity to oneself is the essential, and is not
just making ones own caprices the important thing. To do philosophy in
Freiburg in 1930 was, then, not to be simply a disciple either of Husserl or of
Heidegger in dutiful following of some orthodox doctrine; it could only mean
to think with them and to question, to engage in the questions that drove
philosophy to take the form it had in phenomenology as a living movement
that embraced both Husserl and Heidegger.
What Fink came to see as characterizing living phenomenology was not that
it substituted a new set of doctrinal theses for old onese.g., that conscious-
ness is essentially intentionality, or that subjectivity constituted objectivity as
its telos; or that the essence of Dasein is existence, or care, or transcendence
but rather that it was a movement of continual requestioning and ever-renewed
consideration of the very elements that comprise life and thought in the midst
of reality. This was the point of the epoch, a move of suspension that opened a
questioning that has to be repeated for those very conceptions and descriptions
that the epoch itself allows to take on new meaning in the eld of pure
phenomena, such conceptions as immanence, intentional, subject, and
consciousness itself. If phenomenology meant going back along the line of
the presuppositions that cover human life in the world in order to disclose the
roots of that life and the hidden meaning of the presupposed, then radical ques-
tioning and freedom are of the methodological essence of phenomenology.
We come thus to the remark quoted as an epigraph at the beginning of the
chapter. More interesting than the image it givesof two men who each
accuse the other of bridling a horse on the wrong endis the fact that this note
6. EFA U-MH-I 150152 (corresponding to MH-GA 27, pp. 395, 397, 398, and
401), all emphasis that of Finks text itself.
7. See Z-IV 27a (EFM 1), a note paralleling Heideggers emphasis on freedom and
entitled Situation of the Phenomenological Reduction, which is virtually the same
name given 5 in the Introduction to the dissertation (Studien, pp. 1416). The idea of
freedom, however, is not taken up in this Introduction.
carries the designation Thesis for Difference. This title, in fact the name for
a writing project that, among many others, never emerged from Finks notes to
see the light of day, is a fascinating miming of the famous Hegelian antecedent
of 1801 on Fichte and Schelling: the full title Fink gave it is Difference be-
tween Husserls and Heideggers System of Philosophy. As we shall see, Fink,
in a remarkable parallel to Hegels double critique, works the post-preliminary
reinterpretation of twentieth-century phenomenology by rethinking the work
of the two philosophers he is following. And this he does, like Hegel, by
addressing the very issue that lies at the heart of the differences between
Husserl and Heidegger, to nd therein the resources for moving beyond the
achievements of both.
The clue to that central issue, that is, to those elements in phenomenological
description that need to be critically rethought, is already pointed to in the ex-
ergue: Husserl is blind to transcendence, Heidegger is blind to constitution.
3.1. A Third Way Beyond Mutually Opposing Constitution

and Transcendence
In the course of chapter 2 (2.6.2.1) we saw how equivocation marked
Husserls analysis of constitution specically in regard to the status of being in
regard to cognition, and then how Heidegger criticized Husserl for not ex-
plicitly raising the question of the meaning of being (even if Fink found Hei-
deggers fundamental ontology to be in turn marked with a fundamental am-
biguity) (see 2.6.2.4). In the simplest formulation of principles one could put
the contrast between Husserl and Heidegger as follows, in Finks words:
the paradox of the two ways for philosophy to start:
(a) the ontological way, which thematically intends being, but unthematically
makes use of the relation of cognition;
(b) the theory of knowledge way, which thematically xes the subject-object
relation as basis, but constantly unthematically presupposes being.
This, however, is too general to capture the specic point at issue between
Husserl and Heidegger, and Finks numerous and extensive reections sharpen
the focus considerably. But we should see the whole context of the lines quoted
above in order to follow it out to the consequence Fink draws there.
8. In the abbreviated title, Z-X 13ab, 15a, and 24a (EFM 2), and in the full title,
Z-XIV II/1b, from 1934 (EFM 2); see also Z-IV 120b (probably late 1928 to mid-1929;
EFM 1).
9. OH-I 3637; EFM 2. Strictly speaking, the contrast should be between an on-
tological and a gnoseological entry; see 2.6.2.1, note 83 (in the appendix).
The note-text just quoted actually offers a proposal by Fink for explicating
the crucial issue of how to determine the being of the transcendental I, a
central point of contention between Heidegger and Husserl and the ex-
emplum crucis of ontological philosophy. For what it does is to force consid-
eration of the ontological unattainability of the I. If we look back on
philosophic history, Fink explains, we nd a philosophy of identity as the
way of resolving these two possible ways for philosophy to begin, namely, in
taking being and thinking to be onethus philosophy from Parmenides
and Plato to Hegel. But more recently the solution has been sought by the
endeavor of an ontology of knowing. In this the antinomy seems to dis-
appear, when the organ of the cognition of that which is [das Organ des
Erkenntnis vom Seienden] is interpretively seen through to its constitutive
state of being [Seinsverfassung]. Fink, however, nds himself compelled to
consider a new third solution, namely, the conception of the freedom from
being on the part of spirit, that is, the meontic conception of cognition,
which would include within itself the two other attempts at a solution as
subordinated problems.
The whole schema of Finks ideas for the Difference between Husserls and
Heideggers System of Philosophy, and for his thrust beyond that difference, is
virtually contained in this passage. We have to go slowly, however; to unpack
the implications given in this schema will take the whole course of the present
study, beginning here with the specics of the difference between Heideggers
ontological transcendence and Husserls epistemological constitution.
3.2. Transcendence in Heideggers Fundamental Ontology

It is signicant that the prominence of Heideggers concept of transcen-
dence in his fundamental ontology comes across more fully in his lectures
than it does in Being and Time. Transcendence may be the term Heidegger
comes to prefer for the key structural element of the analysis of Dasein in that
book, but it does not come into its own until late in its exposition, in 69. As a
proper characterization of Dasein, it is what the long treatment leads to, rather
than that from which it expositionally proceeds. In short, the traditional con-
ception of the transcendence of the world is grounded in the fundamental
transcendence of Dasein. Heidegger is much clearer about this in his last
lecture course at Marburg, in the summer semester of 1928, under the simple
10. OH-I 36; EFM 2 and 2.6.2.6; and see appendix.

11. All quoted phrasings from OH-I 3738, in EFM 2.
12. SZ, pp. 36366.
title, Logic. About midway through the treatment here transcendence is

presented as the pivotal conception for understanding the essence of truth and
the structure of groundingand therefore for understanding the nature of the
logical; and transcendence is now directly and simply named being-in-the-
world, in an equating of it with the understanding of being that is fundamen-
tal to human being, to Dasein. Thereafter the course of Heideggers treat-
ment is an exposition, in great part historical, of the meaning of Daseins
transcendence (11) as well as of the temporalization that conditions tran-
scendence in its world-opening capability and its freedom (12), and that
therefore ultimately grounds the truth force of the logical (1314).
Heidegger arrived in Freiburg with these ideas obviously rmly in hand, and
his rst course of lectures, Introduction to Philosophy, wove those same
ideas integrally into a view of the nature of philosophic thinking, in part via a
reading of Kant. This is where Fink began hearing Heideggers own exposition
of his thinking after Being and Time, and he could hardly fail to grasp the
centrality of the concept of transcendence in the architectonics of Heideggers
philosophic enterprise. As was the case with Husserl, Finks understanding of
Heideggers thinking developed out of a close listening to the thinkers own
thinking as it came across in the living word, rather than primarily in the form
of written texts. Fink heard Heidegger not only in all the courses he gave in his
rst two years at Freiburg but also in the Davos lectures on Kant in March
1929, as well as in those addresses in the special leaps and turns of which the
transformation of Heideggers thinking is formulated. Fink thus heard both
Heideggers inaugural lecture of July 24, 1929, What Is Metaphysics?
which no doubt disconcerted Husserl and On the Essence of Truth,
delivered on December 11, 1930, in which, according to Heideggers later
13. MH-GA 26, under the fuller title, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.
14. If then primordial transcendence (being-in-the-world) makes possible the inten-
tional relation and if the latter is, however, an ontic relation, and the relation to the ontic
is grounded in the understanding-of-being, then there must be an intrinsic kinship be-
tween primordial transcendence and the understanding-of-being. They must in the end be
one and the same. MFL, pp. 13536 (MH-GA 26, 9, p. 170).
15. See 1.2, p. 20.
16. Finks notes on the lecture are in Z-IV 99ab; EFM 1. Husserls hearing it contrib-
uted to the general assessment of Heideggers work that he was then undertaking (see 1.2
in chapter 1). See Husserls letter to Alexander Pfnder on January 6, 1930, with the
distressing conclusion that Heideggers philosophy was of the kind that I have always
counted it was my lifes task to make forevermore impossible (Bw II, p. 184).
17. Finks notes are in U-MH-V 12537 (not in EFM). Fink also read On the Essence
of Ground, Heideggers contribution to the festschrift honoring Husserl on his seven-
tieth birthday; cf. Z-IV 94a, EFM 1. One should add that Fink heard Heideggers Origin
assertion, a certain insight is given into the turn by which the whole
framework of Being and Time is reversed.
Heideggers rst Freiburg lecture course in the 19281929 winter semester,
however, was not just a repetition of rmly held themes. He was constantly
developing and nuancing his thinking; and in this case he drew out the concept
of transcendence somewhat further. After recapitulating his now regularly
stated general conception of it as the Ninth Thesis and Tenth Thesis of
this course of lectures, he introduces a new note (again in Finks representation
of it): Eleventh Thesis: The transcendence of Dasein is the condition for the
possibility of the ontological difference, and therefore in order for the distinc-
tion between being and beings [der Unterschied von Sein und Seiendem] to
enter the scene in the rst place.
This new note of assertion is directly pertinent to the critique of Heidegger
by Fink that we shall be getting to shortly. It is also interesting to note in the
Twelfth Thesis that Heidegger expresses a conception of philosophy that
surely is one of the inuences conrming Fink in how he understands the
central systematic move of phenomenology, namely, as an ever-repeated re-
turn of questioning: The fundamental question of philosophy must therefore
become over and over again simply a question. Philosophizing as human tran-
scending, as the working out of the question of being, has the form of the
question that disquiets, in other words, it is a matter of understanding ontol-
ogy as a problem.
But to continue the main issue train of thought: There is also a second new
note that comes three-quarters of the way through the course, as Heidegger
elaborates on the conception of Daseins being-in-the-world as transcen-
dence, as constitutively the move wherein it rises beyond what-is as a whole
[das Seiende im Ganzen] in order precisely thereby to relate to that-which-
is as what-is as beingas Seiendesas well as to itself, Dasein, as a being.
That this transcending is also that wherein Dasein holds itself in relation to
the world is already familiar from Being and Time, whereby also the world
of the Work of Art, delivered in Freiburg on November 13, 1935, his brief notes from
which are in Z-XVII 1a and 19a; EFM 3.
18. Brief ber den Humanismus, Wgm, p. 159.
19. U-MH-I 6466 (quotation marks Finks, emphasis mine), corresponding to MH-
GA 27, p. 210.
20. U-MH-I 6870 (emphasis and quotation marks Finks), MH-GA 27, p. 214. Hei-
degger includes here the idea about doing philosophy that was represented earlier, viz.,
Philosophy as transcending is the self-sufcient freeing of Dasein into its essence.
21. U-MH-I 110; MH-GA 306.
22. U-MH-I 111; MH-GA 27, p. 307. One should note as well the ambiguityor
paradoxof this rising above [berstieg] inasmuch as the Whereunto of transcen-
is not reducible simply to things assembled in a sum total. But at this point
Heidegger begins to portray the concrete dynamic of this reaching out to the
world, of this transcendence, on the basis of a characterization by Kant of the
world as the play of life, so that the world is now looked at as having
the character of play. Heidegger explains: World is the title for the play
[das Spiel ] that the transcendence of Dasein as such plays. . . . Being-in-the-
world is the original playing of the play which every factic Dasein must get
into in order to be able to play itself out in such a way that all through its
existence this or that is the game played on factic Dasein.
It cannot be doubted that here is a strong inuence upon what will become
one of the most prominent topics of Finks thinking in later years, long after
his work with Husserl, but it will also appear much sooner than that, as
chapter 1 has already indicated (see the last page or two of 1.4). As we shall see
in chapter 5, play will become for Fink a way of trying to move beyond
accepted terminological schemata for approaching the ultimate and deeply
problematic level of the analysis of constitutive process, of the event of tem-
poralization (Zeitigung); but there is much to understand before that.
Through both a close study of Being and Timecloser by far than Husserl
himself had initially doneand through the attentive following of Heideggers
lectures, Fink had become quite familiar with the core of Heideggers sys-
tematic thinking, such as represented in Heideggers elaborations on transcen-
dence. Heideggers fundamental ontology formed the basis for a serious crit-
icism of Husserls transcendental phenomenology; Fink had to take it into
account both to assess the limitations that it disclosed in Husserls position and
to work out the deciencies that fundamental ontology itself might possess
while offering valid contributions to Husserls phenomenological program.
dence, and the Whence [Woher] and Wherefrom [Wovon-aus] by which Dasein
comes to relate to any being as being, including to itself (U-MH-I 110; MH-GA 27,
p. 307)all of which make up the worldis both a relatum (the Woraufhin) and the
conditioning horizon-frame for relating (the Woher and Wovonaus), i.e., for Dasein to
relate as a being to anything whatever (including to beings).
23. Anthropologievorlesung, ed. by Arnold Kowalewski (Munich and Leipzig, 1924),
p. 71, cited in MH-GA, p. 300 (vgl. U-MH-I 107).
24. U-MH-I 112; MH-GA 27, p. 310.
25. U-MH-I 114; MH-GA 27, p. 312. Fink underlined every sentence in this passage,
though this is not done here in the quotation.
26. Thus Finks Spiel als Weltsymbol (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), translated into
half a dozen languages, but not yet into English. Such anticipations are not matters that
we shall be able to develop here, but the suggestion of organic development from Finks
rst years through to his independent endeavors after the Second World War is indeed a
corollary of the present study.
3.3. The Issues in Finks Critique of Fundamental Ontology

The best approach to the way mutual critique between Husserl and
Heidegger can be performed as a move of post-preliminary phenomenology is
to begin at the juncture where the two address a common problem, namely
and not surprisinglythe age-old question of how being and knowing come
together in the actions and capacities of that entity named man. This problem
is a problem as old as philosophy itself, and every philosopher there ever was
meets every other one in trying to resolve it. We must look at it now where
Husserl and Heidegger converge on it specically in phenomenology.
This comes precisely at the point where each starts offwhich is also the
point at which they divergenamely, in the move by which methodical reec-
tion transforms the sphere of ordinary experiential familiarity into the specic
eld of philosophic inquiry, the move of the phenomenological reduction.
Husserl and Heidegger agree that the navet of ordinary awareness of and
dealings with surrounding things and fellow humans, the unquestioning adop-
tion of a matrix of concepts and a stance of construal within which all our
actions are taken generally to make sense to us while we do them, has to be
broken through in order to begin the explication that shows what human
being is, especially in its capacity both to understand and to affect and re-
make what it nds existent around it. Where Husserl and Heidegger disagree
is in regard to the determination of the character that the phenomena al-
ready familiar in the ordinary stance of construal are to be shown to have
in the transformation of the meaning of those phenomena by the act of re-
ection indicated by the term reduction. Fink represents this convergence-
divergence in the way Heidegger nds the beginning of philosophy in the
recognition of the fact of the indifferent, leveled-out understanding of being.
Philosophy here is explication of being, and philosophizing = living,
existing. Husserl, in contrast, begins by putting into question the naive
horizon of problems. Philosophy for him is progress: not just the movement
of subjective appropriation done in knowing about X, but rather productive
experience.
We see here the well-known recognition that Heidegger unlike Husserl
makes the question of being the focus of his starting point for philosophy; but
Fink presents as well the contrast between the Husserlian conception of philos-
ophy as progressively adding components of positive knowledge, as a kind of
science, and Heideggers idea of philosophy as a realization of another sort,
27. These quoted phrasings are all from Z-IX XVII/4a, EFM 2. This subset of notes is
undated, but the dates in Z-IX are all in the fall of 1931. The expression leveled out
understanding of being corresponds to Heideggers own way of putting things in his
lectures for SS 1930, as in EFA U-MH-IV 103; MH-GA 31, p. 238.
neither a science nor progress in positive acquisitions but life and existence.
The rst of these elements of difference, however, will be our focus at present,
the difference in the way the basic operation and yield of the phenomenological
reduction is characterized. Chapters 6 and 7 will take up the second difference.
3.3.1. The Phenomenological Reduction and the Ontological

Difference; the A Priori Problem
It is a curious fact that the term phenomenological reduction does not
occur either in Being and Time or in any of Heideggers Freiburg lecture
courses as recorded in Finks rsums of them. Nevertheless, Fink speaks reg-
ularly of the reduction in the personal research notes in which he contrasts the
positions of Husserl and Heidegger. Had Fink heard Heidegger lecturing in
Marburg, he would have got an explicit statement by Heidegger on how the
reduction was adapted to serve the thematizing disclosure of the ontological
difference. All the same, even without that it had become clear to him that
this was a key point of conict, again as shown in his research notes. The issue
taken up in them is whether it is legitimate to take Husserls reduction as the
move that can lead to disclosure of the difference between being [das Sein]
and beings [das Seiende]. Is there any principle preventing the reduction
being transformed into that very disclosure, and therefore precluding Heideg-
gers thinking from being considered as the organic carrying forward of the
fundamental thrust of Husserls phenomenology? Finks answer is categorical:
The return to the subject (qua transcendence: the projection of the under-
standing of being) and thereby the express thematizing of the being of beings
[Sein des Seienden] is toto caelo different from the constitutive turn back
from object-directed (world-captivated) life to transcendental-constituting
life. Thesis: the phenomenological reduction is in no way the explicit perfor-
mance of the ontological difference. The reasons for this unconditioned
rejection of an equivalence between Husserls reduction and Heideggers the-
matizing of the ontological difference, however, have to be drawn from other
notes of Finks in the whole context of his advanced-level critical reconsidera-
tion of transcendental phenomenology.
Accordingly, the rst point to make is that, in Heideggers proposal to re-
frame the reduction as the thematization of being in contradistinction to
28. This is one of the themes of Heideggers rst Freiburg lecture course. See EFA
U-MH-I 7071; MH-GA 27, 31, especially p. 225.
29. See MH-GA 24, pp. 2829, from SS 1927.
30. Z-IX 25a, emphasis Finks; EFM 2. This note is undated, but the dates in this
collection are all from autumn 1931.
beings, he seems to construe the opening-level character of Husserls phenom-

enology as its proper and nal character. That is, Heidegger presents the
schema of subject-object epistemological intentionality, within which the phe-
nomena for reduction-level analysis are initially structured and investigated,
as taken to be nal and denitive for determinating transcendental phenome-
nologys proper matter for inquiry, and for its ndings and conclusions. But
questioning and relativizing this conception together with its many implica-
tions is precisely what Fink nds phenomenology itself to require in its own
systematic self-critique. Bracketing, Fink argues, may initially be the fram-
ing in noematic-object-form of some matter for investigation, but that framing
should not thereby be thought to be necessarily that investigated matters
ultimate character in its native function or in its original forming in tran-
scendental constitution. Moreover, the reduction, presented as oriented to
noematization in reective operation, i.e., as the act of transforming the
world as sum of ontic objects into a noema, cannot thereby be taken to have
unquestionably disclosed the fundamental relationship that transcendental
subjectivity has to its constitutum. The reduction, rather, is the performance
of un-humanizing. As we have seen, however, for Fink un-humanizing has to
be taken radically; it means to inquire behind the self-apperceptions of subjec-
tivity comprising the whole structure of human being precisely as being-in-
the-world. Fink nds that Heideggers approach falls short on this point.
Where hermeneutical criticism in general failed was that it generalized
the contingent (although substantively pertinent) starting-point that Husserl
took and the type of constitution that was exhibitable for particular objects
in its criticism that these were unsuitable for certain trans-phenomenal struc-
tures of meaning. But what it also needed to do, and did not take up, was to
question the constitution of self-conceptions. Hermeneutical critique is
in full right in objecting to a pseudotranscendental philosophy that only
knows the harmlessness of a pure I, but it has no effect upon the transcen-
dental philosophy that Husserl inaugurated when this transcendental thinking
comes into its own in a meontic philosophy.
Of these two aws of short-sightedness(1) to take Husserls phenome-
nology as schematized exclusively and ultimately by subject-object intention-
ality, and (2) not to acknowledge that the character of being-in-the-world,
even when analyzed in the sophisticated conceptions of fundamental ontol-
ogy, retain the character of constitutedness from the point of view of the
31. See VB/I, pp. 1213.

32. Z-X 9a, in all probability from 1929 (EFM 2).
33. Z-IV 41b, EFM 1.
transcendental reduction as un-humanizing this second point needs a little

further explication in order to see how the two criticisms link together in
Finks criticism of Heideggers position. That done, we can make a rst incur-
sion into what phenomenology as meontic philosophy would mean.
As any philosopher must, Heidegger begins by drawing conceptions from
the domain of the already given, of the naive, of the unconsidered, the domain
whose genuine, radical meaning has to be wrested from its everyday order of
construal. Beginning with phenomena in this domain that are familiar to
anyone, and using them as the matters that both need to be transformatively
explicated and at the same time offer a usable pattern of differentiation in terms
of which to search into principles, the analytic program of fundamental ontol-
ogy consists in displaying the deeper structural determinants from which this
everyday order of the familiar proceeds. In Being and Time Heidegger freely
terms this deeper level of determinants a priorias, for example, being-in-
the-world is the a priori structure of Dasein, and the existentials are a priori
to average everydayness. Thus fundamental ontology will develop its anal-
yses precisely as interpretations of already given self-conceptions. Being-in-
the-world [In-der-Welt-sein], with-world [Mitwelt], thrownness [Ge-
worfenheit], being-toward-death [Sein zum Tode], nitude [Endlichkeit],
and so on, are all interpretative deepenings of the familiar fact of our nding
ourselves already there among things and people and having to be so, knowing
we shall not live forever and knowing we can do nothing about changing that.
What is at issue now is precisely the character of this interpretive deepening.
Toward what exactly as the a priori factor is one moving when one interprets
the phenomena that require deeper explication?
The point of criticism that Fink mounts here from the standpoint of the
Husserlian transcendental position is easily stated. The concepts that Heideg-
34. See the integration of these points in Z-IV 120ab (EFM 1), a note designated
Sketch of the Idea for an Essay: On the Difference between Husserls and Heideggers
Philosophy.
35. SZ, pp. 41, 53, and 110. Even more explicitly, Heidegger offers his work in the
book as following Husserls determination of phenomenology as empirical precisely in
searching out the a priori properly understood (SZ, p. 50, note 1).
36. SZ, p. 44. This is one of the constitutive features of a transcendental inquiry. See
Heideggers letter to Husserl on the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, characterizing the
fundamental tendency of Being and Time within the transcendental problem (Hua IX,
p. 600; Bw IV, p. 145). See also Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Verstehen und Auslegung: Das
methodenproblem in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), for ex-
ample, pp. 1213 and 3245.
ger elaborates from the naively accepted self-conceptions that give humans an
intelligibility to themselves in naively assumed validity are taken up without
acknowledgment of the need for their transcendental clarication in transcen-
dental constitution. But this insistence on Finks part can only hold (1) if
Heideggers critique of transcendental subjectivityof the subjectivity by
which constitution is supposed to be effecteddoes not hold (because it is
aimed at subjectivity only on a preliminary level); and (2) if Heideggers own
account of the deeper something, i.e., of the a priori in terms of which his
interpretation in fundamental ontology is made, is not itself genuinely funda-
mental. These two points are inseparable in Finks criticism, but we have to
return to the rst in order to see the second implicated in it.
Let us rst determine (a) just what kind of constitution Heidegger is aiming
at in his critique, transformation, and displacement of Husserls notion of
constitution, and then we shall see (b) exactly what kind of constitution is
overlooked by Heidegger and thus not accounted for by his position as Fink
understands it. Fink notes that Heideggers concept of transcendence is pre-
cisely that which (a priori) makes possible the setting of subject and object
over against each other. There are, accordingly, two dimensions to the
framework wherein a human individual and thingstaken to begin with in
the mode of objectare distinguished: (1) the correlation that is actual in a
here-and-now experience (ontical correlation), and (2) the correlation
that, prior to any individual action of experiencing, is the already given dyna-
mism of transcendence (ontological correlation). Both these dimensions
are in principle contained within the unique overarching embrace of transcen-
dental constitution, in the following way. Since any being is in principle a
constitutive result, any correlation, whether (1) that of some factual experien-
tial moment exercised on the part of an individual human existent, or (2) that
of transcendence itself, as the projective understanding of being that is con-
stitutive of that being which is Dasein, any such correlation (in the wide sense
used in the present context) is a constituted correlation. Rather than reaching
down to ultimate origination, therefore, explication of the rst in terms of the
second remains on the transcendental surface. The relation of constitution
thus cannot be considered a gross distortion of the ontological correlation,
i.e., of transcendence, nor is Husserls phenomenological reduction a miscar-
37. See Z-IV 71ab (EFM 1), and also Z-XV 103ab (EFM 2).
38. See Z-IX XVII/1a (EFM 2), from autumn 1931.
39. This distinction and the next three sentences are drawn from Z-IX VII/6ab
(EFM 2).
ried performance of the ontological difference. Instead, the lesson of the

reduction is that constitution is a priori to transcendence and the ontological
difference, and these are an outcome and end result of constitutive process.
Finks critical assessment of Heideggers position depends pivotally upon his
identifying a fundamental paradox in Heideggers carrying out of fundamen-
tal ontological explication. Heideggers proto-presupposition is the thesis of
the understanding of being: the ontological difference. This understanding
of being, however, is not supposed to be a free-oating abstraction, a mere
eidetic a priori; it is in place and in play as an existentially conditioning
factor precisely within a specic and very special kind of actual being, namely,
in the existent subject ontologically recast as Dasein. The subject is a being
and yet such that it itself is on the basis of the understanding of being. But in
that case, the subject, thus reconceived and disclosed as Dasein, the ontologi-
cal being, presupposes itself ! That which makes possible the distinction
between being and beings seems to have to be conceived as itself a being, i.e.,
Dasein as existent Dasein, as actually a being, is the conditioning a priori for
itself as a being. But in what sense, now, can this making-possible of the dis-
tinction between being and beings, i.e., the understanding of beingtran-
scendenceas actually in play in an actual Dasein, be said to be an existen-
tial a priori, that is, not an abstraction, but a factor somehow genuinely
there in or of this being? In other words, what indeed is the being of Dasein
precisely as understanding of being, as projection of being, as transcendence?
For Fink, this is the paradox of the Heideggerian ontology, what he also
calls its intrinsic contradiction; and he offers a striking metaphoric repre-
sentation of the problem: Only on the basis of light is the ame and seen. The
ame becomes visible in its own light. (Transcendence as luminary theory of
subjectivity.)
40. This point is from Z-XI 27a, dated September 10, 1933, on Finks conversation
with Hans Reiner, who as a student of Husserls had defended his doctoral dissertation,
Freiheit, Wollen und Aktivitt: Phnomenologische Untersuchungen in Richtung auf das
Problem der Willensfreiheit (Halle and Saale: Niemeyer, 1927), in July 1926. He went on
to produce numerous writings in ethical theory.
41. This point and the rest of the paragraph are drawn from Z-IX XVII/5a (EFM 2),
except as otherwise indicated. The notes in this folder are from autumn 1931.
42. This sentence comes from Z-IX XVII/5a, emphasis mine (EFM 2); but see Heideg-
gers own words to this effect in his rst Freiburg lecture course (in Finks notes, U-MH-I,
110111, and MH-GA 27, p. 306, as indicated in 3.2 above).
43. See appendix.
44. Z-XV 103b, EFM 2.
45. Z-IX 31a, EFM 2. See appendix.
The problem of the paradoxical nature of the a priori in Heideggers funda-

mental ontology is characterized by Fink already, if a little differently, in his
dissertation-period work. One could speak of the secret dogma of the on-
tological philosophy of Heidegger, Fink writes, namely, the antecedence of
the a priori to experience, that is, that all experiencing is led by an antece-
dent horizon-projecting understanding of being. Now this antecedence
may well be demonstrable, and it is already a problem of Western philoso-
phy from its beginning, but the question is, Is this way of starting out ade-
quately secured phenomenologically? Is not this basic problem for ontologi-
cal philosophy still bound up with a vulgar understanding? And Fink adds
that it is consistent with this state of the question that the world becomes for
Heidegger the strongest evidence for the ontological problematic.
It is clear to Fink that for Heidegger the deployment of the world is an a
priori projection; and by a priori is not meant here some ideal unit of
meaning that, as Husserl might have it in cognition, stands in intentional
objectivity to the subject. The a priori in question here is instead subjective,
in the sense of involved in the subjects spreading out of the world, on the
basis of which there is such a thing as the opposition between the ontical
subjective (immanence) and the transcendence of the object. The a priori
in question could be construed as the transcendental spontaneity of the sub-
ject, which in Kants philosophyand indeed as Kants basic thoughtis
attributable to the subjective faculty of reason [Vernunft]except that for
Heidegger the subjectivity in question is interpreted temporalistically, so
that in place of Kants reason the spontaneity in question is that of original
temporality. Thus Heidegger makes use of a basic relational schema wherein
the a priori is that which makes possible the empirical, in that he [Heidegger]
thinks the horizons [i.e., time-horizons] as a priori and the content [i.e., time-
content] as empirical.
With the introduction of temporality we reach a more profound level of
analysis for both Husserl and Heidegger, and that on which in fact the very
same paradox will again arise. Before going into that, however, we have to
nish Finks point of critique regarding the a priori character in fundamental
ontology, namely, that the demonstrating of transcendence takes place dog-
matically with Heidegger. The contrast with Husserl is dramatic: Husserls
46. Z-IV 108a, EFM 1. The phrasing ending this sentence runs: . . . der strkste Beleg
fr die ontologische Problematik.
47. The phrasings are from a note of Finks dated November 22, 1934, in Z-XII 38cd
(EFM 2). The phrases and lines that follow in the present paragraph also come from this
note, with some clarifying expressions from the context included in brackets.
approach is more radical, Fink writes, in that a move of retreat back to the
facticity of the situation, far from being a narrowing down to the sphere of
intuitive presence, is instead the investigation of the world precisely as the
phenomenon of the world. And the principle being followed is that what
phenomenon always means is the demonstrable, in each case in accord
with its own proper sense of demonstrability [Ausweisbarkeit].
The claim of greater radicality, then, for Husserls approach is that it
proposes to examine the constitutive origin of the already given self-
conceptualizing schemata that ontological analysis accepts as the matters to
interpret existentially. But at the same time Fink also nds that the way Hus-
serl normally formulates his program and its ndings is inadequate to the
inquiry at issue.
To put this all another way: Husserls position is distinguished from Heideg-
gers fundamentally in its conception of the a priori. For Husserl the a priori
under investigation is usually conceived as something to be made experience-
able in the act of giving that takes place in essence-intuition. For Heideg-
ger, on the other hand, the a priori in questioni.e., those structural elements
revealed by the analyses of fundamental ontologyare already intrinsic pos-
sessions of the being doing the inquiring, and analysis is an act of appropria-
tion that is a counter-move to constant forgetting, i.e., it is a kind of
anamnesis. Having laid out this contrast, however, the decisive issue is not
the fact of these two contrasting positions but the more radical system-
methodological question of whether the antecedence of the a priori to factic
experience can be exhibited and what kind of exhibiting this is, what the sense
of its possible verication is. For phenomenology to answer this question
means to Fink precisely to take a step beyond initial formulations, that is,
precisely not simply to adopt an explication in terms of the noematically
focused act-intentionality with which Husserl normally explains his tran-
scendental phenomenology, and in terms of which this last contrast between
Husserl and Heidegger in their conceptions of the a priori is put. The real
fundamental question, then, has to be this: What is the nature of ultimate
constitutive origination in a more radical reduction-governed characteriza-
tion, and what is the manner and method by which it is to be conceptually
48. Z-IV 108b, EFM 1. See the series of notes, Z-IV 10920 for detail on how Husserls
move is more radical, when properly interpreted and radicalized.
49. The argument in this paragraph, and the quoted lines and phrases, are drawn from
Z-I 150ab (EFM 1), reections pertaining to a discussion Fink had with Husserl on
July 10, 1929, precisely on the problem of the a priori: the intra-temporal determination
of the essence (Z-I 149a).
50. Z-I 150b (EFM 1) emphases mine, not Finks.
expressed and shown at that nal radical level? This is the issue that governed
the work Fink did for Husserl during the entire period, as illustrated, for
example, in the Sixth Meditation; it was, therefore, an issue that Husserl
had repeatedly to come to terms with in the ten-year running dialogue between
himself and Fink. Out of phenomenologys own radical thrust Husserl was
being pushed by Fink to go further than his normal plan of exposition seemed
to allow. And Fink himself was not only quite willing to go further than
Husserl in trying to answer this kind of question, he was equally willing to go
beyond Heidegger.
3.3.2. The Basic Paradox Again, Now in Heideggers Analysis

of Temporality; the Move Beyond Being
In Finks critique the paradox lying in the move of reduction purportedly
operative in Heidegger is just as manifest in Heideggers treatment of tem-
porality. Indeed, because in fundamental ontology temporality is that which
structures the understanding of being in its basic possibility, and therefore also
that in terms of which the understanding of being has to be explicated in order
to be made intelligible, for Fink to nd the same paradox in regard to tem-
porality is to nd it at the very roots of Heideggers whole philosophic project.
That paradox can be best seen by beginning from the basic Heideggerian
principle that Dasein has a fundamentally different mode of being [Seins-
weise ], viz., Existenz, from that of things encountered by Dasein as objects
in the world, viz., as things taken in Vorhandenheitin presence out
there. The point of this distinction is that, unlike the things that Dasein
encounters entitatively as objects, there is in Dasein a structuring factor that is
a condition of the eld of its possible encounterings, and that is not something
itself within that eld. Temporality is exactly this; it is a condition intrinsically
structuring Dasein for the possibility of encounter, rather than itself some-
thing subject to that conditioning. But this would mean that if Dasein is to be
characterized in its intrinsic structure as the temporalizing that makes encoun-
ters within time possible, then it could not itself be within time. In a word,
since temporality could not itself be within time, then if Dasein is structurally
51. See SZ, division II, chapter 3 (6166). It is more succinctly stated in Heideggers
lecture course on German Idealism in SS 1929, as for example in the following lines (in
Finks summary): Time as the horizon of the understanding of being is the essence of the
nitude of human Dasein. Therefore the question of being must turn into the interpreta-
tion of human Dasein in regard to its temporality. Being is only intelligible in terms of
time: being and time. (EFA U-MH-III 30, corresponding to MH-GA 28, p. 46.)
52. See appendix.
distinguished by being the very action of original temporality, how could

Dasein itself be in time?
Granted: Dasein is not Vorhandenes, and Heideggers thesis that Dasein is
not present out there [vorhanden] means more precisely that Dasein is not
intra-temporal but is rather original temporality. Nonetheless is not Dasein
intra-temporal all the same, even if in a way of its own; for, paradoxically,
is not Dasein qua original temporality, qua non-intra-temporalness and hori-
zonality, still in time, so that time is in itself? Is this not just what gets formu-
lated by Heidegger as the falling of Dasein? And even more, what about
the aging of the I itself, does this not amount to times transience in itself,
the passing of time going on in itself?
Fink argues, in other words, that distinguishing the time of objects from the
time of subjectsmore accurately, of Daseinmay well be to conceive
fundamental temporality not as a property but as a horizon-deploying projec-
tion, but this does not avoid the problem. In fact the way the temporal hori-
zons are approached by both Husserl and Heidegger on the basis of the way a
human individual reaches across the passage of time to encompass his or her
whole life as a totality, and thus to be oneself consciously in unique identity
and continuity, is to approach temporality precisely in terms of the coursing in
time of human experience. The task the reduction enjoins, however, is to work
out what time is purely as itself prior to and as condition for the existential
totality of a human existence, whether as personal self-identity (e.g., as one
might take it in Husserls approach) or as authenticity against inauthen-
ticity (e.g., as in Being and Time). In either case the forming of self-continuity
and self-determination emerges within time-horizonality, which in turn has
to be grasped as clearly as possible as free from in-time kinds of totality; and
for this Fink looks to his own characterization of time-horizonality as de-
presencingEnt-gegenwrtigung.
Here is the crux of the argument. Granted: The analysis of temporality will
inevitably be guided by the existential human experience one nds reectively
within oneself as coursing human life. Temporality is not something discov-
ered rst in its pure a priori status as the basis from which one thereby
explicates the time-character of human existence. Rather, phenomenological
investigation works in the reverse order, i.e., regressively: that which is condi-
tioned serves to provide the interpretative terms for that which does the con-
ditioning. Put slightly differently, that-which-makes-possible is interpreted
in and through that-which-is-made-possiblea process Fink terms retro-
53. Z-IX 35a, EFM 2.

54. See appendix.
application [Rcklage]turning the interpretandum back upon the inter-

pretans, thereby raising the methodological and theoretical question of a
resultant transcendental seeming [Schein]. Fink puts it succinctly in the
following note:
Thesis: Bringing depresencings into the foreground must take care not to make
these identical with the conditioned modes of behavior that are grounded on
them and by which humans relate to their temporal totality. It is not because
Dasein can be authentic that the totality of a whole life is constituted, but
anticipation [Vorlaufen] presupposes depresencing. Heidegger makes the
same mistake as Husserl, [viz.,] to determine the phenomena that-make-
possible through that which-is-made-possible by them. The existentiel [exis-
tentiellen] modes of relating performed in being-whole do not temporalize
[or: do not bring it about that happening is temporalzeitigen nicht], but
rather they only make [happening as temporal] accessible. Just as a horizon
must not be equated with what you get when you cash it in!!
There is one point, now, that has to be made clear in connection with the last
sentence quoted. Several times in the past few paragraphs we have seen indica-
tion that in this phenomenological confrontation with Husserl and Heidegger
Finks rethinking of temporality as ultimate constitutive conditioning casts it
as time-horizonality. The fuller sense and implications of this will be taken
up in chapters 4 and 5, but one signicant element of its import has now been
introduced. The expression what you get when you cash it in is a rendering
of Finks Einlsung, a term he uses frequently to emphasize the qualitative
difference between a horizon and that which is in a horizon. A horizon is
denable as a condition for, is fundamentally different from, and is in no way
reducible to, that which occurs within it.
This is a point approached from another angle in Finks coming to terms
with Heidegger at this same point in the Freiburg years, out of one of Heideg-
gers most famous interpretive moves, namely, the explication of the imagina-
tion of Kants analysis of schematization as original temporality. Fink had
to take Heideggers interpretation of Kant very seriously, for the whole ques-
55. Z-V VI/11b.

56. Z-XV LXXII/2c (EFM 2), one of a set of notes VB/II, the planned reminder
of Finks dissertation, from 1930 or 1931 (explanatory expressions in brackets mine).
Vorlaufen in the second sentence quoted here comes directly from Being and Time,
53, even if Fink does not need to name that source in this note for himself. And the third
quoted sentence implies a criticism of such famous statements of Heideggers as die Welt
weltet and die Zeit zeitigt sich as examples of the fault being criticized here, viz., the
ontical description of that which makes the ontical possible (Z-IV 116a; EFM 1).
57. See also Z-VI 30a, EFM 1.
tion of imagination gured centrally in Finks work in Presentication and

Image. And it was not only from Heideggers 1929 book, Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, that he knew of it; it came forth in Heideggers
lectures in his rst two semesters after his return to Freiburg. For example, in
the winter semester of 1929, Fink noted down the following as Heideggers
idea: What is imagination? An existential interpretation could show that
pure imagination is nothing other than original time itself. And in the
summer of 1929 the point is repeated, again as Fink noted it down from
Heideggers lectures: For us the imagination is not reasons coming to appear
in nitude, but rather this reason is comprehended when rst the imagination
is brought back to its inmost essence: temporality as a quite special con-
struction of the relationship of the nite to the innite about which in the end
only metaphysics itself has to decide. A little later Fink has Heidegger also
saying: Our aim is to follow through the fundamental question of meta-
physics as the metaphysics of human Dasein and its interpretation as tem-
porality. We see in Kants transcendental imagination not the appearance of
reason, but rather original temporality.
To Heideggers interpretive ideas, Fink reply is straightforward: The reduc-
tion of time to imagination is disastrous for the analysis of time. Time and
space are in no way either imaginal or impressional, nor is imagination
time-constituting. This assertion quite simply inverts the true relationship:
The imagination is grounded in time. A distinction between the ontically and
ontologically imaginal makes no sense positively! For Fink it is eminently
clear that if an analysis of time takes as denitive of time purely in itself that
which is characteristic of a being conditioned by it, viz., either Dasein (with
Heidegger) or the self-conscious cognitive subject (with Husserl), one will
inevitably fall into some kind of idealism, here either an ontological ideal-
ismin Heideggers caseor an ontical idealismas Heidegger might say of
Husserl.
The turns that factors of critique play in the long line of philosophic think-
ing that Fink is involved in here is complex; it includes far more than just
Husserl and Heidegger, reaching back to the period of intense reconsideration
58. EFA U-MH-I 92. The published text, MH-GA 27, p. 272, is consistent with but
does not show exactly these words.
59. EFA U-MH-III 143 and 145, the rst of these texts entirely underlined by Fink
(though not carried over here). Again, the corresponding passages in MH-GA 28,
pp. 2001 and 33637, are consistent with what Fink has Heidegger saying, but do not
say the same thing explicitly.
60. Z-VII XIV/14a (EFM 2), from late 1930.
61. See Z-IX 61a and Z-XI 48b, both in EFM 2.
that emerged from Kants critical philosophy. In particular, Heidegger nds in

the unfolding of German Idealism by Fichte and Hegel a failure to grasp Kants
enormous central realization by too focally interpreting Kants work as phi-
losophy of reection. Fink will in turn nd Heidegger analogously displaying
a failure to recognize that Husserls phenomenology implicitly contains a pro-
found insight not unrelated to the ones Kants successors missed.
In his retrospective Heidegger observes the polarity of ens and ego to
be the basic problem of western metaphysics. And he continues: After the
Kantian intermezzo, what occurs, as Hegel takes it, is a reduction of the
Whole to the ego. To read Kant exclusively in this way, however, sub-
sumes his work into too simple a schema, that of the subject-object relation-
ship; it notices only the order of the epistemological, and so attempts to over-
come the oppositional non-identity of subject and objectand hence its
nitenessin a subject-like totality, Absolute Spirit. But for Heidegger this
misses one stunning insight nascent in Kants work, namely, that the world is
in its fundamental sense bound up in the structure of the being of Dasein, in
whose niteness is grounded all hitherto metaphysically conceived inquiry
into reason and reality. Heideggers own aim, then, in pursuing the analysis of
Daseinprecisely as transcendenceis to move past (perhaps better: be-
hind or prior to) the epistemological/reection-philosophical subject-object
relation in an interpretation of the structure of Dasein in the order of being.
Now what Fink sees in this massive philosophical undertaking on Heideggers
part is that his existential explication of Dasein falls into a basic difculty very
much like the one that Hegel saw besetting Kant and that Heidegger in turn
saw still holding Hegel fast; but Fink reformulates this difculty on a more
radical level in a methodological framework specic to phenomenology.
A key text in which to see this laid out is one of Finks notes from 1934, a few
years after Heideggers lectures on German Idealism. Fink addresses the classic
formula in Being and Time, 14, that the world-ness [Weltlichkeit] of the
world is an existential [ein Existenzial ]. Fink argues that while bearing
oneself in relation to the world [Weltverhalten] would certainly be an existen-
62. This is Finks noting down of Heideggers point in EFA U-MH-III 140, correspond-
ing in essentials but not in the same wording to MH-GA 28, 19b. Or U-MH-III 148:
Kantian and Fichtean philosophy is for Hegel philosophy of reection ; and Heideg-
ger immediately adds parenthetically, in the broadest sense in which one can character-
ize Husserls phenomenology of pure consciousness as a philosophy of reection. This
corresponds, again, essentially but not in exact wording to MH-GA 28, Ergnzung 35,
but adds a remark on Husserls phenomenology.
63. See EFA U-MH-III 151153; MH-GA 28, p. 310.
64. See EFA U-MH-III 108110; MH-GA 27A, pp. 3013.
tial, nonetheless the world itself could not be. One can easily grant that the
world is not a being and that it in no way has presence out there [Vorhan-
denheit]; but this does not at all mean that it is a Dasein-existential. Fink
continues: Heideggers doctrine of the world is signicant only in the nega-
tive, in a way analogous to Kants, in the thesis about that which the world
is not. In Heideggers and Kants doctrine of being [there are] reection-
philosophy motives: namely, insofar as the behavior of relating to the world
[das Verhalten zur Welt], as bearing-oneself-not-in-relation-to-a-being [als das
Sich-nicht-zu-einem-Seienden-Verhalten], is itself taken for the phenomenon
of the world. Ontological idealism, i.e., the doctrine of the a priori spon-
taneity of the projection of being, . . . to a certain extent makes the world into
the glow of Dasein, i.e., it makes the bearing of oneself in relation to the world
equate with the world.
As will be shown in the next chapter, reconsidering the world will mean that
the world, precisely as horizonal, cannot be categorized in terms of the struc-
tured involvements that obtain within it; the world is better construed as the
pure containment [der reine Enthalt]. Even if not a being, not an aggregate
or an innitely large thing, still [the world is] independent from the intra-
worldly facticity of the subject, and is not to be dissolved in a mode of
Dasein-like existence, which is what happens when it is conceptualized as
one of the existentials of the ontological structure of Dasein.
Heideggers thinking, then, is not superior to Husserls even if Husserls
(really only initial-stage) formulations are taken in an idealistic interpretation.
Husserls position may thus convert the cognitive antecedence of a human
being into ontologically productive antecedence (see 2.6.2.1), but Heideggers
ontological transformation of phenomenologys transcendental subjectivity
is an erroneous interpretative conversion of antecedency of accession into an
antecedency in the order of being. Fink, however, goes beyond this still too
simple form of criticism. To interpret Husserls position idealistically as Hei-
degger does is a misinterpretation, especially in failing to acknowledge the
preliminary character of Husserls classic texts. This shows in the way Heideg-
ger consistently equates Husserls conception of being with presence out
there [Vorhandenheit]. Heidegger is, of course, correct in an important re-
spect. Presence out there is not to be attributed to the subject; for the
65. Z-XIV VIII/1b2a (EFM 2), bracketed insertion mine.

66. Ibid.
67. Z-IX 63b; EFM 2. In a sharper charge Fink also says: Heidegger equates ac-
cessibility with a production on the part of Dasein. (Z-XI 28a, also 29a; EFM 2.)
epistemological correlation has to be grounded in something antecedent to the

subject, i.e., for Heidegger the ontological involvement of Dasein and world.
Dasein accordingly has a fundamentally distinctive mode of being, a mode not
to be assimilated to the kind of being possessed by those beings Dasein turns to
in action and experiencing.
Fink, however, points out that for Husserl the term presence out there
[Vorhandenheit], radically understood, does not have the restricted sense Hei-
degger gives it but means instead pregivenness [Vorgegebenheit]. And to
grasp the problematic of pregivenness is to shift inquiry into the already
constituted to the deeper level of genetic analysis, to the investigation of
the stratum of the temporalization of time [or: of the process of bringing
about in the mode of temporalityZeitigung der Zeit]. But in the push to
the analysis of ultimate originative processes in full-scale reduction-driven,
post-preliminary reinvestigation, a crucial shift occurs in regard to the ques-
tion of being. Heidegger makes brilliantly clear that the being of the subject
is not to be determined in terms of the subject/object epistemological relation-
ship, yet he locates the processes and conditions whereby that relationship
arises within a being, namely, within Dasein. In the radicalizing of Husserls
transcendental phenomenology that Fink was pursuing, however, this does
not go far enough; for with Husserl the issue is not some sought-after detach-
ment from the domination of the primary concept of being, presence out
there [Vorhandenheit], the point is rather a detachment from the idea of being
altogether. This is the tenor, for Fink, of Husserls real thesis on being
embodied in the phenomenological reduction, namely, the thesis of the con-
stitutedness of what is in being [Konstituiertheit des Seienden]. Correlative
to that thesis is the idea that the move of the reduction is ultimately the move
to thematization of the Absolute as having to be beyond being.
Fink held Heidegger in high esteem for his critical-speculative lan, but it
is Husserls work that holds the rights to greater radicality here, even if in a
way that Husserl himself has to be confronted with. Husserl is right not
to pose the question of the kind of being had by absolute subjectivity. And to
think one is missing something fundamental by not doing so is precisely to
68. See Z-XV 67b (EFM 2), clearly reecting Being and Time, 13.
69. Z-IV 101c, emphasis Finks, expression in brackets mine (EFM 1).
70. See Z-XV 67a68a, probably from 1931; EFM 2.
71. Z-XV 125a; EFM 2.
72. Z-XI 7a, Finks emphasis (EFM 2), datable only as in the period from 1931 to
1934. See also CM6, pp. 15859; VI.CM/1, p. 178.
73. See the discussion on the reduction of the idea of being in CM6, pp. 7175
(VI.CM/1, pp. 7984).
misunderstand the reduction and its aim. Fink continues: Absolute con-
sciousness can as extra-mundane have no being at all, if the question of being
can only be meaningfully posed in the framework of the world. The absolute-
ness of transcendental consciousness is absolutum ab esse [absolved from
being]. Absolutum esse = solutum ab esse [released from being].
The kind of being had by factical human subjectivity is indeed an ontologi-
cal problem, but at the same time a constitutive-meontic problem.
Fink took himself to be unfolding implications in phenomenology without
necessarily being restricted to what Husserl might explicitly adopt (see 2.6.2.1
and 2.6.2.2). We see how this was intrinsic to his also going beyond Heidegger,
in tandem with the critique of Heideggers criticism of Husserl. The paradox
that Fink found in Heideggers fundamental ontology (3.3.1) lay within Hei-
deggers attempt to move past any residual philosophy of reection in Hus-
serls phenomenologyand Fink had to and did take it seriously. But coming
to terms with all this led inexorably to a constitutive-meontic problematic,
the most radical and elusive issue Fink found confronting him. It will take the
next several chapters to prepare for a direct treatment of the meontic, but
we shall continually approach it in the way it will enter into every interpretive
reinvestigation of transcendental subjectivity and constitution at a truly
radical post-preliminary level.
3.3.3. The Ontological Unattainability of the Subject

The paradox that Fink found in Heideggers thinking is not necessarily
an outright inadequacy, in view of its seeming to ow from the very frame-
work of phenomenological investigation as such, namely, as regressive inquiry
into originative conditions. (See 3.3.2.) Obliged to try to resolve this difculty,
Fink realizes that there is another whole feature to it, which, indicated in the
closing paragraphs of the previous section, now has to be made explicit.
The paradox in Heideggers Being and Time that a being in the world is itself
the conditioning surge that opens up the very world-horizon within which that
same being is concretely engagedin a word, that it is both ontic and
transcendentalwas repeated in Heideggers 1929 essay for Husserls Fest-
schrift, On the Essence of Ground, except this time in the form of the motif
of freedom. Freedom, world-forming transcendence, is explicated
here as both included within the order of being and as the presupposition of
74. Z-V VII/12ab (EFM 1), from the period of Finks dissertation.
75. The argument and quoted phrasings in this paragraph are taken from Z-XIV
IX/1a2b; EFM 2.
being. For example, freedom is both (a) the action of the projection of tran-
scendence within beingfor it is something operative in the being of Dasein,
which is itself unquestionably a beingand (b) that which makes that projec-
tion of world possible and therefore conditions being as such, especially if
freedom is explicated as temporality. But the recurrence of the paradox in
this most fundamental of philosophical matters, namely, in a phenomenology
where the question of being demands being posed precisely in terms of the
framing that being must have in the world if one kind of actual being is also to
be capable of understanding being, suggests that, rather than a simple over-
sight or error that can be corrected, a structural inevitability here presents
inquiry with an aporetic of a radically new kind. Fink formulates it as the
ontological unattainability of the subject.
With Husserl unattainability is demonstrated in the context of a philoso-
phy of reection, in the form of the doctrine of the anonymity of perform-
ance life. But this does not mean that the philosophy of reection is what
really powers phenomenology; for reection-philosophical ideas, as always
with Husserl, are only means for exploding the natural attitude. What really
shows in this anonymity in Husserls phenomenology, or in the paradox of
transcendence that typies Heideggers work (or indeed in life-philosophy,
where ever-coursing life precludes being xed in set, invariant forms), is the
subterranean stirring of a fundamental problem, namely, the incompleteness
[Unvollendetheit] of spirit in the world. To confront this incompleteness
[Unvollendetheit] of spirit in the world, its fragmentary being [ fragmentar-
isches Dasein], the actuality of its being-outside-itself, Fink writes, is to be
forced to face not ontologically and cosmologically demonstrable facts but
rather something that can only be conceptualized as the speculative fact
itself ; and this in turn can only be understood in relation to the opening
beyond being that now seems to be called for, what Fink simply terms a
meontic truth.
Mentioned earlier (see the nal paragraph of 2.6.2.7 and the closing consid-
eration of 3.3.2), the meontic dimension of the ontological unattainability and
opacity of the subject becomes more explicit here and is named as pertaining
to one of the two basic moments of the systematic of transcendental phenome-
76. See the appendix.

77. Z-XIV IX/2b.
78. This paragraph continues to draw from Z-XIV IX/1a2b. Note the alternate ways
in which Fink expresses one concept here, das Unvollendetsein des Geistes in der Welt
and die Unvollendetheit des Geistes in der Welt; the rst has been rendered as uncom-
pletedness and the second by incompleteness.
nology. In the previous chapter we saw that Husserls system involves the
dimension of systematic projections, as Fink puts it, or higher descrip-
tions, as Husserl has it (see 2.1, pp. 8687 and 2.3, pp. 99100); here we see
one of the ways in which Fink nds that dimension to be specically devel-
oped, namely, in a speculative order of interpretive determination in which
to disclose and articulate the meaning of the concrete matters concretely ana-
lyzed. And the speculative fact beyond all others comes to the fore in phe-
nomenology when the most concrete of matters, being, is taken up as the
ultimate explicandum, as the meaning that is of greatest import for that most
peculiar particular being, the living human agent, the philosophic questioner
trying to think through what thinking itself discloses of ones own being in the
midst of being. Here Fink is led to the realization that the ultimate import of
differences between Husserl and Heidegger lies not in some doctrinal position
that divides them but rather in the opening to a radicality beyond either that is
methodologically imposed when phenomenology confronts its own work in
full self-critical interpretation.
Thus a year after hearing Heideggers rst two semesters of lectures in Frei-
burg Fink writes in 1930: Heideggers ght against German Idealism shows
clearly the motives that condition his misunderstanding of Husserl. For Hei-
degger, Husserlmuch like Fichte and Hegeloverlooked the nitude of the
subject, the kind of being the subject has, in effect taking ight from nitude
into deication. For Heidegger, Husserls I is virtually the same as the I of
German Idealism, the I-ness that is precisely the problem. Heidegger, in
contrast, insists on interpreting the I-ness of the I in terms of the human I, so
that the absolute subject becomes for him a harmless idea. Thus it is that
the deepest opposition between Husserls and Heideggers philosophy lies in
the way one formulates the basic question: either (1) the question of the
Absolute or (2) the question of the being of beings.
Fink acknowledges: Heideggers restriction of the idea of being to the
region of nitude is an incontestable service to philosophy. But philosophy
must not stop with that; for the authentic theme of philosophy is the
Absolute, which, when posited as a being, is a contradiction in terms. So
it is thatfor reasons that still need to become clearbecause Husserls phe-
nomenology presents itself as a philosophy of the Absolute, while Heideggers
fundamental ontology explicitly does not, Husserls position holds the greater
philosophical radicality. The conception of philosophy as the explication of
79. See in particular the middle of 3.3.2 above.

80. Z-VII XXI/10ab, emphases all Finks.
81. Z-XI 27b, dated September 10, 1933; EFM 2.
the Absolute and the way in which spirit can be thought within phenome-
nology, in appreciation of both the question of being and the special system-
atic character of Husserls enterprise, can only be worked out in view of the
speculative dimension wherein the meontic character of nal inquiry has
to be admitted; and this can only be worked out within and not independent of
the actual reinvestigation of basic phenomenological structures and factors.
That is what we shall be doing in the next three chapters; but clarications
about how reinvestigation will operate methodologically still need to be made,
precisely because it is in Finks coming to terms with Husserl and Heidegger
together that he was able to achieve the full measure of methodological preci-
sion and subtlety that the matters at issue required.
So we must dwell a little longer on the incontestable service Heidegger
performed for philosophy, and on the reasons for which Fink spoke of him as
having brought phenomenology to its rst truth in critical-speculative
lan.
3.4. Heideggers Positive Contributions

This assessment of Heidegger, laudatory as it is, is nonetheless qualied:
this renewal of impetus to philosophic thinking has to be seen as moving
philosophy radically beyond him. In the same subset of notes in which this
grateful acknowledgment is expressed, Fink makes quite clear this larger les-
son: To determine philosophy as ontology is a preliminary. This gets annulled
[hebt sich auf ] in its determination as the meontic. But, Fink adds, the meon-
tic contains a contradiction of its own, namely, that it tends to convert back
into ontology, thereby to protect itself against innity while having to move
beyond nitude. Conceived meontically, philosophy is together the move-
ment of nitude and innity. Heideggers refashioning of ontology so as to
restrict the idea of being to the region of nitude, represented earlier (3.3.2), is
noted by Fink with vivid lucidity early in Heideggers lectures on German
Idealism: Working out the question of being, beginning with the metaphysics
of Dasein, at bottom allows the insight to break forth that all being is only
within the perimeter of nitude, that in the Absolute there is no being to
be met with. But this incontestable service only reinforces the point of
powerful critique that Fink then has to apply. If the movement of thinking that
82. See the text from Z-VII XIV/4a, quoted near the beginning of the chapter.
83. The argument is taken from the recapitulative statement in Z-VII XIV/7a (EFM 2).
84. This formulation by Fink of Heideggers point (EFA U-MH-III 31) is entirely
underlined in red. It corresponds to, but is not in the exact wording of, the texts in MH-
GA 28, pp. 47 and 23637.
carries Heidegger pastor behind, or beneath, or anterior tothe subject-

object relation also transforms idealism into an ontological issue, never-
theless it also urges the speculative drive of phenomenology to nd a break-
through at a more radical level in its investigative program of disclosing
constitutive origination. And this it achieves in focusing on the subject that is
apprehensible ontologically, Dasein, precisely as the result of a constitu-
tion, that is, as itself a self-apperception rather than ultimately performa-
tive ground as such. With this, the concept of being has to be broken through
in a concept of the Absolute that bespeaks a meontic revolution. What
this is, however, is not a culmination in positive cognitive explication. The
seeming absolute knowing that one reaches here will be one, Fink writes
with astonishing negativity, that has to founder. In a word, his melding of
Heideggers insistence that for a being to be it must be nite with Husserls
actual thesis on being, namely, that any being is a constituted product,
imposes the exigency to place the process of constitution in the order of
not-being, in the me-ontic, however problematic that proposal will be in
the end.
While the detailing of this meontic in Finks working out of radical phe-
nomenological self-interpretation will be taken up later, at this point some
indication of the sources Fink drew from to frame it needs to be given; for Fink
did not get his conception of the meontic from Heidegger. It stems rather from
an element that has always been vigorous within the long tradition of philos-
ophybut not always in the mainstream, especially in the modern period
and that Fink confronted in his earliest reading in philosophy while still in the
Gymnasium, specically in the conjunction of Giordano Brunos On Cause,
Principle, and Unity and Kants Critique of Pure Reason. A remark in one of
his early notes for his prize essay portrays the element in question in his
dealing with the concept of the merely thinkable [das blo Denkbare] in
Kants work. In that concepts of the merely thinkable in philosophy before
Kant operate as noumena in a negative sense, Fink observes, Kants termi-
nology is perhaps also dependent upon the philosophical tradition stemming
from antiquity called negative theology, and he refers to a passage in the
Critique of Pure Reason, A289/B345. Fink thus had a concept of the meon-
85. From Z-XV 102ab, emphasis Finks; EFM 2.

86. Z-XI 7a, quoted in 3.3.2 above. See also Z-XV 33a. EFM 2.
87. Finks copy of ber die Ursache, das Prinzip und das Eine and of Kants KrV, both
in cheap pocket editions by Reclam and still in his library, are both signed E. Fink 1921.
88. Z-I 22ab (EFM 1), in a passage parallel to VB/I 25, which, however, does not
refer to the text in KrV.
tic clearly in hand before February 1928, when the prize essay was written,
but the achieved sense of the rapidly evolving idea shows next in notes written
during his revision of that essay into the dissertation. In late 1928, for exam-
ple, he has a note on Hermann Cohens Logik der reinen Erkenntnis in its
treatment of Aristotles formula t t hn einai. He quotes Cohens lines ex-
plaining the meaning of t hn,
namely, that the ground of being must be
placed beyond its present and that it does not sufce to determine being [das
Sein] by the truly existent [das wahrhaft Seiende ]. Instead, Cohen continues,
a pre-being [Vor-Sein] is sought, and in this is being [das Sein] grounded and
secured. What Fink nds so signicant, then, is the nal point Cohen makes
here, now given in Finks slight rewording of it: It is not what-is [was ist], but
what-was [was war] that makes up being [das Sein]. Being is not thereby
displaced back, more or less, into the past; rather it is to be referred to its own
origin.
Fink comments on Cohens looking for this origin in thought, consistent
with the transcendental idealism of the Marburg Neo-Kantian school that
Cohen had founded. It is not necessary, Fink remarks, straight off to take the
turn into the subjective; for, with respect to being, to ask about origin is, as
phenomenology shows, more properly to ask about the horizon of time.
Fink nds this anticipated in Nicholas Cusanus and negative theology, in
which obscure concepts of the innite (en ka pn, non aliud, mh-on) are
really ways of asking about this central problem of the origin of being. In
contrast, when the origin of being, the whence [das Woher] of being, instead
of being taken precisely as the question of the horizon of time is itself cast in
temporal terms, then the originative, construed as the past that precedes pres-
ent actual being, is itself ipso facto converted into something within the hori-
zon for being; for that is precisely what time is. In a word, inquiry into origin,
taken as inquiry into the temporally prior, ends up as the ontication of time
itself. Here is a rst look at the nature of the problem of thematizing what is
essentially a meontic origin.
Linking the Kantian/Neo-Kantian problem of the noumenal dimension of
origin with the Neoplatonic tradition of negative theology to yield a method-
ologically robust conceptuality for speaking of what has to be beyond being
89. See M-I (dated aus der Zeit von 192728) p. [7], as well as Z-I 19a, 25a, 28b,
32b, 44a, 45b, and 53b, all materials preparatory for the Preisschrift, and all in EFM 1.
90. 3d ed. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922). (First edition 1902, revised 1914.)
91. See appendix.
92. Z-IV 66a, emphasis in quoted phrasings Finks. Meontic obviously comes from
the Greek mh-onnon ens: that which is not-being.
is a proposal in play in other notes as well. This linkage is made, thus, not for
syncretistic purposes but rather to pose in its sharpest form the issue that lies in
phenomenological probing at its deepest; and even though Fink knew that his
dissertation was going to be incomplete in deferring that issue to its as yet
uncompleted second part, he wanted to make clear that he was aware of it and
that he was not going to produce a study that would naively blur it. For
example, in a note from 19281929, he reminds himself that in his Introduc-
tion he must stress that the region of pure consciousness is not an ontologi-
cal region. To make the move to pure consciousness is not a matter of
overcoming the character that pure consciousness may have as presence out
there [Vorhandenheit]. Rather, it means something quite a bit more radi-
cal, namely, that every ontological question remains within the world. For
this Kants work, especially as Heidegger explicated in his lectures, is decisive:
Kants philosophy is the rst exhibiting of the cosmological horizon of the
idea of being. Kant thus rst made possible a meontic metaphysics of the
Absolute, as Fink put it in a later note. Being could be dealt with neither
in itself nor in pure thought; the realm of being-as-experienceable simply is
the world. Again in Finks words: The cardinal failing of all transcendental
philosophy is this, that it does not see being and world as an indissoluble
unity. If, therefore, phenomenological inquiry was to push into the origina-
tive realm wherein this world of experience, this world of being, is con-
stituted, then this was to try to push into what was before beingVor-Sein,
to adopt Cohens phrasing.
What Fink heard regarding the mh-on in Heideggers lectures was much
less than this, namely, variant senses taken on in the context of specic dif-
ferent philosophers. Thus the mh-on in Plato was that which stood in con-
trast to the ontvw on (the beingly being, i.e., the really being), the Ideas;
here that which was individual was mh-on. In Aristotle, Heidegger ex-
plains, the on kat sumbebhkwwhat classically is termed accidental
93. For example, Z-IV 49ab (EFM 1) relates the discussion of the term transnite in
mathematical theory to the whole question of how barriers of niteness are transgressed
in phenomenological inquiry. Here, too, we nd the linkage of Plotinus (en ka pn),
Cusanus (non aliud), and Kant (noumena in the negative sense). See also Z-I 67ab and
Z-IV 49ab. VB/I speaks of the transnite in 61, referring to Oscar Beckers Mathe-
matische Existenz in JPpF VIII (1927), pp. 441809. This volume of JPpF also con-
tained Heideggers SZ. See also EFM 1, Einleitung des Herausgebers I, pp. xxxixxliii.
94. Z-IV 97a; EFM 1. Emphasis Finks in quoted wording.
95. Z-XX 7a from late 1935 or early 1936, emphasis Finks; EFM 3.
96. Z-IV 94b; EFM 1.
97. EFA U-MH-I 118; MH-GA 27, p. 321.
beingwas a mh-on. Finally, in Fichte, as Fink records the interpreta-

tive ideas Heidegger delivered, the not-I is not [only] the eteron, the neutral
Other, but is a mh-on.
Yet what Fink did receive from Heidegger, if not speculative specics on the
meontic, was the need to loosen the constraints of Husserls incredible dedica-
tion to the descriptive analysis of die Sachen selbst in near neglect of the
second dimension of integral phenomenological systematics. For example, in
the semester of lectures in the summer of 1930 (his fourth with Heidegger), in
an extended discussion of Kant on the question of freedom, Fink noted down
Heideggers interpretation of Kants metaphysics as a move of regression to
the nature of man that has an originality that is neither psychology nor a
phenomenology of experiences or of consciousness. And Fink has Heidegger
saying: One cannot do a phenomenology of consciousness decade after de-
cade and only then ask about metaphysics. A rebuke to Husserls endless
meticulous descriptive analyses it may be, but more positively it is a telling
point about the fuller demands of phenomenology. In some measure and at
some pointsand perhaps precisely there where the deepest philosophical
issues laydie Sache selbst may not be ultimately intelligible by restriction
solely to the evidence-structured moment enjoined by Husserls Principle of
Principles, especially if this principle itself is a signal instance of a schema
that is not necessarily the model for all levels of inquiry into origination in
transcendental phenomenology.
In sum, the massive engagement on Husserls part in the noetic-noematic
framework as setting the terms for explicating both the structure of phe-
nomena to be analyzed and the methodology for addressing them needed de-
limitation in order for its value to be understood philosophically (see 2.6.2.1).
But the delimitation and supplementation had to be based in the intrinsic,
integrated systematic thrust of transcendental phenomenology as such, in the
continual radicalizing imposed by the reduction.
In the present context, then, there are also specic contributions drawn out
of Heidegger that aided Fink to advance beyond preliminary xations in phe-
nomenology in order to facilitate its genuine philosophical self-explication
and its reading philosophical adequacy.
98. EFA U-MH-V 37; MH-GA 31, pp. 7879.

99. U-MH-III 127; MH-GA 28, p. 184, which has the adverbial qualier put in
brackets here.
100. EFA U-MH-V 91, corresponding to MH-GA 31, p. 205.
101. Ideas I, 24.
102. See again Heideggers 19281929 Freiburg lecture course: EFA U-MH-I 1517;
MH-GA 27, pp. 6263.
3.4.1. The I Am as Finite I Am in the World

The rst of these specic thematic points to which Fink found Heidegger
giving an emphasis that was determinative for a phenomenology-based inter-
pretive analysis is the principle already seen in Heideggers lectures on German
Idealism (see 3.3.3), namely, that subject-beingfor Heidegger, in the form of
Daseinis essentially nite being. Putting it in terms explicitly taking up
the long practice in modern-period philosophy of speaking in the rst person
that is given such dramatic primacy in Fichte, Heidegger declares that the I
am is not a complete sentence but only a fragment of one, yet not in the sense
that some predicate is required to complete the statement. The I, as essentially
a fact-enactmentin Fichtes own neologism, Tathandlungis funda-
mentally different from non-I things, from simple facts [Tatsachen]. I am
is not simply the ontic assertion of my factic existence but rather a statement
of the essence of the I precisely as the acting that enacts the concreteness that I
come to be. I am always that to which I am decided, that which by my
decision is gone through. . . . The being of the I is something which is always
given to the I as a task, to be in this or that way. To put it another way, this
assertion about the I must always be referred to the mineness [ Jemeinigkeit]
of the one who utters the sentence, in the openness to the indeterminate,
in the nitude, that always characterizes an actual, concretely individual
someone. And this basis of the I as freedom precludes its being considered a
typical truth of essence, a typical eidos.
To be an I, that is, to be at all as an I, is to be a concretely nite human I,
which means to be involved in all the manifold engagements with things and
others in a world. Not to recognize this is to have a concept of the I that is
empty. Thus, in his fascinating Dasein-oriented exposition of Fichte, Hei-
degger lls out theoretically the essential structure of human egoic being al-
ready spoken of in his immediately previous Freiburg course, where he had
said: The essence of genuine subjectivity is nothing at all subjective (in the
sense of an isolated I). An I that is not already always there with [bei] the on-
hand existent, is a philosophical phantom. Being-there-with [Sein-bei] belongs
103. EFA U-MH-III 7677, emphasis Finks; MH-GA 28, pp. 1067.
104. EFA U-MH-III 80; MH-GA 28, p. 113.
105. The being-what [Wassein] of the I is not a genus-concept in relation to individual
concrete Is. The concept of essence as eidos fails here. In phenomenology the insight is
not yet reached that the whole determination of the essence of the I is a problem of
existence and refers to an existential metaphysics of Dasein. EFA U-MH-III 81, to which
MH-GA 28, pp. 11314, has no corresponding assertion.
essentially to the concept of genuine subjectivity. With this there is also

being-with [Mitsein], Heidegger adds, i.e., the existential equivalent of in-
tersubjectivity. And when this full structural complex is grasped, Heideg-
ger declares, we are driven to effect a radical revision of the concept of
subjectivity.
Heideggers reorienting of phenomenological themes along the lines of his
fundamental ontology is clearly a strong factor reinforcing Finks shift of the
center of gravity in phenomenology past subject-object, noetic-noematic in-
tentionality to nd non-noetico-noematic factors in post-preliminary rein-
quiry into constitutive origination. But effecting that shift while appreciating
the force of Heideggers insistence on concrete nitude poses this problem:
How can the concept of transcendental subjectivity be at one and the same
time genuinely trans-mundane and yet, in Heideggers sharp formulation, not
a harmless act-center, not free of what Fink has Heidegger calling the
trenchancy of transcendence, that is, the vulnerability of being under the
sway of that in being which it understands, of being essentially surrendered
to the surrounding being that it itself as Dasein discloses? We have here
unmistakable reinforcement of Finks critical point about one fundamental
limitation, and paradox, in Heidegger position, namely, that Heideggers on-
tology is precisely of being in the frame of the world. And that is exactly the
limitation that Fink takes Husserls phenomenological reduction to be the
attempt to overcome, even if it must pass beyond its own initial formulations
to do so. How Fink works out these tensions and conicts will be laid out in
the next several chapters, but here we have to give some consideration to the
way this work of at once critique, interpretation, and integration necessitates
being clear on its methodological character in phenomenological systematics.
3.4.2. Philosophical Explication as ConstructionEven in

Transcendental Phenomenology
The interpretive shift of the center of gravity in substantive conceptual
elements that Fink nds phenomenology to have not only to admit but also to
embrace is not merely a shift of focus that implies no change in phenomeno-
logical procedures. In addition to its effect upon interpretive sense throughout
106. EFA U-MH-I 27, emphasis Finks. The corresponding text in MH-GA 27,
pp. 1045, does not contain statements like these. See, however, 14c (pp. 11317).
107. EFA U-MH-I 28; MH-GA 28, 14a.
108. EFA U-MH-I 27, not represented in MH-GA 28, pp. 1045.
109. EFA U-MH-I 121. See MH-GA 27, pp. 32628.
the panoply of phenomenological ndings, the kind of intellectual operation

that goes into achieving this shift does not fall neatly into the coupling of (a)
intuition of the eidos and (b) intuition of the experienced that together com-
prise the moment of demonstration in evidence enjoined by Husserls Principle
of Principles. There is more at play methodologically than that, and to begin
delineating the richer operation involved in the dimension of systematic pro-
jections and higher order descriptions we can show how it was again
Heideggers work that offered leading suggestions to Fink for that very realiza-
tion. We have already been introduced in a preliminary way to Heideggers
concept of formal indication (see 2.3); now we must take note of how he
explains construction.
In Being and Time, Heidegger professes adherence to Husserls avoidance of
any kind of free-oating constructions in the disclosure of a priori struc-
tures that it is the task of that book to achieve. Yet before Being and Time
reaches its end, the term construction begins to take on a positive sense
in the analysis of the structure of Dasein. Phenomenological construction
eventually is not only admissible but central to the method of getting hold of
Daseins genuine ontological meaning. To do this is a matter of getting
hitherto accepted construals of the phenomenon under investigation to yield a
sense that at one and the same time both is opposed to the way that phenome-
non has been overtly construed and is the ontological core of its very constitu-
tion. The sense to be disclosed is not to be a simple wholesale replacement of
the hitherto manifest meaning by which some phenomenon has been under-
stood but rather is what will show in a transformation or reconguration of
that meaning by the device of projecting onto it an anticipation of what it
must show itself to be that is drawn from already achieved consideration in a
prior phase of investigation. In a word, construction is projection.
In the rst semester of his lecturing in Freiburg as the new chair holder
Heidegger mentions projection in the manner of an aside, but nonetheless as
a point that is intrinsic to the unique status of transcendence. Transcendence
is not the sort of thing that can be straightforwardly presented for scrutiny; it
is rather the ground-condition for any dealing with things in scrutiny of them.
Transcendence is not able to be described because it does not present itself.
Instead transcendence is realized. To work on the question of being and on the
110. See 2.3 and 3.3.3.

111. See SZ 7, p. 28, footnote 1, to p. 50, and p. 302.
112. See SZ 72, pp. 37576, and 73, p. 378. On p. 375 Heidegger refers to 63 for
the explanation of the methodology in which construction gures.
question of the worldi.e., to do philosophyis to be ipso facto the very

movement of transcendence itself. This is the way it is brought to show. But
then Heidegger adds: Philosophy, as projection of transcendence, is essen-
tially construction. What Heidegger, however, does not do at this point is
make clear how the achievement of transcendence as the very action of
philosophizing brings transcendence itself to philosophic disclosure in some
sort of articulated expressive form. Even 63 in Being and Time just describes
the structure of the action (there, of projection), the mechanism, so to
speak, of the disclosive effort. The conceptual expression in which the mean-
ing of the to-be-disclosed and the appropriately disclosed is validated seem-
ingly automatically, by virtue of the coincidence of the projection with the pro-
jected upon, once the existential orientation in which it is framed is grasped as
that of ones very own being. This, however, seems too easy a solution, but it
will require moving further into Finks critique of transcendental language in
an overall transcendental theory of method to deal with this question.
In the next semester, even if Heidegger does not thematically take up the
question of the adequacy and validity of conceptual expression, still, in the
course of an exposition of Fichtes thinking precisely in regard to construc-
tion, he makes it much clearer how construction is projection, and how
he understands the remarkable assertion of Fichtes that all philosophical
knowledge is essentially construction. Construction as philosophical know-
ing cannot mean just fabricating ideas or just putting propositions together in
some merely arbitrary assemblage. The essence of construction is projection;
projection of something over onto something. Projection is a special kind
of disclosure, of letting be seen. Construction as projection is essentially
a making-visible. Every projection requires rst something pregiven which
is taken into the projection and projected over onto something. Heidegger
details the methodological way this constructive projection is guided: it has
a basis in what is already given, but the projection species a determinate way
in which what it is about will be brought into the clear in precisely that
113. The line of thought and the quotes here are from EFA U-MH-I 151; MH-GA 27,
pp. 39596.
114. The authenticity of the potentiality-of-being-a-self guarantees the fore-sight of
primordial existentiality, and this assures us of coining the appropriate existential con-
cepts. BTst, pp. 29192 (SZ, p. 316).
115. Heideggers blanket assertion here is analogous to the one Husserl offers when he
argues to Fink that a specic reduction of the idea of being is not needed. The new sense
words must take on occurs, Husserl assures us, of itself in the properly performed
reduction: VI.CM/1, p. 83, notation 241.
determinate way, against the inexplicitness or distortion in which it had hith-

erto been construed. Every philosophical projecting as explicit projecting is a
leaping out into an already obtaining inexplicit projection.
While this may look like a reformulated version of Husserls signitive in-
tention, there is one point about the situation regarding which construc-
tion and projection are asserted as the appropriate kind of operation that
needs to be emphasized. In both Being and Time and here in the lectures
treating Fichtes philosophy, what is at issue is not some ordinary kind of
philosophic theme but a matter of fundamental distinctiveness. The question
of existence (Being and Time) or of transcendence (Introduction to Phi-
losophy, winter semester, 19281929), and now, in Heideggers lectures in
the summer of 1930, Fichtes attempts to think how the I-subject, out of the
dynamism that is its very being, becomes an I-thinker thinking all that it is and
all that it thinks about as not-I to itself are all efforts to articulate that which
is the originative precondition for the very effort to achieve that clarication;
and that originative precondition is not something, as it were, externally af-
fecting that same disclosure effort but rather that constitutes it intrinsically,
i.e., ontologically, existentially in the very carrying out of the effort.
Thus it is that raising the question of being as Heidegger does marks for it
a manifest heightening of the paradox of the phenomenological reduction,
namely, to make the question of the being of the transcendental subject ipso
facto the question of the way the thinking of transcendental origination is an
investigative thinking carried on by an actual being, and therefore carried on
ineluctably as held within the conditioning that is the very thing it is attempt-
ing to bring to disclosure. What is decisive here, however, is not simply a
formal or logical relationship of conditioningsuch that, for example, it is
unproblematic for reason to analyze and formulate the rules of reasoning that
are constitutive of it, even in doing reasoning itselfbut of a far more com-
prehensive and determining order, that of being, acting, and experiencing. The
all-embracing comprehensive structure at issue in this case is that of the
prime phenomenological themes, in particular world and temporality. These
wholes of a unique sort, fundamental as the horizon for all orders of being,
acting, and experiencing are such as to elude being presented; and so the
question of how they are there to be investigated becomes methodologically
challenging.
116. The ideas and the quoted material are from EFA U-MH-III 3738, emphasis all
Finks; MH-GA 28, pp. 5455 and 28283.
117. See LU, II-2 (6), 1415.
118. See 3.4.1 above. Cf. U-MH-III 37; MH-GA 28, p. 54.
Such is the critical insight that Fink came to be exercised in quite early in his
philosophic study, and we shall see in subsequent chapters how this problem-
atic dominates his entire post-preliminary reinquiry precisely into the themes
of world and temporality. Now, however, a few further points need to be made
about construction-projection.
What construction will work out to be for transcendental phenomenol-
ogy is not dened in terms of a single sphere of matters to be analyzed. This
is made explicit in Finks explicit treatment in the transcendental theory of
method laid out in the Sixth Meditation, specically in 7; but we shall
return to that in chapter 7 (7.2.3). More instructive for the present context is a
long note drafting points relating to 2 of the Introduction to Finks disser-
tation, where Fink not only is more explicit than in the dissertation about
Heideggers contribution but also discusses limitations in Heideggers posi-
tion. What is particularly signicant here is Finks comment about construc-
tion, particularly in giving the paradigmatic context in which construction
is to have a role in transcendental methodology, namely, the problematic of
temporality. The analysis of temporality faces two conceptual alternatives for
determining exactly what it is that will be reached and disclosed therein.
Drawing from his exposure to Cohens work (see 3.4), Fink distinguishes
between an inquiry into ground and an inquiry into origin, explaining
that, because phenomenology at its ultimate level of analysis is an inquiry into
origin rather than into ground, it is obliged to operate by construction.
Echoing Heidegger in insisting that construction must not mean the ar-
bitrariness of unclear ideas and feeling-laden or prophetic speculation, Fink
takes it to be bound to demonstrative exhibiting [Ausweisung], wherein lies
its sole right and the possibility of rigor and inexorability in philosophical
reection. What makes it effective in that, however, is a strength of inter-
pretation and intrinsic exceeding. Every such interpretation is a self-
impelling to a higher level [ein Sichhherwerfen]. All philosophizing is thus
the surmounting of the world.
This is more than simply a restating of the nature of the Husserlian sys-
tem, namely, as a dynamic mutual interweaving of (a) concrete analyses of
detail and (b) general systematic projections, anticipatory perspectives, or
presentations of universal scope in which the comprehensive relevance of
the analyses can be seen. Here, where the question is that of origin, and
119. Z-VI 15ab and ZIV 94ab (EFM 1), two sheets that Fink separated and placed
in two different folders.
120. Z-IV 94ab.
121. See B-I 40a and 22a, quoted in 2.3.
specically in regard to the all-comprehensive order of proto-temporalization,

the procedure goes beyond mere givenness. Interpretive construction is rooted
in, but not slavishly enclosed within, intuitional demonstrative giving. It has to
anticipate, and therefore formulate and express, perspectives of meaning that
in principle exceed the given.
The point is aided by reections Fink makes on one of those phenomena to
which he frequently turnsfor reasons of principlewhich mainstream phe-
nomenological study has tended to neglect, namely, sleep and wakefulness. It
is a familiar situation that, while we know about wakefulness precisely by
being awake, sleep itself is interpretable only in wakefulness. Prior to any such
consideration of sleep, sleep is already a familiar phenomenon, a given fact.
But how, in fact, is sleep given? It is certainly not given while we are
explicitly considering it, because then we are awake, not asleep. And when we
are asleep, it is not given either; for then we are not capable of being reec-
tively attentive to it. According to the basic conviction operative in attempts to
interpret sleep, Fink observes, sleep is taken to be given in awakening, in an
in-between state that is neither full sleep nor full wakefulness. The lesson he
draws, now, concerns a methodological paradox, namely, that the given-
ness of this phenomenon, the manner of its accessibility, is its ontical un-
givenness. This indicates that philosophical insightfulness and clarifying
does not simply follow the instruction of ontical givenness. Fink continues:
Philosophical givenness and ontical givenness do not coincide. Perhaps in a
profound sense the given is never the theme of philosophy. Philosophy is
essentially speculation and construction, so that these possess a sense of exhib-
itive bringing-to-be-seen [ausweisendes Sehenlassen] that is all their own.
Finks point is clear: In general, achieving phenomenological givenness
means precisely to loosen the hold of the naive world-enframed conceptions in
terms of which things in our ordinary experience are already familiar to us, so
that an ordinary object or occurrence becomes a phenomenon when we hold it
before us with a sense other than in the familiar way of ordinary in-the-world
experience. The manifestness, the exhibitive bringing-to-be-seen that phe-
nomenology is to achieve transforms the meaning both of the object or event
under investigation and of the specically phenomenological having or in-
tending of it by which that investigation is conducted. However, what is true
of phenomenological descriptive analysis in general is enhanced when the
issue is the kind of all-embracing comprehensive structure to which Heideg-
ger adapted and applied projection-construction, and which, is its non-
givenness, is in some measure analogous to the phenomenon of sleep.
122. Z-VI 40a; EFM 1.

The way in which construction comes to be a matter of principle within

transcendental phenomenology is vividly seen in the plan that Fink sketched
out in 1930 for Husserls new System of Phenomenological Philosophy.
In that plan, section 3 of book I carries the title Progressive Phenomenology,
a stage contrasting with the Regressive Phenomenology of section 2. One
reads that progressive phenomenology has a constructive character, and
it has this character precisely because it is concerned with the genesis to be
explicated in the primordial action of temporality, especially (but not only) in
regard to the spatiality of the world. The distinction between regressive
and progressive phenomenology is one that Fink will return to again and
again, but, setting that aside here, we must be clearer on how construc-
tion in phenomenology relates to the distinction between ground and
origin.
3.5. The Term of A Priori Inquiry: Ground or Origin?

The nal matter of the present chapter returns us to the question of the
a priori, in terms of which, for phenomenology and for fundamental ontol-
ogy, the naively manifest is ultimately to be understood. (See 3.3.1.)
The question to ask, then, is this: What kind of a priori does Heidegger aim
for, and what kind does Husserl? Fink puts the question in another form: Is
ontological interpretation philosophically adequate, or is a discussion being
given in the face of a question that rescinds ontology as such? And his answer
is: The idea of ultimate understanding is not such as refers to ground but
rather to origin. The problematic of the ground is the intrinsic limit of the
ontological question. It is Husserl, with a program that works to achieve
ultimate understanding on the basis of origin in constitutive transcendental
analysis, for whom the question of origin more clearly and in principle will not
be an intra-temporal event. In this Husserls transcendental phenomenology
has the more radical thrust (though this may only become really clear in post-
preliminary reinterpretation), even if it was from Heidegger that Fink learned
to understand the problematic of ontology, drawing from him the impetus
for thinking out the speculative dimension of phenomenology.
123. VI.CM/2, pp. 39. See 1.3.

124. VI.CM/2, pp. 78.
125. See Z-XI 73a, from February 9, 1932; EFM 2.
126. Z-VI 15b continuing into Z-IV 94a, emphasis Finks; EFM 1. In Z-IV 94a Fink
refers to Heideggers On the Essence of Ground as an example of what Fink is pointing
out.
127. Z-VI 15a; EFM 1.
That Heideggers inquiry into the a priori is an inquiry into ground, not
origin, is a case that could be made in detail but must simply be summa-
rized here. For example, ground and ground-words are some of the most
frequent expressions in Heideggers writing. However much in his later
thinking the breadth of meaning in these words becomes a eld for wordplay
exploitation, in his systematic explication of fundamental ontology a more
rigorous conception is adhered to. In this Heideggers sense of the a priori,
despite its existential matrix, is closest to that of Kant, namely, that the a priori
is a condition of possibility. This shows unmistakably in the lectures that Fink
heard, as reected in his notebook summaries of them. And Fink was not
alone in wondering what exactly Heideggers grounding meant. In Husserls
nally serious reading of Being and Time he found problematic precisely what
Heidegger meant by grounding. For example, in 69, where Heidegger in a
footnote on Husserls linking all cognition to intuition speaks of the ground-
ing of intentionality in the ecstatical temporality of Dasein, Husserl asks:
What does grounding mean?
Now, one of the prime issues about the a priori in this context is the charac-
ter of the dependency relationship between (a) the grounding ground and (b)
that which is grounded upon it. The canonic framing of this question is that set
by Kant: [I]f the conditioned is given, the entire sum of conditions, and
consequently the absolutely unconditioned (through which alone the condi-
tioned has been possible) is also given. This is a point, and a text, that
Heidegger took up in his lectures in the summer semester of 1930, in another
Introduction to Philosophy: On the Essence of Human Freedom. As Hei-
degger interprets it, this principle means that the relationship of the grounded
to the grounding can have positive content only in that the grounded is given
experientially in the world.
Heidegger returns here to the theme of freedom, the analysis of which, as
the ground of possibility for Dasein, has to be oriented ultimately by the
unique kind of being that Dasein possesses. In accord with Kant, the problem
128. In German, of course, Grund has many meanings, the most signicant for
Heidegger being ground and reason. Then there are grnden, begrnden, auf-
grund, and so on, plus compounds with Grund-.
129. See (1) U-MH-I 6466; MH-GA 27, pp. 20910; these are Heideggers Tenth
and Eleventh Theses, the latter of which is quoted in 3.2; and (2) EFA U-MH-V 5051;
MH-GA 31, pp. 13435.
130. See appendix.
131. KrV A409/B436, emphasis Kants own; trans. by Smith, CPR, p. 386.
132. Kants text is cited by Heidegger in EFA U-MH-V 9293; MH-GA 31, p. 212.
133. EFA U-MH-V 50; MH-GA 31, p. 134.
of freedom is a cosmological problem; yet Kants framing of the problem is

too narrow: he takes being to be causally ordered being out there [Vorhan-
densein]. Consequently his conception of the Unconditioned that conditions
this order of being, of the freedom that is thus transcendental, is too narrowly
conceived. In the orientation of fundamental ontology, the freedom that is the
transcendental ground for Dasein will be oriented on the way Dasein is
that being through which all that is in being [alles Seiende] speaks. That
is, the freedom in question is the freedom as letting-beings-be that is pre-
cisely that in which the happening of human existence consists, as Fink has
Heidegger saying it later that year in his address entitled On the Essence of
Truth. In sum, the freedom that must ultimately be disclosed is that free-
dom which is the ground of being and time.
However much Heidegger has gone beyond Kant in this transcendental-
ontological concept of freedom, it remains as the condition of possibility for
the realm of the experiential, for all that comes to appearance and disclosure
within the worldthat is, for all that is being [Seiendes]. And it is in this regard
that, following Kants canon for the validity and intelligibility of the relation-
ship, Fink makes his critical observations on Heideggers program. Fink nds
right here that what passes for radical explication in fundamental ontology
really amounts to interpreting that-which-makes-possiblei.e., the condi-
tioning factorin terms of that-which-is made-possiblei.e., the conditioned
factor. (See 3.3.2.) That is, the lineaments of the conditioning factor are drawn
in accord with and following the features of that which is conditioned by it.
Now it may be that this procedure is unavoidable, and perhaps in principle
unavoidable; but not explicitly to draw out the philosophical implications of
the methodological order whereby the relation in the move of disclosive regress
inverts the order of the relation of conditioning itself, is to remain in an un-
critical navet. The situation is similar in principle to that for the analysis
of temporality, where, as Fink puts it, genetic elucidation leads into self-
temporalizing time rather than a move back into the intra-temporal past. In
other words, to inquire into genesis is to inquire into times temporalization,
into the process of the bringing about of temporality [die Zeitigung der
Zeit]. But in conceptualizing this proto-happening that rst makes all hap-
pening possible, we meet the procedure of retro-application [Rcklage].
That is, though times temporalization cannot be itself a happening, i.e., in
134. EFA U-MH-V 51; MH-GA 31, p. 135.

135. EFA U-MH-V 132; cf. Wgm, p. 85. Heideggers address was on December 11,
1930.
136. EFA U-MH-V 51; MH-GA 31, p. 135.
time, nevertheless it can only be described by retro-applying [Rcklegung] [to

it] that which is made possible by it.
This critical point was indicated earlier (3.3.2 and 3.4), but here it takes on
another note. Rather than simply a move of improper attribution, this retro-
application begins to have to play a positive role, as a kind of malum neces-
sarium. As Heidegger himself make clear in his discussion of Kant in the
summer lectures of 1930, this is tied to the fact that any critical philosophi-
cal reection has to begin with some pregiven set of phenomena to be studied
and some pregiven schema of conceptualization with which to thematize and
explore them; or, put another way, the order of conditioning and structuring
phenomena is inverse to the order of the move of explanatory regression in
knowing. The retro-application of the founded upon the founding
both is necessary and problematizes the disclosure of the conditions of pos-
sibility. In Husserlian terms, one could say, as Fink does, On every con-
stitutive level we nd transcendental seeming [den transzendentalen Schein],
insofar as there is a dragging of the constituted level back over upon the
constituting level. The Kantian concept of transcendental seeming or
appearance will take on considerable importance in later chapters, but let us
now bring this chapter to a conclusion by returning to the question of the
move of regress that, in contrast to the effort to disclose a ground (Heideg-
ger), aims to represent the origin for the matters under investigation.
For Fink, in this context of phenomenological reconsideration that his ex-
posure to Heidegger has provoked, phenomenological understanding has to
be understanding in terms of origin. Origin here has been termed the re-
gion of transcendental being; but, Fink argues, the term region is unsuitable,
137. Z-IV 10a; EFM 1. See also Z-I 149150b. Phrase in brackets mine.
138. See EFA U-MH-V 93; MH-GA 31, p. 31, where Kants point in KrV A409/B436 is
quoted, viz., that to conceptualize the conditioning factor as the transcendental Ideas
are by Kant is, as Kant explains, to deal with regressive conditions, that is, to go in
andecedentia, not in consequentia. (A411/B438.)
139. See Z-XI 62a; EFM 2.
140. Z-XV 56b; EFM 2.
141. Z-V IV/4a; EFM 1. See also Z-V III/9b and III/14a; EFM 1 (with regard to
spatiality). Heidegger is not unaware of the basic operation of retro-application, as one
can see in his lectures in SS 1930: The question of being must take on the same form as
the question of that which is in being [nach dem Seienden]: as what this and that are. The
question of being thus always stands in a clothing that ordinary understanding never sees
through. EFA U-MH-V 23; MH-GA 31, p. 50.
142. Z-XVI XXIV/5b; EFM 3, sketching revisions for Cartesian Meditations.
because it suggests a domain of being to which other domains would stand in

contrast, whereas transcendental being is the origin of all being [alles
Seins]. Simply put, the phenomenological reduction is regress to origin.
If, then, phenomenological disclosure is ultimately to be regress to the origin
of all being, and if the originating factor is to be of itself free of the originated
result, then the originative X in question here has to be antecedent to being,
beyond being.
From early on Husserl designated the transcendentally originative as tran-
scendental being and absolute being. But now, Fink argues in post-
preliminary reinterpretation, this being has to be taken as meon, as not-
being. But how can one determine non-existent being [das nichtseiende
Sein]? Fink answers: Absolute being is, of course, in no way a being that
would be met with on its own alongside or outside of that which is in being
[des Seienden]. Rather it is only accessible at all from the ontical as a point of
departure. It is in a certain way the ontical itself; but inquired into so radically
that it is the ontical, as it were, before its einai.The relation of the absolute
to the ontical we call origin. Origin does not mean a beginning within the
world, but rather is always seen within the world according to that of which it
is precisely the origin. Here we see both what is common to origin and
ground and what has to be stipulated as the radical difference between
them. Both have to follow the Kantian canon that the characterization of the
originativeor the groundinghas to be regressively derived from the origi-
natedor the grounded. Both remain dependent upon the realm of the experi-
entially givable, the realm of phenomena as already given in the world of
familiar events and relationships; and neither offers cognitive access to some
privileged place of a luminously manifest transcendental. But within the
phenomenological program, now that Heidegger has introduced the question
of being into the frame of Husserlian reduction-imposed regress to constitu-
tive genesis, origin has to mean origin in being. This is a far stronger a
priori status than that of the condition of possibility ascribed to ground.
Ontology may be an inquiry into ground, but here phenomenological inquiry
becomes ontogony! This is the very point made toward the end of a paper Fink
wrote in 1935 on Husserls phenomenology and Kant, presented to the Kant-
Gesellschaft that same year. Here in a text that Husserl had read, Fink writes:
143. Z-VI 5b; EFM 1.

144. E.g., see Ideas I, 76 and 49.
145. Z-IV 112b (EFM 1), emphasis Finks, from a subset of three important pages
(110a112b) on absolute being in Husserls position.
With Kant the transcendental problem leads to a new grounding of ontology,

in phenomenology this problem is transformed into the derivation of that
which is in being [des Seienden], i.e., to an ontogonic metaphysics.
The unfolding of this idea is something we shall be treating element by
element in the next four chapters, following in great part some of the details
for it that are sketched out in the Layout Fink produced for Husserls Sys-
tem of Phenomenological Philosophy.
It is obvious that, given the kind and extent of relevance for phenomenology
that he saw in Heideggers thought, Finks post-preliminary undertaking in
transcendental phenomenology had to make the tria-logue involving Hus-
serl, Heidegger, and himself a continuing thing. And now that the question of
being had been brought into phenomenologywith an effect more radical
than Heidegger had foreseenthe world would take on a far more pivotal
role in both phenomenological thematics and phenomenological methodol-
ogy. But before moving on to take that up frontally, one nal comment needs
to be made on the whole issue of construction in the regressive disclosure of
origin.
It becomes a little clearer now why Fink will use the term speculation for the
operation going on in the dimension wherein construction typies the work
of a kind of phenomenological philosophizing termed progressive. It is
because there are matters in the dimension of general systematic projec-
tions, anticipatory perspectives, or presentations of universal scope, in
which, precisely, the comprehensive relevance of the analyses is thought
out, that this kind of work is legitimated, especially when it is about not
only the origination of the whole frame of being, the world, but also the way
the whole system of the work of thinking this through integrates into the very
structure and sense of the question. There is a measure of exceeding here
that cannot be dened ahead of time; that is, the principle of the measure of
this exceeding cannot be determined other than in the context of the con-
crete matters of analysis that need to be understood on the level of comprehen-
sive integration and universal scope. In what Fink will call integration, no
single phenomenon analytically described in the most minute specic detail
146. ND, p. 43, emphasis Finks. Husserl wrote several marginal comments on this
paper but none on this passage. See Finks notes for this paper in Z-XVII (EFM 3). See 1.3.
147. Buch I, Abschn. 3 in VI.CM/2, pp. 78. Note the nal subsection on a critique of
transcendental experience, which within two years of this outline was to be undertaken
in Finks Sixth Meditation.
148. See VI.CM/2, pp. 78, and Finks postwar essay Intentionale Analyse und das
Problem des spekulativen Denkens, ND, 13957.
149. See B-I 40a and 22a, quoted in 2.3.
will escape relevance to, and the implications of, the element of speculative
exceeding. This element is what will give disclosive power to the constructed
projection beyond both the ordinary and naively mundane and the investiga-
tionally evidenced, precisely because it has the perspective of general com-
prehensiveness. We shall see over the course of the next chapters how this
works out, beginning with the theme of world, now brought to the fore as
guring centrally in the phenomenology that, in the Freiburg and Germany of
the 1930s, is showing itself to be in actual fact considerably more than the one
man Edmund Husserl.
4
Fundamental Thematics I: The World
Reason itself and its [object], that which is, become more and more
enigmatic . . . until nally the problem of the world, come consciously to
light, the problem of the deepest essential bondedness of reason and that
which is, the enigma of all enigmas, had to become the proper theme.
Husserl, Crisis
Philosophy is the human passion to know the world, is the questioning

in which a man reaches out to the whole breadth of the world and yet
stays closest to himself.
Fink, EFA Z-VII XVII/21b
That the theme of the world had to dominate the framing of the central
matters to be investigated in phenomenology was not Heideggers discovery,
and it was not in Heideggers lectures that Fink rst saw this principle mani-
fest. Transcendental phenomenology began in the recognition that the world
had to be taken explicitly precisely as an overwhelmingly comprehensive
structure that remained yet to be thematized properly in philosophy. The most
famous methodological devices in Husserls phenomenology, the epoch
1. P. 13 (5), translation modied.
174
The World 175
and phenomenological reduction, are precisely moves by which the question-

ing of the world is to begin authentically, against the unwitting and unques-
tioned acceptance of it as simply there. No longer can the world be assumed as
fully obvious in the way one ought to understand it, namely, as the sum total of
things and events among which the human inquirer, with his or her inquiry, is
just simply one instance of those same things and events. Where Fink came
into phenomenology, however, even though Husserl had progressed consider-
ably in his investigations of the features and phenomena of experiencing, he
had as yet conducted no sustained frontal phenomenological analysis of the
world as such in keeping with the subtlety and detail with which other matters
had been analyzed, for example, time-consciousness. Here, too, what helped
Fink realize that this was demanded now in the stage of phenomenologys
development in which he was learning its meaning was certainly, in signicant
measure, the remarkable philosophical interpretations that Heidegger was
presenting in his lectures.
Husserls raising of the question of the world as the very entry into phe-
nomenology in Ideas I began where any human being must, namely, within
the already obtaining, inescapable, and hardly noticed placement within the
world that makes it possible to be a living, thinking person in the rst place.
Paradoxically, one had to begin within that condition in order to bring this
very condition itself into view, in such a way that it would no longer remain
unnoticed belief, i.e., so that it would no longer condition ones thinking
without having been brought to explicit recognition and clarication.
The problem, of course, was that the framework of this conditioning was
not a simple starting point that one could move out of and behind in order to
disclose it in its framing action. It had to remain the conditioning framework,
and one had to work in terms of itin terms of what Husserl called the
natural attitudein order to try to bring about recognition of it as the
conditioning framework, both in its already long-operative effect as an all-
embracing attitude and, far more radically, in the manner of its coming about
at all as a framework and attitude in the rst place. This is very much what
Heidegger realized as the methodological point embodied in Kants principle
of the relationship between grounding conditions and that which is grounded
by them (see 3.5), but it is also something Husserl himself acknowledges, with
some distress, in a lengthy comment from 1929 on the line of exposition taken
in Ideas I. He nds that well into the book the whole treatment is conducted
in the natural attitude, and, in a certain sense, has to be! I have to place
2. Hua III, Beilage XIII, p. 399. The phrases quoted here are from this appendix, and
the remaining points of the paragraph form a gloss on it.
176 The World
myself in the middle-point: the world is; the world has to be experienced in
actual experience in order to be givenin whatever sense given here
hasin order to be there. If I had no experience of the world as continuing
to be there for me, the world would be a mere word, not the actual phenome-
non in question. The only way, then, for any reecting human to have the
world, i.e., to experience the world, and then to attend to its structures, is in
the experience of it, i.e., in a continued living in the natural attitude.
This realization does not come in a vacuum. As we saw in chapter 1 (1.2),
mid- and late 1929 was the period in which Husserl was forced to take stock of
his whole achievement precisely in the face of Heideggers success, just as he
was also beginning to bring Fink into working more closely with him. This is
also the time in which Finks notebooks are full of entries on the question of
the way the world gures in both experience and phenomenological reection,
in part under the impact of the thinking he was following in Heideggers
lectures.
When Fink listening to Heidegger credits him with the incontestable ser-
vice of showing how the idea of being has to be restricted to the region of
nitude (3.3.3), and then couples this with two other realizations: (a) his own
understanding, against Heidegger, of Husserls real thesis on being, viz., the
essential constitutedness of that which is in being (das Seiende) (3.3.2), and
(b) the principle discovered by Kant that the idea of being is set within the
conditions for the experience of actually given things (3.4), then he, Fink,
realizes the profound import of the very lesson Husserl was expressing to
himself in his comment on his own Ideas I. This retrospective critical judgment
brings to the fore the need to recognize the central problem of the way the
phenomenologically reecting agent remains an agent engaged in the world,
carrying out an activity essentially structured as in the world. The fact that all
of Husserls published writings up till then had a propaedeutic form may have
been a necessary feature for a readership that was learning what it was to enter
phenomenologys program, but it carried a dangerous limitation. These writ-
ings were ways of explaining the instituting move of the epoch and reduction
from within the pre-phenomenological context, i.e., from within the natural
attitude. As such they presented the topic of the world as an issue to help
people to be led into phenomenology. The world had been posed in terms that
3. That the analyses of Ideas I, above all, of intentionality, are in great part devel-
oped within the natural attitude was pointed out by Paul Ricoeur in his notes to his
translation of the work, Ides directrices pour une phnomnologie (Paris: Gallimard,
1950), p. 88, note 3 to p. [87]), where he draws upon none other than Finks 1934 Kant-
Studien article for this point (EH-Ke, pp. 1046; Studien, pp. 11012).
The World 177
had their home where people were on this side of the epoch, rather than past
it. The theme of the world, therefore, had yet to be investigated in terms
proper to the standpoint that resulted from the rigorously applied epoch and
reduction. In other words, the propaedeutic and preliminary cast of the pre-
sentation of the problem of the world meant that the phenomenology of the
world was yet to be really carried out. At the same time, the work of phenome-
nologically reective investigation was itself a work done not by some kind of
super-worldly power but by an agency that in principle had to remain an
experiencing of the world from within it. This clearly corresponded toeven
if in Finks hands it would not be the very same thing asHeideggers insis-
tence that the actuality and concreteness of the being of a subject, reective,
cognitiveof an I amhad to be that of a being nitely existent in the
world (3.4.1).
Such, then, was the specic way in which the regimen of critical consider-
ation that came to dene Finks work with Husserl was turning to the theme of
the world in transcendental phenomenology. This was as well the concrete
way in which the two dimensions of the distinctive system of Husserls
phenomenology were in play, namely, (a) as holding in thematic focus the
matter at hand, die Sache selbst, to scrutinize it in the measure of intuitive
givenness proportionate to it, and (b) as assessing the character and adequacy
of the conceptual articulation of what shows in that matter at hand. What
Fink found is that there are complexities to each order of this integrated bi-
dimensional systematic that need to be explicitly considered and claried.
Intuitive givenness is not so direct and simple and has limits, while the very
operation of critical assessment involves a variety of reective methods that
Husserl in his almost single-minded focus on the intuitively given leaves un-
considered and undifferentiated. In short, the specic methodology of post-
preliminary critique was just as undeveloped as was its actual rigorously and
comprehensively sustained performance.
Accordingly, Finks notes of his work with Husserl show a sustained elabora-
tion of theoretical and methodological points regarding the practice and results
of methodological self-critique and reinvestigation, especially in work to be
done in the dimension of descriptions of a higher kind (Husserl) and system-
atic projections (Fink). For example, one has to recognize the difference in
level on which the phenomena designated by any such higher description or
systematic projection are being considered. In particular, descriptive analy-
ses of a particular phenomenon done on different levels of constitutive regress
4. See 2.1 and 2.3.

5. See 2.1 and 2.3.
178 The World
have to be brought together in order for that phenomenon to be adequately

interpreted. Not only must the different explications be reconciled, but the
relative validity of each such explication on these respective levels also has to be
determined. Moreover, one has to recognize that on deeper levels the thematiz-
ing of totality poses a serious difculty for phenomenological evidencing.
Or, again, the method of dealing with totalities, of projecting totality for
an order of phenomena under investigation, involves what Fink allows could be
termed construction, in adaptation of methodological concepts from Fichte
and Heidegger. We have already briey seen how such matters as these might
be a legitimate and even required kind of speculation in phenomenology,
namely, as bound within the bi-dimensionality of the Husserlian systematic;
and we shall take this up again in chapter 7.
In the work of Fink with Husserl that we shall now be taking up on the topic
of the worldand on other major themes in further chapters: time, life, lan-
guage, and intersubjectivity (chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9)we shall be following all
these methodological ranges; but Fink does not tag the thinking in his research
notes as applying this or that methodological form. These are for the most part
operative factors within investigation rather than its constant focus; they
come to the foreground for specic explication only at particular points. Fink
is following not a rule but a rhythm; the sense and validity of phenomenologi-
cal ndings are discerned and assessed in a concrete context, not by the me-
chanical application of abstract norms, and critical sensitivity comes by the
lessons of practice, not by dictate. So, while we have to recognize method as it
is being employed, it is the reinterpretive and transformative effect that is the
real point. Methodological notices, ours or Finks own, serve and support that
aim. We turn, then, to that work of critically reinterpretive practice itself.
4.1. Reconsidering Entry-Level Treatment; Spinning the

Ariadne Thread
Post-preliminary reinquiry into the phenomenon of the world is gener-
ated under the same demand that initiates phenomenology in the rst place:
preconceptions have to be countered (the function of the epoch) so as to
allow constitutive explications to be given (reductive analysis). Now, however,
the conceptual framing of these operations as well as of the ndings initially
achieved have to be reconsidered for the measure in which presuppositional
6. See 7.3.3.2.
7. See 2.2; see also 7.2.3, 7.3.3.3, and 7.3.3.4.
8. See 3.4.2 and 7.2.3.
9. See the opening pages of chapter 3, 3.3.3, 3.4.2, and 3.5.
The World 179
construal may have still been operative in that framing, and therefore may
have adversely limited the understanding demanded for properly describing
either the phenomenal structure constitutively examined or the processes and
factors disclosed as constitutively operating to form those structures. Several
achievements of this critical reorientation relevant to the way the world must
be approached were laid out in the previous chapter.
1. The world encompasses both the human subject and all those things to
which that subject is psychically related in consciousness. It embraces in
unity both immanence and transcendence. (2.6.1.)
2. The epoch must apply with full rigor to both elements of the phenomenon
of the world, immanence and transcendence. (2.6.2.)
3. The linkage of immanence and transcendence, i.e., of the experiencing
human entity and that which it experiences, is not necessarily to be con-
ceived ultimately in terms of the subject-object epistemological relation-
ship. (2.6.1 and 2.6.2.)
4. It is furthermore too restrictive a schema to conceive intentionality in terms
of the subject-object relationship if this is taken primarily as the perfor-
mance of specic acts directed thematically to a focal object. (2.6.2.3.)
5. Insisting upon an egoic character for transcendental consciousness re-
inforces the schema of the subject-object relationship as primarily act-
intentional. (2.6.2.6.)
6. The non-thematic, performance dimension of consciousness must be ex-
amined in its priority to act-thematic intentionality in order to approach
more appropriately transcendental subjectivity. (2.6.2.8.)
Now these are demonstrably shifts that address preconceptions coming from a
specic philosophic tradition, namely, that heritage from Descartes to German
Idealism within which Husserls phenomenology took its origins. But this
concrete siting in Husserls case indicates a universally holding condition,
namely, that philosophical reection upon the nature and capabilities of hu-
man being in its station in reality inevitably begins from within the situation of
existence in the world in the concreteness of a tradition, of a locale, and of an
individual human life and personality. Fink therefore takes a lesson from Hus-
serl on countering ungrounded presuppositions when he nds Heideggers
charge cogent that Husserl seems attached to the epistemological schema of
the philosophy of reection. This is the insight that necessitates the shifts just
summarized. Accordingly, the character of the world has to shift as well, from
(a) being posed as something that a self-sufcient subject turns to by a specic
act, to (b) being recognized as what an already existent subject, when it begins
to reect on its situation, nds already there for itself. Instead of following
Husserl in taking the idea of rigorous science, i.e., the idea of the structure of
180 The World
reective cognition, to determine the orientation phenomenology must take,

Fink is now obliged to make the issue of privilege the massive pregivenness of
the world. This is no less than the fundamental concrete situation in being of
the one philosophizing that therefore conditions both the very possibility of
the idea of science and determines the whole methodology of phenomenologi-
cal labor, viz., the work of the epoch and reductive/regressive analysis.
So when, as 1929 became 1930, Husserl wanted to produce a wholesale
reformulation of his phenomenology, it was for the purpose of moving beyond
the works so far published in order to present phenomenology in terms of the
newer, deep-reaching insights that his massive manuscript studies had pro-
duced. Whether in the form of a further, more extensive revision of the
Cartesian Meditations or as an entirely new workand Husserl repeatedly
turned from one to the other as more feasibleHusserl had Fink working on
this kind of comprehensive mature-level representation of phenomenology.
(See 1.3.) But in the conception of how this kind of work would be organized,
there is a striking difference between Husserl and Fink, a difference that corre-
sponds exactly to the comprehensive critical-reinterpretive shift at issue now.
Finks Layout for Edmund Husserls System of Phenomenological Philos-
ophy, is a pivotal document. There is nothing anywhere like it in the detail
with which it lays out the full substance of transcendental phenomenology in
such a way as to reect systematic comprehension based on internally deter-
mined self-critique and integration, in explicit awareness of its methodology
on all levels of its work. But Husserl hadapparentlysketched out a plan
of his own for his System of Phenomenological Philosophy, though more
briey and in broader strokes; and in the difference between these two plans
we see the debate between Husserl and Fink on the fundamental choices about
how phenomenology should be oriented and systematically presented.
What makes Finks proposal important, even telling, is that, far from being
any kind of adversarial replacement worked out surreptitiously in the private
musings of a subordinate, it was an actual living component in the regime of
philosophic thinking that bound the two men together in the destiny of those
ten years. What Fink was contributing was concrete steps toward the system-
atic self-completion of phenomenology. Husserl had founded this philosophic
10. See Husserls letter to Grimme, March 5, 1931 (Bw III, p. 90), and Finks explana-
tions in (1) Bericht ber Edmund Husserls unverffentlichte Manuskripte, from 1933
(M-III, #2, [7]; EFM 3, Abschn. 2); (2) Edmund Husserls Manuskripte, from January,
1935 (also in M-III, #4); and (3) Bericht ber die Transkription der Nachlassmanu-
skripte Husserls, December 2, 1939 (EFM 4, Abschn. 4).
11. VI.CM/2, pp. 39. See 1.3.
12. Again, see the rst pages of 1.3.
The World 181
movement and given it a vast development, but what was still lacking was the
achievement of its systematic self-comprehended fullness. Fink was working
to provide just that, something Husserls own work repeatedly announced but
continued to leave undone. What Fink proposed for this purpose, now, was to
set the theme of the world squarely in the position of dominant topic in the
new presentation of phenomenology. The theme of the world was to be the
Ariadne thread that could take the reader through the vast maze of Husserls
analyses of detail in critical reconsideration, systematic coherence, and inte-
grating reinterpretation.
4.2. The Pregivenness of the World within Any Starting Point

The shift to the dominance of the world in a systematic conception of
phenomenology is embodied in a draft Fink prepared for Husserl in December
1929 and January 1930 as the only part of his master Layout that he ever
developed in full: Draft for the opening section of an Introduction to Phenom-
enology. It begins with an interesting concession. As the rst chapter in the
opening section of a massive comprehensive work, the orientation taken is
pivotal. What is curious, then, is that the topic named as the Guiding Idea
and then developed in the several paragraphs of this opening chapter is given as
Philosophy as Universal Science. In the Layout prepared several months
earlier, however, Fink had designated the theme for the beginning of this rst
chapter as Philosophy in the World. The change may well have been made to
take into account oral comments of Husserls when the two discussed the
outline during their autumn stay in Chiavari. When Husserl read through
that same Layout again after Fink had written the Draft, he wrote in a
marginal note the new designation for that rst chapterGuiding Idea: Phi-
losophy as Universal Sciencealong with an outline of its contents. And,
indeed, this new designation accords exactly with Husserls own preferences as
he expressed them elsewhere.
However, this change in designation in no way changes the overall orienta-
tion on Finks part; it represents rather a recognition of the need to come to
13. VI.CM/2, pp. 10105, On the Beginning of Philosophy, corresponding to sec-

tion I of book I, The Stages of Pure Phenomenology, and with annotations by Husserl.
14. VI.CM/2, p. 10.
15. Husserl received the outline on August 13, 1930, before the trip to Chiavari (see
1.3), and studied it after getting there on September 5 (cf. VI.CM/2, p. 1). See Husserls
letter to Cairns, September 23, 1930 (Bw IV, p. 25).
16. Namely, in December 1930 and January 1931: VI.CM/2, pp. 10 and 293.
17. VI.CM/2, p. 4, annotation 2.
182 The World
terms with Husserls choice of entry and to show how his own orientation not
only is not diverted in any way by Husserls but also now gains the opportunity
for putting the guiding idea of science in its proper place in the scheme of
phenomenology. The idea of science cannot be the really basic guiding idea
because the broader aim, the guiding idea of our plan, is that of philosophy
as the all-inclusive intention of humanity toward a nal and radical under-
standing of itself and of the world. Science, in either a broad or a narrow
sense, is an effort to understand precisely that which is met with as reality in
the world, but it does so without recognizing the nature of its grounding in the
soil of its in-the-world experiencing of reality. The philosophic effort under
way in phenomenology has to keep open the possibility that it might push
beyond the way reality in the world is conceived, in order to inquire beyond
the world. Phenomenologys inquiry is the radical, relentless attack upon
the whole of active and ever self-proving essential prejudices attributions of
holding in being [Seinsgeltungen] that comprise carry our natural living
insertion into the world. Phenomenology is itself an effort to reach knowl-
edge (scientia, knowledge, from scire, to know), but the character of knowing
for phenomenology is not ultimately to be categorized and conceived on the
basis of the knowing exercised in any science that remains naive about the way
it is world-bound.
Notwithstanding the presence of the rubric of Philosophy as Universal
Science, then, it is not so much the idea of science with all the methodological
equipment which its historic realization implies that governs the way phenom-
enology begins and proceeds, but rather the idea of a more unspecied kind of
knowledge-seeking, namely, self-reectionand specically the self-reection
that will determine its character by reinvestigating its inevitable situatedness in
the world, counter to any hitherto presuppositional beliefs about that condi-
tion. Such, too, are the opening considerations Fink sketches in the Layout,
quickly reaching the core point, that the situation of self-reection is the
pregiven world. All the remaining points of this opening subsection for the
whole outline are about the world in its pregivenness.
Finks proposed alternative is far from an arbitrary preference; it is grounded
18. VI.CM/2, p. 12.

19. VI.CM/2, p. 14.
20. VI.CM/2, p. 17, expressions in angle brackets Husserls modications. See the
explanation of the difference in orientation between Fink and Husserl in Z-XIII LIX/2b
3a (EFM 2; also in N-EF, pp. 11415), from late 1933 or early 1934, as a sketch for Was
Will die Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls? (Studien, pp. 15778).
21. VI.CM/2, pp. 45: book I: The Stages of Pure Phenomenology, section 1: The
Beginning and the Principle of Philosophy, A: Philosophy in the World.
The World 183
strictly in principle. But the principle of the pregivenness of the world will gain
its force and full signicance if the central theme here, the world, is presented in
the meaning it gains from phenomenological investigations done after and
within the reduction, not from the way the world is considered in the stage
of introduction and initial entry (e.g., as in Ideas I). At the introductory stage
the world is represented more as an obstacle to be overcomeand seemingly
one fairly easily overcome!rather than as an all-encompassing structure
that remains the most pervasive of themes and problems precisely as all-
encompassing. The character of the world as a continuing all-pervasive prob-
lem, and therefore the enhanced place and meaning that the world must be
shown to have even in the movement of entry into phenomenology, are pre-
cisely what the Layout means to provide in the way it opens. As Finks
Draft puts it, This self-reection has a character unique to itself, it is
reection upon a situation that is always and already presupposed before-
hand in any self-reection whatever, namely, the situation of the world [die
Weltsituation], or the world itself as the true situation of someone who
submits to the most radical kind of self-reection.
This difference in approach between Husserl and Fink as the 1930s began is
the same difference that marks the work Fink did in revising the Cartesian
Meditations. Here in fact the difference is even stronger; for the Medita-
tions of Husserls writing are an extremely forceful assertion of the autono-
mous idea of science as the starting point of preference for entering phenome-
nology. For Fink to recast the Meditations along the lines of the thinking in
his Layout and Draft he had to recast the way the Meditations begin, in
order for the secondariness of the idea of science as the starting point to
become manifest. That is exactly what he does in the texts written to replace
entirely Husserls own First Meditation. This is also the topic of a discus-
sion with Husserl that Dorion Cairns reports from June 2, 1932, on the occa-
sion of Cairnss reading nothing other than Finks revisions for the First
Meditation, probably the rst try at it in 1931. Here it is clear that, while
Husserl is willing to entertain an entry into phenomenology from the ideal of
philosophy as radical knowledge, he explicitly prefers an approach via the
ideal of science. What is striking about the conversation that Cairns reports is
that there is no mention in it at all of the whole point of Finks choice, namely,
22. VI.CM/2, p. 24, emphasis Finks.

23. VI.CM/2, pp. 13491, the second revision proposal of Finks, from 1932. The
earlier revision, from 1931 (pp. 10633), is less encompassing but follows the same
orientation.
24. C-HF, pp. 8082.
184 The World
the need to recognize the ineluctable and all-encompassing conditioning of the

pregivenness of the world. Instead, Husserl defended his preference as admit-
ting of a simpler exposition. But Husserl was about to get the second set of
revisions by Fink, and his easy condence was going to be shaken.
Husserl had apparently not given this rst version of Finks revision a very
careful reading, for there are no notations of his own on it. Moreover, that rst
version accords better with Husserls view, as Cairns reports it, that Fink is
beginning with the idea of philosophy rather than with that of science. With
Finks second version, however, the situation is quite different. Husserl read it
carefully later in the year (1932), along with Finks revision proposals for the
rest of the ve Meditationsand the climactic Sixth Meditation. And
with all this, the look of an adequate presentation of phenomenology was
decidedly altered for Husserl, as we shall see later in this chapter.
To recast the place that the world is to have in the presentation of phenome-
nology, however, is not a matter merely of organization, and pregivenness
does something far more important than merely designate a temporal se-
quence. The way the world is to be explicated in its very structure is pro-
foundly recast. In accord with the distinctive methodology of Husserls sys-
tem, explication of the world undergoes radical refashioning in a double-sided
action consisting of (a) reconsideration of what it is that shows up as the
world in intuitive givenness, and (b) assessment of the conceptual schemata
for articulating the structure given in that showing. What we must see now is
something of the refashioning in accord with the fundamentality that asserting
the pregivenness of the world demands.
4.3. Being Situated in the World: Captivation in the World

An important term Fink begins using early on is situation. It is one of
the several central concepts in the Introduction that he added to his compe-
tition essay of 1928 in the course of transforming it into his dissertation of
1929. In 5 of this Introduction, entitled The Situation of the Reduc-
tion, he makes the following points:
(1) The native pregiven situatedness of a human being is that of being in the
world.
(2) This pregiven situatedness is what lies essentially structural in what Hus-
serl termed the natural attitude.
25. C-HF, p. 81.

26. See 2.6.2.2, where points from VI.CM/2, pp. 15358, are represented.
27. VB/I, pp. 1416.
The World 185
(3) Given that philosophical reection in general and phenomenological re-

ection in particular are carried out in the hands and minds of real human
beings, the actual performance of the phenomenological reduction will
itself be carried outto all appearances!as the action of some specic
human thinker in some specic historical cultural and philosophical con-
text; i.e., phenomenology is essentially situated.
(4) Situatedness, i.e., being actual by being concretely situated in the world, is
not only the condition for phenomenology to begin, it is also the condition
for its being carried out, even when, paradoxically, situatedness is the
main theme of phenomenological reection in its action as epoch, that is,
as the lifting of the hold of the nave beliefs native to that situation.
Fink is clearly asserting that something essential of the natural attitude

remains in force even in the doing of phenomenology! But was not the whole
point of the epoch in Ideas I to bring about precisely a change out of that
attitude? What elements of the natural attitude could remain in force even
when one has performed the phenomenological epoch and reduction?
The question to ask here is better put in another way: What has the advance
of phenomenology since Ideas I disclosed about the whole set of conditions
under which phenomenology both begins and then proceeds to work? Which
of these conditions are contingent and changeable, and which are structurally
essential both to living expeience and to reection actually carried out on that
life? To begin with, the term natural attitude as it is used in Ideas I suggests an
immanent psychic stance that, as it were, by a ick of the will could shift from
one valuation to another, especially with respect to the sense in which one
takes the world, as if that psychic immanence were in itself neutral and could
equally well have a natural or a phenomenological attitude. But, Fink
points out, the natural attitude signies something quite a bit more than just
an attitude, a stance in life, or even an all-embracing worldview. It is
instead a factor that holds through all attitudes, that carries them; it is that
within which they exclude or succeed each other, that which antecedes them
all as making them possible. The natural attitude [natrliche Einstellung]
is the set-up [Einstellung] that belongs essentially to human nature, that
makes up human being itself, the setting up of man [das Eingestelltsein des
Menschen] as a being in the whole of the world, or . . . the set-up [Einstellung]
28. There is no question that Fink drew this term, and much, though not all, of its con-
ceptual content, from Heidegger, as he makes clear in Z-IV 27ab, a note drafted in direct
reference to 5 of VB/I just referred to. Many other notes also deal with situation.
29. Hua III/1, 31 and 50.
30. See Finks letter to Felix Kaufmann, December 17, 1932 (in EFM 2, Abschn. 4),
mentioned earlier, in 2.6.2.
186 The World
of mundanized subjectivity: the natural being of man in and to the world in all
his modes. Fink is doing a double recasting here. On the one hand he is
moving past a merely psychological construal of the concept in order on the
other hand to make explicit its phenomenological-structuraleven ontologi-
calessentials. Husserls adaptation of familiar psychological notions had a
pedagogic utility in a work of rst introduction, but that approach has not
been recognized as preliminary, as superseded by all that phenomenology has
been doing since. Instead that initial, introductory representation has become
frozen in as the authentic representation of the insight being introduced,
namely, the recognition of the all-embracing and ineluctable pregiven place-
ment of ones whole being within the world as reected in unwittingly presup-
positional beliefs about it.
It was imperative, therefore, to move from the introductory Husserlian term
for this initiating move in phenomenology and to nd a conception more
adequate to the insight at its heart. This Fink proposed to do through deploy-
ment of a new concept, captivation in the world, Weltbefangenheit. Taking
over the role that the natural attitude plays in Husserls phenomenology,
captivation in the world is not some kind of prejudice taken up or adopted
by the human individual; it is human being itself. The pregivenness of the
world now placed at the head of phenomenological exposition is to be char-
acterized at a deeper level as captivation in the world. While the term is
progressively adopted in Finks writings for Husserl so that it becomes reg-
ularly used in the Sixth Meditation, Fink really does not offer an explicit
rationale for it in his typescript drafts for Husserl or his published papers.
But in his own notes, Fink works out a very clear idea of the conception behind
the term.
The captivation in question here is not that of some subjective feeling,
like the shyness that is one of the ordinary senses of the word Befangenheit,
along with prejudice or bias. Rather, it is like being utterly dazed by
something so as to have eyes only for it, and to be at the same time oblivious to
the state of captivation within which one is held. From this reection on the
31. VB/I, 4, p. 11. The expression natrlich eingestellt is Husserls in Ideas I (Hua
III/1, p. 67, 33). See also Z-VII XVIII/4a, from 1930 (EFM 2).
32. Fink writes: The danger of philosophyremaining caught up in the reection
with which one starts off. Z-VII XVII/26a, from Chiavari in 1930 (EFM 2).
33. Z-XI XCIII/2a, from 1932 or 1933; EFM 2.
34. Z-XV 33a, from 1930 or 1931; EFM 2.
35. Even Cairns does not report much detail in Finks reasoning: C-HF, p. 95, entry for
September 23, 1932.
36. See Z-XIII XVIII/2ab (EFM 2), from late 1933 or early 1934. The subset here is
The World 187
ordinary meaning of terms Finks point then emerges for the expression cap-
tivation to/in the world: To be captivated-in as only-being-open-for a par-
ticular domain of things is a thematic attitude [Einstellung] not toward that
domain as such, but toward that which stands in the domain. Captivation is
captivation in a horizon as only-being-open-for and being lost in that which
stands in this horizon. The captivation itself is not something one is conscious
of. It is rather the limit of the knowable as such. Only in breaking out of the
captivation can we know of it. I.e., it can only be known when it is annulled
[aufgehoben].
Finks explanations are clear enough, but this reconception, needed as it
may be, only leads to further questions. If the sense of the concept goes beyond
the idea of a mental orientation, beyond notions and expectations stemming
from human intellectual and emotional responses, if captivation in the world
is human being itself, then a human being does not cancel it out simply by
deciding to do soand then going on to act as human while holding to that
decision. We have to ask if it is even possible for a human to annul it. Fink
argues that, just as someone caught up in a prejudice can have a certain vague
inkling of being thus imprisoned and can entertain the wish to be free of it, so
the philosophic reection that poses the idea of captivation in the world can
only be an anticipation (Vormeinung) of liberation from it; it is certainly not
the scrutiny of its actual achievement. In short, the analysis one makes of it can
only be at best formal. More precisely, Fink observes, the idea of captivation in
the world is ultimately a speculative concept; it is a matter the annulling
of which can never be ontically realized but only meontically interpreted.
This returns us to the paradoxical topic of chapter 2, the move of the reduction
interpreted as a move of un-humanizing (see 2.6.2.42.6.2.7), the full treat-
ment of which must wait until chapter 7.
Another kind of question to raise about Finks new term, captivation in/by
the world, concerns the way he makes reference in his notes on the matter to
two earlier philosophers. If the world is the universe of that which is [des
Seienden], then anything posed as outside the world would be nothing.
part of Finks notes for preparing the 1934 article, Was Will die Phnomenologie Ed-
mund Husserls? (Studien, pp. 15778). See EFM 2, Z-XIII, Beil. I.
37. Z-XIII XVIII/3a, emphasis Finks.
38. Again, Z-XI XCIII/2a. See appendix.
39. Z-XIII XVIII/4a; EFM 2.
40. Z-XIII XVIII/5a. The difference between the ways Fink and Heidegger speak of the
formality of concepts for all-embracing fundamental conditions will be taken up in
7.2.1 and 7.2.1.1.
188 The World
Kant stands as a thinker who understood captivation in the world and

followed through with it to the end. In contrast, Hegel asserts: The rst thing
in philosophy is to recognize the absolute nothing. But what is the under-
standing of being and nothing that will be allowed, or imposed, by the
whole approach taken here? How can anything of the like nd a place in a
Husserlian transcendental phenomenology?
The only way to answer any of these questions is to keep them in interplay
with the phenomenological reinquiry into structural features of the situated-
ness that is the base-level condition of human being in the world in all its
action and experiencing. Only after more of such specics are in handand it
will take several chapterswill we be able to return frontally to these matters
of an appropriately phenomenological speculative moment.
4.4. How the World Figures in Experience

Among the main features of being captivated in the world is that one is
attentive not to the structure of captivation itself but rather to those things
which that same structure conditions in their determinate and stable appear-
ance. The consequence of this is that a human individual attempting within this
same captivation to turn attention to and to reect upon the conditioning
structure itselfwhich is precisely the point of the epoch and reduction
begins with that same captivation-set orientation to the things conditioned
within it. This is the tendency that one nds in the presentation of phenomenol-
ogy in Ideas I, and therefore it is a fundamental reason for the need to sur-
mount that presentation as preliminary. More precisely put, The constitu-
tive relation between pure consciousness and the world in Ideas is mainly, and
indeed in necessary abstraction, carried out as object-intentionality, whereby
the Whence [das Woher] of the intention and the Wherein [das Worin] of the
objects remains in undisclosure. The endeavor begun with Husserls Ideas I
41. Z-XIII XVIII/4b, again in the subset of notes devoted to Weltbefangenheit; in EFM
2. The sentence is from Hegels Faith and Knowledge, trans. by Walter Cerf and H. S.
Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 169, slightly modied. The
echoes of Heideggers lectures on German Idealism are clear. See 3.3.2 and 3.4.1.
42. See EH-Ke, p. 106; Studien, pp. 11112. Finks point there is succinctly put in B-I
24a (EFM 2, Abschn. 2): Not as if the Ideas were false, but they are overtaken in the later
writings.
43. Z-IV 98a, my emphasis; EFM 1. Heidegger is not named in this note, in all likeli-
hood from 1928, but Finks reading of Being and Time is surely in evidence in it if one
compares it to BTst, p. 8081 (SZ, p. 86): As that for which one lets beings be encoun-
tered in the kind of being of relevance, the wherein [das Worin] of self-referential under-
The World 189
cannot rest with the formulations Ideas I gives, inasmuch as the intrinsic
methodological sense of the phenomenological manner of investigation re-
quires gradual and ever increasing radicalization and elaboration of its self-
understanding. The reduction is not something done and nished once and for
all. Yet, on the positive side, Husserls persistence in taking the object-
centered view exhausted the possibilities of thought done as philosophy of
reection (i.e., done in such a way as to make being equivalent to object-
being), in the course of which what came clear is the deep-rooted structural
feature of bedazzlement by things.
For the phenomenology of the world, then, the problem is that features of
things in the world have set the terms for representing the structural nature of
the world itself. Now, at this stage of self-critique and reinterpretation, one has
to ask what clues there are in experience that would indicate structural prop-
erties of the world that would not be like those of objects and would not
be determined by object-centered thematization, clues, in other words, that
would counter the concealing or distorting of features of the world itself that is
part of ones bedazzlement with object-mode being.
4.4.1. Decentering the Object-Entititative Approach;

Horizonality
If the world itself is not an object or like any of the objects to be found
within it, and therefore is not to be described in terms of objects, then to think
of the world as the aggregate or sum total of objects is to miss the nature of
world entirely. One readily imagines the world as a comprehensive All that
one could see if one were at the proper spot. But the world is not a whole for
the gaze of intuition. The whole world is not a totum accessible like a single
being for some very large intellect. Nor can the world be given a numerical
designation: The world is neither one, nor are there several; the world is not
a being. Not a sum total [of beings] either.
Let us take another tack, following the approach usually recognized as
Husserls central idea about the world and his most original contribution
standing is the phenomenon of world. (Italics in the translated text.) See also Z-MH-I
27a (EFM 4), a brief note from mid-1939 of a discussion with Landgrebe about the
limitations of Husserls position in comparison with Heideggers.
44. Z-IV 64a; EFM 1.
45. Z-XX 19a, from 1935 and 1936; EFM 3.
46. Cf. Z-XI III/6a, from late 1931; EFM 2.
47. Z-VII XVIII/6a, from 1930; EFM 2.
48. Z-VII XXII/5a (bracketed insertion mine), in all likelihood from 1930; EFM 2.
190 The World
concerning it, namely, that the world is the indenite and all-embracing hori-
zon that one nds in an analysis of object-thematic perception. Here the
difculty is more subtle; what is needed is to look at the same element that
others examine here, horizonality, and understand it more radically. Hori-
zonality is certainly found structurally in perception, but the character of that
horizonality must be determined otherwise than under the presupposition that
horizonality be fundamentally explicated in terms of the analysis of percep-
tion geared paradigmatically to the object-centered act-intentionality operat-
ing in it.
This is one of the points Fink wanted to develop in the sequel to his disserta-
tion; that is where he planned to take up the function constitutive of the
horizons as horizons. To speak of the constitution of the world has to mean
primarily the way horizons as such come about, and one need consider only a
small core of actual, i.e., present-making constitution that would go on in
them. Horizon-constitution itself is not an intentional modication of the
kind of consciousness that is object-aimed, as Husserl regularly has it by
explaining the horizon on the basis of the repeated shifting of thematic intend-
ing action. We know of horizons in that consciousness occurs as access to
things, but the horizons are the withdrawing of phenomena from focal
aiming. One cannot render the horizon accessible by taking it in its constitu-
tive withdrawing function in the manner of a determinate phenomenon
within horizontal presentation. Yet, Fink nds, Husserl regularly approaches
the question of the constitution of horizons as if trying to lay hold of the
containing withdrawals [die Enthalte] by way of the contained [die In-
halte], the horizons by the intra-horizonal.
We may recall that the usual conception of the horizon is that it is the range
of a potential, that is, of objects that can be thematically intended. To conceive
the world as the whole range of such ranges of the potentialin terming it the
horizon of all horizonsis to conceive of it as the whole indenitely ex-
tended surrounding set of objects in potentiality. Against this, Fink nds that
consciousness of the world as a whole [Weltganzheitsbewutsein] is never a
consciousness of the and so forth. This would be to conceive the world as a
schema of intra-horizonal lling in; but this does not get to the containing
factor [den Enthalt] as such. The horizonality in terms of which the world
gures into experience is not merely a fringe of potentiality, a constitutively
49. See appendix.

50. Z-VII XVII/1a, dated October 1, 1930, Chiavari (EFM 2).
51. Z-VII XVII/15a, dated September 21, 1930, Chiavari (EFM 2).
52. Z-VII 11a; EFM 2. See also C-HF, pp. 9899, dated October 25, 1932.
The World 191
non-actual border waiting for object-intentionality to make it actual and de-

terminate. Indeed, only because the world is constitutively done and ready
can nished objects, i.e., beings, reach constitution. The nished world has
constitutive intentionally founding priority to individual beings. To put it
another way, the world is not such as to allow being cashed in in terms of the
objects that can be actualized by act-intentional determination as it sweeps
focally through the horizon that contains them all potentially.
Fink has to move the understanding of the world beyond Husserls usual
conception of the wholeness of the world that couches it in terms of itera-
tionin Kants phrasing, the boundlessness in the continuing of intuition.
To conceive the world as this kind of potential innity construes its constitu-
tion as still incomplete. But the wholeness of the world is never still on
the way; it is rather fundamentally over and done with, antecedently to the
constitution of objects. Husserls I can never really explains the horizonal
wholeness of the world but simply presupposes it. What the I can does is
exercise accession, and repetition of it effects the extending of access; but this
does not constitute the world itself as the horizon of accessibility. The world
itself is precisely horizonal, the inaccessible, the un-cash-in-able [das Un-
einlsbare], the antecedent domain for the exercise of an I can.
In the transition from actual to potential and potential to actual done by
exercising the I can it is this plurality of objects, this sum total of objects,
that is indenitely extendable, not the horizon itself. The horizon itselfor
the world conceived of in terms of horizonalityis not itself an extension at
all. Because, therefore, horizons and the world as the horizon of horizons
are not to be characterized by features proper to what appears in horizons,
in the world, Fink coins a term to express this character. Containing [Ent-
halten] is a wherewithin [Worinsein] for a content [Inhalt], he writes.
The wholeness that is antecedent, that provides the clearing for possible
contents, but which is not pieced together out of contents [Inhalten], we call
a Containment [Enthalt]. The world is thus never determinable as the sum of
beings, of contents, but simply and only as Containment. The world is the
53. Z-VII XXII/6a; EFM 2. Both sentences are entirely underlined by Fink.
54. See Z-XV 50a and Z-VII XXII/6a, both in EFM 2. There is a certain parallel
between Finks reections on the world as der Enthalt and Heideggers treatment of the
accessibility or inaccessibility of the world in his WS 19291930 lectures (see U-MH-IV
98ff; MH-GA 29/30 70a). This, however, needs to be linked with the whole nature of
the difference between formal indication in Heideggers thinking and in Finks. See
7.2.1 and 7.2.1.1.
55. Z-VII X/1ab, emphasis Finks (EFM 2).
56. Cf. Z-VII 2a; EFM 2.
192 The World
Containment of all beings. At the same time, Fink explains that the German
Enthalten, containing, also carries in the Ent- the connotation holding
back, detaining. That is, what is contained is also held back, i.e., out
of actual access; and this is an essential feature of horizonality of all sorts:
what is horizonal is held out away from the focal center, whether spatially or
temporallyi.e., is contained-and-detained. This is the way, now, in which
the world is pregiven, namely, as the structural featuring by which what is held
in appearing, in experiencing, is also as much held back as held forward.
This is the featuring that accrues to what is held or contained in the
world, which, as the very essence of horizonality, resists the attempt that
would grasp it in terms of the things thus featured out within it.
Our considerations so far, however, have been one-sided; they have pro-
ceeded as if horizons and the world were things deployed as phenomena before
the gaze of a detached subject, that is, as the panoply of the transcendent before
uninvolved, self-contained, act-intentional immanence. But the world includes
within it the human subject, the human experiencing entity and its imma-
nence. The world as horizonal is not spread out in front of perceptual acts of
intending, it structures them within its embrace of them. The world in its full
sense is not the counter-poise to ones own experiential life, the mere correla-
tional member of a dualistic relationshipas it very much appears to be
forcefully represented in places in Ideas Ibut is rather the concept summa-
tive of the correlation between the ultimately experiencing I in its life of realiza-
tion in self-apperception and the world as experienced in that life, or, more
simply, the unity of this correlation itself, that includes us as a moment in it.
57. Z-V VI/9a, from the dissertation period; EFM 1. The interpretive application that
follows here corrects the construal given in my article, a longer, earlier version of the
present exposition, Redoing the Phenomenology of the World in the Freiburg Work-
shop, 19301934, Alter, 6 (1998), 67. It also corrects the same interpretation in my
article La structure phenomenologique du monde, une rvision, Les cahiers de philoso-
phie, 15/16 (1992), 98.
58. In 5.1.2.3.2 this understanding of the spatial horizon will get deepened in reinter-
pretive reconsideration in terms of the depresencing function of horizons in general.
Correspondingly, the awareness mode, the topic of the next section here, gets radical-
ized to one of gradation in openness to the given within the Containment of world-
horizonalities. Yet it is openness that originatively is constitutively correlated not to
content as contained but rather to maximal, central presencing, or to diminished pres-
encingdepresencingin distance out from the maximal center. Cf. also 5.1.1.4 and
5.1.2.3.3.
59. From Finks 1930 Draft, VI.CM/2, p. 62. See also Husserls marginal note on this
The World 193
4.4.2. Horizonality and Awareness

The question now is this: How does the world in this sui generis hori-
zonal sense gure into human experience, how is the experiencing human
aware of the world in a way specic to it and not as conceptualized in terms of
object-centered intentionality? Or, put another way, if the subject is included
in the world, how is the subject to know of the world other than as a sum total
of objects, whether conceived of in naive fashion as the big thing made up of
and comprising all other things, or, more subtly, as a horizon fully convertible
into objects, able to be cashed in for them?
To begin with, from all the considerations taken up from chapter 2 to the
present, one has to exclude any conception that would construe the world in
its phenomenologically ultimate sense as springing from some kind of really
existent subject agent as such. Thus, to the human experiencing agent in the
world, the world is not a subjective a priori world-form but is in itself,
an absolute phenomenon that is not only given and in place from the rst
moment of the human subjects experiencing and actions but is also the very
conditioning horizon of that experiencing and those actions. The approach
needed, therefore, must go beyond any basing of the world on some perfor-
mance or process accomplished by an agency that is itself essentially struc-
tured by world-horizonality. This is a stricture not only against the customary
Husserlian introductory treatment of the world but also against the Heideg-
gerian existential account. In contrast, the approach now, neither realistic
which Husserl and Heidegger both excludenor idealisticwhether tran-
scendental in the manner of a philosophy of reection (Husserl) or ontological
(Heidegger)will be cosmological: The world is that which makes the whole
problematic of idealism and realism possible, the One and the Whole that
swings around all individual things and all manifolds: the world is the all-
inclusive pure Containment. But how is this non-object-like, radically ante-
cedent Containment not utterly unmanifest in human experience? How does it
text (VI.CM/2, p. 62, note 234). See further Finks brief reection in Z-XII 11c, probably
from 1934 (EFM 2), as well as its fuller development in VI.CM/2, pp. 16086, The
Performance Structure of the Phenomenological Epoch, especially pp. 168ff. (part of
Finks 1932 revision for Husserls Meditation I), and pp. 20212, The Phenomenon
of the World: The Pregivenness of the World (part of his 1932 revision for Meditation
II).
60. Z-XIII 7a, from 1933 or 1934; EFM 2.
61. Z-VII III/2a; EFM 2.
62. See appendix.
194 The World
enter in some way into the awareness humans have in their focus on things and
events (and on other humans)?
The world as horizonality could not be something given as present (in the
sense of being both presented and at present); for present is a value in
world-horizonality, not of the world itself. But with this matter of the pres-
ent and of presence one immediately gets into the question of temporality,
initially the temporality that is a dimension of the world and of human experi-
ence within it, and then the temporality of ultimate constitution, of which the
world would in some way be a product (as a horizonal dimension). That will
be dealt with in the next chapter; but for now this much can be said. Given that
human experiencing takes place precisely within the world as its conditioning
horizon, the more specic features of the discriminating grasp of a constant
entity in its perceptual givenness, in its presence, in its actuality, are structured
by the horizonalities of the horizon of all horizons, the world. Thus, neither
space, nor time, nor actuality [is] a moment in things (objects), they are
world-concepts. Things are spatial or temporal or actual not as some kind
of property internal to them but only on the basis of space, time, actuality.
Evidential demonstration, evidential showingHusserls Ausweisungis ac-
cordingly a performance possible only within the world.
The consciousness of the world, then, the awareness of all-embracing hori-
zonality, or of any horizon at all, has to be non-thematic consciousness, not
the consciousness aimed at an entity or object framed in presence and actuality
so as to determine what it is. To put it another way, if consciousness is intrin-
sically intentionality, then the intentionality in question here is not that of act-
consciousness, nor any modication of act-consciousness. It is in some way
coincident with consciousness in the course of its very living and being. Fink is
insistent on this point: The equating of intention and act-consciousness is a
narrowing down of the original meaning of intention; intention is basically
wider than act-consciousness, is the mode of subjective life as such. Further-
more, he continues, horizon-consciousness is not a modication of the cogi-
tatio, just as time-intentionalities and eld-intentionality are not. We have a
63. Z-XI 40ab; EFM 2.

64. Z-XIII LX/4a, emphasis Finks, supplementary word in brackets mine; by all in-
dications from 1934 (EFM 2).
65. Cf. Z-XI 60a; EFM 2.
66. See Z-VII XXI/8a, offering ideas parallel to one of the main points in Ludwig
Wittgensteins reections in On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), #105 and
passim.
67. Z-VII IX/6a, emphasis Finks.
The World 195
hint here about how to determine that in consciousness wherein the horizon-
ality of the world is recognizedsensed or felt perhaps, i.e., coincident
with its very happeningrather than aimed at and caught thematically. One
has to consider how consciousness is or goes on rather than focus on the
individualized acts that it performs, and this necessarily requires an examina-
tion of the temporality of consciousness. Yet, even as we defer until chapter 5
treatment of the temporal structure of the coursing of consciousness, some-
thing positive can be ascertained about the way the world is manifest in our
awareness.
If the world is the all-comprehensive horizonality of the life of conscious-
ness, then the modality of awareness regarding that horizonality would also
have to be something all-comprehensive in the life of consciousness. And there
is a familiar mode of awareness precisely of this sort, namely, wakefulness.
Wakefulness is simply the way of being open-to-the-world [weltoffen], Fink
writes. Only as long as a subjective life nds itself awake is it open-to-the-
world, and sleep, therefore, is closure to the world. This allows one neatly
to situate the two tricky phenomena immanence and transcendence pre-
cisely in terms of the world: There only is immanent and transcendent on
the ground of openness-to-the-world, of wakefulness.
It is far too limited, then, to think of wakefulness (or sleep) as the state of
an inner entitative region called the psyche. Wakefulness is rather the condi-
tion of the possibility for the kind of being that existence is, and existence is
being awake, i.e., being perceptually open for beings as such. Being awake is
not just physiologically opening ones eyes and seeing. Much more originally
the whole breadth of existence has to be traced back to being awake as the
ground of its possibility. Wakefulness is something more even than an exis-
tential in Heideggers sense; it is the totality-concept of existentiality; all
existential interpretations move within wakefulness.
Yet while Fink continuesfor example, in 1935to entertain the thesis
that we are not open-to-the-world because we have consciousness of worldly
objects, but rather we have consciousness of objects because we are open-to-
the-world, he has to keep asking just how this awareness of wakefulness
is of such things as being and actuality in the openness that wakeful-
ness is said to be. If it is not through noematizationi.e., in accord with the
68. Z-XV 13a, emphasis Finks; probably 1931; EFM 2.

69. Z-X 10ab, emphasis Finks; probably 1929; EFM 2. See appendix.
70. Z-XVI 12a, by all indications 1935; EFM 3.
71. See, for example, OH-IV 32, from 1935; EFM 3.
196 The World
model of the object-centered act-intentional noesis-noema relationshipthat

the subject is in its wakeful relatedness to the world, if act-centered intention-
ality is thus de-centered from its previouslyin a preliminary stagerepre-
sented role of constitution of the world and is accordingly not the mode of
consciousness specically of the world as such, how does this wakefulness
work as the awareness of what is antecedent to any constitution or conscious-
ness functioning in the manner of object-directed act-intentionality? To try to
determine that is the point of Finks turning to wakefulness in conjunction
with its opposite, sleep.
Sleep cannot be approached, for example, as signifying a pause in constitu-
tion; the world cannot be a wakefulness-product, and the life of experienc-
ing taken in the mode of accessionto things in their actuality and presence
cannot be equated with the life of constitution. One has to investigate anew
(a) how the way the many comprehensiveness valuesactuality, the pres-
ent, to name just theseget constituted, relates to (b) the way there is an
awareness of them. In other words, the deepest level of originative constitu-
tion needs to be claried as the context within which to clarify consciousness
of the world as horizonal.
In sum, Fink nds it necessary to go beyond Husserls habitual approach on
the matter of how act-intentional explication applies at different levels of
phenomenological explication, in the following ways:
(1) The I as wakefulness is not necessarily the I as activity.

(2) Accession-consciousness is not necessarily originative constituting agency,
even if accession-consciousness has some constituting function.
(3) Actuality [is] not primarily a correlate of thetic act-characters, but a
horizon that comprehends and precedes all acts and their correlates. Actu-
ality: a medium.
(4) Self-apperceptions are another kind of constituted medium, in this
case for setting determinacy for the constitution both of objects and of
correlative subject characteristics.
What will follow now, and then in subsequent chapters, will be treatment of
how such themes as these are pursued and how certain hitherto somewhat
subordinate conceptions take on a greater role in reproblematized phenome-
nological inquiry.
72. Z-XVI 15b, emphasis Finks; EFM 3. See also Z-VI 57a, from the dissertation
period (EFM 2), and OH-VI 57, from 1936 (EFM 3).
73. The four points here, and quoted material in them, are drawn from Z-XVI 16a,
emphasis Finks, bracketed insertion mine; EFM 3.
The World 197
4.4.3. Performance Consciousness and Its Delineation

The alternative modality of consciousness that now comes to be seen to
play the fundamental role has already been indicated in 4.1 above, in the sixth
of the points listed there in summarizing ideas from preceding chapters. The
kind of consciousness that is aware of the world, akin to if not an intrinsic part
of the awareness a conscious being has of its own living, seems to have to be
the non-thematic, non-act-intentional performance consciousness [Voll-
zugsbewutsein] that Fink found becoming fundamental as a result of his
study of the Bernau manuscripts that he was supposed to work up into a
coherent treatment. Fink saw that deeper time-analysis required shifting the
place of privilege from egoically schematized intentional action to a dimension
of consciousness more fundamental than the egoic, namely, functioning
intentionality. Here is an intentionality that in the very course of its function-
ing would be ipso facto the awareness of its own performance right as it
goes on.
The prioritizing of functioning intentionality is one of the principal features
of interest in postWorld War II phenomenology, beginning with its forceful
highlighting in 1945 in Maurice Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Percep-
tion. Before that, however, Fink had given it special mention in his presenta-
tion of the theme of intentionality in a paper published in 1939, cited by
Merleau-Ponty. Fink also spoke of it in a paper given in Brussels in 1951.
But while the idea of functioning intentionality has become well known by
virtue of the editing work that has made Husserls analyses of passive synthe-
sis availablei.e., Husserliana XIthe question of how these analyses affect
the conception of consciousness as intentional and how this is not only a
genuine but also a fundamental kind of awareness needs to be made clear.
By the time Fink was working in close consort with Husserli.e., by
1930it had become abundantly clear that the phenomenological inquiry
that begins with correlational intentionality and that takes the object-status of
something experienced as its starting point is a rst stage for detailing the
74. Phnomnologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. xiii and 478 (trans.
by Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1962], pp. xviii and 418).
75. Eugen Fink, Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls, Revue inter-
nationale de philosophie, I (1939), 22670 (reprinted in Studien, pp. 177223; see
pp. 21819). One could suppose it highly likely that Merleau-Ponty was inuenced on
this point as well by the discussions he held with Fink at Louvain during his week there in
April 1940; see note 219 in 1.4 (in the appendix).
76. Eugen Fink, Die intentionale Analyse und das Problem des spekulativen Den-
kens, ND, pp. 13957.
198 The World
constituting operations that establish the unity exhibited by an object. Corre-

spondingly, the focally thematizing act-intentional aimings that cohere as radi-
ating from a continuous polar subject, thus having agency status correlative to
the unied sense of the experienced object, represent also a rst-stage determi-
nation. Both the objectivity of the object and the subjectivity of the subject
are referred to a deeper subjectivity that embraces both in its functioning.
This means, however, that it is not simply some further kind of unied sense
possessed by a distinct, discriminated object-unit that is to be accounted for
constitutively beyond subject-object correlativity; what is now at issue is a
dimensional kind of structural value for appearing being, namely, the vari-
ous modes of horizonality. These are what are to be both generatively at-
tributed to a performance order of constitutive process and experientially
evinced in a performance awareness.
There are two interrelated points to make, then. One is to examine the way
in which awareness of the dimensional and situational as suchi.e., of the
horizonalgoes on; the other is to try to disclose how this going on might
lead to the disclosure of how those horizons get constituted in the rst place,
that is, the disclosure of the way constitution can be based on the structure of,
or at least likened to, the way this experiencing of them goes on. To put it
another way, these horizonal experiential features, these structural framings of
human subject-being in the world, are clues for a phenomenological inquiry
into the constitution of those horizons as such, i.e., into the transcendental
constitution of the worldhow the world is there in the rst place.
Unthematic consciousness can be of several kinds. One of these is the aware-
ness of the fringe of potential objects surrounding some focal object of act-
intentionality critically considered earlier in 4.4.1 and 4.4.2. Another is the
self-consciousness of the individual I in the course of its own action, i.e.,
reexive self-awareness, linked to the whole question of what the I is and how
it is constituted. This, however, directly involves the analysis of temporality
and is postponed here until the next chapter. There are in addition other lines
of thinking that can help to dene the non-thematic human awareness of the
world that operates in the base-level phenomenon of wakefulness.
77. See OH-V 4042 for a compact statement from 1935 of a somewhat longer treat-
ment in Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls, Studien, pp. 21819. See
also Finks 1951 paper, Die intentionale Analyse und das Problem des spekulativen
Denkens, ND, pp. 15152.
78. See 2.6.2.8.
79. See Z-I 51ab (EFM 1) and Z-VII XVII/31ab (EFM 2), texts which show how
progression down through levels of analysis requires refashioning the interpretive inten-
tional cast guiding the analysis.
The World 199
For example, one can develop further the contrast between an object
[Gegenstand] and its circumstance [Umstand], its surround (or the
around-dimension), that is, the range of play in which things can come
thematically to the fore. The world, the totality of the surround/circum-
stance [Umstandsganzheit] for beings, is characterizable more accurately
otherwise than simply as a range of indenitely projected potential objects.
Spatiality is a prime instance of a surround, as are distance and closeness,
silence and sound, night (or darkness) and day (or light). Under the title
surround/around/circumstance [Umstand], Fink writes, we understand
all the modes of givenness of objects that belong not to any individual thing,
but to the concreteness of the surrounding world [Umwelt].
An idea to be explored in these surround phenomena is eld-
intentionality. Fink leads into this from the experience of listening, in which
one can distinguish hearing something specic and listening to it (Hren) from
listening for something but not hearing anything at all (Horchen), that is,
anything specic. In the latter, when no noise at all is heard, one hears just
plain silence. Here that of which one is aware in just listening for is not an
object, not a being, but the eld: pure llability, llable, that is, with beings.
But eld-intentionality is only llable in the ongoing coursing of temporal-
ity, in the way the not-yet-lling relates to the not-yet-lled in the now. Field-
intentionality, therefore, can only be explicated through the analysis of time.
Finally, there is one further characterization that, in those politically charged
years 1933 to 1935, Fink continued to think about regarding the way there is
awareness of the world as such in human experience, the way there is the
experience of sheer wakefulness. Since such awareness will not be object-
directed or thematic, and thus will not be by way of a specic act of intending,
it has to be conceived of more as the way one senses or feels the trajectory of
ones being structured in the world, an awareness intrinsic to all the ways in
80. Z-V VI/10b; EFM 1.

81. Cf. Z-X 8a (EFM 2) and Z-IV 31b, 39a, 50a, and 52ab (EFM 1).
82. M-II, Text No. 5; EFM 1.
83. Z-VII XVII/7a (EFM 2) and Z-V III/8a (EFM 1). Husserl himself in one of his
C-manuscripts speaks of the eld component of the streaming present, that is, the
distinction between (a) the egoic element of the now, with the concrete focal con-
tinuity owing through it, and (b) the non-egoic proto-eld (or world-eld) that be-
longs integrally to all this. See HA C 3 III, pp. 2830 [41b43a], from March 1931. One
can see this passage and something of this point referred to by Klaus Held, Lebendige
Gegenwart, Phaenomenologica 23 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 30.
84. Z-V III/12a, from the dissertation period; EFM 1.
85. See 5.1.1.1, 5.1.1.2, 5.1.1.4, and 5.1.2.3.1.
200 The World
which one conducts oneself simply in wakefully living and being in the world, a
world-feeling [Weltgefhl ].
Here is a good example of a term that Fink nds in philosophic thinking
ouside Husserls phenomenology and then introduces into the phenomenologi-
cal double-register systematic in order, by the interplay of the intuitively given
and the conceptually projective and articulative, to test the already disclosed
results of phenomenological investigation for yet inadequately disclosed and
expressed facets. Fink is appreciative of Nietzsche, life-philosophy, and the phi-
losophy of existence for the way in which the world is treated by each as an all-
encompassing whole felt in the core of ones being, yet he nds each critically
inadequate to the full radicality with which the cosmological grounding of
being and experiencing has to be explicated. Positively, Nietzsches world-
feeling is the pathos of cosmology, and life-philosophy reacts vigorously
against the naturalistic conception of life, as does the philosophy of existence;
but, negatively, they all do not give the world sufcient antecedency in the order
of constitutive origination, an antecedency, that is, of the worlds originative-
ness in relation to what is in the world. There is in them all an immobility of
spirit that does not recast the conception of spirit and life profoundly
enough to integrate the two. Transcendental phenomenology, in its capacity
for radicalultimately meonticreinterpretation, sets spirit moving as a
living process; phenomenology is the rendering of life as spirit [Vergeisterung
des Lebens] and of spirit as life [Verlebendigung des Geistes]. And the
Hegelian harmonies here are deliberate on Finks part.
Yet even here what is offered is not nely specic positive conceptual deni-
tion but rather cautions about how not to give conceptual schematizing to
horizon-awareness. The caution is meant to promote recognizing the non-
focused way in which awareness is actual in the experiencing of such things as
(a) the spatiality as such of some thing or some place or some movement, in
distinction from, for example, the measure of it, whereby spatiality becomes a
property ( partes extra partes, extension) of a thing or place or event, or of an
arrangement of things or places or events; or, in further examplesmutatis
mutandis(b) silence, or (c) daylight and night. The point is to try to grasp
the way in which one lives in a sense of spatiality or temporality or silence or
86. See Z-XII 4cd and Z-XIV II/2ab, VIII/1a2a, 10ab, and XIV/2aball in
EFM 2. M-II, Text No. 2 (EFM 2, Abschn. 2), is a typescript draft from 1931 on this
whole issue in relation to Husserl.
87. Whether and in what measure any such denitional clarity can be given is some-
thing to deal with later in connection with the nature of formal indication in Finks
understanding of it, in connection with the interpretive force of the meontic. See 7.2.1
and 7.2.1.1.
The World 201
the eld of the visible. Rather than taking ones awareness of them as a reec-
tively noted feeling about it felt in here within oneself, in distinction from
it out there, the aim is to nd these eld-features as structurings intrin-
sic to the very coursing of ones living action in and through and around the
whole here-there of the realm of the experience-of-the-phenomenal, so that
thereby that very eld, precisely as a distinctively horizonal whole, is what
one is pathic of.
In this sense feeling is a profound life-force and not some kind of
psychological vibrancy in self-enclosed human psychic substance. World-
feeling is not a relating-to [Verhalten-zu] in the mode of distantiality, not a
relating to something over-against, but rather a holding-out beyond all beings
into the limitless expanse of the world, a relating to the indeterminate, a
diverging intentionality, an oceanic feeling. World-feeling as constant
even if inexplicitground-level human bearing [Grundverhalten]. Finally,
feeling is not to be set in opposition to intellect. Like wakefulness, feeling is
taken as the roots of spirit; it is the basic lived orientation of human being
to, in being affected by, the whole of being, the world.
We shall return to the matter of life, spirit, and feeling in chapter 6, which
will concentrate on the fundamental coursing of consciousness and subjec-
tivity as living. But here we have to take up more frontally the way Fink takes
Kant to be the great gure whose work set the critical principle for inquiry into
the problem of the world.
4.4.4. Putting It All Together: Reading Kant and

Reading the World
Chapter 1 described the blockage of any possibility that Fink might
submit the Sixth Meditation as a Habilitationsschrift and had to consider an
alternate idea for it. It is not surprising that he would choose as one al-
ternative the question of the world as a theme. And this would be a piece of
88. Z-XIV 10a; EFM 2.

89. M-II, Text No. 2 (EFM 1, Abschn. 2). And Fink adds: See Heideggers doctrine of
transcendence. There is also a similar kind of distantiality [Abstndigkeit] in SZ
27. See also Finks 1935 conversations with Landgrebe, Z-XIX II/4ab (EFM 3).
90. Z-XIV VIII/1a.
91. As Fink briey remarks in late 1936 (Z-XXII 32; EFM 3): World-feeling a bad
word, but it means bearing-oneself-to-the-whole [Sich-zum-Ganzen-Verhalten]. This is:
longing, fright, anxiety, horror, all inadequate words for the question, Where am I, how
did I get into the world?
92. See 1.3, pp. 3637 and 4344.
202 The World
work of his own, not one carried out as a project of Husserls intentionhis
rst philosophical work, Fink terms it in his rst mention of it as treating
World-Consciousness and World.
The broadening of the conception beyond mere phenomenological analysis
is reected in the alternate titles it receives in his notes: in 1934, The History of
the Concept of World; and in 1935, Historical-Systematic Studies on the
Theory of the Concept of World. As the idea progressed it became quite
comprehensive: historical, critical, investigative. This is manifest in the long-
est and most detailed outline he produced, fteen pages of handwritten text
probably from 1936. Here more space is devoted to Kant than to Husserl,
and even Heidegger gets more mention than Husserl, although all three
are critically treated. Now entitled World and World-Concept: A Problem-
Theoretical Investigation, the projected work seems to be intended as a full
delineation of the lines needed to raise the issue of the world properly, in all the
dimensions that philosophic labors have so far discovered for it, rather than to
work out and demonstrate a nal positive doctrinal solution.
In this outline (EFA V-II), and in Finks whole thinking on the problem of the
world throughout his notes, the single most important insight is a principle
drawn from his study of Kant, even if in a perspective guided by the phenome-
nological epoch and reduction. Early in V-II this statement succinctly makes
the point: Kant is to be interpreted as the discoverer of the cosmological
horizon of the being of beings [das Sein des Seienden]. Being [das Sein] = in
principle worldly; beings [das Seiende] = in principle intra-worldly!
This dominant interpretive point clearly echoes Heideggers lecturing in
1929, but Heidegger was not the sole source for Finks grasp of the idea.
Apart from his own early reading of Kant before coming to the university, Fink
in his rst semester at Freiburg (WS 19251926) heard Julius Ebbinghaus, a
former student of Husserls, lecture on Critique of Pure Reason. Against the
93. Z-XIV II/1b; EFM 2. All indications in the folder place this note in 1934. A later
note, Z-XX 3b, from 1936 (EFM 3), terms it one of his self-assigned tasks.
94. Z-XIV VI/5b; EFM 2.
95. OH-II 48; EFM 3.
96. See appendix.
97. V-II 1; EFM 3. The rst course of lectures Fink offered in SS 1946 is in great part an
exposition of the problem of the world, also highlighting Husserl, Heidegger, and Kant:
Eugen Fink, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. by Franz-A. Schwarz (Wrzburg: Knigs-
hausen und Neumann, 1985). See also Finks 1949 lecture course, Welt und Endlichkeit,
ed. by Franz-A. Schwarz (Wrzburg: Knigshausen und Neumann, 1990).
98. V-II 4 (section 3).
99. See 3.4. SZ does not yet credit Kant in this way.
The World 203
reigning Neo-Kantianism Ebbinghaus emphasized the need for scholarly work

on pre-Kantian and precritical metaphysics in order to understand Kants
work, and he then went on to detail Kants precritical interest in the metaphys-
ical question of the form of the world and the topics of space and time. In other
words, much of the motivation of the Critique is taken to be the wish to
understand the world. Husserl for his part, in his 1927 summer-semester
course, Nature and Spirit, makes a point concordant with Ebbinghauss
exposition. In explaining the phenomenological move from the factual fea-
tures of ones concrete world to the idea of the world as such, i.e., to the
world in its essential phenomenological character as the eidetic integral of all
constitutive strata, such as space, time, causality, substantiality, etc. Husserl
nds that it makes sense to see the problematic and task thus explicated as
the telos of Kants Critique of Pure Reason.
Where Heideggers thinking does show strongly, however, is in Finks read-
ing of Kant in an ontological rather than epistemological orientation: Pre-
Kantian metaphysics = idea-metaphysics, Kant = being-metaphysics, as
Fink puts it in one note. But Fink does not stop at ontology in drawing out the
implications of Kants work, for he immediately adds: Of course [this also
means] the transposition of ontology into the problem of cosmology.
The common ground in the philosophy of reection on the part of Kant and
Husserl makes for denite similarities between them. For example: for Kant as
for Husserl, the world is not some monstrous spatial or temporal emptiness
but is instead a structure intrinsic to the system of experience, it is the
potentiality of the limitlessness of continuation in intuition. But Kant
goes a step farther in his critical consideration of the world, delineating a kind
of world-consciousness that is distinct from, and not a special modica-
tionby apperceptive transference, for exampleof, the thematic con-
sciousness that experiences beings [das Seiende ]. Consciousness of the world
in Kant = the Ideas, Fink writes. That is, there is no genuine intuitive
consciousness of the world that gures into the system of the intentional
constitution of objects in the world. The world is instead an Idea that is a
priori to that system.
In this Kants theory indicates what is most deeply problematic about the
way a human being relates to the world as such, namely, in that limits are being
100. See appendix.

101. OH-III 34, from, 1935, emphasis Finks, bracketed insertion mine; EFM 3.
102. M-II, Text No. 2, Kritisches zu Husserls Horizontlehre, from 1931; EFM 1.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid. See appendix.
204 The World
dened for what in principle can be cognitively taken to be. Awareness of the
world thus does not pass by way of the consciousness or cognition effective for
objects in the world. Kant demonstrates how surreptitiously and mistakenly
ideas about encompassing wholes and dimensionswhat phenomenology
will call horizonscome to be asserted as full and positive concepts, whose
essential restrictedness exclusively to phenomena within those horizons goes
unrecognized. This shows in Kants treatment of the antinomies. The positive
signicance of the Kantian doctrine of ideas consists in having shown that the
relationships of the intra-worldly are not applicable to the totality of the
world, even if human reason has to represent the totality of the world for
itself according to schematization proper to an intra-worldly wholeand this
cannot but produce a decided antagonism. In this Fink returns to one of the
issues that he raised with Husserl in the rst discussion he recorded as having
had with him, and the connection with Kants antinomies there too was recog-
nized by Fink.
The lesson Fink derives from all this, however, has two sides. On the
one hand, the distinction between consciousness of objects and conscious-
ness of the world (as the containing totality), between categories that
are ontological-transcendental determinations and the Ideas that are
cosmological-transcendental, underscores the radical distinction in respec-
tive kinds of consciousness and raises the problem of integrating the two in
one living experiential agency. On the other hand, if the experiencing sub-
ject ultimately relates to the world as world, and does so as an agent whose
cognitive capacity is essentially bound within it, then the aim to gain knowl-
edge of that binding relationship does not seem to be possible as a matter of
thematically evidencing cognition at all. It is something that cannot be known
but nonetheless holds there where the real roots of a cognizing being lie, viz.,
beyond being. And if the nal meaning of the world has to do with the explica-
tion of its origin, the origin of the whole structured realm of experience,
compromising both experiencing and the experienced, then the ultimate move
to origins is the move beyond the realm of beings (which was set out by
theoretical philosophy as a unitary complex of appearances, i.e., as world) out
towards such as cannot be named nothing but also cannot be called some-
thing in being [Seiendes]. This is the very point that Fink led up to in
105. Z-IX 14a, August 31, 1931 (emphasis Finks); EFM 2.

106. See the last paragraphs of 2.2.
107. Z-XV 105a (probably 1931); EFM 2.
108. V-II 14; EFM 3. The thesis that ends the outline in essence is this (emphases all
Finks): In the Kantian distinction of knowing and believing there hides the grandiose
The World 205
his paper to the Kant-Gesellschaft in December 1935: With Kant the tran-
scendental problem leads to a new grounding of ontology, in phenomenology
this problem is transformed into the derivation of that which is in being [des
Seienden], i.e., to an ontogonic metaphysics.
The problem of the world is not resolvable simply by straightforwardly
trying to discover positively the structure of the world, and, correlatively, the
kind of consciousness that awareness of the world might be, but by an explica-
tion of the nature of the problem of ultimate origins on a level of thinking that
is not just regressive analysis or evidentness-aimed phenomenological descrip-
tion. What is also needed is conceptual elucidation bound to these investiga-
tive procedures but concentrating on the dimension of higher description, in
Husserls phrasing, or systematic projections, as Fink puts it (see 2.3); it is in
this elucidation that certain treatments in phenomenology become specula-
tive, as Fink characterizes it methodologically. In this the realization to which
phenomenology must in the end come, i.e., its fundamental idea, is that it is
not ultimately a philosophy of consciousness but rather, if one will, meta-
physics, but not metaphysics in the old style. A caesura [has been] made
across the history of metaphysics by the reduction. The problem of the world
[is] annulled/raised [aufgehoben] into the problem of the Absolute. Kant is
thus the critical trail-blazer of a metaphysics of spirit, that is, he explodes
lifes infatuation with the idea of being to introduce a meontic distance
from being, conceiving being in terms of a regressive relation to the dimen-
sion of origins. Kants philosophy is the rst to exhibit the cosmological
horizon of the idea of being and thus rst makes possible a meontic meta-
physics of the Absolute.
This idea of a meontic philosophy of absolute spirit was explicitly stated
by Fink to be one of the things on which he differed from Husserl. It is one
of the main ideas that differentiates his thinking from Heideggers as well. In
the end, it is only this meontic of the Absolute that will make Finks cen-
cosmological-ontological insight into the worldliness of being and the non-being-liness of

the Absolute [das Nicht-Seinshaftigkeit des Absoluten]. The presupposition for a meta-
physics of the Absolute is the antecedent laying out of the limits of the idea of being.
109. ND, p. 43, emphasis Finks. Husserl had read Finks text, but he did not comment
on this particular passage. See also Finks notes for this paper in Z-XVI and Z-XVII
(EFM 3).
110. Z-XI 39a, emphasis Finks, bracketed grammatical insertions mine; see also Z-XV
55aboth in EFM 2.
111. V-II 15, EFM 3.
112. Z-XX 7a, from 1935 or possibly early 1936, emphasis all Finks; EFM 3.
113. See CM6, p. 1 (VI.CM/1, p. 183).
206 The World
tering of phenomenology on the pregivenness of the world and world-

captivation explicableif explication is at all a term for the procedures of
meontic interpretationand a prominent issue in chapter 7.
4.5. Detailing the World as Horizonally Pregiven

The preview just given of the meontic thinking to which the ultimately
problematic character of the world leads and which speculation in phe-
nomenology eventually has to practice, once radical transcendental method-
ological critique is explicitly developed, does not dispense with but on the
contrary reinforces the demand that the horizon-character of the world, re-
conceived in post-preliminary phenomenology, not remain general and inde-
terminate but be given specic phenomenological determination. In other
words, the speculative legitimizing of the concept of world as horizon, in the
very problematicity of the question of the origin of world horizonality, re-
quires specication in the way that experience is structurally delineated, in the
way in which dimensional kinds of in-the-world placement are dened, rather
than left characterized as an indeterminate global and elusively felt upwelling.
That is to say, one has to specify the different modalities of horizonal con-
tainedness that we are quite aware of, even if not by object-focused thematic
attentiveness. One has to make clear how the implicit awareness of the world
as the Containment is concretely textured in the comprehensive dimensional
structurings that are intrinsic to any phenomenon in the world and its ex-
periencing, namely, as the fundamental sense of space, time, and actuality.
(See 4.4.2.)
The matter, however, is not so simple as to allow space and time to be taken
as homogeneous horizontal features out there, or to allow space and time to
be considered primitive irreducibles utterly separate and unrelated to one
another. Nor can one simply adoptor adaptthe Kantian standpoint of
adducing spatiality to be the form of intuition for transcendent objects of
experience and temporality the form of intuition for immanent, subjective
processes of experiencing. For space is not simply a featuring of objects as
objectively there, nor is time simply a featuring of subjective continua as
pure immanencies, as Kant construes them. Space and time open the region in
which this distinction can be made, rather than divide in terms of it. Kant takes
space, for instance, as the object-space of the world, ignoring its differenti-
ation in optical, acoustic, and tactual modalities. Yet examining these modal-
ities allows recognition of the way the openness for the phenomenal occurs
The World 207
as the play of a eld-intentionality, which, far from being a mere subjective

medium of receptivity, is rather a structure of the world.
Reexamining space, then, means not automatically adopting object-centering
in order to explicate space, and not approaching it automatically in terms of the
distinction between immanence and transcendence. Space is rather one of the
concrete dimensions of what is involved in wakefulness, which, preceding
object-focusing perception, does not introduce the immanence-transcendence
distinction as a feature of its functioning. In other words, the analysis of
spatiality is to be performed in explicit recognition that the world, in its basic
horizons, embraces both immanence and transcendence, rather than having to
be characterized in terms of one or the other. Thus, on the level of the central
system of aisthesis, the here of point zero in orientation space, the body-here,
is in the world, rather than being some sort of absolute antecedent point
relative to which world-space is deployed.
Similarly, one has to analyze time basically as world-time, the time that
encompasses experiential immanence and experiential transcendence, rather
than as simply the time of the ow of internal self-consciousness, the time of
immanence only. Moreover, world-time is not to be explicated as centered
in the constitution of thematic objects but rather precisely in terms of its own
character as the horizonality that embraces both immanence and tran-
scendence. Time-constitution, writes Fink, is horizon-constitution,
not object-constitution. World-time, structuring in-the-world occurrings,
whether of subjects or of objects, has to be itself in turn originatively
accounted for by the analysis of the temporalization [Zeitigung] that is tran-
scendental constitution; for it is the latter that is the constitutive origin of the
former. (Here we shall put aside the problem resulting from having neces-
sarily to start off from levels of temporal process that are in principle con-
stituted, and within the whole apparatus of cognition and articulation that
runs in the tracks of this time in the world. This will be taken up in the next
chapter.)
114. Z-VII X/5a6a, emphasis Finks; EFM 2.

115. See Z-VII XXII/1a1b; EFM 2. See also section 4.4.2.
116. Z-XI 35a; EFM 2.
117. Z-IX 23a and 44a; EFM 2.
118. See Z-IX 16a, emphasis Finks.
119. Cf. B-VII 6d (EFM 2); also Z-VI LVI/4a; EFM 1 (also in N-EF, p. 104).
120. E.g.: The I that reduces time indeed escapes world-time, but its escape still
appears again in world-time. Z-XIII 19a, emphasis Finks (EFM 2). See also OH-I 78;
EFM 3.
208 The World
If, now, it is in its horizonal character that the world is pregivenand

experienced in its pregivennessand if the world in its horizonality is consti-
tuted in the unied process of primordial temporalization, then the process of
ultimate constitution will generate the various horizons of the world in an inte-
grated way within its action. The world will have a unied systematic structure
right in its horizonal differentiation, summed up in this simple formulation by
Fink: the world is the totality of the swing of time, or, alternately, the sweep
of the swing of temporality. This will have to be taken up in the next chap-
ter; but at least here the main idea is clear: Ultimately constituting temporality is
characterized as having a certain swing to its coursing. Its coursing is ex-
pressed in the imagery not of a line, one-dimensionally, but as a swinging, the
multidimensional movement of which constitutes the region of the horizon-
alities that make up world-structure. In this sense space is one of the moments
of the swinging of ultimate constituting temporalization. Accordingly,
space is not primarily the space of objects, and such concepts as distance and
span are not original but derivative. Space is only expressible in concepts
that make it a function of this constitutive swing of primordial process. As
whole-world space, space is thus before all else a mode of being-the-around
[Umstandssein] and not an object-structure [ Gegenstandsstruktur].
Similarly, as with all ways in which the intrinsic capabilities exercised by
world-captivated beingi.e., by being-in-the-world, by human beingare
conditioned and structured, immanently felt or awareness-saturated experi-
encing, whether it be sensuous engagement with sensuous objects in visual,
tactile, or auditory intentionality, or in intellectual rumination (such as follow-
ing the present argument), is structured by world-time, by the temporal hori-
zon deployed for the world by ultimate constituting process. As Fink explains
in one of his revisions for Husserls Second Meditation, world-time cannot
be identied with what we call consciousness-transcendent time; world-
time is the comprehensive temporality that includes immanent and transcen-
dent time. When we adopt the standpoint of immanent-psychological re-
search and take our living experience to have a temporality of its own, we
are performing an abstraction within world-time. We leave out of consider-
ation that the coursing of inner psychic events is in the same world-time
[weltgleichzeitig] as are outer events. From the very beginning the owing
life-continuum of the I is the temporal duration of a being existing in the
121. Respectively, Z-V III/13a (EFM 1) and Z-VII XVIII/5b (EFM 2).
122. Space as the swinging of time! This the most revolutionary thesis on space.
Z-VII XVIII/6a (EFM 2); see also Z-VII XVIII/10a.
123. Z-VII XVIII/10a.
The World 209
world, it is as a stretch of time in encompassing world-time, bounded by the

events of birth and death.
Fink points out one dramatic feature of the way subjective time is en-
compassed by world-time. The stream of experiencing is structured by the
temporal horizons normally designated as past, present, and future, but
subjectively experienced temporal ow is nite. That is, it is set within the
continuum of world-time in such a way that, whereas the world-time con-
tinuum is unbounded, the time of the human subject is a bounded ow. The
embeddedness of the time of subjective life in world-time is an essential mo-
ment of the pregivenness of time-horizons as that pregivenness pertains to the
phenomenon of the world. Here we see touched upon again the question
Fink asked Husserl in his rst recorded discussion with him, Does the pure
stream of lived experience have a beginning and an end? (see 2.2)again,
matter for the next chapter.
This difference between world-time and the temporality of individualized
human beingand by implication, then, between the latter and ultimate con-
stituting temporalizationholds important consequences for the procedures
of transcendental phenomenology. Even in the reective following of ones
own experiencing one does not exit from the world; ones whole reective
endeavor remains within the structuring hold of world-time. As Fink writes
for Husserl, revising the First Meditation, Even the pure sphere of inte-
riority in apodictic self-experience . . . is in principle an interiority in a co-
existent externality and co-holding with it as interiority, in a word in the
world. Even the distinction transcendent/immanent or, in less technical
form, the out there and the in here, is a conception belonging to pregiven
acquaintance with the world.
Given this all-pervasive character for the basic world-horizons of spatiality
and temporality, we cannot avoid wondering how a vigorous and radical
phenomenological reductionan un-humanizingcan be possible. And
while the culmination of the question lies in the Sixth Meditation, in a
transcendental theory of method, this is manifestly at the center of Finks
124. VI.CM/2, pp. 21112. The expressions in angle brackets in the quoted formula-
tions in this paragraph are insertions by Husserl (notations 343 and 344).
125. In the next chapter we shall see the vefold horizonality Fink proposes for time, a
richer productivity in the swinging of world-time than just the normal three temporal
dimensions. See 5.1.2.3.2.
127. VI.CM/2, p. 154; the phrase in angle brackets is an insertion by Husserl, notation
106.
128. See VI.CM/2, p. 157.
210 The World
concern as he works over the ve Meditations that precede it. But what
we are interested in at the moment is how all this underscores the seating of
the whole human enterprise of inquiry and reection (whether in science or
in philosophy) within the world. Even when phenomenology undertakes to
pursue inquiry transcendentallyspecically to transform it beyond world-
inherenceit remains in structure and actual performance an effort of cogni-
tion grounded as an in-the-world phenomenon.
Thus the paradigm of philosophical and phenomenological investigation,
especially as reective, namely, thematization in subject-object intentional
correlation, is a world-inherent structure. And the corollary to this is that
this subject-object correlative stance and action is not something understand-
able or explicable simply as immanent, as an interior occurrence, as if the
epoch were to be represented as the retreat to some such immanent sphere. In
sum, the subject-object correlation, precisely as a cognitive correlation, how-
ever much there be an immanence to it, possesses a world-character. It be-
longs right to the sense of inner experience to know itself as incorporated
into the world, Fink writes, again for Husserl. The interior of inner experi-
ence in no way transcends the world, but is a world-immanent interior in
contrast to the entirety of all similarly world-immanent objects that are tran-
scendent to each human I.
So the stance of cognition is ipso facto a relationship not to the world but
rather in it. This means that the condition for the very presentationthe
givennessof an object, or for the subjects retention of an object in constancy
and identity in thematic focus, is precisely the horizonality structure of the
world-time into which the life of the subject is integrated. For something to be
present is for it to possess a temporal character in a world-temporal process.
The present [Gegenwart] as presence [Prsenz] and the present as right-
now-actuality [Aktualitt] are modes of world-time.
The total effect of this whole network of considerations, then, is to make the
world anything but an Over-against with respect to the inevitably human
reecting subject. Moreover, the world is not the sum total of those things and
events that might be taken as over against the subject. Rather, the world is
the totality of conditions and structurings that give the very being of that
subject, and all its genera of activity, its general lines of structuring. As it was
129. See VI.CM/2, pp. 165ff.

130. See VI.CM/2, p. 202, in Finks revision for the Second Meditation.
131. VI.CM/2, p. 170, for the First Meditation; Husserls addition in angle brackets,
note 184. See also Z-XI 19ab; EFM 2 (also in N-EF, p. 111).
132. Z-XI 40a (probably from 1933); EFM 2.
The World 211
formulated in a text cited earlier, the world is the all-embracing pure Con-
tainment, that is, the total hold of our situation.
4.6. Reections of Finks Critique Work in Husserls

Crisis-Writings
The set of writings under way when Husserls death came in April 1938
and known as the Crisis-texts are a product of the kind of thinking being
done in the Freiburg workshop all through Husserls retirement years. They
are the culmination of the kind of development that denes Husserls whole
program, viz., to advance by radically returning to beginnings. Since the
elements that make up the radicality of this returnin self-critique both of
methodological principles and of substantive ndingsare precisely what we
have been following so far, and shall continue to follow, in the present study,
we have to begin to show how these same elements are in evidence in the
Crisis-writings. In the present chapter that means in regard to the way the
world is recongured in phenomenological investigation, and how Finks con-
tribution is reected in that reconguration.
A full study of Finks contribution to the Crisis-project cannot be done
here. That would require looking into all the particulars of chronological and
thematic correlation between Finks written output of notes and typed drafts
and Husserls hundreds of Forschungsmanuskripte in this period (together
with Husserls vast correspondence). Even then, given that the main exchange
between Husserl and Fink was their daily discussion, and that their interest
was in working philosophically on the issues rather than in taking or assigning
proprietary credit, much is bound to remain indeterminable. Nevertheless, a
number of points do clearly emerge, and these have to be laid out.
There are two kinds of contribution to be seen in what Fink did for Husserl
(without forgetting the far greater inuence that Husserl exercised on Fink).
One can, rst of all, look for explicit theses or points of principle that would
not be a signicant part of phenomenology were they not developed by Finks
voice in the enterprise. Secondly, one can look for the general orientation and
systematic organization that Fink worked on, in terms of which the principles
133. Z-XIV VIII/2a; EFM 2. See 4.4.1.

134. Der Inbegriff unserer Situation, from Z-VII VIII/2b (EFM 2). On Inbegriff in
this context as having not the usual sense of epitome or sum total but rather com-
prehensive hold (thus as having one of the senses of Enthalt, Containment), see Z-XI
19b (EFM 2).
135. See Finks essay, Die Entwicklung der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls, writ-
ten in 1937 but only published posthumously in 1976; ND, pp. 4574.
212 The World
and insights of phenomenology gain clarity, coherence, and self-critical philo-

sophical viability against the dispersion and seeming conict in that vast under-
taking of Husserls detailed investigations. And here in turn is where some of
the theses, ndings, or points of principle emerge that would otherwise remain
unspoken and at best latent, and that in the end function more as radical
requestioning than as denitive solutions.
Husserl in actual fact saw Finks work as making this system-clarifying,
order- and method-rening contribution, but Fink was doing more than just
managing or editing Husserls personal research material. Fink was cothink-
ing with him in the deepening and consolidating of his phenomenolgy. Fink
was systematizing Husserls phenomenological investigations of detail by ex-
plicitly relating them to those cardinal philosophical insights upon which
understanding in the whole undertaking in principle turned. These pivotal
points of importance were being set persistently and unequivocally as the main
themes that ultimately governed interpretation on all levels of analytic penetra-
tion, integrating investigational ndings by uncovering hitherto latent limita-
tions and inconsistencies in their description. The result was not only the
reconsideration of long-constant phenomenological detailings but also the
necessity for methodologically new thinking in phenomenology. With this
contribution on Finks part transcendental phenomenology took on a measure
of development that it would not otherwise have undergone, and that holds the
seeds of further development yet.
4.6.1. The Pregivenness of the World

The theme that names the core of the Crisis-writings and for many
indicated a dramatic renement in Husserls way of explaining his phenome-
nology is the life-world, and the material we have been studying documents
some of the essential factors in the process of that renement. Whatever Hus-
serls preferences for a presentation of phenomenology in systematic com-
pleteness were in 1930 when Fink wrote his Layout for Edmund Husserls
System of Phenomenological Philosophy, or in early 1932 when Cairns
reported the conversation about the difference between Husserl and Fink on
how to begin this systematic presentation, by the time Husserl was writing
out his full-scale Crisis-texts in 1936 that difference had diminished consid-
erably. In the publication that eventually resulted, Crisis of European Sciences
136. See 1.3, especially Husserls letters to Albrecht from December 29, 1930, and
December 22, 1931.
137. See 4.2, which includes reference to Cairnss recording a conversation with Hus-
serl on June 2, 1932.
The World 213
and Transcendental Phenomenology, more briey Crisis, Husserl indeed be-

gins with the idea of science, both in its modern form (i.e., natural science) and
in its initial broader impetus (i.e., pisthmh, rational knowledge), but what he
leads to from that starting point is the assertion of the concrete life-world as
the grounding soil of the scientically true world that at the same time
encompasses it in its own universal concreteness. While this fuller theo-
retical statement is given only farther into the text, in 34, Husserl had been
indicating it all along, for example, in the whole way 8 and 9 are formu-
lated, especially in 9h, entitled The life-world as the forgotten meaning-
fundament of natural science. That is, while Husserl still begins with the idea
of science whereas Fink would start with more generalized human reection,
the point that both establish is the same, namely, that the all-encompassing
condition is the life-world, while science or reection are undertakings set
within it.
This focus in Husserls thinking that had proved to be so compelling for
readers of phenomenology in the decades after Husserls deathMaurice
Merleau-Ponty among themwas actually a re-focusing whose rst clear
formulation came in that systematic plan for phenomenology outlined by Fink
in 1930. Furthermore it was Fink, too, who composed all the section and
subsection titles for the Crisis-texts, for example, those for 9h and 34f,
reinforcing the sense of the life-world orientation of the Crisis-project.
4.6.2. De-Cartesianizing Phenomenology

The principle determining this accord leads now to a truly signicant
transformation in approach, namely, turning Husserl away from his penchant
for a Cartesian orientation. The self-critique that governs this transformation
has been given in 2.6.2.7, in Husserls own statement on it from Crisis as well
as Finks in both his notes and his detailed drafts for Husserl. Fink credits
Husserl with the self-critique behind the shift that Fink espouses so forcefully
in his 1930 Layout, but it was something Fink saw in Husserls phenomeno-
logical practice rather than in any explicit statement by him about his phe-
nomenology. Thus Husserls dedicated followers at the time did not discern it
in his thinking, as the corrective letters (to Kaufmann, Schutz, and Kuhn) that
Fink wrote for Husserl in the early 1930s indicate. For, as has just been
138. Crisis, p. 131 (Hua VI, p. 134).

139. Crisis, pp. 13435 (Hua VI, 13738).
140. See 1.2, p. 21, referring to Finks letter to Strasser, November 1, 1946 (EFM 2,
Abschn. 4).
141. See 2.6.2.
214 The World
argued in 4.4.1 and 4.5, the crucial thing about pregivenness is that it encom-
passes not only the object side of that which is experienced by human being in
the world but also the subject side of the experiencing itself.
This orientation, eventually adopted fully by Husserl in the Crisis-texts, is
already implied in Husserls letter to Ingarden from June 11, 1932, just at the
point when Finks second set of revisions on the Meditations were under way.
I have come to the conclusion, Husserl writes, that only a really concrete
explication that ascends from the natural possession of the world and of being
to the transcendental-phenomenological stance . . . can serve. Yet, as Hus-
serl knew full well, it was one thing to have in mind a general idea of this con-
crete explication that ascends to the transcendental-phenomenological
stance (which is to say, the realization of the system of phenomenology in its
full philosophical and methodological amplitude), but it was another thing to
work it out in specics; for working it out in specics introduces the possibility
that the way basic ndings had been initially represented, and perhaps reg-
ularly thereafter, might have to be radically revised. More than that, it turns
out that in the work of this revision differences open up between Husserl and
Fink.
4.6.3. From the Object-World for Cognition to the World-as-

Surround for Wakefulness
How properly to describe the original situation for human thinking and
human being, the pregiven world wherein human living and experiencing are
already under way, is one of the matters at issue in 37 and 38 of Crisis. From
the perspective elaborated earlier in this chapter, what catches our attention
there is the way wakefulness gures in the treatment of the base-level aware-
ness that properly relates to the life-world. The text of these paragraphs is
rather more complicated in its composition than the smoothly printed text of
the published edition suggests. Husserls original manuscripts, from which
Fink produced the extant typed version upon which the published text is
exclusively based, have not survived. Finks typed transcriptions of Hus-
serls Bernau manuscripts, for example, regularly touch up Husserls original
wording, though this is generally stylistic in character rather than a matter of
substantive modication; yet signicant alteration does occur. And by 1936
Fink had produced many lengthy drafts entirely in his own wording that were
142. BIng, p. 78 (Bw III, p. 285). Husserls remarks here diminish the already men-
tioned contrast Cairns reports from a conversation just a week before this letter;
see 4.6.1.
143. See Hua VI, Zur Textgestaltung, p. 519.
The World 215
meant to state and explain Husserls phenomenology. One cannot exclude

the possibility that the extant Crisis typescript contains some signicant
modications introduced by Fink as he typed it from Husserls manuscripts;
there is no way to tell from the typescript itself. In addition, there are hand-
written insertions and deletions in the typed copy, by Husserl as well as by
Fink (and some by Landgrebe), as one can see by consulting Walter Biemels
recording of these in the Textkritische Anmerkungen in the Husserliana
edition. These changes do at least indicate that one of the matters at play in the
treatment in these paragraphs coincides with the issues of the nature of hori-
zonality and the kind of consciousness that properly relates to horizonality.
So, for example, in 37 we nd written that the life-world, for us who
wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the
ground of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical, and the uni-
versal eld of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. Indeed, to live is
always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world, and waking life is being awake to
the world. And then it is pointed out that there exists a fundamental
difference between the way we are conscious of the world and the way we are
conscious of things or objects . . . , though together the two make up an
inseparable unity. In being aware of things we are always conscious of
them as within the world-horizon. Early in the next section (38) the
world is characterized as the pregiven horizon that embraces all our inten-
tional aimings, and does so, Fink adds in clarication, in the very way an
intentional horizon-consciousness implicitly and antecedently encompasses
[such things]. And 37 then ends with an emphatic underscoring of the
uniqueness of the world in that it does not exist as a being, as an object,
for it is the very horizon within which to distinguish individual objects. The
difference between the manner of being of an object in the world and that of
the world itself obviously prescribes fundamentally different correlative types
of consciousness for them. When, however, it comes to specifying struc-
turally the fundamentally different type of consciousness correlative to the
manner of being of the world itself, we nd the text of 37 already asserting
144. VI.CM/12 make up the most accomplished example of this, but so also are
portions of M-II and M-III, in EFM 1 (Abschn. 2) and EFM 3 (Abschn. 2), respectively,
among other pieces.
145. Crisis, p. 142 (Hua VI, p. 145).
146. Ibid.
147. Ibid., p. 143 (Hua VI, p. 146).
148. Ibid.
149. Hua VI, p. 147; see p. 527; my translation.
150. Crisis, p. 143 (Hua VI, p. 146), emphasis mine.
216 The World
that we are conscious of the horizon itself only as a horizon for existing
objects, without particular objects of consciousness it cannot be actual.
This is the kind of description that 38 takes up, explaining that the com-
pletely different sort of waking life involved in the conscious having of the
world is the consciousness that follows the how of the manners of given-
ness of objects, of their manner of achieving substantive constancy through
the coherence of appearings in spatiality and temporality.
However the text reached its typed formulationthat is, in whatever mea-
sure it represents a combination of Husserls own descriptive preferences and
Finks reorientation and recasting of Husserls investigational ndingsthe
treatment of wakefulness and of the world as horizonal seems to be pulling in
two opposing directions. There is phrasing that seems to give a primordiality
and antecedency to wakefulness as a kind of consciousness of the world that
stands qualitatively distinct from conscious focus on objectscorresponding
to what Fink wants to work into the treatmentand then there is descrip-
tion of the world that retains the primacy of the schema of thematic object-
centered intentionalityHusserls habitual approach. In the text we virtually
see Fink trying to counteract, in Husserls characterization of the world and of
our consciousness of the world, the subject-object intentional framing that
does not give full distinctiveness to structural matters that do not accord with
that framing, namely, the Containment character of the world as horizonal
and the non-thematizing, lived performance kind of consciousness in which
one is aware of (in this case) the spatiality of that world-horizonality. It is a
critical point that Fink unambiguously expressed in a discussion with Land-
grebe during the weeks in early 1935 when the two were organizing Husserls
manuscripts (here noted in telegraphic style): Husserls attempt to lay hold of
the phenomenon of world with object-theoretical methods. Husserls intu-
itionism. World = cashability into givenness.
Fink nds that Husserls analysis of the world persists in applying a thematic-
object-aimed cognitive schematizing rather than allowing a genuine intention-
ality quite different from that kind of consciousness and meriting a different
schema of explication. Already in his work on his dissertation Fink saw that
Husserl tended to close off options through his primarily object-oriented
schema; yet Fink saw there was a critique-based alternative that displaced the
151. Crisis, p. 143 (Hua VI, p. 146).

152. Crisis, p. 14445 (Hua VI, 147).
153. Z-XIX II/4a, March 23, 1935; EFM 3. Here the staccato style of the note is left
intact.
154. See OH-VI 56, from late 1935 or early 1936; EFM 3.
The World 217
objectGegenstandfrom serving as clue for the analysis of the nature of the

world in favor of the surround/aroundUmstand. On classic phenom-
enological principles everything stands in correlation with its own manners of
givenness, i.e., the way in which something is given is the way it is, and
vice versa. Accordinglymutatis mutandisif the nature of the world is hori-
zonal, then it must be given horizonally, i.e., to a correlative consciousness
that is horizon-apt, viz., to wakefulness.
On the question of the life-world, then, there is a difference of principle not
so much in the topic to be dealt withthe life-worldor in its fundamentality
as in the conceptuality with which to articulate it. Right during this most
compelling of Husserls efforts, Fink nds a whole catalogue of critical points
on which Husserl does not retool his analytic conceptuality and which he,
Fink, must therefore take up in an alternate kind of explicating: e.g., wakeful-
ness as horizonal consciousness, the being of consciousness, the structure of
reection, silence and sound. It is not that Husserls work was false but
rather that its radicality remained constricted within the framework of entry
into phenomenology, viz., that of classical philosophy of reection, instead
of reconsidering how that practice imposed limitations that distorted what
Husserls very own investigations were turning up. The result is a tension in
such passages as those in Crisis 3738 that only comes clear when we know
more about the demands of post-preliminary reconsideration that Fink was
working out.
One other point needs to be mentioned about the Crisis-texts that Finks
discussions with Landgrebe in 1935 also bring us to see as part of Finks
efforts in the present context. Another regular feature of Husserls analysis of
the world is that the world is said to be always undergoing new constitutive for-
mation. As explained in 4.4.1, Fink argues that critique of the reection-
philosophy subject-object schema construes the horizon basically as a range
155. See Z-IV 52a; EFM 1.

156. See Crisis, 48.
157. See Z-XX 17ab, from late 1935 or early 1936; EFM 3.
158. Cf. also Ronald Bruzina, La structure phenomenologique du monde, une rvi-
sion, Les cahiers de philosophie, 15/16 (1992), 89110.
159. Z-XIX II/4a, referred to a few paragraphs earlier.
160. See Crisis, p. 104 (the always already developed and always further developing
meaning-conguration intuitively given surrounding world, my emphasis) (Hua VI,
p. 106), and p. 177 (the ways in which this subjectivity has brought about and con-
tinues to shape the world . . . , my emphasis; Hua VI, p. 180). See also Hua IV, p. 115 (in
Finks refashioning of the passage with more detail and nuance than originally in the
typescript; cf. also p. 522).
218 The World
of objects, rather than primarily in terms of a horizonality character proper to

itself. But if the horizon is conceived of properly as horizonal, its pregivenness is
its being done and ready; any continuing constitution can only be in regard to
objectsobject-reconguration and object-reconsolidationand cannot per-
tain to the horizon within which this further constitutive determination goes
on. Here is a clarication that can help to deal with the vexing ambiguity in the
way the terms world and life-world are used in Husserls analyses. Since
either term in Husserls usage connotes a totality of what appears in terms of
discriminable objectseven if this totality be spoken of as an object-horizon,
i.e., as comprising both actual and potential object-appearingsin differ-
ent contexts world or life-world can signify different levels of object-
determination: for example, pre-scientic and a priori universal (e.g., the
experiential-perceptual world in the essential structure of object-appearing),
pre-scientic and yet culturally universal (e.g., the ensemble of intuitable spa-
tial and temporal types in which appearings are consolidated noematically in
perception), pre-scientic but historically and culturally diverse (e.g., the
twentieth-century German cultural life-world, the classical Vedic-Hindu life-
world, etc.)which distinctions all raise further questions. In contrast, the
present direction of reconsideration aims to clarify the rst level of living
consciousness, that of world-situation, as relating not to things (objects) but to
the pregiven immanence-transcendence encompassing horizonal condition for
the appearing of things (objects) in the dimension of living experience that
corresponds to that encompassing condition. The life of consciousness is as
such structured in the Containment, the pregiven world-for-life, the awareness
of which is intrinsic to that life on the level of its living wakefulness.
Fink does not go so far as to assert this outright; his notes, especially those
from late in the 1930s, indicate different elements of questioning regarding the
term life-world as used in the Crisis-writings; but the principle of his recon-
sideration of the world as horizonal in the fullest sense suggests some such
proposal, especially if paired with the way he raises the question of the mean-
ing of life in phenomenology. (See chapter 6.) All that can be said with
certainty, then, is that the point of reexamination at the core of Finks rethink-
ing about the world as horizonal is only evident marginally in the exposition of
the life-world in Crisis, with the result that in terms of this reexamination the
conception of the life-world remains unstable and the phenomenology of the
life-world incomplete.
161. See the various essays in Elisabeth Strker, ed., Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in
der Philosophie Edmund Husserls (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979).
The World 219
4.6.4. Identity and Difference between the Worldly and

the Transcendental
If the world in its pregivenness is the horizonal ground for experience,
cognition, and reection as fully as it is for all that these actions take inso
that both immanence and transcendence, in the sense they have in Husserls
phenomenology as intentionally bonded, are together structured by world-
horizonal spatiality and temporalitythen one of the several corollaries that
have to be acknowledged is that it is impossible actually to imagine the world
as not existing and yet still be able to do such a thing as to imagine, or, for that
matter, to have any kind of thought, feeling, or sensing in the stream of con-
sciousness. Imagining, and any activation in the streaming of consciousness,
are living processes structured within all-embracing life-world horizonalities,
and to try to imagine the world away as non-existent would be to try to
imagine oneself out of imagining. As Fink writes, The ction that the world
might not be, but that my world-life, my world-thinking, would still be is
phenomenologically sheer absurdity. It does not even allow being seriously
analyzed in signitive thought. This ction reverts to being a doubling of the
world. Even if in Ideas I 49 a ction very much like this is undertaken not
as doubt of the world, as with Descartes, but simply as its bracketing, in
order to reach pure consciousness, it nevertheless is a Cartesian move that
utterly fails to recognize the pregivenness of the world in its all-embracing
character. The Crisis-texts do not share this pretension.
Even so, even the point that this ction was meant to make needs to be
appreciated, a point that the Crisis-writings not only do not diminish but
also make more forcefully. In truth this point was already an element of de-
Cartesianizing that Husserl himself asserted in his Cartesian Meditations
themselves, where, in 13 near the beginning of the Second Meditation, he
speaks of a fundamentally essential deviation from the Cartesian course
namely, that whereas Descartes remained on the level of world-bound con-
sciousness and did not see that he was in effect initiating regress to the tran-
scendental, Husserl with his epoch and reduction were to bring that regress
cleanly into view. The real point in question is that it is in transcendental
subjectivity that the validity of the pregiven world is to be accounted for, not in
human consciousness. The problem, then, is to determine positively the char-
acteristics specic to that transcendental subjectivity as transcendental which,
as chapter 2 shows, is not so simple and straightforward.
162. Z-IV 15a, emphasis Finks; EFM 1.

163. CMe, p. 31 (Hua I, pp. 6970).
220 The World
This absolute necessity of making it clear that ultimate originative transcen-

dental subjectivity cannot be human consciousness in the world means that
one has to confront the problem of the inevitability of conceptualizing this
subjectivity, transcendental as it is supposed to be, in terms of structures de-
termined intrinsically by situatedness within world-horizonality. This con-
frontation is one of the main points Fink elaborates in his revisions for the
Cartesian Meditations, particularly in the texts that would replace the
opening section (12) of Husserls Second Meditation (i.e., right before the
section that speaks of the fundamentally essential deviation from the Carte-
sian course). Moreover, it is at the heart of Finks Sixth Meditation.
That Husserl fully understands and agrees with Fink on the fundamental
importance of this issue can be seen in one of the documents that Fink pre-
pared for him precisely to make this point. As we know, Fink had the occa-
sional task of preparing statements of critical comment on interpretations of
Husserls phenomenology by former students and colleagues that were ap-
pearing in journals at the time. One of these critique statements is a draft
written in 1933 or 1934 (and apparently never sent) in response to a review of
Husserls Mditations Cartsiennes by Helmut Kuhn. While containing the
same basic explanation of Husserls position as statements Fink wrote to Felix
Kaufmann and Alfred Schutz (cf. 2.6.2), this one written for Kuhn differs from
the others in that it is more like a joint composition and carries a number of
stenographic modications subsequently made by Husserl.
Of the three points covered in this draft, it is the rst that interests us here.
The text points out that, despite Kuhns acknowledgment that the I to which
the epoch is to lead is supposed to be transcendental, nevertheless in Kuhns
representation it is still the other pole of the intra-mundane correlation
of experience, the pole opposite to objects. The transcendental I discovered
in the phenomenological reduction, however, cannot be a member of the
intra-mundane subject-object relation. It is instead the world-transcending
counter-member of the constitutive relation between transcendental life,
which is not something positable in a worldly way but rather is presupposed
by all presumed positing of the world and the world. The world in turn is
the comprehensive concept [Inbegriffcomprehensive hold] embracing
164. Text No. 4, VI.CM/2, pp. 192219.

165. See in particular CM6, pp. 10632 (VI.CM/1, pp. 11745).
166. Kuhns review is published in Kant-Studien 38 (1933), 20916.
167. The two other points concern the relation of the Fifth Meditation to the other
four and the relationship between transcendental subjectivity and concrete human
being in the world, particularly regarding the demands of social involvement.
168. See note 134 above.
The World 221
mundane objects and among them the mundane subject for the world, there-
fore as the eld of play for the intra-mundane correlation of experience. This
means that when the reduction is fully applied to both objects and subjects
i.e., applied throughout the entire embrace of the worldthen it is that one
comes to recognize the opening of a new universe of being, the opening of
the dimension of transcendental subjectivity as the locus of origin for con-
stitutive sense-giving for the all-inclusive meaning world.
What this text exemplies is this: the issue of the interrelationship and
distinction between mundane and transcendental subjectivity, though unmis-
takably present in Husserls earlier writings, is being formulated nowin the
period leading to the Crisis-writingswith a radical problematicity that it
did not show before. The post-preliminary self-critique and reinterpretation
that Fink is pursuing draws attention to the nature and force of the principle of
the distinction between the human order and the transcendental, in both
originative-constitutive power and reective action, and the issue of this
distinction emerges most dramatically where it is some manifestly human
thinker, the phenomenologist Husserl (or Fink or you or me), who is doing the
transcendental reection on actions and processes disclosed within the experi-
ential course of ones own living consciousness. Both 53 and 54 of Crisis
explicitly focus on this issue of the simultaneous identity of and radical differ-
ence between transcendental and human subjectivity, that is, on the problem
of how transcendental subjectivity has to be un-worldly, while also only
known by way of and as the activity of a worldly, human subject. When we
then take into consideration Finks testimony on the interpretive difference
between himself and Husserl on the matter, namely, that Husserl seems to
insist on egoic individuation on the transcendental level while Fink argues
against its appropriateness in more radically applied reduction-driven cri-
tique, then Husserls continuing his stand even in these Crisis passages can be
taken to indicate the point at which Husserl halts the critique and reinterpre-
tive process.
Given this difference, it is no surprise that the issue, though formulated in
the Crisis-writings with explicitness, is not given clear resolution there. Yet
169. Wahrscheinlich Vorschlag fr eine Antwort Husserls an Kuhn, EFM 2, Abschn.

3, No. 5; also in Bw VI, pp. 24445, but with Husserls alterations (here indicated by
angle brackets) seamlessly integrated into the text. While written in the rst person as if
by Husserl himself, the text was typed on Finks typewriter and is composed in his style
rather than Husserls, clearly reecting Finks thinking.
170. See 2.6.2.2, which refers to CM6, p. 1 (VI.CM/1, p. 183); in Crisis, see pp. 210,
259, and 264 (Hua VI, pp. 214, 263, and 26768).
222 The World
in this interpretive difference between Husserl and Fink there is nonetheless

accord on the meaning of the level of analysis on which that difference (and
others) lay in the context of the crisis of European science. Transcendental
phenomenology, precisely by its move of regress from worldly consciousness
to transcendental constituting subjectivity, precisely by way of its both making
the distinction and asserting the still puzzling identication between the two,
was to explicate the enigma of subjectivity so as to make clear the deep-
est essential interrelation between reason and being [Seiendem] against the
dissolution of the ideal of universal philosophy, against the loss of faith
in the human capacity to secure rational meaning for individual and common
human existence. This was Husserls reasoning, and Fink reinforced and
claried itwith the interpretive differences indicated, which we have yet to
explicate fully. To facilitate the move to that further explication, it is worth-
while noting a proposal Fink composed in 1935 for the close of Husserls
Prague lectures. Here Fink, like Husserl, asserts that the way out of the crisis
of condence in reason and science, with its recourse to irrational powers,
lies in the radicalizing of self-understanding; for the crisis resulted precisely
from the inadequacy of efforts to understand philosophical culture in the
living person of human subjectivity as these efforts had hitherto been pursued
either in transcendental speculation or in psychology. The difculty is not so
much that these latter are both wrong, one in seeing the subject as utterly
transcendent to the world, and the other in taking the subject as utterly im-
mersed in it, but that each position is only intelligible if it is transformed
by being integrated with the other. It is transcendental phenomenology that
can make clear how it is that the objective being of the subject in the world,
its being as human psyche, comes about transcendentally; it is transcendental
phenomenology that can explain the mysterious double nature, both tran-
scendental and world-bound, to be found in human being, so that a human
existent has within itself, in some way, the subjectively performing life
(a) that constitutes every existent objectivity in the being-sense that it pos-
sesses, and (b) that constitutes itself as an entity among other entities. In effect
Fink is proposing that transcendental phenomenology can resolve the central
paradox in Heideggers fundamental ontology. (See 3.3.1 and 3.3.2.)
171. Crisis, p. 5 (Hua VI, p. 3).

172. Crisis, p. 13 (Hua VI, p. 12).
173. Finks title for 5 runs: The Ideal of Universal Philosophy and the Process of Its
Inner Dissolution.
174. Crisis, p. 13 (Hua VI, p. 10), translation slightly modied.
175. OH-V 2936; EFM 3. The phrases quoted in the present paragraph are from this
text.
The World 223
For transcendental phenomenology to be able to do this, it has rst to make

clear the nature of the movement of constitution itself, with as unrelenting a
radicality as is possible. One has to focus squarely on the duality of nature in
human subjectivity (a) as disclosing within itself the process of the origin of
constitutive determination, and (b) as displaying itself as itself constitutively
determined intrinsically within this same process of origin in respect to the
meaning and being that it itself possesses. And the two principal lines along
which this inquiry into consciousness has to be done are, rst, the analysis of
the temporality of experience as the approach to ultimate constitutive process,
and, second, the examination of proto-temporality and ultimate process as a
living dynamic. We turn now to these, rst to time and temporality.
5
Fundamental Thematics II: Time
Wir sind die Treibenden. Alles das eilende

Aber den Schritt der Zeit, wird schon vorber sein;
nehmt ihn als Kleinigkeit denn das Verweilende
im immer Bleibenden. erst weiht uns ein.
Rilke, Sonnete, I, 22
The elaboration attempted on the basis of . . . the Bernau time-

manuscripts in the years 193235 foundered . . . because it became clear
to the one working on them that time could not be philosophically
understood by beginning with time-consciousness, that here precisely a
reversal takes place: time (as world-time) is that which is makes both
objects and the constituting subject possible.
Late remark by Fink (196869)
1. An English translation (while not quite as apt for the present study) in Rilke,
Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. by C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1964), p. 45, offers this: We are the drivers./But take times stride/as trivial beside/what
lasts forever. The transient hastens/and soon will be over;/only what lingers/hallows and
chastens.
2. Fnf Lose Bltter 4a; EFM 2, Abschn. 2.
224
Time 225
If we would begin the treatment of time and temporality at the level of

critical phenomenological consideration sketched out in the previous three
chapters, we could simply start with material drawn from Finks notes and
sketches for the study of time beyond the Bernau texts, that is, from 1933
and 1934 (and later), correlating them with Husserls newer work in the
C-manuscripts on temporality of 1930 to 1934. For example, the critical
insights we considered in chapter 4 are neatly continued in some of the points
Fink makes in several outline variants for an Introduction to his then pro-
jected time-book. For instance, in specifying the issues central to the study
of time in Husserls manuscript work from the Bernau to the nal C-group
materials, Fink characterizes the pregivenness of world-time as captivation in
it. That is, just as consciousness is at rst a mundane concept, so also [is]
time-consciousness. [One has to work a] regress from worldly, intra-temporal
time-consciousness (as a being-in-time [in-der-Zeit-Sein]) to a pre-worldly
time-consciousness. Intrinsic to this situation, then, is the paradox: Start-
ing out from the mundane time-problem. Abandoning the problems
ground. That is, since we already have an implicit but nonetheless denite
understanding of time, an understanding that can only arise in the situation
of being-in-the-world, and since any such time-understanding rst makes
the question of the essence of time possible, the question is whether and how
one can reach an explanation of time that would transcend world-
knowledge, in an overcoming of the mundane level on which problems are
posed and resolved.
As has already been made clear, however, while the overall problem of a
phenomenology and philosophy of time can be stated in general terms, dealing
with the problem cannot remain on the level of general conceptual statement;
it must be done in concrete investigation and in the critical, interpretive recon-
sideration of both the method and conceptualities at work in that investiga-
tion. Accordingly, how the points just given, from an advanced stage of Finks
work, emerge out of that close concrete-bound labor has to be considered
before we can return to those same points in the culmination that was reached
in the Freiburg-workshop years that we are now learning about.
Fink enters work on the inquiry into time at a time when Husserl already
has behind him two full series of investigations, so that we must distinguish
one set of stages in Husserls progress and another in Finks. The basic idea
3. B-VII XV/3b (EFM 2, Abschn. 2), bracketed inserts mine, following the original
key-thought style of the note.
4. B-VII XV/3c.
5. B-VII 3b.
226 Time
of Husserls trajectory of progress is quite straight-forwardly represented in

Finks distinguishing three stages:
(1) the stage of the 1905 lectures, which, however, are conducted on a level
that does not clearly demarcate the difference between the psychological
and the transcendental, that is, with only implicit recognition of the con-
stitutive level of analysis;
(2) the stage of the Bernau research, where transcendental temporalization
comes squarely into view;
(3) the stage just beginning in 1930, where concentration will be put on the
primordial presentwhich, as Husserl works on the matter in new
manuscripts, will be soon regularly designated the living present.
As narrated in 1.2, Fink begins work on Husserls project almost ten years
after Husserls work in stage 2. When Fink nished his dissertation and was
able to work more fully on the issues in the Bernau materials, that is, to go
beyond mainly transcribing and ordering the manuscripts, he began to enter
more into Husserls daily regime; but this also suggests that Husserls return to
manuscript writing on the time-problematic (his stage 3) was at least in part
motivated by ideas Fink was generating out of his labors on the manuscript
material. At the same time, Fink had a trajectory of thinking of his own, as the
ensemble of his notes shows; and this is what will set the framework for the
present chapter, as follows:
(1) Finks ideas for radicalizing the analysis of time in the context of the
dissertation work, 1928 to 1930, and the rst Bernau edition plan of 1930
to 1933;
(2) the new conception of a work on time, Time and Temporalization,
comprising the Bernau manuscripts (part I) and Husserls new studies on
time (part II), 1933 to 1934; then the further revision of this plan into a
comprehensive integrated treatment of time, again in the same two parts,
plus a detailed introduction, 1934 to 1935; Fink is now given entire re-
sponsibility for the phenomenology of time;
6. Not a quotation (except for expressions in quotation marks) but directly based
upon B-I 17a18a (EFM 2, Abschn. 2), and not earlier than 19291930. In a directly
paralleled outline of the same stages in Z-XI 46a, probably from 1933, Fink names the
living present [lebendige Gegenwart], rather than, as here, the primordial present
[urtmliche Gegenwart]. See also Finks 1959 essay, Die Sptphilosophie Husserls in
der Freiburger Zeit, ND, pp. 22025.
7. Not at all unusual, this is precisely what we see in Husserls writing of For-
mal and Transcendental Logic, occasioned by his review of Landgrebes editing work;
see 1.2.
Time 227
(3) Finks reorientation of the whole approach and his writing of a work on
time of his own, 1935 to 1936, leading to his displacement of the entire
problematic in favor of a radically new option, from 1936 on.
5.1. Stage 1: Finks Study of Time and the Bernau Manuscripts

As his prize-essay work shows (see 1.1), Fink had already gained the
basic orientation and the main conceptual resources for the study of time in
phenomenology before he was asked by Husserl to take up the editing of the
Bernau materials. For this to have been possible, he must have had access to
Husserls rst set of time-consciousness studies before their publication in
1928. What is distinctive about this pre-editorial work on his part is the
fundamental problematic that Fink discerns in Husserls time-studies; this is
what will guide the task he then pursues as Husserl assigns him the respon-
sibility of editing the Bernau manuscripts, the work of which in turn is the
setting in which his initial orientations get tested, refashioned, and developed.
In all this too we also can see the determinants that place Finks approach
squarely in the post-preliminary stage of phenomenological critique, recast-
ing, and reinterpretation.
5.1.1. The Basic Time-Problematic

In beginning our treatment it will help to see how Finks approach to
Husserls work contrasts with the interpretative expositions of later scholars
of Husserls work. For example, the expositions of two editors of Husserls
time materials are extremely helpful explications of central insights and de-
velopments on Husserls part. One advance in particular that they show Hus-
serl was making from 1905 to 1917 is his criticism and rejection of his initial
use of a data-sensualist schema in the analysis of time-consciousness. Prior
8. See 1.1, p. 8 and note 27 (in the appendix).

9. For further detail on Finks development, and then on his work with the Bernau
texts, see EFM 1, Einleitung, sections I and II. Note there the way in which Fink was
helped by the work of Oskar Becker, Mathematische Existence, JPpF, VIII (1927):
441809, treating the problem of the transnite in mathematical theory via the phenom-
enological concept of horizon largely as Heidegger handles it.
10. See Rudolf Boehm, Einleitung, Hua X, pp. xxxxlii, and Rudolf Bernet, Ein-
leitung, in Edmund Husserl, Texte zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins
(18931917), Texte nach Husserliana, Band X (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), pp.
xxivliii. See also Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserls Concept of Constitu-
tion, Phaenomenologica 18 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), pp. 74115.
228 Time
to the newer Bernau studies Husserl had already come to see that the inten-
tionality of temporal ow was not at all a process of endowing some neutral
sensuous content with the temporality of an act of consciousness to give it the
phenomenal character of experiential temporality. Retention and protection,
intentional as they may be termed, were thus not instances of the imposition
of sense upon some kind of preset given material. They were rather the very
structuring that enabled all identiable feature-constancies to hold, however
briey, within the ow of consciousness, even the most primitive, such as the
sheer sense-quality (or material), say, of a sounding note, Husserls favorite
example.
Yet Husserl had advanced still further in this same period. In working
through this divestiture of the intentional-sense plus neutral-content schema
via the analysis of the consciousness of the temporal continuity of an appear-
ing object, he also came to see not only that the temporality of consciousness
itself was a process whose analysis above all resisted the application of the
schema but also that that ultimate process could not in general be spoken of
straightforwardly in terms appropriate to the temporality structure of (a) the
objects that came to appearance in it, (b) their appearances thus immanent to
consciousness, or (c) the acts of consciousness intending them. Consciousness
was a time-consciousness not simply because it was awareness of the tem-
porality of objects, or of the temporality of the appearances of those objects to
or in itself, or because its acts directed to objects arose and perdured as them-
selves discriminable unities in time, but rather because it had a more funda-
mentally structured subsistence of its own distinctive kind, because it was
itself, as ow, structured in a unique way that was ipso facto temporal aware-
ness. This consciousness with its own character was absolute consciousness,
the absolute time-constituting ow of consciousness that preceded and con-
ditioned the unity of continuous appearance for all objects in consciousness
(and for all acts of intending turned to those objects via their appearances).
Accordingly, the descriptive terms that originally designate time-features of
objects, or that are used to speak of their constituted appearances in con-
sciousness (or to speak of the acts of intending directed toward those objects in
their constituted appearances), can only have an improper, a metaphorical,
11. Bernet, Einleitung, Texte, pp. xxxvilviii. See also John Brough, The Emergence
of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserls Early Writings on Time-Consciousness, Man
and World, 5 (1972), 298326, reprinted in Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick,
eds., Husserl, Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1977), pp. 83100.
12. Hua X, p. 73 (34). See appendix.
Time 229
sense when used to conceptualize absolute constituting time-consciousness

itself; and this qualication would have to include such terms as retention
and protention. Indeed, in a strict sense, says Husserl in regard to absolute
time-consciousness itself, for all of this we lack names.
The implication here was quite clear to Husserl: Beyond the inapplicability
of the criticized schema (intentional form/sensuous matter), even to speak of
the ultimate consciousness as temporal was questionable. The ow of the
modes of consciousness is not a process; the consciousness-of-the-now is not
itself now. That which retention is as comprised together with consciousness-
of-the-now is not now, is not at-the-same-time with the now, and it would
make no sense to say that it is. Utterly fundamental structures of constituting
time-consciousness, such as retention, are, Husserl asserts, un-temporal,
namely, nothing in immanent time.
This is the issue in Husserls time-studies that is most determinative for the
problematic that concerns Fink. The relationship of the conditioned to the
conditioningof the constituted to the constitutingsets up the problem
that must ultimately govern inquiry that rethinks Husserls investigations in
post-preliminary phenomenology. There is a dangerous ambiguity inherent in
the way time-consciousness is treated if temporality is taken as itself a con-
sciousness, namely, as something that, while asserted to be unqualiedly tran-
scendental and ultimately originative, is nevertheless conceived in terms of
structures that are properly speaking intra-worldly, that is, in the end human.
The problem then is that the consciousness belonging to the human subject
itself is kept in the foreground as the very image of the transcendentally ulti-
mate constituting agent that the investigation is supposed to disclose and
describe.
It is this concern that we nd dominant also in the notes of Finks that lead
up to and follow the prize essay of 1928 in the genesis of his 1929 dissertation,
the nal stages of the writing of which coincide with Finks rst study of the
Bernau manuscripts. For example, if time is not the form of immanence in
distinction from transcendence but is rather the conditioning of the life of
experience in the world comprising both forms integratively (see 4.4.2 and
4.5), i.e., if the temporality Husserl is analyzing is the temporality of the
integration of human being and living in the horizons of the world, wherein
13. ZB (Hua X), 36, p. 75 (ZBe, p. 79).

14. ZB (Hua X), pp. 33334 (ZBe, pp. 34546), emphasis Husserls. While this pas-
sage is in one of the supplementary texts added in the Husserliana edition, and therefore
was not published in the 1928 version, that version does have a passage much to the same
point, if far briefer, at the beginning of ZB (Hua X), 36, pp. 7475 (ZBe, p. 79).
230 Time
time is rst world-time, space world-space, not object-space, then the way
consciousness is temporal in its intending of a phenomenon needs to be rein-
terpreted. One can indeed distinguish matters that are constituents of the
stream of consciousness (immanent objects) from matters to which one
gains access intentionally (transcendent objects) by way of these, but this is
only a start. The fact that the object-sense of phenomenal-stream-held compo-
nents forms up within the stream of consciousness, and that the stream of this
experiencing consciousness is essentially temporal, does not mean that this
experiential consciousness is itself the source and basis of the temporality of
those objects, is the temporal action or power originative of the tem-
porality of all that takes shape and determinacy as appearing in it. For con-
sciousness is itself held and embraced by the temporality that conditions its
streaming. Temporality embraces both transcendence and immanence
because both are embraced by the world, of which temporality is a primary
structuring process. But if time is essentially a structure of the world and for
that reason essentially a feature of this being in the world that has conscious-
ness of it, then the ultimate constituting process of temporality cannot be a
process that is an essential feature of this world-and-temporality-embraced
stream of experience (of lived processErlebnis) constitutive of the en-
tity dened by it, i.e., the consciousness that Husserl speaks of (or, for that
matter, Heideggers Dasein) unless, of course, experience and con-
sciousness are not themselves to be understood as essentially conditioned by
world-horizons and thus not a human endowment.
What is needed here is a resolving of the ambiguous unit, human-conscious-
ness/transcendental-consciousness into its component strata, in order
to distinguish (1) temporality as experienced time (i.e., as internal time-
consciousness), and (2) temporality as primordial constituting action.
Consciousness, in apprehending itself as an entity displaying a dynamism of
two sortsone intentionally engaged with objects in the continuous manifold
of their appearing, the other structuring the continuity itself as a continuity (a
continuity both of that object-manifold appearing in it and of its own perdur-
ance)comes to construe ultimate process in terms of the form that it itself
has come to possess constitutively in that all-structuring process, most notably
in the form of noetic-noematic intentional acts. If, therefore, there is reason in
principle precisely not to assume that ultimate processtermed temporal-
ity in the radicalized transcendental understanding of that term that remains
15. Z-I 155a, datable on the basis of adjacent notes as written soon after Finks discus-
sion with Husserl on July 10, 1929 (Z-I 149); EFM 1.
16. See Z-I 44a, EFM 1.
Time 231
unclear and problematicis appropriately conceptualizable in terms of the

structure of consciousness as constituted by and held within that tempo-
rality, then the analysis of temporality must be conducted in terms other
than those of the intentionality of noetic-noematic correlation. Accordingly,
one of Finks earliest recastings of the conceptual frame by which the analysis
of time-streaming as conscious is done offers a conception of retention and
protention that entirely sets aside structural predetermination from noetic-
noematic content-aiming.
As is well known, Husserl analyzes the moment of actuality as not at all a
pure now totally clean of anything not-now. The moment of actuality is
phenomenologically more than a pure unmitigated now; integrated with it
are both a retentional holding of the now-no-longer actual and a protentional
anticipation of the now-not-yet actual, and he allows that these retentions
and protentions cannot quite be noematic objective correlates to some noetic
artultimately on pain of innite regress. They are rather the very stuff of the
continuity-in-ow of lived process prior to any noetic directional act. They
are the intentionality longitudinal to the ow of lived conscious experi-
ence that binds its dimensions together. Retention and protention in present-
moment actuality are thus the primary structuring condition that makes possi-
ble the secondary action of remembering or expecting in the proper sense,
namely, an act of explicit representative recall or pre-presentative proposal
that, moving into the retained deposit of the now-no-longer or the anticipated
lling in of the now-not-yet, would be noetic to the re- or pre-presentedly
noematic.
Fink nds, however, that this way of putting phenomenologys ndings is
not radical enough. It derives too presuppositionally upon the privileged
schema of noematic content and noetic act-intentionality, without taking into
consideration the fundamentality of the horizonality that preconditions both
determinate content and the act-intending of it. Fink therefore proposes to
orient his dissertation study on those intentionalities that constitute the living
horizons for the experiential present, such as retention, protention, and appre-
sentation. They are neither presentings [Gegenwrtigungeni.e., acts that
intend as present what is actually present in its own appearing] nor presen-
tications [Vergegenwrtigungeni.e., acts that intend as present what is not
thus actually present; envisionings]; we designate them, in a somewhat risky
17. See ZB (Hua X), 38 and appendix XII.

18. ZB (Hua X), 19. In these early studies Husserl initially called retention primary
memory.
19. ZB (Hua X) 39 and appendix VIII.
232 Time
linguistic expression, as de-presentings [Entgegenwrtigungen]. Fink goes

on to remark, in accord with Husserls analyses, that the present [die Gegen-
wart] is neither a pointlike now nor a kind of extensional time-form
but instead has to be understood in terms of a continual process that encom-
passes several phases. Primordial impression [Urimpression] is a kind of
limit that subsists only by continually drawing from protention and con-
tinually passing into retention in a living, streaming temporality; it must
naturally not be conceived as a temporal atom and is only abstractively
distinguishable from the whole process into which it is set, from the full
dynamic reality of the living present [lebendige Gegenwart]. This sets the
context for explaining further the concept of depresenting.
The ground for the step Fink takes here is clearly the descriptive analytic
material in Husserls rst-stage manuscript work on time in the revision done
by Edith Stein that was published under Heideggers nominal editorship in
1928; and Finks 1929 dissertation makes explicit reference to On the Phe-
nomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. But this key passage (9)
in Presentication and Image, introducing this new step, was actually writ-
ten before the publication of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time in mid-1928. The text of this 9 in the dissertation repeats
almost entirely what Fink had nished composing by February 1928 for his
competition essay, except that he does not make reference in that essay to these
time-consciousness studies of Husserls. Husserl had to have made the Stein
revision of his time-consciousness studies available to Fink at some point well
before February 1928; it was his normal practice, and both the content of
Finks summary explication of time and his later reference to the time lectures
as published indicate this. The main thing to note, however, is the fact that
Fink is expressing the move of radicalization that already takes the phenome-
nological analysis of temporality one stage farther before Husserl took him on
as assistant. Fink had gained the insight required for this move quite early, in
the months of thinking about matters of consciousness and temporality that
resulted in the competition essay (that is, in the course of 1927, prior to its
20. VB/I, p. 22, explanatory phrases in brackets mine. Rendering Vergegenwrtigung

by envisaging, as Theodore Kisiel does in his translation of MH-GA 20, History of
the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington, In.: Indiana University Press, 1984),
would be much clearer than presentication and is by far preferable. The only reason
for not using envisaging here is that presentication makes for immediate linkage to
Gegenwrtigung, presenting, and Entgegenwrtigung, depresenting.
21. VB/I, p. 22.
22. See EFM 1, Beil. I, 4.
23. See appendix.
Time 233
actual composition in February 1928). Finally, it is also clear that he had

reached this insight not only via the massive guidance of Husserls rigorous
phenomenological analyses but also through the impact of Heideggers Being
and Time.
This step of recasting beyond Husserl on Finks part consists in a radical
shift of schematic focus by which what has already been laid open in analytic
scrutiny gets looked at quite differently. The before and after, or the
protentional and retentional moments of differentness, now get explored
not as specic discriminated senses (to which there might correspond specic
discriminating acts of awareness) but rather in terms of that special kind of
structure that is one of Husserls main contributions to philosophy, namely,
horizons, horizons of, as it were, intentional value (in this case, temporal
value). They are looked at now as not in any way contentlike features of
sense but rather as latencies that one can awaken by intentional themat-
ization, for example, in various acts of presentication (envisaging)spe-
cically, in recollection and anticipation, in reective awareness of past or fu-
ture experiencing and experienced objects or situations as past or future.
Horizon-forming depresentings [or: depresencings] are not any kind of inten-
tional experience, not any kind of act that in some way rst carries off some
objective something, so that now presentication would be the countermove
against this carrying off. Rather depresencings are a way in which original
temporality itself comes about as temporal processtemporalizes [eine
Zeitigungsweise der ursprnglichen Zeitlichkeit selbst]. Retentional (or
protentional) depresencing is not some determinant in an objects content,
some way of modifying the object and still in some way including it in the
present. The horizonal condition of de-presencing [Ent-gegenwrtigen], i.e.,
of negatively inecting the presentness of the just-now present, is that by
which temporality takes form as temporality in the rst place. It is, therefore,
the condition of possibility for any steady objectness as such; depresencings
constitute the temporal horizons out of which alone something like an object
can come forward as a self-maintaining identity in the ow of temporal
phases. It is essential, therefore, not to see retention or protention in terms
24. Husserl himself calls retention the living horizon of the now in the 1928 publica-
tion, but his analysis never carries this possibility further. See ZB (Hua X), p. 43 (ZBe,
p. 45).
25. Vergegenwrtigung und Bild, Studien, p. 24. Preisschrift, pp. 1415. On render-
ing Entgegenwrtigung as either depresenting or depresencing, see the discussion in
footnote 41 below.
26. VB/I, p. 23, emphasis Finks; Preisschrift, p. [13] (EFM I, Beil. I). See appendix.
27. VB/I, p. 25; Preisschrift, p. [15] (EFM 1, Beil. I).
234 Time
of some kind of intentional ray of determining action, some directive action

by an I-agency. Depresencing is intentional as horizonal, not as in any way
noetically noema-aimed. If one designates depresencing as an intentional dy-
namic, it must be intentionality of a kind all its own, anterior to (and condition
for) egoic action.
The nature of the radicality of Finks move here, and the role Heideggers
thought played in his taking this step, are what show clearly in Finks personal
notes, supplementing the brief discussion in the published dissertation with far
fuller exploration, especially in respect to the implications this has throughout
phenomenology. Recall that the dissertation was to have a sequel in which the
analysis of temporality would be taken up. Fink wrote notes on this second
part during much of the period of his work with Husserl; the need to explicate
the roots for the intelligibility of his rst philosophical work converged and
intertwined inextricably with the rst task Husserl assigned him, editing the
Bernau manuscript texts. The limits to the possibility of doing the latter philo-
sophically would set the limits for the possibility of completing the former.
Husserl was surely not ignorant of this linkage, and perhaps one can see this as
one factor in the choice he made of Fink to be his newand lastassistant.
In one of Finks early notes on time-analysis for the second part of the
dissertation, which he characterizes as my own research, he names both
Husserl and Heidegger as pertinent to it, and puts depresencing at the head of
the list of topics to be covered. In other notes he explores the way depresenc-
ing [Entgegenwrtigung] conditions presentication [Vergegenwrtigung];
for in being grounded in retention, presentication always refers to a de-
presencing and as such is always the movement out into a horizon. But in
this retentional linkage of the not-present with the present that is grounded
in depresencing, one must not think of depresencing as a second action added
to the rst action of presencing, as if what gives the movement of temporality
to time were the combined result of two interlinking actions, presencing and
depresencing. Rather, presentness is actualized in the dynamic, in the ow, but
in this dynamic what conditions presentness in ow, what conditions the ow
to be temporal, is depresencing. Temporal ow is always the dynamism of the
present, but that dynamism of ow as temporalness, its sui generis transitional
28. VB/I, pp. 2526; Preisschrift, pp. [1617].

29. See 1.2.
30. Z-I 45b. 45a is a listing of chapter headings for the projected section II of the
Preisschrift, on neutrality modication, while 45b merely lists topics for section III on
time. No specic topical or textual reference is given in connection with Husserls and
Heideggers names.
31. Z-I 138a.
Time 235
thrust, springs from depresencing. Fink writes: The ow of time is just pres-
encing [Gegenwrtigen], it takes place in time. Depresencing temporalizes
time [zeitigt die Zeitbrings it about as temporal], depresencings are not in
time.
If it seems strange to hear of presencing spoken of as the ow of time, it
becomes less so in view of the way Husserl himself considers the living pres-
ent of time in the manuscript studies he began to produce not long after this,
in the C-group written largely in 1930 and after. Moreover, Husserls early
studies had already made it clear that time is not a kind of divided reality,
divided, namely, between the central phase, the now, as one kind of reality,
and the non-now phases of past and future as another kind of reality ex-
tending out, as it were, on either side of now-reality. Rather, the now-
phase is precisely a phase, i.e., something only intelligible in terms of its
structuring in a dynamic of passage, the other phases of which are intrinsic to
that dynamic as such, even if it is in the central holding of the now-phase that
the other phases function dynamically. Such is how Husserl refers to it in a few
places in Ideas I, despite the emphasis he gives in one of them to the point-
like character of the the actual-moment now.
That the structural whole of time is the structuring of the present as a
living passage is precisely what Fink makes clear in the brief explication of
time in his dissertation, where he uses the expression living present in the
section of text originally written for the competition essay. Curiously, none of
Finks notes on Husserls courses gives a phrasing like living present, al-
though his typed rsum of Husserls Basic Problems of Logic (SS 1925)
mentions it. An expression of that kind also appears in the manuscript text
of the course Husserl taught just before Fink arrived in Freiburg, and we
must certainly assume that Fink considered the expression to be Husserls
32. Z-I 133a, phrase in brackets my paraphrastic alternate of the German phrasing.
33. See Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des Trans-
zendentalen Ich bei Edmund Husserl, Entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik,
Phaenomenologica 23 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 1738. See too Finks
1939 Louvain report, Berichte ber die Transkription der Nachlamanuskripte Hus-
serls, EFM 4, Abschn. 4, pp. [34].
34. See, for example, ZB (Hua X), 38.
35. See Ideas I, pp. 179 and 180 (78, Hua III/1, pp. 167 and 168), and, in a second
text, Ideas I, pp. 19495 (Hua III/1, p. 183).
36. Nachschrift, p. 66, and in Hua XI, 28, 34, 35, and 36. See 1.1, including footnotes
15 and 16 (both in the appendix).
37. Hua VIII, pp. 14950. Held has drawn attention to this text in Lebendige Gegen-
wart, p. 22.
236 Time
own. Nevertheless, when Fink was writing these pages the conception of the
living present did not yet possess the dominant importance in Husserls expli-
cations that it was to acquire from 1930 on.
Furthermore, in determining that, while the present may be the centerweight
of temporal process, the present results from rather than generates its specic
processive character as timethereupon asserting that depresencing tem-
poralizes time, while not itself being in timeFink is taking a point that
Husserl himself had already broached in the studies published in 1928 and
giving it a different specic assignment. Husserl had already asserted that
fundamental time-constituting structures are un-temporal, that is, not them-
selves held within time since they were the elements constitutive of it; but
Fink asserts that it is depresencing that, not itself in time, makes temporal
process both temporal and a process and, accordingly, gives to the living
present its temporal character as living. And Fink knows that he is taking a step
beyond Husserl; his own time-analysis, he writes sometime in early 1929, is
distinguished from Husserls by the demonstration that the intentionality of
the constitution of the complex of time is of another kind. Time is the condi-
tion of possibility of everything objective, but is not itself objective. Time is the
unity of the present and horizons (depresencings). Depresencings are antece-
dent to protentions and retentions. Past and future are not stretches to be
cashed in [i.e., cashed in in terms of determinate content or objects]. If for
Husserl protention and retention have to do with the transformation of con-
tents as seen in their passage from the present, for Fink depresencings as
horizonal are the condition of possibility for presenting itself, for presenc-
ing, for bringing something to presence [Gegenwrtigung].
What is decisive in this analysis of time in terms of depresencings, as that
which constitutes the difference by which retention and protention are dif-
38. One of Husserls Bernau texts of 1917 already analyzes temporality as the living
present (HA L I 20, EFA, Hua XXXIII, No. 14; on this manuscript, see below, p. 263),
but Fink could not have read it before he wrote his competition essay, that is, in the year
before he became Husserls assistant and rst learned to read Gabelsberg shorthand in
order to transcribe Husserls Bernau manuscripts. Expressions like this, however, are also
to be found in other manuscripts of Husserls as well, and in his lectures, e.g., in Hua VIII,
p. 149, which Landgrebe had nished transcribing in the summer of 1924.
39. ZB (Hua X), 36, p. 75 (ZBe, p. 79).
40. Z-IV 23a, explanatory phrase in brackets mine; EFM 1. See also B-III 1516 (EFM
2, Abschn. 2), which mentions Heideggers concept of time as the unity of ecstases as
phenomenologically apt, i.e., in conceiving the future and past specically as horizon-
alities in their integral unity with the now-present.
41. Z-I 143 ab, from the rst half of 1929 (EFM 1). See appendix.
Time 237
ferent from the actual-present in the now, is not to take depresencing as a

looking forward or backward projected out from the now. Coeval with the
actuality of the now, the horizonal depresencings are that by which now, not-
yet-now, and no-longer-now are dimensions (topoi, wheres, are ways
Fink terms them) for specic determinate time content to be otherwise than
now, otherwise than presentyet with the now, of the present otherwise than
present. Time-horizonsin the form of depresencingdo not exist rst (as
if there were temporal sequence before time!). Instead, in the all-at-once
coming about of the whole structural complex of (experienced) time as the
product of ultimate constitutive process, time-structural originalness lies in
the time-horizonal, not in the time-contained; the modulational role of de-
presencing is originative of the temporality of the temporal rather than the
positional function of presenting, even if the (depresencing) horizons are not
actually there without the latter.
Here is where one nds the effect of Finks reading of Heidegger. For Hei-
degger, in Being and Time, emphasized the need to analyze time precisely as
horizon. The long text just referred to comes from a series of notes among
which is found Finks corrected and recorrected tentative draft for an ac-
knowledgment of ideas he was led to by his study of Heidegger. What Fink
drew from Heidegger, however, is not a set of alien concepts to be forcibly
amalgamated into Husserlian results but rather phenomenologically critical
stimulus to look at Husserls own analyses for elements that allow the radical-
ization that the phenomenological program in principle aims for and requires.
Thus the presence-inectional horizonality that Fink seeks to explicate is one
found latent in Husserls own analysis of ultimate temporalization; but to
explicate it as constitutively fundamental means to proceed in a critically
transformative renewal of the analysis of time, and it leads to the critical
displacement of certain dominant Husserlian tendencies. At the same time,
Finks explicating the presence-inectional horizonality of temporality within
the frame of transcendental phenomenology will reect the critical stance Fink
takes with respect to Heidegger (chapter 3). For Fink presence-inectional
horizonality cannot have its source in the constitution of human being; it is
instead the presence-inectional locus in terms of which and within which
human being is itself constituted in the world, and functions therein. Presence-
42. Z-I 145a146b, EFM 1.

43. See, for example, BT (SZ), division II, chapters 3 and 4. Heideggers conception of
time as projection is also at play in Z-I 145a146b, the complexity of which has not
been represented here.
44. Z-I 143b; see 2.6.2.4.
238 Time
inectional horizonality thus has to be explicated by taking together (a) the

way (human) subjectivity is constituted in the world and (b) the way the world
itself is constituted. This is the ensemble of matters that has to be explored in
the critical refocusing that internally unfolds the realm of the problem at
the core of Husserls phenomenology of time-consciousness.
5.1.1.1. The Constitutions Carried On in Temporality

General Orientation
At the point where discussions between Husserl and Fink on the phe-
nomenological analysis of time began to take place with regularity and inten-
sityi.e., late 1929 (see 1.2)Fink had become familiar with both the time-
consciousness publication of 1928 (ZB, Hua X) and the Bernau manuscripts,
and Husserl was about to give regular and sustained attention once again to
the analysis of time in the C-group manuscripts. Finks notes from 1928 to
1929 show him working out the implications of his early recasting of tem-
porality in terms of depresencing horizonality, in contrast to Husserls main-
taining his base for time-analysis in the starting-point paradigm of thematic
object-intentionality. Fink, however, realizes that conceiving temporality in
terms of a kind of intentionality and analyzing it accordingly cannot be
simply a given; intentionality is instead an initial determination whose real
sense has to be critically resituated and reexamined.
Husserls concept of intentional constitution was threatened by an idealistic
mire if the transcendental subject were construed in any way as a single actual
being that produced, and discharges from itself, all other being. If constitu-
tion was not to mean make, effect, engender, produce, and if the
antecedency of the transcendental subject to the world were such as could not
be properly conceived as an antecedency of causation but one that is inten-
tional, then the intentionality to be asserted of fundamental, temporally
constituting subjectivity had to be thought through in further careful and
critical investigation.
Accordingly, protention and retention are recast not simply as modica-
tions of the paradigm act-intentionality of perceptual action (or of thematic
recollection and imagining) but as radically different from it. Despite the fact
45. The phrase is from Finks report on activity (Ttigkeitsbericht) of August 26,
1934, EFM 2, Abschn. 3.
46. One of the C-series, C 8 I, dates from October 1929 (cf. HChr, pp. 35152), but the
rest range from 1930 to 1934.
47. Z-IV 1a (EFM 1), rst of a series of notes on analyzing subjectivity and temporality
in this folder. Dates in the folder range from late 1928 to mid-1929.
Time 239
that de-presencing [Ent-gegenwrtigung] is a lexical derivation from an

assumed privileged presencing [Gegenwrtigung], the protentional and re-
tentional horizons here do not gain their operative value from presenting, as if
the latter is achieved rst and depresencing is then a modication of it (e.g., a
shading off, in the Husserlian image of Abschattungen). One may character-
ize in that way the content that is held retentionally or protentionally, but
the horizons of depresencing themselves are quite another thing. Far from
being the negative derivative from the centering hold-in-presence of an object
that perception effects, they are intrinsic to the total possibility of the hold in
the now precisely as dynamic and owing, rather than as frozen and static.
They are thus not mediated but unmediated factors; they are not subordinate
supplements to but conditions for the very thing from which they might other-
wise be considered to derive.
The pivotal implication of this is that a non-egoic constitutive process-
character distinct from the egoic has to be acknowledged, together with the
priority of the rst with respect to the second in regard to constitutive tem-
poralness as such. Fink writes: But passive constitution is still always I-con-
stitution; i.e., insofar as passive constitution is a presenting action [Gegen-
wrtigen], the I that always essentially belongs to presenting action can be
awakened. Transverse intentionality [Querintentionitt] as such is I-inten-
tionality. I and object are the two poles, and necessarily co-implicative poles,
of transverse-intentional constitution. Time-constitution proper is I-less. In
another but in some way similar sense, the I is only possible in a horizon of
time, is a being that is constituted as identical in time-horizons. If the
identity and constancy of the I is itself conditioned by time, then the structur-
ing that is time cannot be the consequence of some action that springs from the
I as act-center. The temporality-structuring condition of depresencing is un-
qualiedly I-antecedent. Here, corresponding to the distinction between pres-
encing (or presenting) and depresencing (or depresenting), the subjectivity of
consciousness divides into the egoic action of constitutively determining some
object-theme within temporalityi.e., thematic intentional experience
and the pre-egoic temporalizing that conditions that egoic action. The most
primary intentions are the time-intentions, of which intentional experience is a
modication, writes Fink.
48. Z-IV 27; see also Z-IV 12a.

49. Z-IV 24ab, EFM 1.
50. On the sense of these two renderings, see 5.1.1, note 41 (in the appendix).
51. Z-IV 8b9a, EFM 1. This note also treats of the In-Stances, which the next
section will be taking up.
240 Time
Here one has to resolve an unrecognized ambiguity in the terms past and
future. We have to distinguish between the past and future that are the
horizons of depresencing from the lling [Fllung] of those horizons in the
form of actual experiences, each of which takes place in the present of actu-
ality. In this sense, the horizon of the past, for example, is a pre-past [Vor-
vergangenheit] that cannot be reduced tosimply cashed in in terms of
the specic experiences one can bring back in recollection. The horizon of the
past is not experiential lling that stretches back indenitely but is rather
that depresencing which gives the temporal character of no-longer, to such a
thing, for example, as ones earliest memory. In other words, one has to
distinguish those temporal features found in subjectivity that compose the
intentionalities of human agent consciousnessexperiential lling gained
(and anticipated) in the now of actualityand those temporal features that
make human agent consciousness possible in the rst place, i.e., the time-hori-
zons, and that therefore cannot be considered either a product or a constituent
of that agent consciousness.
At this juncture of reaching a certain measure of distinction and clari-
cation, however, a serious difculty arises. When I as phenomenologist
necessarily in the action of a particular human personreect upon the struc-
ture of my immanent life and try to analyze time on the basis of the temporal
proceeding of that same immanent life, I try to grasp this immanent temporal
process cognitively. I cast it into a cognitive frame, into thematic objectness,
into the form of a discriminable item with the structuring coherence and
identity of an actual experiential lling, which in principle means in the
form of something in the world-frame, in this case, something within the
sphere of the reective interiority of a being in the world. This means that
the structuring work of the proto-constitution of ultimately conditioning
temporality is being brought to thematic identity, to evidenced eidetic deter-
minacy, in the form of something which is essentially conditioned by tem-
porality, rather than as temporality itself. But if this is so, then this truly
ultimate transcendental factortemporality itselfcannot come to the fore
in its true native transcendent ultimacy beyond/prior-to/not-in time. What,
then, does this analyzing of dynamic transience as the conditioning by which
52. Z-IV 9ab. This way of describing presencing as lling is not entirely of Finks
manufacture; it is implied in the distinction of empty and lled intentionality already
in LU II/2, Investigation 6. Moreover, Husserl comes close to an idea much like the
present one in Grundprobleme der Logik, Nachschrift, p. 49 and passim, Hua XI 30,
p. 143 (see also p. 303). See 1.1.
53. See 2.6.22.6.2.1, 4.3, and 4.4.2 for the interpretive rethinking that leads to this
point of principle.
Time 241
depresencing structures the now of actuality in the integrated owing hold, in

the now, of the no-longer and the not-yet, achieve in the end?
Finks explanation is this: Genesis is the temporalization of time [die
Zeitigung der Zeitthe bringing-about-of-time-as-temporal], and genetic
elucidation lays out for us the self-temporalizing time [die sich selbstzeit-
igende Zeittime bringing-itself-about-as-temporal], not some kind of se-
quence of actions or performances in time. But to articulate this temporaliza-
tion of timethis non-event, non-action, non-performance itselfone nds
that the conceptualizing of the temporality of ones own experience of the
temporally concrete, of the experiential intra-temporally integrated coherence
of not-yet and no-longer in the nowthe concrete happening of ones temporal
conscious lifeis laid back over upon the non-happening genetic origina-
tion of that same in-time experienced happening. To put it another way: Rather
than presenting a full-edged positive philosophic-phenomenological analytic
answer to the question of what ultimate constituting proto-temporality is,
we are confronted with the essential problem in the question. In this horizon
of this enigmatic structure of retro-applicationthe structure which leads to
the place where the ground for possible questioning falls awaythe philosoph-
ical problem of time must rst be posed, as well as that of the a priori.
This is the very difculty Husserl had already recognized, in nuce, in the
material published in 1928, namely, that the originative surge itself, out of
which, on the one hand, the horizonal structuring of phenomenal determinacy
conditions the owing sense of a thematic object and, on the other, the experi-
ential, subjective intentional hold upon that sense in its owing modulation
operates as the ray of focal activation, is not properly describable in the terms
proper for articulating the in-time elements thus structured by it, i.e., within
the temporality-dimensions which that originative surge gives rise to. Just as
is the case for the human psyche that the phenomenological reduction initially
concentrates on to begin the regressive investigation of pure subjectivity (see
2.6.2), so also is time-consciousness as humanly experienced the starting point
of the investigation into ultimate temporalization, not the nal goal; that goal
can only be reached, here more than anywhere else, by recognizing the full
otherness that the ultimate originative source in principle possesses. The step
of regression that brings this one measure closer in terms of concrete structural
elements is precisely the recognition of the fundamental role of depresencing
horizonality.
To distinguish the intra-temporal from the time-horizonal, and to shift the
54. Z-IV 10a, phrase in brackets in quoted material mine. See appendix.
55. ZB (Hua X), pp. 33334 (ZBe, pp. 34546), referred to in 5.1.1.
242 Time
focus for the identication of the temporality of timethat is, its dynamic ow
characteraway from I-conscious thematic intentionality, is a step of counter-
ing the construing of subjectivity in too restrictively human a fashion. By
shifting the question of the kind of being this subjectivity has to the framework
of horizonality one is able to recast the question more properly by just that
measure. Fink writes: Transcendental subjectivity is determined in its kind of
being wholly and entirely by depresencings. These latter are the constitutive
intentionalities through which something like a world is rst possible, but they
are also the constitutive conditions for the possibility of intra-worldly subjec-
tivity. In unity with presencing [Gegenwrtigung] they comprise the transcen-
dental phenomenon of time. . . . It is precisely in the unity [a.] of times carrying
off and [b.] of the present that [the transcendental phenomenon of time] is
phenomenologically demonstrable and has to be interpreted.
To put it another way: If the determinateness in intentional experience
accrues to the concrete sense of an appearing from the intentionality of the act
of presenting, then retention and protention cannot themselves be the simple
retaining of no-longer acts of presenting and the anticipation of not-yet
acts of presenting. For if the fundamental structure originative of the tem-
poralness of temporality is taken as analogous to or explicable in terms of the
temporally proceeding intending act in which determinate object-like content
is apprehendedrather than as sheer depresencing horizonalitythen the
temporalness of this level will be grounded in and originate from a second,
deeper-owing temporalityand Fink sees this very tendency in Husserls
manuscripts, despite Husserls own awareness of the difculty.
Since, therefore, we can never nd temporality otherwise than as tempo-
rality experienced, that is, as occurring within the parameters that structure
human consciousness and human life, i.e., since the analysis of temporality
must always be conceptually articulate as a retro-application of in-time
conditioned elements and structures, it is imperative to follow the movement
of originative unfolding that underlies the manifest in-time, in-the-world phe-
56. Z-IV 11a, emphasis Finks, the bracketed insertions mine (EFM 1); see also Z-XV
LXXII/2d (EFM 2). In this note Fink is equally critical of Husserl and Heidegger, in that
each in effect cashes in the depresencing horizons in terms, respectively, of presenc-
ing and ecstases. Fink thus qualies the approval of Heidegger he expresses in B-III 16;
see 5.1.1, note 40.
57. Thus to make retention analogous to presentication (Vergegenwrtigung), as
Bernet shows Husserl to do in the 1928 publication (ZB, Hua X), is precisely to make it a
kind of act of presenting (Einleitung, Texte, pp. xlixl; see note 10 above).
58. See Z-IV 3a, EFM 1. Husserls awareness of this difculty shows especially in the
Bernau manuscripts; see 5.1.2.2.
Time 243
nomenon of act-intentional experiencing of the phenomenal back along the

line of conditioning that makes that experiencing possible, in the full complex-
ity of factors integrated in it. With horizonal depresencing now proposed in
its fundamental role, the next moment to consider is that of the factor that
stands squarelyand multidimensionally integratedin the moment of now-
actuality in which presencing lls in the otherwise purely formal temporal
ow. This is the moment that Fink names In-Stance.
5.1.1.2. The Constitutions of Temporalitythe In-Stances

The reinvestigation of time Fink is taking up proposes that the proto-
temporal be explicated out of horizonal depresencing as the kind of con-
stitutive factor that though itself not in the temporality dimension of the
world, is nonetheless of that dimension. The horizonal as such, however,
applies in two correlative directions, namely, to what comes to temporal for-
mation (a) as a determinate something (the transcendent) and (b) as deter-
minate experiencing itself (the immanent). It is this latter that initially sets
the terms for explicating and interpreting time in phenomenology, and so Fink
must explicate as well the way temporal horizonality functions in the determi-
nations of experiencing in order to unfold the properly critical perspective
within which to speak of proto-temporality itself, in other words, in order
to articulate analytically the processes and structures of constitution.
The movement of the radical reworking of regressive disclosure can be
thought of as having three stages. There is, rst of all, the reduction that
everyone is familiar with from Husserls main published writings, namely, the
move that goes behind the object to its constitution, namely, behind that
which appears as standing in noematic oppositeness to a noetic subject, be-
hind the Gegenstandthe Counter-Stance (one could say the Encounter-
Stance). At the next stage the reductive move discloses the constitution of the
world, namely, the realization that the world has to be explicated as not-
an-object (and not a sum total of objects) but rather as horizonal, as the
Around, the Umstandor better, the Circum-Stance. Finally, the move
is made by which the phenomenon of experiencing itself (including its reec-
tive immanence, especially as reective inquiry into its own transcendental
conditions) is analyzed in the manner of its constitution, not as an object
(Counter-Stance) and not as the Around (Circum-Stance), but rather
as the In-StanceInstand. The sense of Finks adaptation of this word,
59. See 4.4.3.

60. See Z-IV 119a, EFM 1.
244 Time
Instand, which is not used independently as a noun in modern German usage,

is perhaps best put paraphrastically: the way of stationing in the world, of
being thereby structured temporally, in which that being that nds temporality
to be the essential structuring of its own being is an actual concrete being.
Finks threefold schema of reductive progression makes clearly distinct
(a) the constitution of worldness [Weltlichkeit] and (b) the constitution of
being-in-the-world [InderWeltsein], even if this does not mean that these
constitutions are separable; for they are both accomplishments carried out
in function of proto-temporalization. But this distinguishing of the constitu-
tion of the worldness of the world from the constitution of being-in-the-world
is intrinsically bound up with post-preliminary phenomenological reinterpre-
tation in a unique way. The In-Stance is a conception meant to hold integrally
within its signication explicit recognition of the methodological issue at the
heart of the theory of transcendental self-critique that is Finks single most sig-
nicant achievement for Husserl, namely, the Sixth Meditation (VI.CM/1).
Phenomenological regression to absolute constitutive origins, the ultimate aim
of phenomenologys program from Husserls Ideas I on, proceeds by the phe-
nomenologists developing conceptual articulation for the disclosure of those
origins in derivation from, and in intuitive evidencing in, the temporally
thematized temporal experiencing of things in the worldi.e., within the
conditions of all-compassing Circum-Stance (the world-horizons)that is the
life of ones own conscious being as In-Stancial. Transcendental originative
constitution can only be conceived of as proto-temporalization by retro-
applying the structures that I as phenomenologist nd to be in play in my
own experienced living being in the worldin time-consciousness, to use
the canonic term of Husserls long, three-tiered investigations into time. The
legitimacy of this reductive-regressive retro-application depends directly upon
making clearas much as may be possiblethe way human being relates to
the transcendental ultimate of origination, a relationship that has to be essen-
tial to both (a) the basic constitution of human being as such and (b) the
functioning of ultimate transcendental constitution as such. Lastly, this special
role will be understood, and the nature of transcendental constitution ex-
plicated properly, only if the dimensions of being-in-the-world and being-in-
time that are explicitly looked into are not reducible simply to being-an-object
in the world and in time, in either perceptual experience orespeciallyin
reective thematization.
Finks dissertation had formulated in general terms the nature of this rela-
tionship (later to be expressed forcefully in Husserls Crisis-texts). In
61. See Z-IV 11a (EFM 1), quoted in the previous section.
62. Cf. Hua VI, 54b.
Time 245
Finks rethinking the natural attitude, not in terms of implicit beliefs about
the nature of objects or the metaphysically absolute being possessed by the
universe but as the essential situatedness of human being in the world (see
4.3), the natural attitude comes to have the positive status of the sum of self-
apperceptions of transcendental objectivity and belongs to the very meaning
of constituting life. The transcendental subject necessarily nitized itself into
man. . . . The natural attitude, as the being of man in the world in all its modes,
is a constitutive result and as such an integral moment of transcendental
life itself. This same interpretive principlean example, one must add, of
the speculative articulation of a feature intrinsic to phenomenological in-
quiryis reformulated by Fink in the present context by his asserting that
the self-objectivation of the transcendental subject for itself is not just a
matter of making it into an object [Ver-gegenstndlichung], but rather the
envelopment in In-Stances. Transcendental structures do not just come to
appearance as elements to be observed in objectivation, i.e., as objects over
against a scrutinizing subject. Their functioning as constituting power and
process takes manifestable form, in actuality and being, precisely as and in
the experiential life of human being-in-the-world, which is the basis for reec-
tive investigation. What is reected upon in phenomenological inquiry, viz.,
the life of human experiencing in the world, must, therefore, bear a relation-
ship in principle to transcendental subjectivity in the structural and func-
tional ways in which consciousness subsists constitutively in the setting of
being-in-the-world and fundamentally via modalities that are simply not
objectlike.
The delineation and analysis of In-Stances, therefore, done in full counter-
ing of both naturalistic-order (scientic) as well as philosophical presupposi-
tions, will show two features. It will be (a) as comprehensive in its disclosure as
is the nature of situatedness in the world, and (b) it will emphasize the non-
objectlike character of In-Stancial structureswhich includes as well moving
beyond an intention-relationship schema limited to thematizing action aiming
at the phenomenologically objective. Thus on the rst point Fink writes, The
world is the sum total [Inbegriff ] of the In-Stances in which transcendental life
stands; and on the second: The self-constitution of subjectivityi.e., as
In-Stancescan be explained neither in terms of object-constitution nor
without the idea of a constitution that is a-presential.
63. VB/I, 5, p. 14, emphasis Finks.

64. Z-V VII/2b, EFM 1.
65. Z-IV 18b, EFM 1. See the texts cited in the last lines of 4.4.4, and the alternate
interpretation of Inbegriff in note 134 there.
66. Z-V VI/4a, Finks emphasis; EFM 1.
246 Time
Yet if the In-Stances are the modes of the self-constitution of absolute

subjectivity, then the truly fundamental way of dening them is to conceive
them as time itself, or, better, that which makes time into the temporality of
human existence [Zeitlichkeit menschlichen Daseins].
The In-Stances are not simply one of the many features of human being that
arise in the course of long natural and cultural development. They are not
simply one of the many self-construals that compose the self-interpretive por-
trayal of humanity to itselfe.g., the conception of humans as a biological
species kindred to the anthropoid apesconstruals that arise genetically (in
the phenomenological sense) in the stream of the experiential consolidation
and habitualization of sense, and that are open to investigation as an inten-
tional tradition in genetic analysis. The In-Stances have a character quite
different, in that in them the very featuring of time as temporal is constitutively
structural: they are the way the temporalization of timedie Zeitigung der
Zeit, the bringing-about-of-time-as-temporalis displayed, and active, in the
form of human experiential life. This is how the shift on Finks part to a
horizonal conception of temporalization becomes so telling: it allows grasping
the constitutive functioning of temporality in a way that is not tied to the
productive capacities of human being as specically human agency.
The issue, however, is not quite so simple; temporality is not exclusively
horizonal depresencing, even if its temporalness is originatively indicated by
that horizonal effect. Temporality also has the actuality of the present, and
that brings Fink to the difculty of integrating this actuality of the present, the
very structural core of I-ness for Husserl, with the horizons of depresencing
expressed succinctly in this formula: Original time is nothing other than the I
in the concretization of its In-Stances.
If the I is taken not as in-time generated contente.g., as some concrete
aspect of perception or remembering, in immanent streaming either as noetic
or noematicbut as embracing in the now both the actual and the pro-
tended not-yet and the retained no-longer, and therefore transcending sheer
now-ness, then in the streaming integrative encompassing of all threei.e.,
of not-yet, no-longer, and nowthe I has a kind of not-in-time character.
67. Z-IV 8a, EFM 1. This note also points out the nature of genetic clarication as
not about a still-to-be-discovered rst action, in a sequence of events in a stretch of past
time. It is rather, for example, a matter of analyzing what it means that there is no
beginning, that to begin in the world is simply what In-Stance names, with no
allusion to a pointin any sense, temporal or spatialof beginning. See 2.2 and 3.5.
68. Z-IV 44b, emphasis Finks; EFM 1.
69. See the full train of thought in Z-IV 44ab, EFM 1.
70. Z-IV 54b, emphasis Finks. For more on this see 5.2.2.2.
Time 247
Nevertheless this transcending character of the I accrues to it by virtue of

these horizonal dimensions. That is, if the I is taken in terms of an act per-
formedby which selection and thematic focus are actualizedthen the I-of-
acting, in its standing action, is conditioned by these horizonalities rather than
standing as that out of which those same horizonalities themselves spring. In
other words, the present is perhaps not an In-Stance in the same sense as the
past and future. The present in its owing, in its becoming new and becom-
ing old, executes the lling by which the actual is materially determinate,
while the horizons of depresencing are the conditions for lling to take place
in the specic temporal values of past and future.
In other words, the formal structure of temporality must be integrated
with structural considerations that give concreteness (a feature intrinsic to
Husserls analytic practice in investigating time). The In-Stancial element of
lling, of material content, is presencing, while the In-Stancial element
of owing (thereby supporting the constancy of hold on determinate
content-sense in that owing) that horizonally conditions that lling are the
depresencings of not-yet and no-longer. These two kinds of elements (presenc-
ing and depresencing in the not-yet and the no-longer) are In-Stances with very
different orientations and have quite different structure and function, one
corresponding to Husserls transverse intentionality of act, the other corre-
sponding to his longitudinal intentionality of retention and protention.
Neither subsists without the other, but they are not equals. And their interplay
will always happen concretely, i.e., with a lling that is historically specic
and determinate in the full comprehensive structure of In-Stancial features
which is what now has to be given more detail.
That the originative process of temporality is only actual in its constituting
process in concretization and nitization in and as the stream of living that
makes up human subjectivity is expressed by Fink when he writes: The pos-
sibility of such a thing as an object rests on the comprehensive whole of In-
Stances. Only in the integrated structural whole of In-Stances, history
birthbeing-there-with [Sein-bei]fatedeath, can experience [Erfahrung]
rst happen. In other words, In-Stanciality is not just part of the form
71. Z-IV 8b9a, EFM 1. See also 5.1.1.1 and appendix.

72. See Z-IV 27b, where Fink reects on the topic of 5 in the Introduction to VB/I
(Studien, pp. 14ff.). Finks adaptation of Heideggers mode of expression is more pro-
nounced in this note than in the corresponding text in the dissertation.
73. Z-IV 55a, emphasis Finks (EFM 1); see also B-III 44 (EFM 2, Abschn. 2). In Z-IV in
general, and in 55a in particular, Fink words his idea using Heideggerian terms for the
temporal: ecstasis, the ecstases. The manner of his adaptive reinterpretation of these
248 Time
of temporality but is rather, again, the I in the essential concreteness of the

situation of standing temporally in the world. In-Stancially the I is not
an empty polar moment but the I of enworlded, temporalized, concrete
nitude. The In-Stances are limit-structures not in the sense of one specic
content-determination that circumscribes another but rather as the concretely
manifold nitude that an actual being living within horizonality as such will
structurally, constitutively possess. The horizonal parameters of depresenc-
ing are delimitations for any concrete, content-determinate, temporalized life
and experience taking place within them.
Pure consciousness, then, the stream of experiencing conceived as transcen-
dentally pure, may preclude being construed in terms of a beginning and an
end, but an actually living and experiencing temporal stream will possess
endedness [or: nitudeEndlichkeit] precisely in living and experiencing
within horizons. Horizonality is its nitude, writes Fink, so that it is intrin-
sic to the living stream of human being that it begin and that it end.
What is clear in Finks rethinking of Husserls work on time-consciousness is
the rich inuence of Heidegger, and we shall have to point out the radical
modulation by which Fink recasts Heideggerian conceptions in terms of the
overall problematic that governs his work for Husserl. This is something that
has to be done in different contexts as we proceed, for example, in the very
next section. As we move to that, what must be emphasized is the uncondi-
tional way that Finks concept of the In-Stance asserts and reinforces the in-
the-world character and status of human being precisely in the special station
human being has in regard to the transcendental absolute of temporalizing
world-origination. It is in this perhaps that Finks thinking most denes it-
self in distinction from both Husserls and Heideggersone of the essential
points of this book.
5.1.1.3. Temporality and the Problem of Origin

In the usual phenomenological language of Husserls publications tran-
scendental agency is spoken of as a world-transcending subjective abso-
lute. Moreover, in its initial presentation as transcendental pure conscious-
ness it was spoken of as in principle able to exist without the world; indeed,
terms in Finks use cannot be taken up in detail here, although the essential difference will
be explained in 7.2.1 and 7.2.1.1. See also Z-IV 8a9b.
74. See Z-VI 9b and, in a further point that directly involves intersubjectivity, Z-VI 30a.
75. Z-IV 11b, EFM 1.
76. Z-IV 130a.
Time 249
as the power that constituted the world, it had no intrinsic need for it. In
post-preliminary phenomenology, and in keeping with Husserls later recon-
sideration of his initial presentation, Fink has to reconceive the status of the
transcendental constituting absolute in relation to the world quite differ-
ently. The worldlessness of the transcendental subject, he writes in his
notes, is not some kind of being-outside-the-world on the part of that subject,
but is rather its being-prior-to-the-world. And he continues: The transcen-
dental subjects anteriority to the world is not an intra-temporal antecedency,
not a genetic antecedency in an intra-temporal sense. The antecedency of
transcendental life over world-apperception (In-Stanciality) is an antecedency
that is regressively given. It is only from the world-bound situational subject
that the reduction regresses to the worldless subject.
Regressively given antecedency is not to be confused with the antecedency
of apriority.
Here the principle of reduction-governed regression in phenomenological
investigation is made methodologically precise. For phenomenology the dis-
closure of transcendental constitutive origins is exclusively a one-way route of
access: they can only show from within already familiar matters within ones
own experiencing that are what they are precisely as the result of transcenden-
tal constitutive origination. We have seen how this governing methodological
principle of regression allows the phenomenological critique of Heideggers
fundamental ontology (3.3.1), but Heideggers work is not subjected to crit-
icism and then simply rejected. Rather, it receives a fundamental legitimation
in its offering rich material for integration into the Husserlian transcendental
problematic, precisely as descriptive work countering the natural attitude con-
ceptuality that may remain still unexamined within phenomenological regres-
sive explication. Nevertheless, where the concrete parameters of human being
and experience are examinedthe structures that Fink calls In-Stances in
manifest analogy to Heideggers inquiry into existentials what is essen-
tial for transcendental inquiry is that these structures be explicitly understood
in terms of the problem that is intrinsic to them, namely, how in them proto-
77. Ideas I (Hua III), 33, 49, and 50.

78. See 2.6.1 and 2.6.2, and 4.2 and 4.3. One should note, however, that, strictly
speaking, what transcendental consciousness does not needand what is thereby enter-
tained as annihilated in a counterproductive tactic inconsistent with the overall point
of the whole chapteris the world considered as in itself. In actuality, transcendental
pure consciousness stands with all worldly transcendencies, namely, as constituted
within it (Ideas I, p. 113, Hua III/1, p. 107).
79. Z-V VII/6a, emphasis Finks.
80. The analogus relationship shows implicitly in Z-IV 8b.
250 Time
constituting process, viz., the intentionality of proto-temporalization itself,

becomes able in principle to come to evidence regressively.
As the previous section began to show, the In-Stances are the structural
ways in which an actual consciousness, an actual subjective life, is concretely
placed in a determinate station or stance in the world, that is, in world-
temporality as temporal process itself experienced. They are the waysthe
only ways phenomenologicallyin which proto-temporality can be appre-
hended by a reective turn upon that streaming life of experience. That is, the
In-Stances are transcendental proto-temporality under the guise of concrete
realization in actual human experiences, in that the retro-application of the
conceptualization of experienced temporality constitutes the only thematiza-
tion possible for originative transcendental proto-temporality.
This is the situation within which the characterization of temporality as
transcendentally antecedent is made. Fink puts it nicely in a graphic image
from mining engineering. Rather than presuming to begin with an already
manifest absolute subject and go on from there to construct the world, he
writes, phenomenology must proceed inversely: Every path to deep constitut-
ing strata is dismantling [Abbau], retro-movement [Rckgang], regress [Re-
gress]. It is of maximally central import, now, that an individual analysis of
detail always be seen in terms of its starting-point and its situation. The regres-
sive situation (the boring site for deep analytic drilling) is an essential struc-
tural element of the boring itself. But, as was explained in 3.5, the a priori in
question here, rather than being epistemological, i.e., the condition of cogni-
tive coherence and access, is that which makes for constitutive coherence in
being, that is, for constitutive coherence in being as structured out as appear-
ing, as being that is possible only within the horizons comprising the world.
The reduction, then, is precisely the reversal of constitutive origination under
these conditions for being by its explicit use of retro-application.
Ultimately, too, the question of constitutive origins reaches far beyond the
frame of individual interior psychological life; it is inquiry into the a priori of
origin for experiencing itself as happening temporally. The question of the a
priori is the question of the intrinsic determination of time itself, the constitu-
tive moment of temporality.
Yet to attempt the explication of the intrinsic determination of time itself,
the genetic elucidation of self-temporalizing time, is precisely to propose
moving beyond the temporal condition within which all reection must pro-
ceed; and that, in effect, is to strive to reach in reection the point where the
81. Z-V VII/15b, EFM 1.

82. Z-IV 53ab, EFM 1. See 5.1.1.1.
Time 251
ground for possible questioning falls away, the point where one faces a
nothing! In the disturbing question of origin one comes up against the limits
in the depths of human being itself, leading to the shaking of all solidity of
ground. In principle, to reach for the ultimate coming-about of temporality,
the temporalization of temporalness itself, would amount to going back be-
hind the In-Stances, to loose oneself from them in an ab-solution. This
loosing could no longer be an existential bearing [Verhalten]; it is a leap
behind oneself taken by reection, in which one faces the falling away of
ground [Abgrund], the non-ground of the nothing [Abgrund des Nichts].
It is the task of phenomenology, writes Fink, to venture the leap into
the depth of the non-ground, the abyss, that opens up beyond all being and
beings and to wrench the non-ground/abyss of this nothing out of the
emptiness of its subsistence in dialectical conceptuality into being experienced
in the philosophical question.
Eventually we shall have to zero in on precisely what this move in the non-
ground can mean for the phenomenological program; it is the meontic once
more announced, but not yet brought to focal center. Before it can be taken
upin chapter 7there are a host of other matters to pursue, and in particu-
lar, here in this chapter, the way the constitution of the world gures into the
inquiry into proto-temporal origination.
5.1.1.4. Temporality and the Constitution of the World

The nal theme to take account of in the set of basic ideas through which
Fink tried to formulate the fundamental problematic of time-analysis in post-
preliminary rethinking draws from all the reinterpretive ideas so far repre-
sented, namely, the task of expressing intelligibly how the origination of the
world takes place in the constitutive process of proto-temporalization, in the
coming-about of the temporalness of temporality.
To begin with, we have the disclosure that temporality and spatiality are
horizonal structurings of the pregiven world, embracing both transcendent
and immanent being, embracing both appearing-to and experiencing-of.
Nonetheless, in that phenomenological analysis also shows temporality as the
integrative ow-character of the coincident moment of experiencing and ap-
pearing, as the multidimensional unity of not-yet, now, and no-longer that
embraces all the world-horizonal determinants applying to all appearing and
all experiencing, it is temporality that must be taken to indicate ultimate
83. Z-IV 10a. See 5.1.1.1.

84. Z-IV 57b, EFM 1.
252 Time
transcendental phenomenological origination. Accordingly, it is depresencing

in temporal ow-horizonality that offers the principle guide for characterizing
originative proto-temporalization. Let us see how.
Fink asks: But how is time-horizonality itself to be described when all
available concepts have intra-temporal sense? And he proposes in answer:
We can dene depresencings as Enthalten. Enthalten has a twofold sense:
(1) hold back, [detain], (2) hold in, include [contain]. In this sense futural
horizonality holds [enthlt, i.e., holds-back/holds-in: detains/contains] the
future. However much temporality is easily imaged spatially in diagrams,
by which before and after get in effect conceptualized in terms of separa-
tion and distance, temporality is really qualitative in its ow-character. The
ow-dynamic of temporalness is a change of value in terms of presence and
depresencing, not of dispersion or passage from one place to another. So also
horizonality in general is not a distribution of places but rather the condition
whereby specic lling is concretized as (held-)in-timenot-yet, now, no-
longeror (held-)in-placehere, there, near, far, etc. the holding (in the
double sense: hold-back/hold-in) of which is itself not the action by any such
concrete in-time or in-place Something. Since this is the way horizons have
constitutive effect for the temporal (and the spatial), i.e., for what is in the
world horizonally, Fink has to try to elicit out of horizonal containing-and-
detainingi.e., depresencingthe conceptual terms by which the origina-
tion of those horizons in proto-temporalization, and the coming-about of
temporalness as such, can be expressed.
To do this, to nd embodied in horizonal depresencing the very mark by
which to derive a characterization of the originative moment itself, Fink tries
out a range of terms with one special advantageous feature. Origination as a
meaning connotes capability, power, and dynamism. In place of the term
horizon, then, which is static, Fink starts speaking of depresencing as the
swing of time. The problem of the world-totality is the problem of the
swinging of time [Zeitschwingung], so that, as this world-totality is a total-
ity of depresencing, the transcendental subject would be originative precisely
in unfolding the world in the dynamic of its time-swings [im Schwung ihrer
Zeitschwnge]. Moreover, in that the horizonal as depresencing is a range of
the always further, the always more, the always held back, the world is a
85. Z-V VI/9ab, EFM 1. The words in brackets are proposed translations as close to
suitability as one might get. See the correlative treatment in 4.4.1.
86. Z-V III/4a and /5a, EFM 1.
87. Z-V III/2ab. Emphasis all Finks.
Time 253
phenomenon of passage (swinging). World is horizon, i.e., range of play

[Spielraum]: the alternating condition of nitude and innity.
Finally, the conception of the world as the totality of time-swinging also
has to cover the relation of time and time-content, which is the problem of
the intrinsic unity of time-swing and intra-temporality, of transcendental
time and the time of ordinary experience in the world, vulgar time. The
time-swingings are the pure detaining-containings of the world [die reinen
Weltenthaltungen] that rst make containedness [or: contentnessInhalt-
lichkeit] possible. Time-swingings as depresencings are conditions for
coherent, continuing appearance and experience in the owing actuality of
presence. Spatiality, for example, is not a set or sum of places but rather the
proffering of places, the pure possibility of being situated-in [Einstellbar-
keit]. What the present is for temporalityviz., the modality for the lling
that is actualitythe thematically focal is for spatiality, namely, the modality
that breaks or stops the swing of temporality; and together these are the
present. In a word, time and space are llability. In lling, in the consol-
idation of sense in owing coming-to-genuine-presence, in the esh, we
come to Finks strongest formulation: A being as the break in the swinging of
time. The swinging of time is thus pure breakability.
In these dissertation-period notes of Finks there is a radical recasting going
88. Z-V III/5a. The rst phrasing is: Welt ist ein bergangs-(Schwingungs-)phnomen.
89. Z-V III/13a.
90. Z-V III/12a.
91. Z-V III/12b.
92. Z-V III/10a.
93. Z-V III/14a. See the text from VB/I, p. 11, on Einstellung in 4.3, p. 185. There is
a contrast between Finks idea here and Husserls in Grundprobleme der Logik, Nach-
schrift, p. 54, Hua XI, 30.
94. Z-V III/3a and /14a, and Z-I 153a, both in EFM 1. The idea of seeing space as
integral to time is by far not alien to Husserl, who frequently speaks of the two as a
couple. What Fink does, however, is to give this integrality an originative conception. It
should be realized that Finks proposals on lling also answer to Husserls aim in his
Bernau manuscripts to achieve a phenomenology of individuation within the analysis of
temporality. See 1.2, p. 15, and the letters mentioned in footnote 60.
95. Z-V III/3a. On lling, see 5.1.2.3.1 and footnote 292 in 5.2.3.2; and on this idea
of das Seiende als Bruch der Zeitschwingung, see the analogous idea in MH-GA 29/30,
p. 252; individuation is one of the themes of Heideggers course and pertains to this idea
of a break. This passage, however, was in one of the four sessions that Fink missed (U-
MH-IV 53; not in EFM), though this does not exclude the possibility of his having heard
of the points given in them in another way.
254 Time
on in several ways. The rst, most obvious one, given the treatment so far, is to
develop a way of characterizing transcendental constitution otherwise than in
terms of the psychological or epistemological components in which subjec-
tivity is traditionally conceptualized in the modern period. Reection on im-
manent experience, in other words, opens out far beyond the merely Carte-
sian internal realm; it discloses of its own structure all that embraces it to give
it its hold upon and place within the region of being as appearing. Secondly,
Finks exploration of alternative conceptions for the character, structure, and
functional play of temporality offers options for rethinking originatively
i.e., in terms of the originative play of proto-temporalization as suchnot
only past, present, and future, the standard triplet of time, but spatiality,
actuality, and possibility. We have seen something of this for the time-triplet
and for spatiality, but actuality and possibility remain to be reconsidered
against the seemingly indelible Leibnizian imprint with which the modern
tradition has accepted these concepts (even in Husserls work). Is there not,
Fink therefore asks, in the streaming of temporalized experience a horizon of
the temporal always (timelessness), which is depresencing in pure fantasy,
the constitutive condition of possibility for ideal objects, etc.? In contrast,
when analyzing the structure of temporality for presencing one is examining
how actuality is constituted. But actuality [Wirklichkeit] is not something
that ows from the character of the object itself; it is rather that which accrues
to it from the condition that make its presencing-presentation possible. Actu-
ality is not primarily a mode of objectiveness, but rather a mode of temporal-
izationas is then, too, possibility. The classic triplet of past, present, and
future may pertain to actuality, may designate the mode of temporalization for
the actual, but can there not also be a proper temporalizing mode for the
essentially non-actual, namely, possibility? This mere mention of possibility as
another dimension (or horizon) of temporality will have to sufce here. It will
be dealt with further in chapter 8 when the ideal, the eidetic, is considered in
the phenomenology of language (8.3).
Lastly, in the recasting under way, one has to notice the distinction between,
and the intertwining of, the two levels of origination. To the rst pertains the
96. Z-I 127a, EFM 1. The two terms here are Immerzeitigkeitthe temporal
alwaysand Zeitlosigkeittimelessness. Their meanings are determined in op-
posite ways, one by totalizing, the other by negating, to characterize the same phenome-
non, namely, the temporal character of a thematic object that is not determined in terms
of the temporal triplet for the experience of the actually existent. See also Z-I 129ab and
the notes that follow it.
97. Z-V III/9a, EFM 1. In Z-V VI/39a possibility is alternately named de-
actualization [Entwirklichung].
Time 255
question of how constitutive factors contribute to the formation of deter-

minacy and manifold meaning for what appears in or happens in the temporal
stream of experience in the worldthat is, the origination accruing consti-
tutively from the horizons of depresencing in integration with presencing; and
regarding the second level it is the question of how those factors themselves
originate, namely, in the coming-about of temporal process itself as tem-
poral. What Fink is trying to achieve is to prevent thinking of either origina-
tion in terms of the kind of antecedency that natural in-the-world origins
display. A before-and-after conception applied to either process of origina-
tion will be in principle misleading. The regress to origins that reaches to
temporal process on either level is not a regress to structures and processes that
are antecedent in time or place or causal inuence, i.e., according to the man-
ner of in-the-world antecedency, but rather to the wholly sui generis order in
which the consolidation of appearing and experiencing, in sense and being,
occurs. It is an order of effectuation that is named intentional but re-
mains primarily indicated rather than defend. Originatively considered, a dy-
namically maintained whole, as any in-the-world entity or process will be,
relates to its origin as internal to the multidimensional eld of experiencing-
and-appearing within which it comes to coherence and consolidation, and not
as something applying to it externally from another domain or another
point in time or space. Here, in the question of how, within a something, its
origins are etched in the very structure of its manifold integrality, is where
overcoming conceptions that tend to spatialize time (or, mutatis mutandis,
any horizonality as such) takes on such importance. This is especially neces-
sary in regard to the question of the interrelation between the dimensions of
the present, the past, and the future, all of which, dynamically considered, are
together in the now, not deployed out from it in any way. The dynamic of
these three dimensions of time is what counts, namely, that they are moments
of a non-spatial ow. The second level of origination is more difcult yet,
though the principle is analogous, as the present section shows. Here in the
question of the radical pre-temporal coming-about of the temporalness of
temporality as such the issue is, again, the problematicity of the only pro-
cedure of characterization possible, retro-application. That is, the issue is
explicating the originated by seeing constitutively within it a moment of ante-
cedency that as originating is in principle free of any featuring belonging to the
originated, save that of its originativity.
98. See the remark on genetic in 5.1.1.1, footnote 54, in the appendix.
99. See the rst two paragraphs of 5.1.1.1, with the reference to Z-IV 1a.
100. See the text from Z-IV 112b, cited in 3.5.
256 Time
One other point of signicance in regard to conceptually articulating the

character of origination concerns Finks choice of swing-terminology for
the purpose. This exploitation of lexical resources does not seem to be entirely
of his own doing. Though none of his notes alludes to a specic source, one has
to suppose he was inuenced in it by none other than Heidegger. There is a
striking similarity between the vocabulary Fink uses here with what Heidegger
employed in a particular section of his last lecture course in Marburg before
returning to Freiburg. More than that, Fink uses this similar terminology in
regard to the same philosophical points: that horizonality has to be given
dynamism as the temporalizing factor, and that the dynamism results not only
in the temporality of particular consolidated appearings but of the whole
region of appearance as such, the world. One can hardly doubt that Fink had
got acquainted with this particular expression of Heideggers ideas; the only
question is, how? There is no evidence that Fink attended any of Heideggers
lectures at Marburg; in fact he was following a full complement of lectures in
Freiburg that summer semester of 1928 when Heidegger was giving this lec-
ture course in Marburg. Finks exposure to this material of Heideggers, there-
fore, would seem to have to occurred in Freiburg itself. The notes of Finks in
which this swing-terminology rst appears are those from the year of Hei-
deggers rst lectures in Freiburg, but Finks notes from Heideggers courses
show nothing of these expressions. There remains, then, either the freer in-
structional setting of Heideggers seminar (Philosophical Exercises, as these
are termed in Finks registration records), or personal conversations (the most
likely circumstance)or possibly the exchange of notes among students from
the two universities. In any case, here too it seems legitimate to see the
openness to ideas from Heidegger that typify Finks thinking, that is, a willing-
ness to take these ideas as proposals for working out issues in the program of
phenomenological investigation, and not as alien imports to be grafted forc-
ibly onto Husserlian stock.
What we have seen so far in the immediate context (5.1.1 to the present
section) are the basic directions of the thinking along which Fink was working
as he moved from his studies prior to taking up the assistantship with Husserl
to the work of editing the Bernau manuscripts while working on his disserta-
tion (i.e., in 1928 and 1929). There is a decisiveness in the overall orientation
he was taking, in post-preliminary phenomenology and in certain of his ideas,
specically those laid out in 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2, but the ideas pursued in
5.1.1.3 and 5.1.1.4 were being tried out, remaining far from nalized. Yet
101. MH-GA 26, 12, specically pp. 26870.

102. See appendix.
Time 257
through all of these ideas Fink remained keenly aware of the methodological
problem that both determined and critically tested them all, namely, the prob-
lem of describing the originative out of the features of the originated. In
the further progress of his work with Husserlpresented in the rest of this
chapterwe shall be seeing more on all these matters. Yet it also must at least
be mentioned that there are other themes that Fink realized needed to be
brought into the present problematic. Of these the main one is the role of the
dimension of intersubjectivity as an In-Stancial factor. Chapter 9 will
take this up specically later, but here at least one should note that there was a
conjunction of concern about this in the pivotal winter semester of 1928
1929, when Heidegger gave his rst lectures as successor to Husserl and Hus-
serl offered his last course, terminated early. The place of the Other gured in
both these courses, in Heideggers as one of a number of themes, and in
Husserls as part of the principal topic, empathy [Einfhlung]. What Fink
himself works out, in the three-way encounter that was his study of phenome-
nology, is in keeping with the directions of rethinking being followed here. The
question of intersubjectivity requires moving past initial phenomenology as
required by methodologically conscious critique and the radical inquiry into
time. Rather than seeing intersubjectivity in terms of a transfer of signi-
cance (say, onto a second someone rst perceived as a bodily object) at the
level of self-conscious recognition of ones own supposedly complete human-
ness, i.e., at the level of the transcendentally reduced primordial sphere
construed in terms of act-intentionality), the transfer-factor that is the com-
munalness of basic human structures has to be seen as already in effect antece-
dently, namely, at the level of the horizonal In-Stancial determinations in
which alone the continuum of specic acts performed for oneself or for an-
other can proceed.
There is another point, however, that comes to the fore in Finks remarks on
the In-Stance of intersubjectivity, namely, that his position is also a critique
of the presentialism dominant in Husserls analysis of time. Fink is quite
clear about the central point of this criticism: Husserls starting approach into
the problem of constitution is presentialist insofar as the present is alone the
temporal mode of originarity. In fact the displacement of presentialism is
103. Cf. Z-V V/2b, Z-IV 87ab, and U-IV 4445, all in EFM 1.
104. Cf. MH-GA 27, 1820, and see 1.2, pp. 1314.
105. Z-IV 88a, EFM 1.
106. See Z-IV 87a88b, EFM 1. See 5.2.3.1.
107. Z-IV 90a. This is one of the main points in Finks resituating of the treatment of
intersubjectivity in his revision texts for the Fifth Meditation. See 9.1.1, as a start.
258 Time
already being pursued in the radicalized time-analysis that we have been fol-
lowing, and it was one of the tasks Fink saw to be necessary as he began work
in the Bernau materials.
5.1.2. Stage 1: Finks First Revision Plan for the Bernau

Manuscripts
The distinctive character of Finks collaboration with Husserl was re-
counted in 1.3, but at rst the task Fink had received from Husserl to work up
the Bernau manuscripts into a coherent text did not differ in kind from what
other assistants had done. For all of them it was genuine research. Unlike
philological or expository work done once a philosophers life is closed by
death, that is, unlike the editing done on texts (published or unpublished) that
remain behind when the arc of the thinking that produced them has ceased,
the task of Husserls assistants was to take up and consolidate the investiga-
tional thinking in his manuscript texts rather than treat them as its sacred
nalization. They had to work with the texts so as to help to bring to fruition
the measure of insight into the issues with which they engaged for the sake of
further thinking; the focus was to be on the issues, not on the texts as texts.
This is what Husserl himself told Ingarden when he initially asked if Ingarden
would undertake the editing of the Bernau manuscripts. It is also what
Husserl himself did when he took up again the inquiries conducted in earlier
research manuscripts. And this always ended in his writing yet more new
ones.
Fink describes the work of assistants as taking the mass of these research
studies and integrating them, adjusting them to some same level of analysis,
bringing their diversity to consistency and coherence, and then making their
ideas accessible by whatever tactful rewording would retain their meaning
108. An earlier, fuller treatment of the matters in 5.25.2.2 appeared as The Revision
of the Bernau Time-Consciousness Manuscripts: Status QuaestionisFreiburg, 1928
1930, Alter, revue de phnomnologie, 1 (1993), 35783. Some points in that article are
corrected in the present sections.
109. See EJ, pp. 37 (EU, pp. VXI), and Ingarden, ed., Edith Stein on Her Activity as
an Assistant of Edmund Husserl, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22
(1962), 15659.
110. See Finks report on activity (Ttigkeitsbericht) of August 26, 1934, EFM 2,
Abschn. 3.
111. BIng, p. 154.
112. See Ingarden, Edith Stein on Her Activity, pp. 15659.
Time 259
while diminishing over-complexity and obscurity. Then these revisions had

to be referred to Husserl himself for approval. This involved a substantial mea-
sure of rethinking on the part of Stein or Landgrebe, and now Fink; but what
began to happen in Finks case was a greater measure of cothinkingor, as
Fink put it, using a favorite expression of Husserls, of co-philosophizing.
What Fink understood rethinking co-philosophically to mean he makes
quite clear: it was not to read the manuscripts for what they offered as a
solution, but for what they gave as a way to pose the question anew, or, as Fink
more accurately put it, to internally unfold the realm of the problem to
which the manuscripts were on their way. And this in turn meant both
pursuing ones own work of investigation supplementing Husserls manu-
scripts and providing the scientic systematizing and methodical illumina-
tion of the analytic work, that is, broadly comprehensive reection on the
principles of the system and methodology of phenomenology. By the time
Fink wrote this statement about his work for Husserl the understanding of
phenomenologys system and methodology was well in hand (cf. 2.3, 3.3.3,
3.4.2, and 3.5.)
One implication of the methodological systematic that was always a vig-
orous element in the thinking Fink did with Husserl is that interpreting the
phenomenological sense of the ndings of a single manuscript requires bring-
ing a lot more to it than is contained in it alone. One has to grasp how a
particular texts detailed ndings addresses the problem at issuethat is, at
what level of analysis it stood and in what stage of critical refashioning
then how that same problem is dealt with in parallel manuscripts, and how
the issue and achievement in those several parallel approaches t together
in systematic coherence. But this means as well that phenomenology does
not consist straightforwardly and simply of descriptive work; or, to put
it another way, it is in synthesizing retrospective upon phenomenologys
work as a whole from the standpoint of more fully achieved self-unfolding
and self-systematization that the genuine sense of a particular text will be
113. See again Finks Ttigkeitsbericht of August 26, 1934, EFM 2, Abschn. 3.
114. A unique intellectual relationship, as Fink characterized it, which grew into a
collaborative arrangement (Fink, Lebenslauf of December 18, 1945, in EFM 4,
Abschn. 4). On Husserls use of cophilosophizing see pp. 5354 in 1.3; cf. also the
letters to Heidegger and Schutz referred to in footnote 213 there.
115. Again from Finks Ttigkeitsbericht of August 26, 1934, EFM 2, Abschn. 3,
p. 455, emphasis his.
116. Ibid.
117. See Finks 1959 paper, Die Sptphilosophie Husserls in der Freibruger Zeit,
ND, p. 220.
260 Time
interpretable. In other words, Husserls manuscripts have to be taken as more

advanced starting points that could be more than mere repetitions only if
material and methodological critique explicitly guided the renewal; only then
can more radically probing explication of the structure and sense of a phenom-
enon in question be achieved.
This is how Fink in fact worked and is what made his work both participa-
tion in and instigation for the further development of the phenomenology of
time that we nd in the nal writings of Husserls retirement years.
5.1.2.1. The First Revision Plan

The text situation for the Bernau manuscripts is rather complicated. In
the 1928 publication The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, the rst part, The Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time from
the Year 1905, did not consist simply of the lectures from 1905. It contained
rather the lectures as revised and amplied in the light of Husserls reections
in the years following 1905; and this revision was done by Edith Stein in 1916
and 1917 using Husserls own manuscript modications and additions.
Moreover, for the second part, Addenda and Supplements . . . from the Years
19051910, Stein had included materials from beyond 1910, including por-
tions of the latest manuscripts Husserl had produced by 1917. In fact some
two-thirds of the material in these Addenda and Supplements is drawn from
Husserls Bernau work. This all caused some complication for Finks task,
but that was not where the real problems lay. The real problems were philo-
sophical problems.
It is curious that Finks actual text-work on the Bernau manuscripts did
rather little revising and hardly counts as an elaboration; and from a philo-
logical point of view his transcriptions are not very faithful at all. In them he
continually reworks the text, modifying or reordering the wording, replacing
one word with a near synonym, smoothing the grammatical ow, and so forth,
rather than bringing it to stand in an original purity. Sometimes the change
makes for a signicant shift or sharper focusing of the text; but what he does
not do is produce a coherently unied single text by synthesizing the individual
manuscripts (or portions of them) into a whole in the way Stein and Land-
grebe produced, respectively, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time and Experience and Judgment. Instead, Fink lets the individual
118. See Boehms Einleitung, Hua X, together with Bernets Einleitung, in Husserl,
Texte (18931917), pp. xilxvii.
119. See appendix.
Time 261
manuscripts stand, although sometimes curtailing their length; and he does

not include all the Bernau materials, leaving out portions besides those that
had been part of the 1928 publication. What he does do, however, is to put
them in a particular order. Fink seems to have wanted the texts to remain as
texts, to be taken as steps and stages on the way to an adequate analysis, rather
than as an advanced achievement and a nished analysis. What we have to do,
then, is discover how Fink intended to situate the texts in the whole project of
analyzing time by what he would say about them in some form of an Intro-
duction, which soon took on far more importance than the Bernau texts
themselves. This seemed to be how Fink would make clear the nature of the
dominant issue, the problematic, that Husserls Bernau work was engaged
with and that carried beyond the texts themselves.
One of Finks own declarations on this, a note from the spring of 1929, is a
helpful explanation. What Husserl wanted the revision to do, Fink writes, was
to draw out and elaborate what he [Husserl] sees to be the most important
advances vis--vis the Time-Consciousness of 19051910, specically res-
titution of the Brentano-Aristotelian doctrine, in phenomenological deep-
ening of the problematic of individuation as exhibited in the new diagram-
ming of time, and reaching as well to the theory of the temporality even of
ideal objectsthis latter pertaining to Landgrebes editing of materials on
Transcendental Logic. In contrast, Fink wanted to take up what he called
my own problematic. Here he had to go beyond Husserls desiderata to
emphasize the new and essentially better working out of details on retention
and protention, especially in their distinctiveness against the contrasting
character of presentications. These points will be at least touched upon
as we proceed, and some will be taken up extensively. What needs high-
lighting now is the contrast in primary focus between Husserl and Fink,
which, while conforming to the whole thrust of the exposition in chapters 2
and 4, shows its deepest incisiveness in this: Husserl accentuates the pres-
encing moment of presentication [Vergegenwrtigung], while Fink asserts
the special constitutive character of retentional-protentional intentionality as
depresencing [Entgegenwrtigung], providing therein the basic consideration
for addressing the question of niteness in the stream of consciousness.
120. Z-IV 76a, EFM 1. Fink also mentions the question of the beginning and end of
the stream of consciousness (see 2.2, the last paragraphs of 5.1.1.2, and 5.1.1.3) as a
matter of something merely thinkable (see VB/I, 25).
121. E.g., on individuation, see 5.2; on the temporality of the ideal, see 8.3. On
Brentano-Aristotelian doctrine, see the last point in 5.1.2.3.3.
122. See also 4.5.
262 Time
This is what orients as well Finks handling of Husserls manuscript texts. If

we look at Finks plan for the ordering of the manuscripts themselves, and then
take note of the points he planned to cover in his Introduction at the stage of
his rst conception of their signicance in phenomenology, i.e., by the spring
of 1930, we see rst of all that he places the Bernau texts in the context of the
whole trajectory of Husserls program of time-analysis up to that point. In
the rst stage, represented by the 1928 publication, the analysis turned mainly
to the already constituted stream of immanent time. Even in Ideas I (1913),
which explicitly adopted the constitutive standpoint, we only nd a rst level
of constitutive inquiry; Ideas, particularly in respect to the question of the
world, set aside inquiring into the constitutive sources of immanent temporal
consciousness. What the Bernau writings do, then, is to go one level deeper
and inquire into the constitution of immanent time itself; and in taking these
texts up for revision Fink helps Husserl enter his third stage, that of genetic
explication in terms of the primordial living present. For Husserl this nal
inquiry into temporality will be the most radical and successful, and as he
pursues it it will continually affect Finks work of revision.
For the Bernau manuscripts, then, Fink sees his task to be to lay out the
second-stage manuscript material so as to make clear the deeper probing set in
motion in it: Transcendental time is about nothing else than transcendental
consciousness itself with respect to its primordial genesis [Urgenesis]. But
this means something for Fink that, even while Husserl could agree with it
basically, has implications that Husserl might have difculty accepting. The
basic idea of the Bernau analyses, writes Fink in explicating the conscious-
ness of internal time, is its peculiar kind of being. For Fink, to inquire
into the radically different structure of time-genesis is not separable from
questioning with equal radicality the kind of being to be found there. This was
exactly what Fink planned to do in the nal part of his dissertation, so that as
he worked on the Bernau materials he was working out how he might con-
clude the project he had begun as a dissertation.
In that extraordinary meeting and clash of thinking in Freiburg when Hei-
degger succeeded Husserl in the rst chair of philosophy, Fink could nd a way
to characterizeand problematizeboth positions by a single rubric that
expressed what was at the heart both of his own work and of the editing task
123. See the three-stage schema drawn from B-I 17a18a (EFM 2, Abschn. 2), given in
5.1.
124. B-I 3a4a, 16a, and 35a; and Ideas I (Hua III), 8182.
125. B-I 36a (emphasis Finks), EFM 2, Abschn. 2.
126. B-I 31a, emphasis Finks.
127. See, for example, Z-I 89ab.
Time 263
Husserl had given him: Being and time is the basic formula for transcendental
philosophy. Being and beings are always only understandable in terms of the
horizon of time. And in continuing this note Fink raises the problem that lies
at the center of both Heideggers fundamental ontology and Husserls tran-
scendental phenomenology. If time is the condition for the possibility of
experience, then one has to ask: But does not time itself also exist? Heideg-
gers basic problem. And Husserls too! And a central issue for a theory of self-
conceptions for, after all, developing an adequate self-conception is
what both fundamental ontology and transcendental phenomenology basi-
cally consist in.
This question of the kind of being transcendental subjectivity will have in
consideration of the horizon of time as the horizon of ultimate genesis is what
we see behind the order in which Fink arranged Husserls Bernau manu-
scripts. While we cannot detail and interpret every manuscript, several need
to be singled out, the rst of which is the one that Fink chose to stand at the
very end, in the place of culmination for the whole set; for it is the one that
Fink nds offering not a conclusion to the analysis but rather the maximum
opening to its more radical recommencement.
In the manuscripts opening consideration of my stream of experience and
the I, Husserl speaks of the continuity of living presents that makes up
any particular stretch of immanent time and is the horizon surrounding
the point of full presence. This point of primordial presence [Urprs-
enzpunkt] is not something independent but is only the focal point of a
horizon that is inseparable from it and a point of the full present [Gegen-
wart]. In moving more deeply into time to see how this integrality comes
about, Husserl wants to home in on utterly egoless tendings wherein the
formation of horizons lies, the level of original time-consciousness in abso-
lutely passive intentionality. Here any idea of a pole of reference, not for
any particular individual moment of interest in the stream of time but for all of
128. Z-IV 58a, emphasis Finks. See also the 1939 Louvain report, Berichte ber die
Transkription der Nachlamanuskripte Husserls, EFM 4, Abschn. 4, p. [5].
129. Given in B-I, Beil. I, p. [2], EFM 2, Abschn. 2.
130. EFA B-II 24450 (EFM 2, Abschn. 2), Hua XXXIII, pp. 27480 (Text No. 14). In
his arrangement of the manuscripts Fink uses this theme as its title. The typed transcrip-
tion shows many modications of Husserls original wording.
131. EFA B-II 24445, Hua XXXIII, pp. 27475. For the nal expression in this
quotation Husserls manuscript text has a point in the full time of presences [Prsenzen-
zeit]. In the larger passage here Finks modications reduce the presential punctualism
of Husserls phrasing. See 5.2.3.1.
132. EFA B-II 246, Hua XXXIII, p. 276. Husserl writes simply passive intentionality
as an independent phrase, without qualifying it as absolutely passive.
264 Time
the stream, for the whole of experiencing, which therefore would be above
time and itself not temporal, is the idea of that for which words like I no
longer can be used. It cannot be called a being, for it is the antithesis to all-
that-is [allem Seienden], not an object [Gegenstandcounter-standing some-
thing] but the proto-standing something [Urstand] for all objectness [Gegen-
stndlichkeitcounter-standness]. The I here ought not mean I, ought
not mean at all, for then it has already become an object. It is rather the
Nameless, something simply functioning. This needs to be thought about
more, Husserl cautions; it lies almost at the limit of possible description.
How, then, can reection apply to this all-integrating non-object X
still called problematically I? It is supposed to be non-temporal, and
yet can only be reectively found as actually functioning in time (as en-
temporalized, as Husserl would say in certain C-texts, but not here), in the
form of active notice directed to the constituted and busy with it. Then there
accrues to it a temporal obtaining [Bestand], and this is what shows to
reection the direction to the functioning I which now, in reection, becomes
an object as an identical center of function. It is as concretely intending a
specic constituted something that there is a basis for reectively positioning
this X-I thematically as an object of eidetic, cognitive grasp.
Yet Husserl asks, How can what is not an object become objective, how can
that become apprehensible which is not temporal but supra-temporal, and
which can only become temporal in being apprehended? And he answers:
Because it belongs essentially to the structure of the experiential stream that
in the experiential stream precisely this sort of thing comes on the scene and
can always do so. Yetand this is crucialfor the non-temporal to
become temporally active and concretely manifest to reection is a becoming
[Werden] of a totally different order from that of everything that has to do with
experience; it is not a mere happening like any other in the stream of time but
an I am doing, I am performing on the part of the pole in question. And
this polenumerically identical, for all times temporal points . . . and
experiencingshas the absolutely identical meaning I, an identity of form,
133. EFA B-II 247248, Hua XXXIII, pp. 27778 and note 2 on p. 278, emphasis in
the text itself. Next to this passage Husserl writes a most interesting remark that Fink did
not include in his transcription (Hua XXXIII, p. 78, note 1): Being [Seiendes] as
individual being, bound to a locus in time and individualized by it. The I is thus not in
being [Das Ich so nicht seiend].
134. B-II 248, Hua XXXIII, p. 278.
135. Ibid. The angled brackets mark a phrase of Husserls that is dropped by Fink in his
transcription.
136. Ibid.
Time 265
as it were an ideal identity that is again and again localized temporally, in its
acts and its states, and yet is not actually temporal.
This (rather Kantian) transcendental I at the deepest level of the analysis of
temporality is something Husserl will hold to throughout his subsequent
work, and it is one of the points both strongly criticized by Fink and rein-
terpreted in a quite different fashion. In this regard the question has to be,
Does Fink nd anything in the Bernau manuscripts that reveals more about the
problematic character of this nameless all-unifying agency than Husserl
notices and asserts in the Bernau texts, so that an opening is made here that
calls for further critically reasoned interpretation of the matter?
5.1.2.2. Prime Elements in the Bernau Manuscripts for

Motivating the Move Beyond Them
Fink offers us a clue to answering this question in asserting, as we saw,
that Husserl in the Bernau manuscripts works out the details on retention and
protention in a new and essentially better way, so as in particular to bring
out their distinctive character in contrast to presentication. Where Hus-
serl works the most on retention and protention is in the large manuscript,
New Attempt to Clarify the Structures of the Consciousness that Constitutes
Temporal Objectness, that opens the third section in Finks arrangement.
Here Husserls problem is one of the principal questions of his whole inquiry:
In what way does the structure of the time-ow of consciousness itself con-
stitute the self-awareness of consciousness as temporally owing? Or, in other
words, is it possible that the being of the ow is a perceiving-of-itself as
temporality? If the way to understand time is to discover its structure as
ow in the very being of consciousness, and if, as Husserl writes in this same
manuscript, consciousness is itself a streaming, itself has a temporal being-
form, then the great question is how this process of time-ow is conscious
of itself in the very structure of its owing. And the problem is heightened by
the fact that for Husserl the process of being conscious must be in some way a
constituting act, and not simply a passive registering of some already struc-
tured phenomenon.
137. EFA B-II 250, Hua XXXIII, p. 280.

138. See the points from Z-IV 76a in the previous section.
139. EFA B-II 263315. See appendix.
141. EFA B-II 31213, Hua XXXIII, p. 45. Fink modies stream [Strom] to stream-
ing [Strmen] in his transcription.
266 Time
As another manuscript makes clearTime and Time-Modalities,

as Fink names itthe self-awareness of temporality cannot be a time-
objectivating apprehending, either added on or built into the time-ow
structure itself in some way. For in either case self-consciousness in the form
of an actual perception would have to be itself in turn constituted in a tem-
poral constitution, and that simply opens an innite regress. The only re-
maining possibility is that a non-objectivating, i.e., not-thematizing, aware-
ness be in itself as conscious of itself, a constituting process for itself that
requires no other process of temporally ordered constitution for that self-
awareness. Constituting process must be an ultimate proto-process whose
being would be consciousness and consciousness of itself and of its tempo-
rality. How can this be made clearer?
Leaving aside Husserls consideration of the various options in New
Attempt . . . , we should go directly to his nal attempt there at a resolution,
for that is the one that Fink nds deeper and more critically necessary. Essen-
tial to this is that temporality not be taken as some kind of content added to
the content-ensemble comprising some object of intentional focus; it is instead
a formal factor. The now, for example, is a form of the content. Or, as
stated in Time and Time-Modalities, temporal characteristics are formal,
i.e., characteristics that have to be independent of the particularity of the
content. Content-determinacy remains basically the same as structuring in
temporal form proceeds, as time ows on.
Husserl delineates carefully the relationship between the form and the
ow. Time as the encompassing form of objective stretches of time is xed
and does not ow, Husserl writes. It is precisely the xed identity in the
ow and is nothing without this ow. Thus time itself does not ow,
rather, modes of givenness ow in it. Time is the ow of all presents, the
continuous coming forward and sinking away of all presents. If, then,
142. EFA B-II 11530, Hua XXXIII, pp. 181203 (text Nr. 10), and pp. 203207
(Beilage V, from the middle of the manuscript). Finks transcription lacks Hua XXXIII,
pp. 194/3197/15.
143. EFA B-II 118b19a, Hua XXXIII, p. 188.
144. EFA B-II 120b21a, Hua XXXIII, p. 191. This passage is also quoted, and under-
lined, by Fink in B-III 12 (EFM 2, Abschn. 2).
145. EFA B-II 264, Hua XXXIII, p. 210. See also B-II 305, Hua XXXIII, p. 36.
146. EFA B-II 129b, Hua XXXIII, p. 202.
147. From another manuscript in the second division in Finks arrangement, On the
Theory of Time-Modalities, EFA B-II 110a, Hua XXXIII, Text No. 7, p. 136.
148. EFA B-II 115b, Hua XXXIII, p. 182 (Text No. 10 again). See also B-II 304, Hua
XXXIII, pp. 3536.
149. EFA B-II 110b, Hua XXXIII, p. 136. All the lines from which the quoted material
Time 267
time-ow itself is not in time, could the consciousness of time-ow itself be

conditioned by time-ow? Or is time-consciousness a character of time-ow
itself in its very formal constitution? In either case it cannot be via a kind of
presenting; for then as presented it would become something in time and
conditioned by itwhich again begins an innite regress.
In the end, however, Husserl takes a new tack: he turns to protention as
his starting point instead of retention, which has dominated his analyses of
temporal ow up till now. Shaking loose somewhat from the well-worn tracks
of explication centered on retention (and its analogy to presentication in
memory), where holding onto content is featuredi.e., a kind of retentive
presentingHusserl now looks at the dynamic of ow in analogy to the pro-
cess of the lling of empty intentionality. Working in terms of form, he con-
siders a special kind of progression of presence-and-absence for some deter-
minate intentional content-item, a spectrum of presence and absence that
ranges between a maximum and a minimum, between total intuitive lling and
total intuitive emptying. One extreme, the maximum, is the grade of greatest
lling for an item of determinate content, the point of highest clarity, of
intuitiveness, of differentiatedness. The other extreme, however, is,
strictly speaking, not really a minimum, a last point of possible presentabil-
ity in the spectrum where least clarity, intuitiveness, or differentiatedness might
be had, but rather an open, not only non-intuitive but rather undifferentiated
horizon. One has to recognize, beyond the minimum, the null state of
objectness, the horizonality of non-presence as such, the horizonality always
there in terms of which a possible object couldminimally, futurally
begin to be intended-for-presence. The dynamic continuum of the pro-
cess, fully considered, shows, then, a symmetry of two ranges of fullness-
and-emptiness: (1) progression toward presenting, toward lling, out of a
horizon of total non-presentialityi.e., protentionalityand (2) progression
is taken in the present paragraph up to this point are underlined in red by Fink in his
transcription.
150. EFA B-II 281ff., Hua XXXIII, Text No. 11, beginning with 8.
151. EFA B-II 285287, Hua XXXIII, Beil. VI, pp. 23235; cf. footnote 139 above.
152. EFA B-II 283, Hua XXXIII, p. 228, my emphasis. Actually, Fink had heard
Husserl making much the same point already in his WS 19251926 course, Basic Prob-
lems of Logic, p. 45 (in Finks Nachschrift, to which the closest equivalent in Hua XI is
Beil. X, pp. 38485). See 1.1, p. 5, and footnotes 15 and 16.
153. Right here, Husserl does not make clear that horizonality is beyond the minimum;
this only becomes clear through Finks efforts to clarify the nature of horizonality.
However, Husserl does clearly exclude characterizing maximal emptiness as a point.
He writes (EFA B-II 300, Hua XXXIII, p. 30): The limit of nullity for intuitability is not
distinguished from the eld of obscurity.
268 Time
away from presenting, toward emptying, back into non-presentialityi.e.,

retentionalityneither of which is a variant type of presenting as such (again,
on pain of instituting innite regress). Accordingly, Husserl represents the
ow of time by a new, more complicated spatializing diagram as a process
in which a continual plus/minus gradation in two directions, protending
and retaining, is intended out from the moment of now-being, i.e., from
the moment of being in the mode of thereness-in-the-esh [Leibhaftigkeit],
of having something itself present. Consciousness at the zero-point of
positive tending, lledness, consciousness in a state of satiation, origi-
nary consciousnness in which its object is given in the mode of the in-the-esh
present [leibhaftige Gegenwart], is not just consciousness of the matter
[Sachbewusstsein] [i.e., as thus in-the-esh lled present], consciousness of its
primary object {of primary contents (objects)}, but also internal conscious-
ness, consciousness of its own self and of its intentional process. It is, then,
the tending-out from that center point of lledness (but integrated with it)
which is at once the dynamic of temporalness and, as this tending, the structure
of being-aware-of in regard to the way a particular content-something comes to
presentation temporally. Directedness, tending-to, writes Husserl, is the
fundamental character of consciousness-of in its most original essential make-
up, in the doubleness of formal structure: (1) positive tending with grad-
uality in the direction out to something, wherein the grade increases;
(2) negative tending with graduality in the direction out away from some-
thing, the graduality of the negative distance from it.
In this (horizonal) gradation of the not-yet and the no-longer in conscious-
ness of the now, what is in force is not an action done by consciousness but
154. EFA B-II 282, Hua XXXIII, pp. 22627. See also in this connection B-II 300, Hua
XXXIII, p. 30.
155. EFA B-II 292, Hua XXXIII, p. 22 (cf. footnote 139 above).
156. EFA B-II 31011, Hua XXXIII, pp. 4143 (7 in Text No. 2). This doubles the
lines that model the intending to show both a forward and a backward change
from presence to not-yet-presence and no-longer-presence. See the additional diagram-
ming in Hua XXXIII, pp. 3233 and 4849 (EFA B-II 3012; the last diagram not given
in Finks transcription), and Finks own versions (Z-I 93a; Z-IV 2b, 60ab, 79ab, 84a
b, and 134aall EFM 1).
158. EFA B-II 308, Hua XXXIII, pp. 3940.
159. EFA B-II 310, phrase in brackets my supplement from the context, phrase in
braces Finks modication in the transcription; Hua XXXIII, p. 42.
161. Hua XXXIII, p. 38, note 1, a marginal remark that Fink did not include in his
transcription.
Time 269
rather a structural character of its very being as ow, a structuring in terms of

plus and minus fulllment that is the very dynamism of the now, of its passage
[bergang] character. And in the very essence of the now as passage-phase
Husserl includes a de-actualization at one with an actualization of what is
conscious in ittwo mutually belonging modications that have a single
form.
Husserls analysis makes it clear that the time-ow structure of conscious-
ness by which the no-longer and the not-yet belong to the now as part of the
consciousness of the now cannot be an act-intentionally thematic perception-
like presenting. But does his analysis make fully clear positively the kind of
consciousness the ow has of its own temporality and of that of anything
carried in it, especially if the dynamic of temporality involves a horizon
of de-actualization? Husserl is optimistic but perhaps not entirely certain
about it, and the manuscript in Finks transcription ends with a question: A
streaming consciousness structured thus is necessarily also consciousness of
its ownself as streaming. Isnt that fully understandable?
From Finks perspective, and taking the whole Bernau set into consider-
ation, there are two reasons for hesitation in answering positively. For one, in
Husserls analysis the awareness of temporality is always mediated by an
object-determinacy, and Husserl does not take up specically the possibility of
a kind of awareness capability distinct from the intentionality proper to the-
matic object-determinacy. An adequate concept suited to the kind of aware-
ness in play in the very process of temporality is still wanting, especially (a) if
temporality is explicated in terms of the genesis of horizons, and (b) if con-
sciousness is to be explicated not just as process but as living process. All the
Bernau texts offer is an opening to inquiry into this possibility.
The second reason for caution regarding the adequacy of Husserls analy-
sis has two aspects. On the one hand, what is needed yet is an account of
the relationship between (a) the structure of time as protentional/retentional
ow, wherein a unique intentionality of gradation in plus-and-minus presenc-
ing simply is the consciousness internal to time, and (b) the thematic act-
intentionality of reection as itself carried in that time ow. The other prob-
lematic aspect devolves from the rst, namely, does the ego-character that
Husserl still insists upon for the absolute consciousness of ultimate temporal
162. This term occurs regularly in the manuscript, notably at the end (in Finks tran-
scription; cf. footnote 139 above), EFA B-II 315, Hua XXXIII, p. 47.
164. EFA B-II 315, words in angle brackets Finks editorial additions; Hua XXXIII,
p. 48.
270 Time
process derive from the constant form of owing process as now analyzed
(a) in the present paragraphor from the active I of reective thematizing
action(b) here?
One great difculty lying in the essential structural difference between,
again, (a) the consciousness of internal timeor perhaps better: the con-
sciousness of time internal to timeand (b) the consciousness of reective
thematization aiming to present to itselfwith eidetic insightthe structure
of time-ow and of the consciousness internal to that ow, is that this ego-
enacted reective presentation of time-structure is itself conditioned in both
possibility and validity by temporality; it is done in time. But since the time in
which it is done cannot be a second time, one is then faced with the question of
how the time as reected uponand thus taken as (presented) in timeis or
is not the time of ultimate constitutive processabsolute consciousness.
Answering this would decide if the unifying center for the whole stream of
temporalization, i.e., the form of the owing temporal as such, can be, as
Husserl insists, a genuine I that is itself not essentially in time.
We thus return again to these questions: (1) How can the in-time-structured,
reectively thematizing explication of temporality and of its internal con-
sciousness (which is actually the analysis of how what is in-time is temporal)
be in fact effectively of what ultimate, originative time itself really is, and (2)
how can the in-time-structured explication of the perduring form of tem-
porality be characterized as essentially I, a something that itself in princi-
ple is not in time or temporal? It is still too soon to take up the proposals that
answer these questions, although we already anticipate that Fink considers the
possibility that, beyond straightforwardly trying to make positive explicative
assertions about the structure of transcendental time-consciousness (as ulti-
mate constituting ow and as consciousness of itself), one may have to take
the paradox in any such positive explicative assertions to be ineluctably intrin-
sic to their whole meaning. It may well be that it is not recourse to a trans-
temporal I that ultimately anchors the sense and validity of the analysis of
transcendental constitution, but rather a methodological statagem, namely,
the paradoxically integrating of the properly sayable with the not-properly
sayable, a permanent confrontation of the ontic and the meontic.
165. I.e., in the two manuscripts that end the arrangement Fink puts them in, viz., The
Stream of Experience and the I (see 5.1.2.1, pp. 26365), and The Eidetic Form of
Psychic Internality (see the following footnote).
166. On this see The Stream of Experience and the I, B-II 24450 (especially 247),
Hua XXXIII, pp. 27480 (especially p. 277), and The Eidetic Form of Psychic Inter-
nality, EFA B-II 22330 (especially 22527), Hua XXXIII, Text No. 15 (especially
pp. 28385), this latter being the manuscript placed second last in Finks arrangement.
Time 271
5.1.2.3. Explorations into Time by Fink, 19301933

The Bernau manuscripts were for both Husserl and Fink a stage of
achievement that prepared for advancing further in the investigation of tem-
porality. For Husserl that further advance, begun around 1930, would be nal
for him. For Fink, as this year became the move into the second stage of his
thinking about temporality, the difcultymethodical and criticalwould
increase, to open out into a third stage, which will occupy the last sections of
this chapter.
In Finks work the Bernau materials stand as contributing to development
along two concurrent lines that were already strong in his earlier thinking. On
the one hand he worked on details regarding the structures and dimensions of
temporality, especially in their integration within proto-temporal origination;
on the other hand, together with this, he continued to develop explication on
the level of higher-order descriptions, of systematic projections (see 2.3),
whereby the meaning of the details disclosed in analytic investigation, in inte-
gration with all the orders of phenomena investigatedespecially that of
ultimate constitutive originationcould be more adequately formulated con-
ceptually. While with Finkas with Husserlthe ferment of philosophic
rethinking brewed without regard for dates and neat ordered sequence, nev-
ertheless for the question of temporality one can still see the summer and fall
of 1930, the months in which the trip to Chiavari took place (September to
November), as a period of particular importance. Though for Husserl two of
the three months there on the Italian Riviera were lost to illness, Fink was not
so hampered, except that work with Husserl was diminished (see 1.3). In
Husserls case several portions of his C-group manuscipts on time-analysis
date from before and after the Chiavari trip, while Fink writes, on Septem-
ber 23, 1930, My most important problem in Chiavari is elucidating the
connection of depresenting and eld-intentionality.
The ensemble of Finks notes from Chiavari, though economical in style,
richly conrm this; but the core of the idea just expressed comes already in
167. An earlier treatment corresponding to 5.1.2.35.1.2.3.3 appeared as The Revi-

sion of the Bernau Time-Consciousness Manuscripts: New IdeasFreiburg, 1930
1933. Alter, 2 (1994), pp. 36795. The recasting in the present sections is more ad-
vanced thematically and methodologically.
168. See HChr, pp. 366, 367, and 370.
169. Z-VII XVII/5a, emphasis Finks; EFM 2.
170. Z-VII, subset XVII, is explicitly dated and identied as done in Chiavari, though
others in the same folder may have been written there as well. In any case, all are relevant
to the themes in those that were.
272 Time
his notes from a year earlier, as much in the previous sections shows. For
example, Fink writes: Husserls time-analyis suffers under the defect that the
division in principle between transverse and longitudinal intentionality, al-
ready found in the 1905 Time-Consciousness, was not carried through radi-
cally and consistently. At issue is the way in which transverse and longi-
tudinal intentionality are not two more or less presenting intentionalities
that, like linear rays of directional intending, intersect in the now, but ra-
ther they constitute the play of plus and minus progression, of lling and
emptying in regard to presence and presentness, of coming-to-be-present,
being-present, and no-longer-being-present. One aw in particular in speak-
ing of longitudinal and transverse intentionalities is that this spatializes
the forms of the temporal dynamic, of the integral interplay of presence and
non-presence. Fink seeks to analyze the interplay in another way, which we
shall take up shortly.
At the same time, and directly tying in with 5.1.2.1, Fink will explore fur-
ther how to interpret the problematic situation that he nds Husserl so clearly
raising in the manuscript he placed at the very end of his editorial arrangement
of the Bernau materials. That is, on a matter that seems in principle to defy
analysis in straightforward disclosure in reective thematization done upon
ones own experiential streamingnamely, the nameless, un-temporal
proto-I, itself not in beingclarication can only be done in another mode
of thought, which Fink calls generically speculative. For example, the rela-
tionship (as Husserl sketched it out) of the proto-I to the determinate tem-
poralized act-manifestations in terms of which it is knowable as active might
translate neatly into Finks phrasing in 5 of the Introduction to his disserta-
tion, where he speaks of the necessary self-nitization of the transcendental
subject and it is quite conceivable that this manuscript of Husserls con-
tributed to that idea. That is, the phenomenological character of an analysis
aiming to explicate transcendental origins, and thereby requiring it to move
regressively back along the line of relationships lying constitutively within the
phenomenon that is ones starting point, sets the conditions for subsequently
171. Z-IV 3a, EFM 1; from the dissertation-writing period.

172. One might thus differentiate presence [Anwesenheit]being there present be-
fore meand presentness [Gegenwart]being presented in the now. Needless to say,
the two are intimately interwoven.
173. See appendix.
174. The Stream of Experience and the I, EFA B-II 24450, Hua XXXIII, Text
No. 14.
175. VB/I, p. 14.
Time 273
interpreting the results of the analysis ontologically and metaphysically. It is a

condition that, right in 1930, Fink frames in terms of the phenomenological
aim not to reach for a ground to explicate origins (see 5.1.1.3.). The thesis:
The Absolute is the Nothing, is to be abandoned in favor of this one instead:
The Absolute is Origin. Is origin a temporal relation? Yes and no! No, insofar
as the origin lies in time. Yes, insofar as the origin is the origin of time it-
self. The emanation of the Absolute is the originative being [Ursprungsein] of
time, i.e., of the world and thus of that which is as a whole [des Seienden im
Ganzen]. The Neoplatonic emanation recalls one of Western philoso-
phys strongest strains of thought, never abandoned, even in modern philoso-
phy, although somewhat marginalized since Descartes. While the connes of
this book will not allow extensive treatment of the Neoplatonic element in
phenomenology, some mention will be made of it in chapter 7 (7.3.3.5). For
now the point is to ll out a little more the overall interpretive framing of the
role in transcendental phenomenology of the analysis of temporality as Fink
was working it out, right at the point where Husserl was taking up his own last
study of time.
In his reections in the months following Chiavari Fink nds that it is
decisive to realize that all constitutive questions as such are included in the
fundamental, comprehensive question of the nitization of the innite, abso-
lute subject into the nite self-determinacy, powerlessness, abandonedness,
and subjection of human existence in the whole of the world. To inquire,
then, into the methodological form that the analysis of nitization (the
speculative proto-concept, Fink terms it) may take on, knowing that one has
to question the adequacy of adopting a chronological style in concep-
tual characterization, is to raise another serious question as well: Can the
speculative proto-relationship of origin and originatedness (of Absolute and
world), in a word, can the phenomenology of the Absolute, be in principle
decided with the methodological insights of Husserlian phenomenology?
And the reason for asking is that this way of posing the problematic of self-
apperceptions is but marginally touched upon in the usual procedures of its
investigations. In being so relentlessly analytic in eidetic descriptive evidenc-
ing, Husserls phenomenology does not allow recourse to the interpretive re-
sources of a legitimable speculation integrated with but not consisting in
that operation. The proof of the need for it, Fink nds, lies right in the limits to
176. Z-VII 5a, EFM 2.

177. All quoted phrasings from Z-XV 22ab, emphasis Finks; EFM 2. The only dates
in this folder are from 1931, though some could be from a later year.
274 Time
that evidentness-bound analytic work that Husserl himself so honestly dis-

closes; but the openings thus made need more than honest acknowledgment, if
phenomenology is to make its ultimate investigative achievement intelligible.
Thus it is that, again in 1930, Fink sketches out a plan of the themes that a
full phenomenology of temporality would cover, weaving together both rein-
vestigated specics and the speculative issue lying at the heart of the whole
problematic. The rst set of themes in this plan follows Husserls classic
pattern of correlations:
I. Thematic intentionality:
Future Presenting Past
(a) (Expectation) (Perception) (Remembering)
(b) (Protentionality) (Ground-level-intending) (Retentionality)
These initial determinations are made under the guidance of the idea of inten-
tionality as primarily thematizing in its action; but Fink has to transform these
by a new triad, forming the second set of themes in the general plan:
II. Depresenting Field-intentionality and Depresenting
space
This leads to the third correlated set of theme-transformations:

III. The swing of time and the proffering of places in the horizons, i.e,
in the dimensions of time taken as essentially modalities of breakable-
ness. Here full and empty time are the values in interplay, wherein
there is a correlation between time with its eld-intentionality and
wakefulness. [See 5.1.1.4.]
The fourth item is the overarching issue that Fink found in Husserls Bernau
work as opening up investigation to more radical reinquiry, namely, the ques-
tion of
IV. Absolute subject and time, i.e., how the temporalization of the Abso-
lute is its move out of itself (emanation).
Finally, what Fink saw had to be done was

V. The me-ontic determination of the Absolute and the appearance of time,
that is, the theory of the appearance of the Absolute, the phenomenology
of the Absolute.
178. The elements in outline that follow are all taken, rst in their outline form (parts I
and II), then in a combination of explanatory paraphrase and quoted expressions (parts
III, IV, and V) from Z-VII X/3a, EFM 2.
179. It should be noted that Fink ends his outline with the remark that one theme did
Time 275
The present chapter will lead up to the fourth of these theme-determinations

as it is currently doingwhile chapter 6 will provide one last matter needing
treatment before chapter 7 nally takes up the fth thematic of the whole plan.
We return now to Finks developments in moving from the rst point through
the second to the third of this outline.
5.1.2.3.1. The Central Structure: The Horizonal Complex of

Presenting and Depresenting
Recall the circumstance of the year in which the outline just given was
(in all probability) written, 1930. As the months of 1930 passed Husserl came
to realize that his Cartesian Meditations, so satisfactorily completed the year
before and soon to appear in a French translation, was in fact inadequate for
presenting his phenomenology to his German audience, and that he needed an
entirely new systematic conception of how to present it. (See 1.2.) This led to
Finks drawing up in August the master plan for the System of Phenomeno-
logical Philosophy; it was ready for Husserl to take along on the working
holiday planned for Chiavari (September and October). (See 1.3.) It is interest-
ing that temporality is not a consolidated topic on its own in this master plan
of Finks; temporality appears embedded within other issues laid out there. Yet
in Chiavari, in Finks work immediately following his preparing this plan for
Husserl and while Husserl in fact studied it, he turned to temporality as of
central concern. As his personal notes from Chiavari show, the further inves-
tigations that the Bernau materials prepared the ground for were under way.
Elucidating the connection of depresenting and eld-intentionality his
most important problemrequired seeing the two as in the end united in
one: they are nothing other than the original unity of temporality [Zeit-
lichkeit] or, better, temporalization [Zeitigung]. What he is concentrating
on here draws from Husserls analysis in New Attempt to Clarify the Struc-
tures of the Consciousness that Constitutes Temporal Objectness, the long
Bernau manuscript where the intriguing new orientation in analyzing tem-
porality is offered, namely, explicating the character of the temporal not in
terms of intentionally holding onto specic content across a gap of difference
not get represented in the way this outline was conceived, namely, possibility, which
other schemata of his assertively name as a distinct dimension of temporality. See
above, 5.1.1.4, p. 254.
180. Z-VII XVII/5a, EFM 2.
181. EFA B-II 263315; see footnote 139 above for the texts of this manuscript-sheaf
in Hua XXXIII.
276 Time
represented spatially but in terms of gradation in gaining or losing a unique

value, the formal temporal character of the structure of time, namely, full
self-presence (or thereness-in-the-esh, Leibhaftigkeit). (See 5.1.2.2.) Charac-
terizing the not-yet or the no-longer as the depresencing of the now of actu-
ality is the way Fink casts the very essence of the horizonality of these two
dimensions. But what he has to do is show specically how these two horizons
of depresentingthe gradation of the not-now in the form of the not-yet-now
and of the no-longer-nowintegrate in the actuality-now itself; and this
means he has to analyze more closely the nature of the actuality-now. A
more conceptually lucid designation is needed than the metaphorical (and
Heidegger-like) lling of empty time-swings by the ontical, or breaking
the time-swing, or stopping it up, striking as these expressions are. That
the not-yet and the no-longer allow explication in terms of horizonal depres-
encing may be clear enough, but what about the right-now, the actually-
present? Is it also to be recast as a horizon, and if so, what is the role of the
thematizing ray of act-intentionality (with its correlate, the evidently pre-
sented object) that is the Husserlian paradigm in perception? This is Finks
most important problem for Chiavari.
Fink nds that after all it is as pure horizonality that time makes being
possible. Acts or experiences had by an agent may well be what set the
content held in temporal passage, but they do not produce that which holds
time together as comprehensive and unitary [Zeitinbegriff ]. This is consti-
tuted in times horizonalness, and the specic interwoven horizons, as depres-
encings, are what belong to originary time-consciousness. In sum, tempus
is not constituted in acts. Acts are themselves constituted unities in the latency
intentionalities of temporality. We would do better not to talk about time-
consciousness; we should speak instead of the relating-to-being in latency
[Seinbezug der Latenz].
What Fink is doing here is displacing the present, against the construal that
dominates Husserls conceptual schema (i.e., in its intentionally thematic ac-
tion and self-sufcient unitary station), as the primary paradigm for the expli-
cation of temporality, in favor of a horizonal concepti0n of that same element
of the actually present. This does not mean that Fink would argue against
placing the determination of thematic objectness in intentional noesis; indeed,
he criticizes Husserl for placing too much importance on the posited noematic
182. Expressions all from Z-VII XVII/5a. On Die Brchbarkeit der Zeitschwingung,
see Heideggers analogous mode of expression in MH-GA 29/30, p. 252. Heideggers
exposition here was in one of the four sessions that Fink missed (cf. U-MH-IV 53).
183. Z-VII 15a, emphasis all Finks; EFM 2.
Time 277
core, as if the impressional hyletic element, i.e., something other than

noesis, were what determined the presential character that the noetic then
followed. Nevertheless, the presential character of the noetic in turn is not
produced by the noetic thrust itself; i.e., temporalness is not constituted by
noetic acts. That would be to treat the constitution of temporal presentness as
a form of object-constitution, whereas the constitution of time has its own
constitutive character distinct from that. Husserls abiding prioritizing of
the present, and his accompanying tendency to develop an analysis of the
structure of time in function of the paradigm of noetic action (but in modica-
tion or removal of elements in a kind of temporal analogue to the paradigm), is
reected in his positing of the transcendental primordially living present
[urlebendige Gegenwart] as an abiding identity that is distinct from any
constituted concrete living present in an actual stream of consciousness and
reected upon in phenomenological analysis as the starting point for regres-
sive disclosure.
So the temporal has to be understood as horizonal in all three dimensions:
that of presentness, of llednessthe nowand those of depresent-
ness, of graduated un-llednessthe not-yet and no-longer. This, now, is
what leads directly to the concept of eld-intentionality as a depresenting
distinct from and contrasting with past and future depresenting. The present is
to be understood primarily as a horizon rather than as some atomlike density
polarizing an indeterminate or empty background. Filling takes place, then,
not only in a process of passage from future through present to past, in a bi-
directional gradation into the negative of lling (in the horizon of temporal
depresenting), but also in a eld of implication as present; but the gradation to
the negative here is of another kind, namely, the presential modication of the
simultaneously potential. This is the moment, inseparable from the temporal-
ity of the stream of experience, and therefore from proto-time itself, of spa-
tiality, the co-existence sphere of potential experience, the fourth dimen-
sion of time. Here Fink recongures Husserls always seeing the moment of
space as an integral component of time and that original temporality as the
meaning of the being of transcendental subjectivity is always spatial. But in
doing this, what Fink wishes to emphasize is the way the integration of space
184. Z-VII XVII/30ab, in the Chiavari set.

185. Z-IX 23a, EFM 2. The dates in this folder are all from 1931.
186. Z-IX 26a.
187. Z-IX 33a.
188. Z-VI 26a, EFM 1.
189. Ibid. See also CM6, Husserls note 183 on p. 57 (VI.CM/1, p. 64).
278 Time
with time means that the ultimate time-ow is itself also the action of the
constitutive deployment of the world.
5.1.2.3.2. Time and the Constitution of the World: The Five

Horizons of Time
As we saw in 4.4.1, Fink found it necessary to construe the world fun-
damentally as horizonal in structure, i.e., as radically not at all any kind
of object, not at all a Counter-StanceGegenstandbut rather an
around, Circum-StanceUmstand. (See 5.1.1.2.) In addition, the
world thus deployed horizonally as the total Circum-Stance was the sweep of
the swing of temporality. The depth of difference that this shift regarding
the proper structure of the world as such makes in (a) the way the process of
constitution is conceived and (b) the way the human subject is aware of the
world and the constitutive function of its horizons is characterized must now
be taken up in this section and in those following.
As to the rst, how the horizonalities of the world have constitutive effect
precisely in being horizonal, one way to grasp what is at issue is to examine
again the external horizon, the surround of potentially thematizable percep-
tual objects alternate to and accompanying the specic object-center actually
held to thematically. In the course of perceiving, one can shift from the present
object as actual to one of these potential objects, which then becomes actual.
This shows that the present actually perceived object is not the whole of what
is given in this present now. However, instead of looking at some other also
present but still potential object, I can also recall as now actual an object that is
not present, i.e., envision or presentify [vergegenwrtigen] it in actual
focus not as in the past, yet not presentwhat is technically termed a remem-
brance of the present [Gegenwartserinnerung]. This is the case, for example,
when distance or some spatial obstruction now prevents actually seeing some-
thing that is actual now but not actually presented.
The point of mentioning this, Fink points out, is that this operation of an
alternate presentation-in-memory of what in the present could be actually
perceived again cannot be taken to suggest how the full eld of the simulta-
neous present, the full external horizon, is constituted. This remembrance
of the present is really only consciousness as accessional to rather than
constituting of the horizon of the present. What gets intuited here is some-
thing in the now that is only inaccessible spatially. This is where one has to
190. Z-VII XVIII/5b, EFM 2. See a few paragraphs further here, and 4.5.
191. See Finks discussion in VB/I, 1819, and Husserls in ZB (Hua X), 29.
Time 279
recognize the distinction between actual being and experiential accessibility

to actual being. Something spatially withdrawn can be still in the now and
simultaneous with my experience in its adequate perceptual grasp of a portion
of the surroundings present to me. And in considering the situation this way
one begins to see the constituting function of the horizon (here that of space
as depresenting). That is, what actually constitutes the world-horizonality
around an experiencing subject is not the egoic, object-thematizing subject but
the temporalizing at work as depresenting. This, again, is the same point
that was made in 4.4.1, where Fink argued that conceiving of horizonality in
its own terms meant countering the assumption that the horizonal could be
cashed in without remainder in terms of objects actual and potential. It is
not, then, that the I can of act-intentional directednessin one of Husserls
favorite expressionsconstitutes the world; rather, it only works within the
world to determine individual instances of accession.
The basic temporal function of depresenting is, therefore, what is at work
also in the dimension of the now that is the eld of the simultaneous sur-
rounding that subtends the focal core of act-intentional thematization in the
actual present, and this is the spatial horizon of the world. Here the basic
depresenting function of the spatial simultaneous surrounding stands in
contrast to the depresenting function of the ow of temporality. Both are
horizonal, but Fink designates the rst as eld-horizonality. (A parallel con-
trasting term might suggest ow-horizonality for the other, but Fink does
not have such a term.) Here is what makes up, delineated in more detail, the
sweep of the swing of temporality, a dynamic that, in Finks speculative
borrowing from Kants formulation of the problem of the world as Idea,
transcends all objectness to be excessive, superabundant, the excess/
superabundance/swing-out-beyond [berschwang] of depresenting.
Here, too, in phenomenological specics is how realitytaken more strictly
as actuality [Wirklichkeit]is not a property of the object but rather a
station or condition resulting from the constitutive process of temporality.
192. Z-VII XVII/15b (EFM 2), emphasis Finks. The text ends with two sentences
given maximum emphasis by double and triple vertical emphasis lines next to them: (a)
There shows here in the egological sphere itself, in a certain way, a mediateness for
experience. (b) All essential constitution lies in the horizons which are themselves in
turn structural moments of In-Stantiality. The emphasis of the underlining of the rst
sentence is also Finks own.
193. See Z-VI 26ab, EFM 1.
194. Z-VII X/1ab, EFM 2.
195. Z-VII XVIII/5b. See in EFM 2 the comment on the loose similarity of this expres-
sion in this text with Heideggers phrasing in MH-GA 31, p. 239 (U-MH-V 117).
280 Time
Temporality is an integrated dynamic that, in the horizonalities of its action

(or play), wherein the essence of the world is deployed, structures differen-
tially actuality (reality) and non-actuality (non-reality). Actuality (real-
ity) is constituted in the two interlocked depresentings of spatiality and tem-
porality in the swinging sweep of the world. Actuality is a time-
relationship, writes Fink. It is not because there are actual things that there
is actuality . . . , but rather because actuality is, there can be actual things.
Actuality is one mode of times swinging, and is itself always surrounded by
the swing-mode of non-actuality.
What is not entirely clear in Finks notes is how the non-actuality of the co-
given potential in the present-horizon of spatiality relates to the more com-
prehensive non-actuality of sheer possibility that Fink takes to be legit-
imately dened as a fth horizon of the temporal dynamic. (See 5.1.1.4.)
Given that the reason for discriminating this fth dimension is its distinctive
temporalityviz., its being free, in its omni-temporality or timelessness,
from the process of a future-present-past owing (though the noetic intending
of it may ow in these dimensions)it would seem to have to be distinct from
the non-actuality governed by the temporal play of depresencing. Nonethe-
less, what is clear is that the principle by which to distinguish fundamentally
different kinds of possibility can only be decided in coordination with an
incisive delineation of temporal structuring. Finks effort here is intriguing
but needs more clarication than his notes provide.
We now have the full set of horizonalities in terms of which to return to
the question of the kind of awareness that would be of the world specically
as not reducible to or interpretable as a sum total of objects, and how this
awareness would be structured as awareness by the self-integrating and self-
differentiating dynamic of temporality as such.
5.1.2.3.3. Performance Consciousness as Unthematic

Horizon-Consciousness: Wakefulness
From the beginning Husserls phenomenology took as a principle that
the process by which the meaningfulness of reality took form as determinate
appearance in living experience could be discovered, described, and under-
stood by the reective capacity that, rooted in and a factor of that same living
196. Z-VII XVII/24ab, emphasis, and double emphasis, Finks. See the analogous
text from Z-VII XVII/30a quoted in 2.6.2.8. Much of Finks explication of the horizons
of time, space, and actuality return in his later work, in simpler terminology, for example,
in Alles und Nichts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 24647.
197. See Z-XV 66a, EFM 2.
Time 281
experience, turned to the same living experience and appearing to examine

and analyze it. That this living process that was the coursing of its own life as
consciousness would as living process disclose its sources and structure is
expressed in terming that source and structure subjectivityor, equally
often in Husserl, consciousness, in the loose usage that waited for the exact,
full sense of the term to come from the results of the investigation beyond its
semantic usage hitherto. Moreover, that subjectivity was deemed active
meant that this source was a process of structuring rather than a given order of
xed assignments.
What was originative, then, for the experience and the appearing of real-
ity in meaningful determinateness was not the kind of wholly interior self-
possession that, in Cartesian fashion, would dene human psychological acts,
but rather the process of coming about of experiential appearing; this is
what structured consciousnessthe supposed psychological interior of
human beingto be precisely conscious experience, rather than the other way
around. What we see happening in the phenomenological analysis of time-
consciousness is precisely the move to clarify this structuring of human
experience as the structuring of the way reality is there for that experience,
and hence the way there is experience as such in the rst place. Thus it is, then,
that the way there is awareness of the world will be the very way the structur-
ing of the world comes about; or, to say the same thing, the way the horizon-
alities of the world come about is the way consciousness will be of the world
right in its awareness as awareness by virtue of that coming-about itselfi.e.,
by virtue of proto-temporality in the manifold deployment of presence-and-
depresencing, actuality, and possibility. This is what is encapsulated in Finks
succinct formulations: The subject is open to the world. Only as long as
a subjective life nds itself awake is it open-to-the-world. Wakefulness and
openness-to-the-world are identical. Sleep = closure to the world. What is
needed now is a little more specication for the modalities in which this con-
sciousness might be best conceptualized, in such a way as also to make clear
how reective thematization works out of it upon it. (See 5.1.2.2.)
Here a shift can occur in how one construes Husserls expression innere
Zeitbewutsein. Does this mean the time-ow within the human psyche as
self-enclosed immanence, or the time-ow that, as the all-encompassing pro-
cess of coming-about, is manifest as the dynamic of the several horizonal-
itiesve in Finks explicationby which the coursing of appearance, expe-
rience, and thought is structured and which together make up the ensemble
that is the world? The difference can be expressed by construing the phrase not
198. Z-XV 13a, emphasis Finks. See 4.4.2.

282 Time
as the consciousness of internal time but as the consciousness intrinsic to

time. The effect of both Husserls and Finks investigations is to require tak-
ing the phrase in the latter sense.
Husserl, of course, recognizes the distinction between thematic and unthe-
matic consciousness. (See 2.6.2.8.) Fink in turn acknowledges Husserls clear
identication of anonymous experience as distinct from theme-specifying
experience (especially as ego-polar); it is exactly what Husserl indicated in his
rst time-consciousness work and then made clearer in the Bernau manu-
scripts. The problem is rather that Husserl stops short of the reinvestigative
step that would determine more specically the character of anonymous func-
tioning precisely in its function as antecedent condition for the reective the-
matic consciousness that operates out of it and with respect to it. Husserl
tends to model reection on internal experience too closely upon the thema-
tization of external objects. In contrast Fink nds that on reinquiry, taking
into account the deeper analysis of time-consciousness, reection does not just
repeat the thematic objectication of the intending of an external object,
with the difference that it turns objectication upon the intending act itself,
i.e., reverses it; reection is rather another kind of reversal: that of an
expression-mode of performance consciousness. The validity of reection
as attaining what it is about does not consist in its being an emulation of
object-thematic perception, that is, in posing itself as an object to itself in
genuine object-presencing, a kind of true introspectionand in a kind of
second temporalized stream of awareness. It can seem to do that by a kind of
de-interiorization of itself, by precisely suppressing its own antecedent and
concurrent mode of non-thematic self-consciousness in favor of an object-
directed semblance and then proceeding as if the latter were self-sufcient in its
grasp of what was going on behind it.
That this is anything but an arbitrary insistence on Finks part results rigor-
ously from the considerations at the heart of the analysis of time in its function
of conditioning thematic act-intentionality, in the latters lledness of pres-
ence for something determinate. If it is only on the basis of horizonal time-
process, namely, the interplay of presenting and depresenting, that thematic
intentionality aiming at something in its presence in the esh (such as per-
ception) is sustained, then, as we have seen, that originative making-present
itself is originally already knownand constitutedas temporal, but not
199. Z-VII XXII/7a (#2), EFM 2.

200. Z-XV 67a, EFM 2. Again, see the treatment and texts in 2.6.2.8.
201. See Z-VII XVIII/1a (EFM 2), as well as Z-V X/1a, EFM 1 (both quoted in
2.6.2.8).
Time 283
by some kind of thematic act. The question, then, is, What does reection do?
Does the efcacy of reection lie specically in the thematization of antecedent
a-thematic performance? In a self-objectication? If the efcacy of the self-
awareness in the temporality of consciousness really lies right in performance
consciousness, i.e., the awareness constituted right in and as the very enact-
ment of temporality that is antecedent and still continuing, then it makes sense
to say of the self-reection of consciousness that its efcacy relates to, draws
from, and is sustained by performance consciousness in a way that is not
simply self-detachment in thematic objectication. This is the point of
Finks speaking of reection as the shift to an expression-mode of perfor-
mance consciousness.
Unfortunately Fink does not say more about this reformulation; one nds
only brief mentions of performance consciousness and performance experi-
ence, rather than more detailed explicative statements. What he does give
attention to, however, is the way the performance level in question stands as the
gure of absolute consciousness. For example, he writes: Functioning sub-
jectivity in its most proper sense is transcendentally constituting (me-ontic)
subjectivity, its functioning (constituting) has world-objectivating power.
This returns us to the point that Husserl makes in the nal Bernau manuscript in
Finks arrangement, namely, that the nameless, functioning proto-stand
comes on the scene in the form and guise of temporally proceeding process.
In itself, as the absolute beyond temporality, it is no process at all. That is,
the functioning process that reection nds thematic in its consideration may
well be, as thematized, its own experiential stream in the full breadth of consti-
tuted horizonal background dynamism, but as thus manifest reectively it
is also the best and only clue to the truly originative temporal coming-about of
the structuring horizonalities of the world. This of course poses once more
the question of the relationship between absolute transcendental subjectiv-
ity working antecedent to and within human consciousness in the very process
of temporalization, on the one hand, and that same human consciousness
within time, on the other. Thus while reective awareness of antecedent non-
thematic performance consciousness may not fundamentally relate to the latter
202. Again, Z-XV 67a. Fink revisits these issues and considerations, actually radicaliz-
ing the problem one stage further, in one of his postwar university lecture courses now
published as Natur, Freiheit, Welt, ed. by Franz-A. Schwarz (Wrzburg: Knigshausen
and Neumann, 1992), 1416, pp. 12835. Cf. also Finks 1939 essay, Das Problem der
Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls, Studien, pp. 20510 and 6.
203. Z-VII XVII/31a, again from Chiavari in 1930.
204. See the last four paragraphs of 5.1.2.1, on the manuscript entitled The Stream of
Experience and the I.
284 Time
as its objectifying (in Finks explication of it), yet for the sake of themati-
cally explicit conceptualization reective consciousness presents its antecedent
performance-awareness to itself in the guise of a present-able object as if for
its own detached scrutinizing gazewhich in the end means in the guise basi-
cally of a human cognitive agent. The problem, then, is a double one. One has to
clarify how these two knowings relate together, across the difference be-
tween performance consciousness and thematizing reective consciousness,
and one has to clarify how the two knowns relate together, across the differ-
ence between the entemporalization of absolute originative process as humanly
experienced living temporal process and the originative absolute itself.
On the rst matter, Finks work essentially nds that the intentionality of
thematizing has to be characterized otherwise than in relation to the seemingly
self-sufcient status that objectication comes to possess; acknowledging this
is one of the most important results of Husserls ongoing time-analyses. An
alternate line of investigation converging with this is to recognize that, for
example, there is far more to the paradigm of thematic act-intentionally, per-
ceptual consciousness, than the ray of objectication. Thematic directedness
(objective situation), writes Fink, is only the most conspicuous structure in
the phenomenon of perception; and he goes on to exploit the etymology of
the older German word for perception, Gewahrnehmung instead of Wahr-
nehmung, in order to link perceptual experience to the ground phenomenon of
wakefulness.
The second problem links to the rst in many ways, but in particular in
connection with the characterization of basic consciousness as wakefulness. If
a mode of consciousness structured essentially as an I is primarily, and para-
digmatically, relevant to temporality in its transverse intentionality, while lon-
gitudinal intentionality, properly considered, functions horizonally in its ow
and coherence structure, then the conception of the I must give full and
proper status to both kinds of structure, namely, to both focal act-thematic
determination and horizonal gradation in terms of depresencing and with-
drawal. And full and proper status may not mean equal status. What will
decide the matter is the answer to the question of which of these functions in
temporality constitutes the process-performance wherein the presentness and
205. Z-VII XXII/1a, from 1930, and Z-XIII LX/2a, from 1933 or 1934 (both in EFM
2); Fink makes reference here to the eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Nicolaus
Tetens; cf. Tetenss work Sprachphilosophische Versuche (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1971),
p. 107. See appendix.
206. See Z-IV 24ab, quoted in 5.1.1.1, p. 239.
Time 285
presence of the multidimensional now is accomplished precisely as owing

continuity. Otherwise put, is the I origin or result? Here is where the con-
trast between the purely formal and the concrete conception of the now is
telling; for if purely formal consideration is done under the presupposition of
the primacy of act-intentional object-aiming over horizonal conditioning,
then the purely formal is really abstract as much as it is formal. So, for exam-
ple, the pure form of the standing order of elements in terms of which there is
ow is thus not in the temporal ow itself; it holds true of each successive
point of proto-presence [Urprsenz], but is not itself in time, however
much it is the focus of an inseparable horizon. Concretely speaking,
however, in an actual I do this, an actual functioning in the process, the I
is an I of specic noetic acts carried on (in habitualitized capabilities) in the
concretely determined ow of horizonal depresencing in its directedness to
some thematic object. It is also an I whose functioning is not exclusively act-
intentionalwhich is Finks point about wakefulness, strengthening consider-
ably Husserls allowing other dimensions of consciousness than act-thematic
aim to be found of the wakeful I. The question is, How much do the
conditions of the concretely functioning I have to dictate the way the purely
formal I beyond time is to be characterized?
Here is the point, then, on which Fink nds grounds for differing from
Husserl on one of the central themes of the new time-studies Husserl is
undertaking, the C-group. Fink writes: The self-constitution of the I is not
pole-constitution. The I is primarily not the pole of experience at all (not
transcendental apperception), but this pole structure is grounded in the con-
stant being-present of time itself. Constantly self-temporalizing time is the I.
The coming-about of time as temporal [Zeitigung der Zeit], however, is In-
Stance-setting. It is because longitudinal intentional is at work that there
can be a phenomenon of I-identity. That, concretely taken, the I is an actually
living I-in-the-process of temporal horizonal owwhat Husserl terms the
Nameless that in this concreteness comes on the scene where reection can
take it up. And the I of living process, the I temporalizing itself in the hori-
zonalities of the world, is basically non-egoic precisely as the wakeful sub-
ject. Wakefulness, as the mode of openness to the world belonging to the
207. EFA B-II 244, Hua XXXIII, p. 274. Cf. 5.1.2.1, p. 263, and 5.1.2.2, p. 266.
209. Z-VII XXII/7a, EFM 2.
210. Z-VII XXII/2a.
211. EFA B-II, Hua XXXIII, p. 278. See above, 5.1.2.1.
286 Time
swingings of time, is not an activity of the I (as of the act-pole). Rather, since
I-wakefulness is performed in virtue of the world-horizonal structuring of
appearance and experience, it is a unity that is prior to any I-polarization.
Here is the problematic to follow in the next stage of the investigation of
time that Husserl and Fink are now engaged in; but before moving to that next
stage, two last points must be added. The rst is a principle that ows on the
one hand from Finks reinvestigation of the place of the world in the regime of
phenomenological investigation and on the other hand from his reorientation
of Husserls time-analyses. If the world is the framing for being as experience-
able, and if temporality is the process of the origination of the horizonality of
the world, then Husserls modest acknowledgment in the last of the Bernau
manuscripts, in Finks ordering, that the absolute constant for which time is
there is not a being, but is rather the antithesis to all-that-is, takes on
massive fundamental signicance. It becomes Finks categorical assertion,
The region of absolute being is in no way an ontological region. All
questions of ontology are found to be questions of that which comes into
determination in temporality, which is the very working of absolute con-
sciousness, the fundament-level movingness of temporalization as such.
The second point returns to the text of Finks referred to near the beginning
of 5.1.2.3, only part of which was represented there. Finks critique of Hus-
serls analysis of time in this note goes on to speak of a further implication of
the defect spoken of earlier that he nds in that analysis, namely, not carry-
ing far enough the distinction between transverse and longitudinal inten-
tionality. Depresencings, says Fink of Husserls construal of protention and
retention, are thematized in such a way that they take on the apparent char-
acter of intentional experiences. This is ultimately the deepest reason for the
aporia that runs through Husserls time analysis, which is called in its latest
form restitution of the Brentano-Aristotelian doctrine, namely, that every
time-ow is itself known in a deeper time-ow. Husserl had quite naturally
expressed his wishes for how he thought the Bernau manuscripts should be
worked up into a viable text, and restitution of the Brentano-Aristotelian
doctrine was one of his desiderata; but in his reinquiry and reinterpreta-
tion Fink shows how any such restitution that requires recourse to another
212. Z-XV 111b; cf. also Z-XI III/3a. Both in EFM 2.

213. See the textual treatment of B-II 247248, HUA XXXIII, pp. 27778 and note 2
on p. 278, in 5.1.2.1, pp. 26364.
214. Z-IV 97a, EFM 1.
215. Z-IV 111a.
216. Z-IV 3a; see above, in the third paragraph of 5.1.2.3.
217. Z-IV 76a; see the third paragraph of 5.1.2.1.
Time 287
time-ow is neither possible nor in principle necessary. Originative tem-

porality is not also itself a multiply dimensioned ow-structure, i.e., not a
deeper form of the past-future-now complex of the time of world hori-
zonality (or of the vefold complex in Finks analysis), nor for that matter any
process at all. Originative temporality is the coming-aboutZeitigungof
the only temporality there is, namely, the interplay of horizonal depresencing
wherein presencing is a process rather than a massive xed moment. Ab-
stractly taken, absolute consciousness can be conceived as a proto-stand
that is not itself a temporal streaming, but the question then is what sense
stand can have if considered apart from the temporal streaming of actuality
needed for any such stand to occur. Originative temporality, then, is
simply the originativeness of the complex of horizons in which the manifest-
ness of being comes about in always relativized becoming. The temporality of
this always-coming-about is experienced as the world-time of experiencing
itself. In the dynamic of horizon-conditioned always-coming-about lies the
very essence of originativeness, for which the only conceptual articulability,
in any structural detail, will be the conguration of that always-coming-
about. So while this originativeness is always only for what is in this always-
coming-about of temporal process, for something determinate that comes
about in manifestation within the interplay of horizonal depresencing, still the
coming-about-ness, the origination, of this interplay itself can only be mani-
fest and hence known in terms of the conditioning action of that interplay
itself on something horizonally constituted within it. The problem with this, of
course, is that it leaves enigmatic the sense of the origination in question
here. (See 3.5.) Perhaps one has to say that the origination of this interplay
itself can only be as the very interplay of that conditioning; and that this
marks the only disclosable fundamental conditionthis interplay of ultimate
constitutive horizonsas a kind of ultimate Fact, a non-absoluteness that is
nonetheless antecedent to contingency.
Again, this is a matter that must wait for fuller treatment in chapter 7. In the
meantime we have now some indication of the tenets adhered to by Husserl in
218. Thus the character of atemporal stand-ness is intrinsic to Husserls concept of

the absolute beyond temporality. See p. 283 (and note 204), and the characterization
from EFA B-II 250, Hua XXXIII, p. 280, on 26465.
219. See Z-VII 15b, EFM 2.
220. This would converge with Husserls thought in the last paragraph of the last
selection in Hua VIII (p. 506), that history is the great Fact of absolute being, high-
lighted in Landgrebes article A Meditation on Husserls Statement: History is the grand
fact of absolute Being, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1974), 11125. German
original in Tijtschrift voor Filosoe, 36 (1974), 10726.
288 Time
his time-analyses that lie behind Finks charge of presentialism (and punc-
tualism: see 5.2.3.1), even in Husserls nal manuscripts on time in the
C-group. In coming to terms with these last investigations of Husserls Fink
moves into the second stage of his own inquiry into time.
5.2. Stage 2: Reconceiving the Revision ProjectThe Two-

Part Treatise
The fact that Finks text-revision work on the Bernau manuscripts never
got past the stage of making editorially modied transcriptions of individual
manuscripts begins to make some sense when we see the issues that Fink found
the Bernau texts led to but did not themselves take up squarely. He did not see
them making the kinds of radical, self-critical moves that were requisite. Sim-
ply to revise the texts, either by leaving them substantially as they were or by
synthesizing portions of them into a continuous treatment (as Edith Stein had
done with the 1905 lectures and related manuscripts), would leave those prob-
lems still not properly formulated, nor would either tactic allow any advance
to be made toward a resolution of those problems. On the other hand, Fink
apparently felt that an introduction, if it were full enough, might present the
issues beyond those limitationsat least this is what the most ample sketch of
such an introduction in his notes for the revision arrangement suggests. But
this introduction was never written. All we have are parts of various drafts for
it, plus the plan of Finks arrangement of the manuscript texts as it stood
from the rst period of revision.
But a second reason for the seeming arrest of the project at that transcription-
arrangement stage is that those texts were being quickly overtaken by new
work Husserl was producing on the question of time, surely from the stimulus
of the discussions that he was having with Fink about the whole topic. One
may suppose that these discussions reected the issues that we have seen grip-
ping Fink during the period from his rst discussion of time in his competition
essay (1928) and dissertation (1929) through the years 1930 to 1933, as both
221. B-I 36a, EFM 2, Abschn. 2.

222. This is what the texts in B-I are.
223. Given in B-I, Beil. I.
224. See Fnf Lose Bltter 1ab (EFM 2, Abschn. 2). See also Finks Report,
written in Louvain in December 1939 (EFM 4, Abschn. 4). Ingarden remarks of Steins
discussions with Husserl: It is well known to me, that during such discussions with his
direct disciples Husserl used to develop some of his best and deepest thoughts. Edith
Stein on Her Activity as an Assistant of Edmund Husserl, Philosophy and Phenomeno-
logical Research, 23 (1962), 156.
Time 289
his own notes and other documents show. We are faced with the situation
where Finks engagements and Husserls are intimately intertwining, however
much there are differences to be seen.
The contours of Finks work as limited to preparing an edition of Husserls
Bernau texts had to be modied as Husserl produced new manuscript mate-
rial, especially since this material took into account the issues that the Bernau
texts led up to as Fink understood them. By 1933, when the bulk of Husserls
new manuscripts on time, the C-group, had been written, the editing project
now had to be recongured into two parts. Part I was to contain the Bernau
texts virtually as they had been left in 1930, and part II would consist of the
new manuscripts centered on the living present. Thus the second and third
stages of Husserls work on time were to be presented together in a single
publication.
Here, too, we see again the way philosophic work, personal relationships,
and the sociopolitical situation in Germany all intertwined. (See 1.3.) The
political and social changes of 1933 led to grave uncertainty over the funding
needed for Fink to continue his work with Husserl. The formal application for
nancial support that Fink made in both 1933 and 1934 to the government
agency Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft gives us a clear view of
the work on the time-studies that was going on; for there Fink explains in
some detail the components and tasks encompassed by the project. In addi-
tion, Husserls two letters to Fink from around the time of these two applica-
tions, respectively, allow us to see something of the two men themselves in
their relationship, while Husserls more voluminous correspondence to others
often speaks of the two-part work with the title Time and Temporalization
that was now being envisioned.
225. See the partial listing in Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, Phaenomenologica 23
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 18687.
226. See the explanations just before 5.1.
227. See the documents in EFM 2, Abschn. 3. It is worth noting in these documents the
way in which Fink, despite the ofcial anti-Semitic program of Nazi coordination, not
only makes no apology for working with Husserl but even underscores the importance
of Husserls manuscripts and of his own, as he continues the task of editing Husserls
materials.
228. Husserl to Fink, March 6, 1933, and July 21, 1934 (Bw IV, pp. 9094); to
Ingarden, October 11, 1933 (BIng, p. 84; Bw III, p. 291); to Felix Kaufmann, October 15,
1933; and to Cairns, November 15, 1933 (Bw IV, pp. 198 and 33). See also the letter of
Dietrich Mahnke to Fink, January 13, 1934 (in the Fink Nachlass). Husserl generally
writes the title as Temporalization and Time, in inversion of the way Finks notes
give it.
290 Time
At the same time, this two-part set of time-studies also tted into the larger
regimen of Husserls continuing manuscript writing. For if time is the form of
all worldly being, and if this nexus of being and time is absolutely fundamen-
tal, then with the explication of time-constitution the very next thing to work
out would be the constitution of the rst content that emerges within time,
namely, nature, the solidity of things we see and touch in sensuous imme-
diacy. In archival designation, Husserls C-manuscripts lead naturally to
the D series, in which, Fink writes, the real main problem is the problem of
individuation. In other words, while the Bernau studiesat least at the
time when Husserl was writing themwere viewed as all-inclusively a work
on time and individuation wherein rational metaphysics was being re-
newed, further work showed individuation to involve more than just the
question of proto-temporalization as a formal condition. Individuation in-
volved spatial and temporal determination within the world, not just in terms
of the ow-structure of temporalization. That is, the whole matter of time
as the process wherein individuation comes about, in essential form and in full
concreteness, raised the question of how ultimate temporality itself could be
designated by any conception that implied individuality.
These are profound issues, and their resolution would touch upon the whole
character of Husserls phenomenology. To be faced with the prospect of chal-
lenging Husserl on his own phenomenology in its fundament was surely a
matter of worrisome concern for Fink. Nor could the disturbing issue of the
social and political transformation under way in Germany, coupled with -
nancial uncertainty, not add to this concern. Husserl was aware that Fink was
under strain. He speaks of it in his letter to Fink of July 21, 1934 (see 1.3),
encouraging Fink to talk over the problems he was having, but he makes no
explicit mention of philosophical differences. Yet Husserl well knew there
were differences between his own view and Finks on the analysis of proto-
temporalization. And he well knew the basic dilemma inherent in any such
analysis, namely, that any operation of thematizing, together with its thematic
object, was itself structured by a temporalization, and therefore either began
an endless regress of temporalities or had to renounce the efcacy and ade-
quacy of its thematic grasp. Furthermore, Husserl must have been aware at
229. Fink, 1939 Louvain Report, EFM 4, Abschn. 4. See also Z-XI 46a (very likely
1933), EFM 2.
230. Fink, 1939 Louvain Report, EFM 4, Abschn. 4.
231. See Husserls letter to Heidegger from March 28, 1918 (Bw IV, p. 130). Cf. 1.2.
See also Husserls letters to Ingarden from April 5, 1918 (BIng, p. 10) and Adolf Grimme
from June 8, 1918 (Bw III, pp. 8384).
232. Fink, 1939 Louvain Report, EFM 4, Abschn. 4.
Time 291
least in general that while he analyzed ever further the living present as the
originative factor for temporality, Fink saw the genuine originative structure
to be horizonal depresencing. Husserls insistence that Fink feel totally
free to work out the treatment of time in question as he, Fink, sees it necessary
to do possibly implies recognition of Finks sensitivity on the difculties in
question, yet it leaves the exact reason unspecied.
One other fact about this difference may have made for some of the strain
Fink felt. The difference just spoken of, between the living present and hori-
zonal depresencing, meant that Fink in his solution was accepting as the utter-
most fundamental feature to be found in the phenomenological analysis of
time a structural element that corresponded to one of the principal themes of
Heideggers analysis of time, notwithstanding Finks explicitly critical stance
on Heideggers work. And in the circumstances of 1934, with Nazism in full
implementation in Husserls own university in Freiburg under the guidance
of Heidegger himself, Fink, aware of Husserls feeling of being betrayed by
his former protg, would have found this philosophical point of difference
awkward.
It was a difference that nevertheless was becoming more necessary to ex-
press unambiguously; for the task of the two-part time-work was itself rapidly
evolving. As Fink worked on it from 1933 to 1934, the idea of a double edition
setting the Bernau set side by side with the living present manuscript ma-
terialsthe initial idea of the two-part setbecame unsatisfactory. This is
the development Fink took pains to explain fully in his application to the
Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in July 1934. The gist of the
matter was that, given Husserls advances since 1930and, one must add,
Finks own critical rethinking the Bernau materials had to be extensively
233. See Finks remark on his laying out for Husserl the difculties he found in the
whole undertaking: Fnf Lose Bltter 2ab and 5a (EFM 2, Abschn. 2).
234. See Husserls July 21, 1934 (Bw IV, pp. 9394). See 1.3. Husserl was devoting
some of his summer to working on new manuscripts on time (several were written in the
course of 1934), as a letter of Finks to Alfred Schutz, June 1, 1934, indicates (in the Fink
Nachlass). See HChr, p. 447.
235. See the last paragraphs of 5.1.1. Fink also criticized Heidegger for his failure to
understand the nature of Husserls phenomenology in its transcendental character, e.g., in
B-I 23b (EFM 2, Abschn. 2): The historical line of phenomenology today (Kaufmann,
Becker, and in part Heidegger) completely misunderstands the task of transcendental
phenomenology. See 3.3.1.
236. In his 1934 Report to the Notgemeinschaft (EFM 2, Abschn. 3) Fink explicitly
mentions the work of my own inquiry supplementing and extending Husserls manu-
scripts (EFM 2, p. 457). This statement of activity is dated August 24, 1934, but the
292 Time
supplemented. Their analyses of passive time-constitution had to be drawn

out further to include comprehensive analyses of protentiality, of the tem-
porality of acts, and of the temporality of kinesthesis, all matters that per-
tained to the transcendental constitution (or temporalization) of the time-
plenum [Zeitflle], rather than just the time-form. Fink now proposed to
write a massive introduction that would present the whole issue of time-
analysis, not simply in the specic manuscripts in questionthose from Ber-
nau and now also the C-groupbut in its whole compass for phenomenology.
It would furthermore give some treatment of other theories of time both con-
temporary, specically those of Bergson and Heidegger, as well as of earlier
philosophers.
In a letter from late November 1934 Husserl writes to Ingarden that, be-
cause of the retrospective on historical attempts at a theory of time, this In-
troduction has changed considerably, to become almost a whole book.
Its going to be a ne piece of work and truly basic, he writes. Our daily
discussions are most stimulating. But half a year later the work is not
yet done. On July 10, 1935, Husserl tells Ingarden that Fink is still working
well on the indeed exceedingly difcult and broad theme, TimeTime-
Constitution, encompassing the whole of phenomenology. And in the
same letter Husserl tells of how things went with his Vienna lecture two
months earlier in May, and what he is planning for his Prague visit scheduled
for November. The Crisis ideas are now moving him, and Fink is spending
time helping him with that too. Husserl will mention the time book to In-
garden once more, on November 15, 1936, saying that Fink believes he will be
nishing it. But did he?
Husserls remarks here in fact pertain to Finks having entered his third stage
letter requesting funds was written earlier. It is interesting that its date, July 22, 1934, is
one day after the date on Husserls second letter to Fink, that of July 21, 1934. In his letter
Husserl speaks of Finks distress at having to modify further the rst part of the time book
just when he thought he might be done with it.
237. Or perhaps: lledness of time. Ibid., p. 458. Husserl has the term Zeitflle
meaning das Rumliche in Hua XI, p. 303 (cf. also p. 143). Cf. Finks 19251926
Nachschrift, Grundprobleme der Logik, pp. 49ff.
238. Report to the Notgemeinschaft (EFM2, pp. 45859).
239. Letter of November 26, 1934, Bw III, p. 298 (BIng, pp. 8990).
240. Bw III, p. 303 (BIng, p. 94).
241. Bw III, p. 308 (BIng, p. 99). It is perhaps surprising that temporality gures into
the Crisis-texts in so modest a fashion (see Crisis, 49). Perhaps the fact that Crisis
was still an introduction made for the brevity of mention, but a better reason could be
Husserls having relegated the treatment of temporality entirely to Fink.
Time 293
of work on temporality, with a quite different kind of book now entitled

Time and Time-Constitution. Before turning to that, however, we have to
review some of the basic characteristics of the thinking in Finks 1934 plan; for
there he proposed to represent both the fundamental difculties of phenome-
nological time-analysis and the resolution of those difculties in what would
be the culminating chapter of ndings in Husserls transcendental philosophi-
cal program, the analyses of the living present.
5.2.1. The 1934 Plan: Details

There is no surviving manuscript or typescript of either the full-scale
revision of part I of Time and Temporalization or the Introduction that
Fink had projected, but there are sheaves of notes giving sketches for its outline
and for some of its specic parts, as well as repeated reections on its main
ideas. In these notes it is not the details of the actual phenomenological
analysis itself that concerns Fink but rather in the principal problematic char-
acter of the situation within which any attempt to analyze time must begin its
work and continue to be conducted. On the one hand, unless one identies
unqualiedly ones own philosophizing mind with the unconditioned tran-
scendental Absolute, any such investigation will necessarily be carried out and
realized in time and in the world by a human mind in human language on the
ineluctable basis specically of the human experience of time in the world.
On the other hand, this reection will attempt to place in abiding thematic
focusi.e., in abiding reective presencethe very condition in principle
for the possibility of any such reective thematic focus. One is faced with the
alternative of either (a) positing a regress of reective subjective temporalities
or (b) accepting the deeply paradoxical, and seemingly inefcacious, philo-
sophical reectivity that we have seen repeatedly arise. Fink is uncompromis-
ing in laying out the absolute necessity of a program of transcendental phe-
nomenological reduction as the one way to solve the philosophical problem
of time, but reduction can go no further than delineating the horizonal char-
acter of world-time. Phenomenological inquiry can go no further than the
always already originated complex of horizonalities that are termed dimen-
sions of proto-temporalization, i.e., of the coming-about-of temporalness as
such; but the character of that originative proto-temporalization itself, as
beyond or behind those dimensions, remains in principle inaccessible and
242. See B-IV, B-V, B-VI, and B-VII in EFM 2, Abschn. 2. The title also seems to be
shifting, sometimes Temporalization and Time (usual in Husserls mention, but not
always), sometimes Time and Temporalization (Finks customary formula).
294 Time
inarticulableexcept in terms of that which is conditioned by the dimensions

originative of it. Accordingly, the character of the phenomenology of ulti-
mate temporality has to change as well, or rather has to allow a kind of
conceptual articulation that can make intelligible a state of affairs that cannot
in principle offer itself to intuitive evidencing. The very idea of what constitutes
access to the nal thing itself [Sache selbst], proto-temporalization, re-
quires that phenomenology be something more than straightforward inves-
tigational scrutiny of the objectively given or givable. The philosophical ques-
tion of time as the demand for a deeper intelligibility, a deeper philosophical
dimension wherein time gets probed beyond the mere description of its es-
sence, cannot be shown from the general idea of philosophy. This dimension,
and thereby the way time will become a problem, determines the philosophy
from which the inquiry can be made: phenomenology. Here is one of the
central issues in the kind of systematic elaboration that Husserl was leaving
entirely up to Fink. Husserl was going to relinquish altogether being involved
in work on the book on time, he told Fink. He would read it only after it is in
print. It will thus be exclusively your work, although based on the manuscripts
youre taking as the starting-point. Husserl recognized that Finks work
was doing something specically distinguishable from his own, though an
integral part of the same phenomenological program; and we may presume
that Husserl understood that systematic considerations would perforce modify
some of the detail matters he was devoting himself to, not to mention the
possible qualication and limitation that might be imposed upon cartain basic
phenomenological principles. This is 1934, two years after this very idea that
systematic integration and, especially, methodological critique could require
modication of even long-standing phenomenological conceptions was specif-
ically laid out in Finks Sixth Meditation. Husserl had read and reread the
Sixth Meditation over the course of 1932 and 1933, and he knew the Kant-
Studien essay of 1933. He was perfectly aware that there were differences of
philosophical interpretation between himself and Fink, and he accepted Finks
work with those differences, however much he and Fink might debate them
without achieving unanimity.
It is these differences and the core of the difculties that Fink had with
Husserls time-analyses even in Husserls further and nal work, from 1928 to
1934, that we must now consider.
243. B-VII XV/3ab, EFM 2, Abschn. 2.

244. B-VII IV/5. Cf. Z-VII XV/3bc.
245. Letter of July 21, 1934, Bw IV, pp. 9394 (emphasis Husserls own).
246. See 1.3, pp. 36 and 4446.
Time 295
5.2.2. Husserls Time-Analysis in the C-Manuscripts

It is obviously not possible to treat fully Husserls examination of tem-
porality via the concept of the living present in the C-group of manuscripts,
nor is it necessary to duplicate the treatment Klaus Held gives in his book on
Husserls analysis of the living present in the C-manuscripts. Nevertheless,
some points will coincide with those Held covers in order to show here both
the conjunction and the divergence between Husserl and Fink on the matter of
the ultimate analysis of temporality.
There are two main issues that in the present context emerge in the C-group
manuscripts. One is the question of the kind of structure that analysis dis-
closes for ultimate temporality, for proto-temporalization [Urzeitigung
proto-coming-/bringing-about-as-temporal]. The other is a metaquestion, the
critical issue of the validity and meaningfulness of the positive concepts in
terms of which proto-temporalization is to be characterized and dened, the
question of the efcacy in principle of the transcendental reective thematiza-
tion of that which is purported to be the absolutely originative. We shall start
with the rst question, and the second will follow as inseparably involved
with it.
5.2.2.1. The Living Present as the Transcendental Proto-I

As Helds study makes abundantly clear, Husserl in the C-manuscripts
comes to identify the living present structure of temporality unambiguously
with the ultimate transcendental I itself. In transcendental life as reected
upon in my own experiencing, I nd this transcendental ego standing as
proto-condition for the sense of being for [everything that exists for me].
That is, I nd myself as living present, I nd this I-am in the living stream-
ing of having-present [Gegenwrtighaben] and the present itself [Gegen-
wart selbst].
247. An earlier treatment of the matters in 5.2.2 to 5.3.2 appeared as The Aporia of
Time-AnalysisReection Across the Transcendental Divide, in Burt C. Hopkins, ed.,
Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1999), pp. 10532. Certain points in that article are corrected in the present
sections.
248. Lebendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des Transzendentalen Ich
bei Edmund Husserl, Entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik, Phaenomenologica
23 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
249. HA C 3 III, p. 10 [32a; see footnote 205 above] (dated March 1931; pagination
that of the typed transcription), emphases all Husserls, bracketed expression my supple-
296 Time
This is basically the same point Husserl made in the nal manuscript of
Finks Bernau arrangement (see 5.1.2.1). Here, however, Husserl goes into far
more detail in his description of this concrete I-being (of the wakeful I), i.e.,
living temporalization with its I-pole, emphasizing the absolute origination-
function of this proto-livingness as continual constitution, continual tem-
poralization, namely, that by which all and everything that is for me this-
moment present [das aktuelle Gegenwrtige] is. Husserl species a whole
range of structures constituted in basic constitutive processes, for example, the
bodiliness in which the reective I nds its humanness concretized, as well as,
and equally important, other humans, all of which are structures contained in
the pregivenness of the world as living present pregivenness, i.e., precisely as
it is given in this livingness. There is, thus, the primordially live streaming
temporalization itself, and then, dynamically structured within it, the im-
manent coexistence and succession of temporalized appearances, or, more
globally put, the experiential stream of the collective appearances of the
world as a whole.
5.2.2.2. Bringing the Living Present/Transcendental Proto-I

under Phenomenological Scrutiny
But here there also arises the paradox that Husserl in that same Bernau
manuscript in the nal position in Finks arrangement already discloses. The
only way reection can turn to temporalization in its concreteness is to reect
upon it precisely as itself something appearing within temporalization, i.e., as
something appearing within temporalized conditioning, as something passing
in timeor, better, passing in the living present from the not-yet to the no-
longer. I am as streaming present, but my being-for-myself is itself con-
stituted in this streaming present, Husserl says; the living present constitutes
itself as living present, and on occasion also constitutes itself in scientic
fashion. In fact that which is to be reected upon in order to nd the I
of the living present in its concrete reality is my own human being as al-
ready existent in the worldwhich is thus in some sense the already self-
temporalized I, else reecting upon it could not begin. Starting from this al-
ment from the context. Most of the text as cited here is given in Held, Lebendige Gegen-
wart, p. 67.
250. HA C 3 III, p. 22 [38a].
251. HA C 3 III, pp. 2223 [39a].
252. See HA C 3 III, pp. 2324 [39a], cited in Held, p. 114.
253. HA C 3 III, p. 33 [44b].
Time 297
ready temporalized current of human experiential being, reection must bring

the character of the I as the living present of proto-temporalization to the fore
in some kind of actual presentation. Turning, therefore, to the concrete I in
this actual reectionwherein is made explicit and thematic what was before
anonymously already active Husserl asks, What is this all about, this
I, this I am, I was, I will beworldly? When I work the transcendental
reduction, do I, in what I thereupon am, turn out to be different from what
was earlier designated as streaming (transcendental) present?
The answer Husserl seeks must be carefully tracked through several of his
manuscripts. The doubleness of the I is unmistakable. I am the originness of
this streaming life in its streaming constituting, and so I am the center for
all that is in the world and for the world itself as universe of all this being;
and I am also the I that is in time, the now-center of reference for the time of
everything temporal, for the temporality of what is in the now of the world
both transcendent and immanentthe I-center that gives the meaning tem-
poral present in reference to which one designates the past and future.
There is, accordingly, an ambiguity in the term present. It means constituting
subjectivity as living proto-source, and it means constituted present.
This living proto-source is not in time at all, meaning not in the present
that, come-about-as-temporal, continually comes about temporally as proto-
modal living present. That is, the living proto-source in its most origin-
level originness is not in the present as a temporal mode distinguished from the
past and the future, again the point that Husserl had already made clear in the
Bernau manuscripts. In a manuscript from 1930, thus earlier than the ones
254. HA C 3 III, p. 28 [41b], where Husserl asks, But how is the I-pole a part of this
concrete temporalization? His answer basically is that, once again, it must not be the
abstract I that one considers but the I that is concrete only by way of the content of the
streaming present.
255. On this anonymity, see Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, pp. 11822.
256. HA C 3 III, p. 34 [45a].
257. Ibid.
258. HA C 3 III, p. 35 [45b]; words in angled brackets are editorial insertions by Fink,
who had rst transcribed the C-manuscripts.
259. Ibid. And, Husserl remarks, this ambiguity will require a suitable terminology.
260. HA C 10, p. 21 [14a] (dated 1931), emphasis Husserls, cited in Held, Lebendige
Gegenwart, p. 117.
261. See the treatment of the manuscript, The Stream of Experience and the I (EFA
B-II 250, Hua XXXIII, p. 280), in 5.1.2.1. It is also in the time-analysis writings repre-
sented in the 1929 publication, if only in nuce; see the reference to ZB (Hua X), pp. 333
34 (ZBe, pp. 34546), in 5.1.1.
298 Time
being followed here, Husserl thought the passive temporalization of a pre-

time and a pre-being could mean without the action of an I; but in 1932,
when he returns to add further thinking to this same manuscript, he believes
this passivity to be only apparent, to be really antecedent activity. And the
crucial move on Husserls part to reach this conclusion is that he allows the
presentation of proto-temporalization done in transcendental phenomenolog-
ical reection, the retrospective thematization of proto-temporalization al-
ready having gone on, to set the relationship-paradigm that is to be taken as
responsible for that proto-temporalization itself. Proto-temporalization is now
interpreted as the effect of a power exercised in some way by an irreducibly
absolute proto-I. And this way of conceiving proto-temporality is guided by his
having to dene the kind of intentionality one might consider passive stream-
ing to possess. What Husserl now nds is that the temporalizationand the
time-constitutive intentionalitythat is to be asserted of the owing stream of
ultimate subjective life is a temporalization not performed by that ow as itself,
but rather one with which the reective grasp turned to it imbues it, apperceiv-
ing it as something in being [Seiendes]. Performed by the phenomenolo-
gizing transcendental I in its active thematizing, it is an entemporalizing
[Verzeitigung] of the coming-about-of-the-temporal (Zeitigung) itself. The
temporalization that is thus taken as actual is not that of the streaming life itself
but of its thematization, that is, the temporalization with which and in which
the reective thematization itself carries on its phenomenologizing action.
But how does this solve anything? Do we not have all the more clearly two
orders of temporalization, one originative, one imputed?
Husserls attempt to settle this problem is to correct the apparent distinc-
tion, earlier accepted, between the passive proceeding of streaming life in
itself and the active performance of an egoic thematic reective intending.
There are not two sorts of intentionality in the proper sense, he writes in
1932, and thus there is no pre-temporalization [Vor-Zeitigung] in the proper
sense. The temporalization that is taken to be presupposed as already
going on, to become evident in reection, is actually that of the transcen-
dental phenomenologizing I. This I is what originally effects temporaliza-
tion, and this I is what gives temporalization the evidentness of experiential
temporality. Temporality is thus in every mode performance of the I, origi-
nal or acquired. But this experiential entemporalization is not something
262. HA C 17 IV, p. 1 [63a63b], summer 1930.

263. See HA C 17 IV, p. 4 [64b] (dated 1932), quoted in Held, Lebendige Gegenwart,
p. 100, and discussed in detail on pp. 97104.
Time 299
being done by the unceasing activity of an always active transcendental phe-

nomenological I; for that would mean an endless regress.
But what kind of temporalization, then, has its source in the transcen-
dental I when the latter is not actively performing thematization, that is,
when the temporalization is just streaming on experientially? Husserl pro-
ceeds to distinguish, in the a priori ever-antecedent streaming of entem-
poralization and the a priori ever-antecedent I, between (a) this ever-
streaming feature itself, and (b) the consciousness-of character of intention-
ality that is always a feature of the I as well, especially the I taken as wakeful
I (of which transcendental phenomenological reection is a variant). This
is Husserls crucial move whereby temporalization devolves from the I of
identity in two ways, with the intentional function of that I as the differentiat-
ing element. The I is thus the inmost motor of living proto-ow, without
attributing to it in all respects some kind of specic activity, some specic act-
intentional performance of the sort worked by phenomenological thematiza-
tion itself. It is instead a kind of condition of possibility for such activity, a
condition that does not itself arise by activity. One has to distinguish (1)
the stream of consciousness as temporal, to which even the transcendental I is
referred in its acts, capabilities, and habitualities, especially in its constitutive
relationship to the world, and (2) the proto-ground of this temporalization,
the proto-I, concretely apprehended as the I of this all-temporalizing life.
Yet Husserl has to ask how this transcendental proto-ego comes to be ap-
prehended, because what we thus claim as the ultimate being, as the proto-
being, . . . is precisely not the ultimate by virtue of the fact that it is a phenome-
non for us. How are we to understand this proto-ego in its anonymity, a
proto-ego that we inevitably represent in the form of a pole of acts and yet
must consider to be the pole of intentional experiences that are not acts?
The fuller context of Husserls ponderings in these C-manuscripts has to be
recalled, namely, the daily discussions with Fink regarding both Husserls
wide-ranging work and Finks several writing projects besides the one dealing
264. HA C 17 IV, p. 5 [65b], cited in Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, pp. 1001.

265. HA C 17 IV, p. 6 [65b], only partially cited in Held, Lebendige Gegenwart,
pp. 1012. Immediately after, Husserl turns to the specically active I of phenomenologi-
cal reection to highlight this unique capacity of the all-identical I.
266. HA C 10, p. 23 [15a15b] (dated 1931), cited in Held, Lebendige Gegenwart,
p. 103.
267. HA C 2 I, p. 7 [6b] (dated 1931), cited also in Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, p. 103.
268. HA C 2 I, p. 12 [8b].
269. HA C 2 I, p. 14 [10a10b].
300 Time
with Husserls time-analysis. In the C-manuscripts we nd Husserl engaging

with one of the central issues in Finks Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Written
in the summer of 1932, the Sixth Meditation focuses exactly on the method-
ological questions regarding the transformation of the previously anony-
mously proceeding stream of experience when it is made the theme of phe-
nomenological reection. What might the relationship be between the stream
of experience in itself and the stream as transformed and thematized, so
as to allow some valid meaningfulness to the phenomenological disclosure
thus attempted of the absolute something?
When Husserl a little later, in 1934, and virtually at the end of his consider-
ations of the time-question, returns again to the treatment of the antece-
dency status that primordial streaming [das urtmliche Strmen] has as
primordial constitution and primordial temporality, his analysis is unmistak-
ably marked by the framing of issues in Finks Sixth Meditation. The pre-
time and pre-being of the I that lives in this consciousness-stream are
without object-form and are both unexperienceable and unsayable. But
when this unsayable, this unexperienceable, is displayed, and thus be-
comes experienced and made theme of an assertion, it is precisely onti-
ed. In being thus ontied it is transformed from its native pre-temporal
and pre-ontological character into the thematically presented objectlike struc-
ture typical of that which actually has (or can have) being within temporal-
ization, that is, within the world. But the real reason that this transforma-
tive thematization can be performed, that phenomenological reection can
pose pre-time and the primordial streaming as having a constant, identiable
process-structure, is that this pre-temporal streaming, precisely in the very
manner in which its pregivenness is manifest as pregivenness, has already been
transformed into a kind of given something, and already gures into subsistent
givenness of a certain sort.
This is as far as Husserl goes in reframing the critical point that he had
already repeatedly dwelt upon in his C-group manuscripts. One should note,
however, that it is not just Husserls adaptation to Finks framing of the meth-
odological situation that is at work here. Husserl is also following one of the
prime demands of phenomenological inquiry itself, namely, that it draw its
270. See CM6, Prefatory Note, p. 2 (VI.CM/1, p. 184), and 7 (especially pp. 56ff.;
VI.CM/1, pp. 63ff.), 8 (especially pp. 75f.; VI.CM/1, p. 85), 9 (especially pp. 83f.;
VI.CM/1, pp. 9293), 11b and 11c.
271. HA C 13 II, pp. 89 [24a] (1934), my emphasis; cited in part also in Held,
Lebendige Gegenwart, p. 103.
Time 301
eidetic lessonsits further questioningfrom investigation into the con-

cretely given. Pregiven primordial streaming of life here is to be considered not
in the abstract but on the basis of and in its concrete actuality, namely, in terms
of the streaming life of consciousness as already having a worldwhich is the
very line of thinking that had been articulated by Fink in the Layout of 1930
and then worked out in Finks Draft for the opening section of an Introduc-
tion to Phenomenology. (See 1.3 and 4.2.) This very point, pivotal to Finks
own critical reaction to Husserls focus on the I-ness of ultimate tempo-
rality, is one that Husserl himself underscores in that manuscript from
March 1931, C 3 III, that we have been reading from 5.2.2.1 to the present
section.
Living subjectivity, Husserl observes, is in possession of its constituted
world, and is this as itself in a certain way doubled, (1) in its function as
streaming presencing [strmende Gegenwrtigung] and (2) by being con-
stituted as something worldly, namely, as the streaming present [that is] the
centerpoint of the two branches of oriented time, past and future. But if one
must distinguish this concrete transcendental subjectivity from the tran-
scendental I, the Transcendental, the Absolute, that thus corresponds to the
human person (whereby I, the one reecting upon myself, nd myself in the
transcendental reduction as transcendental I), then one has to ask what this
concrete transcendental subjectivity, the human person, fundamentally is.
Husserls answer is not as conceptually explicit as it becomes in 1934, but
nevertheless he sees that, in the thematizing aim taken at the proto-I, this
living, streaming soul is what gets apperceived in the particular egoic
life that the proto-I has in that soul; and in that apperceptual concrete,
enworlded manifestness the underlying ground [Untergrund] is obviously
there too and can become thematic as its underlying ground.
In sum, all pregivenness of either the world or the proto-process that con-
stitutes the world with all it containsespecially humans in their experiencing
of and in the worldmust be disclosable as structures and functions ac-
cessible within this same stream of concretely proceeding experiencing that
is ones own, allowing thereby regressive explication done from within that
same stream of experiencing. More precisely put, this stream that is ones
own is, in some sense yet to be made clear, the proto-stream itself as having
shape and function in the world-frame itself, i.e., as enworlded. And, as thus
accessible, the stream that is ones own is therefore also to be regressively
272. See 5.1.1.2, pp. 24447.

273. HA C III, pp. 3637 [47a47b].
302 Time
explicated as precisely the proto-stream itself as set into time, as enworlded

and entemporalized.
5.2.3. The Aporia of Time-Analysis: Reection Across the

Transcendental DivideFinks Proposals
There is no escaping this paradoxical, seemingly aporetic situation re-
garding the validity and meaningfulness of the positive concepts in terms of
which absolutely originative proto-temporalization in principle has to be char-
acterized and dened. Eventually we have to look into the logic of intel-
ligibility that this paradox denes for the way ultimate temporality and ul-
timate constitutive process can be characterized conceptually. This will be
nally taken up in chapter 7. Here however, we have to follow how our study
so far conducted allows us to dene the differences that rise between Husserl
and Fink on the analysis of ultimate temporality in transcendental phenome-
nology, and how a fundamental non-closure lies at the heart of the problem-
atic of those differences.
There are at least two dimensions to this matter of divergence. One is the
issue of which ultimate analysis of proto-structure and proto-process, Hus-
serls or Finks, is in better accord with an integrated consideration of all
relevant matters. The other is that, in either case of pursuing the analysis of
ultimate temporality to its most profound level, the basic aporia remains,
namely, the moment of radical inaccessibility to the absolute of transcenden-
tal origins implied by phenomenologys founding method of regression from,
and irremovable anchoring in, the given. (See 5.1.1.3.) A fundamental non-
terminability or non-closure arises as the inexorable consequence of the struc-
ture of the program itself.
There are differences, now, between Husserl and Fink in both these dimen-
sions, but let us start with the difference of nding for the structural feature in
the stream of ones own concretely proceeding experiencing that each respec-
tively gives primacy to in order to characterize proto-temporalization appro-
priatelyor, perhaps better, with the least non-appropriateness. In Husserls
case the feature drawn out is the I explicated in terms of the present as the
living form of streaming process, the living present. For Fink the feature of
fundamental relevance is horizonality, here explicated in terms of dimensions
antecedent to egoity that are differentiated into the presencing of the present
on the one hand and depresencing of the past and the future on the other.
274. See HA C 3 II, p. 7 [22a], cited in Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, p. 74.

Time 303
Let us look rst at a few general critical points Fink makes with respect
to Husserls orientation and then examine more closely the differences, not
only in terms of the problem of transcendental conceptual adequacy but also
in terms of the analytic theme presently at issue, the temporal life of the
wakeful I.
5.2.3.1. Critical Points: Presentialism

For Fink it is paradoxical that the source of the strength of Husserls
investigation is precisely the cause of its limitations, and this shows clearly
even in Husserls nal return to the analysis of time. By insisting at all levels on
the necessity of evidencing in order to avoid the extravagance of free-oating
speculation, and by anchoring the notion of evidencing in the paradigm of
object-perception, Husserl, to Finks critical eye, blocked the possibility of
articulating the features of temporality that counted most. Moreover, and as a
consequence of this insistence by Husserl, for Fink Husserls analysis of time
was from beginning to end presentialistic, despite the extreme subtlety of
Husserls scrutiny and the success with which he brought into the open those
features that, counterbalancing that presentialism, could, with the proper shift
in perspective, make for a radically different explanatory result.
Husserls presentialism consisted in taking the primacy of the present as
fundamental, with the present taken in its double sense to mean both the here-
presence of givenness and now-presentness in temporal ow. It was clear to
Fink from his rst work on the Bernau materials that the origination mode of
temporality had to lie for Husserl in the present, yet there were other pre-
sentialistic features of Husserls approach as well, principally two. One was
Husserls continual practice of building out his analysis of the present from the
core of act-intentionality, resulting in the tendency to represent temporal
structure in terms of time-points. The other was the practice of addressing
the question of totality, the wholeness of the world, or of the I, or of time in
terms of presents, that is, as the system of many actual and potential presents,
all of which would have to mean presents in time. For Fink, even if Husserl
clearly acknowledged the necessity of conceiving originative time (proto-
time) as beyond constituted time, nevertheless to privilege the present in the
275. Of the many places the texts make this point, see the compact, comprehensive
statement in Z-XI 60a, EFM 2.
276. See Z-IV 91a, EFM 1.
277. See appendix.
278. See Z-VII X/7a, EFM 2.
304 Time
explication of originative time, especially by identifying it with the egoic living

present, was to concede too much to a basically intra-temporal paradigmatic
element. Thus, in Finks retrospective report on his rst months of work at
Louvain in 1939 the C-manuscripts are spoken of as the metaphysical culmi-
nation of the presentialism of Husserls theory of time.
The full compass of this presentialism of Husserls was something Fink early
recognized, right in his own consideration of the time-question in the context
of his dissertation: Only by pushing into the time-horizons themselves can
meaning be unveiled. All meaning always reaches beyond the present. Phe-
nomenological analysis is not analysis of time because its objects are at a point
in time, or because time is a constitutive moment in these objects, but solely
because the ultimate and inmost theme of phenomenology is time itself. All
phenomenological analysis is therefore always in principle a passage beyond
the sphere of presence, and thus always a transgression past intuitiveness
(inasmuch as one denes this as pure presentness). Fink did not feel
the same unbending obligation to root everything in the priority of the act-
intentional present as Husserl seemed to have. What Fink saw to be funda-
mental in Husserls own time-analyses was, therefore, something, so to speak,
off to the side of Husserls own main focus, showing therein his accord with
the shift in the analysis of temporal fundaments taken by the Korreferent for
the dissertation defense, Heidegger.
5.2.3.2. The I as Wakefulness in the Horizonality of

Depresencing
Husserls move to explicate primordial temporality as the egoic living
present, thus giving a structural characterization for both the ultimate tran-
scendental I and the originating power of temporalization, was meant to be a
move of nal clarication, of nal disclosure of rizvmata pntvn. For Fink,
however, it was more critically correct to take temporality as primarily hori-
zonal; for depresencing was the more radical function of temporalization, the
279. See Z-XV 91a, 111a, and 117a; EFM 2. Again, it is not the presentness of pres-
encing that is the dynamic factor in the coming-about of temporality but rather de-
presencing.
280. Finks Louvain Report of 1939, EFM 4, Abschn. 4. See also Z-XXVII XIX/2a
(#5), EFM 3, from a conversation with Landgrebe, January 14, 1940. See also Finks late
general statement of the limitations of the schemata that Husserls analyses followed in
his classic description of phenomena, ND, pp. 32022.
281. Z-II 35b, EFM 1.
Time 305
coming-about of the temporal as such (5.1.1); and the correlate in human

consciousness to this primordial originative dynamism was not an I-center for
action but the pre-egoic openness to the horizonal as such, namely, wakeful-
ness. (See 5.1.2.3.3.) Reducing the inappropriateness of conceptualization for
primordial temporalization meant moving as far as possible regressively along
intra-temporal structuring not only by de-presentializing but also de-
egoizing the ndings.
Wakefulness is not an intentionality of doing, it is more like an intention-
ality of beingif one would retain the term intentionality. Correspondingly, it
is not an intentionality thematically aimed at a specic goal but rather pre-
cisely a non-specic and non-directed intentionality, namely, global open-
ness to fundamental horizonality as such rather than to any kind of objective
something. Such is the conception Fink proposed. For Husserl, wakefulness
frequently comes up in the C-manuscript analyses, but always as subordinated
to thematic act-intentionality. Yet Husserl is worried about it. The whole
of what exists for me [das ganze Fr-mich-sein] as human, as person in the
world, comes out of wakefulness, he writes in one lengthy manuscript; and
wakefulness is an encompassing condition that has to be brought into consid-
eration when the activity of wakeful subjectivity is explicated as constitution.
But wakefulness is understood by Husserl as the period of the possibility of
activity on the part of an agent-ego, so that wakefulness, along with birth and
death, seems somehow to mark beginning and ending in the life of transcen-
dental constitutive action. Granting, however, Husserls posing this activity of
constitution in terms of a plurality of subject-centerstranscendentally the
world is the constitutive product of transcendentally wakeful subjects as per-
sons standing together in wakeful association in a unity of tradition, he
writesstill he has to ask how one makes intelligible the idea of the new
entry of transcendental subjects on the scene and then their disappearance.
Here is where Husserl introduces a slight inection in the identication of
the transcendental I with the living present. Husserl determines the rst sense
282. The de-egoizing of egoity (absolution) is not attainable by a mundane annihila-

tion of the I, but rather by a radicalization of egoity. And Fink adds: Thus too de-
temporalization. Z-XV 117a, also Z-XV 111a (both in EFM 2). Again, see the paral-
lel to this point in Heideggers 19291930 lecture course, EFA U-MH-IV 46, MH-GA
29/30, p. 201. See 7.3.3.2, p. 438.
283. See, for example, C 3 III, p. 22 [32a], C 17 IV, p. 6 [65b], and C 3 III, pp. 3637
[47a47b], cited above in the present section (footnotes 250, 265, and 273).
284. HA C 17 V, p. 33 [85a], from 1931.
285. HA C 17 V, pp. 3334 and 36 [85a85b and 86b].
306 Time
of the transcendentally absolute as that of the standing streaming present it-

self in which I and Others are co-present in their streaming proto-being;
that is, in this rst sense the transcendentally absolute is the Invariant:
standing-staying form. In a second sense, however, the transcendentally
absolute is that of the temporality that is ones own, the temporality con-
tained in my transcendental present . . . as streaming in time-modalities, the
temporality that contributes to and is part of the transcendental historicity
in which are found Others as well. The problem here, however, which
Husserl does not pursue, seems to be that this differentiation of temporalities,
in the plural, can only be made for the lling-out process in time rather than as
the temporality of proto-time itself antecedent to time-modal structuring; the
latter alone is the temporalizing origin-form of in-time structuring. Husserl
may well say, in a formulation not unique to the C-group texts, that absolute
being, the being of a transcendental subject, means being as a member of
transcendental intersubjectivity as world-constituting, . . . precisely as the
absolute functioning subjectivity for the constitution of the world; but the
form of absolute temporality, the Absolute persisting eternally in the eter-
nal change of its modes, the Invariant: standing-staying form, does not
clearly allow plurality for itself as such, even if it is as well the form of absolute
co-existence whose symbol is space. In the end the problem remains some-
what out of focus in this manuscript. Wakefulness and the plurality of Is as
features pertaining to temporality at the level of proto-being seem assertable
only by some kind of compromise between the pre-temporal and the intra-
temporal. In these most advanced analyses of time by Husserl beginnings and
endings, limits and individuation seem to be matters only clearly denable in
terms of that which goes on in time, rather than as belonging intrinsically to
proto-temporality in its absolute invariant pre-temporal originative structure.
It was, therefore, with good reason that Husserls reply earlier to the second of
Finks questions, in that rst recorded discussion between them in 1927, was so
cautiously hedged (see 2.2).
Finks critique revealed Husserls position as suffering under severe limita-
tion, a kind of tunnel vision. Husserl gave rubric-setting dominance to the ego-
centered epistemological schema of subject and object, thus prioritizing the
present in its object-constituting structuration, but in doing so he overlooked
286. HA C 17 V, pp. 3940 [88b].

287. HA C 17 V, p. 47 [95a].
288. HA C 17 V, p. 40 [88b].
289. Ibid.
290. HA C 17 V, p. 47 [95a].
Time 307
the specically horizonal character of both the present and that out of which
the present dynamically emerges, viz., depresenting in the time-swinging
that both temporalizes and spatializes being. Husserl, of course, knew per-
fectly well that the horizonal was an inseparable aspect of object-focused
intentionalityhe had discovered this structural principle and given it the
philosophical currency it now enjoys; but for him it seemed to be something
with a derivative and dependent role rather than as having a primary constitu-
tive function. The horizonal for Husserl was always treated as that which in
principle gets cashed in in terms of objects, and its specic depresencing
character never comes to the fore for him. It seems astonishing that Husserl
never seems to have confronted the challenge posed by the horizonal as recast
by Fink in terms of depresencing, given the constant conversations between the
two men. Yet Husserl did, in fact, from time to time raise the question that
perhaps horizon-consciousness might be of a distinct kind; yet he never saw it
as weakening in any way the centrality of the I. For, since the fundamental form
of all temporalization is the living present, which simply is the I, even eld-
structures in consciousness are carried by this ultimately egoic living pres-
ent. Feeling (das Gefhl ) too, which one might suppose Husserl would
allow some ultimate non-I primordiality, is already egoic; the I is a feeling
I, and feeling something is the Is way of being in a state [Zustndlichkeit]
before all activity and, when it is active, in activity. For Fink, however, this
was a fundamental place where critical reconsideration offered an insight-
promising opening that Husserls own seemingly unquestioned analytic frame-
work prevented him from developing. (See 5.3.2.)
There was, however, a second limitation, of quite a different kind, namely,
that the methodological restrictions upon the analysis of ultimate temporali-
zation had to become integrated into the way one critically interpreted the
results of the analysis itself. Recall that, since methodologically ones access to
constitutive origins had to be by regressive movement from, and an abiding
291. Held mentions Finks conception of depresencing in Lebendige Gegenwart (p. 40),
but he does not discern its fundamentally challenging implications.
292. See Husserls discussion in HA C 3 III, pp. 3035 [43a54b]. Recall that the
living present retains an important place in Finks refocusing of the analytic of tem-
porality. And not only does it have the function of thematic specicationthe lling of
empty time-swings by the ontical, for examplethere is as well a specic horizonality
to the present, that of the eld of spatiality (see 5.1.2.3.1).
293. HA C 16 V, p. 18 [68a]; but the whole context should be read, where what Husserl
is talking about is the idea of feeling as pre-egoic hyletic awareness. Cf. the studies in
Alter, 2, 1994, Temporalit et affection; also Anne Montavont, De la passivit dans la
phnomnologie du Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).
308 Time
anchoring in, the end-products of constitutive genesis, the transcendentally

originating had to be presented in the guise of the transcendentally originated.
(See 5.1.1.3.) But, as Husserls considerations in C 13 II show, might not the
relationship between the originating and the constitutively originated be more
than a matter of simply non-proper representation? If the form of something
within time is the only way any actuality and manifestness of originative
temporalization is at all possible, thendespite non-properness and inade-
quacydoes not manifestation have to be taken as in some way holding and
valid, and indeed as intrinsic to the very economy of transcendental constitu-
tive origination? The logic of this paradoxical validity of the non-proper
and inadequate has to be integrated into the self-interpretation of phenomeno-
logical analysis at its ultimate level, right where the sense of phenomenological
ndings is supposed to get nal philosophical determination. Again, this is
matter for chapter 7.
Such, then, were the elements creating strain in Finks work with Husserl on
the two-part treatise that was one of Finks main tasks in 1933 and 1934. But
as his effort on it continued, Fink came to realize that even comprehensive
introductory discussion in an edition covering all of Husserls second- and
third-stage time-analyses would not be enough to produce a coherent treat-
ment capable of withstanding the difculties; what was needed was a complete
reorientation of the whole approach.
5.3. Stage 3: The Reversal and the Displacement

Between the letter Husserl wrote to Ingarden on November 26, 1934,
and the one he wrote on July 10, 1935, about Finks work on the time-project
(see the end of 5.2, just before 5.2.1), the scope of Finks work increased
considerably. In the letter of July 10 Husserl writes that Finks work, on the
indeed exceedingly difcult and broad theme, Time and Time-Constitution,
is such as to encompass the whole of phenomenology, so that this no longer
seems to be simply a work on time as a single restricted theme. Husserl adds
that unfortunately he cannot join with Fink in the literary composition, with
its historical-critical discussions, thus keeping the promise he made to Fink
294. See 5.2.2.2, where typescript pp. 89 [24a] from HA C 13 II is cited (footnote
271).
295. See the treatment of HA C 3 III, pp. 3637, in the last two paragraphs of 5.2.2.2,
just before 5.2.3. See also 5.1.1.3 and 5.1.1.1.
Time 309
in his letter of July 1934. And what at rst might seem a mere alterna-
tive formula (Time and Time-Constitution instead of Time and Temporal-
ization) for the same ongoing work turns out to be the title for an entirely
new work.
5.3.1. Reversal: The New Time-Book

A brief retrospective remark that Fink wrote on his arrangement outlines
for the Bernau texts indicates the three stages for his work on time for Husserl
that we have been following, and hints at the character of his new book
manuscript. Time and Time-Constitution, he notes, contains but little of
Husserls manuscript texts. The task once meant for a comprehensive In-
troduction to the second-stage two-part edition of revised manuscript mate-
rial has evolved to embrace the treatment, in new terms, of everything that was
to have been covered in an edition of Husserls manuscript investigations.
The most telling evidence for this new and nal undertaking on Finks part,
however, comes from near the end of Finks life, in a few brief notes written
before 1970. The new book, Time and Time-Constitution, was Finks
own work, not in the sense that he was responsible for the editing and literary
presentation of what was basically Husserls material but in that it was the
working out of his own attempt to explicate time. Three important features
stand out in this effort as represented in these late notes. The rst is that a
decided reversal in approach occurs: Time could not be philosophically
understood by beginning with time-consciousness. Time-consciousness is
precisely something conditioned by time, rather than being in some way itself
originative of temporality. The only way to analyze time, therefore, is to see it
as something prior to consciousness, and, indeed, prior to it with an antece-
dency at least as absolute asif not in principle more thanthat of the world
itself. In other words, instead of seeing time from within consciousness, con-
sciousness had to be considered as structured within time. Husserls solution
to the problem of ultimate time-analysis, Fink explains, was the intensied
296. To Ingarden, Bw III, p. 298, BIng, p. 94; to Fink, Bw IV, pp. 9394; on the promise
to Fink see 1.3.
297. Description on the envelope (Umschlag) in Beil. I to B-I, EFM 2, Abschn. 2. What
Fink here designates as (1) the rst period of revision and (2) before the wholesale
reworking seems to correspond, respectively, to the two stages that preceded the new
book manuscript, Time and Time-Constitution.
298. Fnf Lose Bltter EFM 2, Abschn. 2.
299. Fnf Lose Bltter 4a, emphasis Finks. See appendix.
310 Time
presentialism of the living present, while the only proper way Fink could see
now was to begin with world-time as the encompassing supra-objective and
supra-subjective primordial process. And to take this approach, Fink ac-
knowledges, amounted to breaking away from Husserls whole conception of
transcendental conditioning foundations, Husserls transcendentalism.
In a word, when Husserl handed over to Fink the task of taking the investiga-
tion of time to the culmination that the problematic of temporality itself
seemed to lead to, he in effect gave Fink the freedom to follow the demands of
that problematic beyond Husserls own treatment.
The second feature these notes disclose is Finks realization that not only
does the effort to explicate time based on Husserls approach (such as in either
the Bernau or the C-group manuscripts) founder but even his own rever-
sal approach itself was abortive. And thusthe third pointhe had
kept it under lock and key and would continue to do so. However, Finks
book, Time and Time-Constitution, not only remained under lock and key
(so that no one besides him seems ever to have read it); apparently, it is no
longer even in existence. He seems to have destroyed it.
Whatever the personal motivations that led Fink to keep to himself this
material on the ultimate issues in phenomenology and therefore on its ultimate
philosophic possibility and validity, we can at least make clear some of the
philosophical reasons for the deeply problematic, aporetic, or at least para-
doxical character of both Husserls and Finks attempts at explicating the
nature of time, and therefore the problematic character of any nal systematic
treatment of phenomenology. In the absence of Finks nal treatment of the
issue of time itself, we have had to reassemble its main investigative threads
and knottings from his notes. The present treatment has done little more than
lead up to the reversal that the investigation of time provoked. Yet this does
not mean that there is no more that can be said about what the reversal
accomplishes. In fact what we nd is that phenomenology in this reversal is
charged with new possibility. To this we now turn.
300. Fnf Lose Bltter 3ab, emphasis Finks.

301. Fnf Lose Bltter 4a.
304. See appendix.
305. This book limits itself to the rethinking of temporality that shows in Finks notes
from the time of his work with Husserl. His thinking, however, did not stop with that,
and the direction it takes after the war, continuous with what he was doing before it, can
be seen in his Natur, Freiheit, Welt, sections 1416.
Time 311
5.3.2. Reversal Becomes Displacement: The Metaphysics

of Play
Finks critique-driven thrust beyond Husserls framework is easily dis-
cernible in the notes from 1935 on. He has now clearly circumscribed the
limitations in Husserls position owing to its privileging of epistemological
schemata in the detail work of his phenomenological analyses and his structur-
ing of the framework of being to accord with the framework of the philosophy
of reection at work therein. Thus in early 1936 Fink writes that Husserls
greatest service is the exhausting of the possibilities for thought in a phi-
losophy of reection. Yet this does not mean his simply abandoning what
was achieved in Husserls phenomenoloy; rather, it means following the dy-
namic initiated in it to an opening beyond the constraints of the framework
that Husserl had made canonic, especially within the constraints of the prob-
lematic lying at the heart of the now radicalized inquiry into time. Whereas a
little earlier Fink might have provisionally considered the openness of Hus-
serls phenomenology to lead to a metaphysics of spirit, in contrast either
to the philosophy of life track Heidegger might be taken to represent or to
that of a kind of phenomenological positivism based on the noetic-noematic
correlation of constitution, now the issue of what phenomenology led to was
far more problematic. For what is at issue in the problematic of time is
just how to conceptualize that which even spirit might mean, if this term, or
any other chosen, is supposed to stand for the ultimate in primordial tem-
porality itself.
What emerges from the work on time Fink did with Husserl, for Husserl,
and then for phenomenological philosophy itself, is that the category of spirit
may not ipso facto be the necessarily privileged one for designating the tran-
scendentally ultimate, such as philosophy since Descartes, via Kant and Hegel
and now Husserl, had in principle supposed. Or rather, perhaps it has to be
reconsidered in terms other than those of the idealistic-subjectivistic tradition.
Thus in August 1934, as Husserl was thinking over a suitable statement for the
International Philosophical Congress in Prague (September 1934; see 1.4),
Fink sketched out some ideas in this vein about the whole issue of how philos-
ophy begins and proceeds, especially in paradigmatic gures like Hegel and
Husserl, and how that might help to understand the present crisis situation to
which the Congress was thematically addressing itself. His notes end in the
306. Z-XX 19a, probably from late 1935 and early 1936; EFM 3.
307. See Z-XII 39a, probably the latter half of 1934.
312 Time
form of a brief suggestion of points for Husserl to consider for his address to
the Congress.
Here Fink hints that self-reection might disclose things other than the
epistemological action and relationship of the subject with respect to the ob-
ject as that within which there is an originative power to spirit. In the notes
that lead up to this proposal Fink speaks of spirit as not a faculty belonging
to humans but a power of existence [Daseinsmacht], a passion. Greek
life, he continus, stood under the supreme sway of the will to know. And
then he adds: Passion as the substance of life. And a little before this he
comments on his taking a fork in the road different from Husserl. Unlike
Husserl, Fink does not believe in the ethical mission of philosophy to improve
mankind, as the formal logos of the world that makes genuine human life
possible. Instead, he writes, philosophy is a passion. Only the inner compul-
sion to have to live thinking makes up the fate of the philosopher.
This openness on Finks part to possible ultimates that critical consider-
ations might recommend in phenomenologys push to origins was with him
from the beginning; it was something needed in and part of his early apprecia-
tion of the critique dimension of Husserls phenomenology. And it was in the
analysis of time that the most necessary place in principle was to be found for
considering other possible ways of conceptualizing phenomenologys ndings.
Thus the whole thrust of Finks critique of Husserls presentialism was to
displace the originative centrality of the perceptual present, even if explicated
as the living present, in favor of an a-thematic consciousness of operative
openness to the eld- and horizon-dimensionalities of the temporal order of
depresencing, and of these as concrete moments of the swinging of time.
Wakefulness and the horizonality of the world comprised the rst alternative
that Fink saw Husserls analysis to open out to, in reduction-driven post-
preliminary critique. But even wakefulness and world-horizonality themselves
could be legitimate options to Husserls presentialist egoic living present for
providing the appropriate structural schema for interpreting the ultimate tran-
scendental Absolute of origins only in a deeply qualied way, namely, as the
ontied guise of the ultimate in question. Still, wakefulness and world-
horizonality were less non-appropriate to it in the way they were systemati-
cally, constitutively self-effacing; they were determinative precisely in that
what they made possible as prominent in full determinate manifoldness oc-
cludes them. It was, then, the force of the critique of the subject-object and
308. Z-XIX IV/19 and 11, ending with IV/12ab; EFM 3.

309. Z-XIX IV/8a, emphasis all Finks.
310. Z-XIX IV/7a, emphasis Finks.
Time 313
egoic schematic frames of the manifest that gave preferability to Finks option;
its appropriateness was one of relative not absolute principle.
Yet wakefulness and world-horizonality are not the only constituted fea-
tures of temporality that show at this level in this perspective (again, always as
ontication of the ultimate). Further alternative expressions for the ultimate
begin to take center stage in Finks reections, in focus on elements that have
been intrinsic to Husserls program from the beginning though not thematized
by him for direct consideration. Against the hitherto canonic factors of cogni-
tional access as clues, or at least as starting points, for explicating constitutive
origins, Fink now tries out features specically of intrinsic dynamism. We nd,
therefore, in Finks notes the gradual prominence of the themes of life and play
as beginning to bear the weight of ultimate explicative potential. And this
should not be surprising. There is a naturalness to it in phenomenology itself.
One way to put it is to say that Fink comes to realize that the pairing of time
and spirit can just as much be the pairing of time and life, or of time and play
or of all of these together at once. In his last folder of notes for work on the
Bernau revision he writes: The system of phenomenology is the system of
life. Life here not the denitive concept for protecting the mode of being of
the subject against naturalizing reication, but rather life as concretely playing
intentionality. . . . Philosophy as living spirituality, functioning, operating.
Even earlier, in the Chiavari notes of 1930, in the midst of ideas about the
structural features of time that must be given ultimacy, Fink writes down as the
last of several points on the analysis of time this idea: Interpretation of tem-
porality as longing, that is, as an irrepressible compulsion onward, a kind
of intentionality with non-specic teleology. Temporality as longing has a
philosophical ancestry of importance for Fink that is rather un-Husserlian,
namely, from one of the rst philosophic authors he had read as a youth in a
Germany quite different from what it was becoming in the mid-1930s, espe-
cially in the tenor being attributed to that same writer, Friedrich Nietzsche.
311. Cf. CM6, pp. 94 and 98 (VI.CM/1 pp. 103 and 107). Along with reading Hus-
serls notations to these passages, it is well to take keep in mind that Husserl was capable
of expressing the principle of this relativity himself, as in HA C 2 I, p. 14 (1931): Thus
what we presume as the last being, as the proto-being, under the title proto-phenomenal
present, is not the ultimate Something precisely because it is a phenomenon for us. On
this entire issue see 5.1.1.1, p. 241, 5.1.1.2, pp. 24446, and, in particular, 5.1.1.4.
312. B-VII 10c, all emphasis Finks; EFM 2, Abschn. 2.
313. Z-VII XVII/29a, dated September 19, 1930. See also Z-XV 64a, which, along
with other Nietzschean tropes, Fink goes on to interpret in terms of his analysis of time.
Temporality is characterized as longing in the section On the Great Longing in part 3
of Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
314 Time
Nietzsche will gure prominently in the next chapter, so that we can be

content with but one other admission by Fink of Nietzsches legacy in his
thinking at this crucial juncture. In a conversation with Landgrebe in 1936,
Fink asks, What is philosophy? A science? An attitude? A movement of life?
And his answer is: The life-movement of the will to power, lifes taking
possession of itself. He then jots down ideas on his interpretation of Nietz-
sche, that life in Nietzsche is not to be taken to mean nature-bound life as lying
behind culture, as it were, in a kind of naive biologism, but rather life free of
disablement, life that, while always lost in roles, is beyond all of them and is
simply the play of them, life as the play of being. The essence of life =
play, he writes in another note from the same time. Clearly it is not life as
mute, brute drive and impulsion that interests Fink but life as the structuring
play of elements, or rather as the play of origination into order and differentia-
tion. In short, it is a metaphysics of play that he sees as a possible viable
option opened up by the miscarrying of a strictly phenomenological analysis
of temporality. As 1936 proceeds, time-analysis is gradually displaced by
the exploration of conceptual alternatives for expressing the play-life at the
heart of the origin of the world and human experience in it, at the heart, that
is, of temporalization itself. In the period when Husserl labors over his nal
production, the Crisis-texts, consolidating, deepening, and broadening his
phenomenological program, Fink sees limitations that to his mind cannot but
block the success of that effort, and he allows his mind to notice and take a
fork in the road that may lead around those limitations.
Yet this highlighting of the idea of life by Fink is not without a deep reso-
nance in Husserls whole work; and while this issue will be the focus of the
next chapter, here we should at least note the ease with which life has all along
been accorded a primordiality in phenomenological analysis without really
being focused on, so long as the endless busyness of temporal structuring
dominated the philosophers analytic attentions. This shows nowhere more
forcefully than in the very title Husserl chooses for my transcendental being,
314. OH-VII 28, EFM 3.

315. OH-VII 2833, emphasis Finks.
316. OH-VI 2, EFM 3.
317. See the reference to Fnf Lose Bltter, 5a, earlier, 5.3.1. See the reference to
OH-VII 50 at the end of 1.4. The phrase metaphysics of play is found several times in
OH-VII (A/2a, A/4a, A/6a), and it gures as the culminating topic in a long sketch for a
possible study entitled Problem-Concept of Philosophy, in Z-XX 2ab, 3a and subset
XXVIII/4b, from early 1936. All in EFM 3.
318. See Z-XX 2a3b and 10a11b on this same nal effort of Husserls.
Time 315
namely, the concrete proto-living present [urlebendige Gegenwart], or

my temporally original being, my being as entemporalizing-entemporalized
life-stream. So many pages of Husserls late time-studies bear the term
living, alive, livelylebendig in some formulation; and yet this ceaseless
upwelling and ow of living is framed ultimately in terms of the I as center, as
I of this stream, in terms of the invariant time-form that is made concrete
by being continually lled with contentmost globally put, lled with the
world itself, which is thus for me lled time. The whole dynamism of
phenomenologys center, that which makes its world a life-world, not an intel-
lectual construction, lies in the thematic core of interest but remains out of
self-critical explicative focus. But it was not out of focus for Fink in those years
of both private thinking and animated conversation in that close workshop
circle of just Husserl and himself. What thematic consideration of life at the
level of origins might bring into the program of phenomenology, stretching
and straining the boundaries of Husserls program, is what the next chapter
will show.
319. HA C 3 II, p. 1 [19a].

320. HA C 7 II, p. 16 (41a].
321. Ibid.
6
Fundamental Thematics III: Life and Spirit, and

Entry into the Meontic
But this self-interpretation of life, and in particular of world-

experiencing life, is not mere exposition or analysis of something n-
ished and set. Life is what it is as intentional performance, and ever new
performance; and that it is that, is already an interpretation, not a real
analysis. In this way for life to be put into some construal is for life to
continue on, with life behind it and alongside it, not in some merely
natural externality, but in the internality of an intentional tradition. Life,
we can even say, is through and through historical. . . .
Husserl, Nature and Spirit, lecture course, summer 1927
Thesis: Philosophizing is inquiry that knows, knowledge and science in

its content but not as a stance on lifes part. For as a stance it is lifes
taking possession of itself, the play that is about freedom.
Fink, handwritten note from late 1935 or early 1936
January 1936: In a year and a half Husserl will be stricken with his nal
illness, and in a little more than two years his life will come to an end. With-
out knowing it, he has only eighteen months left of productive capability; but
1. See appendix.
2. Z-XX 11b, emphasis Finks (EFM 3).
316
Life and Spirit 317
he has been renewed by the previous Novembers experience of giving his

Prague lectures, The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology, and he is
in feverish labor over the rst part of his Crisis-texts. The University of
Freiburg, against the standard honoring of emeritus professors, no longer lists
him in the roster of its academic personnel, but he is writing now for an
audience beyond the increasingly bleak and twisted world of this Freiburg and
this Germany. His phenomenology holds a message for the future and for a
humanity wider than the society that has written him out of its community.
And he still has Fink to speak with about his work and the ideas that are still
alive in it.
Yet that they share a common frame in the program of phenomenology does
not mean that they have a common assessment of what is to come next in that
programs development. To Husserl the fundamentals of phenomenology
compose a groundwork of ever-holding, ever renewable insightfulness in rig-
orous fulllment of the ideal of rational explication. But for Fink, as the
chapter just concluded makes clear, those same fundamentals are themselves
deeply problematic; and to realize this means that carrying out phenomenol-
ogys program of disclosing origins transforms it into an effort to think the
other side of an unconditional boundary. So while Husserl plunges into the
task of explicating the full spread of content-positive ndings reaching from
perceptual experience intrinsically imbedded in the world to the reective self-
assertion of rationality itself, Fink wonders about a complement, if not a
radical alternative, called for by the limits structured intimately into phenome-
nologys whole methodology from its opening action onward. For Husserl the
dimension of investigation needs continuing; for Fink the dimension of cri-
tique is now in the forefront, and this of necessity means opening up ways of
determining matters for inquiry that do not fall neatly into the established
patterns of Husserls work.
It seems that the two of them talked about this, perhaps not so much strictly
in methodological terms as in terms of different foci of content, different
themes. Fink noted down the topics of two conversations at the time, one from
January 21, 1936, the second from February 18, 1936, that reveal something
of this kind of discussion they would have been having. The way things are
said, and the way some things seem to remain unsaid, or at least are only
discreetly indicated, are revealing of the dimension of deference (and a mea-
sure of reserve) on Finks part that was a feature of his work with Husserl,
3. OH-VI 1517 and OH-VIII 3637 (both EFM 3). The rst text raises a point about
life, self, and freedomespecially life as self-masterywhile the second notes a deep
difference in the way Husserl and Fink, respectively, approach the problem of God and
religion in phenomenology.
318 Life and Spirit
despite their intense and intimate work together. These discussions link up
with the contrast in orientation already sketched out in the nal section of the
preceding chapter; and the notes Fink wrote throughout 1935 and 1936 high-
light how differently he and Husserl dealt with the crucial theme. Both saw life
to be the central topic for philosophical examination; but while Husserl took
up life obliquely, as the dimension of dynamism for the life-world toward
which the investigation of living experience was preparing the way, Fink saw
that more direct questioning was needed even in this preparatory stage, in
view of the corrective this would impose.
There are three aspects to this corrective. The rst is, once again, that Hus-
serls way of addressing the theme of life as fundamental in a phenomenology
of the world, however forcefully put in his Prague lectures, The Crisis of the
European Sciences and Psychology, nonetheless followed the classical rea-
soning of the philosophy of reection. This was inadequate because it based
the analysis of fundamental originative process upon structures that arise
within that process rather than opening up lines of investigation that move
beyond those originated structures to the originative power itself. If phi-
losophizing is the movement of a fundamental living force producing its own
self-explication and thereby taking possession of itselfand this is the second
aspectthen it must approach that fundamental life at a radical level in both
theoretical schemata and practical engagement. Philosophizing, writes Fink,
is rst of all lifes taking possession of itself, the return to being not dis-
abled, and therefore is a countering of all xing of life within absolutized
forms that cramp and stie its forceone of the very points of Finks conver-
sation with Husserl on that January 21, 1936. Philosophic thinking is in prin-
ciple an action that continues the the play of being, which is the essence of
life. Thus at the head of the list of themes that Fink envisions for outlining
his own philosophical direction, drawn up in the weeks after his thirtieth
birthdayDecember 11, 1935, right in this crucial period of workstands
the metaphysics of play. Finally, the third aspect, again seen in the conclud-
ing remarks of the previous chapter and explicit in these same notes of Finks
from 1935 and 1936, is that the thinker provoking this new thematic develop-
ment is neither Husserl nor Heidegger (nor Kant), but Nietzsche.
4. See 1.3, pp. 5152, and 5.2, pp. 28991.

5. See OH-VII 12 (EFM 3), a remark explicitly on Husserls Prague lecture.
6. See OH-VII 21.
7. OH-VII A/2a.
8. See the lines on Nietzsche from January, 1936, quoted from OH-VI 2 and OH-VII
33 in 5.3.2.
9. See the lines from OH-VII 50 (EFM 3), quoted near the end of 1.4.
Life and Spirit 319
These three features of corrective difference prominent in the Fink thinking

in the period of Husserls sustained production of his Crisis-texts were not
the result of mere personal preference on the part of one man in contrast to
another. They sprang rather from problems internal to phenomenology, and
this becomes clear when one turns to the larger setting in which this specic
theme of life came to be addressed urgently now in phenomenology. For that
we have to go back a moment to developments earlier than January 1936.
6.1. Life-Philosophy, and Life as an Idea in Phenomenology

There is nothing new about identifying the main element of this fuller
setting as the philosophic orientation known as life-philosophy. But beyond its
character as a diffuse orientation still prominent in the 1930s, it was in the
form of a specic philosophic position that it had an important bearing on
Husserls thinking, from the rst years of the century on to the last decade of
his life, namely, as the work of Wilhelm Dilthey.
Husserls intellectual engagement with Dilthey is a well-known feature of his
career, but Diltheys work was more than a merely external circumstance that
Husserl had to take into account in order to be up-to-date and relevant. As
Husserl explained to Dietrich Mahnke in a letter from December 1927, he had
been tremendously impressed that Dilthey took phenomenology as identiable
with his own geisteswissenschaftlichen psychology and thereby as linked with
his lifes goal of providing a foundation for the human sciences in general (die
Geisteswissenschaften). Yet despite an internal correspondence between
Diltheys and my intentions, as Husserl characterized the convergence in a
letter to Georg Misch in August 1929, there was a more fundamental differ-
ence that had to be made explicit, namely, that inasmuch as phenomenology
via the reduction explicated the relation of experienced reality to subjectivity
as one of constitution, it had to be seen as a science of spirit (Geisteswissen-
schaft) that was far more radical and fundamental than Diltheys psychology.
From the perspective of the reduction, Diltheys work remained bound to
the pregiven world and to an anthropology, whereas phenomenology
10. Bw III, p. 460, from December 26, 1927. See Guy van Kerckhoven, Die Grundan-
stze von Husserls Konfrontation mit Dilthey im Lichte der geschichlichen Selbstzeug-
nisse, in Dilthey und der Wandel des Philosophiebegriffs seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed.
by Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Phnomenologische Forschungen 16 (Freiburg: Karl Alber,
1984), pp. 13460.
11. Bw VI, p. 277, August 3, 1929. See van Kerckhoven, Husserls Konfrontation mit
Dilthey, pp. 15456. See also Diltheys letters to Husserl, June 29 and July 10, 1911,
320 Life and Spirit
disclosed the universal life in which all science . . . was constituted, the
universal form, the universal typology of concrete universal subjectivity that
operates in this life and in so doing takes shape in personal form, out of
sources of specic activity and on the basis of an intentional passivity that is
also to be disclosed. One can easily see in Husserls remarks here to Mahnke
and Misch an earlier formulation of the theme of the life-world.
The widely enthusiastic interest in Husserls idea of the life-world, it should
be noted, is almost entirely focused on the way in which the life-world repre-
sents the structural ground for a non-Cartesian concept of human being and
for an analysis of the frame of experience that is prior to and more fundamen-
tal than the objectivistic, naturalistic universe postulated by the account of
reality embodied in the physical sciences. The press of scientic methodology
and the positive, objective explanatory treatments of natural phenomena leads
phenomenology to offer a counteracting approach in the form of the concep-
tion of human nature as being-in-the-world, so that all human endeavors, such
as the natural sciences, among many other things, are taken as rooted in the
ontological situatedness of experiential being-in-the-world. The life-world
is, accordingly, adopted and adapted as a heuristic and analytic concept for
explicating this fundamental being-in-the-world. (Actually, this focus is analo-
gous to the motivation of much of Diltheys work, namely, to establish the
distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit, as
well as one of the important points on which Husserl and Dilthey in fact
converged.)
Valid and important as it is to treat the life-world this way, namely, with the
focus on world-element, nevertheless it leaves the other essential component
of the concept, namely, life, in a penumbra where its signicance and relevance
are merely implicit and presupposed. The analysis of the world is one of
phenomenologys main contributions to philosophy; but it is no less true that
life, living being, is not only central to the realities that phenomenology insists
upon as the phenomena of record for philosophic study but in addition is what
phenomenology itself is in its acts of reection and analysis. For phenomenol-
ogy philosophic reecting and analyzing are themselves acts of a living being,
acts that methodologically, in Husserls classic formulation of the Principle of
Principles, come to consummation in the evidentness of an object given in its
edited by Walter Biemel, Einleitende Bemerkung zum Briefwechsel Dilthey-Husserl,

Man and World, 1 (1968), 42846; also in Bw III, pp. 27174 and 27880.
12. Bw III, p. 462, letter of December 26, 1927.
13. See appendix.
14. See the letters of Dilthey to Husserl referred to in footnote 11.
Life and Spirit 321
vivid reality to an actual active intending. For phenomenology, reection and

analysis are not just about the living being of that existent that only is as in a
world, they are also, in a genuine and fundamental way, instances of living
being; this too, then, is an essential topic of phenomenologys inquiry; and this
in the end has to be the ultimate reason for phenomenology to come to terms
with the life-philosophy that was its contemporary.
It was not, however, the question of life as such that stood thematically in
Husserls mind in his treatment of Dilthey and life-philosophy. Husserls con-
cern was predominantly to try to establish and clarify the precise character of
phenomenologys work by critically examining the way phenomena and issues
were dealt with in contrasting non- or pre-phenomenological studies and pro-
posals. This is easily seen in the several angles and stages of Husserls response
to Dilthey. For example, Husserls 1911 essay Philosophy as Rigorous Sci-
ence reacted to the historicism, and relativistic skepticism, that he thought he
saw in Diltheys work, a perception that a subsequent exchange of letters
initiated by Dilthey cleared up for him. More importantly, Husserl found
accord with Dilthey on the matter of having to turn to the inner life of spirit to
ground and explain human science as such, whether it be science of human
experiences and activities or of natural objects. And Husserl returned again
and again in his courses to reection on Diltheys position regarding precisely
the distinction between nature and spirit. For it was on this distinction that a
proper understanding of psychology turned, and for Husserl psychology was
the science that stood closest to the central work of phenomenology itself.
Husserls study and discussion of Dilthey, therefore, represented more than
anything else his endeavor to determine the character of phenomenology in
distinction from, and the manner of its agreement with, the science of psychol-
ogy, especially as Dilthey conceived of it. In the nal stage of Husserls
coming to terms with Dilthey, however, beginning in 1930, the question of life
nally did come into play somewhat more focally; but the issue for Husserl
now was not Diltheys work directly but the perception held by the philo-
sophic public on the character of his phenomenology.
As recounted in 1.2, Husserl realized that he had to counter the popular
view of his work as predominantly a logic-centered, static conceptual opera-
tion in contrast to the way Dilthey, and especially now Heidegger as he was
being understood, dealt with the origin and locus of meaning in the movement
15. See Biemels Einleitung, Hua IX, pp. xvixx.

16. Thus Husserls lectures in the 1920s, such as Phnomenologische Psychologie, SS
1925 and 1928 (Husserliana IX), as well as Natur und Geist, SS 1927 (Hua XXXII).
Eugen Finks attendance at these lectures, and his notes on them, will be referred to later.
322 Life and Spirit
of living being. Accordingly, we nd Husserl producing in this period rich

analyses of such phenomena as wakefulness and sleep, of historicity and cul-
tural setting, of intersubjectivity and temporality, and especially of that central
issue of temporality, namely, the owing, living present. These were all
eidetic analyses of living being, action, and appetition, in that this living being
is a living action of constitution, and the appetition in play is that of the
fundamental intentional dynamic of living temporality.
It takes little reading of Husserl to see how extensively the stratum of tran-
scendental constitutive action is characterized as a life, and the project of the
Crisis-writings only raties the centrality that constituting action always
had for Husserl as a living process. What these writings do offer more clearly
than before, however, is explicit acknowledgment of the methodological and
substantive difculty of the double meaning that typies the results of tran-
scendental phenomenological inquiry in general; but they do so not directly
with respect to life but rather regarding subjectivity.
Husserl points out in Crisis, for example, that the life of subjectivity, which
it is phenomenologys task to explicate, displays a double character. What the
reduction discloses is that the subjectivity we nd in our own lives is really
absolute functioning subjectivity, which objecties itself . . . in human
subjectivity. Phenomenology, he continues, must confront this paradox,
namely, that man, and in communicalization mankind, is subjectivity for the
world and at the same time is supposed to be in it in an objective and worldly
manner. Human life in the world somehow manifests two radically dif-
ferent strata: (a) constituted, mundane human entitative being, and (b) con-
stituting, transcendental agency.
With this distinction, however, the status and validity of descriptive terms
comes into question. Again Husserl in Crisis warns us: To be sure, words
taken from the sphere of the natural world . . . are dangerous, and the nec-
essary transformation of their sense must therefore be noticed. This remark
is made in regard to the terms stratum and component, but the principle in
principle applies to all terms used to describe the transcendental, and, there-
17. See Kerns Einleitung, Hua XV, pp. xliixlviii.

18. There can be little doubt that this represents Husserls coming to terms with one of
the central critical points in Finks Sixth Meditation. Husserls repeated reading of this
text testies to the seriousness with which he took it. See CM6, Translators Introduc-
tion, p. xviii.
19. Crisis, p. 262 (72); see also pp. 113 (29), 175 (52), and 186 (54b).
20. Crisis, p. 262 (72).
21. Crisis, p. 174 (51). See also p. 210 (59).
Life and Spirit 323
fore, also to the term life. But Husserl in Crisis does not in fact go on to ex-
plain specically the transformation of sense that one must make regarding
the term life.
There are, then, two issues in the matter of explicating what life must
mean in transcendental phenomenology. The rst is to determine the positive
characterization of life so as to cover the two senses of it: (a) as life in
the world on the part of human subjectivity, and (b) as the life both of abso-
lute, constituting subjectivity and of subjectivity as transcendentally reecting
upon the whole scene of world and world-constitution. But this rst issue,
how to produce an appropriately comprehensive characterization for life, can
only be taken up in a way that remains preliminary until a second, more basic
issue is nally resolved, namely, the determination of what exactly the differ-
ence, the similarity, and the relationship are between these two strata of life,
the mundane and the transcendental, and what exactly the methodological
principle of validity is for the terminology and conceptuality needed to express
and articulate all these relationships. It is no surprise to nd this complex of
issues, central throughout Finks work for Husserl, dominant also in Husserls
own thinking about the question of life.
6.2. Life-Philosophy and Phenomenology: Outline for an

Essay
That the primary factor in the context of motivation for the orientation
taken in the most signicant achievement of the nal phase of Husserls phe-
nomenology was life-philosophy is easily seen in Husserls own statement of the
fact. In July 1930 he nished a small essay for the nal volume of his Jahr-
buch that he called Epilogue to My Ideas, in which he characterized the
situation of German philosophy in terms of the Philosophy of Life striving to
be predominant in it, with its new anthropology, its philosophy of Exis-
tence. In this climate, Husserl continues, my phenomenology is charac-
terized as intellectualism and rationalism, which indeed, he acknowledges,
22. Life, then, should be the kind of concept that Fink, in his 1957 Royaumont
paper, Operative Begriffe in Husserls Phnomenologie (ND, pp. 180204), called op-
erative rather than thematic. In addition, again in Finks methodological framing,
the concept of life in Husserlian phenomenology is not explicated speculatively (Die
intentionale Analyse und das Problem des spekulativen Denkens, ND, p. 152).
23. See appendix.
24. Epilogue, translation in Ideas II, p. 405 (Hua V, p. 138).
324 Life and Spirit
are very closely connected with my specic concept of philosophy. But the
nature of the way his phenomenology works, Husserl eventually points out, is
not the miring of my methodic procedure in abstract one-sidedness, nor is it a
failure . . . to touch upon original-concrete, practical-active subjectivity,
skirting the so-called problems of Existence as well as the metaphysical
problems. To object to phenomenology in these terms is for Husserl sheer
misunderstanding, for it interpretively returns phenomenology back to a level
the overcoming of which is precisely its whole sense. It amounts to a failure to
understand the whole point of the phenomenological reduction.
The way Husserl limits himself merely to indicating his position, basically in
reaction to Mischs study (again, see 1.2) does not go nearly far enough to be
effective, nor was it meant to, since this text was a mere Preface primarily
meant for English readers. In the end his real response will be the Crisis-
texts, but that was not the only way in which counteracting the wide public
perception of the deciency of Husserls phenomenology was to be achieved.
In point of fact a powerful defense was meant to be mounted in the project
that began as Finks essay in Kant-Studien, The Phenomenological Philoso-
phy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Critique.
What has apparently hardly been noticed about this universally read essay is
that, preceding the text there is the Roman numeral I, indicating that what
follows is a rst part; and yet no second part appears in the article. Nor has the
discrepancy been noticed between the object of Finks countercriticism in his
essay, the Neo-Kantian interpretation of Husserls phenomenology, and the
locus of the critique that Husserl in fact found so distressing, namely, life-
philosophy and the philosophy of existence. The situation becomes intelligi-
ble, however, when we realize what the envisioned part II of the whole
project was supposed to be, now that Finks extensive notes pertaining to it are
available. Sometimes in mid-1933 Fink noted down a list of projects under
way or planned, of which the last one is entitled Life-Philosophy and Phe-
nomenology, with the subtitle Edmund Husserls Phenomenological Philos-
ophy in Contemporary Criticism II.
Why Fink began his treatment of phenomenology vis--vis contemporary
criticism by addressing Neo-Kantianism can only be surmisede.g., that the
25. Epilogue, p. 4056 (Hua V, p. 138).

26. Epilogue, p. 407 (Hua V, p. 140).
27. Z-XI 25b (EFM 2), my emphasis on II. The rst two of the ve items on the list
are the time-work and Presentication and Image II. See also OH-II 48, from 1935,
for this full title.
Life and Spirit 325
place and function of the phenomenological reduction had to be well under-

stood before all else, against either misconception or navet (as Husserl him-
self noted in his Epilogue), that Finks recently written Sixth Meditation
laid out the radical methodological implications of the reduction, and there-
fore these had to be clearly stated, as the Kant-Studien essay, modeled upon
the Sixth Meditation, does, or that Husserls phenomenology was too easily,
albeit mistakenly, assimilable to Neo-Kantianism. Fink does not remark in his
notes upon the reason for the sequence of treatment. Nevertheless, what re-
mains clear is that the points to be made in addressing life-philosophy in the
sequel provide the track along which the issue of what life in transcendental
phenomenology means would reach its most radical thematic treatment. Yet,
owing no doubt, in part at least, to the oppressive social and political circum-
stances, this sequel was never written.
Sometime in 1934, despite the clear realization by this time that any such
part II would never be allowed to appear in Kant-Studien, now fully coordi-
nated with National Socialist policies, Fink sketched out in a project list the
way phenomenology might be presented in relation to life-philosophy:
Life-philosophy and phenomenology:
(a) Against the thesis of the abstract concept of consciousnessreduction as
the catastrophe of existence.
(b) Topical reection and the deviant modern species of the philosophy of
reection: anthropologism, grounded historistically in its naive form,
and systematically in its more important form.
(Representing the naive form: Misch and the Dilthey school; representing
the more important form: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and also, in a
certain sense, Kant.)
(c) The illusion of absolute idealism. Its hubris, its extravagance, immod-
eration, unhumanness, You will be like God. Not a human attitude, but
the meontic completion of spirit.
(d) The double truth: the cosmological-phenomenological antithesis and its
unity: the dialectic of absolute philosophy.
As in part I, the Kant-Studien article, the point of departure for part II con-
sists of the specic criticisms laid against phenomenology, now from within
the perspective of life-philosophy. Accordingly, we shall proceed as Fink
did, rst making clear what the charges given mean, and then developing the
28. Z-XIV II/1b, EFM 2 (emphasis Finks). Especially interesting are two of the other
items on the list: the third, world-consciousness and world: rst philosophical work
(Finks emphasis), and fth, Difference between the Husserlian and Heideggerian Sys-
tems of Philosophy, discussed, respectively, in chapters 4 and 3.
326 Life and Spirit
phenomenological counterpositionin both cases drawing from Finks notes

relevant to the matters involved.
6.2.1. The Charges against Phenomenology, 1: Consciousness

an Abstract Concept
One idea in the widespread interpretation of phenomenology was that
by the action of the epoch the phenomenological reduction was an act of self-
removal out of the stream of living existence in order to reach the stratum of
pure reason. With this, consciousness was dened as ultimately the intellect
of logic and mathematics, which by comparison with concrete living being
was an abstraction, an agency dealing with pure meaning-essences in retreat
from the grip of existence. This is how Georg Misch represents Husserl in the
nal part of his Lebensphilosophie und Phnomenologie, which appeared in
November 1930, where he writes that the puzzle of the existence of the
nite is just what Heidegger now places back at the center of concern.
It was not just Misch who characterized Husserl in this way; Heidegger
himself was seen as presenting Husserls position precisely in this contrast to
his own. Fink, for example, in the Draft he wrote for Husserl at the end of
1930 as the opening section of the planned massive System of Phenomeno-
logical Philosophy (see 1.3, p. 29), refers to an objection Heidegger makes to
the way Husserl takes the epoch-prepared turn to reection. In explaining
that the aim of Husserls phenomenology is to raise naive living in the world to
the mode of reective awareness precisely as the living actuality of our
factic situation, Fink points out that the moment of reective consideration
may indeed be a moment of isolation for the one reecting, but that is an
effort far from the self-certain, placid positing of a solipsistic ego, far from
the harmlessness of a worldless subject that Heidegger represents it to
be. To be fair, Heidegger may not in Being and Time, or in his lectures after
his return in 1929, have directed this charge explicitly against Husserl. Nev-
ertheless, phrasings using harmlessness and worldless subject occur with
some frequency as Heidegger delineates his own Dasein-centered analysis. In
the context of Freiburg in 1928 to 1930 the allusion is unmistakable: it is
Husserls transcendental phenomenology that is meant.
29. Lebensphilosophie und Phnomenologie, pp. 193216, and for the cited phrase
p. 211.
30. VI.CM/2, pp. 2728. See Z-VII VIII/16 (EFM 2), a subset of notes from 1930
that sketch ideas for this Draft. Cf. 3.3.3.
31. See appendix.
Life and Spirit 327
6.2.2. The Charges against Phenomenology, 2:

Phenomenology Has No Topos, No Where
For some time now the word topos, and terms derived from it, prin-
cipally topology, have been used to designate a critical approach to thinking
that, in large part based on the reading of Heidegger, aims to recognize the
intrinsically historical character of the most basic conceptual orientations of
philosophy. But here we are looking for the sense that topos and topical
have for Finks reections in the early 1930s, however much there may be
similarities of source for both this and more recent use. It is Finks own notes,
consequently, that must provide the clue for understanding the sense of the
second of the charges against Husserls phenomenology by life-philosophy.
The basis upon which this charge rests is a point that Fink sees to be funda-
mentally valid, namely, that Husserl presents his phenomenology as essentially
a philosophy of reection. But Finks acceptance of this element of criticism
pertains to phenomenology not in the full self-critical achievement that Hus-
serl had meant to achieve with Finks help but rather in the way it was pre-
sented in its preliminary and introductory stage. This is something we saw in
some detail in chapter 2 (see 2.6.2.1). The superiority over Husserl claimed by
life-philosophy in the present instance, then, lies specically in the assertion
that topical reection, unlike a philosophy of reection, realizes that spirit
is only living when it gives itself over to the life of the object. That is,
topical reection insists that, instead of withdrawing, as phenomenology is
purported to do via the epoch, to a topos hyperouranios, a place be-
yond the world, philosophical study must take that which otherwise gures as
the thematic object-domain for a putatively autonomous reection, i.e., the
world, and retain it in its concrete features as the grounding contextual topos
for reection itself; and the principal such concrete feature is life.
This restoration of the topos within which reection is supposed to proceed
takes various doctrinal forms. As Finks characterization of the general charge
here indicates, there are two main versions of topical reection. The rst one
places reection in human being as a factually historical entitythus Misch
and the Dilthey schoolwhile the second places reection within a system of
principles that articulate the dynamics of nitude. In this second category Fink
32. See Otto Pggeler, Heideggers Topology of Being, in On Heidegger and Lan-
guage, ed. by Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972),
pp. 10746.
33. Z-XIII 12a, EFM 2. The notes in this folder are generally from 1934.
34. See Z-IV 111b (EFM 1). Z-IV 110112 is a sequence on the meaning of Absolutes
Sein in Husserls work.
328 Life and Spirit
names Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, and, in qualied mention, Kant. With-

out attempting a thorough treatment of Finks categorization of these think-
ers, we shall have to see briey how, despite their being represented as advo-
cates of topical reection, they turn out, in Finks countercritique, not to be
themselves innocent of the very charge they lay against Husserl, namely, that
they also exhibit the standpoint of the philosophy of reection, so that the
superiority claimed for topical reection is only a pseudo-superiority.
Fink follows Hegel in using the expression the philosophy of reection to
mean in general a position that begins from and stays within the oppositional
setting of the subject over against the object, and then tries to work out the
relationship between the two from the subjects examination of itself. While
the object might be presumed to possess a ground of autonomy within itself in
regard to the subject, the subject has pivotally an irreducible priority of cogni-
tive accessibility. The primacy thus afrmed can develop in various forms,
which Fink outlines as follows:
(a) the prevailing of inner experience over outer. (Descartess theme);
(b) the overall antecedency of the subject to the object with respect to validity
gets deduced from the transitive direction of the experiential correla-
tion; confusion of the ordo essendi with the ordo cognoscendi. The being-
for-me of the world?
(c) the antecedency of concrete mans lived experience to mans world (his-
toricism);
(d) the a priori antecedency of innate ideas in the soul to the empirical
content of experience;
(e) the antecedency, in the understanding of being, of the projection of the
world to beings.
One can see here that Fink does not see Husserl as a unique instance of the
assertion of a primacy of the subject (in some interpretation) over the object,
and it is easy enough to nd names for other philosophers who t some of the
designations given herefor example, Dilthey for (c) and Heidegger for (e). In
fact, Fink sees Kants work to have prepared the ground for these very off-
shoots of the philosophy of reection, inasmuch as in the theory of time as
the form of inner sense Kants a priori subjectivism was the root for histor-
35. On the question of nitude in Heidegger, see chapter 3 (e.g., 3.3.3), and on Kant,
see 3.3.2.
36. Z-XIII 12a, EFM 2.
37. See Z-XV 76a (EFM 2), probably from 1930 and typical of this understanding of
Hegel.
38. Z-XIV II/4a, from the same subset containing the master sketch for treating phe-
nomenology and life-philosophy.
Life and Spirit 329
icism, for life-philosophy, and for Heideggers temporalistic ontology; and

thus Kant also ts into this list at various points. Here, too, there shows one
essential element of Finks counterargumentation that the exorbitant primacy
of which Husserl stands accusedgiven in essence in (b)is exemplied by
the philosophical position of the accusers, though in different form. They too,
like Husserl, misunderstand the link of subject to world by taking access to
being on the part of the experiencing subject as the forming of being. As
constituting objects and the world of objects, the subject is posed as the cre-
ative source of both objects and the world they compose. But this means that
the subject cannot itself be conceived as really having an integral place in the
world. The subject is, therefore, shorn of any real historicity or existential
nitude, any real life, and the native place of the actual, concrete experiencing
subject as genuinely in the world and in history remains still not properly
recognized and explicated.
What Fink will argue, now, is that there is a factor of thinking in transcen-
dental phenomenology that genuinely does go beyond the standpoint of a
philosophy of reection, and that in this lies phenomenologys preeminence.
But to show this means developing a stage in phenomenology that, by address-
ing the ultimate methodological issues of a fully reduction-led transcendental
disclosure of origins, must take issue with the way Husserl usually presents
phenomenology. But let us continue with the charges.
6.2.3. The Charges against Phenomenology, 3: The Hubris of

Idealism
The linkage between the previous charge and the present one is obvious.
To make the entitative experiencing subject the source of the being of the ob-
ject of that subjects experience is an idealism that makes the subject creative in
the manner of God. It is to make the world and objects ontologically depen-
dent upon the subject; and this unfortunately is a view that is often suggested
by the way Husserl expresses phenomenological basics. Here again we meet
the task that was Finks in working with Husserl. He had not just to counter
the common misunderstanding of phenomenology; more importantly, he had
to develop systematically in phenomenology the critical self-interpretation in
which ambiguities and inappropriate self-representation would be corrected.
When that was done, the core philosophical sense of the program could be
properly formulated. What this critical restructuring would come to Fink
39. Z-XII 36a (EFM 2), from 1934.

40. See above, 2.6.2.1.
330 Life and Spirit
indicates in the response he outlines to the nal charge against phenomenol-

ogythe illusion of absolute idealism and its hubris, extravagance, im-
moderation, and unhumannessnamely, that it is indeed not a human
attitude but instead opens up to the meontic completion of spirit.
In the end the development of the meontic dimension of phenomenology is
Finks key to the resolution of the central difculties that arise within phenom-
enology, especially when it is confronted with criticisms of its position from
other philosophical postures, as the last point in his sketch announces. The
debate with life-philosophy, then, offers basic lines along which to start artic-
ulating the meontic in a dialectic of absolute philosophy unique to transcen-
dental phenomenology and integral to it, however much it may strain and
challenge the way Husserl normally presents his thinking.
6.3. Explicating Phenomenology in the Context of Criticism

One of the noteworthy things about Finks 1933 Kant-Studien article
explaining phenomenology in the context of Neo-Kantianism is the remark-
able subscription Husserl in his Foreword to the article gave its presentation
and defense of Husserls program (see 1.3, pp. 4546). But what is equally
important is the lesson Husserl draws from the criticisms raised against his
work. It is quite necessary, he writes, to come to terms with these cri-
tiquesall the more so as the undeniable imperfections in my own presenta-
tions . . . are as responsible for misunderstandings as the presuppositions
embodied in those viewpoints by which the critics of phenomenology con-
sciously or unconsciously allow themselves to be led. Finks essay, then, is the
attempt to rearticulate phenomenology precisely in discussion with [Hus-
serls] critics in order to make clear what phenomenology is really doing.
So also, we may suppose, would be an essay on phenomenology and life-
philosophy. Writing out an article for public use, however, is quite another
thing from sketching out ideas in ones own privacy. As the preceding chapters
have shown in general, Finks personal notes disclose far more explicitly both
the departures from Husserls own presentation of phenomenology and the
critical reasoning upon which they are based than appear in the articles he
41. Again, from Z-XIV II/1b.

42. Preface by Edmund Husserl, in EH-Ke, pp. 7374 (Studien, p. viii). See the
strikingly similar acknowledgment that Kant makes in chapter 3, The Transcendental
Doctrine of Method, in KrV, A834/B362, trans. by Smith, CPR, pp. 65455. Finks
Kant-Studien article, as an alternate statement of much of his CM6The Idea of a
Transcendental Theory of Methodis purposely parallel to Kants treatment in many
respects.
Life and Spirit 331
wrote for publication, even if, once Finks notes are better known, those pub-
lished articles do indeed show indications of these deeper, more explicit differ-
ences. Since there is no nished article, not even a draft, treating the con-
frontation of phenomenology with life-philosophy, we have to draw points for
such a treatment from Finks notes. These will naturally display more ex-
plicitly the way Fink would see phenomenology to have to move beyond
Husserl, while precisely remaining faithful to the essence of phenomenol-
ogy through critically ascertaining and reinterpreting its core legitimacy and
meaning. At the same time we shall nd that the one essay Fink was able to
publish in Germany after the Kant-Studien article does elaborate one element
at least of that treatment.
6.3.1. The Reduction as Precondition for Thematizing Life

Husserls prefatory acknowledgment of the need for a critical re-
presentation of phenomenology in effect raties Finks setting his discussion in
the Kant-Studien essay explicitly within the demands imposed by the phenom-
enological reduction. At the same time, the reduction will function more as a
touchstone for interpreting the kernel of validity in the criticisms that life-
philosophy raises against phenomenology, rather than as a shibboleth for their
utter rejection.
Take the central thesis of philosophies of life, namely, that life as the phe-
nomenon of matrix and fundament has not been regarded properly in much of
philosophy hitherto. It is a reaction provoked by two tendencies, one to inter-
pret life idealistically, the other to interpret it naturalistically. In reaction to
idealistic positions the turn to concrete existence would see the human individ-
ual to be more than a mere agency of cognition. In addition to the rational
there is the non-rational side of human being to be given full acknowledgment;
and this is what the concept of life is meant to encompass. At the same time,
life is not to be conceived as mere physical or material process. Far more
essentially it is experience, feeling, and drive, which must be integrated in
some way with the emergence within them of culture and rationality in the
self-articulation of spirit by which the eld of phenomena becomes richly
differentiated in its basic right. This is the import for phenomenology of
Diltheys distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit.
Phenomenologys task is to probe the proper meaning of the two counterac-
tions just mentioned for its own program, and to do that depends in turn upon
framing inquiry into the meaning of life in such a way as to hold in abeyance
43. See EH-Ke, pp. 7576; Studien, p. 8182.

332 Life and Spirit
the presuppositional conceptual framework of the natural attitude. What

this means in terms of Husserls work is to turn to the deepest level of his
constitutive analysis, namely, that devoted to temporality, as the stage of anal-
ysis that reaches to the springs of the world as the all-encompassing frame of
experience. The world that is there for me, writes Husserl, as in the way it
holds for me now, is in the now, in a temporalization that belongs to the living
present; and this living present, this primordially live streaming temporal-
ization, is precisely that within which and by which the collective appear-
ances of the world as a whole come to form and constancy. In other words,
to understand life in its deepest, all-encompassing power is to understand
what phenomenology would disclose in the analysis of living temporality as
the genesis of the All of arrangement and coherence in both its expanse and its
ow, in a word, of the world as the horizon of all horizons. Accordingly, one
cannot take the phenomenon of life as it appears within the world as the
authentic manifestation of ultimately originative life itself. To be able to ap-
proach life in this sense as the unqualied power of origin itself one must set
out of play and go beyond the framework that holds for all activity within the
world, including the activity of thought and reectionto the extent this is
possible.
This is a rst difference between Husserl and Dilthey, and in the end the
dominant one. For Husserl, the return to concrete life does not mean plunging
into life as it proceeds in the world. When the radical phenomenological
epoch is exercised, when the pregiven, world-bound conceptual schemata
with which one of necessity must begin are radically, reductively reconsidered
in terms of constitutive processes, then two matters of fundamental impor-
tance get addressed.
First of all the division of human powers in the traditional multiple layering
is overcome. Instead of three factors (spirit, will, feeling), or two cognitive
powers (the sensibility and the understanding)whereby subjectivity tends to
be considered abstractly as the dominant, cognitive stratum in the division
Husserls phenomenological investigation nds a single primary structure to
consciousness, namely, intentionality; and this now becomes the basic dynamic
in terms of which to explicate human experience as essentially acting and
living. Yet to state it so simply belies the process of refocusing that is involved
here. For if intentionality is to be an integrative rather than a divisionary
44. HA C 3 III, p. 2223, quoted also in 5.2.2.1.

45. See Z-XI 91a, EFM 2, as well as EH-Ke, pp. 95100 (Studien, pp. 1016), and
VI.CM/2, 5.
46. See Z-V VIII/3a (EFM 1), in a subset dealing with life-philosophy critiques.
Life and Spirit 333
structure, it has to be conceived more broadly than in terms of the schema that
internally sustains epistemology and that functions for Husserl as the point of
departure for his phenomenology, namely the subject-object relationship, the
schema that makes an object-intentional act the primary accomplishment of
conscious life. This radicalization is what emerges from the analysis of time-
consciousness and proto-temporality. Intentionality at this level cannot, Fink
nds, be conceived as a subject-object action, but rather as performance-
intentionality, as performance consciousness. Fink nds it necessary, thus,
to conceive intentionality as not primarily the structure of the experiencing by
individual subjects of specic objects in perceptual grasp (despite the fact that
Husserl invariably presents it that way in his published introductions to phe-
nomenology), with the result that Fink can begin to reinterpret the analyses of
intentionality as analyses primarily of the structure of life rather than mainly of
cognition. To conceive spirit in terms of the distinction between the rational
and the irrational, for example, and to construe it as a partial function within
the more comprehensive life-whole that embraces both the rational and the
irrational, it is to conceive spirit in terms of the pregiven conceptual schema
that denes human self-understanding in the natural attitude, the mundane
situation. This is what is to be countered and interpretively transcended by the
radicalized conception of intentionality, and this is what is expressed when
Fink writes in 1933: The essence of life is creation: creation is at bottom
world-creation, is constitutive being-forming with being understood phe-
nomenologically as being-as-appearing-and-experienced.
If, then, spirit, analyzed in terms of radicalized intentionality, is rethought
so as to be the fundamental dynamism itself, it can no longer be viewed either
as primarily like the abstract consciousness of mathematical reason or as the
rational in opposition to the nonrational, that is, as some form of capabil-
ity whose exercise is denable within an already established basic order of
dimensions, capacities, and processes in the world. It has to be instead primor-
dial, origin-level constituting, the encompassing essence of life in its manifold
capacity. This is what Fink mulls over on the occasion of a conversation with
Husserl in the spring of 1933, when, after speaking of life-philosophy and
Nietzsche, he considers phenomenology as that which rst puts spirit in
movement and thereby gets life, i.e., the creative essence of spirit, into its grip.
Phenomenology, then, is the enspiriting of life and the enlivening of spirit.
Life = spirit and being = the expression of life. But to take spirit as the
47. See Z-IV 8b9a, quoted in 5.1.1.1.

48. See 4.4.3 and 5.1.2.3.3.
49. Z-XII 3bc (EFM 2), emphasis Finks. See appendix.
334 Life and Spirit
essence of life can only be if this conception is understood as not an on-

tological but a constitutive, i.e., meontic truth; and that is something we
shall be turning to later in the chapter. For now, however, this much can be
said. The terms life and spirit can no longer be interpreted in any straightfor-
ward prioritizing of one over the other; instead, both have to be seen as
receiving their sense, as terms for ultimate originative process, precisely from
the way one resolves the problems raised by the attempt to analyze the sphere
of the functioning of intentionality in its ultimate sense, the stratum of tem-
poralizing protoconstitution.
6.3.2. Phenomenology as the Metaphysics of Life as Spirit

We do not nd Husserl himself setting out the problem of the thematiza-
tion of life in the way Fink has. Moreover, for Fink himself this is to be found
mainly in his personal notes, and even there it is not systematically drawn
together in one comprehensive statement but only in scattered and explora-
tory fashion. Still, the essential elements are indicated rmly and consistently
in their main signicance, both interpretively and methodologically.
One important step is to come to terms with the main difference in meaning
between the concepts of life and spirit. In the common understanding of things
spirit is a form of life that displays a feature, or features, that life in general
does not have, whereas in contrast life is the comprehensive reality that in one
of its developments becomes spirit, and the structures of spirit that come to be
formed emerge out of life while remaining within it. Thus one can speak of
the life of the mind or of reason. With the phenomenological reduction, how-
ever, something of the mind (or spiritGeist) seems to take on an ul-
timacy in the origination of the phenomena of experience that life as such does
not connote; for the processes of constitution that deeper-probing analysis
disclosesagain, the intentionality of temporalizationhave a character
linked to the life specically of spirit rather than simply to that of nature. If
this is so, then one must opt for a certain spirit-character as in some way
essentially constitutive of life-process; and Fink will write, in late 1933, that
his formula is not the immanence of spirit in life, but the immanence of life in
50. Z-XII 4cd. See also V-IV 45 (EFM 2) and OH-I 3236 (EFM 3).
51. See Finks discussion with Karl Alphus from December 11, 1933, in Z-XIII 36a
(EFM 2). Alphus was a student of Husserls who received the doctorate with a dissertion
on ethics through a study of Kant and Scheler.
Life and Spirit 335
spirit. This is the direction that Fink at this point1933 and 1934tries
taking for phenomenology. In contrast to options others took for developing
philosophical possibilities coming from phenomenology, Fink will try work-
ing it out as a metaphysics of spirit.
Once again, however, this must not be a matter of taking spirit in the
ordinary sense of intellect or reason, as Finks sketch for ideas for Hus-
serls planned 1934 address to the Prague Philosophic Congress make clear
(see 5.3.2.). Here, as is his regular practice, Fink does anything but simply
repeat Husserl in what he sees to be too narrow an initial conception of spirit
as centered in cognition, in subject-object thematic act consciousness. In
this whole problem-context two theses stand as prominent possibilities in the
work of reinterpretating spirit and nature and have to be critically considered.
The rst would propose that the I, as agent, as identity, and as unity of
self-consciousness, be taken as the prototype of substance. This would
mean the anthropomorphizing of the world, and ontology would be an-
thropologized ontology. The second thesis takes the I as the being of
subjectivity, as action, freedom, and existence, and hence would reject
any subsuming of it under the ontological schema of a thing (ousa). Fink
reads Nietzsche and Kant as offering the rst thesis. Nietzsche, for example,
reverses the traditional conception of being as the true world with change only
apparent, so that change becomes the only reality, while any kind of eternal
being is a ction. Kant, altogether differently from Nietzsche, gives an episte-
mological basis to the prototype character of the I in the B-Deduction of his
Critique of Pure Reason. As for the second thesis, Fink nds this put forward
in life-philosophy (in particular, by Dilthey and Misch) and, very differently
from life-philosophy, by Heidegger in his existential-ontological explication of
the subject. At the same time, Kant in the Paralogisms suggests this thesis as
well, as does Fichte in the idea of the subject as activity [Tathandlung].
As a way of explaining how these antithetic alternatives arise, Fink suggests
taking account of life as primordially transitive, i.e., as centrifugally in-
volved with things; indeed, this orientation functions in the way the under-
standing of being is instituted. When the subject reects upon itself, it adopts a
conception of itself in terms of the non-reective substance to which it is
52. Z-XIII 40a. Fink ends this one-line note with the familiar Parmenidean rubric,
taut noein ka einai (Fragment 3).
53. Z-XII 39a, EFM 2. See 5.3.2.
54. OH-I 33 (EFM 3), from 1934.
55. OH-I 35.
336 Life and Spirit
intrinsically oriented, a prejudice not removed even when the subject later
reects upon itself as itself substance that is antecedent to the things to
which it is oriented. The question of the I thus becomes the exemplum
crucis for ontological philosophy, particularly in view of the paradox of the
double starting-point for philosophy. That is, one can make thematic and
explicit the ontology of human placement in being, while unthematically fol-
lowing the pattern of the cognitive relationship in ones explication of that
placement in being; or, alternatively, one can make this subject-object correla-
tion the master schema for ones explications, but doing so would leave the
ontological situation presupposed and unthematized. This doubleness of
starting points was treated earlier, in chapter 3 (3.1), but the orientation of the
present context is different. Here it is a matter of determining what is connoted
by speaking of the ultimate originating Something as spiritone initial alter-
nativeinstead of more broadly as lifethe Otherwhile at the same time
going behind and beyond the epistemological conception of consciousness and
subjectivity. It is to ask in what way prioritizing the dynamism of life needs to
be integrated with a conception of spirit as integral to life in the way life is
manifest as essentially movemental. But does not phenomenologys own anal-
ysis of time-consciousness, as Husserl conducts it, achieve that aim?
Answering this question takes us back to the characterization of temporal-
ization as intentional in its radically new sense. The sense of intentionality now
does not get divided between consciousness and the unconscious; the inten-
tionality that is intrinsic to spiritand to life as spiritis not to be identied
with consciousness as contrasted to the unconscious. More exactly, intention-
ality in this sense is neither consciousness nor the unconscious because it is not
something that takes place in terms of features that occur in the horizon of
experiential or entitative intratemporal and intraworld differentiation. Inten-
tionality is instead the structural-dynamic core of originative temporalization;
it is life-that-is-not-in-time, in contrast to anything that is in time, to any
entitative something that always in some sense must hold for a time in con-
stancy and identity. Intentionality as temporalization is thus essentially perfor-
mance, performance of nothing other than itself, self-performance.
Performance taken as the essence of life, writes Fink, stands in contrast
to everything object-like; objects abide [Whren], and to abide = to be
in time = to be (existere, esse). But this introduces a serious problem, the
56. OH-I 3536.

57. OH-I 3637.
58. See OH-II 9 and 1219 (EFM 3), from 1935.
59. OH-II 1213.
Life and Spirit 337
very one we have already seen with respect to originative temporality. For are
we not giving a characterization to the pretemporal and extratemporal that in
fact only has sense when applied to the intratemporal? Is not any naming of
originative temporalization as performance a naming of it by something
that occurs within and from that temporalization? Fink continues: As self-
performing, life doesnt abide, rather in its performance what befalls it is the
abiding of things and of itself. It is in this result of performance that perfor-
mance is disgured/displaced [entstellt] in the form of an ontological cate-
gory. Performance itself, creation, making, positing, [is] the meon-
tically fundamental denition of life. Finally, to follow this thought through
is to realize that life in the end cannot be conceptually settled in ontological
terms, and one has to face the situation of the ontological unattainability of
life.
In effect, then, inquiry into the nature of life ends up at the same method-
ological difculty as does inquiry into the nature of subjectivity, since in phe-
nomenology both are inquired into by constitutive regression from the phe-
nomenon of living process manifest in ones own being as consciousness. The
inquiry into the nature of life as spirit and into the nature of the subject as
living streamso that in the stream of ones own experiencing what somehow
gets disclosed is ultimate constitutive agencylead equally to this ontologi-
cal unattainability.
It is in this connection that Fink gives the most sustained attention to just
what performing might mean here, a concept we have already seen in its
fundamental importance. To perform [Vollziehen], writes Fink, is to
carry out, to carry through. Performance = execution. Play is pure perfor-
mance of life, is self-performance. Life does not primarily perform actions, but
itself. Life is self-realization [Selbstverwirklichung], but self-performance
[Selbstvollzug] is a better term than self-realization. Life is not a happen-
ing [that befalls someone or something] [Geschehen] but a coming-itself-to-
happen [Sich-geschehen]. Thus a radical autonomy seems to be the feature
that allows proto-life to be spoken of as spirit, an autonomy that is radical
because it is only in the living exercise of carrying out nothing but itself that
60. OH-II 13, emphasis Finks. The nal phrase here occurs also on a calendar sheet
from January 16, 1935 (Z-XI I/1a, emphasis all Finks): The distance to being = the
meontic distance of life. Life is more than it is. The ontological unattainability of life.
(Not of subjectivity!!!) Emphasis Finks.
61. See 3.3.3. See also Z-XI I/1a (EFM 2), from January 1935.
62. See 2.6.2.8, 4.4.3, and 5.1.2.3.3.
63. OH-II 14, emphasis Finks, bracketed connotative phrase mine.
338 Life and Spirit
the world and things in it form up (constitutively). To put it another way, it is

the radical self-contained freedom of sheer play.
Yet, once again, proto-life/proto-temporalization/proto-spirit is known
only by way of that which takes shape within its performance, rather than as
itself. It is life in the world that is manifest, manifest, that is, to and within
conscious living entities that are themselves equally in the world. That is, life
as lost in the world is what we initially come to know; but once it is dis-
covered that primordial life is rst (and perhaps only) manifest in the guise of
its own product, of what emerges out of its performance, then in that cogni-
tive realization life is brought back to itself. There is a deeply spiritlike
factor inherent to proto-life itself if it returns to itselfin some sense of
returnby the reections of the entity that is normally designated spirit in
an intraworldly sense, viz., human being. In other words, philosophic think-
ing itself, in its very performance of reection as a living movement, ipso facto
evidences a spirit-dimension to lifea fact that becomes for Hegel the basis
for a whole speculative metaphysics. Does Fink follow Hegel in this? Partly he
does, partly he does not; but before getting to that (in the next chapter) we
must look more closely at how phenomenology matches or surpasses the
prime feature and claimed advantage of life-philosophy.
6.3.3. Life in Life-Philosophy, Life in Phenomenology

As Fink sees the situation, phenomenologys basic quarrel with life-
philosophy is that it afrms the primacy of life as a concrete phenomenon with-
out establishing the proper orientation for explicating it fundamentally, i.e., in
its radical originating power and comprehensiveness. The fault here is that in
its inquiry into the structuring essence of originative life life-philosophy oper-
ates within the framework of the still naively unexamined presupposition of
the world, the natural attitude of unconsidered world-captivation. This shows
in that it grounds its method in the mode of cognition of the human sciences,
the sciences of the spirit [Geisteswissenschaften], in claimed equality to the
sciences of nature [Naturwissenschaften], while standing in contrast to and
autonomy from them by establishing an alternate region and methodology.
Understanding [Verstehen] as the organon of life-philosophy in its aim for
the self-comprehension of life, argues Fink, adopts a schema that is set within
the parameters of nite being within the world by focusing on a part of life in
the world, spirit-life. Life is accordingly conceived in terms of the phenome-
64. See OH-II 18.

Life and Spirit 339
non of signicance, as one dimension of one region conceived in thorough

intramundane fashion.
Nevertheless, one important positive contribution from life-philosophy is
its insistence that the intrinsically dynamic character of life precludes its being
captured in denitive, xed form, thereby rejecting naturalization. Yet the
danger is that this inkling of a fundamental unattainability leads to a
systematic agnosticism which is supposed to be compensated for by universal
historicism. Finks own transcendental theory of method will itself have
to try to deal with this unattainability for that which transcends mundane
conceptual frameworks, yet has to be carried out in what seems originally to
be of that very kind of conceptuality.
The problem with the approach that life-philosophy takes is analogous to
the difculty Fink nds in Heideggers project, as we have seen (3.33.3.3),
but there are deep differences. First of all, Heidegger himself, in his lectures in
the summer semester of 1929, takes issue with the comparison of his work
in the study of life-philosophy and phenomenology that Misch was publishing
in serial form over 1929 and 1930. Heidegger nds that Misch, in following
Diltheys rejection of metaphysics, misses the basic problem lying in meta-
physics, namely, how and why the problem of being is bound up with the
question of human being, which ultimately will turn out to mean Dasein as
temporality. That is, Misch does not grasp the problem of the conjunction,
being and time. Instead of recognizing this radical issue of ontology,
Misch talks about a new logic, in vague reference to Kants transcendental
logic, by which he would make clear what life is. In short, Misch pitches his
treatment of both life-philosophy and Heideggers thought on a wholly inade-
quate level, namely, that of epistemological grounding in certainty, rather
than pushing beyond that to the question that antecedes any such grounding
effort, namely, the question of being and timewhich in the end is the open-
ing to the falling-away-of-ground [Ab-grund]. The fundamental issue,
then, is not the particular choice of thematic material that reasoning con-
sciousness will turn to and how it will work on it, but rather the being of
65. OH-IV 39 (Finks emphasis), EFM 3, from 1935. See also VI.CM/2, 5, pp. 3536.
66. Z-XIV IX/2a (EFM 2), in a set of critical notes on both Heideggers position and
life-philosophy. (See 3.3.3.)
67. MH-GA 28, 12 and pp. 30811, summarized in Finks handwritten Nachschrift,
EFA U-MH-III 9396. On Mischs Lebensphilosophie und Phnomenologie see the be-
ginning of 6.2 above, and 1.2.
68. MH-GA 28, pp. 13435.
69. MH-GA 28, p. 136.
70. MH-GA 28, pp. 137 and 136, Heideggers hyphenation.
340 Life and Spirit
the human being that thus takes up life, and its own life, in study and self-
reection.
Nevertheless, Heideggers work displays the fundamental paradox of plac-
ing the disclosure of the elements and structures for dealing with the question
of being and time squarely within the track of existence that constitutes the
being of one unique kind of being, namely, human beingDasein. Thus, while
Heidegger does indeed explicate the world as all-encompassing horizonal
structure for beings of every kind, including human being, he nevertheless
nds that this world-structure is generated by the projecting action intrin-
sically constitutive of this same unique kind of being, human being. In other
words, world-structure originates out of the fundamental life-action of this
one particular being, out of its constitutive existential dynamic.
The paradox in Heideggers position, however, is equally an ambiguity. On
the one hand Heidegger shows that one has to approach the explication of
world and of being in the world in terms of something fundamental in that
being that, although persistently hitherto characterized philosophically as
spirit, now has to be taken more radically than consciousness understood
as the sheerly mental. Thus he pursues the analysis of Dasein in terms of
existentials; and thus the transcendence and freedom of Daseins exis-
tential structure are explicated as forming the world. Yet, despite this,
world-forming is also couched in terms that seem to displace the agency from
Dasein to become an event that arches over ontological differentiation: The
world worlds, Heidegger will say. The net result of such ambiguity is that
world-originating power escapes effective grasp while Daseins constitutive
structure itself also remains unsettled.
There continues to be a deep-rooted paradox in Finks position as well, and
it is reinforced in his coming to terms with the criticisms that life-philosophy
and Heidegger present to Husserls project. On the one hand, it has been clear
to Fink from early on that life-philosophy, ever so concreteness-craving as it
is, is more abstract and one-sided than phenomenology, for which the true
concreteness is transcendental life, in which all strata of concreteness are con-
71. MH-GA 28, pp. 13738 and 30910.

72. Also see the end of 3.2, where Heidegger interprets Kants characterizing of the
world as the play of life in terms of his own explication of Dasein as transcendence.
73. At the same time, Jacques Derrida in De lesprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris:
Galile, 1987), English translation by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Of Spirit,
Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), shows Hei-
deggers continued use and dependence upon the idea of spirit throughout his thinking
career.
74. Again, see Z-XIV IX/1a2b (EFM 2).
Life and Spirit 341
tained. On the other hand, the actual showing and adequate designation of
this ultimate concreteness, transcendental life, are irreducibly problematic,
in that to move in regression, from the living stream of consciousness down
or back to the originative proto-life within which consciousness thus lives
and ows, will come up against the limits of both access and descriptive
adequacy; and Fink nds himself obliged to place this paradox at the center of
his theoretical concerns. Both the philosophy of reection and the philosophy
of lifeand Heideggers fundamental ontologyall display a basic in-
completeness and incompletability, an only fragmentary being for spirit,
which in turn is thus far short of expressing the intrinsic nature of the sub-
ject. The subject as essentially incompletable is thus a metaphysical gap in
the cosmos. But in order for the problem thus emerging, the ultimate spec-
ulative fact that ultimate truth is meontic truth, to be seen in its full ampli-
tude, one more element in Finks reections needs to be made explicit about
the way spirit isfragmentarilya living phenomenon in the world.
6.3.4. Life as Pathic: Nietzsche in Phenomenology

The determining factor for the uncompletedness of spirit, and therefore
the difculty for the task of explicating ultimately originative life, is, once
again, that really existent spirit is always to be found already formed and
operative in the world. The pregivenness of the world and the pre-subjection
of subjectivity to the structuring processes of this pregivenness comprise the
condition that sets limits to any claim of radical self-sufciency that an actu-
ally existent subject might make. For life-philosophy as well as phenome-
nology (properly understood) this cosmological fact confounds all efforts to
demonstrate that the subject is a power of self-constitution efcacious in all
reaches of what is essential to it. Even Heideggers radical freedom is a free-
dom thrown into the world, although at the same time, paradoxically, it is
supposed to be the power that projects the world. The problem that is raised is
the problem of the subjects being ineluctably and intrinsically in the world
and yet not entirely encompassed by the world, else it could be dened and
brought to fullness in that in-the-world order, i.e., completed.
Yet we have not probed deeply enough just how the subjecti.e., hu-
man spirit, human being in one of its capacitiesis in fact structurally in the
world. Because Fink accepts the need to criticize Husserls approach as too
75. Z-V VIII/4 (EFM 1), from late 1928 or 1929.

76. Z-V VI/1a (EFM 1).
77. Z-XIV IX/2b, treated in 3.3.3.
78. The argument of this paragraph is drawn from Z-XIV IX/2a2b, EFM 2.
342 Life and Spirit
dominantly that of a philosophy of reection, he cannot be content with

characterizing the manner by which life is in the world as primarily cognitive
in accord with the standard subject-object schema. Finks whole effort at radi-
calizing Husserls analysis of time-consciousness was to disclose within that
analysis the ultimate signicance of intentionality as a kind of power anterior
to and encompassing cognition rather than primarily identied with it or
structured according to its paradigm. When this further dimension of inten-
tionality is more exactly grasped, i.e., when spirit in the world is understood in
its noncognitive and/or precognitive aspects, then spirit as the underlying
originative play of life can itself be approached more appropriately.
The problem has two aspects to it, running through the main themes of
chapters 4 and 5. The rst aspect is, once again, that consciousness considered
at the level constitutive of its being is structured not as thematic object-
intending but rather as intentionality of another kind, the intentionality con-
stitutive of temporality. Consciousness in this case has awareness of its own
streaming self that is not object-cognitive, although just how this is performed
remains a matter of debate in the phenomenological work of Husserl and
Fink, as chapter 5 showed. The second aspect, intimate to the rst, regards the
way proto-temporality must also be explicated as the very process of origina-
tion of the world as the fundamental horizon of horizons for phenomena; and
the way this is analyzed provides the basis for explicating awareness of the
world as world, i.e., not awareness of things in it but of itagain, not in the
manner of object-cognition.
Conceptualizing this precognitional awareness so as to see in it a clue, a
hint, an indication, of the basic character of spirit as life playing on and
playing itself out, beyond standard differential schemata for dening living
phenomena, has to overcome one critical limitation in one of life-philosophys
major achievements, namely, its emphasis upon the culture-building capability
of spirit in endless, manifold change through history. Here is where we turn to
the only article after the 1933 Kant-Studien essay that Fink was able to publish
in Germany until after another ten years of Nazismand a world warhad
passed. In life-philosophy, Fink points out, the culturally creative move-
79. Was Will die Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls? Studien, pp. 15778. English
translation by Arthur Grugan, What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl
Want to Accomplish? Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), 527; but not used here.
As with the Kant-Studien article, Husserl was involved with this essay as well; see Z-XIII
with its Beilage I (EFM 2). See chapter 1, 1.3, footnote 190 (in the appendix), for Hus-
serls full approval of this essay of Finks.
Life and Spirit 343
mental character of spirit isphilosophically seenstill always held within

and enclosed by a deeper-lying unmovedness of spirit, which it is the concern
of the fundamental experience of the phenomenological reduction to annul
and transcend. In other words, life-philosophy conceives of spirit in terms
of its fundamental situatedness in the pregiven horizon of the world; spirit
nds itself in the world, specically as human spirit within human being in
the experience-frame of humanity, in all the differentiation of things and pro-
cesses in the world in terms of which life is conceptualized.
When, now, Fink attempts to express the sense of this move of reduction-
governed radicalizationsetting in motion what before was at rest, viz., the
presupposition of the world as unquestioned ultimate frame and horizonhe
does so in a manner utterly uncharacteristic of Husserl, namely, by coming to
terms with Nietzsche. He characterizes the move to the radical questioning of
the worldthe (unmoving) horizon of life and consciousnessas a kind of
drive, a kind of carrying forward that, in some sense, is continuous with the
carrying forward that is intrinsic to life in general as temporal play. The idea
of ground-laying that is at work in Husserls philosophy becomes intelligible
rst of all in terms of the Pathos of phenomenology, i.e., in terms of the stance
of human existence that lies at its basis. This Pathos is not something
found only in phenomenology but is rather the comprehensive, deeply felt
drive intrinsic to any philosophy, namely, the passion of thinking. More-
over, this whole passion-driven effort to reach in thought radical understand-
ing of the whole continuum of living movement that leads to this very under-
standing constitutes a new level of development in that same living movement;
that is, life unfolds as spirit (in the sense of a determinate, articulate self-
awareness) in its ultimate reaches of realization precisely in this radicality of
thinking. Fink writes: The Pathos of philosophizing that understands itself in
the passion of thought . . . radicalizes itself to self-reection, as the manner in
which spirit has experience of itself. The phenomenological philosophy of
80. Studien, p. 166, emphasis Finks. This point was introduced in 6.3.1.
81. Studien, p. 169, adapted loosely from Finks phrase das Sichselbstnden des
Geistes in der Welt. See the whole passage in Studien, pp. 16971.
82. Studien, p. 162, emphasis Finks. Finks word in German is Pathos, which, unlike
the English pathos, does not have the connotation of a pity-engendering expressiveness
but means instead deep or ardent feeling more generically taken. This corresponds some-
what more to the sense of the Greek pyow, (strong) feeling, than the English word does.
Accordingly, the device of capitalization is used here to remind the reader that this more
generic sense is meant.
83. Studien, p. 163, emphasis Finks.
344 Life and Spirit
Husserl lives in the Pathos [deep feeling] of the self-realization of spirit taking
place in self-reection. In the next section we shall take up further the
question of the role reective thought holds in the economy of the play of
originative life, i.e., the place of philosophy and phenomenology in the self-
performing of life. At the moment the issue is what identifying the thrust of
thought as pathic contributes to explicating the nature of world-originative
life. There are conceptions available that might offer a ready possibility, Hei-
deggers care being one, as might also Nietzsches will to power; but in
either these or other options the crucial question is deciding just how to take
such terms. For phenomenology that matter is formally, methodologically
settled by the fact of the reduction: any such designations are to be understood
as radically as is possible for a factor that is originally mundane, that is, that is
found as set and determined within the horizon of the world taken as an
unquestionable given. Finks adapting of Nietzschean expressions concen-
trates on the way these might allow interpreting life and spirit in terms of the
basic phenomenological problematic of the constitution of the world, namely,
as the intrinsic effect of the coming-about of the temporal as such in proto-
process. This is no mere exercise in syncretism but draws from philosophic
resources in philosophers other than Husserl for critically explicating, against
deep-seated presuppositions, issues and ndings at the heart of the phenome-
nological enterprise.
The question, therefore, is exactly how conceptualizing the pathic, the
passion-element, in regard to the life of spirit in the world would contribute to
determining the character of the originative life that encompasses the world as
such in its dynamic. To begin with, as already argued, any setting of spirit and
life in mutual opposition has to be itself opposed; this in fact was very much
part of the crisis raging in Germany in the mid-1930s. In a series of brief notes
from the autumn of 1934 citing issues in the question of temporality Fink
writes: The real antinomy of life and spirit [is] Europes fateful problem.
The emptying of spirit into a derivative rationality. Solution: the pathic world-
view as the courageousness of reason. Rather than emptying life by dening
rationality in a way that accepts naturalism and denes it paradigmatically,
say, as the mathematical and the purely logical, Fink will allow that [l]ife is
neither rational nor irrational, but pathic. Thus if [t]he performance of the
84. Studien, p. 164, bracketed expression mine, after note 82 above.

85. Z-XI II/18a, (EFM 2). The notes from this subset quoted here and in the following
lines are written on different calendar sheets from late September 1934.
86. Z-XI II/11b. Finks emphasis. The entire note (/11ab) is a concise instance of the
whole critique of life-philosophy.
Life and Spirit 345
life of absolute subjectivity = the world-play of spirit reminiscent of the

way Heidegger read Kant so dramatically (see 3.2)and if passion is the
substance of life, passion is not the opposite of the work of spirit but its very
dynamism.
The point in this line of thought is not that in some vague way (1) knowing
(again as a differentially determinable capacity) and (2) driving/being-carried
forward are identical operations but rather that the former is not explicable as
movement solely in terms of itself. In Nietzsches reections Fink sees the vivid
lesson that, if knowledge is drive for truth, then the mere recognition of this
factthe knowing of it gained in a reective momentis not what makes it
that kind of relentless endeavor; it is already fundamentally more than know-
ing. Knowledge of a will-tendency does not determine the latter. Since
knowledge is unintelligible except as a movement toward the goal that denes
it, acts of knowledge do not stand in contrast to their source in the essential
dynamism of actual movement toward a goal. In this way knowledge and
reasonand a fortiori phenomenology itselfhave to be seen in terms of
the passion of life, in terms of deeply operative and deeply felt fundamental
vitality.
It is important to realize here, too, that this is not to be taken to mean that
feeling in the sense of the various specic kinds of feeling which humans
havehuman feelings or emotionsis a mode of existence with an essential
priority over other capabilities, such as reection and rational thought. The
traditional distinction opposing reason to feeling in their intraworldly sense is
precisely what is to be overcome. Fink reads Nietzsche as disclosing the way
reason itself has the dimension of feeling and therefore can be spoken of as
itself a movement of Pathos and passion. Or, rather, the originative core
movement of life is a pathic power out of which the various modalities of
existence in the worldthe human feelings, the human will, the human
reasonall spring in continuity with it. Just as intentionality is radicalized
into a performative antecedent to the schematizing of the parts and powers of
the soul and spirit, so the originative pathic must be taken in a sense that,
87. Z-XI II/12a, Finks emphasis.

88. Z-XIX IV/8a.
89. See Finks Argumentation against Husserls Socratism, in Z-XII 27ab, EFM 2.
See also the surrounding notes in Z-XII XV/1a41 and 26ab.
90. One implication of this position is to underscore the nonultimacy of subjectivity as
self-reectively egoic. While this is already clear in the Husserlian analysis of intention-
ality as temporalization, the same thing comes out of understanding the pathic dimension
of reason. See Z-XII 8a. Cf. also VI.CM/2, Text No. 5, p. 220, and Text No. 8.
91. See the critique of the traditional differentiation of spirit [Geist] or intellect [In-
346 Life and Spirit
denitionally neither rational nor irrational, is not in opposition to reason

but fundamental to it, even its root, in its status as a differentially distinct
power. There is a drive-factor in reason too, just as in all living movements:
Reason wants truth. In this way philosophy has its source in the passion
of thinking; thinking is a great, and perhaps the greatest, passion of life,
and philosophizing is immanent to life.
Reason, then, gures in the current of vital Pathos, of the being-carried-
forward that is intrinsically felt in every dimension of living consciousness,
that makes it at once spirit and life. What Fink seems to be getting at in all this
is perhaps best seen when put in the context of the way in which Husserl draws
closest to a conception of life in his time-consciousness analyses. There the
initial aim is to analyze the structure of the process that results in the constitu-
tion of objects as coherent unities abiding through the streaming of appear-
ance. However, success in that analysis (which has subsequently become ca-
nonic in the phenomenological literature, despite its representing for the most
part only the rst stage of the investigation of temporality) is inversely propor-
tionate to the possibility of success in explicating the way an experiencing
consciousness knows of the ongoingness of its own performance precisely
in, indeed as, the very coursing of it, as the very temporalness of it.
Thus, in order to explore the kind of noncognitive awareness there might be
in the very life of consciousness about the uttermost basic dimensions of its
own being, and how this might be indicative of the nature of that life as life in
the most radical sense, Fink has to orient his analysis differently from Hus-
serls; he has to explore it precisely as pathic, on all levels of consciousness,
including that of rational reections own movement. It is the pathic, i.e.,
feeling as a general, fundamental experiential dimension active in all orders of
consciousness, that characterizes life, or, more exactly, that characterizes the
way in which actually living processi.e. some actual experiential stream
originatively structured by proto-temporalizationis ipso facto aware both
(a) of itself as performance and (b) of the fundamental accomplishments of the
temporalization operative in that performance.
With regard to its own self as performance, temporalized living process can
be conceived of as pathic in that it is also the feel of its own being, the feel of its
tellekt], will [Wille] and feeling [Gemt] in Z-V VIII/1a4b (EFM 1), in that these
concepts in effect construe consciousness as an abstract stratum in the concretum
man, making subjectivity but one moment in human being (Z-V VIII/3a).
92. See Z-XIV VIII/1a, EFM 2.
93. Z-XII XV/3c, EFM 2.
94. Z-XIII XV/2a.
Life and Spirit 347
own structural articulation, the feel of the ow and accretion that governs all
consolidations in identity and constancy taking place within it. At the same
time, as chapter 4 laid out (4.5; also 5.1.1.4), primary dimensions are gener-
atedswung out, to use the metaphoric term for their genesisin that
same move of temporalization; and of these too there is awareness pathically,
globally, horizonally rather than in cognitive object-thematization. Fink iden-
tied this awareness as sheer wakefulness, the openness to the world as the
realm of being that undergirds all specic cognitions and actions; but in the
present context it is characterized as well as feeling the world, world-
feeling; so that, correlative to the pathic awareness by living conscious-
ness of its own performance as temporalized, as continuously structured inter-
nally by temporalization, there is pathic awareness of the whole frame of fun-
damental dimensions that that same primordial temporalization generates,
namely, the horizons that comprise the world in its primordial sense.
The world-feeling aspect of wakefulness, mentioned in chapter 4 (4.4.3),
returns here, where we could do considerable eshing out of the idea from
Finks extensive phenomenologically transformative reading of Nietzsche; but
a little of this must sufce. For Fink philosophic reection can do no better
than begin from wonder at the overwhelming fact of ones simply being there
in the cosmos (see 4.1 and 4.2). In a passage of some metaphoric exuber-
anceclearly the result of reading NietzscheFink speaks of this as wake-
fulness to actuality on the part of the man of the earth, as Pathos. It is
life open and turned to the cosmic powers, and overpowered and shaken by
them. It is a renunciation of all salvations, but at the same time meta-
physical feeling as a profound power of life acknowledging death, fate,
sexuality, age, and madness, among other things. It is devotion to the world,
innite feeling, longing, the world-feeling that reaches out, out into the
whole of being and beyond everything individual; and Fink quotes a line
from Zarathustra: The boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and
time. Of this rich network of gurative expression for the feeling for the
world, one term is of especial interest to Fink, namely, Nietzsches Great
Longing. We were introduced to this in the nal paragraphs of chapter 5, in
the context of Finks attempt to think beyond the aporias intrinsic to Husserls
95. See appendix.

96. On world-feeling see 4.4.3.
97. Phrases and lines from Z-XIV 10ab (EFM 2), emphases Finks own. The line from
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 3, The Seven Seals, subsection 5, is given in Walter
Kaufmanns translation (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 230. Nietzsche is also credited with
the expression man of the earth.
348 Life and Spirit
analysis of time, although there he speaks of longing as temporality itself.

Here, however, Nietzsche is credited with the realization of a primary motive
force in human life that gains its intrinsic sense from an interpretation gov-
erned by the phenomenological reduction radically applied; and the various
contexts in which Fink refers to this longing show the two aspects that we have
been speaking about, viz., one correlative to temporality, the other correlative
to the world. Nietzsches earthly Pathos of philosophy is Finks awakening
to the pathic realization of being held within and traversed by the cosmos, an
irrepressible felt openness to the horizon of the world as obtaining beyond all
matters found within it.
Yet this Great Longing does not remain mute and vague. In an article
published from Louvain in 1939, a year after Husserls death, The Problem of
Edmund Husserls Phenomenology, Fink speaks of the wonder from which
philosophic reection arises to take up thinking explicitly about this very
situation, against the bonds that hold all ones being within it. This wonder-
instigated endeavor wondering to reach down to the roots of ones constitu-
tion to see how it is all done, is termed, after Nietzsche, the Great Long-
ing. And that brings us to the next matter to follow in Finks reections
alongside Husserl on the question of the crisis of reason in Europe in the
1930s, the topic, namely, of the nature and meaning of philosophic reection
precisely as one of the performances that life plays out.
6.3.5. Philosophic/Phenomenological Reection as an

Act of Life
Far from delaying yet longer the repeatedly alluded to question of the
meontic, taking up the way philosophic reection is an act pertaining to orig-
inative life brings us concretely to its very threshold. Recall the effect of the
reduction as the radical operation by which the world is returned to its original
character. Under the reduction the world, rather than being taken as a set of
objective patterns of entities and events, is disclosed as the horizon of hori-
zons, that is, as the dimensioning frame wherein the ceaselessly temporalized
ow of appearing offers stability only in ever-varying partiality in spatiotem-
poral presencing and depresencing. Reection resituates this all-embracing
conditioning frame, this ultimate factor of xity for human experience and
thought, in the boundless power of sheer originative life. Phenomenology
98. See Z-XIII 29a (EFM 2).

99. Studien, pp. 179223.
100. Studien, p. 183.
Life and Spirit 349
becomes herein radical philosophy of life; for it overcomes the tempting

presumption of power on the part of reective reason and instead acknowl-
edges its work as basically the power that life itself has over itself. Since
reection is a moment in the current of life, this reective realization in phe-
nomenology, rather than merely a conclusion drawn in theoretical insight, a
mere thesis about life, is the active passion that, driving knowledge, trans-
forms life in achieving the recovery by life of the power it intrinsically has over
itself. In short, the phenomenology of life amounts to a new grasp of itself
by life.
The idea of lifes taking possession of itself opened the chapter, but now it
has to be explicated further. Far from meaning that some human individual
Husserl or Fink, or a Nietzschewould come into possession and control
over fundamental life-force, and thereby become some sort of superhuman
being, what happens is rather that the human individual comes to recognize
himself or herself as precisely powerless, namely, as constitutively set entirely
in the already given world and, even more, in the already given originativeness
that holds the world and all else within its dynamic. In a word, human being
including the philosopher and the phenomenologist, even in the latters tran-
scendental radicalityis intrinsically a being of the world [Weltwesen]. It is
to recognize that, inasmuch as the reecting human individual nds within
himself or herself clues for disclosing the hidden performances that, as the
constituting source for the world-frame and for phenomenality in it, antecede
and go beyond ones own self as individual, ultimately one has to recognize
oneself as an ontological paradox, as a gap in the cosmos. The effect of
this reective realization is anything but a solidied sense of security and
complacency; it is instead the radical questioning of the certainty in terms of
which we normally live our world as the ground and frame of consciousness
and action. Once the security of life is shown in its character as the conceal-
ment of life, Fink writes, the ground is already indicated toward which
philosophizing aims as the action of taking oneself down to the ground [Sich-
zugrunderichten]: [namely,] life itself. Philosophy in this form, as radical
phenomenology, Fink concludes, places man himself in question; and it is in
the detailed inquiry that necessitates this questioning that [p]hilosophizing is
lifes taking possession of itself.
101. Z-XII 20d (EFM 2), a set of seven theses (20ad) on the meaning of the phenome-
nological reduction.
102. Z-XII 23ab; Finks phrase here is einem neuen Selbstbegriff des Lebens.
103. Points all from Z-XVI 1ab, EFM 2.
104. Z-XVI III/4a, bracketed insertion mine. The expression translated take down to
350 Life and Spirit
These notes were written by Fink in preparation for the Dessau lecture he
gave to the Kantgesellschaft on December 4, 1935, The Idea of Transcenden-
tal Philosophy in Kant and in Phenomenology, and the same ideas were
woven into the lecture itself, especially in its concluding paragraphs. Husserl,
now fully at work on the train of thought leading to the Crisis-project, had
himself read through the text beforehand and made a few marginal notes.
Indeed, Finks proposals to Husserl for the Prague lectures of July 1935 ex-
press in detail these same ideas, so that we can be sure Husserl knew quite well
how Fink was thinking out phenomenology in an alternate orientation. But
this alternative has implications that are rather far-reaching.
The simplest way to indicate these implications is to say that lifes taking
possession of itself meant rejecting the grounding of values, institutions, or
roles in some ultimate determinant, even while recognizing that an actual
setting in institutions and roles was an intrinsic condition of human being and
living. In January 1936, the season with which this chapter opened, Fink, in
thinking about topics for a discussion with Landgrebe, noted down ideas
about the way philosophy as lifes taking possession of itself meant that not
specic roles but play, which gives itself over and over again to roles, is the
essence of undisabled life, even while never being free of the guise of specic
roles. That life is essentially the dynamis of play, however, is anything but
a denitive xing in a nal essence, nor is it a description for human life. Roles
are the order of the human, as in the whole phenomenon of culture in the
instituting of self-interpretive forms, for example, in the form of the overarch-
ing institution of a state. In contrast to the state as the stabilized power of an
order of life that, representing security, nal validity, the univocality of the
actual, is necessarily dogmatic, philosophy is always skeptical, always
keeps a watchful eye out, is experimental, takes risks, is a view opening out
into the unknown, in mans distant future. In this respect philosophy al-
ways represents a noncompliance with the established order as set and given.
the ground, Zugrunderichten, normally means simply to wreck or destroy. Here Fink
reads the term in a more literal sense. The same sense of the term is also found in Finks
Sixth Meditation, CM6, p. 32 (VI.CM/1, p. 36). Here is the context for the striking
difference one can see between Husserls orientation in his 1935 Prague lectures and
Finks in his proposals for Husserl for these lectures. See 1.4, where these proposals
M-III, No. 8 (EFM 2) and Z-XVIII V/1a4b (EFM 3are mentioned.
105. The opening essay in ND, pp. 744. See 1.3, p. 47.
106. See appendix.
107. Z-XX 4a (EFM 3), emphasis Finks, in a set of notes on The Denition of Man
from 1936, again in the midst of Husserls work on the Crisis-writings.
Life and Spirit 351
And Fink broached these ideas in discussions with Husserl, in that same Janu-
ary of 1936.
In this discussion Fink expressed with force and explicitness both (a) his
nding teleology in phenomenology to mean simply the onward thrust [Ten-
denz] of life, with absolutely no predetermination of its content, and (b) his
resistance view of philosophy, if we can take the telegraphic summary in the
notes as representing the actual discussion. The very fact that he was having
this conversation with Husserl as a matter of course in the daily regimen of the
life that he had chosen is itself an instance of Finks resistance to the institu-
tions of that painful period of Germany history. His doing of philosophy
and Husserlswas the very assertion of the freedom of life coming to its own
self-possession; and there was another side to this view of philosophy in its
practice, Finks getting away entirely by himself on occasional retreats into
solitude in a cabin far from Freiburg in the Oytal east of Lake Constance. This
is something we shall return to in chapter 9. More important now is to draw
attention to two other aspects of his thinking, especially in relationship to
Husserls at this point in time.
Husserl did not quite share this perspective of Finks on freedom and life,
and he did not adapt it into his own writing. In other notes, Fink writes for
himself quite frankly that, despite all the emphasis on beginning radically,
Husserl starts out with a rm and xed idea of philosophy: to him it is sci-
ence. Of course Fink recognizes that Husserls idea of science is to be
distinguished from that of the natural sciences, especially in Husserls linking
of his science of phenomenology with inquiry into the life-world antecedent to
natural sciences determination of its objects of study, and then to the source of
life-world structuring in the performance of subjectivity. Yet in other re-
spects Husserls conception of philosophy as science shares features with the
pursuit of natural science. Husserls philosophic life is the scientic knowing
of beings, even if as an innite task for generations of researchers in an
innite progress, a supra-individual collective enterprise of human cultural
advance, . . . sanctied by the aim of a practical universal rational culture,
for which philosophy undertakes the function of self-reection. From this
there results the idea of the philosopher as assigned a particular role, namely,
that of servant to unending advancing science. For Fink the problem with
108. See the opening pages of this chapter.

109. OH-VI 1517, EFM 3. See also OH-VII A/2a.
110. Z-XX 11a, EFM 3.
111. Z-XX 11b.
352 Life and Spirit
this is that it is a philosophy that does not sufciently bring its own stance into
question. It is not that philosophy has no contributions to make in cognitive
content but rather that it is also an instance of a living movement. As that, it is
not denable in true fundamentality as science but rather as lifes taking
possession of itself, the play that is about freedom.
Correlative to this is Finks refusal to accept the idea of philosophy as
fundamentally a career or a profession, as something dened in terms of some
intracultural role. Against Husserls conception of philosophy as a profes-
sional attitude with professional hours, for him philosophy is a revolution
on the part of life. Here surely is a difference between Husserl and Fink
that lies in more than number of years, a distance in experience and back-
ground that was itself revolutionary. The German cultural scene after 1900,
and after the Great War of 1914, was vastly different from that which Husserl
knew as he was maturing, in still imperial Vienna and Bismarckian Leipzig
and Halle. One item alone is a sign of this: Finks avid reading of Nietzsche, in
contrast to Husserls scant consideration of his work. It is no wonder that
there would be some tension between them in the practice of their thought, or
that Fink would vigorously reject the role he saw Husserl give him: The
caricature of the philosopher: the good disciple, who lives in the illusion of a
notion of service, and passes over his life. (Example: Husserls conception of a
good successor, a role that is intended for me!)
There is an even more radical consequence that Fink draws from the rule of
the reduction, again precisely via his reading of Nietzsche, wherein the pri-
macy of life emerges as the metaphysics of play. With equal vigor, Fink
rejects both the idea of vitality as resentment against morality and this
ideas complementary opposite, a moralistic interpretation of life. The philo-
sophic position to take with respect to life beyond good and evil is only
possible by an epoch, by going behind the contrast between the moral and
the anti-moral. Values, including moral values, are always products of
life, not properties of it as of originative power itself. Yet, once created in
the particular tradition to which they are relative, value conceptions come to
be taken to constitute the very carrying of life itself, what Fink in one place
112. Ibid., emphasis Finks.

113. OH-VII A/1a, EFM 3.
114. Nevertheless, Cairns reports Husserl saying he had had in his youth a lively
interest in Nietzsches earliest writings, Conversations, p. 60, December 23, 1931.
115. OH-VII A/5a.
116. OH-VII A/6a.
117. See Finks discussion in OH-I 1115 (EFM 3) of slave morality and master
morality.
Life and Spirit 353
calls the primordial phenomenon of the self-inclusion of life in the value-

system that stems from it. As had been expressed in a caf conversation
between Fink and Jan Patocka in 1934, what the phenomenological reduction
radically understood to be imposed was a morals-free conception of absolute
life rather than a teleology that was itself moralistic; this latter is what Fink
saw Husserls position to be. It was also a topic of close discussion with
Landgrebe two years later, in that pivotal January of 1936, when Fink gave
considerable detail to his critical position regarding Husserl. Fink saw Husserl
transferring the traditional Enlightenment values of modern European hu-
manism into ultimate subjectivity: for Husserl alignment to the good
becomes a striving within the being of subjectivity. Subjectivity in itself is
good, that is, strives for the good, and thus being (inasmuch as subjectivity
for Husserl is the absolute existent) is morally viewed. Fink insists that
phenomenology radically taken must move beyond this admixture, and he
knows this represents a demand that Husserl does not acknowledge. Fink does
not view philosophys deepest inquiry as having the duty of providing human
life with its ultimate ethical value. Only the inner compulsion to have to live
thinking makes up the philosophers destiny. The radical inquiry of philos-
ophy as phenomenology was not a movement with primarily intracultural
import, with direct utility or relevance to the human living practices of the day.
The passion for radical questioning made philosophy instead essentially un-
timely. It even made philosophys passion an a-social drive!
Yet really achievable exit from the reality of being a particular someone in a
particular here and a particular now is not possible. You cant fall out of
being, Fink writes in another context. What is crucial is to see oneself not
as poised upon some essentially and irrevocably xed fundament of being but
rather as emergent in the intrinsic free play of life itself. It would be delusion to
think that a person can become entirely free of the physical or personal-
historical background that has formed ones character, nor is this condition
some kind of fatalistic (or indeed divine providential) assignment. Its sense is
rather that of a transitory product of lifes free play, and this characterizes as
118. Z-XII XV/2d, EFM 2. See also Z-XII XV/3c.

119. Z-XI II/6a, EFM 2.
120. OH-VII 4445, from January 29, 1936 (EFM 3).
121. Z-XIX IV/7a, EFM 3. Indications are that this subset of notes is from mid-1934.
122. Finks word, again very Nietzschean, in Z-XIII IV/2a, EFM 2.
123. Z-XIV VI/5a, EFM 2.
124. Z-XI II/22b (EFM 2), Finks point in this note dealing with the way fellowship
with others is a necessary ingredient of happiness (eudaimonia), against the sufciency of
self-consciousness, is that one can opt for neither escape nor fusion.
354 Life and Spirit
well the reection that turns to thematize the constituting process itself of the
play of life.
For the philosopher, then, questioning the role or roles into which a person
happens to be cast and is expected to play is one practice imposed by radical
phenomenological inquiry, but another is holding out for the dimension of fun-
damental nonnecessityfreedomin ultimate philosophic achievement it-
self. Philosophizing = living experimentally, Fink writes, in direct borrow-
ing from Nietzsche. Again, this does not mean arrogating to oneself the liberty
of adopting some arbitrary nonconformist stance or lifestyle simply for the sake
of asserting independence and individuality. Beyond the practice of noncom-
pliancefor example, in regard to rigidly authoritarian role-assignments
and in search of its grounding, Fink has something in mind lying deep in radi-
cal phenomenology. Philosophizing is returning home, better, seeking home
[Heimsuchen], writes Fink, taking home not in the sense of a place of
shelter or homeland but rather the search for the untouched (integral) life,
lifes taking possession of itself. As a move beyond all traveled paths, an
experimenting [Versuchen], a being-experimental, the great experiment/temp-
tation [Versuchung], this is at once risk and danger. Phenomenology
means seeing life as the originative, the constituting process for all phenome-
nality. To philosophize phenomenologically, i.e., to direct ones reections by
the requirements of the phenomenological reduction, is to tear oneself away
from being set among beingsi.e., set in the natural attitudein order to
become the self-mastering experimenter of being, in order to try to nd out
how this whole setup of world and phenomena in it comes about. It is to try to
adopt the position upon this process that implies being outside it, to become in
this way the player of the world [Weltspieler]. In this way, writes Fink of
one who philosophizes, he is like the gods, as Heraclitus says of Zeus: He
plays with worlds.
125. Z-XVII 9a, and see also Z-XVIII 4a (both in EFM 3). Following this latter note is a
sketch of ideas (Z-XVIII V/13) for the lectures Husserl was to give in Prague in Novem-
ber 1935.
126. OH-VII 4849, EFM 3. Versuchung normally simply means temptation, even
though Versuch means trial, attempt, experiment. In the present context of wordplay
upon the root -such-, Versuchung has to carry the sense experiment and attempt as
well. This note is one of the many late notes of Finks designated Re: The Cabin in the
Oytal, meaning the kind of thinking that is carried on in solitude away from normal
involvements.
127. OH-V 23, in notes pertaining to Finks Dessau lecture of December 1935 on Kant
and Husserls phenomenology. It must not be left unmentioned that, while Fink was an
avid reader of Nietzsche long before he met Heidegger, nevertheless Heideggers lectures
Life and Spirit 355
Yet it is questionable that a human being can in fact ever actually stand in
the position of someone who plays the world from beyond it. However
much Fink, or Husserl, or we ourselves, can formulate and assert this idea, it is
quite another thing actually to carry it off. If primordial life is precisely the
performing of the world, can the reversal of that performance be achieved in
reection, can that action be followed back in its operation to its source by the
thought-activities of a human philosopherand what other kind is there? Is
not reection, whatever its transcendental aims, always placed within the life
of temporalization, and therefore never able to gain transcendent access to its
actual generative performance? Is not philosophical reection, therefore, al-
ways topical, i.e., framed within a topos, and not so absolutely autonomous
as Husserls transcendental program would seem to claim?
With the return of these questions the sense of the experimenting in ques-
tion that has to be held to begins to emerge, namely, that what is mobilized
may be the mode of trying as such rather than an actual action in presumed
fully achieved efcacity in reaching its objective. Supporting this interpreta-
tion is, on the one hand, the play on words in the German as Fink uses it,
centering on suchen, seeking, and versuchen, trying, and on the other the
main point of Finks conception of the meontic, namely, that the ineffectuality
of the conceptions in terms of which one tries to explicate ultimate origins
does not dissolve the necessity of these conceptions but precisely imposes it; so
that ones efforts, ones trying, cannot subsist without them, even if no instance
of trying can be adequate, even if the effort is an experiment that cannot
succeed. To put it another way, at the ultimate level of philosophical inquiry
perhaps it is the problem, the question, that is important, rather than any
answer to it; the question must continue to plague any answer. Perhaps the
question is even such that it cannot be answered, that it has to be sustained
precisely as a question.
6.3.6. The Aporetic of Phenomenological Reection as an Act

within Life
In the end the lesson of the realization asserted by life-philosophy is seen
by Fink to be largely a negative one: those actions or elements that hitherto in
philosophy had been asserted to be transcendent are not transcendent. When
must have given Fink decided encouragement and direction in his own thinking regarding
the sense of play in the processes that phenomenology was attempting to explicate. See
3.2.
128. See footnote 126, just above.
356 Life and Spirit
Nietzsche, for example, discovers the immanence of values in life, this is

really the de-masking of the navet of believing that values (religion, morality,
art, science) are transcendent ideals abiding in some untouchable heaven
and not cultural products in the historical coursing of life. Making this
point, however, does not by any means amount to giving the positive explica-
tion of what either life or immanence means. For explicating what these
things mean can only be done once one has made clear how it is possible to
take a stance in respect to life as the ultimate originative power within which
all ones existence moves, including any such stance-taking. Simply to as-
sume the possibility of an effective standpoint upon life would amount to
reverting to the position of a philosophy of reection, particularly if the rela-
tionship between subjective life and the object-realm remains in effect one of,
respectively, priority and subordination. Finks move, therefore, is precisely
not to offer another standpoint but to render any standpoint-taking radically
problematic, however much a standpoint may both be unavoidable and still
have a necessary function. More than that, what Fink will do is make that
radical problematicity the very essence of the methodology required.
When Fink was composing his Dessau lecture of December 1935 he wrote
for himself the following note, which sums up much of what we have been
seeing here, especially in his divergence from Husserl: The specic basic
conception of philosophy that guides me: Philosophizing is lifes reach to grasp
itself. Philosophy is not a science, not a cultural matter, but knowing about
the creative power of life. Two things are to be noticed about this note,
beyond the obvious t with the matters in the previous sections. The rst is
that, despite the use of lexicographically related terms, scienceWissen-
schaftand knowingdas WissenFink cannot mean knowing here to
be a straightforward subject-object cognition, knowing as Husserl regularly
exhibits it. The second thing to notice is the context in the folder where it
occurs; for immediately preceding it is a note pertaining to the explanation of
phenomenology that Fink put forward in his Dessau lecture, namely, that
phenomenology = ontogonic metaphysics: i.e., the inquiry into the origin of
being.
What, now, can knowing be in regard to ultimate life in an ontogonic
129. See OH-IV 717 (EFM 3).

130. Z-XVII 18a, emphasis Finks (EFM 3).
131. Z-XVII 17a; Z-XVII is a note-tablet with many of the sheets still attached at the
perforations, including the ones here referred to. The sequence and mutual relevance are
indisputable. For the corresponding text in the lecture, see ND, pp. 4344. Husserl, it is
worth mentioning, wrote not a word of comment or objection to this passage in the
lecture manuscript.
Life and Spirit 357
metaphysics, knowing that would not be of the kind termed scientic

(even in the Husserlian sense)? In this same contextual note Fink explains that
origin here cannot mean a beginning in time. Since to be means simply
originating and passing away in time, to inquire into the origin of being is
to inquire altogether beyond that-which-is [das Seiende], therefore also be-
yond all ontological modes of originating and passing away. But what kind of
thinking and knowing can actually take place as a living action and still reach
out altogether beyond that-which-is? Finks answer: Only because in the
midst of beings there is one that is not utterly and without remainder taken up
in its being, that is, only a being that is the bridge from being to nothing.
Only the kind of being for which its being is but a fragment. Only a being
that is essentially structured by a distance from being precisely within the
action by which the self-possession of life (in the fundamental sense) is
achieved, only this fragmentary being can be such as holds itself apart from
being in performing a meontic epoch. And this means that in the explica-
tion of this beings being, in the unfolding of its ontology, what is experi-
enced is the foundering of every attempt to conceive man as a being, i.e.,
the realization of human beings ontological unattainability.
Now if philosophic reection in phenomenology cannot extricate itself
from life and still continue to be and to actlife taken here in both the
ultimate sense as treated in the previous sections and the sense of in-the-world
livingif, that is, the way in which one is aware of ones situation in being and
in the world both before and while doing the explicit reection that leads to
this realization, then, in a coupling of points, one has to make explicit and
integrate (a) the way the efcacity of reection depends in principle upon
living process as continuingagain in both sensesnot simply as an external
condition for it but as an internal ground of that very reective action, and (b)
how reection acting as thematic grasp in intuitional evident givenness has no
purchase upon that which constitutively antecedes the conditions of intu-
itional thematic givenness, of presence-prescribing thematization.
Here is where two of the results of chapter 5 return, namely, the explication
of (a) how being temporal can be at the same time awareness of temporal
process as temporal, and (b) how bringing temporalization itself to show in
temporally conditioned presence is not possible. There the points were that (a)
the awareness of time that coincides constitutively with the ongoing process of
temporalizationwith the coming-about-of-the-temporal as suchhas to be
characterized as performance-consciousness (see 5.1.2.3.3), and (b) any
conception of a way in which temporality could itself be presented foundered
132. Z-XVII 17ab, emphasis all Finks. See 6.3.3.

358 Life and Spirit
in that it necessarily cast temporalization into the form of what it itself could
not be, namely, something whose character was the constitutive result of the
antecedent origination of the temporal as such (see 5.2.2.2). Now, however,
when temporalization is taken as ultimate living process, temporalization-as-
life is not only the root and sustaining power for any thematically focused turn
of consciousness, especially for reection on ones own being as temporally
structured process, it is also itself determined to be the very life and living
character of self-reection. That is, in terms of the very formulations that
reection leads to in this matter, self-reection can never really be the seizing,
in oneself, of life by life itself in intuitional thematic givenness-in-presence, i.e.,
in evidentially presence-prescribing thematiziation. Its action as self-reection
has to be recognized as a radically unusual kind in both its operation and the
manner of the manifestation it entertains.
This is the import of a number of texts referred to in chapter 2, now able
to be read radically, i.e., in terms of the kind of reach exercised by the humanly
immanent toward ultimate life itself, as ipso facto already operative within
itself. One of the texts indicated there in particular neatly expresses the point:
Inner experience, in contrast to outer experience, is not a thematic experience
(object-experience), but is unthematic, precisely performance experience. Re-
ection is never a thematizing (object-ifying) of so-called immanent life, but
is rather a special way of intensifying performance experience. In keeping
with this, Fink makes a move in regard to the reective action of phenome-
nologizing that may seem at rst sight to be in conict with one of the ideas
with which he is frequently identied, namely, the distinction of three levels of
egoity disclosed in phenomenological analysis and culminating in the action of
the transcendental theoretical onlooker. In Finks notes from a conver-
sation with Landgrebe in March 1935, among other topics that he felt to be
most problematic (e.g., transcendental theory of method, phenomenological
cognition, and the concept of life as the creation of being) the nal point is a
terminological proposal: Instead of transcendental onlooker, with its con-
notation of a pure thinking entity [Denkwesen] that volatilizes the gravity of
existence [Daseinsschwere], the concept of the transcendental witness, which
breathes more the atmosphere of life. Here phenomenological reection is
characterized not as something done by an external observer, in the manner of
the spectator at a spectacle, but rather as done by someone, as we might say,
133. Z-XV 67a (EFM 2) and Z-V X/1ab (EFM 1), cited in 2.6.2.8.
134. See appendix.
135. See the Kant-Studien essay, EH-Ke, pp. 11516 (Studien, p. 122).
136. Z-XIX II/3b (EFM 3), dated March 20, 1935.
Life and Spirit 359
right in on the game, by a participant in the operation who is carried along by

it and knows about it because of that.
What seems to be a turnaround on Finks part when this idea is confronted
with the Kant-Studien article with its three egos, one of which is the tran-
scendental onlookernot to mention the same onlooker in Finks Sixth
Meditationbecomes perfectly consistent once it is realized that Finks ef-
fort in those two texts was not straightforwardly to elaborate a positive and
denitive doctrinal position for phenomenology but rather to pose a critical
problem and to explore its implications for phenomenologys theoretical un-
derstanding of itself. Finks selection of the new term, witness, as an en-
gaged party represents the direction of the solution for at least one problem.
Being in on the game, or perhaps in on the play, of life is, then, not only
asserted as a phenomenological nding in regard to human being but also the
character of phenomenologys very operation of reecting, especially in its
ultimate realization. Life-philosophys charge of having no topos is utterly
wrong, but equally wrong is the kind of topos that life-philosophy takes to be
appropriate. But this is far from being the end of the matter; for the topos in
question is not a place simply encompassed within the world but a place
characterized as a gapa metaphysical gapin the cosmos, where a
bridging is effected utterly beyond the world to the originative dynamic of
the coming-about-of-being in the concrete dimensional horizonalities of ap-
pearing that comprise the world in its basic phenomenological sense.
While, therefore, here it is not the theoretical, subject-object-reective stance
of explication but rather performance awareness that carries the validity for
the realization that ones own being is immanent in life, and while it is not a
disengaged onlooker, whether dissembled in the guise of topical reection
or portrayed as transcendental, that will ultimately be the effective agent of
fundamental knowing, the fact remains that even in saying all this there is a
signicant measure of positive cognitive articulation that itself results from an
enormous body of careful, explicit, and thematic investigational ascertain-
ment. For this is what allows moving with conceptual efcacity to the summit
methodological issue for phenomenology: How can one reach methodical
insight about the ultimate that is beyond access by methodical insight, namely,
about that which is to be known in an ontogonic metaphysics? To put it in
137. See OH-IV 6 (EFM 3), a notebook from the very same period. Husserls own use
of the term onlooker is found regularly, for example, in his First Philosophy lectures (cf.
Hua VIII 40 and 41, as well as pp. 168 and 177), and occurs again in Crisis (e.g.,
pp. 23940, 69).
138. See appendix.
360 Life and Spirit
other terms, the effectiveness of the conceptual lies in its making clear and
denite what we are investigating and what we nd out must be said about
itthat is, what ultimately is to be found in and of our experiencing as its
originative and sustaining ground. After all, the purpose of the conceptually
explicit is the specication of the intentionally aimed at (which, ultimately,
will be rooted in the horizonal eld of being-as-appearing); but what is being
proposed in the line Fink is following here is that we have to try to explicate
thematic explication otherwise than in terms of the oppositional schema of
subject-and-object. The implications of this for general phenomenological
methodology will be drawn in the next chapter.
When all these considerations are put together, we see that Fink distin-
guishes phenomenologys inquiry and explication from that of life-philosophy
not by the straightforward assertion of a competing position but rather by
showing that phenomenologys work has to be a combination of two ele-
ments: (a) theoretical assertion that positively characterizes reective aware-
ness as intrinsically performance, thereby unmasking the autonomous pre-
tentions of pure theoretical onlooker reection, and (b) methodological
critique that reveals the limitation of that same theoretical assertion for dis-
closing ultimate origins. It is the further treatment of this second element that
we must now take up in phenomenologys confrontation with life-philosophy.
6.4. The Double Truth of Ultimate Constitutive Explication as

Meontic
In accord with Husserls own explicit statements, Finks general conten-
tion for phenomenology is that, while life-philosophy charges phenomenology
with being abstract, it is life-philosophy itself that is the abstract position.
Indeed, life-philosophy is far more one-sided than phenomenology, given its
overlooking of the problem of the world, which it presuppositionally accepts
as the ultimate framing basis. Precisely in putting the world in question phe-
nomenology thus comes to the discovery that the true concreteness is tran-
scendental life, in which all strata of concreteness are contained. At the
same time, however, Finks reconceptualizing of Husserls phenomenology
here under the impact of the thematization of life in life-philosophy and in
Nietzsches reectionsrequires a critique of, and move beyond, the unrecon-
sidered adoption within phenomenology of traditionally given schemata in
order to be able to explicate the ultimate concretum thus disclosed in phenom-
enologys investigation.
139. Z-V VIII/4a (EFM 1), cited in 6.3.3.

Life and Spirit 361
This is one methodological consequence of the reduction-imposed demand

characterized in chapter 2 as the un-humanizing through which the living
subjectivity of whoever attempts to perform the reduction must pass (see
2.6.2.5); but there is a far more substantive consequence as well that has
already been expressed here in the context of confronting life-philosophy.
That the very being of the human as set up in the worldi.e., in its constitu-
tive natural stance of presuppositional xity upon the ultimacy of the world as
frame and fundamentbe explicatively undone in the regressive move of
inquiry into originative constitution amounts to the catastrophe of human
existence. The same consequence is expressed in the present chapter as the
ontological unattainability of life, which Fink gave expression to in another
context in terms of the question of spirit: But spirit, or the essence of man,
is ontologically unattainable. An ontology of the subject is the most direct
way, via its foundering, to force entry into the problematic of the meontic.
For the regressively necessary tracing of constitution in transcendental phe-
nomenology starts from the human order not only as the constituted result of
originative constitution but also as the form in which the efcacity of constitu-
tive action is concretized as existent subjectivity, as living spirit. The attempt to
retrace this self-constitution of ultimate originative power into human spirit
amounts to the very drive of this ultimate originative power to recognize itself
in the self-reection of the human subject. Thus to make intentionality as
constitutive process the object of inquiry is to effect a reversing of life, Fink
writes; it is the peritrope of lifes performance of the world.
The basic problem is that there is radical difference in principle between the
kind of thing the constituted subjectthe human subject, constituted life
and spiritis, on the one hand, and on the other the kind of thing the con-
stituting powertranscendental spirit (subjectivity), primordial life and
140. See the points drawn from Z-XII 20ad in 2.6.2.5.

141. Z-VII XIV/13ab (EFM 2), from 1930. The note deals with Dilthey and Heideg-
ger on the contrast between being in categorial grasp and being in existential grasp,
in the context of the too commonplace dualisms of real-ideal, nature-culture, etc. On
this matter see Finks noting of Husserls point that, since the interrelated concepts spirit
[Geist] and nature [Natur] were worldly concepts, the sciences of spirit [Geistes-
wissenschaften] as well as the eidetic psychology posed as a desideratum were sciences of
the natural attitude (U-IV 27, EFM 1).
142. See Husserls expressing these ideas in Crisis, 29 (p. 113), 54 (p. 186), and 72
(p. 262), despite the profound difference lying in Finks determining the character of
transcendentally ultimate life as meontic.
143. Z-XI II/14a (EFM 2), a small calendar sheet dated Thursday, September 27,
1934. See also CM6, p. 113 (VI.CM/1, p. 125).
362 Life and Spirit
temporalityis. Since the effort in reection to recognize constituting, origi-

nating power only actually arises in and as an activity of the constituted
subject (i.e., the human subject), of necessity the phenomena this effort turns
to for this disclosure (lived human experience) and the terms in which it
attends to them (the terms proper to the description of human experience) are
all elements originally proper to the constituted realm, the realm of being- and
life-in-the-world. The by now familiar question therefore returns: What is the
manner of validity by which terms drawn from the realm of the constituted,
from the realm of human being and of phenomena in mundane experience,
become usable for characterizing the transcendental structures of the power
that does the constituting?
As we saw in chapters 3 and 4, Fink nds the idea of being to have to be
interpreted as coterminus with the sphere of temporalized appearing that is
the world, i.e., as coterminous with the constituted; the realm of being is the
realm of the world. As such, one cannot properly speak of transcendental
subjectivity or transcendental life in terms of being, since transcendental per-
formance is world-constituting, that is, being-constituting. Ontological deter-
minations remain irrelevant to the transcendental, ontological terms simply
do not apply.
In Finks notes, now, under the impact of his appreciation of the critical
questioning offered principally by Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and given
the powerful transcendental neutralizing action he nds required by the reduc-
tion, Fink allows no mincing of words: the transcendental is in principle be-
yond the sphere of the applicability of ontology as such. In the realm of
transcendental origins one is dealing with the radically not: not-human, not-
world, not-being. But the not here is neither the not of contrariety within
a schema of dualistic pairing nor absolute absence but rather the not of
radical transcendence beyond applicability. Consequently, since all charac-
terization of subjective agencyi.e., of life as spiritis drawn from the realm
of being, i.e., from the realm of world-structured being and specically from
the lived, living experience of that subjective being whose self-reections are
the action of this characterization itself, all conceptual articulations of the
transcendental are not-appropriate, even if they are the only ones that can be
made. They inevitably present the transcendentalthe transontologicalin
144. See 3.3.2, p. 151, Husserls real thesis on being and the reference to Z-XI 7a,
and 4.4.4, p. 202, including the reference to V-II 4. See also VI.CM/2, 199: The idea of
being coincides with and collapses into the idea of worldly being [welthaften Sein].
145. See VI.CM/2, p. 200, in Finks revision proposal for Husserls Second Meditation.
146. See appendix.
Life and Spirit 363
the conceptual guise of the mundane and ontological, i.e., of nite human
subjectivity, of nite human life. They draw it out of its radical not-status
into the status of seeming-to-be something ontologically positive, they give it a
constituted character and ontify it.
For Fink, therefore, while the phenomenological reduction leads to seeming
ontologically valued analysis and description, in the end it must ultimately
recognize that this radical sign of the meontic not limits and transforms the
seemingly positive analysis and conceptualization thus produced. Philosophy
as the self-consciousness of the Absolute is the un-nihilating of the Absolute, is
thus the admissibility into being of such as is not. In other words, philosophy
un-nihilates the Absolute in converting it into its opposite. It is the reciproca-
tion that onties (constitutes) the Absolute. . . . Philosophizing as catastrophic
thinking, thinking the origin, the excess of man, the thinking of man to mans
end, un-humanizing, in that it is the un-nihilating of the Absolute, is the an-
nihilating of man. This situation, however, is not simply one of sheer
negativity, because there is a structural necessity in principle that the Absolute
of constituting agencyarticulated conceptually in the present topical context
as life/spirittake on the appearance it does both ontologically in the mun-
dane form of the living human subject and reectively and conceptually in
terms of the analytic and descriptive characterizations drawn from the phe-
nomena of that living human subject; for ontological, mundane human life and
subjectivity are the very self-realization of the Absolute of origins. These are its
simultaneously proper and not-proper appearance in the realm of being and
knowability. But this means that, once taken up in self-critical transcendental-
phenomenological methodology, this disclosure of the Absolute in the form
of higher or more comprehensive being in philosophical explication has to
be seen as having the status of an illusion [Schein] that is intrinsic to meontic
explication. To succumb to this illusion, to take it as true, positive disclosure,
is the constant danger for every absolute philosophy. A philosophy that
tries to reach the ultimate cannot escape this illusion; it can only nullify
[aufheben] it. It has to founder as reective seeming [Widerschein].
An appearance that has to be taken as nonproper semblance, a purportedly
actual being that, transcendentally considered, is the illusory reection [Wid-
erschein] of some higher kind of being that can genuinely be no being at all,
such is the meontic character of what one reaches via the reduction in the push
147. Z-VII XIV/1ab (EFM 2), from November 1930, emphasis Finks.
148. Z-IX 12a (EFM 2), from 1931, emphasis Finks. The rendering here makes ex-
plicit the worldplay on Schein in this context. Normally Widerschein simply means
reection.
364 Life and Spirit
of inquiry toward absolutely ultimate origins. The meontic as the philosophy

of origins has to fear transcendental illusion even more than an ontology (the
analytic of Dasein), it gets going only in transcendental illusion. It is the phe-
nomenology of transcendental illusion: the theory of the appearance of tran-
scendental illusion. The crucial point, however, is that phenomenology as
meontic knows this, and has come to understand the nature of this necessary
illusion.
This is the import of the item that stands last in Finks sketch of topics for
the confrontation of phenomenology with life-philosophy: (d) the double
truth: the cosmological-phenomenological antithesis and its unity: the dialec-
tic of absolute philosophy. This nal point in the countercritique to the
objections raised against phenomenology is highly unusual. Unlike a position
that takes philosophy squarely as explication of lifewhich would mean
explaining life in terms of in-the-world conditions and featuresFink sees
that phenomenology is theoretically and methodologically committed in some
way to an Absolute that stands in constitutive difference from something thus
intraworldly. But in order for the explication of the Absolute to integrate both
(a) the primacy of the phenomenon of life, and (b) the need to counter the
charge of ontological navet, Fink saw that phenomenology had no alterna-
tive but to make a positive feature of the very thing that caused the difculty,
namely, that the radically non-worldly, non-ontic, non-ontological character
of the transcendental agency of constitution, of the Absolute of origins, had to
have the appearance of being worldly, ontic, and ontological, in short, had to
bear the features of precisely what it could not be, namely, a self-aware and
self-reective human being integrated in the current of life, in the world, in
being. This meant that it had to be true both that the Absolute is not human
being and that it is human being. The Absolute is not human being, either
some one human being or all human beings together, inasmuch as all human
being is being-in-the-world, whereas the Absolute is origin of the world and of
being, and therefore is beyond any of the articulative determinations proper to
an ontological particular, beyond anything ontological. At the same time,
human being is precisely the form of appearance of the Absolute as actual
being; human being as being-in-the-world (i.e., human being together with the
world-frame of being) is precisely the self-constituted and self-ontologized
stationing and functioning of the Absolute within being. And therefore the
Absolute is human being. It is, therefore, the task of philosophy at its ulti-
149. Z-VII XXI/15a (EFM 2), emphasis Finks.

150. Z-XIV II/1b, cited in 6.2.
151. This argumentation is basically found in CM6, 11.B and 11.C.
Life and Spirit 365
mate, most radical level, i.e., phenomenology, to thematize and think this very
situation of ontological-meontological doubleness and integration, and to in-
terpret questions of life and spirit, of reason and being, precisely in terms of
that doubleness, in terms of the dialectic of the ontological (i.e., that which is
in/of the worldthe cosmological) and the meontological. All this we shall
have to take up again in chapter 7.
With this realization of transcendental phenomenology as ultimately meon-
tic, all the difculties charged against phenomenology by life-philosophies fall
away. Ultimate concreteness is attained, because the concreteness of living
being in the world and in time is retained, though identied in meontic para-
doxicality with an Absolute of origins antecedent to the cosmological and the
temporal. Anthropologismthe rooting of the fundamental determinations
of being, the horizon of being, and being itself, in a contingent being, namely,
human beingis avoided because, while human being is always the self-
appearance of the Absolute of origins, it is not as human being that that
Absolute exercises originative agency. To think of the Absolute in whatever
essential form, whether as spirit, or as life-force, or as Dasein, is to think
of originative agency in a fundamental distortion. Fink writes: Human sub-
jectivity is the nite reection of transcendental subjectivity. What makes the
danger of anthropologism so great is that man always insinuates himself into
the transcendental subject, that on the other hand man even bears the features
of the transcendental subject. Man is the disgurement of the absolute sub-
ject. That one cannot in principle take human subjectivity in any form (i.e.,
a subjectivity whose originative home is in the world and in being) as con-
stitutively active at the level of ultimate origins, and that therefore there is a
radical questionability about just what a transcendentally constituting sub-
jectivity could be, are precisely the features that both necessitate the move to
the meontic and thereby preserve the status of human subjectivity in a none-
theless transcendental economy. The ontological opacity of the subjectivity
of the transcendental subject rst bespeaks only negatively its incomprehen-
sibility in the framework of the question of being: i.e., its me-ontic nature.
Yet that same surdlike opacity receives positive signicance in being inter-
preted within a meontic dialectic. There will be more said on this in chapter 7.
At this point, however, we can see in Finks opening to the meontic the basis
as well of the way Fink turns back the basic Heideggerian objection to Husserls
152. Z-VII XVII/31b (EFM 2). This entire text, from Chiavari in 1930, is underlined
by Fink.
153. Z-XV 100b, emphasis Finks (EFM 2). Z-XV 100ab is a very helpful text,
probably from 1931, on interpreting idealism meontically.
366 Life and Spirit
program. Fundamental ontology turns out to be, at best, a preliminary stage

for the meontic and, at worst, a transcendental anthropologism if,
that is, Heideggers work can be shown to be trying to ground the fundamental
frame of possibility, the world, in the fundamental possibility-establishing
performance of Dasein as projecting that world, so that thus Dasein would be
the being that founds the framework of being for everything else. Ultimately, as
treatment of the considerations that lead to it shows, Fink meets Heideggers
criticism of Husserl not by simply counterposing the two and arguing for one
against the other but by going beyond both.
Finally, the charge of idealism is not so much rejected as given a context of
interpretation in which the basic idea of idealism that is being objected to
the fantastic notion that individual human beings could be the actual orig-
inating agency for either the being of entities in the world or for the world
itselfis shown not to apply to transcendental phenomenological consti-
tution rightly considered. Meontic-phenomenological idealism does not
subjectivize the world . . . , but instead precisely grounds the de jure status of
that-which-is as quite other than subjective. World-captivated, existent sub-
jectivity is precisely powerless; human being is the necessarily constituted
counter-station [Gegenhalt] to independent objectivity [Gegenstndlich-
keit], and the mundane opposedness of subject and object, the independence
of beings from us, is afrmed by meontic-phenomenological philosophy.
Subjectivistic philosophy, the philosophy of reection, is superseded.
We can only suppose that the meontic would have been introduced in some
way into the sequel to the Kant-Studien articleperhaps with the same near-
appearance as in the Sixth Meditation. In Finks notes the methodological
principles that would elaborate the meontics basic validity and intelligibility
are briey put in a large variety of compact entries scattered through many
folders; a comprehensive theoretical statement of it is nowhere to be found.
Moreover, it is only in his notes that the meontic is spoken of in writing
directly and without reserve; it does not appear in either the essays he pub-
lished at the time or the drafts he produced for Husserl, except indirectly.
On the other hand, he did not keep it entirely to himself, and we cannot

155. Z-VII XVIII/7a, emphasis Finks.
156. Points drawn from Z-XV 113a (EFM 2), probably from 1931. See 7.2.2.1.
157. See CM6, pp. 70ff. (VI.CM/1, pp. 79ff.).
158. The concept of the meontic is hinted at in the 1934 essay Was Will die Phnome-
nologie Edmund Husserls? (Studien, p. 161), and in the Dessau lecture (ND, pp. 4243).
In contrast, Finks preparatory notes for this lecture are explicit about it (Z-XVII 1420,
especially 17ab, and OH-V 3848, in particular 4446both in EFM 3).
Life and Spirit 367
suppose that he did not voice it at all to Husserl, even if he would not have
spoken of it contentiously or provocatively.
Despite the sketchiness in Finks treatment, the meontic is one of the most
continuous themes in Finks notes throughout his assistantship years with
Husserl. Of equal importance is the fact that the meontic emerges as a theme
of interest for Fink even before he actually began that association, and even
before Heideggers return to Freiburg in 1928 as successor to Husserl. In
other words, the meontic shows as an important element of independence
from Husserl as well as Heidegger that Fink himself brought to phenomenol-
ogy, and that then took on systematic denition and signicance within phe-
nomenology, even while it gave Fink a framework for addressing a fundamen-
tal problem in phenomenology that Husserls conceptual equipment could not
dene and articulate. All told, the move to the meontic represents a move
beyond Husserls own explicit thinking, offering a development of transcen-
dental phenomenology that took its force from the very elements that made up
phenomenology itself, namely, the epoch and reduction and the exigency
thereby imposed of radicalizing self-critique and the need for integrative rein-
terpretation. This is what enabled the objections and criticisms from rival
philosophical positions that Fink addressed to be relevant to phenomenology,
including those that Husserl himself might not have seriously considered, all
of this being fed back into his thinking via Finks contributions. This makes
one wonder if the projected sequel to the Kant-Studien article, had it ever been
written, would have received as unequivocal a ratication by Husserl as the
rst part did. Yet Husserl, for all the rigor of his dedication to phenomenology
as he himself practiced it, had regularly integrated ideas from others into his
investigations, but only when they had become, as it were, his own thinking on
the matters under scrutiny. He might have surprised us in the present matter.
The force of habit was strong in Husserl, but the force of argument and
evidence was stronger.
There are serious implications yet to be drawn from this ultimately meontic
character in phenomenology regarding the very nature of philosophy, regard-
ing the governing aim and the intellectual means for pursuing nal under-
standing. For what the meontic directly asserts is that the level of ultimate
understanding is the level at which the normal fundamental frameworks of
conceptualization become ineffectual. Everything touching upon nal ori-
gins and ultimate grounds has to be marked with a negative sign as the very
index of validity, even if that negative sign is to be interpreted in terms not of
159. See appendix.

160. See the texts of M-I, and the Preisschrift (in Beilage I to Z-I), both in EFM 1.
368 Life and Spirit
antithesis but of transantitheticality, of transcendence beyond the framework

within which the positive and negative determine oppositional signication.
Ultimate intelligibility is a dialectic of the conceptual and the transconceptual
together. Again, this and other methodologic implications will be taken up in
subsequent chapters, especially chapter 7.
6.5. Life, World, and Life-World: Husserl, Fink, and the

Crisis-Texts
Given the status of Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, standardly taken as the consummation of Husserls phenom-
enology in its relevance both for its time and for subsequent philosophical
undertakings, the surprising thing about the ideas Fink elaborates in the con-
frontation with life-philosophy is that, while this comes just as Husserl is
turning attention to life in the problematic of the life-world, Finks notes show
a stark divergence between the thrust of Finks treatment of life and Husserls.
The comprehensive critical-methodological issue that is so much a part of
Finks approach in his notes, including during the years of Husserls intense
work in 1935 and 1936, affects and enters into Husserls own treatment basi-
cally in only one way, namely, following the orientation so forcibly expressed
in the Sixth Meditation as pertaining not to how life is to be interpreted
but rather how the I could be both the transcendental agency of world-
constitution and the self of human being in the world. The question that
emerges from the context of the present chapter, then, is this: How are we to
understand Crisis as the product of a collaborative effort that seems riven by
sharp divergence?
There are two main requirements for approaching this question. One is to
keep in mind the difference of stages that will necessarily show in phenomeno-
logical inquiry and exposition, especially in regard to a presentation of phe-
nomenology meant to bring readers into its insights by starting out from
matters familiar to them prephenomenologically. In the Crisis-writings
Husserl is developing an approach he has not used systematically before,
namely, to awaken readers to the theme of the life-world as fundament for any
scientically interpreted construal of reality; and this life-world fundament
was to be disclosed in an examination of the philosophical and natural-
scientic developments that have so deeply impressed themselves into contem-
porary human self-understanding. The other requirement is to take into ac-
count the extent and character of change that progression through stages may
161. See Crisis, 53 and 72.

Life and Spirit 369
impose, and therefore the extent to which not only advancing discoveries but
also contingent circumstancese.g., personal background, history, and men-
tal habits, the context of both philosophical debates and movements and
social and political eventswill affect the actual framing of issues and the
choices of approaches, orientations, and conceptualities in the actual work of
investigation and thinking.
In terms of the results of the treatment so far in the present study, two
passages in the Crisis-writings can be taken as determining the answer to the
overall immediate question in the present section, how to understand these
writings as collaborative despite sharp divergence by their collaborative au-
thors. The rst passage is Husserls emphatic statement in the introductory
section, part I, giving the overall theme of phenomenological inquiry in gen-
eral, namely, to bring to clear recognition and explicitly take up the problem
of the world, that is, the deepest, essential bond between reason and being
[Seiendem] in general, the enigma of enigmas. The other passage is by
Fink, in his proposal for how the Crisis-project would continue to its com-
pletion, sketched in the early months of 1936. In contrasting psychology
the topic in the last completed part of Crisis, part III Bwith the aims of
phenomenology Fink makes clear not only that phenomenology analyzes the
intentionalities operative within the worldact-intentionalities and the eas-
ily demonstrable horizon-intentionalitiesbut that the consciousness-of-
the-world itself, the opaque ground presuppositionally unquestioned as
that upon and within which one works, is now taken up explicitly and seen
through to the origins that give it its sense and meaning. In this step psy-
chology transforms into transcendental phenomenology.
The fact, now, that Husserl only speaks in general terms of the problem of
identity-in-difference between transcendental and mundane subjectivity in
the I, and this only near the very end of part III B (as, in parallel fashion, only
near the end of part III A), shows that what precedes that mention has to be
taken as having a still introductory and preliminary character. Rather than
being the nal word on the phenomenological elements spoken of in them, the
162. Hua VI, p. 12 (my translation; see Crisis, p. 13).

163. Hua VI, pp. 51416, 557, and 559, and Hua XXIX, pp. lvi and lviii.
164. Crisis, pp. 39899 (modied) (Hua VI, p. 515).
165. Again in 53 and 72. What makes the problem of the I appropriate for Husserl
to speak of in this way in Crisisapart from Husserls being struck by its problematicity
as detailed in Finks Sixth Meditationis the fact that Husserls treatment of the
constitution of the world is framed in terms of the cooperative constitutive effect of the
I-community, the universe of I-poles. See Crisis, 53 and 54a, as well as the whole
treatment in 4752; and see 6.1.
370 Life and Spirit
entirety of the work done before the mention of this overarching and funda-
mental issueand an element intrinsic to the central problem of Finks sketch
of a transcendental theory of method in the Sixth Meditationis pre-
paratory; those same elements have to be all revisited in the next stage of
inquiry and thinking that phenomenology requires. Crisis, as everyone knows,
is unnished; but the demands of nishing it are not the demands for more
detail at the same level. Instead, Fink indicates in his Outline for the Con-
tinuation of Crisis that a whole new level of explication is to be realized
wherein a genuine transcendental explication and understanding be rigor-
ously worked out in the truly absolute horizon, that is, in the examina-
tion of truly ultimate constitutive origins, those of the world and world-
consciousness as such. It is, then, in the terrain of progression at this advanced
stage and on this advanced level that the paths of difference emerge between
Husserl and Fink, and it is on this level that Finks critique of Husserls xity
on the various conceptual schemata liesprincipally the schema of subject-
object epistemological correlation, the schema of act-intentionality in consti-
tution, the schema of egoity in the analysis of the living temporal present, and
the schema of personal identity for transcendental subjectivity.
Moreover, in this way the recognized ambiguity in Husserls use of the term
life-world in Crisis becomes contextualized as an introductory and prelimi-
nary treatment. And even when, despite the regrettable ambiguity, it is recog-
nized that Husserl in Crisis means the life-world to be taken in the sense of a
nonrelative general structure that was not culturally contingent and particular
but formed the basis and sustaining core for any culturally contingent and
particular conceptions of the world, this nevertheless remains at the level of
a structural constant for life thematized as experience in the world. In this
sense the life-world in turn grounds as reality any particular ensemble of
objects and events that transpire before and around us as a kind of panoramic
objective scene, i.e., what human sciences such as anthropology mean by the
worldthe set of myths, beliefs, products, techniques and practices and
environing areas and assets that make up the cultural goods of a people,
especially in prescientic fashion. Thus, too, even in a scientic age every-
166. Crisis, pp. 39940 (Hua VI, p. 516).

167. See David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1974), ch. 8Ambiguities in the Concept of the Life-World
and the same authors Welt, Weltbild, Lebenswelt: Husserl und die Vertreter des Be-
griffsrelativismus, in Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls,
ed. by Elisabeth Strker (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), pp. 3233.
Life and Spirit 371
day life is lived in a concrete surrounding of familiar things and people, and
this world of everyday familiarities is always as well a life-world.
In his treatment Fink makes clear, in a way that Husserl does not, that the
world as such cannot be confused with the objects and sequences of events in
it; the collection of contained things has to be clearly distinguished from the
horizonal structure that contains and conditions them in their phenome-
nal objectness and their phenomenological coming-about as appearing. The
world itself is not to be taken in terms of objects at all, however its horizon-
alities are intrinsic to the appearing of objects, nor is it to be understood as
displayed like them panoramically for a subject standing over against and
distinct from it and them. Instead, the world is the phenomenon of situa-
tion, the universal totality encompassing that-which-is for-us, the all-
encompassing matrix-condition that comprises structurally within itself the
correlation as such between the life of the ultimately experiencing I as perme-
ated with self-apperceptions and the world [of entities] experienced in it.
This correlation, Fink continues, is our ultimate situation and rst denes
the full concept of the world, in a preliminary sense. An inquiry into the
life-world, in the sense of this matrix-situation, must, therefore, move be-
hind the self-apperceptions, the conceptualizations that arise within the
correlation-situation, in order to gain thematic recognition of that situation
itself.
Even if Husserls showing that the world as concretely lived by concrete
human subjects has structural elements prior to and not reducible to the spe-
cic conceptualizations worked out by modern natural science, and even if,
therefore, these prescientic, world structurings can and should be examined
in its own terms, there are structural elements of a kind other than science-
antecedent, perception-intrinsic features of the individual composition of ob-
jects (i.e., their material qualities, such as shape and surface, weight, warmth,
168. Compare Husserls treatment of the life-world with the way Fink explicates the
world and the life-world in his Draft for the Opening Section of an Introduction to
Phenomenology, VI.CM/2, 5. In Finks notes the term life-world appears infrequently,
e.g., in Z-VII VI/2a (with the sense of the historical cultural ensemble) (EFM 2), Z-XX
11a and XXIX/2b (EFM 3), and OH-VII A/1b and A/7a (also EFM 3). These latter three
instances reect Husserls conception of Crisis.
169. VI.CM/2, p. 36 (5). Finks formulation is Die Welt als Situationsphnomen ist
der universale Inbegriff alles Fr-uns-Seienden.
170. VI.CM/2, p. 62 (5), bracketed insertion mine. Husserls remark on this point in
notation 254, in effect ratifying it, is worth noting.
171. Ibid.
372 Life and Spirit
hardness, and so on). Fink, while he will mention these things in his writings
for Husserl, in his own work lays the emphasis upon eld-features, such as
the differentiations of day and night and of nearness and distance both visual
and auditory. This amounts, again, to requiring the approach to the life-
world specically as world, taking it unambiguously as horizonal, indeed, as
the horizon of horizons, and not as a thing or collection of things (see 4.4,
4.4.2, 4.5, and 4.6.3). This is what Husserls phenomenology discovers. In this
Fink, while still operating on a preliminary level, prepares more effectively for
moving to the advanced stage still to come beyond the Crisis-texts as we
have them, the analysis of how the world-structure itself, precisely as the
horizon of horizons of appearing-and-experiencing, arises constitutively in
primordial, originating life.
The fact remains, nevertheless, that Fink found critical limitations in Hus-
serls habitual approach to the whole concept of the world on the one hand
and to the phenomenon of time on the other, pointing out that Husserl begins
and ends by equating being with object-being and by orienting his analysis
of intentionality predominantly along the axis of act-performing object-
thematization. But this criticism did not prevent Fink from working closely
with him to develop Husserls new approach to phenomenology, even if Fink
would work wordings into their common text that would in some measure
modify Husserls descriptions so as to diminish the dominance of the schemata
that Fink could only nd to be severely limiting, in regard to the very purposes
of Husserls program in general. (See 4.6.3.) Yet even if one goes beyond
Husserl to take such familiar eld-phenomena as light and darkness, place
and orientation, sight and sound to approach the horizonal structure of the
world, these remain factors guring into experiential life in-the-world, and
therefore do not as such display elements of the life to which to attribute
constitutive fundamentality and origination, however much such phenomena
stand in contrast to and subtend the conceptions of natural science. It is rather
the intentional life of temporalizationcharacterized as the swinging-
action by which the horizonal dimensions of the world form upthat is the
ultimate conditioning and originating process, the life in which world truly
comes about, the life in terms of which to understand the world in inversion of
the meaning life has in the concept life-world.
172. See VI.CM/2, pp. 32 and 40 (5). See also 7, with the distinction between the
belief held in regard to determinate objects as against that held in regard to the whole
range of play [Spielraum] for things, i.e., the horizon of the alternatives of being and
seeming (pp. 8991).
173. See Finks note from 1939, Z-XXVII 29ab, EFM 4.
Life and Spirit 373
In his notes from the brief period of two or three years in which Husserls
life-world idea blossomed into elaboration, Fink never explicitly states conclu-
sions of the sort just expressed concerning the life-world. The life-world as it
gured in Husserls new writings seemed to remain for him something that
was not truly fundamentalquite in contrast to the way postwar decades of
phenomenology would view this last work of Husserls. Later, however, after
Husserls death and after emigrating to Louvain, in the context of dialogue
now no longer with Husserl but with followers of phenomenologywith Van
Breda and Alphonse de Waelhens, for example, and, of course, with Land-
grebeFink does turn from time to time to applying earlier points of his
critique to the topic of the life-world. For example, in considering the classic
characterization of phenomenology as a philosophy whose method of inquiry
is to discover hidden origins by following the clues of the history of sense
in being-intending intentionalities, Fink sketches a progression that begins
from the scientic world determined by the idealizations and the substruc-
tion of exact identities back to the fundament of sense, the life-world.
Here the intentional structure of life-world experience is treated. But the
second step of regressive tracing moves from the life-world to the radically
subjective origins of that-which-is [des Seienden] in the intentionality that
effects the meaning: being [Seinssinn]. This is a radicalization that changes
the way one grasps intentional life. Here the push of regressive inquiry
takes up where Husserls introductory presentation stops in Crisis. The world
correlative to actual experiential life in human being, namely, the world taken
as the life-world plenum of concrete meanings and values whether viewed as
an ensemble of objects or as the basic variously dimensional eld, is itself
embraced by and brought about in the total encompassing dynamic of the
swinging course of proto-temporality, the ultimate life-power.
Yet it is easier to name this absolute kind of life and world than to expli-
cate methodologically the positive sense such naming can have. Since every
characterization of the transcendental ultimate remains fundamentally prob-
lematic, any nal explication of the world, including therefore explication of
the life-world, remains as well fundamentally problematic. It is a problemat-
icity that encompasses more than the question of the world, however; indeed,
it applies to what traditionally has been called metaphysics. Before drawing
the implications of this radical problematicity, then, in this wider embrace, the
next chapter will have to explicate further features and interpretive conse-
quences of this whole meontic opening.
174. Z-XXVII A/11a. EFM 4.

374 Life and Spirit
This chapter cannot close without remarking upon an extraordinary equi-

librium in this whole scene, on the one hand, of profound philosophic tension
in the heady transcendence that attempts to reach beyond the mundane, and
on the other of deeply stirred human reactions and feelings in a situation of
unending strain and recurrent disruption in society and lands around these
two very different persons and thinkers. The work of phenomenology in the
hands of Husserl and Fink in the period we are studying was a work lying
between and somehow encompassing the perduring aporetic verities of funda-
mental thinking and the inescapable transience, vulnerability, and nitude of
human life. Their seeing this recognition in each other nds stirring expression
in a brief draft of remarks that Fink wrote down in 1934. Given their context
of both manuscript work and historical situation, and in view of their formal
compositional style, these remarks seem to have been meant to be addressed to
Husserl at a party planned for his seventy-fth birthday. Husserl, however,
wanting to avoid a celebration, went instead up to one of his village haunts in
the Black Forest. Fink apparently, therefore, never presented his carefully
crafted encomium, which in fact breaks off and remains unnished. The com-
plete text is worth reading, not least of all for the point at which it breaks off:
The deeper sense of a birthday is always that of a celebration of gratitude for
life. When together with you we meditatively look back upon your life on this
day, wanting to bring before our minds its inmost sense and nal accomplish-
ment, then all the ways of understanding by which a human life is grasped,
and the standards by which a human destiny is measured, decidedly fail.
This must not be taken as an idealizing homage before your contingent
factual person, honorable and cherished as that must be to all who have come
to know the immense seriousness of your conception of the world and life, the
rigor and clarity of your bearing, the courage of your judgment and your
intellectual integrity.
It is the extraordinary destiny that has fallen upon you that separates and
distinguishes you from other people. Your life has been touched and dened
to the last by the power of the unique commission of bringing absolute spirit,
the ultimate ground of being, out of the darkness of an age-old hiddenness
into the light of its self-awareness and self-understanding. In your philosophy
has been achieved, in the stillness that is proper to all essential events, the
breakthrough . . .
175. HChr, p. 445.

176. Z-XIII 31ab. The analogy to the remarks in the latter half of 73 of Hua VI
(Crisis, appendix IV) is striking.
7
Critical-Systematic Core: The Meonticin

Methodology and in the Recasting of Metaphysics
Seiund wisse zugleich des Nicht-Seins Bedingung,

den unendlichen Grund deiner innigen Schwingung,
da du sie vllig vollziehst dieses einzige Mal.
Rilke, Sonette an Orpheus, II, 13
Keep up the momentum now, and give it your whole effort, the soberest
impartiality, driving without letup into the depths of phenomenology.
Dont get stuck in formulations of any kind; with the move beyond hu-
mankind and the natural world, which is a human world, the phenom-
enological reduction discloses endless depths, depths beyond depths, an
endlessness of problems, problems that demand work.
Husserl in a letter to Landgrebe, May 28, 1932
An absolute philosophy must nitely/nally begin.

Note by Fink from 1930
1. See appendix.
2. Bw IV, p. 289.
3. Z-VII 11b (EFM 2). The point of the note, a meditative and critical, i.e., meontic,
adaptation of Hegel, is also taken up in Z-VII XIV/3ab, dated November 1930. While it
375
376 Critical-Systematic Core
Someone once wrote of Beethoven: His string quartets do not grow

from or reect specic experiences; they summarize; they are his personality
abstracted into absolute music. If only it were so simple: that thought about
the Absolute could indeed be wrested out of the stuff of experienced creation
through some wonderful process that would distill from it the pure form by
which its being is manifest. On the other hand, perhaps it does get done
precisely in music! Perhaps music is the Play of Being in its closest coming to
that Absolute of Transcendent Form, the Absolute that lies originative in the
coursing of humanitys living its world; for is not the very movement of music
the ow of temporality in both its insistent thrust onward and its carrying of a
complex sonority that itself shifts and thickens in the interweaving along time?
But it was not as music that Edmund Husserl thought to discover the thread of
the Absolute that laced through life in Urzeitigung. For Husserl the sourcing to
be traced in a human beings own consciousness was that which would unfold
the world more as if through articulate gaze than in the productive making of
sound. Nor did Eugen Fink think it was in a primordial singing that the act of
cosmogony could be discerned, though as he moved to the metaphysics of play
he might be thought closer to such an idea than Husserl. No, it was another
track to the Absolute that was being followed in the transcendental phenome-
nology that reached its peak in the last years of Husserls life. It was through a
move of transcending that could not be realized as pure sonority but had to
make its medium conceptual meaning, the formulable sense by which the
mind could grasp and hold its theme, or could at least realize how that theme
in principle eluded its effort to comprehend. It was a strategy of understanding
to be done in the thinking work of language, and in this phenomenological
philosophy held true to its traditions.
7.1. General Points

The way of words in phenomenology will get its hearing yet in the
present studyin chapter 8but we must rst nish unfolding Finks realiza-
tion of how the program inaugurated in Husserls thought undergoes pro-
found transformation at the point of its systematic achievement. And it is as a
system that phenomenology is achieved, a system not in the sense of a totaliz-
ing structure that would allow univocal and denitive determinacy in the
is clear that Finks endlich here means primarily nitely, the ordinary sense nally,
at last, is connoted as well.
4. Beethoven, The String Quartets, Juillard Quartet, CBS Masterworks GM 101, CBS
Records 1978, liner notes, p. 1.
Critical-Systematic Core 377
tting out of all parts within it, but rather in the sense, specic to phenomenol-
ogy, of the necessary interrelationship between primary investigations of phe-
nomenological detail on the one hand and integrative theoretical reinterpreta-
tion on the other, a relationship that requires the recognition of the difference
of levels on which investigations are conducted and integrative theoretical
interpretation is worked out. But when the ultimate level of this interpreta-
tion is meontic, the effect is to cancel utterly the possibility of nal positive
interpretive sense; the heart of phenomenology is the opening in which the
ultimate source of the very movement of constitution in temporalization turns
out to be an Absolute structured by radical methodological negation.
The systematic import of the meontic is perhaps nowhere more dramati-
cally displayed than in a conversation Fink held with Landgrebe on March 20,
1935, when the two of them were reorganizing Husserls manuscripts pre-
cisely with a view to the interrelations between the areas of Husserls re-
searches, and right at the time when Husserl was composing the Crisis-
texts. Here are the rst ve of the eight points of explanation from that
March 20 discussion that Fink laid out for Landgrebe and that we can take as
a guide:
1. Theory of method as part of the metaphysics of philosophy.

2. What kind of knowing is phenomenological knowing? Receptive? Or
productive? Neither! Phenomenological knowing = knowing of the
meontic.
3. Against mysticism, which would dene the Absolute as Nothing in the
via negationis. The Absolute = ontogonic becoming, the poles of which are
being and nothing.
4. Hegels opening move in the Logic as meontic!
5. The absolute dimension = not in any way a eld of being, but rather the
horizon of distance to being: the meontic distance. Concept of life =
creation of being.
5. On the idea of Husserls system, see 2.3. On levels of the horizon of relevance,
see below, 7.3.3.2, p. 440.
6. Finks notes from this and other important conversations are in Z-XIX II/1a8a
(March 1935), and Z-XX XX/1a2b and 21a (the end of January and beginning of
February 1936). Additionally, OH-IV 43 repeats Z-XIX II/3a, while OH-VII 44ff. gives a
fuller statement of certain points in Z-XX XX/1a2b. All are materials in EFM 3. Unfor-
tunately, Professor Landgrebe was not able to recall these conversations in his later years,
specically when I showed him Finks notes from them and talked with him about the
matter in May 1986.
7. Z-XIX II/3ab (EFM 3), emphasis all Finks. The remaining three points(6) the
problem of self-constitution; (7) yevrein as passion; and (8) the term transcendental
The theory of method in phenomenology, the very thing so acutely devel-

oped as the Sixth Meditation, is part of the metaphysics of philosophy
because the metaphysics of philosophy is system-theory; and system,
Fink points out, must be taken in the philosophical sense, as the multi-
dimensionality of truths: the architectonic of levels of truth. Here it is the
keystone of that architectonic that is at issue, the meontic.
Thus far we have followed the progressive radicalization wherein transcen-
dental has come to mean the ultimate process of origination for experiencing,
not only of specic object-phenomena but, more importantly, also of the all-
embracing horizonality of the world; but this is not quite enough. It is not just
the world as structure that is to be explicated in its originative upsurge but the
world as the sense: being [als Seinssinn], as Husserl puts it in Crisis. This is
what makes it obligatory to recognize that the concept of constitution can-
not be made intelligible if transcendental subjectivity is thought of as in being
[seiend] and accordingly if constitution is understood as the relationship of
one being to another that is already in being or that is rst made to be.
Accordingly, the meontic construal of absolute subjectivity takes constitu-
tion as a me-ontic relationship, as not-ontic; not as a relationship between
things that are in being [zwischen Seiendem] but instead between the world
(being [Sein]) and nothing; as the relationship of origin and originated-
ness. But this must not be taken as giving originative privilege to some kind
of subsistent negative, especially in a metaphysical sense. The negative mo-
ment here is not separable from the positive moment, for neither the originat-
ing nor the originated can be conceived autonomously in exclusion of the
other. Thus, if one speaks of the ultimate of origination as the Absolute, this
Absolute can in no way be designated, even formally, in terms of existent
non-being [das seiende Nichtsein ] or non-existent being [das nichtseiende
Sein]. More correctlyin perhaps the most incisive thought in the whole
of meontic explication absolute being, Fink writes, can in no way be a
being that would be met with on its own alongside or outside of that which is
in being [des Seienden]. Rather it is only accessible at all from the ontical as a
witnesshave been or will be explained in other sections: (6) in 7.3.3.2 below, (7) and (8)
in 6.3.4 and 6.3.6, pp. 35859, respectively.
8. OH-III 16 (EFM 3), glossing Hegel via Kant.
9. Hua VI, p. 156, my emphasis (42). See appendix.
10. Z-XV 26ab (EFM 2), the full text of which is a helpful explanation of the term
meontic.
11. Z-IV 112b, EFM 1.
point of departure. It is, in a certain way, the ontical itself, but inquired into so
radically that it is the ontical, as it were, before its einai [being].
The relationship of constitutive origination is, therefore, not between one
being and another, for the priority that lies in the pre- of pre-being [Vor-
seiendes] cannot be anteriority in time. The origination in question is pre-
cisely the coming about of the temporal as such, as the dimension of being-as-
appearing, wherein dependency in before-and-after sequencing can take place.
The origin-question here is, then, not properly an inquiry into a ground or
into some condition of possibility; for both conceptions pertain to the do-
main of the ontological, though differently. In the economy of phenomenolog-
ical inquiry in the context of the present study, ground could be considered
the factor of dependency that forms the internal limit of the ontological,
while a condition of possibility is a ground the positive conceptualization of
which is drawn from that which is grounded by it i.e., by proper retro-
application, by characterization of the grounding condition in terms of that
which is conditioned by it.
Still, although origin in phenomenology is not to mean a priority in time,
time is still at the heart of the question of origination. Originative process in
phenomenology, transcendental constitution, is ultimately identied as proto-
temporalization, the coming about of temporality as such, the emergence of
the structure of happening as such; and what the inquiry into temporalization
shows is that to follow happening to this ultimate temporalizing origination
is to approach the brink of the falling away of ground, the brink of the non-
ground/abyssAbgrundwhere one confronts the Nothing. But,
again, this Nothing does not stand in itself as sheer negativity, as sheer
emptiness; it is the Not in and a plenum of the positive. Continuing his
thought in the text just referred to, and in complement to the quotation from
Z-IV 112b given two paragraphs ago, Fink adds: It is the task of philosophy
to venture the leap into the depth of the non-ground/abyss, that opens up
beyond all being and beings, to wrench this Nothing out of the emptiness
of its subsistence in dialectical conceptuality into being experienced in the
12. Z-IV 112b (EFM 1), emphasis mine. This text was presented as well in 3.5, p. 171.
13. See 3.4 (esp. p. 157). See also CM6, pp. 7475 (8). Again, see the compact
explanation in Z-XV 26b.
14. See Z-VI 15b and Z-IV 94a (EFM 1), quoted in 3.5.
15. Again, see 3.5.
16. See 3.3.2, pp. 14748, 3.5, 5.1.1.1, pp. 24143, and 5.1.1.2, p. 244.
17. Z-IV 57b, quoted near the end of 5.1.1.3.
philosophical question. There is a factor in play here that cannot be left

implicit and that lies at the heart of phenomenology: understanding is not tied
primarily or exclusively to sheer conceptuality but has living sense in the
linkage of the conceptual to the experientiala linked achievement that in the
present case is the living realization of a moment of yawning nondeter-
minability in the fullness of the engagement with being that holds ones exis-
tence. We shall probe further the elements of the way the non-ground abyss
of this Nothing is able to be experienced in the philosophical question,
but for the moment we must draw out further the characterization of the
structural complex at issue that has already been given.
The value of such terms as the Absolute and origin rather than simple
talk of the Nothing stems from the methodological necessity of retro-
application, the general requirement that in regressive inquiry the character-
ization of the factor of origin be achieved by starting with the originated and
using it to indicate the originating factor. What is special about the present
case, namely, where the originativethat which is beyond beinghas to
be conceptually determined in terms of the originatedthat which is in
beingis that this situation is intrinsic to the sense of both origin and
originated. To see the Nothing-beyond-being as both (a) intrinsic to the
understanding of something-in-being and (b) only understandable in its link-
age to the something-in-being is to see the Nothing precisely as the origina-
tive Absolute. As Fink puts it at one point, The thesis: The Absolute is the
Nothing, is to be abandoned in favor of this one: The Absolute is Origin.
This integral place of the originated in the economy of originating is pre-
cisely what denes the fundamental ontological indeterminability of human
being, the foundering of any attempt to conceive man as a being. For
human being is the one kind of being that, instead of being entirely comprised
within being, raises the question of being, asks about the origin of being, that
is, brings being into consideration in terms of a relationship to not-being, to
nothing. Human being is a bridge to nothing in that, asking the question of
the origin of being, it holds being apart from itself in a meontic epoch.
This makes the essential moment of meontic thinking a reciprocalness. The
meontic Absolute is essentially (if we may say this) the move into being,
18. Z-IV 57b (EFM 1). Note the original German in the closing phrases of this text:
aus der Leere seines dialektischen begrifichen Bestehens zu reien in die Erlebtheit der
philosophischen Frage.
19. Z-VII 5a (EFM 2), quoted in 5.1.2.3.
20. See Z-XVII 17ab (EFM 3); see 6.3.6.
21. Again, Z-XVII 17ab.
the un-nihilating of itself that is the production of the world; but this
means also that actual, phenomenologically reective human being is the
agent that in its questioning mimics this production in drawing the process
of ultimate constitution (ultimately, Urzeitigung) out of its native pre-being
into conceptually characterizing determinacy in its linkage to the human expe-
rience of time-consciousness, and then designates that determinacy as meon-
tic, i.e., as non-/pre-Determinacy and non-/pre-being. In casting constitutive
process into the form of subjectivity-in-action (transcendental productivity)
phenomenological reection un-nihilates the Absolute-Nothing, and, all
the same move, reciprocally an-nihilates that determination (which basi-
cally is mundane in its whole structure) as not the Absolute-Nothing itself.
To think the meontic Absolute in connection with human being is to think
human being catastrophically. Or, to put it another way, ontication is
at once reversed in meontication.
With this the basic logic of origin is laid out, that is, the basic structure
of the intelligibility of phenomenology as ultimately meontic. What we must
do now is draw out the more specic features and consequences of this distinc-
tive meontic methodology.
7.1.1. The Logic of Origin, 1: Meontically Dialectical

Seinssinn
In meontic reinterpretation origin and origination designate a
way of taking what we see around us and in ourselves as intrinsically non-
necessary in its being. That is, the being of anything that is experienced and
22. Z-XV 55ab (EFM 2). The wording here un-nihilating translates Finks expres-
sion entnichten. Compare this to its opposite spoken of in the footnote following.
23. Z-V VI/19ab. Here, in order to avoid the usual sense of total destruction in the
usual rendering of the German word, annihilation, one could write en-nihilation (as
will be done hereafter). Finks way of suggesting this sense is to write Ver-nichtung.
24. See the text from Z-VII XIV/1ab quoted in 6.4.
25. Again, Z-V VI/19ab. The paradoxical details of the reciprocalness comprising (a)
the Absolute-Nothing and (b) what originates from it in proto-constitutionthe world
as the horizonality of being-as-appearingare carefully articulated in CM6, 11C.
26. The term is taken up by Fink from his reading of Hermann Cohens Logik der
reinen Erkenntnis, one of the sections of which, of high interest for Fink, is entitled Die
Logik des Ursprungs. (See 3.4.) Cairns reports Finks explaining the idea of a meontic
logic in discussions with him on January 20, 1932 (Conversations, p. 67; see also p. 57).
Interestingly, in a letter to Fritz Kaufmann from February 6, 1949, Cairns discusses the
ultimate sense of being in a way that coincides with Finks idea of the meontic, though
without expressly terming it that (letter in the Husserl Archives).
experienceable in the world-horizonalities of appearing is not self-explicable

being. Rather than having self-sufciency in its sense, being has its negation
as intrinsic to its holding good as actuality and reality. That which is in being,
the ontical itselfdas Seiendewhen thought about radically, elicits out of
its very being-sense the question of its negation, of non-being: Why is there
something-in-being at all instead of just nothing? However, the fact that the
phenomenological analysis of experiencing and appearing has fundamental
merit does not mean that the ultimate meaningfulness of being can be found
unqualiedly and straightforwardly in that order of analytic, that being can be
adequately characterized simply in terms of the intrinsic proceeding of the
order of experiencing and appearing. For one thing, to be conditioned within
the horizons of temporality and spatiality does not exhaust the meaning of
being; for those horizons themselves pertain to being as actuality. One might
think, then, that the meontic amounts to afrming the contingency of this or
that being, rather than of being as a whole. That is, one might think that it is
the individual being or eventein Seiendesthat is contingent, but being as
suchdas Seinis not. Considered thus the ground for the very values
of necessity or contingency, being as such could not itself be either contingent
or necessary. Phenomenologically speaking, however, this fundamental fact
of being is itself structured; it is not just a blank there. Being as such is
fundamentally being-as-appearing, which means essentially structured in
the horizonalities of the world as the opening or the there of appearing. And
the structuring that characterizes being-as-appearing involves a correlative
subjectivity, namely, the life of an experiencing entity. In particular, the
world-horizonality of being-as-appearing is temporalized in the relativity
modalized in the protentional-retentional present, as well as correlative to
pathic wakefulness. The question therefore arises, What is the originative
structuring of this fundamental fact, which is the all of being as such? This is
the question to which the meontic is the response.
This is all part and parcel, on the one hand, of opting for the primary value
27. The question is Leibnizs (Les principes de la nature et de la grce fonde en

raison, 7), but it is a refrain in Heidegger (cf. MH-GA, 27, p. 393; Einfuhrung in die
Metaphysik, MH-GA 40, p. 3ff.; cf. MH-GA 26, p. 141).
28. The phrasing hereto speak of the world (being-as-appearing) as a primary
fact, or to nd it essentially related to experiencingis in keeping with Husserls own
way of describing the matter, e.g., in Hua VII, pp. 220 and 25657, and especially in his
later manuscript writing in Hua XV, pp. 385 and 403, Beilage XXXIX, and p. 669. See
also Finks expression for the world as the absolute episode (Z-XV 55b, EFM 2; cf. Hua
VIII, p. 506). See 7.3.2.
29. See 4.4.24.4.3 and 6.3.4, p. 346.
of conceptually formed knowledge and, on the other, of accepting being as, in

some sense, the correlate of knowledge. It is also the very thing that phenome-
nology, for both Husserl and Fink, demonstrates as fundamental to human
being not only in its natural setting in-the-world but also in its endeavor to
achieve a transworldly, a transcendental view. And therein lies the commit-
ment that results in the meontic paradox, the requirement that reason hold
onto both in-the-world being and beyond-the-world nothing as together fur-
nishing ultimate conceptually articulable intelligibility.
But why is it that Fink, as he declared to Landgrebe, is against mysticism,
which would dene the Absolute as Nothing in the via negationis? Why
does he retain both poles of ontogonic becoming, being and nothing, as
togetherand only together in mutual irreducibilityas constitutive of ul-
timacy, of the Absolute? The answer is deceptively simple, and bespeaks
the whole thrust of Husserls phenomenology: for Fink it is essential to be
true to the world. As he puts it, Meontic philosophy is not a ight into the
Nothing, but rather delity to the world [Welt-treue] in the deepest sense: the
nite, being, time will not be abandoned (left aside) for the sake of a mystical
sinking into the Nothing, but instead will be drawn out of the Nothing, cre-
ated. The philosopher thus becomes in this way creator of the world. . . .
Being [das Sein]: the world, is necessary. Needless to say, to grasp this point
as Fink means it one has to keep in mind the way he has radicalized the
analysis of the world to give horizonality as its proper structural character,
beyond any reduction of it to the aggregate of things-in-being. (See 4.44.6.3.)
Here we see on Finks part a delity to Husserl in regard to the meticulous
positivity of the analysis that the latter practiced so persistently. While many in
this highly charged period of German history celebrated the vitality of experi-
ence as passion and instinct, Fink wrote: I require a strict, tough, audacious
rationalism that is big with destruction and big with construction, in a word,
that is creative. And again: Desire, homesickness, return to God, etc., as
the mufed intuitions of feeling that are mingled with earthly-all-too-earthly
30. See #3 in Z-XIX II/3ab, the text from Finks conversation with Landgrebe quoted
in 7.1. This is a point emphasized as well in the Sixth Meditation (CM6, p. 143;
VI.CM/1, p. 157) in an alternate formulation: The Absolute is . . . the comprehensive
unity of the existent as such and the pre-existent (of mundane and transcendental
being), of world and world-origin.
31. Z-IX V/3a (EFM 2), emphasis Finks, in a subset of notes dated fall 1931. On the
via negativa, see 7.3.3.5.
32. OH-II 23 (EFM 3), in a note entitled Vital Concept of Reason. The remark
closes with this dictum of resistance: The nationalization of life is what today the ght
for the spiritual must direct itself against. This booklet is from 1935.
longings. The clarity of conceptuality is alone the watershed that separates

tender-hearted romanticism and genuine philosophic truth. No, for Fink
phenomenology cannot be content with a sense of the profound that remains
dark and obscure but must work what lies hidden into explicit displayable
meaning. This is integral to trying to wrench this Nothing out of the
emptiness of its subsistence in dialectical conceptuality into being experienced
in the philosophical question. From this certain methodological features
will follow, as we shall see shortly (7.1.3.17.1.3.3).
The whole move to the meontic as the culmination of explicative under-
standing is grounded in the massive main realization that sets the scene for
the whole of phenomenology, namely, the pregivenness of the world, which
Fink so positively and explicitly afrmed in the critique- and reinterpretation-
guided systematization he sketched out his 1930 Layout for Edmund Hus-
serls System of Phenomenological Philosophy. (See 1.3.) The pathway
to the opening beyond being is what requires the integration of that to which
opening is made, the Nothing beyond being, into the ultimate interpretation of
phenomenological ndings. The reduction thus effects a caesura, a sharp
cut slashed through the sinewy cord that runs through the history of meta-
physics and holds it together. The world-problem [is] annulled raised [auf-
gehoben] into the problem of the Absolute, but a meontic Absolute
the Me-on.
Yet the logic of ultimate discovery is a logic not of unqualied but rather of
paradoxical positivity; it is the logic of foundering. The logic of phenomeno-
logical metaphysics, of the meontic reinterpretation of phenomenological
ndings at the level of ultimate constitution, is a Logos amrtikow, as Fink
once termed it, a logic of failure, a logic aimed at the Nothing, that is, at
the Not-in-being [Nicht-Seiendes]. Yet this caesura of failure only sub-
33. OH-I 1011 (EFM 3), from 1934.

34. See Z-IV 19a, cited in 7.1 above.
35. Quoted from Z-IV 57b, a text cited in 7.1.1 and also at the end of 5.1.1.3.
36. See the text quoted from Z-XI 39a (emphasis Finks) in the nal paragraphs of
4.4.4. This caesura is also spoken of in CM6, p. 113 (VI.CM/1, p. 125).
37. See appendix.
38. See the text from Z-IX 12a referred to in 6.4 (p. 363), as well as Z-XV 55ab (both
in EFM 2). Other texts that speak of foundering are Z-XV 102ab, referred to near the
beginning of 3.4, and Z-VII XIV/13ab (EFM 2), referred to near the beginning of 6.4.
See also Z-XVII 17ab (EFM 3), Z-XV 62a, and Z-IX 11ab.
39. Z-V VI/32a (EFM 1), from Finks dissertation year, under the title Logic of
Metaphysics. See also Z-V VI/18b, together with section 11A in CM6, p. 106 (VI.CM/
1, p. 116). Cf. Kants precluding facile resolution of the irreducible opposition between
the supersensible and the experiential in Kritik der Urteilskraft, 90, #2.
sists in an integration across the cut in the concept of origo, an integration

that nonetheless does not heal that cut.
The paradox is extreme: Nothing is precisely nothing, and yet the move to
the Nothing seems enjoined by the very effort to get to the rizvmata pntvn,
now pushed to its furthest possibility. But to think the Nothing is, as Kant had
so clearly taught us, to try to think it as something, and cannot be otherwise. A
methodology of the meontic must be a methodology of Being-and-Nothing,
even if it is also, just as much, a methodology of Being-and-Nothing. It is
essential, therefore, that the meontic annulling be done upon that which, at
early levels of phenomenological inquiry, stood as the gure of the originative,
transcendental subjectivity and its constitutive intending. This principle is one
that Finks work consistently and constantly embodies. For example, it is in
dramatic evidence in the Sixth Meditation, in the discussion in 8 on the
reduction of the idea of being, when he writes: We have to make clear to
ourselves that transcendental being, as a counterconcept to natural or
worldly being, is not a kind of being at all. The methodological principle is
gently introduced: the process of world-constitutionand a fortiori that
which is conceived as the constituting agency of world-constitutioncannot
be itself designated as something-in-being [seiend], nor can we characterize it
with the naive counter-concept to being, the concept of nothingness. What
is needed, Fink proposes, is a thematic reduction of the Idea of being by
which, Fink immediately adds, the whole of phenomenology is stamped with
its nal and fundamental character.
The meontic barely shows its face here, but when we read this in view of
Finks own research notes, we can only take the thematic reduction of the
idea of being to mean the recognition of the nonultimacy of it in regard to
constitutive origination. Just as the reduction in general converts otherwise
hitherto presuppositionally assured in-itself realities into constitutive results,
so here the being of all that counts as in-being [seiend], in the horizonalities of
appearing, comes to be considered as at bottom also a constitutive result. This
point was brought in earlier as Husserls thesis on being, but here what
comes clear is that the bringing-about of this constitutive result, and the
bringer-about of it, cannot be conceived as themselves encompassed in being,
as having being. At the same time, we are not enjoined to conceive of this
40. Z-XV 80a (EFM 2), by all indications from 1930, emphasis Finks. The Latin word
caesura is Finks.
41. CM6, pp. 7172 (VI.CM/1, pp. 8081), emphasis Finks. Husserl makes no com-
ment on this passage, but in the pages that follow his annotations show him not to disagree
with the radical change that the concept of being must undergo in phenomenology.
Nevertheless, he insists that methodologically a specic reduction of it is not necessary.
42. See the rst paragraph of 3.4.
constitution or its agency as unqualied Nothingas if an Absolute accessible

only by a pure via negativa.
As we have seen, the meontic understanding of originto give ultimate
constitution its proper termimposes the divisiveness of being and nothing as
together structuring the very process named origination and its result: the
ontical itself . . . inquired into . . . , as it were, before its being. Being and
nothing are together that which, in the effort to achieve thematic explicitness,
one may feel constrained to name the Absolute, as an integrated power or
state; it is an absolute which does not stand apart from the process. Its abso-
luteness lies in the achievement of the process, in the resultancy of being as
deployed in the many modalities of horizonality that are the very swing of
proto-temporalization.
Yet phenomenology has for the most part not proceeded in this manner of
full meontic integration in the paradox; it has instead described the process in
much more mundanely concrete terms. It has characterized the process in terms
of the subjectivity that reects upon the coming-about of its own life, as experi-
encing being in the horizonalities of appearing. As Fink puts it in the Sixth
Meditation, phenomenological inquiry into constitutive origination achieves
a knowing of it by lifting the constitutive building-processes out of the condi-
tion of pre-being [Vorsein] proper to them, . . . the pre-being life-processes of
transcendental subjectivity, and onties them. In a word, phenomenolog-
ical reective inquiry into ultimate world-origination is productive of the
characterespecially the being-characterthat pre-being takes on in that
inquiry. And Husserl himself reinforces this point by inserting a phrase a little
earlier in the passage to make clear that the objectivation that is worked by
phenomenologically bringing these the constitutive building-processes to
thematic manifestness (productively) constitut[es] a new thematic universe of
being; for, since something taken as having being, Seiendes, only makes
sense if it is an existent in a world [Seiendes in einer Welt], to ontify the
transcendental, in posing it for cognitive grasp, means to give it the character,
and the full universal context, of worldedness!
In his notes Fink gives this ontication its explicit methodological tenor:
Phenomenological integration is the method of taking the life that works
constitution, which itself even after performance of the reduction is still
caught up in levels of self-apperception (which of course are preliminary
43. Z-IV 112b, quoted above in 7.1, pp. 37879.

44. See 4.5, p. 208, and 5.1.1.4.
45. CM6 p. 76 (VI.CM/1, pp. 8586), emphasis Finks.
46. CM6, Husserls modication 256 on p. 76 (VI.CM/1, p. 85).
47. CM6, Husserls notation 257 on pp. 7677 (VI.CM/1, p. 85).
stages toward the nal self-apperception, man), and freeing it from self-
apperceptual disgurement. Or, more briey, the explicit reversal of dis-
gurement (integration) must be performed in order for the sense of the con-
situtive problem as such to enter into view. Meontic integration, then, the
understanding of origination, is done by reinterpretively integrating preceding
levels of phenomenological investigation, especially those of the most ad-
vanced ascertainment, with ultimate meontic paradoxicality. One is simply
not permitted to assume that reaching some nal level of positively, con-
statively described processes will ipso facto be the form of nal intelligibility;
integration with the failure of the positively constative is intrinsic to whatever
validity the constative will ultimately possess. Just as the Absolute as such is
not nothing, but consists rather of the constitutive reciprocalness of nothing
and being, so the ladder, as it were, of ascent to the Absolute cannot be
abandoned and tossed aside; one does not step free onto a supposed self-
sufcient transcendently transcendental vantage point. Transcendence to the
ultimate of origin is not absolute. It is achieved only by still standing on the
ladder of approach; ones feet never pass the last rung to become actually,
purely transcendental in ones own being and thinking.
There is one more consideration to take up before turning to specic meth-
odological features of the logic of origin, the logos hamartikos of meontic
understanding. We have to return for a moment to the other key remark of
Finks about the meontic, namely, that its task is that of wrenching this Noth-
ing [of meontic interpretative integration] out of the emptiness of its subsis-
tence in mere dialectical conceptuality in such a way that it can be experi-
enced in the philosophical question.
7.1.2. The Logic of Origin, 2: The Living Question

The previous chapter made clear the train of thinking that leads to the
realization of the unique character that experiencing the question of ulti-
mate origination possesses. To attempt to grasp thematically the process and
48. Z-IX 37a (EFM 2), from 1931.

49. Z-IX IX/3a.
50. See Z-IV 20a and Z-V VII/7a (both in EFM 1), and again in Z-IX 27a, 44a, and 53a
(EFM 2). See also a somewhat earlier note that poses this interpretive task in terms of In-
Stances, Z-I 87a (EFM 1).
51. See Z-VI 52a (EFM 1), apparently from late 1929.
52. See also Z-XV 57ab, EFM 2, for an image of the inverse failing: not to realize the
need to question beyond the existential frame of being would be to use a diamond as a
brick.
53. See 6.3.16.3.6, especially 6.3.5 and 6.3.6.
structure of ultimate origination is to be faced with the paradox of the meontic

(see 6.3.6 and 6.4). From this emerges the realization that inquiry into the ulti-
mate can never be closed with a nal resolution; it remains constitutively an
ever-to-be-renewed question. Moreover, while the work of phenomenological
reection on the ultimate of origins, achieved thematically, analytically, and in
conceptual articulation in the investigation into proto-temporalization via
reection on time-consciousness, is to be recognized as itself an act of the
fundamental dynamic of life itself (6.3.5 and 6.3.6), nevertheless, for reasons
of reduction-driven radicality, that embeddedness of living reection in the
dynamic of living temporality has to be considered as itself a kind of aware-
ness that is not itself thematically intentional reection. It is a pathic aware-
ness that is in force and from which the reectively articulate turnin its
ontication of living process as its thematic objectivegains its meaningful-
ness. That is, reection is successful less by the efcacy of conceptual explicit-
ness working in direct intuitional evidencing than in its function as an expres-
sive mode of the pathically self-aware living that is both what carries it along
and what it attempts to thematize and characterize. Even if noetic-noematic
determinacy cannot be dispensed withfor this is intrinsic to meontic para-
doxnor thematic objectication be eliminated, on pain of vagueness and
loose mysticism, still the source of the meaningfulness remains ones own living
[Erleben] of the subjective life that continues on in ones phenomenologizing.
7.2. The Methodological Demands of Meontic Dialectic

As a result of the meontic character of the transcendental absolute of
living origin, certain methodological features that we have already seen in
their intrinsic importance in phenomenology take on a special kind of mean-
ing when the level of nal explication is reached. That is, the endeavor to
inquire into the transcendental absolute of living origin and to think through
the paradoxical structure of its intelligibility transforms the character and
meaning-status of those already exercised features. In particular we have to
look into three such features that Fink made explicit in the elaboration of
phenomenological understanding at the level of nal integrative interpreta-
tion: formal indication, speculative explication, and construction.
7.2.1. Methodological Features 1: Formal Indication

Working as Fink did in the context of the twofold philosophic effort,
Husserls and Heideggers, that had developed in phenomenology, and espe-
cially in view of his being caught up quickly in methodological issues, it is not
54. See 6.3.6, especially pp. 35759; note also the references in footnote 137.
surprising that Fink would pay some attention to formal indication early in
his studies at Freiburg. Barely two years into his program, he read Being and
Time as soon as it appeared, but this was not the only source for learning of
Heideggers term for a unique kind of conceptuality named formal indica-
tion. Published alongside Being and Time in the same volume of Husserls
Jahrbuch there was Oskar Beckers book-length study, Mathematical Exis-
tence, which Fink read as well. In addition to making use of the term in this
book, Becker discussed it in his courses, which Fink had also followed.
Rather than a treatment of this entire development and adaptation process,
the focus here will be placed on the essential point of the concept formal
indication, namely, that the character of its distinctiveness as formal and as
indicative derives directly from the character and status of that which is to
be thus indicated; and in the present connection this is going to be the matter
on which all individual concretely investigated structures ultimately depend,
namely, the transcendental absolute of living origin as it gets approached in the
collaborative efforts of Fink and Husserl.
In particular, approaching the analysis of temporality requires having a
concept of at least some formal suitability in the sense that it has to be determi-
nate of something essential regarding time in order to be relevant to the phe-
nomenon in the rst place, even if the structures to be grasped remain to be
explicated more carefully or more radically. Thus while the role of the pres-
ent as a starting point in the analysis remains necessary, what is decisive is
that, as the investigation proceeds, the initial determination gets modied
amplied, shifted, radicalized, transformedunder the force of the matter
itself [Sache selbst] as scrutinized in reduction-sensitive self-critical exibility
in regard to the determined sense of the conception that is thus acting to orient
and guide the investigations. (See 2.3.) So in the case of time-analysis, the
structural factor that comes to be seen as constitutively fundamental becomes
depresenting, even if in tandem with the force of the present. In instances
such as this, then, formal carries the force of being still sketchy, not
concretely lled out in essential adequacy, not yet genuine; but this is only
the initial and provisional sense of the formal. In the present case the analy-
sis has further to go, namely, it has to try to explicate not only the role of
55. Mathematische Existenz, Untersuchungen zur Logik und Ontologie mathemat-

ischer Phnomene, JPpF, VIII (1927), 441809.
56. See appendix.
57. See 5.1.15.1.1.1. The point of the present paragraph is laid out in detail in Z-I
145a46b (EFM 1), and this is treated in 5.1.2.3.1.
58. Other examples of this connotation are seen in Z-I 43b, Z-VI/1b and VI/6a
perhaps also Z-XXII III/22a; cf. also CM6, p. 53 (VI.CM/1, p. 58). Heidegger himself
occasionally sees it in this sense; cf. MH-GA 20, p. 48, and MH-GA 29/30, p. 424.
depresenting in the constitution of temporally determinate experiential par-

ticulars but also the comprehensive matter of how all constitutive horizonal
structurings that comprise the world, the horizon of horizons, get constituted
in proto-temporalization, the truly ultimate coming-about of all tem-
porally deployed constitutive horizonalities. And since the nal sense of the
understanding in any matters phenomenology investigated depends ultimately
on how temporality is thus explicated, the formal provisionality of all analysis
is tied to the character that ultimate time-analysis takes on in its nal accom-
plishmentwhich in the end amounts to nonaccomplishment, to nonclosure
in positive determination. The question, then, is: How does the meontic char-
acter of the explication of ultimate constitutive origination affect the concep-
tion of the formality and indicativeness of the conceptions at play in the
system of phenomenologys investigation?
The answer lies in the whole line of the critique and reinterpretation that we
have been following in the preceding chapters. One could speak, as Fink does,
of the way the reduction as such is a formal indication if one looks at the
way it gets progressively carried out from its beginning in Ideas I through to
Husserls nal projects. For what happens is that, from the initial approach to
the transcendental Absolute via the preeminence of (ego-centered) imma-
nence in radical distinction from the world in natural-attitude construal,
subsequently the world and the place of subjectivity in regard to it get recon-
ceived more integrally in terms of the fundamentality of the pregiven situation
of subjectivity in comprehensive world-inherence. World-inherence, then, is
what gets constitutively explicated much more carefully in its pregivenness in
order for absoluteness to be more properly approached. This is the di-
rection that dominates in the Crisis-writings and is embodied in the way
transcendental methodological critique poses the issues that lead to meontic
paradoxicality.
Two aspects emerge in this for the character that conceptuality regarding
the Absolute takes on as formally indicative. One pertains to the way ulti-
mate originative/constitutive factors and processes get conceptualized, and
this is the orientation of the problematic in the Sixth Meditation. Here the
process of rendering the originatively constitutive in conceptual determination
gives it the character of a something, and, typically, a specic kind of some-
thing, namely, subjectivity. To give the transcendental Absolute of constitu-
59. See Z-V I/1aII/2b (EFM 1); but as an item on a list in Z-VII XVII/11b, cor-
responding roughly to the section on the phenomenological reduction in Finks 1930
Layout for Husserl, VI.CM/2, pp. 56. Similarly, phenomenological idealism is also
characterizable as an abbreviation in formal indication (Z-V VI/6a).
60. See Z-V II/1a. Cf. a later analogous mention in Z-XXI 1314 (EFM 3).
tive origination the gure of subjectivity, whether in the form of a full-edged

concrete ego, including in an intersubjective multiplicity, as in Crisis, or in the
form of the egoic living present of the C-manuscripts, is a productive enter-
prise; it is an ontication, and poses the originative in a positivity that can
only be considered transcendental seeming (Schein). (See 6.4.)
The other aspect is a little different, even though, as an integral outcome of
the regressive inquiry into constitutive structures and process, it too is marked
by conceptual inadequacy in regard to delineating the originative Absolute.
Here the issue is the way the gure of human being and experience itself, in the
operations that I as phenomenologically reecting nd going on in myself, not
only provides the avenue by which to approach constitutive process as such
but also, far more than that, embodies and displays that constitutive process in
the only way its effectiveness is actual. Proto-temporalization, in the full sense
of ultimate originative constitution, has as its telos the very actuality of the
world as experiential eld of appearance; but this eld is only actual when
there is an actual experiencing. Constitution in all its orders, then, is not
effective except in the actuality of the experiencing by which intentional inte-
gration between subject and object, between being-in-the-world and the
world itself, is concretely in play. It is in this sense that original time is nothing
other than the I in the concretization of its In-Stances. The In-Stances, in
other words, are the modes of the self-constitution of absolute subjectivity
that is part and parcel of its constitutive functioning; or, again, they are
time itself, or, better, that which makes time into the temporality of human
existence [Zeitlichkeit menschlichen Daseins]. The linkage here is consti-
tutively intimate and essential, else there would be no starting point for
reduction-led phenomenological regressive analysis, and no transcendental
phenomenology at all, at least as aiming to disclose constitutive origins. But it
also requires the ontological unattainability of human being inasmuch as
human being is, once again constitutively, the opening to the Nothing-moment
of the Absolute. (See 6.3.3, and 6.3.66.4.)
We have in hand, now, the considerations needed to determine the formal
and indicative character of meontic-phenomenological conceptuality. (1) On
the one hand there is the way in which that toward which phenomenological
regressive analysis aimsnamely, the disclosure of the fact and structure
of constitutive processexceeds the capacities for framing and articulative
61. See 7.1, especially the nal paragraphs.

62. Z-IV 54b (EFM 1; emphasis Finks), giving the central idea of 5.1.1.2, the treatment
of which is presupposed here (see also 5.2.2.2).
63. Z-IV 8a, again guring in 5.1.1.2.
64. Z-IV 44b, also prominent in 5.1.1.2.
determination that would achieve the disclosure, even while these processes
are the source of the living dynamic of the agencyhuman reectionthat is
attempting that disclosive framing and articulation. This disclosure can only
remain thus empty of cognitive informativenessin this sense unrestrictedly
formal. (2) At the same time, at this depth of radicality, in this total foundering
of content-positivity, the conceptuality does not remain utterly empty. Origi-
native constitution needs the gure of positive determinationwhich will
inevitably be in the form of constitution-resultantsnot only in order to be
thought and spoken of but also in order to be differentiated in its modalities
wherein to grasp the distinctive status of human being in constitutive actual-
ization, namely, in terms of the In-Stances, especially in the interplay of the
horizonalities of depresencing and the present. (Again, see 5.1.1.2.) As Fink,
once again turning to the question of explicating temporality in terms of
depresencing writes: in order for insight to be gained into the way world
and depresencings are interlinkedi.e., in the way originative life gains self-
mastery of itselfdepresencings cannot remain so formal in the constitution
of the self-apperceptions of transcendental subjectivity. They will become in-
stead the sum-total of In-Stanciality.
Another way of putting this follows upon considering what manner of
indicativeness might lie in formal indication. One way an indicator can
function as emptily formal is as an indexical, i.e., as pointing out the situa-
tionally determined individual; but whether indexical or not, indication can
only function by remaining in the framework for signifying, namely, situa-
tionality within the world. Only to the extent, then, that a sign functions within
the world is it possible to speak methodologically of indication. Hence for-
mal indication, whether in the sense of the provisional and sketchy or as
situationally indexical, has to function within the realm of constitutive resul-
tants; it can have no purchase with respect to what transcends the realm of the
constituted as originative of it. Methodologically, then, the In-Stancial is
what would allow something like formal indication in the modality with which
65. Z-VII XXI/7a, EFM 2.

66. In general what Husserl calls occasional expressions, see LI (LU), Investigation 1,
26.
67. See Z-V VI/30a and /32a (EFM 1); but cf. also Finks treatment of sign in Z-XXII
2, 59, and II/4ab (EFM 3).
68. This is also what prevents thinking that the distinction (a) between formal indica-
tion and following out the signicative directing it determines simply coincides with,
rather than radically transforms, the distinction (b) between empty-signitive intending
and its fullment in evidential fullment, a point Fink puts in his 1930 Layout for
Husserl (VI.CM/2, p. 6).
meontic paradoxicality so radically qualies any positivity; and Fink thus must
characterize the conceptuality in play at this level precisely in terms of the
valence imposed upon it by the meontic.
Accordingly, Fink offers a schema that suggests the various differentiations
that need to be drawn here. On the one hand one might speak of philosoph-
ical concepts, in which case Heidegger designates the concepts proper to the
analysis he is making as existentials [Existentialien], in fundamental dif-
ferentiation from mere categories [Kategorien]. Fink, however, would term
the concepts absolutive in view of their requiring the absolving [or: release]
from esse. In consequence, when the character of these radical concepts is
given its methodologically proper designation in nal-stage phenomenologi-
cal self-interpretation, they should be named meontic concepts. In a table of
concepts for a logos hamartikosthe logic of founderingone might
include as perhaps incipiently meontic those conceptualities that such philoso-
phers as Heidegger and Kant employ to speak of the ultimately originative.
Thus Heideggers existential-ontological conceptuality works, in his designa-
tion, as formal indication, but this in the end amounts to disguising the
absolutive in world-inherent guise, in ontication, a guise that for Hei-
degger is not disguise but the necessary niteness that must constitutively
characterize any genuine being. Kant, for his part, recognizing the method-
ologically problematic nature of conceptuality for the ultimate of origination,
characterizes it as transcendental seeming (or: illusion), while from Kants
occasional use of as-if in speaking of such ultimates Hans Vaihinger built
up a whole philosophy along Kantian lines. Finally, only when the paradox
of meontic intelligibility gures explicitly in the characterization of the con-
ceptuality in which transcendental origination is designated can suitable de-
scriptors be given in terms of which to form the concepts in question.
Finks schema therefore concludes with several terms for the way concepts
for the Absolute have to be at the same time used and rejected, that is, have
to be explicitly recognized as in irreducible self-conict; and these are terms
that we can see recurring in his discussions of meontic paradox both in his
notes and in the Sixth Meditation. Thus meontic concepts are protesting
69. The explanation that follows is a gloss on the schema in Z-V VI/34a. See also Z-IV
104a. (Both in EFM 1.)
70. See the text from Z-V VII/12ab, cited near the end of 3.3.2.
71. See 6.4, pp. 36264 and the texts from Z-VII XIV/1ab and Z-VII XVII/31b on
p. 365.
72. Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen
und religisen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistichen Positivismus
(Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920); cf. in particular part III A, on Kants use of as if method.
conceptsthat is, they are ontication with a bad conscience and in con-
stant protest they are ironicimplying the opposite of what seems to
be expressed and they are masked termingsthat is, they present the
meontic in the guise of world-inherent subjectivity. Lastly, one name for
meontic concepts designates them in terms of the reversal-of-nothingness
function that ontication works: they are concepts that in their content
unnihilate what it is they are meant to speak of, meontic origination itself.
7.2.1.1. Heidegger
The development and function of formal indication in Heideggers
work, the methodological element of that we have just seen guring in the
discussion of the kind of conceptuality at play in phenomenological investiga-
tion and thought about the originative ultimate, has been taken up for close
study in recent years. It also seems in this to have become the core method-
ological feature of his thinking, at least in the period leading up to and con-
tinuing the project of Being and Time. Rather than follow that treatment,
what has to be done here is to show the way Finks intense inquiry into the
methodological demands and limits of transcendental phenomenological re-
ection critically situates Heideggers formal indication in, or in regard to, this
enterprise. Points for this have been given from chapter 2 on, but here these
will be pulled together and integrated with the present fuller treatment of the
meontic.
There are several points about Heideggers formal indication that can emerge
clearly from the study done on it, and that show as well in the material of
Heideggers with which Fink was familiar in the period of his work with
Husserl. (1) The overall aim of Heideggers philosophic inquiry was to try to
bring to disclosure (a) the all-comprehensive structure of the world as the
73. Z-V VI/19b and /23a, EFM 1 (cf. the last paragraphs of 7.1); and see CM6, p. 89
(VI.CM/1, pp. 9798).
74. Cf. Z-V VI/8a.
75. See again the text from Z-VII XVII/31b cited on p. 365 in 6.4; cf. also Z-IX 40a,
and Z-XI 72a and XCII/3ab.
76. See the cited texts and treatment in the later pages of 7.1.
77. See appendix.
78. In addition to BT itself, one can clearly see the elements given here as four points in
the rst lecture courses Heidegger gave on his return to Freiburge.g., MH-GA 27, 46,
and MH-GA 28, 3d, in conjunction with pp. 12223 in 11bbut also, and quite
extensively, in Heideggers last lecture course in Marburg before his return, MH-GA 26,
1113.
manifestness of being in human existence and (b) the coming-about of that

structure. (2) At the same time, this inquiry could only be conducted in the
living intensity of ones own philosophically reective existence. (3) That is, it
was only as a concrete human being that this inquiry could be done, i.e., only as
Daseinthe kind of being whose own being made up this structure and its
coming-about. (4) Finally, given the extraordinary uniqueness and fundamen-
tality of this comprehensive event, in expressing the realizations of ones think-
ing conceptually and linguistically one could at best only indicate this momen-
tous revelatum in intimately lived concrete particularity, even if via subtly
original articulateness. That is, the disclosure, however extensively sensitive
and nuanced, would function in the end as purely indicative, i.e., as purely
formal.
It was not that Fink found this to be incorrect or misguidedfar from it.
Heideggers work was for Fink extraordinarily fruitful in the radical acuity of
its insightfulness, but it stopped short of the full measure of interpretive radi-
calization demanded by the phenomenological project of transcendental in-
quiry, even as Heidegger felt he was achieving its consummation by transform-
ing it into the ontological analytic of Dasein. This limitation showed in what
formal indication was to do as the methodological mainstay of the whole
enterprise. Both the methodological functionto indicate in effective disclo-
sive pointingand the end it was to serveexplication of the fundamental
originative performance that was the transcendence of Daseinwere not
realizable if they were meant to culminate in the perfect existential-intuitional
insight wherein that transcendence coincided with the very being of ones own
concretely existing person. On the rst point Fink writes: Heideggers term
formal indication is not relevant in that it is not a question of an indication (a
symbol, a signal). And the reason that indication fails is simply that the
character of what it is to indicate has been missed: the concepts that are needed
have to be protest-concepts, me-ontic concepts, concepts the meaning-
function of which is to go beyond the realm of within-the-world differentia-
tion wherein alone indication can apply. Or, to put it another way, Heidegger
has not grasped the me-ontic sense of the originative fundament; for what
concepts termed by Heidegger formal indications have to do is not reveal a
structure and action that is already there, concealed, in each existent Dasein
79. Z-V VI/23a, EFM 1.

80. Ibid.; and see above, 7.2.1, from the middle to the end.
81. Cf. Z-V VI/35a, which, while a note on Heideggers not recognizing in Hegel the
meontic import of Hegels treatment of absolute subject and its time-character, ap-
plies here as well.
to disclose or reveal is to let something be in its own beingbut rather to

unnihilate by ontifying that which in itself is not, and to do this with
explicit notice of this paradoxical doubleness.
In sum, as earlier treatment here and in preceding chapters has made clear,
it is not Heideggers nding that nite being is ambiguous in its constitution
that is debatable but rather that he does not explicate radically enough the
profound paradoxicality that lies in it. The originative transcendere ex-
ercised in Dasein is both constitutive of it and situates it in the nitude that
results from that constitutive exercise. This intrinsic living doubleness in
human being that he struggles to detail in his analytic of Dasein does not get
explicated in the radical self-divisiveness of the ontic and the meontic, whereas
this becomes an explicit systematic property in Finks concept of the In-Stance.
There is another aspect to this difference between Heideggers formally
indicated ontological and Finks meontically reinterpretive construal of the
originative ultimate. In Heideggers case, positive conceptual determinacy is
undermined, in Finks it is validated, even if in paradox. Granting that what
Heidegger is attempting to disclose is distinctive with the singularity of the
ultimately fundamental and originative (even if singularity, as a character
that is only possible within the frame of differentiation and multiplicity, i.e., in
world-horizonality, makes this a problematic feature, so that it is really a
trans-singularity), still the indication of it has to be by means of differentiating
conceptual content, even if this must not be substantive what-content
categoriesbut rather ways of being, hence existentials. All the same,
while these indicative existential concepts make sense as signifying denite
structures, these structures all get transformed when interpreted in terms of
the world-forming transcendence wherein that which is in being is let-be
in the manner of holding forth in its world-inherence. That is, in the end
this latter structural whole, in that it is such as can only be indicated formally,
escapes conceptual efcacy. Yet such featuring works; but if it had no positive
determinacy for orienting the postulated living, intuitive coinciding with ones
very being as transcendence, the very aim of Heideggers remarkable analysis
could not even be posited as realizable (though, indeed, one may wonder if in
the end Heidegger deems it realizable).
82. Z-V VI/24a; note the sequence here with Z-V VI/23a, cited a moment earlier.
83. One could here mention the way Anzeige in German can mean just this, explicit
announcement or notice, such as publicly posted information or want ads, and not just
content-bare indicative pointing. Again, see the discussion in 7.2.1.
84. Again, see, e.g., 3.33.3.3, 5.1.1.25.1.1.3, and 6.3.3.
85. SZ, 9.
86. Cf. MH-GA 29/30, 73d76; or, alternatively, MH-GA 26, 11.
Fink nds that transcendental-phenomenological methodology requires

positive value in conceptual determinacy, however provisional and radicaliz-
able it must remain in that it attempts actually to approach and to explicate
the ultimate origin. This is why the formal character of the conceptual deter-
mination that both guides and stems from phenomenological inquiry can be
considered to undergo progressive transformation and radicalization in posi-
tive featuring, rather than receding in deference to purely indexical pointing.
Yet in precisely the measure that positive characterization is developed for ulti-
mate originative constitution, in that very measure it must be negated in a way
that, rather than dispensing with it, retains it as integrated with its negation to
comprise the achievement in paradox of ultimate disclosure. In this way the
being in terms of whose existential experientiality the originative ultimate is
explicatedhuman being, Heideggers Daseinturns out to be far less than
ontologically attainable and explicatable, even if far more than nothing.
Finally, what this means is that realizing the Nothing not in the empti-
ness of its subsistence in dialectical conceptuality but rather as lying in the
living action of the philosophical question that drives transcendental phe-
nomenology marks phenomenological philosophy with a permanent non-
closure to questioning. At no level can any phenomenological nding be -
nally settled philosophically; every formulation of accomplished disclosive
articulateness is in turn the determination of further inquiry. And it is to
Heideggers credit that, while he did not open the dimension of the meontic,
which is what irrevocably renders questioning irremovable, he certainly seems
to have had the effect of encouraging Fink to see in phenomenological method
a system of ever-renewed questioning.
7.2.2. Methodological Features 2: Speculation

If the living realization of the paradoxical moment of radical, me-ontic
nondeterminability in the fullness of the engagement with being that con-
stitutes human existence is the apogee of phenomenological disclosure, then
the conceptuality that guides the reaching of this moment and conceptually
formulates its meaning has to hold a special and indispensable place in phe-
nomenological methodology. There is only one name for it: the speculative,
which, culled from philosophys history and rethought in terms of the pro-
gram and methodology of regressive inquiry, stands also as the dimension in
which transcendental phenomenologys achievement could be philosophically
87. See 6.3.2, pp. 33536, and 6.3.6, p. 356.

88. See 2.3 and the appendix.
claried both as it proceeds and as it reaches its term. And it is as well the title
for one of Finks most continuous contributions in his work with and for
Husserl.
The consummate example of the speculative is, then, meontic interpretive
integration, exercised in two ways: (1) in methodological-critical explication
of the results of ultimate level analysis, that of proto-temporalization, of the
coming-about of the temporalness for all-that-is to appear experientially in
world-horizonality, and (2) in retroactive reinterpretation needed for all phe-
nomenological matters previously analyzed in view of the standing provision-
ality that awaited the nal determination of their meaning out of the analysis
of ultimate constitutive processeven if that nal determination would sim-
ply transform the provisionality into the necessity of ever-renewable question-
ing. But what Finks work shows is that in phenomenology it is not so much
this general and abstract form of the meontic that is legitimated; rather, the
concrete way the results of exacting concrete phenomenological investigative
analysis get redetermined. Some of these interpretive redeterminations of key
phenomenological investigative themes will have to be briey exemplied.
Before that, however, we have to give more detail to the speculative in its
distinctive phenomenological character.
One of the prime features of the speculative in phenomenology, exemplied
again and again in Finks notes, has already shown itself in the way the meon-
tic has been mentioned here in every context from chapter 2 on. Explicating
the sense of the results of concrete investigations in view of the structures and
workings of transcendental constitution may be the ultimate task of phenome-
nological inquiry; but if achieving those results, requiring as it does disclosure
in intuitional demonstration, amounts to ontifying the transcendental
that is, nding it given, against its status as originative, in the form of a
horizonally engaged and temporalized subjectivitythen making the sense of
this disclosive result intelligible means taking it beyond the bounds of intu-
itional demonstration. This is the prime speculative moment in transcenden-
tal phenomenology. It is the recognition that all questions of constitution are
matters of the critique of self-apperception wherein what becomes clear is
89. Finks Brussels paper from 1951 is well known: Die intentionale Analyse und das
Problem des spekulativen Denkens, ND, pp. 13957 (rst appearing in both German
and French in Problmes actuels de la phnomnologie, ed. by H. L. Van Breda (Paris:
Descle de Brouwer, 1952), pp. 5388. It reads like a summary of what is to be found in
his thinking in the Husserl years, and is well worth studying.
90. Cf. CM6, 8, a point clearly analogous to, but by far not the same as, Kants (e.g.,
KrV, A63435/B66263); more correctly put, the analogy is to the whole operation of
Kants Transcendental Dialectic. See CM6, p. 64 (VI.CM/1, p. 71).
the ennitizing of the innite absolute subject whereby in self-reection

the nite self-determinedness, powerlessness, abandonment, [and] subjection
of human existence in the totality of the world is seen and analyzed in terms
of the performance of constitution in ones own experience. Ones own living
subjective experience becomes the manifestation, in nitized actuality, of
the fundamental meontic structure, the speculative proto-relationship of
origin and originatedness, of Absolute and world.
In this same way, too, in view of the meaning of world-captivation the
very idea of breaking out of navet is a speculative act, even if the specula-
tiveness of it does not constitute actually breaking out of world-captivation, as
in fact meontic interpretation establishes. Similarly, speculative is the way
subjectivity, as the very gure of the transcendental, gets interpreted as tran-
scendental seeming, as the Absolute masked. Finally, intrinsic to the con-
ception of transcendental seeming is the speculative status of human subjec-
tivity and human being as constitutive result, necessitating the move beyond
the concept of being in meontic revolution. This may all seem antithetic
to Husserls well-known rejection of speculation, but the situation is not
quite so oppositional.
The key point in seeing how Fink can claim legitimacy for speculation in
transcendental phenomenology turns, as is plainly implied in the treatment so
far, not on the way a kind of thinking called speculation was pursued in
previous philosophic history had been done but rather on the way phenome-
nology displaces what was thus earlier called speculation by recasting and
integrating its aim and function within its own methodology. Husserls fears
are not about high-level articulation but about the way it seemed to him to be
conducted, namely, as free of linkage to an intuitional demonstrative ground.
The trouble is, however, that Husserl had but a limited understanding of
speculation in historical philosophic practice. His concept of speculation,
writes Fink, does not spring from a real coming to terms with speculative
philosophy, but is a polemical concept. Husserl read speculative philosophy
as based on the conviction that pure thinking as suchdianoiais au-
thentic access to being [zum Seienden] and its comprehension. In correction
of this, Husserl takes thinking to be an intentional modication of intuition,
91. Z-XV 22ab; see also Z-XV 38a and Z-XI 87aball in EFM 2; also see note 115
below (in the appendix). Again, one can see this issue in play in the Crisis, p. 262 (72);
see also pp. 113 (29), 175 (52), and 186 (54b).
92. See Z-IX 10ab, Z-XIII XVIII/4a, and Z-XV 12ab; all in EFM 2.
93. Z-XI XCII/3ab and Z-XV 91a (both in EFM 2); see 6.4.
94. Z-V 13a and 102ab.
and one that is thus characterized by a certain mediacy and distance from
phenomena. This suggests that the intentional modication of intuition,
the thinking that phenomenology puts into operation, rather than simply dis-
placing intuition by a purely conceptual analytic exercise, retains the intu-
itional link that thinking must have to the experiential material of phenome-
nological analysis but turns to explicating the sense of that material in view of
integrative and critical principles operating over the whole range of phenome-
nological investigation. Thinking is never to be cut loose in favor of recourse
to pure conceptual or inferential analysis.
In this anchoring to the intuitionally exhibited, in this integration of spec-
ulative explication to the very situation wherein sense is grounded experien-
tially, i.e., in the horizonally structured realm of being as experienced, the
intelligibility to be articulated speculatively is essentially structured in terms of
this grounding, in terms of constitutively effected access to the experientially
actual in being; and this shows in the very character of the meontic, in its
irreducible dialectic of being and nothing, of ontication and meontication.
(See 7.1 and 7.1.1.) In this, phenomenology is a movement of continuous
transformation. First there is the analysis of a phenomenon named as inves-
tigandum and oriented by already anticipatory conceptual formulation. Then
this analysis is reconsidered as seated in the comprehensive horizon of the
phenomenologically interpreted world, which, in the end, makes it regressive
inquiry into the originative; and in this phenomenology achieves evidential
showing of the philosophical dimension, this dimension being the phenom-
enologically speculative, distinct from the way historically prior speculation
was donewhich in one form at least is a thesis-like deduction of the world
from a philosophical dimension got in some kind of speculative presenti-
ment. Phenomenology is thus not deduction of the world from the philo-
sophical dimension, be it being or the Absolute, but a reduction of the
world; not a derivation from [Ableitung] a ground for the world that is antece-
dently held secure, but a reverse move leading back to it [Rckleitung], a
method of evidentially demonstrative regressive movement. Phenomenology
starts from the prephilosophic sphere and climbs up and over the world
rather than soaring beyond it . . . on wings of speculative fantasy.
All this is the equivalent in methodology to the very principle by which
95. Z-XXVII 59a, emphasis Finks; EFM 4. This folder in general contains notes from
1939, pertaining largely to Finks writing of Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund
Husserls, the rst portion of which appeared in Revue internationale de philosophie, I
(1939), 22670 (Studien, pp. 179223).
96. B-VII 23ab, EFM 2). See also 2.3 here.
97. B-VII Ib /3a3b, emphasis Finks. The difference here is expressed by the contrast
verbs bersteigen and beriegen.
phenomenology is constituted as such, and which its whole effort is aimed to

investigate and disclose. For what phenomenology basically aims at under-
standing is ultimately the question of how human consciousness hasper-
haps better: lives inaccess to that which is in being [der Zugang zum
Seienden], how that-which-is holds good in its being [die Seinsgeltung des
Seienden]. Achieving this disclosure is done not by some mental trick but
by the intentional analysis of the holding-good-in-being of that which is.
This is precisely one of the main points in Finks 1939 article, The Problem of
the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and one cannot overlook the way
this converges neatly with Husserls declaration in the Crisis-writings that
the ultimate question he is investigating is the bond between reason and
being.
There are two aspects to the actual work-project situation here regarding
the speculative dimension that Fink is developing in tandem with Husserls
intuitionally demonstrative investigation. The rst is that Husserl had an ex-
plicit example in hand of Finks articulation of the speculative moment in the
form of the 1935 Dessau lecture, The Idea of Transcendental Philosophy in
Kant and in Phenomenology. There Fink lays out the principles of the
higher-level transformation of phenomenology into ontogonic metaphysics,
making clear at the same time that this is not some Icarus ight of speculative
reason. What he argues is the reinterpretation of just what the transcen-
dental problem means, when, beginning within human self-reection, phe-
nomenology nds itself forced to realize that the human essence is onto-
logically unreachable and that it can only be understood by breaking free of
the spell cast by being [Seinsbann]. Only when we take the human essence
as both not-in-being and not not-in-being can we speak of it as in any
sense the transcendental ground of being, as that from which being as a
whole is intelligible, i.e., in some way derivable. This, now, is what Fink
means by a speculative interpretation of transcendental constitution. Hus-
serl read the entire essay, but he made not one notation on these closing
paragraphs. In addition to his tactful appreciation of the sensitivity of Finks
position with him (see 6.3), one has to think that Husserl, having also read
Finks Sixth Meditation several times now and perhaps knowing himself not
98. Z-XXVII 58a and 63b, EFM 4; emphasis here mine.

99. Studien, pp. 179223; see footnote 95 above.
100. See Crisis, 5, especially pp. 11 and 13 (Hua VI, pp. 9 and 1213); and compare
with Studien, pp. 189, 210, and 197.
101. See 6.3.5.
102. ND, p. 43.
103. ND, p. 43. The passage itself shows integrally the main topic of chapter 6; see
6.3.5.
to be capable of putting things quite the same way, nevertheless saw the force
and logic of Finks position in the Dessau paper. And this, we recall, comes
at the very time when he was working out the rst elaborations of his Crisis-
project, where among other things he very much attempts to come to terms
with this same body of issues.
The second aspect of this situation, however, lies right at the heart of phe-
nomenology, namely, that the meaning of the demonstrational intentional
evidencing in terms of which phenomenologys work is legitimated and to-
ward which it aims in its analyses, is itself a speculative principle, and explicat-
ing that meaning is a speculative interpreting. Husserls rejection of the tradi-
tional practice in philosophy of explicating universal concepts by the sheer
power of reasonspecically those overarching concepts that cover all that
holds as being, the traditional transcendentals of medieval School philoso-
phy: ens, unum, verum, bonum; or the all-governing ideas of subjectivity, the
world, and God in the modern period focus on reective cognitiontrans-
forms the problem of being into the problem of truth, but in the very specic
form of consciousnesss constitutive access to being in the intentionally real-
ized self-giving of being. In a word, being is appearance [Erscheinung],
phenomenon, in constitutive relation to the intentional subject, especially if
this is interpreted in such a way that being-as-appearing is construed as a
constitutive result. Thus the central axis of Husserls phenomenology is the
speculative integration of the construal of being with a conception of truth,
even if Husserl does not himself turn to rigorous consideration of this specula-
tive determination itself. Rather than working abstractly on a theory of being,
he is concerned with investigating being itself.
Here one has to contrast two conceptions of the speculative. The rst would
take a speculative thinking to devote itself to explicating all-encompassing
unconditional determinants that as such are fully manifest and accessible to
such thinking which in its realization would follow different conceptions of
what was absolute: (a) such transcendental generalities as the idea of being,
104. Only one of Husserls brief notations to Finks typescript of this lecture is given in
ND, on p. 33. The last notation Husserl made is to the sentence in the last four lines of
ND, p. 35. See appendix.
105. Drawn from Z-XXV 190b; see also 4ab, 66cd, 117a, and 174aEFM 3and
Z-XXX 38ab and 54a55a, EFM 4. The notes in Z-XXV are generally from mid-1937,
while those from Z-XXX are from 1939 and 1940. Cf. also Z-XV 6a and 57ab (EFM 2),
from during or somewhat before 1935.
106. See Z-XX 19ab (EFM 2); and see 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, pp. 15152.
107. Z-XXV 4ab. Cf. also Z-MH-I 33a, a folder of notes largely on Heidegger, from
June and July 1939 (in EFM 4).
truth, God, and so forth, as were elaborated so astutely by Christian Wolff in

his massive compendia; (b) the Absolutes knowing of itself as the ultimate
being; or (c) the absolute mode of knowing, viz., the knowing of innermost
essentialities beyond the contingencies of experience. The second kind of spec-
ulative thinking, however, would direct itself to knowledge in its engagement
in the actuality of the happening of experience, namely, in the situation of the
way appearing is the mode of the manifestation of cognizable essence. This is
utterly opposite to a conception of the absolute as xed and set, and this is the
force of Hegels insistence on thoughts realization of the living concept.
This extraordinary transformation already worked out in principle by Hegel
before Husserl is now in turn transformed when Husserls phenomenology is
itself interpreted in terms of the radically, in the end meontically, understood
dynamic of the consitutive unication of intentional subjectivity and being.
7.2.2.1. Speculation: Hegel and Heidegger

In contrast to Husserls incapacity to grasp Hegels thought, Fink en-
gaged positively with that thought all during his years with Husserl. But as the
issue of developing the speculative element in transcendental phenomenology
came increasingly to the fore in Finks thinking, so too, and in this same
measure, Hegels work, principally Phenomenology of Spirit and Logic, had to
be drawn upon in explicating the meaning of Husserls transcendental phe-
nomenology in its philosophical integrity and consummation.
Already in the early years as assistant Fink saw clearly that the phenomenol-
ogy of Husserl, like that of Hegel, was no mere psychological analytic, nor
was it an ontology of human life and existence. Husserls and Hegels phe-
nomenologies were both inquiries into the grounding of philosophy in the
Absolute. What Hegel offered was conceptual incentives for articulating
the sense of what Fink also early discerned as the speculative proto-relation-
ship between origin and the originated (the Absolute and the world). It was
not, then, that Husserls phenomenology should be interpreted according to
Hegel but rather the other way around: the meontic character of ultimate
understanding in Husserls phenomenology determined the manner in which
Hegels phenomenology might provide speculative articulateness if meontically
108. Again, see Z-XXV 66cd and 186a.

109. See appendix.
110. See appendix.
111. Z-XV 22b (EFM 2), quite possibly from the same general period, 1931, but no
later than 1935. Fink adds that this proto-relationship cannot in principle be decided
with the methodic insights of Husserls phenomenology.
recast. For example: Hegels insight is that the absolute is not as the Absolute;
it is itself only as being-other. Indeed, the being of the Absolute is its giving-
itself-up, a situation which Fink, in his specically meontic-phenomenological
interpretation, names nitization: ontication. The proto-relationship
is to be understood not in terms of a relationship between two entitative terms
but as a wholly different way in which a constellation of factors already known
entitatively is understood at another level. With Hegel it is fundamentally not
a matter of being but of absolute knowing. What we get is not metaphysics as
ontology but rather the metaphysics of absolute knowing, a knowing of which
one moment is being. It is as a system of knowing that truth is achieved
and not as a new entitative process; the knowing is a rethinking of what already
is, i.e., what is inescapably pregiven. This rethinking of the given that already is,
however, is radically transformed in Husserls phenomenology by the reduc-
tion. Fink writes: Captivity in the world cannot be ontically overcome by any
philosophy, it cannot be ontically annulled. The phenomenological reduction is
not an ontic but a meontic annulling of world-captivity. The annulling in
question, therefore, takes place precisely as a projection, an interpretation, a
formal question-marking, wherein intelligibility is composed by the double
sign of the meontic, which Fink takes to be anticipated in Hegels speculative
system.
In this way subjectivity as such, meontically seen, has no power of domi-
nance over being; for subjectivity it is intrinsically structured as in the world.
World-inherent subject-being is powerless before the constitutively indepen-
dent counterholding of object-being. This is the reverse of classic subjective
idealism. That idealism, Fink explains, works an ontic inversion, whereas
phenomenology makes a meontic inversion, or works an integration. Put
more fully, and in meontic adaptation of the speculative idealism that is
Hegels, viz., absolute idealism, this means overcoming the dualism of subject
and object, and the alternate choices it poses of realism or idealism, not by
following the subject-object schema that governs it (i.e., not by following the
philosophy of reection), or by seeking the answer in some superbeing, but by
reaching back behind all being into the en of the Nothing of the meon-
112. Z-VIII 8b, EFM 2. In this note temporality is given its Hegel-instigated speculative
sense; it is the Absolute itself in the stage of its own alienation, in its simply being-other.
113. From EFA Z-VIII 11cd, emphasis Finks.
114. Z-XIII XVIII/5a (EFM 2), emphasis Finks; from late 1933 or early 1934, ex-
plicitly presenting world-captivation in its speculative import.
115. Z-XV 113a (EFM 2), with explicit reference to Hegel. See 6.4, p. 365, and
appendix.
116. Z-IX 10b (EFM 2), emphasis Finks; from the latter months of 1931.
tic Absolute that is an origin where all ground falls away [des urgrndigen
ursprnglichen Nichts]. But this has to be put another way, not in terms of
one something coming from another Something, but rather as the very becom-
ing of the something that, in the phenomenological starting point situation of
the pregivenness of the world, is already in being. Being is the unnihilating of
the Nothing [Entnichtung des Nichts], and Nothing is only as unnihilating
itself. This is what Hegel, meontically reinterpreted, means by becoming
[Werden]. Fink writes in summary: Becoming is ontication, the emana-
tion of Nothing into being i.e., origination.
The Absolute, then, is only in the ontication of the world, and conse-
quently does not exclude but rather includes nitude. Finitude, then, is not
a proto-phenomenon but is rather en-nitization [Ver-endlichung]. Fini-
tude is a constitutive result.
It is on this point that, in developing speculation beyond Hegel and through
Husserl, Fink takes issue with Heidegger. Fink sees Heidegger ultimately pro-
posing that the only absolute subject is one that really is, i.e., exists; and this
is Dasein. But there is a double character in this existing Absolute, Dasein,
a twofoldness that, unlike the ontic division between subject and object, is
insteadbut in analogy to itthe articulation of and articulation within the
horizon of transcendence. Against this Fink contends that, regarding Da-
sein as both itself a being and the transcendence that projects the horizons
for other beings to stand forth in their being, speculative thinking in its ulti-
mate tenor must articulate the twofoldness of this absolute subject not in
terms of anything corresponding to subject-object-being but rather in terms
of what grounds that twofoldness structure originatively, namely, the di-
viding of Meon and world. Fink agrees with Heidegger that the Absolute
does not exist as absolute, i.e., does not exist actually in pure absoluteness, but
what each of them makes of that is totally different. In Heideggers interpreta-
tion of Hegel in his summer-semester lectures for 1929and in parallel to his
position regarding the transcendental subject in correspondence to Husserl
on the Encyclopaedia Britannica article for the Absolute to be actual
[wirklich] means for it to be there in the comportment of nite man. And
Heidegger continues: Insofar as nite man knows of his nitude he is already
117. Z-VII XVII/20b (EFM 2), from Chiavari, September 1930.

118. Z-XV 47ab.
119. Z-VII XIV/3a (EFM 2), dated November 1930. See VB/I, 5, Studien, p. 14, to
which this note makes reference.
120. Z-VII XIV/6a.
121. Z-VII XIV/6b.
122. See 3.5, footnote 130.
beyond it: this is Hegels fundamental conviction. In knowing about innity

are we beyond? Beyond, however, is just what we are not. In being-beyond
in knowledge we do not exist innitely. Finks objection is that it puts the
gravitational center of the interpretation of Hegel on being rather than on
knowing. Fink, however, takes Hegel closer to his word. Hegel insists that
the fundamental dynamic is the movement by which the Absolute becomes
for itself, and that this is what one must come to terms with as speculatively
fundamental. Only because we ourselves in philosophizing participate in the
movement of the Absolute from in-itself to in-and-for-itself can the Absolute
come, via us, through to the being-for-itself of its movement; thus our phi-
losophizing is its way of moving. Philosophy is thus an absolute tending.
But the element in which this is presented by Hegel is not the Phenomenology
of Spirit but the Science of Logic. To put it another way, natural consciousness
has to raise itself into the aether of absolute knowing, to the realm of
Absolvence [Absolvenz], to use the term Heidegger offers for Hegels con-
ception of the status of the Absolute; and from that perspective to look
upon what philosophy in the end is aimed at, the real thing [die Sache] of
philosophy, is to look with the eyes of absolvent knowing.
Heidegger, now, takes absolvent to mean understanding the Absolute in
terms of the endless nonresting, nonstasis of its movement, which in the
end, as Fink understands Heidegger, means to interpret the Absolute as Dasein
in the movement of its being, in its existence. Fink, however, understands
absolvence as the meontic absolving from ontology, so that the Absolute is
interpreted in terms of the positivity/negativity of ontication. Heideg-
gers ontological interpretation of Hegel thus represents a preliminary stage
in the genuinely, phenomenologically speculative level of knowing, i.e.,
meontic knowing, in terms of which to interpret the life of consciousness.
123. This is how Fink notes down Heideggers interpretation in the lectures, EFA
U-MH-III 152, to which the corresponding passage in MH-GA 28 is on pp. 33940 (cf.
also pp. 20910).
124. Z-VIII 10a (EFM 2).
125. Z-VIII 11a.
126. MH-GA 32, pp. 7172. In Finks summary notes, EFA U-MH-VI 27.
127. EFA U-MH-VI 28, MH-GA 32, pp. 7475, where the text has Heidegger writing
with the eyes of absolute knowing.
128. See MH-GA 32, pp. 7172. Finks notes in EFA U-MH-VI 27 do not convey this
point in any but an implicit way.
129. See Z-V VII/12b and Z-XI I/1b, both EFM 2; see toward the end of 7.1. See
Appendix.
130. Z-VII XIV/7a, from late 1930.
Heidegger, for all the sensitivity of his interpretation, seemed to Fink to

miss the all-important element in Hegels thinking of transcendence beyond
being.
There is, then, in the meontic a crucially different valuing of Hegels think-
ing about the interplay of being and nothing, especially in its capsule form
in the sentence Being is the Nothing. Again, Fink rejects the then reigning
ontological interpretation. The Hegelian sentence is the supreme statement
for a meontic-absolute philosophy, he explains, in that being is the nothing,
i.e., being is the nothing. Nothing is as being, being as the un-nothing-ing
of the nothing. In sum, the identity of being and nothing is a speculative-
meontic identity, and the becoming involved in the movement of the Abso-
lute is no less than ontication, the emanation of the nothing into being.
Thus, too, the conception of synthesis in Hegels dialectic ultimately has
to be understood not as the transformative soldering of opposites into a
new unity but rather meontically, and this means specically the under-
standing, the dialectical knowing of familiar entitative processes as intelli-
gible in a radically different register, that of the speculative. And the meon-
tic dialectical dynamic thus interpretively known is what ultimately is
the life of absolute subjectivity. Fink pushes Husserls transcendental
phenomenology to reinterpret Hegels phenomenology and logic, making this
thinking of the Absolute mean understanding that the Absolute is only as its
manifestation. There is no Absolute that is rst already there, and then sub-
sequently constitutes the world; rather, it is insofar as it manifests itself.
Constitution ultimately means, therefore, manifestation or appearance [Er-
scheinung] of the Absolute. Phenomenology = the theory of the appearance
of the Absolute.
This is how it is that Husserls transcendental start with the ego and its
cogitationes has to be developed further into the concept of spirit, writes
Fink. Hegel was the rst to carry out this development, in his Phenomenol-
ogy, but in a manner still laden with the ontological. Husserl is superior to
Hegel by the integrity of transcendental methodology, thanks to the method
131. See Z-V VI/35a (EFM 1), in all probability from 1929.
132. See Z-XV 47ab (EFM 2). Hegels statement is found in Wissenschaft der Logik I,
Abschn. 1, Kap. 1, C. Werden, 1, the rst sentence.
133. Z-XVI XXIV/6b (EFM 3), generally 1935.
134. See Z-IX 45ab; also Z-XI 87ab (both EFM 2).
135. One of the points in the conversations with Landgrebe on March 28, 1935,
Z-XIX II/7b (#3) (EFM 3).
136. Z-XV 92b (EFM 2).
137. OH-III 28, from no later than 1935 (EFM 3).
of the reduction, but inferior in the development of the essence of absolute life
from consciousness to spirit. This whole interpretive possibility for
transcendental phenomenology was simply unsuspected by Heidegger, as well
as by others. And the nal dramatic effect it imposed cannot go unreit-
erated. To interpret reason in human being as absolute spirit does not effect
systematic completeness and closure; Husserls system is a system that frac-
tures and breaks open in a radical and irrevocable rupture. In distinction from
both Husserl and Heidegger, integrating the question of being into transcen-
dental phenomenology is not a solution but the consecration of the ever-
renewing of inquiry. The meontic demanded that philosophy never end its
questioning. It was a system of knowing that could only be sustained as
foundering.
7.2.3. Methodological Features 3: Construction

Before Finks Sixth Meditation was published in 1988, the idea of
construction in Husserlian phenomenology was known only by the mere
mention Merleau-Ponty gave it in the opening remarks of his Preface to
Phenomenology of Perception. Earlier than that, construction showed up as
a methodological feature in Heideggers thinking, being mentioned a few times
in Being and Time as an implied alternate designation for projection.
Whatever uncertainty there might be about this equivalence, however, was
remedied two years later in his book on Kant. There the methodological struc-
ture of projection in fundamental ontology is unambiguously and directly
called construction, although the character of projection as formally indica-
138. OH-III 2829, emphasis Finks. Fink also points out (OH-III 27, emphasis Finks)
that phenomenology (in Husserls accomplishing of it) is speculative as theory of
the reduction, which has its central signicance beyond the limited region of object-
constitutive phenomenology.
139. See Z-XIII 14a, EFM 2.
140. See Z-XXV 135ab, probably 1937 (EFM 3); also XXIV II/6b, from 1938
(EFM 3).
141. PP/e, p. VII; PP/f, p. 1. See also my Construction in Phenomenology, in The
Reach of Reection: Issues for Phenomenologys Second Century, ed. by Steven Crowell,
Lester Embree, and Samuel J. Julian (Boca Raton, Fla.: CARP and the Electron Press,
2001), pp. 4671, for a treatment that, covering and developing some of the points given
here, goes on to show the place of construction in Merleau-Pontys later work.
142. See pp. 37576 in 72, with Heideggers note referring to 63 and thus indicating
the equivalence. The version of SZ in MH-GA 2 makes the equivalence explicit in an
annotation by Heidegger on p. 375, but without indication of when it was made.
tive is left unmentioned, even while the aim of formal indication itself
namely, to bring about the disclosure and grasp of the metaphysical Pro-
tofact (the proto-singularity, we might say) that determines Dasein in its
being as concretely niteis clearly explained. In the meantime, in Heideg-
gers rst two lecture courses after his return to Freiburg in 1928 construction
was explicated as the central methodological feature of projection in the exis-
tential analytic of Dasein, and there can be little doubt that the idea of the
positive utility, not to speak of the necessity, for an element of construction in
transcendental phenomenology came to Fink via Heideggers expositions. Yet
there is a profound difference between construction as Heidegger conceives
of it and the construction that Fink determines for the full methodological
efcacy of transcendental phenomenological philosophy; and the basis for the
difference emerges quite clearly in both the Sixth Meditation, 7, on
constructive phenomenology, and in the manuscript notes in which it is
spoken of.
Heideggers construal of construction is determined by the fundamental
centrality of Dasein. But, as chapter 3 explained in detail, for Fink the
intrinsic ambiguity of the status of Dasein cannot be left in play without
methodological critique; and when that ambiguity is addressed, it leads ul-
timately to the meontic problematic. In the Sixth Meditation, accordingly,
Fink focuses precisely on this problematic, pointing out again and again the
situation that has to ground the sense of an operation to be termed con-
struction. At issue in the question of phenomenological accession to tran-
scendentally constituting subjectivityand what determines that accession
whollyis the very possibility of the presentational givenness of that sub-
jectivity precisely as displaying it in its function of constituting the world; for
to display transcendental subjectivity would mean for it, in its very constitu-
tive thrust, to be taken up into the constitutive production that it itself
works and to be itself constituted in the horizons of presentation, i.e., in the
world. For transcendental agency as engaged in . . . world-constitution is the
very thing that makes for whatever givenness is phenomenologically possible,
namely, reductive givenness. Thus, as was made clear in 3.4.2 and 3.5, the
143. KB, 42. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heideggers lectures in the
summer of 1927, that is, in the semester after SZ was published, shows this same identi-
cation, but this could only be generally known with the publication of MH-GA 24 in
1975 (see 5).
144. See 3.4.2.
145. See appendix.
146. CM6, pp. 5758 (VI.CM/1, p. 64).
problem here is that what one is expecting in a genuine sense to gain access to
is precisely the sort of thing to which no access is in principle possible; the
constitutive coming-about that is the whole action in question is precisely not
a process subsumable into the conditions that make for standing as an efcacy
on a rst level of distinct functioning or as a rst action in a sequence, so as to
count as either a ground or a beginning. It stands outside any such series in
that it is the constituting of the very horizonal conditions in which any some-
thing can happen in function-dependency or in sequence. Here genesis is the
coming-about of temporal horizonality as such, by virtue of which all being is
manifest temporally, i.e., appears. In other words, it is the moment of the
genesis of the whole horizonal world-frame for the coming of being to ap-
pearance and experientiality, i.e., cosmogony, a becoming that can be ex-
pressed equally, and was so publicly three years later, as ontogony. The
question must therefore be, How can that which antecedes the framework of
horizonalities for discrimination in intuitionally thematizing presentation be
itself thematically presented?
This, however, returns us to the treatment detailed in the present chapter
(7.1 and 7.1.1) and in chapter 6 (6.4). What remains is simply to close the
circle, so to speak, by noting that construction is therefore equivalent to
ontication, that is, the procedure by which, in reduction-governed reec-
tion on transcendental constitution, the ultimate originative source is given
intuitionally presentational determinacy in the form of an agency active within
the horizons of constitution for being. But what has to be remembered is
that this very ontication is methodological unavoidable not simply because of
some deciency that lies in human cognitive capability but because the ulti-
mate originative source has no role apart from the ultimate originative process
itself; it itself, taken alone and conceived of as some ultimate source/agency
147. Cf. CM6, pp. 6063 (VI.CM/1, pp. 6770). Cf. 3.4.2 and 3.5.
148. See the detailed treatment in OH-I 16 (EFM 3), dated November 14, 1934.
149. See CM6, pp. 10, 12, and 142 (VI.CM/1, pp. 11, 15, and 157). Cf. also Z-XIV
V/3a (EFM 2) and OH-II 56 (EFM 3).
150. See the text from Finks 1935 Dessau lecture in 3.5. In point of fact, the very next
section in CM6, 7, makes clear the meontological import of the issue in construction
(see p. 76; VI.CM/1, p. 85).
151. See the compact note Z-XI 52a (EFM 2), corresponding to the explanation of
productive ontication in CM6, pp. 76 and 8384 (VI.CM/1, pp. 8586 and 92
93). Z-X 25a (EFM 2) concisely states the point that CM6, 9, develops at greater length,
viz., determining the character and role of the eidetic in transcendental productivity
(constructivity). On both points cf. also the early note in Z-I 148a (EFM 1).
something, is not the Absolute for phenomenology. The Absolute, as indi-

cated at the very beginning of this chapter and as explained at length in the
Sixth Meditation, is the totality of ontogonic becoming as such, the poles
of which are being and nothing. Accordingly, too, construction here, as
with phenomenological speculation in general, is bound in principle to the
intuitively given.
One further aspect to this needs to be recalled here. There is a certain
privilege accorded human being by virtue precisely of the reduction-governed
paradoxicality of the meontic Absolute. Human being in its very constitution
is the self-realization of the Absolute in the world precisely as the process by
which the Absolute comes both to be at all and to be as experience, conscious-
ness, and knowledge; the fundamental structures of human being in the world
are the fundamental structures of the Absolute in its very self-realization in the
very performance of constitutive proto-genesis, i.e., as actualizing itself in
actualizing the world. Expressed thus in Hegelian, but meontically re-
interpreted, terms, the constitution of the worldand of the In-Stances
that structurally characterize the fundamental station of human being in
the economy of constitution is an episode in the self-realization of the
Absolutenot a transitory but the absolute episode. Only with
the reective realization of this situation, however, in the meontic-speculative
self-reinterpretation of phenomenologythat is, with the philosophical un-
nothing-ing of the nothing of the Absolutedoes the Absolute reach its
improperly proper ontication. In addition, however, there is a more
positive role that human being plays, namely, that human beings placement in
the world, its situation, is the setting of the contours for constitutive deter-
minacy in the actual appearing of being (to it) and in its specic experiential
152. Z-XIX II/3ab, point no. 3, quoted in 7.1. In CM6, 11 C is dedicated to explain-
ing this very point.
153. See 7.2.2, and such texts as Z-IV 94ab (EFM 1), B-VII Ia /5b (EFM 2), and Z-XX
XXXIX/3b (EFM 3), contrasting the rejected kind of construction with its phenome-
nologically methodological meaning.
154. CM6, p. 57 (VI.CM/1, p. 64). In this way, too, there occurs as well the further,
speculative reinterpretationand correctionof Husserls thesis on being, viz., that
being is a constitutive result (see 3.4). Being comes to be seen rather as an integral
moment of the economy of origination itself, not as a mere objectlike product. See Z-XV
29ab (EFM 2).
155. See 5.1.1.2 and 5.1.1.3.
156. Z-XV 55ab, EFM 2.
157. Ibid. Cf. also Z-XV 49ab.
acts (of intending being) within that setting, that is, for the determinacy of
actual individual appearances. In other words, constitution is concretely car-
ried outand in principle only able to be carried outin the form of ac-
tual individual human being precisely now meontically understood in terms of
the self-realization/self-ontication of originative agency. This is the In-
Stancial lling that can only take place in concrete experiential making-
present.
At this point, then, the difference between construction in Heideggers han-
dling and in Finks construal of its meaning can be specied. As a methodologi-
cal device for articulating the speculative, construction in Finks proposal in
general contrasts with Heideggers in accord with the explanation given earlier
regarding Heideggerian projection in formal indication (see 7.2.1). Con-
structive content-determinacy in the methodology of phenomenologizing, ac-
cording to Finks transcendental theory of method for Husserls program, does
not serve as it does for Heidegger simply to aim sheer indexical pointing
namely, to the ever mine-own-ly [ je-meinig] singular existential totality of
Daseinso that therefore the construction must remain irremediably for-
mal. The content-determinacy of the construction meant to articulate con-
ceptually the structure of the meontic originative Absolute has another kind of
limitation, because what transcendental phenomenological reection (phe-
nomenologizing) is meant to disclose ultimately lies beyond the frame of com-
petence not only for content-determinacy but also for indicatable individuality
of any kind, including especially a perduring this. That is, because transcen-
dental origination lies beyond (antecedent to) the temporally structuring con-
stitution of actual being (des Seienden) as appearing, especially in individu-
ality, transcendental origination must be constructed in content-positive
determinacy, in the determinacy of the constitutively resultant (i.e., onti-
cation), else its articulation would be totally empty, articulating precisely
nothing. Nevertheless, this constructive content-positive determinacy re-
mains marked as of the meontic, as what in itself as originative force can-
not have in any such constitution-resultant determinacy. In these two ways,
then, as content-positive and as explicitly marked meontically, construction in
Finks methodological handling is essentially different from construction in
Heideggers. In a word, Heideggers formal indicandum is ultimately an abso-
lute singularity that is only able to be pointed to; however nitely factic it must
be in order to be existent, it transcends descriptive adequacy. But Finks In-
Stances are positively and appropriately eidetic, even if at the same time in
158. See 5.1.1.1 (especially p. 240), 5.1.1.2 (especially p. 247), and 5.1.1.4 (especially
pp. 25253).
meontic interpretation they open to the unattainable and become themselves

ontologically indeterminable.
One must, however, note a second positiveness in content-determinacy,
namely, in the In-Stancial lling of the present in temporal horizonal constitu-
tion. This lling of the present is a constitution that is realized within and as
dependent upon the horizonal conditions of in-the-world situatedness; it is a
constitutive action as intrinsically enworlded precisely as constitution. It
thus stands distinct from, and supplemental to, proto-constitutive origination,
the coming-about of the horizonal conditions themselves wherein being hap-
pens as temporalized appearing. If deriving this interpretive conclusion from
Finks sketchy notes is correct, here we have an aspect of constitutive process
that is drawn out of another ambiguity which Heideggers project of funda-
mental ontology leaves in place. For with Heidegger the deployment (consti-
tution) of the whole frame of the world is undistinguished from the existen-
tial self-realization of individual Dasein; both are achieved in one dynamic,
that of Daseins constitutive temporality, while the experiential constitution
in temporality of any individualized being other than Dasein remains un-
thematized and unanalyzed. Explicating the twofold level of constitution in
terms of the status of human being as In-Stancial, as Fink does, however,
allows making clear the two-level way in which human being can be (spec-
ulatively) considered the self-realization, the self-enworlding, the ontication
of transcendental constitutive achievement. Human being is the actualization
of the constitution of being (a) at the originative levelin that phenomenolog-
ical reection onties originative constitution in terms of an agency mod-
eled after subjectivity as horizonally situatedand (b) at its most concretely
actual level, that of the experientially individual, in the lling of the present,
which can only take place in function of enworlded, concretely situated sub-
jectivity. This latter is therefore a self-ontifying, an always operating self-
constitution whereby the performance of constitutive process reaches its most
concrete achievement, whereas the former is the reective self-realization done
in the highly specied work of phenomenologizingand here originative con-
stituting action is ontied as positively delineated transcendental subjec-
tivity (especially if also designated as I).
Thus, in Finks explication of transcendental methodology, there is a posi-
tivity that fullls the phenomenological demand for eidetic determinacy in its
aim to be more than simply analytic conceptual virtuosity, to be genuinely
disclosive in a true cognitive project. And it is the concept of In-Stance that
159. Again, see the references in the previous note, and also 7.2.1, p. 391. For a point of
further discussion, see appendix.
embodies this conceptually determinate disclosiveness, even if in different

ways. On the one hand, it is the concrete realization of the constitutive dy-
namic that results in the horizonal structuring of being-as-appearing, on the
other, it displays the determinants that structure individual actualities within
this situatedness. Complementarily, and on another level, both dimensions of
resultant structuring are embraced within the meontic Absolute of constitutive
origination, an integration that can only be interpretively disclosed as such
in what is methodologically dened as phenomenological speculation. It is,
moreover, at this level that the import of the distinction between these two
dimensions of constitution shows its broader relevance, beyond its critical
import in the interplay of Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian fun-
damental ontology. In the philosophic tradition of the modern period, speci-
cally in what is termed German Idealism, the second of the two dimensions is
already thematized as an object-constituting relationship. What happens,
then, is that the subjectivity taken to be active in constitution as the individual
I (whether alone, or in multi- or intersubjective action) tends to be con-
strued as ipso facto and unequivocally transcendental in its intentional thrust,
a tendency that dominates as well the general interpretation of Husserls
work. But when the rst dimensiontruly ultimate originative consti-
tutionis explicated as that wherein thematizing the meontic becomes ur-
gentso Finks proposalthen a more radical interpretation of the seeming
transcendental action of individual (or multiple) I-subjectivity becomes nec-
essary. The constitution that is thus accorded my own experiential intending
has to be seen as transcendentally efcacious only in being the self-realization
of genuinely, meontically constitutive process and power, not as having
transcendental status as unqualiedly my (or our) very own.
A further crucial point regarding the stages of this interpretation of tran-
scendental constitutive agency will be taken up a little later; we have rst
to consider another aspect of Finks dening of the speculative dimension in
transcendental phenomenology, namely, its providing a clear delineation of
the distinction between regressive and progressive phenomenology, in the lat-
ter of which lines for further phenomenological elaboration of extraordinary
reinvestigational and reinterpretive import are laid down.
160. By way of examples, see the clear, well-crafted expositions of J. N. Mohanty in

Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1997), e.g., chapter 6, and of Robert Sokolowski in
Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) e.g.,
pp. 5859; see also Anthony Steinbocks Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology
after Husserl (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995), a provocative origi-
nal study embodying this general understanding.
161. See 7.3.3.2, pp. 43738.
7.2.4. Methodological Features 4: Regressive and Progressive

Phenomenology; the Analytic and the Speculative
Given the methodological elaborations set out so far, the distinction
between the phenomenological work called regressive and that to be termed
progressive is relatively straightforward; it is exactly the distinction between
intuitive-analytic and constructive (speculative) method. And the clearest
detailing of the themes in the two kinds of undertaking is given in Finks 1930
Layout for Husserl. Rather than a treatment of the themes as given there,
which in fact embraces the entirety of phenomenological investigation and
then its self-critique and self-interpretation, we shall focus on the distinction
itself, with help from the indications about it that are scattered about in his
notes.
If one follows the unfolding of the sketch of progressive phenomenology
in the Layout one nds a proposal for continuing phenomenological work
that is different from the ordinary sense of the term progression. Here it has to
be thought of not in terms of a sequence of new themes but as the transforma-
tion of the way certain themes of utter fundamentality, proto-themes, are
to be approached, recast, and treated. Rather than the analytical tracing of
how manifest phenomenal features found already in place and holding allow
being analyzed in terms of factors whose working is already antecedently
effective constitutively in these features, instead, that is, of a regressive deter-
mination of fundamental constitutive operation by starting from and remain-
ing evidentially anchored by those given features themselvesfor example,
by starting from the concrete temporality and spatiality of human being
and acting in its experiential materiality (e.g., kinesthesis, proto-drives,
proto-association, hyletic elds) in order to establish the all-embracing
role of world-horizonal temporality and spatiality (and one might add: mate-
rial sensuousness)the effort now becomes understanding the coming-about
of these latter fundamental structuring factors. What is aimed at now is to gain
rigorous, self-critical insight into what origination means for these most
basic elements of the world as the frame of being as appearing and experi-
enced. If a word is needed, let us use the Husserlian term Fink gives here: it is
the question of understanding proto-intentionality in the fullness and gen-
uineness of its originativity. And this is the stage at which one has to get clear
on understanding being in terms of the distinction between pre-being and
162. Z-XI 73a, dated February 9, 1932 (EFM 2). On regression see 2.6.2.3, pp. 109
11, 3.3.2, p. 146, 3.5, 5.1.1.2, and 5.1.1.3. See also CM6, 6.
163. VI.CM/2, pp. 68. On the need for this distinction, see Finks brief remark to
Cairns on December 14, 1931, in C-HF, p. 57. See also Z-XXV 125ab, EFM 3.
164. VI.CM/2, pp. 78. See appendix.
worldly being, at which point one has to take up a critique of transcenden-

tal experience.
That this last matter links up with the Sixth Meditation, specically 8
Phenomenologizing as theoretical experiencecannot be mistaken, and
because of it we have a way of better understanding what progressive
means. Moreover, the few notes in which the progressive stage of work is
spoken of, while they give but few further details, do clearly reinforce, and
indicate signal features of, this same linkage: it is the stage wherein the matters
to be rendered intelligible have to be explicated in the register of the meontic.
For example, in progressive analysis the understanding of constitution is
shifted from the context of intentionality as a constitutive feature of subjec-
tivity, in the form of a synthesis achieved in intentional acts, to that of the
speculative interpretation of constitution in terms of un-nothing-ing as
the world. Furthermore, this interpretation of constitution cannot avoid
the ontication of the process and the moments involved, their construction in
the form of stages and features the determinacy and presentability of which
are only possible within the world-horizonal constitutive conditioning within
which being is temporally actualagain one of the main points of the Sixth
Meditation, both in 8 and in the treatment that follows it. Accordingly, this
is an interpretive eidetic that is not demonstrable in the evidential self-giving of
the matters themselves, given the meontic status of the latter. It remains
ideal-genetic, that is, the genetic (originative) character of the processes and
moments in question can only be eidetically determined as a possibility that
remains ideal, never intuitionally fulllable in evidential presentations,
again, of the matters themselves. Progressive phenomenology as ideal-
genetic, and thus as capable of treating the issue of the proto-coming-about
of the temporal as such (as we might paraphrastically render Urzeitigung)
precisely in its full originative character, is thus contrasted in the Layout
with regressive phenomenology as being proto-modal, i.e., centered on
the temporal modality of the actual present, a restriction Fink takes pains to
point out in his revision-texts for Husserls Cartesian Meditations.
165. Again, VI.CM/2, pp. 78. An example of progressive analysis can be seen in
Finks recasting of the dimensions of temporalization as vefold, and of the swing-
character of temporalization itself: see 5.1.2.3.2 and 5.1.1.4, respectively. See also the
further brief point on progressive phenomenology at the very end of 9.3.3.
166. See appendix.
167. See CM6, 9.
168. VI.CM/2, p. 8 (on ideal-genetic and temporality see also Z-V V/2b, EFM 1, and
Z-X 26ab, EFM 2), and Text No. 12 to Meditation IV, pp. 23942. Cf. also Z-IX 22a
and 44a, #1, EFM 2.
Finally, an additional last point: one telling issue progressive phenomenol-

ogy would address is the question of the verbal tense to use for the action of
transcendental originationor, in the almost obscurely compact formula of
the Layout, the question of the present-perfectness [Perfektivititt] of the
constitutive achievement effected by transcendental life. If the world is
already therewhich is what its pregivenness seems to implythen can
we not say that the constitution of the fundamental horizonal structures is
done and nished? Yes, we can, as indicated in chapter 4; but this cannot
mean taking it as a temporally past event. The antecedency of this constitutive
accomplishment is the pretemporal antecedency of origination, not that of the
rst action of a temporal series in an already given temporal horizonality. But
that, of course, only lets the question stand: What is the sense of the already
of the nishedness here, given that it means transcendentally constitutive
priority and not just logical priority? Simply to say that it is not temporal does
not remove the connotation of temporality, i.e., does not clear all ontication
from it. Present-perfectness is a property precisely of that which is in being
[des Seienden], in whatever kind of coming-about is proper to a particular
being, and therefore, to whatever extent present-perfectness is retained in
the conceptualization of the originative, it remains meontically paradoxical.
It should be abundantly clear by now that this meontic character of con-
stitutive originative process that methodologically rigorous and speculatively
self-interpreted phenomenology discloses sets the parameters for treating
any theme the meaning of whose being is intrinsically structured by world-
horizonality. With that, we reach the point at which we can show how phe-
nomenology would address those questions traditionally designated as the
metaphysical, which is precisely what Finks Layout sketches out as the
very next major section for the system of phenomenological philosophy that
Husserl once seriously considered composing (see the beginning of 1.3).
7.2.4.1. Supplementary Note: Internal and

External Treatment
In trying to sketch out an Introduction to the edition of Husserls
Bernau manuscripts that would present the issues for phenomenology in its full
philosophical comprehensiveness and critical rigor, Fink put in the forefront
the need both to recognize in principle and to put into practice, with clear
169. VI.CM/2, p. 7.
170. Cf. the last several paragraphs of 4.6.3; see further Z-VII III/2a and XXII/6ab;
EFM 2.
171. Cf. OH-II 53 and, in more subtlety and detail, OH-I 3845both in EFM 3.
methodological awareness, the integration of the speculative with the ana-

lytic. Inherent in the very nature of the problem with which in the epoch
Husserls program nds its phenomenological starting point, namely, the ques-
tion of the status of the world as constitutive result, is that it contains these
two dimensions within its very formulation. Simply to propose the problem of
the result-status of the world is to move beyond what normally lies manifest
before ones gaze, it is to open a dimension yet to be disclosed in investigative
inquiry; and that proposal, that projection, to use the term Fink borrows
from Heidegger, that opening of the sphere within which phenomenology will
proceed in contrast to presupposition-bound belief, is the activation of the
speculative specic to phenomenologys program. It is the sphere within
which the new intelligibility is determined that will give hitherto familiar
phenomena a whole new cast (leading ultimately to meontic interpretation).
This realization is a constant in Finks notes and in the end is the framework
within which to understand his own whole development after Husserls death,
namely, as elaborating the elements of this speculative sphere of the intel-
ligibility of what is analytically disclosed. As we shall see in the next chapter
(in particular 8.2), it becomes a major point for taking up again the question of
language in fully self-critical phenomenological inquiry. What should be noted
here, however, is that there it is also represented as the distinction between
external and internal analysis, this being a deeper characterization of
the distinction between speculation and analysis.
7.3. Primary Issues Interpretively Recast in Meontic

Integration: Phenomenological Metaphysics
On June 3, 1932, Edmund Husserl in a letter of birthday greeting and
heartfelt remembrance to his oldest and closest friend, Gustav Albrecht, wrote
of the state of his work and of his spirits at that hour of highly charged aims
and projects. He spoke of the state of the sciences, of the intellectual tenor
172. See, for example, B-VII 23ab (EFM 2), one of many similar formulations.
173. For one example of the many trial texts in B-VII making this point, see B-VII Ib /
1a3b, EFM 2.
174. E.g., Z-XXII 2425, EFM 3. This distinction governs the entirety of the treatment
of language in this folder, a private tutorial on Husserls Formal and Transcendental
Logic done over several months in late 1936 and early 1937. The distinction is also
explained in OH-IV 2029, and mentioned in the other OH folders, e.g., OH-II 3537
(all in EFM 3).
175. See the rst third of the account in 1.3.
of the times, and of how his phenomenology could meet the needs he saw to be
so pressing by pursuing careful, laborious inquiry that would begin with basic
questions and then, once these had been thoroughly explicated, would address
the questions that lie at the highest reaches. These matters, the kind that
everyone could grasp in their urgent signicance, were the ones termed meta-
physical. They concern, he wrote, birth and death, the ultimate being of the
I and of the we made objective reality as humankind, the teleology that
ultimately leads back to transcendental subjectivity and transcendental histor-
icity, and naturally as highest of all: the being of God as the principle of this
teleology, and the meaning of this being in contrast to the being of the rst
Absolute, [which is] the being of my transcendental I and the universal subjec-
tivity that discloses itself in methe true locus of divine working, to which
belongs as well the constitution of the world as oursspeaking from Gods
viewpoint, the constant creation of the world in us, in our transcendental
ultimately true being.
These lines to Albrecht were no mere occasional remark. In Husserls pro-
gram rst philosophy was the explication of the transcendental origin of
conscious life and experience within the horizons of the phenomenologically
reconceived world, and only in terms of the parameters that this explication
set could questions of the highest and last things be addressed. These
matters, to be couched in terms of phenomenologys framework (as Husserl
does in his letter), accordingly stand second in order of treatment, indeed last
of all. And, more than that, it seemed as if they were even now being put off
to the very last. But even if Husserls treatment of these questions in a phenom-
enological metaphysics had to be withheld until phenomenology itself was
sufciently complete to provide the proper basis for it, this did not mean that
the issues were out of mind. Particularly in the last period of his life Husserl
was profoundly aware that these nal questions were even more pressing and
could not continue to be simply put off. They were in fact to be treated in the
publication projects he was then planning with Finks help.
The urgency in addressing metaphysical issues came from several circum-
176. Bw IX, pp. 8384, bracketed grammatical insertion mine.

177. See Rudolf Boehms Einleitung to Hua VII, p. XVII; also Boehms article Hus-
serls Concept of the Absolute, in The Phenomenology of Husserl, ed. by R. O. Elveton
(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 174203; originally published as Zum Begriff des
Absoluten bei Husserl, Zeitschrift fr philosophische Forschung, 13 (1959), 214
42, and reprinted as Das Absolute und die Realitt in Boehm, Vom Gesichtspunkt
der Phnomenologie, Phaenomenologica 26 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968),
pp. 72105.
stances. There was the growing eclipse of his own philosophical work by that
of Heidegger in the eyes of the intellectual public, and there was the bafing
character of Heideggers approach to metaphysics, such as Husserl himself
heard it in Heideggers inaugural lecture in July 1929, What Is Metaphysics?
and saw laid out in Heideggers Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (ap-
pearing also in 1929). At rst Husserl thought his Cartesian Meditations
would show the way in which transcendental phenomenology led up to the
highest metaphysical problematic, as he wrote to Ingarden in March 1930
something that the then soon-to-be-published French translation, Mditations
cartsiennes, did not quite do. Husserl had to address metaphysical issues in
a way that distinguished itself from Heideggers approach, where metaphysics,
interpreted in terms of the basic movement of Dasein out beyond beings into
the Nothing, escaped the procedures operating in rigorous science. For
Husserl, as he explained to Albrecht in his June 3, 1932, letter, metaphysics
had to be basically nothing other than the science that produces the nal
clarication of the world and of man, that thus has their nal absolute meaning
as its theme, whereas, in the tenor of the times as he understood it, meta-
physics was being taken as a eld of vague speculation or a realm of entranced
mysticism, predicated upon the nonsense of an idea of being that could be
separated from the possibility of knowledge. And now he had an actual
plan that gave a specic place and determination to the metaphysical within a
systematically laid out phenomenology.
This plan was Finks Layout for Edmund Husserls System of Phenomeno-
logical Philosophy, which, as we saw in chapter 1, evolved from the task
of going beyond the framework of the ve Cartesian Meditations of Hus-
serls rst, 1929, revision. So Husserl had written to Cairns on September 23,
1930, of how with my excellent assistant, Dr. Fink, I am working on a new
systematic outline of transcendental phenomenology (the problematic reach-
ing up to ethical-religious and to metaphysical issues). But Husserls
178. See the second half of 1.2.

179. See Husserls letter to Ingarden on March 19, 1930, Bw III, p. 262.
180. Was ist Metaphysik? in Wgm, pp. 1718 (MH-GA 9, pp. 12022; English
translation by David Farrell Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. by David
Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 11012.
181. Bw IX, p. 83.
182. See the nal pages of 1.2 and the beginning of 1.3.
183. Bw IV, p. 25. Husserl also recommends to Cairns Finks doctoral dissertation, VB.
That Husserl was actually being guided by Finks Layout is also attested by his letter to
Ingarden from December 21, 1930 (BIng, pp. 6264; Bw III, pp. 26870); see Kerns
Einleitung, Hua XV, pp. xlixlii.
hopes that this new work would be nished and published in 1931 were not
realized, and in 1932 it was once again a full revision of the Cartesian Medi-
tations that was being produced. This revision, nevertheless, was an alternate
conception for the treatment of phenomenology that would cover its entire
eld, including metaphysics (although the analysis of temporality would be
left for a separate publication, Finks work on Husserls time manuscripts).
The result is that we are presented with two sketches for the way metaphysics
would be recast in transcendental phenomenology, one as part of a wholly
new presentation of phenomenology, the other the nal component of an
extensively revised Cartesian Meditations, as we shall see shortly. Neverthe-
less, it was the Layout plan on which Husserl was focused at this point, one
that left the burden of the overall organization, and no doubt too the expected
refashioning of Husserls manuscript writing, in Finks hands.
Before taking up Finks two ways of situating metaphysics within phenome-
nology, however, we should not overlook the two sketches of Husserls own
showing where metaphysical issues t into phenomenology, both relevant to
the project Husserl had set himself in 1930. Besides the sketch of metaphysical
themes for phenomenology based on traditional metaphysical issues that we
nd in his June 3, 1932, letter to Albrecht, Husserl had earlier composed his
own outline for a comprehensive treatment of phenomenology wherein meta-
physics would presumably in some way t. But what we nd in that outline is
that the place for metaphysics is only implied, being represented in the form of
the mention at the very end of the problem of teleology and God, two of the
themes spoken of to Albrecht but here not even designated as metaphysical.
In contrast, Finks plan details the methodological and thematic organization
of phenomenological investigation in terms of which the principles for inter-
pretively recasting metaphysical issues are determined. The articulative com-
pleteness and explicitness in Finks Layout is no doubt what led to Husserls
following it himself as a general orientation for his own thinking in regard to a
full systematic statement of phenomenology, as reected in his comments to
Ingarden and Cairns just referred to. The exact implications of this outline
for phenomenologically treating metaphysics is what we shall be taking up in a
moment.
We should, however, rst gain a better grasp of Finks overall conception of
the new System of Phenomenological Philosophy just mentioned, the Lay-
out that Fink had given to Husserl on August 13, 1930. This outline proposed
an Introduction in which the specic system-character of phenomenology
184. Hua XV, p. xxxvi.

185. See the previous paragraph above, and note 182.
would be explained, and then gave two major divisions: book I, The Stages of
Pure Phenomenology, and book II, Ontology and Phenomenology. It is
clear what book I was to be, namely, a treatment of phenomenology in all its
main components and stages of investigative unfolding, because the general
outline is followed by a more detailed sketch of it. In addition, Fink proceeded
soon after (December 1930 to January 1931) to write out a full draft of section
1 of this book I. There is, however, no corresponding detailing of the con-
tents of book II; but, given the context of Husserls having to come to terms
with the enthusiastic reception of Heideggers fundamental ontology as super-
seding transcendental constitutive analysis in the lineage of phenomenolgy (see
the last pages of 1.2), together with Finks own appreciation of the question of
being in transcendental phenomenology, we may suppose that in the actual
treatment of the three topics nameda transcendental aesthetic, nature
and spirit, and the move from pure internal psychology to transcendental
phenomenology it would have been a detailed interpretive explication of
the meaning of being in the investigative disclosures of a concrete phenomenol-
ogy of experience as transcendental constitutive teleological result. These
three topics, accordingly, indicate three ways of approaching the question of
being in regard to both transcendental originative subjectivity and transcen-
dentally constituted results, each topic undergoing a radicalizing reinter-
pretation in nal-stage reconsideration.
Before the topic in book II could be addressed, then, the treatment of phe-
nomenological investigation itself had to be laid out in its ordered detail, as
Finks outline for book I shows. It is of course no accident that, in drawing
from Finks own notes in the enterprise he was pursuing with Husserl, the
present study has represented many elements and stages of phenomenology as
sketched out for book I, for example, the central standing of the world in its
pregivenness, book I, section 1, A, and the character and methodology of the
reduction, book I, section 1, B (for both these topics, see chapters 2, 3, and 4
here), the nature of, and certain primary topics of, regressive phenomenology,
book I, section 2 (see chapters 4 and 5 here), as well as of progressive phenom-
enology, book I, section 3 (see chapters 6 and 7 here). With that all in place, we
186. VI.CM/2, pp. 10105.

187. See 2.5 and 2.6.2.4, among many other indications.
188. VI.CM/2, p. 3.
189. On the end-product of constitutive origination, see, for example, CM6, pp. 23
24 and 128 (VI.CM/1, pp. 26 and 141).
190. See appendix.
can turn to the remaining section of book I, section 4, Basic Features of

Phenomenological Metaphysics.
The detailing of the ve topics comprising this section 4 bears being quoted
in full here:
A. Phenomenological idealism and the problem of transcendental

historicity.
B. The transcendental necessity of the fact of the ego. Centering
transcendental-historical intersubjectivity in the central egological monad.
C. The transcendental deduction of the singularity of the world.
D. Restoration of the transcendental legitimacy of navet. (Constitutive
denition of the natural attitude as a mode of existence of transcendental
life itself.)
E. The transcendental tendency of returning-to-oneself (prior forms in
religion, wisdom, and in the ethical authenticity of life in the world). Philoso-
phy as function of the Absolute: the philosopher as the one who discloses
absolute subjectivity is the one who manages the business of world-spirit.
Outlook upon a philosophy of history.The philosopher as transcendental
ofcial [transzendentaler Funktionr] has the possibility of the highest au-
thenticity, his responsibility as model: phenomenological restoration of the
Platonic idea of the state.
If one compares this sketch of basic features of metaphysics in phenomeno-

logical recasting with the list of themes in Husserls letter to Albrecht (June 3,
1932), and with Husserls own outline of a new, full presentation of phenome-
nology (mentioned a few paragraphs above), then, given the treatment that
has brought us to the present chapter, one can begin to appreciate the delicacy
of the task Fink has: the highest themes in Husserls transcendental phenome-
nology have to be radically reinterpreted as not purely, consummately, tran-
scendentally ultimate or absolute when subjected to meontic methodological
critique; and the effect ripples down through every other theme from histor-
icity, through intersubjectivity, to God, in a way that reinterpretively reinstates
even the stratum of constitutive product standing at seeming furthest re-
move from spirit, namely, nature, as having a positive transcendental
import and function. What we shall be doing in the remainder of the pres-
ent chapter, then, is to indicate in compact summative form some of main
meontic-governed reinterpretations thus required. This purpose, however,
will be well served if we also take into consideration the alternate sketch of a
191. VI.CM/2, pp. 89, emphasis Finks.

192. See footnote 190 just above (in the appendix).
phenomenological metaphysics that Fink also drew up in the context of the

revision of Husserls Cartesian Meditations.
There are two versions of this sketch, kept together in a single subset of
notes and written probably before the Layout.
[A]
Meditation VII: The phenomenological transformation of the idea of meta-

physics. Transcendental deduction of the singularity of the world on the basis
of the necessary singularity and unity of the transcendental monadic com-
munity. Entemporalizedness [Verzeitigtkeit] as transcendental subjectivitys
living of itself [Sichselbstleben]. Being that is under way. Outline of time-
constitution.
[B]
Meditation VII: will give an outlook upon the future metaphysics of phenom-
enologyor: upon the phenomenological transformation of the traditional
idea of metaphysics (by which metaphysics is to mean more than ontology
precisely the whole of the last and highest questions of justication)namely
following the lead of one metaphysical problem: the question of the possible
conceivability of a plurality of worlds, or transcendental deduction of the
singularity of the world. The question of the contingency of the world as
factic with respect to the constitutive possibility of transcendental life. The
contingency of transcendental life itself. It [i.e., transcendental life] is not
contingent, but rather the condition of possibility for contingent and neces-
sary being. The necessity of transcendental existence is the ground for the
necessity of the singularity of the existing world.
In these sketches what we see is the way the framework of Husserls Carte-
sian Meditations has set the need for a counterweight to the monadic ego-
centering that characterizes them. Unlike the Layout for the once planned
wholly new work, where the ego-prominence that habitually schematizes what
Husserl wrote for publication is situated within a much larger and more diverse
193. The folder into which these versions were put holds notes largely from 1929 (see
the Beschreibung to Z-VI, EFM 1). The subset (Z-VI X/16) in which they are found
a subset devoted entirely to the revision of Cartesian Meditationshas one note sheet
with a crossed-out theme and date, natrlichen Weltbegriff 1930, that coincides with
both a topic in book I, section 1, A, of the Layout, and with the period of its composi-
tion, viz., before August 13, 1930.
194. The versions here designated A and B are from Z-VI LVI/3a and LVI/6b,
respectively, emphasis Finks, bracketed insertion mine (EFM 1, but also given in N-EF,
pp. 1025, as are other texts mentioned here).
constitutive economy, the Cartesian Meditations, even in revision, retains

that ego-centered schema as its central axis. Yet, while this ego axis is in force
throughout the ve Meditations, the supposed autonomy of Cartesian reec-
tive self-manifestness is from the beginning and thereafter in Finks revision
inected by the counterweight of the pregivenness of the world and the sit-
uatedness of the I am, even in its apodicticity. Accordingly, as a task having
to be continually kept in mind, this resituating had also to be reiterated right to
the end in the revision, where the way metaphysics would be handled in a fully
mature phenomenologyperhaps without as complete a treatment as in the
Layout, but at least as an outlook upon a future metaphysics of phenome-
nology (version [B]). And the guiding idea for it would focus once more on the
world, specically the character of the world as embracing all being and as
singular, in a wholly different kind of center of gravity, in that, totally unlike a
polar I, the world is horizontal and not polar, not a center at all.
All things considered, therefore, and in view once again of the prepon-
derance of the theme of the world in the whole economy of phenomenology as
transcendental constitution-analysis in the thematic and methodological clar-
ication that it was Finks contribution to work out (as the present book is
meant to show), the topical center for a phenomenological metaphysics can
justiably be taken to lie in the question of the singularity of the world.
What remains to be done, then, is to sum up concisely the point of this cen-
trality, and to follow through from that to the summary detailing of its im-
plications in a comprehensive phenomenological metaphysics.
It has to be remembered that, in addition to Finks having to adapt the
thematic orientation and organization of the Layout to the egoic axis of the
Cartesian Meditations, Fink also adapted the orientation of his Layout to
Husserls preferences when he drafted the full-scale elaboration to its opening
section, an Introduction to Phenomenology (see 4.2). In each case, however,
this did not mean adulterating his approach with elements of compromise but
meant coming to terms with Husserls concerns and showing how in system-
atic self-critical consideration those concerns could be integrated with the
overall orientation he saw to be required. However, this integration meant as
well critically reconceiving Husserls thematic concerns, again in line with the
general reinterpretive transformation of phenomenology necessary for its
post-preliminary stage. In other words, the self-transformation of transcen-
dental phenomenology that we have been following was the precondition for
the effective recasting of metaphysics that would give it phenomenologically
195. See appendix.

grounded new meaning, with the same methodological and interpretive intel-
ligibility that was held, in the end, within meontic constraints.
In keeping with the overall critical self-interpretation that is thus under way
in all of Finks work for Husserl, then, the line of coherent approach to the
recasting of metaphysics will follow the line of progression in reradicalizing
phenomenology. This is what we nd not only in the orientation of Finks
Layout but also in the full subset of notes in which this pair of alternate
sketches for a phenomenological metaphysics occurs. In addition, even more
condensed indication for a phenomenological metaphysics is given in Z-VI
LVI/5a, where the transcendental problem of world-singularity is the only
topic given for the Seventh Meditation, while Z-VI LVI/4a offers the per-
spective of a fundamental complementarity that must not be overlooked. In
this latter note the Cartesian Meditations are implicitly paired with Finks
work in the Bernau texts on time-analysis, with their relationship indicated in
a single phrase characterizing the place of time-analysis as preparing the way
for the work of Sixth and Seventh Meditations, namely, by effecting the
reduction of pregiven world time to constituting proto-temporalization. Ac-
cordingly, the line of progression, holding at the same time for transcendental
self-critical reinterpretation and for phenomenological metaphysics can be
posed in the following thematic sequence:
(1) Meontic phenomenological radicalization makes metaphysics mean more
than ontology.
(2) Guiding theme: that the world as the horizon of all horizonality, with all
the contingency and factuality of events and entities within it, is itself
necessarily singular.
(3) World-singularity is grounded in the originative absoluteness of the life of
transcendental constituting subjectivity.
(4) The living process of transcendental constitution can only be approached
in the form of experienced temporality, which is itself the actualization of
true ultimate originative temporalization.
(5) This proto-temporalization is antecedent to, and lies beyond, necessity
and contingency inasmuch as it is the unconditioned ground of necessity
and contingency in the realm of being. Yet originative process and the
originated comprise together the order of the meontic Absolute: origina-
tion + being in end-constitution, in primary enworlding.
In sum, metaphysics in its phenomenological recasting is not done through

purely speculative constructions that can only indicate some true being-in-
196. See 7.1, and cf. CM6, pp. 99 and 150 (VI.CM/1, pp. 108 and 167).
itself; it is rather the understanding of the true universe of being [des Sei-
enden], in which the naive universe, the world, is only a moment. What char-
acterizes the phenomenological conception of metaphysics is the inquiry into
the unity, totality, and being-structure of this true universe of being
even if it must ultimately be interpreted in meontic terms. With this overall
conception in place, we may now turn to specic points in a phenomenological
metaphysics.
7.3.1. Phenomenological Metaphysics Is More Than Ontology

Husserls usual conception of ontology, in its classic statement in Ideas
I, follows the tradition of metaphysics in late Scholasticism and its canonic
ratication in the work of Leibniz and Wolff. There in metaphysica generalis,
Fink explains, the concept of ens in commune is the formalization of sub-
stance, while the formalization that leads to the something whatever is the
formalization of the object, of objectum, in the language of Scholasti-
cism. But in integrating this conception into his correlativistic starting point,
namely, in the equating of being and object, Husserl does not allow the
problem of the ontological concept of being [des Seienden, that-which-is]
really to come forward at all. That-which-is, that which is in being
[Seiendes] is accordingly the correlate of acts that give something as it-
self. Fink, however, accepts the exigency that being [Sein] have a meaning
beyond that of its character as a modality of positing, that is, that it have a
cosmological, more precisely a cosmogonic, horizon; and so he has to dene
Husserls real thesis on being as the thesis of the constitutedness of that-
which-is [Seiendes].
Constitutive phenomenology is, then, ontogonic metaphysics: which means
inquiry into the origin of being. Origin in transcendental constitutive regres-
sion, however, cannot mean beginning in time; for to begin in time is the
ontically understood mode of arising and passing away. To inquire into the
origin of being is rather to inquire altogether beyond that which is in being,
197. Z-XX XXIX/3b (emphasis Finks), from late 1935 or early 1936, EFM 3.
198. Hua III/1, 9.
199. OH-IV 2021, emphasis Finks. It is clear from other indications in this booklet of
notes that this note dates from 1935, prior to March 20 (date of the discussion with
Landgrebe recorded in OH-IV 43). See also OH-VI 11 and 43. (All in EFM 3.)
200. See 3.3.2, p. 151 which cites this same text from Z-XI 7a (EFM 2), here with my
modication of Finks emphasis.
and beyond as well all ontological modes of arising and passing away. The
limit of ontological philosophy, therefore, the limit of the effort to understand
being, lies in the impossibility of leaping over the situation of being-in-the-
midst-of-being. Lacking any distance from it, ontology asks about being so to
speak from within. But what is needed is a way of gaining some distance
from being, an action of holding oneself apart, the meontic epoch, writes
Fink. Achieving this is not a matter of achieving, or pretending to achieve,
true exit from existence in the world but of recognizing, in the meontic specula-
tive turn, the foundering of any attempt to conceive man as a being, i.e., the
ontological unattainability of human being. Positively put, this is no less
than the integration, into a single, paradoxical unity, of ontology and meon-
tic, which together make up phenomenology in its consummate philosophical
self-interpretation.
7.3.2. The Singularity of the World

In the same moment of phenomenological speculative interpretation just
spoken of, the Absolute is neither some self-sufcient originative power nor
the sum total of being, with either taken alone, but rather their unity in the
condition of constitutive originatedness. The world, then, phenomenologi-
cally explicated as the horizon of horizons for all experiential actuality-in-
appearing, the one Something always already there for any attribution to be
possible (see 4.4.2), is the rst product of constitutive origination wherein
any meaning can be given to the phenomenological Absolute. The world is,
then, the rst actualization of the Absolute, precisely as not itself but rather as
an originated product. Or, to put it another way, the rst step of coming-
into-being, of self-actualization, by the Absolute is the production of world,
worlding, which is, thus, far from being a transitory episode. It is the abso-
201. Z-XVII 17ab (emphasis all Finks), designated For the Dessau lecture and
written after November 15, 1935, the date at the beginning of this tablet of pages when
Fink wrote down his thoughts on Heideggers lecture, The Origin of the Work of Art,
delivered two days earlier (EFM 3).
202. OH-IV 30, emphasis Finks (EFM 3), from the rst two or three months of 1935,
i.e., before the text referred to in the previous and following footnotes.
203. Again, Z-XVII 17ab.
204. Ibid.
205. Z-V III/6b (EFM 1); cf. 7.1, p. 377, citing Z-XIX II/3ab, #3; 7.2.2, and 7.2.3
(pp. 40911). See appendix.
lute episode of the structuring-out of being-as-appearing, the deployment-

condition of being corresponding to the openness to being-as-appearing that is
the wakefulness of human life as subjectivity. This means, in turn, that the
proto-doing of world-origination (as we may call it) has, so far as living
experience is concerned, always already been done (see 7.2.4); for that is the
very factuality with which the phenomenologist is faced in the ineluctable
pregivenness (a) of the world, (b) of the process by which the world has been
constituted (proto-temporalization), and (c) of the phenomenologists own
ineluctable being and structuring in world-conditionalities, up to and includ-
ing every moment of even the most rened transcendental reection he or
she may be doing. This sheer pregivenness remains a unique kind of fact,
not one able to be subsumed unproblematically in any kind of categorical or
eidetic system appropriate for beings that are set within the framework of the
worlds horizonalities. Instead, the worlds factual pregivenness is the very
mark of what is utterly supracategorical and supra-eidetic. It is as well the
mark of standing beyond the contingency both of events and the individuation
of entities in time. If the analysis of temporalization is the analysis of constitu-
tive becoming, in two registers, (1) that of events and entities in their appear-
ing in actuality, i.e., as being in the horizonality of the world, and (2) that of
the origination of the horizons wherein being is actual only as in their becom-
ing in temporalized appearing, i.e., the proto-coming-about of world horizon-
ality as such, then there are two radically different registers on which to speak
of contingency and singularity. The rst is the register (a) of contingency
contrasting to necessity and (b) of individuality and singularity contrasting to
multiplicity and community in kind, while the second transcends any such
framework. The world for all actual beingthe rst actualization of transcen-
dental constitutive productivityis a Fact that is neither contingent nor
necessary, and a Singular that is neither individual nor multiple; it is the
206. Z-XV 55ab and 127a, EFM 2.

207. On being-as-appearing, temporalized and spatialized as a complex structure of
both the manifest and the nonmanifest, see chapter 4 passim, and as constitutively
achieved in protention and retention by de-presencing as, so to speak, the motor of
temporalization, see 5.1.1.
208. See Z-VII XVII/17a, Chiavari, September 21, 1930 (EFM 2).
209. See Z-IV 127a, EFM 1. See also the convergence with Finks thinking here on the
part of Merleau-Ponty in his working notes in Le visible et linvisible (Paris: Gallimard,
1964; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 1968), pp. 72, 148, 28182 (pp. 47, 110, and 22829). See also
Hua VII, p. 188, note 1, continuing from p. 187.
horizonal condition for any such mutually related features. Its factuality
and singularity embrace all possible coming-to-be and continuing-to-be,
and nothing can be conceived beyond it.
7.3.3. Metaphysical Themes in the Crisis-Project

For the cosmological perspective to set the governing framework for
phenomenology both in principle and in self-critical interpretive practice
thereby transforming it systematically and methodologicallymeans that
Husserls recurrent Cartesian approach has to be subordinated and resituated
within what is basically a Kantian perspective. If rst philosophy is now
simply phenomenology in its determining the way philosophical inquiry must
begin as a scientic discipline of the beginning still Husserls Cartesian-
inspired objectivethen metaphysics, called by Aristotle rst philosophy, can
only come later, in fact at the end, after phenomenology completes its inves-
tigation. But when that Cartesian opening leads to the recognition of the
understanding that rules in concealment, i.e., that rules as constituting the
always already developed . . . intuitively given surrounding world, then
the framing work of Kant, the great preguring fashioner of scientic philos-
ophy, intervenes. So while the ultimately intuitive evidencing of transcen-
dental operations must still be sought in phenomenologys investigations,
nevertheless the character of that intuitional evidencing gets interpretively
revalued when subjected to the methodological critique that is determined by
the impact of the cosmological problematic, that is, when the basically Kant-
ian transcendental critique of the structuring of objects in the world is itself
remodulated by the force of two further considerations. The rst of these is the
Heidegger-inspired raising of the question of being, and the second is the need
on phenomenological grounds to move behind the schema that Husserl and
210. See sketch B from Z-VI LI/6b on p. 424 in 7.3 above.

211. It is no accident that Jan Patocka, long a close friend of Finks, highlights this
transformation in a lecture given in 1971, Edmund Husserls Philosophy of the Crisis of
Science and His Conception of a Phenomenology of the Life-World, trans. and intro.
by Erazim Kohak, Husserl Studies, 2 (1985), 148. See also Iso Kerns treatment in Husserl
und Kant: Eine Untersuchung ber Husserls Verhltnis zu Kant und zum Neukan-
tianismus, Phaenomenologica 16 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), e.g., pp. 3450
and 192245.
212. Hua VII, p. 5. See the whole passage, pp. 45, together with p. 8.
213. See Hua I, 64, pp. 18182.
214. Crisis, p. 104 (28), translation slightly modied.
215. Hua VII, p. 235.
216. See Hua VII, p. 237, and Crisis, 30. Cf. also Kern, Kant und Husserl, pp. 1016.
Kant share, namely, the epistemological subject-object schemahere, too,

reecting the strength of Heideggerian critique.
In a word, the Kantian framework holds the properly methodological valid-
ity for going beyond entry-level explications, those that historically intro-
duced phenomenology, in order to pose the fundamental problem, which in
turn should lead to recasting the way phenomenology should be presented
from the beginning in any new treatment. It is this recasting that is in effect
in Finks treatment of metaphysics in phenomenology, as we have seen, and it
is this recasting that, given the general difference between Husserl and Fink on
the priority to be followed between Cartesian and Kantian orientations, even
if reconceived, will translate into a contrast between the way metaphysical
themes occur (a) in Husserls nal project, the Crisis-writings as Husserl
produces them, and (b) as Fink would himself work them out in a critical
methodological cast.
It is in this situation of critique and recasting that we shall now take up for
summary representation the remaining metaphysical themes Husserl listed in
his letter to Albrecht as these make their appearance in the Crisis-writings.
7.3.3.1. History
Husserls explicit treatment in his Crisis-project of the historical di-
mension of the progress of philosophical development toward and within
phenomenology, as well as the accomplishments of the transcendental con-
stitution that phenomenology is meant to disclose, has been a topic of study
and interpretation in much of the period after 1945, with the return of aca-
demic normalcy and the increasing access to Husserls manuscript for that
217. See appendix.

218. This displacement, however, planned by Fink to take the same effect at least in the
revised Cartesian Meditations, is not effected by Husserl in Crisis. In this work Husserl
reafrms subject-object centering as canonic for phenomenology, for example, in p. 171
in 50 (Hua VI, p. 174), p. 177 in 52 (Hua VI, p. 180), and p. 179 in 53 (Hua VI,
p. 183). The Cartesian rubric, ego-cogitatio-cogitata, asserts Husserls approach to
the world as in function of the constitution of objects (see 4749), thus maintaining
Kants philosophy of reection schema in its compatibility with Descartes intuitional
evidencing.
219. The contrast between formulations in Husserls Crisis and Finks own notes is
complicated inasmuch as the text of Crisis itself, as edited in Hua VI, contains phrasings
that Fink has contributed to it. (Landgrebe also contributed wording changes.) A careful
study of the Textkritische Anmerkungen (pp. 52151) allows some grasp of this inter-
play, along with the material in Hua XXIX.
project, in particular the publication of Husserliana VI in 1954. The pres-

ent brief representation, however, is meant to address not the specic is-
sues that have arisen in that postwar study but rather the place of the theme
of history in the working context of the critical reinterpretation that phe-
nomenology was undergoing in the original period of the production of the
Crisis-writings themselves, with Finks thinking, therefore, as one of its
constitutive elements.
In accord with the general tenor of the present chapter, then, the setting for
the phenomenological understanding of the theme of history here is deter-
mined, more than anything else, by the full theoretical-interpretive implica-
tions of the critique of transcendental method that came to explicitness in
phenomenologys work during the two years before the Crisis-project be-
gan. In essence, if the two registers spoken of in 7.3.2 are kept in mind, it is
clear that what determines the sui generis Singularity and Factuality of
the world also determines the meaning history can have in regard to both the
matters investigated in phenomenology and the nature of phenomenology
itself. Thus the identiable determinacyconstancies and continuities of ac-
tion or of entitative identitythat is actual in the horizon of temporality is
ipso facto immanent in the horizonality of the world, and this immanence
denes the proper sphere of history. Accordingly, the constitutive origination
of the horizonal determination of this same immanencethe immanence
wherein being is actual only as in temporalized coming-to-bethat is, the
proto-coming-about of world horizonality as such, may be inexplicably fac-
tual and singular (see 7.3.2), but such properties of origination can in no
way signify a coming-about in time. Genesis, which is the theme of genetic
analysis, is not intra-temporal, writes Fink, but rather is the history of the
coming-about of the temporality of time itself [die Geschichte der Zeitigung
der Zeit selbst].
This could not be termed history in anything like the normal sense; for the
fact of origination is in no way identiable or discoverable as such, is in no
way accessible in itself. It can only be thematizedthematically intendedin,
and immediately out of, the concrete form of its realization, namely, the In-
Stancial integral that is the situation of the moment of actual phenomenologi-
220. The character of the text in relation to the body of manuscripts pertaining to it
cannot be taken up here. The materials for this are, of course, Hua VI and Hua XXIX.
221. See appendix.
222. Z-IV 117a; also cf. 19ab and 101c (EFM 1). Here genesis is used to mean what
Fink will term origin or origination. See 3.5.
cal reective inquiry. Genesis, in other words, is a designation by retro-

application, and so also must any characterization of it be, such as speaking
of it as a historyas in the quote from Fink just above. Any instance of
reection thematically aimed at the originative moment of the constitutive
status of a determinate unity transpiring in temporalized actuality only takes
place within the situatedness of that reective acts own actual being in the time
and place of, and with, the regard exercised upon it by an actual human being-
in-the-world, and can only intend ultimate originative coming-about as a di-
mension of the whole constitutive actuality of that situatedness. In that this
total-situational constitutive actuality is at once the carrying-out of originative
process and its telos-term, that process itself is only as its term, and hence is only
determinable in the appearance of that term. In that the appearance of the
term of origination is an event in time as regarded by existent humans regarding
it, this, then, this is where history takes place properly speaking. In other words,
history takes place only in the situation, in the temporal framing of actuality,
not as the originative process of that framing itself, the coming-about of time as
horizonal-temporal itself; and, yet, since the gaining of this reective realiza-
tion of what is antecedent to history can only be done on and in some actual
situationally whole concrete instance, the thinking effort to reach constitutive
origination, and its determinate characterization, are also a historical event in
the situation. In short, this reective realization has to be an intending-
through that applies to the actuality-term of origination, which in that very
actualityprecisely as reected upon in terms of its origined-nessis the
appearance of its originative fact and process in the constitutedness of its
originative outcome; and this intending-through is another way of charac-
terizing the speculative dimension of phenomenological nal interpretation.
That is, only in meontic-speculative reinterpretation can the pretemporal and
transeventual history that is genesis-origination be interpretively seen in the
historical situatednessand in the concrete historyboth of the originatively
constituted and of transcendentally aiming reection done upon it. A concrete
example of how this meontic interpretation works will be given in chapter 9
(9.3.3).
Such, then, is the interpretive framework, worked out concurrently with the
production of the Crisis-writings themselves, in terms of which the prob-
lematic of history as raised subsequently by interpreters of those writings
223. See 4.24.3, 5.1.1.25.1.1.3, and 7.2.1, pp. 39091.

224. Z-IV 117a, EFM 1. See 3.3.2, pp. 14647, and 3.5, pp. 17071.
225. See appendix.
would have to be taken up, a task that unfortunately cannot be pursued within
the connes of the present study.
7.3.3.2. Human and Transcendental Subjectivity

The constitutive relationships and the interpretive conditions that deter-
mine the understanding of history in phenomenology hold as well for the
question of the identity and difference between human and transcendental
subjectivity, the problematic with which the text of Crisis concludes in both
sections A and B of part III as we have them (5354 and 72, respectively).
This is a topic that is woven through the entirety of the present study, and
through the manuscript materials of Finks that stand in complementarity to
and critique of Husserls own enormous output.
Of the many aspects and points that an integral treatment of how this
complementarity and critique work in the present topic, the best orientation on
which a summary can be based is perhaps the one that Fink himself wove into
his contribution to Husserls thinking in that once prominent endeavor, the
revision of the Cartesian Meditations, the last substantially completed un-
dertaking before the Crisis-project. The fact also that the culminating draft
of the Sixth Meditation continued to have an effect upon Husserls thinking
in his composition of the Crisis-texts underscores the value of taking this
orientation. It is no accident, then, that there is a marked coherence between
the overall issue that Husserl would come to place as the actual theme of
inquiry in his Crisis-project and the paramount question that Fink asked of
the approach embodied in the Cartesian Meditations as Husserl had com-
pleted them in 1929. Husserl in Crisis calls the problem of the worldthe
deepest essential interrelation between reason and that-which-is in gen-
eralthe enigma of all enigmas and asks, Can reason and that-which-is
be separated, where reason in its knowing determines what that-which-is
is? Fink early in his revision-text replacement for the First Meditation
draws critical attention to the difculties of grounding cognition on the basis
of the I by asking, Is the apodictic evidentness of the I am the in itself
rst evident situation and the one that exemplies the grounding presupposi-
tion for all other instances of the evidentness that eventually are to be re-
established? Is the existence of the I an antecedency of being prior to every
other being, or is it a matter merely of an antecedency of cognition, namely,
that the I is for itself the closest immediate thing in the order of what becomes
226. Crisis, pp. 13 and 11, translation modied, emphasis Husserls (5, Hua VI,
pp. 12 and 9).
known, although as far as being is concerned it is dependent upon some other

being? Husserls modications to Finks wording in annotations 91 and 93
in this passage and its context should be carefully read, but the relevance of the
question for the topic of metaphysics in the present setting lies in how this
question actually functions, namely, to bring into play the effect of the distinc-
tion between what Fink in his notes (but not in the revision text itself) calls the
internal phenomenological analysis of intentionality and the external phe-
nomenological thesis about the being of intentionality. And the reason for
wanting to force this issue is that what Fink nds Husserl regularly doing is
converting the structure of intentionality as internally explicated into an exter-
nal, that is, phenomenologically speculative, thesis, namely, into the ontologi-
cal principle of the priority of the intending subject with respect to the intended
object (see 7.2.2 above). The result is a dangerous metaphysics of validity, a
metaphysics of sense-forming, a metaphysics of knowledge.
The cure for this danger is to recognize thathowever much the attempt to
reach understanding of the transcendental may have to go through the apo-
dictic Iif one pays attention to the kind of meaning the being that this
apodictic I has, one has to recognize that the apodicticity holds only as
long as and while I experience myself, that is, only so long as one explicates
any such apodicticity in its transcendental sense by strictly following in ana-
lytic thoroughness and concreteness the guidance [Leitfaden] of the struc-
tural form that holds for the humanly subjective. An entire thesis about the
relationship between pure psychology and transcendental psychology lies
in this point. However, leaving that aside now as we must, it is, again, the
general metaphysical importthe meontically speculative pointthat has to
be made here in repetition complementary to earlier representation (see 6.4).
227. VI.CM/2, pp. 15253, emphasis mine in this passage. The point of the question
was explicated earlier, in 2.6.2 and 2.6.2.1.
228. Z-XX 9a, emphasis Finks (EFM 3), by all indications from 1936, that is, during
the work on the Crisis-writings.
229. Z-XX 10a.
230. Phrasing drawn from Husserls annotation 93, VI.CM/2, p. 153: Was dieses
apodiktische Ich eigentlich fr einen Seinssinn hatall underscored by Husserl.
231. VI.CM/2, p. 155.
232. VI.CM/2, p. 196, from one of the revision passages for the Second Meditation.
233. See by way of example the conjunctions and differences between (a) Husserl in
Crisis 72, p. 257 (Hua VI, p. 261), annotation 384 to VI.CM/1, p. 120, p. 262 (Hua,
p. 266), and p. 264 (Hua VI, pp. 26768); and (b) Fink in his sketch for the continuation
of the Crisis-project, Crisis, p. 399400, #4 (Hua, pp. 51516), and the parallel text in
Z-XX XXIX/1a4a (EFM 3).
Distinguishing mundane and transcendental subjectivity in the form of

the distinction between the constituted and the constituting only makes sense,
Fink argues, if constitution is explicated in terms of a kind of constitutive
performance that is other than that of determining objects, namely, it has to be
explicated in terms of ennitizing [Verendlichung]. That is, this concept
(speculative in its character, one must realize) needs to be understood in terms
of the distinction between the subjectivity that-is-brought-to-be-a-being
and the subjectivity that-brings-a-being-to-be. The latter alone is the ul-
timately transcendental. In this reconception, then, constitution is taken as
the process of ennitizing [Verendlichungmaking-into-the-nite], that is,
the process by which the absolute subject, in apperception, dis-gures/dis-
places [ent-stellt] itself out of its transcendental primacy and out of its tran-
scendental necessity into mundane placement [Stellung] in the cosmos, and
into metaphysical contingency. Human being, then, is distinct from the
transcendental by the whole thickness of being: Being is result, writes Fink;
being is transcendental surface. And yet, Fink quickly adds, transcen-
dental appearance/seeming [Schein] is always in the right, and the world is
the absolute surface.
Here, then, is the orientation also for the denition of human being in terms
of the difference and identity between human being and the transcendental. In
a line of thinking that cannot but stand in contrast with Husserlsnot be-
cause it contradicts it but because it exceeds it precisely by moving the resolu-
tion of the question of identity and difference to the register of speculative
meontic interpretation human being is the metaphysical gap in the cos-
mos, the open wound in the world, in that in human being lies the
234. Z-XV 71a, probably from 1931 (EFM 2). The awkward hyphenated paraphrases
represent Finks succinct phrasing here, die ontizierte Subjektivitt and die onti-
zieriende Subjektivitt. Fink no doubt writes these terms in echoing Aristotles t on
rather than Heideggers distinction between the ontic and the ontological; for the
meaning Fink intends overarches this distinction. Here is the ultimate import of the move
treated in 4.44.4.3, by which the schema for conceptualizing constitution is displaced
from that of subject-object intentionality to that of horizonal intentionality.
235. Z-VII XVII/17b, dated September 21, 1930, emphasis Finks (EFM 2). The note
also gives brief insight into the status of nature in this connection.
236. Z-IX 49b, from the latter months of 1931, all emphasis Finks; EFM 2.
237. Z-IX 50a, emphasis all Finks.
238. See appendix.
239. Both phrases in Z-XII 24a (EFM 2), with the rst also in Z-V VI/1ab and /26a
(EFM 1); Z-IX 49a, Z-XI 62b and 67a, Z-XIV IX/2b, Z-XV 62a and 67a (all three in
opening to the meontic originative source that cannot be encompassed within

the actuality-horizon of the world. And in the end, precisely in the measure
that the un-humanizing that is imposed by the phenomenological reduction
(see 2.6.2 and 2.6.2.5) becomes a transformation beyond the human [ber-
menschung], becomes absolutive, in that same measure the effort to
give conceptual positivity to transcendental originative agency and process
means to cast this same transcendental meon into the framing required for
any positive and intelligible determination, namely, the entire system of hor-
izonal framework for being-as-experienceable. Explicitly taken up in the
Sixth Meditation, the idea had essentially been worked out by Fink at
least two years earlier. In a long note from late 1929 or 1930 Fink explains
that if one wishes to speak of this ontication as a productivity, it cannot
be taken in any way as ontic in character, that is, as the creation of actual
being; it is instead the exhibiting of the pregiven that in fact is not given at
all before the phenomenological reduction. It would be better, then, to con-
ceive of it as unnihilation [Entnichtung], that is, dragging the transcen-
dental origin of all that is in being [alles Seienden] out of the nothing and
making/letting it be [Seinlassen] in a unique way: namely, with a bad
conscience and constant protestontication in the manner of meontica-
tion. And since this admitting/letting into being [Einlassen ins Sein] is done
by reectively nding constitutive origination actual in the form of the pro-
cesses constitutive of the subjectivity that constitutes human being, this self-
realizational intrusion of the Nothing into the world is the en-nihilating
[Ver-nichtung] of man. We return here, then, to the themes of any number
of earlier treatments, in particular 6.3.5, 6.4, and 7.2.1.
Again, this interpretive recasting of the metaphysical question of the na-
ture and status of I-subjectivity, both transcendental and human, is achieved
in the speculative dimension specic to phenomenological methodology; but it
EFM 2); Z-XVI 1a, Z-XVII/31b, and OH-I 10 (these in EFM 3); the second phrase, far
less frequent, is also in Z-XII 20d. See also 6.3.5, p. 349, and 6.3.6, p. 359.
240. Z-IX 11ab, EFM 2.
241. Ibid.
242. Z-V VI/21ab, EFM 1.
243. See, for example, CM6, p. 76 (VI.CM/1, pp. 8586).
244. Z-V VI/19ab, emphasis all Finks (EFM 1). Regarding both this transcendental
reective productivity and points relative to it, see also, for example, CM6, the Note on
p. 76 (VI.CM/1, p. 86), and, further, Z-VII XVII/17b, /23a, and /32a; Z-VII XXI/4a,
Z-VIII 3da, Z-IX VII/3athese in EFM 2; Z-XI III/9ab, 72a, and 78a; and Z-XV
70athese in EFM 2; and Z-XVI XXIV/5b, and Z-XIX II/3ain EFM 3.
carries back through phenomenology itself in a radical reorienting of the

whole sense of one principle regularly repeated by Husserl, namely, the univer-
sally found parallelism between the features of transcendental subjectivity and
those of psychological subjectivity, taken up earlier in 2.6.2.7. Beyond the
question of determining which schema for a phenomenological inquiry into
psychological subjectivity might best serve to articulate transcendental con-
stitutive functions, the fact remains that ultimately any such articulation ends
up having to be reinterpreted in terms of the sense that ontication has
speculatively in meontic paradoxicality.
There is one further point, however, on which some additional detail is
needed, the question of the self-conscious person, I or me. On the one
hand, the question of the ultimate being of the I and of the we in its
objective reality as humankind is one of the pressing issues in traditional
metaphysical concern (for example, in the questions of whence I come in
birth and whither I go in death), and on the other hand the I plays such a
commanding role in Husserls own phenomenological explications, including
in the Crisis-writings. From chapter 2 on, the present study has shown
Finks efforts at de-egoizing [Ent-Ichung: de-I-ing] the agency of true
transcendental constitution; but it must be kept in mind that this is not at-
tainable by a dissolving of the Ii.e., by the kind of rejection that denies
that a particular structure is actually to be found in the horizon of being
but rather by the radicalizing of I-ness, precisely in analogy to the proce-
dure by which proto-constituting temporality is itself placed beyond time
in de-temporalizing [Ent-Zeitigung]. In other words, it is not by dis-
missing egoity as an improper lead or clue to use, as if what one needed to
nd was something less than the I, but rather by squarely delving so deeply
into egoic life that the transcendental is best disclosed as surpassingly more
than the I.
How this direction for a resolution of the problem of ones personal being in
phenomenology is allowed by Husserls own discussions of it is something that
others will have to provide. Here the most that can be done is to recount the
way this question was in fact addressed at a particular juncture during the
years of Finks work with Husserl. In January 1934, at Husserls request, Fink
245. See also the subset of notes in Finks Z-XX XXIX/14 (EFM 3), from the period
of Husserls and Finks work on the Crisis-writings.
246. See Husserls letter to Albrecht from June 3, 1932, quoted at the beginning of 7.3
above.
247. Z-XV 117a (EFM 2); see 2.6.2.6 and 5.2.3.2, note 282.
wrote a response to some concerns voiced by an English priest, E. W. Edwards,

in connection with a visit he had just had with Husserl. Edwards had writ-
ten Husserl to express surprise and distress at the way phenomenology
seemed to deal with the question of immortality, something he had learned in
conversations during one of the regular walks that were so integral a part of
Husserls and Finks thinking day. In the explanation Fink provides in re-
sponse to Edwardss letter it is not surprising that the governing consideration
is the interpretive ultimacy imposed by the inquiry into temporality.
The idea of immortality, Fink writes, this most profound of human ideas,
gains a new formulation in phenomenology: the relation of time and eternity
is no longer taken up on the dogmatic basis of world-time but on the foun-
dation of the phenomenological disclosure of absolute time-constitution. If
immortality is supposed to mean everlasting being-in-time, phenomenologi-
cally speaking the concept of immortality is dogmatic, for all being that exists
in time is constituted. But if one takes the idea of immortality in its religious
thrust, then, phenomenologically situated, the problem of immortality does
not lie at all on the plane of constituted being but in the context of the analytic
of ultimate time- and world-constituting life. Rather than a determination of
subjectivity in its temporally objective reality, immortality pertains to time-
creative, time-constituting subjectivity.
In the letter Fink assigns a positive place in the economy of phenomenologi-
cal interpretive integration for monads, namely, as constituted structures;
but that allows them neither an eternity of time nor the freedom from time that
immortality might imply. For reductive regressive inquiry does not end in
the dogmatic positing of a world of monads but rather pushes further, behind
the monadic self-objectivation of absolute subjectivity. What is crucial
to keep in mind, Fink continues, is that no stage of the reduction can be
statically absolutized, neither the demonstration of a monad universe nor
the disclosure in depth of the ultimate, non-individuated life of absolute
248. HChr, p. 441, giving the dates January 1218, 1934. Edwards had also come for a
week in May 1931 (HChr, p. 379).
249. Edwardss letter to Husserl is apparently lost, but cf. Bw VII, pp. 7273. One has
to glean information about it from Finks letter to Edwards, January 24, 1934 (EFM 2)
as here. Fink refers to the circumstance of Edwardss visit and mentions Edwardss last
letter to Professor Husserl, adding that he, Fink, is writing a reply at Husserls request.
Z-XIII 61ab (EFM 2) is a tentative draft for portions of Finks letter.
250. Besides the letter itself, see also OH-I 36, from November 14, 1934.
251. See appendix.
252. Letter to Edwards, pp. [12].
subjectivity. And then Fink states an all-important general methodological

principle for the critical task in which phenomenology both reinterprets and
integrates its own work and transforms metaphysics in terms of its own self-
critical interpretation: The phenomenological analyses achieved in the dif-
ferent reductive stages and problem-strata do not conict with one another at
all; the analysis of the proto-I does not contradict the analysis of the monad-
ically objectivated I. In the system of phenomenology each truth is understood
in its horizon of relevance and brought into correct relationship with the
diverse levels of truth. Finks grasp of the distinctive system-character of
Husserls phenomenology, one of his prime virtues in working for Husserl and
so crucial for being able to nd his way in the maze of Husserlian manuscripts,
comes out clearly here. Yet in this letter Fink writes as if under the constraint
of representing Husserls position without the clear resolution of an ambiguity
that the principle just enunciated allows to stand. He seems to take back with
one hand what he gives away with the other. For is not to speak of a proto-I
for absolute subjectivity that is nonindividuated ultimately not to speak of
an I at all? Yet actually making the move to meontic, speculative rein-
terpretation as implicitly called for, but not undertaken, here in the letter is
what Fink readily embraces in his notes, where his going beyond Husserls
standard formulations is expressed without hesitation.
In one pertinent text, for example, from late 1934, he speaks of birth and
death as constituted, not absolute truths, ontic actualities, not meontic deter-
minations. To address such themes as these one has to make the fundamen-
tal distinction between ontic and constitutive identity, and this in turn will
help one to understand the principle of the non-reversibility of reductive
relations. What this principle means is that the intrinsic relationship in the
reduction, the move of regression from the constituted pregiven to the con-
stituting originative, is methodologically not reversible: it is simply not possi-
ble to take up the position of the point of origin before actually achieved
origination, and to give an account of the unfolding of originative process
purely in its own terms. This is what prevents the logic of transcendental
explication in phenomenology from being speculative deduction. On the
other hand, when this principle is not recognized, philosophy is driven into a
253. Letter to Edwards, p. [2]. Cf. Z-XIII 63a64a.

254. Ibid., emphasis Finks. See appendix.
255. OH-I 2829 (emphases Finks), notes written on or subsequently to the initial
date written on the rst page of the booklet, November 14, 1934 (EFM 3); cf. Z-XI II/5a
and 25a, Z-XIII 5a (both in EFM 2), and Z-XIX II/5a, a discussion with Landgrebe,
March 25, 1935 (EMF 3).
256. See 7.2.2, especially the text from B-VII Ib /3a3b.
fantastic idealism, into a spiritualistic ontologywhich is the danger of

German Idealism, especially in Hegel. And if phenomenology too is party to
this same neglect, it becomes deformed into rationalistic optimism, into
confusing the distinction between the ordo essendi and the ordo cogno-
scendi, it makes apodicticity a principle of being and becomes Husserlian
Cartesianism, an ontological philosophy of reection for subjectivity.
How much of this thinking of Finks Husserl knew is, once again, not easy
to determine precisely, but the principles Fink expresses here are embodied
and operative in all that he was doing with and for Husserlfor example, in
the revision text for the First Meditation indicated above, and most espe-
cially in the Sixth Meditation, particularly if one carefully looks at Husserls
modications and comments. The fact remains, too, that the concluding pas-
sages of Crisis, parts II A and III B, referred to at the beginning of the present
section, written in the main by Husserl himself, seem not to employ the dis-
tinction Fink prescribes. These passages seem to treat intersubjectivity in the
form of a multiplicity of individual Is as the transcendental agency ultimately
constituting the fundament world that holds for them all. The matter of the
pluralization of the I-pole in intersubjectivity will, however, be taken up in
more detail in chapter 9.
7.3.3.3. The Pregiven WorldFinished and Done, or in an

Ever-Continuing Constitution?
Correlating to the same unresolved status of the I-pole taken as tran-
scendental, one striking assertion in Husserls Crisis-writings is his charac-
terization of the world, in the sense of the always already developed . . .
intuitively given surrounding world, as also an always further developing
meaning-conguration. There is an ambiguity here. If what is being re-
ferred to is the world understood as the cultural life-world, then it is cer-
tainly true; there are always new things and structures and sense emerging as
257. OH-1 2829, emphasis Finks. On the issue of birth and death it would be worth
reading here Z-IV 40ab (EFM 1), entitled On the Meontic of Death, where birth and
death are interpreted as In-Stances.
258. Especially Crisis, 54 b. It is of some signicance that in Crisis Husserl, in explicit
reference to the problem of the identity and difference between human and transcenden-
tal subjectivity, does not name intersubjectivity as monadic but names it rather in terms of
a polar character (cf. 50, p. 172Hua VI, p. 175; 53, p. 179, Hua VI, p. 183; and
54a, p. 183Hua VI, p. 187). See Finks critical discussion of monadic plurality in OH-
I 4044 (EFM 3).
259. Crisis, p. 104 (28; Hua VI, p. 106).
components of the cultural surround of human life. But if what is meant is the
world in the sense of the truly pregiven and constitutively basic structure,
namely, (1) fundamental horizonality, and (2) the dimensions fundamentally
constitutive of human experience (i.e., the In-Stances), then to say that this
world is an always further developing meaning-conguration is to suggest
that the course of experience as human existent in the world introduces further
determination into the truly fundamental conditions that govern the constitut-
ing of the human precisely as concretely in-the-world. We have to see how
Finks critical perspective helps further to specify and resolve this feature of the
life-world problematic posed by Husserls Crisis-writings.
To begin with, Finks understanding of Husserls position casts the world as
an absolute phenomenon, not in the sense that it itself stands free of ultimate
originative contingency (see 7.3.2) but in the sense that its transcendental
constitutive origin puts it prior to, and indeed as the framework for, the differ-
ence between the necessary and the contingent, and the true and the illusory or
false. He is quite aware, however, that Husserl seems to take the transcen-
dental constitution of the world not as something done once and for all but
rather as always in progress. For Husserl, writes Fink, the world is an
incomplete world, there is indeterminacy to it, as an absolute phenome-
non the world is transcendentally unnished; and this indeterminacy is the
index of the life-process of transcendental intersubjectivity, so that for Hus-
serl all being is on the march, and the marching in question is ultimately
the life of the universe of monads. Now the problem with this lies in the
general orientation Husserl takes in disclosing the world, namely, making the
intersubjective cooperation of many I-poles necessary to the work of deter-
mining the world as world; for that orientation makes problematic precisely
how horizonality is analyzed. It is, of course, fundamental for Husserl to
conceive of the world as horizonal, but the conception of the horizon is thus
left in suspense between two possibilities. The horizon can be taken on the
one hand as (1) the subjective how of the givenness of beings and on the
other (2) as the objective comprehensive totality [objektiver Inbegriff ]. In
this, Fink points out, Husserl himself refers to it above all as the open and-so-
forth that is given totality by apperceptive transfer. The world is thus not a
pregiven nished universe of entities but rather, phenomenologically, a world
260. See Z-XV 127a and 55ab (EFM 2); cf. 7.2.3, pp. 40910.
261. See Z-VII III/1a3b (from 1930; EFM 2), comparing it to Crisis, p. 104 (28; Hua
VI, p. 106), as well as p. 177 (52; Hua VI, p. 180).
262. Z-VII III/2a, emphasis Finks. Cf. also Z-VII VI/3 and XXII/6b.
263. See 4.44.4.2.
on the march, that is, a whole movable system of anticipational horizonal

references within which the particular and the determinate appears and dis-
closes itself ever in new forms and facets.
The problem with explicating the world as horizon while respecting this last
characterization lies in the tendency embodied in the two options just men-
tioned; it is, as we saw in chapter 4, to base the analysis of the structure of the
world too rigidly upon the analysis of the center point for the system of
horizonal references. That is, the analysis is held too predominantly upon
(a) the object that appears in the world, and, correlatively, (b) the individually
subjective intendingalso within the worldthat determines the specicity
of that appearing-of-the-object. This shows when we consider what it means
for the world to be incomplete under either of the two interpretive op-
tions(1) and (2)given in the previous paragraph. For example, under the
second option, the world as the comprehensive totality of objects is incom-
plete in that, phenomenologically, objects are only given in the temporally
circumscribed actuality of focus in an active intending. The totality of even a
single object can only be an idea, not an actual appearing, and so, too, will the
totality of all objects be only an idea, not an actual appearance. On the other
hand, to consider the world as the horizon-structuring of any act-intentional
focus on an appearing object is again to nd an incompleteness; for, centering
on the object actually in thematic focus, the horizon is precisely the surround
of indenitely extending further possible intentional object-actuation, which
therefore is intrinsically incompletable in any single perceptual experience.
Yet, for Fink the horizon ought not thus to be conceived in terms of quantita-
tive extent; the world is the conditioning of horizonal distanceability out away
from a focal center (i.e., a kind of withdrawing, see 4.4.1; a spatial depres-
encing, see 5.1.2.3.2), and thus unable to be itself considered in terms of
extent (see 4.4.1). As the universal conditioning horizonality for extension
(among other things) rather than being itself an extended quantity, the world
is indeed fully determinate and functional as horizonal (i.e., not as an object),
and therefore objects in their phenomenological incompletability can make
their appearance in experience. As Fink says, The constitution of the totality
of the world is never still on the way but rather is fundamentally over and
done with, antecedently to the constitution of objects. Here, then, is the
reason Fink will write, in his retrospective reections upon Husserls position
shortly after leaving Freiburg, I have doubts about the Husserlian thesis of
the originality of the life-world insofar as this also seems to me to rest upon
264. See appendix.

265. Z-VII X/1a, EFM 2.
the thesis [of ] the world on the march. That is, it is only when the world
is conceived as horizon in the proper sense of horizonality that one could
speak of a life-world antecedently grounding the world of idealizing sci-
ence. The phenomenological constitution of objects in their appearing may
be always on the march, but the world as the frame of their appearing
cannot be. Its origination is antecedently beyond temporal event of change.
7.3.3.4. God
It is a short step from the question of the origin of being as nite in
actuality, the question of the coming-about of the entire horizon of being as
appearing and passing away, to the question of that being whose nature has
traditionally (in philosophy in the Christian West) been thought to have just
the kind of being and life that is beyond the limits of time and location and
that is ultimately originative for all the world, namely, God. In the Crisis-
writings, however, the topic of God arises within the opening problematic of
the project, namely, the question of the nature and validity of reason in human
life, both for the achievement of knowledge that can hold true and for the
grounding of ethical action. In this, reason is central for human being precisely
in consideration of human being as historical in the life lived in the world. If
man becomes a metaphysical, a specically philosophical, question, then he
is in question as a rational being; if his history is in question, it is a matter of
the meaning in history, a matter of reason in history. The problem of God
clearly contains the problem of absolute reason as the teleological source of
all reason in the world, of the meaning of the world. Once again, the
reason to be explicated is that in terms of which to account for the enigma
of all enigmas, the world-problem, the deepest essential interrelation be-
tween reason and that-which-is in general. The convergence here with
Husserls remarks on metaphysics in his letter to Albrecht, which open this
chapter, is manifest.
Husserl places the question of God squarely within phenomenology both in
general terms and in relation to certain phenomenological specics. In general
266. Z-XXVIII 29b, emphasis Finks, bracketed insertion mine, to bring out the gram-
matical sense of what is actually a phrase in parentheses in the original.
267. XXVIII 29ab, emphasis Finks. To put it another way, the world as horizonal is
always in present-perfectness, is always already been; see the last two paragraphs in
7.2.4.
268. See appendix.
269. Crisis, p. 9 (3; Hua VI, p. 7), slightly modied.
270. Crisis, p. 13 (5; Hua, p. 12), slightly modied.
terms, for example, Husserl in a letter to the Benedictine priest Father Daniel
Feuling, dated March 30, 1933, writes that the problem of God is the ques-
tion that is in fact the highest and last in the systematic of the phenomenolog-
ical method. As the problem of the possibility of transcendental totality in
the form of teleology and its principle, this is the question of the over-
being [das berseiende], which prescribes sense and possibility to every being
(with the sense of being that is rst for us) on all levels of meaning. Thus,
in Husserls view, phenomenological philosophy, as an idea lying in innity, is
naturally theology. For me, he adds parenthetically, genuine philosophy
is eo ipso theology. Specic terms for working this out, however, are rare
in the Crisis-texts, but they conform to this general approach, namely,
in seeing Gods action as holding transcendentally constituted being-as-
appearing in a coherence of meaning for that being through all living experi-
ence in the world.
In contrast, for Fink the question of God has to be set quite differently. The
phenomenological reduction imposes an approach through the cosmological
problem, the problem of the constitution of the world, wherein the question of
actually reaching the register of origination, of creative power, beyond the
world-frame ends up being radically answerable only in meontic paradox,
that is, it remains irremediably an irresolvable question. To proceed otherwise
would be to fail to clear the human naively takeni.e., as still unambiguously
mundanefrom the philosophical interpretation of the Absolute; it would be
to remain still naively captivated in world-bound conceptuality and not yet to
see the meontically transcendental character that any human clue to the
Absolute must possess. If the question of God belonged to phenomenological
thematic concerns, then it had to be pursued with proper phenomenological
radicality.
However, in this kind of treatment of God one could not maintain an action
of evidential showingi.e., phenomenological evidencingbut would rather
have to do speculative thinking, a mode of practice that Husserl was not
inclined to take up. Husserl could not quite see how to conceptualize and
271. Bw VII, pp. 8788. See pp. 5051 in 1.3 for the circumstances of this letter.
272. Bw VII, p. 88, emphasis Husserls. See the treatment in R. A. Mall, The God of
Phenomenology in Comparative Contrast to That of Philosophy and Theology, Husserl
Studies, 8 (1991), 115, as well as Held, Lebendige Gegenwart, 17384, and S. Strasser,
Das Gottesproblem in der Sptphilosophie E. Husserls, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 67
(1959), 13042. These studies were, however, all written with no knowledge of Finks
work with Husserl on the question.
273. See Crisis, pp. 18081 (53; Hua VI, p. 184), p. 208 (the Vienna lecture; Hua VI,
p. 334), and p. 389 (appendix IX; Hua VI, Beil. XXVIII, p. 508).
think the subject for whom the world was there, as what it was, without
thinking unabashedly of that subject as existing absolutely, even if this would
not make sense on rigorous methodological grounds, as the Sixth Medita-
tion made clear. Rather than construing that subject in another kind of
schema for the Absolute, namely, as the self-actualization of the absolute
divine Nothing that actualizes itself in self-actualization, Husserl seemed to
hold onto the positive idea of the self-sufcient, world-independent abso-
lute Subject through whom the world is constructed as intentional meaning-
giving. As a result, the proper, speculative conception, wherein all being,
including any actually existent subjectivity, is the result of a becoming that
itself is not a process in being but the process that leads to being, escaped
Husserl, while Fink grew ever more clear in seeing that to understand the
becoming of being thus in its meontic nature was the only strictly philo-
sophic way phenomenology could frame the attempt to represent God him-
self. If breaking through the prison of the world meant to come out
beyond being, then the gure of an existent deity could only be considered a
basically mundane representation by which one attempted naively to capture
conceptually the true radically phenomenological Absolute, the meontic Ab-
solute. One need only add that this meontic Absolute is precisely the Abso-
lute that the analysis of proto-temporalization opens onto, however paradoxi-
cally and aporetically.
There are radical consequences of the meontic metaphysics of God, now,
that cannot be left unmentioned. One such consequence is the conclusion that,
oriented by the cosmological-cosmogonic framing of the methodological cri-
tique of meaningfulness, the personalistic, monotheistic conguration of the
divine and of human relations to the divine is essentially dictated by human
concerns. That is, this conguration derives from elements of the human phe-
nomenon of religious belief rather than offering a strictly philosophical sche-
matic for explicating God itself. Especially in the context of Judaic and
Christian dispensations, of religion as revelation, to address the question of
God in terms of an evidentness that is specically religious is to cast the issue
274. Z-XV 6a, EFM 2.

275. Z-XV 7a.
276. Z-VII XIV/11a, from November 1930 (EFM 2). Many note texts take up this
theme, e.g., Z-VII VI/4b and XXI/9a; Z-XV 22ab, 55ab, and 128a (EFM 2). See also
Z-IV 36a (EFM 1).
277. See Z-XV 124b, as well as Husserls own recognition of this cardinal point in one
of his C-manuscripts, Hua XV, p. 670, from 1934. The indecisiveness in this text of Hus-
serls as a whole, oscillating between a monadic plurality and a monad-transcendenting
unity, is striking. It is a text to which Finks principle for differentiating and integrating
different levels of analysis is eminently applicable (see 7.3.3.2, pp. 438 and 51314).
in terms of the philosophy of reection, i.e., in terms of the way God is a

phenomenon for man. In contrast to this approach, especially in its coupling
with a personalistic religious bent, typical in the Judaeo-Christian tradition
and in fact Husserls stance, Fink asserts a cosmological religion. Cos-
mological religion, he writes, preserves speculative mystery and is essen-
tially not a religion of revelation.
In the Crisis-texts, then, it was an all-too-human model that Fink saw
Husserl allowing to dominate the interpretation of phenomenological results,
adopting thereby a kind of moralism into his articulation of the philosophi-
cal sense of phenomenology, a mingling of philosophys problematic with the
traditional values of the Enlightenment as the secularization of the values of
Christianity and Antiquity. An axis of orientation to the Good became for
Husserl a tendency lying in the being of subjectivity, subjectivity was in
itself good, i.e., strove toward the good, so that being [das Sein] (insofar as
subjectivity for Husserl is the absolute being [das absolut-Seiende]) is viewed
morally. Yet under the strictures of the phenomenological reduction
and its ultimate meontic implications, moralism of this sort, however much
it might be defensible in terms of human being and human endeavors in
the human contexti.e., in the frame of being in the worldcould not be
grounded in the ultimate essence or the determining acts of some absolute
being. In phenomenological terms, no such distinct supreme being, much
less one that instilled moral direction in the world, made justiable sense.
7.3.3.5. Addendum: Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and the

Meontic
A topic allied to those just considered in the Crisis-texts and one that
would merit extensive treatment but can only be covered here in summary
points, is the way Fink is aware of, and prots from, the lessons lying in
the long, fractious tradition in Western philosophy of the idea of the radical
278. OH-VII 3637 (EFM 3), notes from a conversation with Husserl, February 18,
1936, one of the very few Fink characterizes as one of contention, as Streitgesprch.
279. OH-VII 4445, notes from a conversation with Landgrebe, January 29, 1936. See
6.3.5.
280. OH-VII 45. On the question of teleology in Husserls phenomenology see Paul
Jenssen, Geschichte und Lebenswelt, Phaenomenologica 35 (The Hague: Martinus Nij-
hoff, 1970), pp. 51135.
281. For more on this issue, in connection with the Kantian critique of practical reason,
see V-II 1015, EFM 3. Cf. also Bruzina, Jan Patocka und Eugen Fink: Gesprchs-
partner im Denken ber den Schein hinaus, Internationale Zeitschrift fr Philosophie, 1
(1998), 11024.
transcendency of the intelligibility of ultimate causes, one prominent meth-

odology for which is the so-called via negativa. For example, Fink refers to
Plotinus a number of times in his notes. However, what he focuses on is not
the elaborate Plotinian metaphysics of differentiation and procession by
which Nouw and cuxh derive from the En, and by which ultimately the world
of sensible, material entities results, but rather the basic, radical difference
between the One of ultimate origin and all else. It is in this regard, too, that
Fink freely draws terms from this tradition and freely adapts them to the
problematic specic to phenomenology.
More specically: since the key conception in the fundamental problematic
for phenomenology is that of the world, it is in the way any of the thinkers in
this other current conceives the world in relation to some corresponding Abso-
lute that would determine any similarity or afnity to Finks meontic. The
exact course of Finks derivation of his concept of the meontic is a more
complex matter, and must be simply left aside here; the essential consider-
ation for any such discussion is all that can be indicated here.
About the world, then, what is central is its fundamental and all-
encompassing determinacy for ontological positivity. On phenomenologi-
cal principles there is no being to be found beyond the world. That is, no being,
no something-in-being, can make sense outside the temporalized horizonality
for the structuring-and-appearing of being. It is not, therefore, the world con-
sidered in the sense of the sum total of beings, of somethings-in-being within
temporalized horizonality, that is phenomenologys specic conception of
originative ultimacy, whereas the world in just this sense is what these other
traditions tend to assume as that in terms of which to speak of some supremely
subsistent Other. This Other and Absolute might, therefore, be conceived of as
282. See Z-IV 19a, 54a, and 59a; Z-V VI/20a, VI/32a, and VI/35a; Z-VI 47ab, 55a
all three folders in EFM 1; and Z-XIV 4ab, EFM 2.
283. Interesting also is Finks late essay on Giordano Bruno, where not this point but
rather Brunos raising the problem of the understanding of the world is taken up: Die
Exposition des Weltproblems bei Giordano Bruno, in Der Idealismus und seine Gegen-
wart: Festschrift fr Werner Marx zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Ute Guzzoni, Berhard
Rang, and Ludwig Siep (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976), pp. 12732.
284. See appendix.
285. See the treatments by Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press,
1963), and Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York:
Vintage, 1969). Actually, Brunos ber die Ursache, das Prinzip und das Eine, in the
translation by Paul Seliger (Leipzig: Reclam, n.d.), is one of the rst philosophic books
Fink had read (see 1.1, p. 3), and it is still in his library in Freiburg.
286. See appendix.
287. See 7.2.3, pp. 40910, and 7.3.2.
subsisting totally beyond this world, or alternatively as the All of this sum total
world itself; but it is only to the rst of these alternatives that any comparison
with Finks Meon could be drawn.
Once again, it is the conception of the world that will be determinative, and
again there are alternatives. The present surrounding world could be taken as
a mere means or pretext for some leap out of it to the radically Other where
true being is reached; or the world could be integral to the economy of this
Other in its own proper station and operations. Here is where a division sets
in, for example, between Gnosticism and Plotinuss own position; for with
Plotinus the world is not, as in Gnosticism, the dualistic antipode of unmiti-
gated evil and matter is not the incompatible negativity of utter contrariety to
the divine. For Plotinus, too, a process of betterment was not a leap of clean
exit from a supposed frame of oppression but a movement of ascent in a
continuous and harmonious order. With Girodano Bruno, whom Fink had
read as a youth, the situation is more complicated, combining gnostic as well
as Plotinian elements. His world (in the sense of the sum total of beings) does
not seem to be evil in dualistic antithesis to the Good, and the divine permeates
it as the One. Yet the world is ruled not by the intelligible order but by
hermetic demonic forces that cannot be understood or explained rationally;
and they can only be reached or inuenced by acts mimicking them, that is, by
magical practices.
For phenomenology as Fink worked out this issue while engaged with Hus-
serl, the world is the realm of the positivity of both being and intelligibility, but
it is also a world in which the radically other lodges internally precisely as
the factor of origination. In other words, as with Plotinus and the Greek
feeling for the cosmos, the world is the realm of ens and verum. On the other
hand, as with Bruno and Gnosticism, the otherness of the origination that
constitutively marks being is radically other, and its uncompromised alienness
determines the manner of its being dealt with, namely, without the possibility
of positive knowledge. In contrast, the otherness that Fink sees in phenome-
nology is an otherness that stands in generative and methodological integrality
with that to which it is so unremittingly other, so that this Other is as much the
other to itself as it is itself, yet without either fusion of the two or diminution
of the otherness that distinguishes them.
What needs to be nally added to this summary comparison is the equally
necessary point that it is the function of phenomenological philosophy pre-
cisely to understand the phenomenologically speculative metaphysics of this
situation. To begin with, there is the coherence between the generative and the
288. See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 24165.

289. See Yates, Giordano Bruno, pp. 20574.
cognitive relationships, which is what Finks use of the terms katabasis and
ekbasis serves to express. These terms refer to the reciprocal movements in the
orders of origination on the one handkatabasisand, on the other, of cog-
nitive following and explication of that originationekbasis. Thus Hegel,
for example, is spoken of as making a move of ekbasis in tracing the way to the
absolute in the Phenomenology, while his Logic follows the route of katabasis
in demonstrating the derivation of all determinate forms of being from abso-
lute beginnings; or, in other words, the rst moves from nitude to innitude,
the second from innitude to nitude. At the same time, Fink sees Hegel as
having exaggerated the katabantic; that is, in dening the Absolute as sub-
ject, Hegel modeled it too closely upon that into which it nitizes itself,
namely, human spirit. The result is a conception of the Absolute that
identies too unequivocally with the human subject, i.e., without the dis-
equilibrating tension required in the meontic. In contrast, the ekbantic can
be exaggerated as well, resulting either in the idea of release from worldly
existence and dissolving into the Absolute in mystical union or in the utter
indifference to nite being on the part of the Absolute.
Fink distances phenomenologys meontic from both of these exaggerations.
For phenomenological speculation the relation to the Absolute can be neither
fusion nor absolute scission, and this determines the difference as well between
the meontic and the via negativa. The meontic emphatically asserts a negation
for the effort to characterize the Absolute of originationthus the founder-
ing; but it is a negating that requires the ontological positivity of what is thus
negated as the only ontological status the Absolute can bear. There is no leap
to another order via the negation, for there is no other order. Yet this does not
make the Absolute an actual being; for no actual being can stand as origin. To
search for the ultimate origin is to come upon the radical negation of being, so
that the rizvmata pntvn consist precisely of this Not. Hence, where Neo-
platonism (or other doctrines) might speak of emanation, this can only be
interpreted in phenomenological speculative metaphysics as another meta-
phor for the meontic relationship of origination; it is not a real process
at all.
In sum, Finks meontic for phenomenology advocates neither an ontological
290. See note 284 above, in the appendix.

291. See Z-XV 82b, EFM 2.
293. See again Z-VII XIV/10a (EFM 2), but also Z-V VI/35b (EFM 1).
294. See Z-VII XVII/8a as in effect corrected by Z-XIII 58a (both EFM 2). See also Z-V
III/6b (EFM 1); Z-XI III/4b and 71a; and Z-XV 29a, 38a, 47a, 62a, and 105bthe latter
two in EFM 2.
dualism nor an ontological monism, in contrast to Gnosticism and Neoplato-

nism, and in contrast to tendencies to either on the part of other intellectual or
religious movements. This is crucial in understanding the position he develops
on ontication and, correlatively, on the question of whether transcendental
subjectivity is ultimately singular or plural. For Fink the absolute cannot be
thought either pluralistically or monistically. Once again, it is the systematic
interrelationship of the levels of phenomenological work that must be taken
into account in reconciling meontic radicality and nonconclusiveness with the
descriptive and explicative positivity of its research analytic.
A nal observation: The scintillating speculative character of many of Finks
notes may read strangely to those used to Husserls sobriety. Yet it is in direct
proportion to the validity of Finks systematic concept of the philosophy of
phenomenology that this speculative dimension not only can be admitted but
even has to be embraced. Fink himself certainly embraced it, and Husserl did
not disparage it as Fink worked on it. One can see, too, a minor progression
in Finks notes wherein the exuberant terminology of Gnosticism or Neoplato-
nism is displaced by expressions more familiar in the modern tradition, those
of Hegel in particular; but the issue they represent remains, and, if anything,
deepens, and the central feature of meontic integration was clearly set early in
Finks thinking, to remain a constant thereafter throughout his years with
Husserl. The earlier formulations serve, therefore, to pose dramatically from
the beginning the issue that becomes the center of the problematic of in-
telligibility in the meontic, that is, the ultimate problematic posed for the
phenomenology of phenomenology. In this way these otherwise perhaps
excessive-seeming speculations demonstrate their intrinsic role precisely as
speculation in the fulllment of the task that denes phenomenology as a
transcendental program.
7.3.4. Transition: Transcendental Articulation

It is apparent that conceptuality as articulate linguistically is crucial in
phenomenology, whether in describing analytically what is evidentially given
eidetically in phenomenological demonstration, or in formulating what is to
be conceptually determined in speculative interpretation. This makes it neces-
sary, now, to turn to a corollary issue running through the whole of phenome-
nology from the beginning, the nature and role of language as this must be,
and had been, considered in methodologicaland now meonticcritical
nal-period phenomenology.
295. Z-XIII 63a64a, from around the beginning of 1934 (EFM 2).
8
Corollary Thematics I: Language
. . . Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, V
Worte gehen noch zart am Unsglichen aus . . .

Und die Musik, immer neu, aus den bebensten Steinen
baut im unbrauchbaren Raum ihr vergttlichtes Haus.
Rilke, Sonnette an Orpheus, II, 10
The import of the meontic in determining the function and import of the
speculative dimension did not have to wait until the very last to have an effect
upon the reconsideration that the phenomenological ndings in Husserls vast
analytic investigations had to undergo. It was already in play from the earliest
work that Fink did with and for Husserl, as the long trajectory of the present
1. A literal rendering, not trying for poetic form, would run: Words give out gently at
the Unsayable . . . and music, ever anew, out of stones most tremulant builds in unusable
space its divinized house.
452
Language 453
study has been showing. However, in our following this effort of reconsidera-
tion, this reorienting and recasting of descriptive features already disclosed in
the investigative analytic that allowed new aspects to come to the fore (e.g.,
taking depresencing [Entgegenwrtigung] as the constitutive action of tem-
porality, or nding the world as properly horizonal to correlate a-themat-
ically to nonthematizing awareness, i.e., to wakefulness), what has so far been
only implicit is the role language has played in reaching this understanding.
That is, we have not considered how the paradoxical problematic of ultimate
explicability in phenomenology as meontically transcendental has to mark
language as well; and more than that, it also raises the question of the very
special position of language in the whole program of phenomenological in-
quiry. Language was and is coterminous and coincident with the work of
phenomenology, i.e., with the very process (1) of raising its dening questions
in the rst place, and (2) of the methodology of its investigative effort, in terms
of both the structure of its positive meaningfulness and validity and the limits
of its reach and adequacy. In a word, it was and is in language that the ques-
tions and the insights addressing those questions arise and develop, and it was
and is in language that the nonclosure of phenomenological inquiry and the
incompletability of transcendental reduction are paradigmatically and con-
situtively in full force and in full display.
8.1. The Antecedency Status of Language

One of the momentous displacements that Finks critique work effected
in determining how post-preliminary phenomenology had to begin again was
to overcome the restricted construal of language that dened Husserls ap-
proach from his Logical Investigations on, through Formal and Transcenden-
tal Logic and into the late texts in which language was treated once more, in
the context of the Crisis-project.
It was clear in the system-integrative reconsideration of phenomenology
Fink was conducting that Husserls work on language tended to retain vir-
tually intact and unreconsidered the schema within which he treated language
in his earliest phenomenological inquiry into it, Investigation I: Expression
2. Three late texts in particular are relevant here: (1) The Origin of Geometry,
Crisis, appendix VI, pp. 35378 (Hua VI, Beil. III, pp. 36586); (2) K III 22, from
November 1936, part of which is included in Hua VI as Beil. II, pp. 35764; and (3) the
one-page text B I 5 1, from 1930 or 1931 (on this latter cf. my article Dependence on
Language and the Autonomy of Reason: An Husserlian Perspective, Man and World, 14
(1981), 35568.
454 Language
and Meaning, in his Logical Investigations. One serious drawback with this
was that this schema followed a perspective that focused on and captured only
certain aspects of the whole phenomenon of language, namely, those features
that conformed to the way language could be represented as giving expression,
in an external medium, to meaning that achieved determinacy in an autono-
mous internal operation of thought. It was a conception easy to be taken as
satisfactory when meaning was taken as an ideal abstract determinacy, such as
in logic or mathematics; and this was Husserls point of departure in Logical
Investigations and Formal and Transcendental Logic. Yet while Husserl also
clearly recognized and asserted, right in the latter work, the need to trace even
this kind of meaning back to an originative ground in concrete living experi-
ence, he did not signicantly modify his schema for examining language in
the analysis of origination, even in his Crisis-work. It was Finks realization
that more radical reconsideration was needed here, and this is what he was
setting in motion.
Examining the full progression in which this reorientation was achieved is
beyond the scope of the present study, including adequately covering the cen-
tral document for seeing this reorientation, the extensive set of Finks notes in
Z-XXII, a packet of more than one hundred sheets of material for the tutorial
sessions that he gave twice a week from November 14, 1936, to February 5,
1937, for an American student, Dorothy Ott, in Freiburg to study with Hus-
serl. However the basis of the reorientation in question can be stated sim-
ply enough. The Crisis-project itself aims to bring about the same reorien-
tation in general that is needed more specically also for language, namely, the
move of regression back to the prelogical and premathematical situation of
experientially-wakefully living out in the world. This is completely in ac-
cord with Husserls own aims as given at the end of Formal and Transcenden-
tal Logic, but only sketched in principle there rather than carried out in any
detail. Fink accordingly develops the critical refashioning needed by doing a
close explication of Formal and Transcendental Logic, taking up many of the
3. LI, pp. 269333 (LU II/1, pp. 23105).

4. See FTL, chapter 7, especially 102, 1067, and the Conclusion, pp. 29193;
cf. also appendix II, 2 (b) and (c).
5. See the brief explication of this point developed on the basis of the three texts
mentioned in note 2 above, in my essay Language in Lifeworld Phenomenology: The
Origin of Geometry Was Not the Final Word, Philosophy Today, 40 (Spring 1996),
91102.
6. Z-XXII comprises sixty-eight pages in EFM 3 and will be referred to frequently
here. See appendix.
7. Z-XXII B/1b, EFM 3.
Language 455
prime features of language, both formal and material, as presented in that

book, e.g., the proposition, vocabulary and syntax, and the principle that
living speech is saying something about something to someone, but setting
them back into the larger context that, again, it is the aim of the Crisis-
project to bring to explicit central thematization. Saying something about
something to someone is, therefore, an action set in relationship to the whole
of things.
This general orientation prepares the way for noting the principal point
about language in the present context, namely, that language stands ready as
anticipatory ontological grasp, as an antecedent preinterpretation of being
[des Seienden]. And the question to ask, then, is whether the antecedent
grasp [of being] is a denitive interpretation, or one that is annulled or modi-
able. In other words, can a critique be performed on the understanding
of being that lives in language so as to get back to the forgotten proto-
situation of this living understanding? To put this another way, there is
a certain parallel and analogy between on the one hand the pregivenness of
the world, for both human being in general and philosophic reection in par-
ticular, and on the other the standing-ready of language [Bereitstand der
Sprache], i.e., that language is an implicit ontology that is communal-
and-public [ffentlich-gemeinsam] and already in place. It is not just a matter
of a linguistic deposit (vocabulary) or structures (syntax) but rather a global
phenomenon the comprehensive character of which cannot be dealt with in
terms of the relation of the sign and the signied.
What is global about language, now, and methodologically both presup-
posed and ignored in subsuming language to the sign relation of thing and
8. This is Finks formula for speechRedein Z-XXII II/8a: Reden = ber etwas
etwas sagen zu jemand (emphasis Finks own), in a clear antecedent to the formula that
Paul Ricoeur has made so central in his analysis. See Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory:
Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Ft. Worth: Texas Christian University Press,
1976), ch. 1, and his Structure, Word, Event, in The Conict of Interpretations, ed. by
Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), especially pp. 8788.
9. See Z-XXII B/4a, II/10a, 1415, and 19ff (EFM 3).
10. Z-XXII B/4a, emphasis Finks.
11. Z-XXII B/46, emphasis Finks, insertion in brackets mine.
12. The quoted phrases and points subsequent to the previous reference are all from
Z-XXII 1415 (EFM 3). Bereitstand is here rendered in a form closer to the way the
expressions components combine their meanings: bereitready, Standa stand-
ing. One could translate it in one ordinary way as availability or readiness. The
subsequent way Fink explicates Bereitstand recommends instead the rendering given
here. One could even render it as the standing-already, or standing-(al)ready.
456 Language
word, is that the sense of words only makes sense in worded experience not
because words are simply discriminable elementary components of semiotic
structure and function but rather because sense is the concreteness of the
differentiated appearing to us of things in their being-there for us. Fink
writes: The standing-ready of language is not primarily a store of words
along with the forms of possible combination [i.e., syntax] all lying at ones
disposal; it is rather a standing-ready in things. This does not mean that
language simply of itself determines things but rather that things, in the
way they show and disclose their in-itself for us, are co-determined by latent
language-characters. Languages standing ready as a standing-ready in things
is a latent mode of the being-for-us of that which is, which for the most part we
cannot separate off and know as that [being-for-us]. In other words, what is
global about language is that its thrust and validity are constitutively set by the
very situatedness of human being as originatively structured in its being by
enworlded engagement with being in all the dimensions of experiential pro-
cess. If this is so, then explicating the function of language is made problematic
by the very same difculties that determine and limit the phenomenological
inquiry into the constitutive origination of the world in living temporality,
which is the problematic that unfolds through chapters 4, 5, and 6namely,
that of delineating the conditioning in terms of the conditioned, or, more
technically put, the import of the methodological-ontological principle of the
antecedency that can only be regressively given (see 5.1.1.3; also 6.4). This is a
matter we shall return to toward the end of the present chapter (8.4).
8.2. The Explication of Language as a Phenomenologically

Speculative Task: Internal and External Treatment
What Fink undertakes, now, is to displace Husserls relatively xed posi-
tive conceptual framing of the way language is used in favor of formulating a
fundamental problem that underlies that conception. Syntax, for example,
taken as the assemblage potential of elements, does not explain how and why
compositional wholes and continuities matter; producing composition out of
elements is not all there is to making sense of the coherence of things in their
beingas if it were perfectly plain how the rules of combinatory logic ipso
facto achieve for us the grasp of entitative integrity and open for us the basic
possibility of truth in understanding. The issue facing us here is not that of
identifying the units of substantive analysis and determinateness that give
13. Z-XXII 1516, emphasis Finks; from the tutorial session of November 20, 1936.
14. Ibid., emphasis all Finks. See appendix.
Language 457
informational answers to informational questions but rather, more fundamen-

tally, that of the kind of intellectual insight and analysis that are required to
recognize and think properly about the nature of the problem itself.
In chapter 4 we saw Fink displacing Husserls object-centered analysis of the
world by one that took the worlds horizonality to be its fundamental charac-
ter, and to require similarly the furthering of the kind of consciousness that
corresponded to horizonality in human experience. Then in chapter 7 we
followed the way Fink argues for a displacement of the kind of intellectual
operation that the system-conscious interpretation of the philosophical sense
of phenomenological ndings and procedures required, namely, one that (a)
takes a second, critical look at the ndings of evidentness-led constatation in
order to interpret their fundamental sense (speculation), (b) projects for that
fundamental sense intrinsically problematic dimensions (construction) that
escape evidence-based constatation, and (c) recognizes and ponders ultimate
meontic paradoxicality and foundering. This same thrust of phenomeno-
logical self-deepening past the limitation-bound schema of the philosophy of
reection enters here as well, in the question of how to think the origin-
situation within which ontological preunderstanding as linguistic lodges and
which is not explicable in terms of conceptions of language that themselves
depend upon the subject-object divisional schema of agency and effectuation.
To understand language in its role in the human understanding of being, in
the integrative original bond of t on and lgow, as Fink puts it, to move
thus behind the conception of language in terms of objectiable (and sense-
objectivating) elementswordsin a combinatory system, under the man-
agement of a thinking subject-agency, ultimately forces ones efforts to work in
the phenomenologically speculative dimension. It is to be forced to recognize
the problem as speculative.
But what is a speculative problem? In view of the treatment in the last
chapter, the answer is familiar:
Speculative problems in philosophy are problems that run right through the
whole course of philosophizing and guide its inquiry, in such a way that their
questionableness constantly grows. They are not at all solvable by the
means used in analytic investigation. For their part, they precisely rst give all
analytic investigation the sense it in principle has. Philosophy is neither ana-
lytic nor speculative. As exclusively analysis it ceases to be philosophy, as
exclusively speculation it ceases to be knowing [Wissen]. Philosophizing is
that thinking that, in the deep-felt grip of a basic question and in constant
15. See 7.1.1 and 7.27.2.3.

16. Z-XXII 22 (EFM 3).
458 Language
[yet] threatened guidance by it, achieves an analytical knowing whereby this

basic question is itself worked out further as a question and becomes more
pressing. Speculation is the power of spirit to inquire into the whole, and to
question it beyond its measure; speculation is deep meaning. Analysis is the
power of spirit to distinguish; analysis is the principle of intelligibility. Phi-
losophizing, however, is not the synthetic whole of speculative and analytic
thinking, but is rather the conict within and paradoxical unity of an analytic
inquiry guided by speculation that turns back upon the speculative problem
and makes it grow.
As was mentioned, but not explained, in the previous chapter (7.2.4.1),

another way Fink characterizes this contrast in intellectual operations is to
distinguish internal from external treatment. Take, for example, the question,
What is knowledge? The usual way to address this is to develop a detailed
analysis of modes of fulllment, levels of rank, kinds of knowledge, forms of
evidentness, and so on, writes Finkvery much the kind of thing Husserl did
in the last two investigations of his Logical Investigations. All such analyses,
he continues, move on the soil of the antecedently and vaguely understood
phenomenon, knowledge, what many philosophers like to call their basic
intuitions about the matter. But what one never gets around to is an on-
tological determination of the being of knowledge, how the whole operation
takes place in being, by a being, about a being, so that one never addresses the
question, what is the linkage of knowing and being as itself transpiring in
being? Thus, Fink explains, the distinction between internal and external
determination is not identical with that between ontical description and on-
tological determination ( la Heidegger), but rather with that between ana-
lytic and speculative.
This is an important comment, for it does two things: (a) it equates two
distinction-pairs that Fink himself uses, namely, internal/external as equiv-
alent to analytic/speculative, and (b) it distinguishes both of these from the
fundamental Heideggerian distinction of the ontic and the ontological. The
equating of the two distinction-pairs helps us to understand Finks position in
its own terms, while contrasting these with Heideggers distinction-pair warns
us that, while Fink has indeed drawn considerable impetus from Heideggers
thinking in the very idea of the distinctions he makes, he nevertheless means
them in an interpretation integral to Husserls program of transcendental phe-
nomenology, not as belonging to Heideggers fundamental ontology.
17. Z-XXII 2324, emphasis Finks, expression in brackets mine. Right after these
lines Fink gives t t on? and What is truth? as examples of speculative problems.
18. Points and quoted material all drawn from Z-XXII 26, parenthetic comment Finks
own.
Language 459
Much of what Fink writes about language in his speculative-external

treatment of it may indeed look like a straight adoption of ideas for which
Heidegger is so famous. For when Fink develops the idea of an external
explication of the connection between t on and lgowwhich is precisely the
speculative problem involved in languagehe nds it leading before any-
thing else to a reection on the meaning of truth; and the conception of truth
that he offers as having to be thought about here is one that goes behind any
determination of it in terms of language, cognition, or entities themselves; it is

the conception of truth as the happening of A-lhyeein, as the happening of
the disclosure of that which is. In his words: Truth is as the being of man
as disclosive [als Enthllendsein des Menschen]. Every dealing with things,
and not only one that is theoretical, is as such disclosive. Insofar as man is
awake, he is disclosive, i.e., understands. What is disclosed is that-which-is
[das Seiende]. . . . Disclosing is something that happens with that-which-is,
something that does not come as a change to it itself, but yet does come to it. It
becomes a being for us. Being-for-us is an ontological problem. Truth can
become a problem only insofar as with it that-which-is in its being as being-
for-us become problematic and enters also into the question. At rst sight
one might well think that here Fink is making a straightforward, and perhaps
simplistic, adaptation from Heidegger that takes the disclosive event rather
frankly as something that the action of human beings accomplishes, some-
thing they cannot help but do from the moment that they are awake. Yet
that would be to fail to perceive the real thrust of this passage, which is
indicated in its nal lines, namely, that what has to be achieved is to revisit
precisely as a problem the whole phenomenon of the being-for-us of beings,
the whole phenomenon of the basic situation in which we connect with
things in experience, language, and knowledge.
The statement that truth is disclosure is not, therefore, an answer. What
has to be grasped is that with any such statement the problem is merely
posed, the unique speculative nature of which has to be realized. The question,
What is being?the speculative question with which man stands up in the
midst of that which is in beingis not an answerable question, if answering
is prescribed in its style by the idea of the way intramundane things are de-
ned. What characterizes the speculative question, however, is that it can
develop, and this development is the proper history of philosophy. Develop-
ment is achieved in speculative projections of dimensions of analytic investiga-
19. Z-XXII 27.

20. Ibid., emphasis all Finks. See appendix.
21. Z-XXII 2930. Fink here reaches December 1, 1936, following the points given in
the previous text from November 27.
460 Language
tion. Indeed, questions really become speculative in the proper way only
when the speculative projection itself develops while guiding analytic work.
What counts, therefore, is the basicand unrelentinggrip upon our won-
der by which the question remains as a question, the grip, that is, of the
inescapable and insistent experiential engagement with that-which-is. Such
is the force of the questions Where am I? and How did I get into the
world?
These questions highlight the contrast between internal treatment in rela-
tion to external inquiry. Epistemology, the analysis of knowledge, for exam-
ple, works internally in the discussion of agreement between a proposition
and knowledge and between knowledge and reality, or in the discussion of
validity, proof, and verication, or, more generally, in any discussion of the
way a subject meets reality as an object. Treating all these matters presup-
poses the topos of the disclosure of being, and lodges within it. All these
investigations are thus internal, i.e., to the global situation they presuppose.
That topos itself, however, cannot be inquired into by the practices that de-
pend upon it. What is being posed as a question, then, is the consideration of
that topos as pursued not in the terms conditioned within the topos itself but
rather externally!
It is not possible, of course, to exit from this topos, this place wherein we are
there in being with beings. The idea of an actual stance taken upon the place of
all stances is utopic, and not actually attainable. What it is possible to do,
however, is to indicate that topos. Disclosure, then, is not at all some kind of
denitive name for this topos, it is in fact nothing but a metaphor; yet it is a
metaphor in which we must recognize a special and fundamental point. It is
offered as grounded in the basic experience of our being in the world among
beings and in some way knowing them, but it works by way of integrally
interlocking the question What is truth? with the question What is being?;
it is not the disclosure, before ones evidentiary eyes, of a fully manifest ob-
jective domain but rather the notication of a problem ensemble, yet a
problem ensemble of a kind that cannot be dealt with within the framework
of adequacy-seeking intuitional investigative evidencing.
With speculative matters such as the one broached in this chapter, the ques-
22. Z-XXII 30, emphasis all Finks.

23. Z-XXII 32.
24. This point is the theme for December 4, 1936, Z-XXII 3540.
25. See Z-XXII V/4a, supplementary notes on the nature of philosophy.
26. Z-XXII 41, from December 8, 1936. Here the term Anzeige, so frequently trans-
lated indication, is given an analogous but quite common rendering as notication
or notice.
Language 461
tion is not the delineation of a gap that can be lled in by the answer as a
manifest recognitional giving in presentness; the answer rather is seen as
maintaining the gap. That is, the question is a continual questioning. The
question is not replaced by a fully positive knowing but rather continues as a
knowing that one doesnt know. This not knowing of ones knowing only
mounts higher with answers, i.e., with scientic determinationsi.e., with
continuing internal work, continuing analyses, such as were Husserls ex-
traordinary accomplishment. Fink continues: The knowing [Wissen] that
philosophy has is not emptied of value by the thesis of the unresting question,
but rather dened by it: it is not a knowing about something that is missing,
that is still outstanding, but is instead a knowing about the known, only in
such a way that the knowing of the known is driven into deeper knowing.
Now one will expect that what lies just beyond range here, in the deeper
knowing, is the whole idea of the meontic as dealt with in the previous
chapter. But the way Fink rounds off the tutorial session from which this
point is taken indicates how this move in a further dimension is carried out,
namely, in a mode that, while subject to radical methodological (meontic)
constraint, nevertheless also draws out and articulates in a positive way the
meaning of analytic results in their overarching unifying signicance.
As a projection of the philosophic effort needed here in Husserls phenome-
nological program where the extraordinary wealth of analytical details has to
be integrated in terms of comprehensive, coherence-effecting conceptions,
Fink mentions the ideas to which self-critical reection on the aporetic re-
calcitrance lying in the analysis of temporality and life had led him, as has been
laid out here in earlier chapters. If phenomenological-philosophic reection
is a movement of living spirit, then it has the same absence of a denable,
directly accessible whither as does ultimate life itself. Radical reection
is not drawn onward by a goal but urged forward by a living dynamic that
is manifest and actual in many dimensions: as drive and need, as historical
development, and as enthusiasm. But enthusiasm here, rather than
meaning the familiar ardent interest one feels in some exciting prospect or
engagement, with the consequent heightening of energy and dedication in the
midst of everyday affairs, takes on a more radical sense. The essence of the
27. Z-XXII 4445, emphasis Finks.

28. See the last few pages of 7.1, led by the text quoted from Z-IV 112b.
29. See 5.2.3, 5.35.3.2, and 6.3.46.4.
30. These are the key-word terms in the compact outline of Z-XXII 45 that ends this
session for December 8, 1936.
31. See Z-XXX 2b, especially in the context (EFM 4).
462 Language
enthusiasm Fink speaks of as characterizing the dynamic here has several

facets: play, the Dionysian, and the necessity of freedom, to use
the very words that Fink employs here to tie in with the themes of originative
temporality and life. Already in the very rst session of this tutorial, for Doro-
thy Ott, Fink noted that the categories of seriousness and enthusiasm
express existential conditions for doing philosophy: they set the path for the
dialectical tension between analysis and speculation that, as we have seen, is
the methodological heart of phenomenology. Of several forms of living in
enthusiasm the relevant one here is doing philosophy, i.e., the life that
lives seeking to know itself. But it is not the tutorial notes themselves that
make clear the precise meaning of enthusiasm; for that one has to consult
the abundant material in the notes from the years that follow, but in particu-
lar the lecture Fink gave at Louvain in early 1940, On the Essence of Enthu-
siasm. As this lecture details, basically enthusiasm betokens the way in
which a human being exceeds itself in the direction of what is in principle
beyond-the-human; and this, quite simply, means ones stance in the whole
of being. What becomes plain is that human being is an in-between being,
bent together between God and animal, between Nothing and being properly
speaking.
One could easily see this as an analogue of the phenomenological reduction,
in the mode of recognizing the constitutive stance of ones being in the midst of
being, thus loosening the grip of that stance a little, namely, just enough to
conceive the idea of it, even while not being able actually to leave it and take an
actual stance beyond it in order to pose that situation as an evidentially given
phenomenon. Doing philosophy, writes Fink sometime in 1937, but not in
the Ott tutorial, is laying open freedom, that is, recovering the enthusiastic
depth of life. To bear oneself to being as the existence that questions is to
tear oneself free of the spell, to create a distance, to step out, ecstasis,
ekbasiw. And in doing this, in philosophic realization as a living act,
fundamental life continues its dynamism: Life as spirit plays; enthusiasm as
32. Z-XXII 45, Finks emphasis. The notes in Finks folders from 1937 on through the
last year of Husserls life, 1938, to 1940 increasingly pursue this theme of enthusiasm.
Most such notes, all pertaining to the lecture On the Essence of Enthusiasm, are found
in Z-XXX.
33. Z-XXII 1 from September 14, 1936.
34. Z-XXII 45.
35. After being presented a second time in 1946 at Salem Abbey just north of Lake
Constance, the lecture was published as Vom Wesen des Enthusiasmus (Essen: Verlag Dr.
Hans V. Chamier, 1947). The quotations here are from pp. 25 and 26, respectively.
36. Z-XXV 113a, EFM 4. On ekbasiw, see 7.3.3.5, footnote 284.
Language 463
the essence of play, writes Fink in telegraphic style. And in thus conceiving
the mode of existence of philosophy to be enthusiasm, Fink points out a
difference from Heidegger, despite the clear similarities on this matter of the
fundamental constitutive cast of human being in the midst of beings. What is
curious about Heideggers now classic assertion of anxiety as the philosoph-
ically fundamental experience is that anxiety is contactless. In striking con-
trast Fink nds that enthusiasm, like play very different from anxiety, is a way
of being right there with maximal being. This brings us to the term that
comes to be for Fink the quintessential formula for the meaning of enthusiasm
in philosophic thinking, naming what is involved in interpreting the internal
analysis of language in integrative external treatment: the ontological
experience.
8.2.1. Language and the Ontological Experience

The phenomenological reduction has to be looked at not simply as
a methodological moment but as the way one gains access to something,
namely, as the laying open of the universe of functioning subjectivity. True,
there is a restrictiveness in the way Husserl casts this laying open done by
the reduction as the regressive move from the unity of the object into the
manifold of functioning syntheses, that is, by casting being fundamentally as
the object-being for a thematically intending subject. But along with this
point of criticism the important thing about Husserls initiative is that even
under its initial restrictive schema what gets posed here is the transcendental
problematic of the relation of ens and verum. To pose this relationship as
intrinsic to the reduction in the form of the subject-object schema is, Fink
observes, precisely the moment of essentially speculative theorizing guiding
all Husserls investigative analyses, however much this moment lies latent and
37. Z-XXV 116a.

38. Z-XXVI 121a, EFM 4.
39. Z-XXVI 94, Finks emphasis; the phrase is Sein bei dem seiendsten Seienden. On
this point of the closeness with maximal being, and the contrast with Heidegger, see
also Z-XXVI 79a83a and 95aamong many texts both in this folder and those that
follow it.
40. Z-XXIX 44a. This folder, largely from 1939 and 1940, is devoted entirely to a
proposed work to be entitled Ontologische Erfahrung (EFM 4).
41. Formulas taken from OH-V 4041, from autumn 1935 (EFM 3).
42. OH-V 42.
43. OH-III 27, also from sometime in 1935 (EFM 3). This point also is the burden of
2.62.6.2.8.
464 Language
undeveloped in those investigations themselves precisely as internal in char-

acter (see 8.2). Moroever, this relationship holds as the essential moment, even
when ones inquiry into the functioning subjectivity in question moves be-
hind or beyond the correlational form in which much of Husserls investiga-
tion material is couched.
What is needed, then, in fullling the understanding of phenomenological
ndings is precisely to explicate the sense of this relation of ens and verum,
that is, of the fundamental experiential grip on and by being, the ontological
experience, within which phenomenology works its evidentially proceeding
investigations. Yet this does not make the ontological experience the prov-
ince for either phenomenological analysis or speculation alone; it pertains to
both equally in its import, even if it is speculation that treats it beyond the
limits that phenomenological analysis methodologically sets for itself. What
is ratied here, then, right in the opening of the speculative, is the bond with
phenomenological analysis that it must never sever. Fink writes: A discussion
of the relationship of phenomenology with speculation would be vague and
general if it were unable to refer to the carried out concrete analyses done by a
philosophy of [investigative] work. And this is the way in which a human
being dwelling in speculative articulation on the ontological experience is
taken up in the enthusiastic move spoken of in the previous section, a move
to dwell in thought on the way ones existence is held within the integrative
relationship of ens and verum.
Here, then, is the way in which the sense of the language situation is to be
probed as that condition whereby the human setting, the milieu encompassing
human being, rst has its human sense for us as world by language (as
ontological projection). So, in turning from the rst phase of his tutorial to
the second, viz., to that wherein to accomplish the explicit unfolding of this
language situation in speculative articulation, Fink has to make clear ex-
actly how to approach this situation from the actual ground [Boden] for it
as a question that is laid out in the phenomenological analytic of knowl-
edge. To understand properly the way this reliance on the ground of the
44. Both OH-V and OH-III dwell on this point throughout.

45. Thus it is that Fink designated the projected work, Ontologische Erfahrung, as a
treatise on the limits of phenomenology, which, in seeking to make clear the nature of this
limitation, would be itself speculative in character. See Z-XXIX 286ab, 318ab, and,
more briey, 224a (EFM 4).
46. Z-XXIX 286b, supplementary word in brackets mine.
47. Z-XXVII 21a.
48. Z-XXII 5354. This session for January 23, 1937, gives a rsum of the rst phase
at that point nished, and then launches into the second phase.
Language 465
analytic works one has to examine the presuppositional schemas in which the
relationship of ens and verum is already set in the analyses of language pur-
sued in various alternative philosophies. As speculative projections guiding
analyses, such schemas orient the analysis into quite different descriptive re-
sults. Specically, Fink names two positions to begin with: (a) idealistic theo-
ries of knowledge, especially that of Neo-Kantianism, and (b) the ontologists,
Nicolai Hartmann for one, and, rather differently, the followers of Heideg-
ger. The lesson Fink draws from the treatment of these tendencies is that the
conict between them indicates the nature of the problem. And the problem is
this: how to determine the status and kind of being to ascribe both to the
process of knowing and to the knowing subject as such, without either (a)
equating being with the being-character of things, or (b) determining the char-
acter of being from the status being has in being known. At the same time, a
third option is offered from another direction that Fink has to consider, the
viewpoint that one can tie in with the work of Charles Morris, not so much
Morriss own view but rather one that he was familiar with through his rela-
tions with the Vienna Circle and that he tried to modify in a pragmatistic
fashion. Fink terms it correlativism, citing positivism in its many forms
as an example of it. Correlativism here consists in the attempt to avoid any
explicit thesis on the ontological status of knowledge, and to restrict itself
specically to the internal analysis of cognition. But, all the same, any such
analytic cannot be free of a concept of being. Even if it rejects both the active
idealistic conception of knowing and the receptive ontological version,
still, Fink argues, it fails to recognize that the question of being is a problem,
even while implicitly lodging the act and process of knowing squarely within
being.
What Fink gains from all this, now, is conrmation of the necessity of
making the distinction between the internal/analytic and the external/specu-
lative dimensions in the problem of knowledge, sharpening the fundamental
difference between the two. From epistemological idealism one sees that the
being of knowledge cannot be conceptually grasped using as a clue that which
is given in being through knowledge. From critical study of the ontologists,
on the other hand, one realizes that being a thing does not simply reduce
to being an object, and that the bond between knowledge and being cannot
49. Z-XXII 5557. A contrasting of positions analogous to this is the treatment in 3.1.
See also 6.2.26.2.3.
50. See Z-XXII 5758, for the full detailing.
51. See appendix.
52. Z-XXII 5961.
466 Language
be designated with the internal intentional characteristics of the cogito-

cogitatum schema. Finally, correlativism contributes the recognition that the
analysis of knowledge taken as such represents a self-contained thematic.
Put in terms of the overall issue of how to treat language in view of the
fundamentality of ontological experience, the lesson is that the details of an
analytic have to be at one and the same time (a) eidetic details of actual
instances of knowing and (b) the close following of the concrete way in which
the fundamental experience of being is articulated. If, then, the speculative
formulations are to be, in Finks telling expression, abbreviations of analy-
ses, this can only be if, reciprocally, the idea of the Adamic character
of languagei.e., its lighting and poetic wording guides the way
analysis lets this be recognized as in play in the concrete phenomena exam-
ined, that is, lets this truly fundamental idea of intentionality open up the
signicance of the concrete details. What in the end methodological and
presupposition-attentive critical reconsideration leads to as the guiding over-
arching conception is that the speaking of language can be brought to display
its concrete articulative function for the experience of being-as-appearing
only within the constitutive force originatively responsible for the world-
horizonality in virtue of which appearing can take place.
If we look at the topics Fink laid out for the nal ten sessions of the Ott
tutorial there are a number of things one cannot help but notice. One is the
interest in Aristotle, and the reason for it, namely, to analyze the dimension of
the senses in the performance of knowledge. Another is the way in which cer-
tain pivotal conceptual shifts that critically reorient the phenomenological
analysis gure into the treatment of intentionality and reection. Horizonality,
wakefulness, and performance consciousness, for example, enter into most of
53. The points in this paragraph are all from Z-XXII 6162.
54. Z-XXVII 63b (EFM 4). The term abbreviations [Abbreviaturen], i.e., of the
ndings of analysis, as here, though rst occurring in Z-V VI/6a, is repeated in reections
on speculative conceptuality in Finks later notebooks; cf. Z-XXIX 308b, and Z-XXX
54b (both EFM 4), as well as Z-XXII II/11b (EFM 3). Fink also uses the term for
conceptions that are taken in forgetfulness of their groundedness in analytic ndings, in a
counter-phenomenological sense; cf. Z-XXVII A/9a, Z-XXX 55a, and Husserl-Kritik,
#16 and #42 (all three EFM 4).
55. Z-XXVII A/II/14 and Z-XXIX 198b (both EFM 4). See appendix.
56. The session for January 26, 1937 (Z-XXII 5664), is the last one for which full
notes are worked out. From then on (January 30 through March 5) there are only brief
topical listings given on a few sheets slipped in at the end of the main booklet of notes.
57. Z-XXII D/1a and /2b. See appendix.
Language 467
the nal ten sessions of the tutorial. What this suggests is that the renewal of the
analysis of language has to do more than simply repeat Husserls standard
phenomenology of intentional life; it must thoroughly rework it. Thus, in
particular, internal analysis has to be reworked as essentially open to what
cannot be encompassed or dealt with in terms of constative, descriptive ana-
lytic procedures, oriented as they are toward evident intuitional presentation.
Conversely, speculative explication of the results of analytic procedures must
draw its explicative sense from their evident intuitional presentation. Thus,
just as the question of language requires the regressive move from the analytic
of the sign, internal analysis, to the dimension of disclosure, viz., the dimension
of the originative co-implication of ens and verum, i.e., speculative thinking,
so the analysis of object-perception opens up regressively to the dimension of
wakefulness to the world and to the horizonality of the world as not reducible
to potential object-presentation. So, too, the analysis of temporality leads
regressively past tripartitely structured presentness to de-presencing.
More generally put, then, intentionality as such has to be taken beyond the
partitioning into an immanent knowing and a transcendent known, to
draw a point from a folder earlier than the Ott tutorial. Constitutively antece-
dent to that partitioning is the unity of the recognitional relatedness of the
subject to the object, i.e., of the recognition of something-that-is [eines
Seienden], namely, recognition constitutively grounded in ontological ex-
perience. When, then, a few years earlier and in keeping with the program-
matic declarations that end Husserls Formal and Transcendental Logic, Fink
writes, A new grounding of logic has to begin with a highly rened analysis of
the relation of subject and object, we can see in the Ott tutorial what this
entails for recasting the whole treatment of logic and language. The scale is
enormous, reaching from the most comprehensive dimensions of awareness,
world-openness, to the most specic concretization of meaning in the spo-
ken word, and necessitating an integration where hitherto there has been
dichotomy, e.g., between corporeality and mentality and between transcen-
dence and immanence. In the tutorial Fink is far from actually achieving all
this, but he reworks and prepares the ground for approaching it. He identies
the specic openings to it, the specic directions of requestioning that call for
it in the interplay of analytic scrutiny in positive phenomenology coupled with
58. Z-XI 43a, emphasis Finks (from 1932 or 1933; EFM 2). See also Z-XI 45ab,
EFM 2.
59. This is the way point 5 in the list of Theses on the Problem of Logic in Z-XI 44a
begins. The rest of point 5 is represented in what follows here.
468 Language
the speculative probing of fundamental comprehensive sense. It would seem

that the phenomenology of language is still waiting to be done, or at least to be
carried out further, in terms of this fullness of conception.
8.3. Ideality
The detailing of further points in the methodological and speculation-
and-critique driven reexamination of logic and language, much of which,
though not all, is brought together in the Ott tutorial, can be found inter-
spersed throughout the notes both before and after Z-XXII. But while this
task is being indicated here only in general terms, one issue in particular merits
specic mention, namely, the question of the nature and status of ideality.
Husserls rm insistence on the pivotal importance of ideality, one of the
true constants in his phenomenology, is as regular as is the deferring of serious
investigative reconsideration of it on the level of his more mature phenomeno-
logical achievements. Moreover, it marks the habitual tendency on Husserls
part to hold too long and fast to the philosophy of reection schema that both
formalizes being and levels it down to object-being. As a consequence, when
sense is looked at in linguistic expression, it tends to be considered primarily as
transposed to this logical register, namely, as having transindividual autonomy
and xed givennessideality and identityas well as objectness; but featur-
ing linguistic sense this way, appropriate as it may be to taking language as an
eidetically coherent region, obscures the fact that sense is an order of quite
heterogeneous phenomena.
When, then, sense gets reconsidered in its many kinds, this being one of the
main points Fink prepares for his discussions with Charles Morris, it is by
interlocking internal analysis focused on sense with external (speculative) rec-
ognition of the inadequacy of the concept of logic-regulated identity for guid-
ing the investigation of linguistic sense that the full richness of sense has to be
approached. Yet, one must not think that, beyond simply occasioning repe-
tition of the considerations given in the previous section, this would leave
nothing new to be said specically about ideality.
The two key concepts that gure in Husserls analysis of expression and
meaning in the Logical Investigations, ideality and identity, are not without
60. See, e.g., FTL, 2, where ideality is both afrmed as central and left out of further
investigation.
61. OH-VIII 9 (EFM 3).
62. See OH-VIII 911. The brief notes in booklet OH-VIII all refer to the meeting Fink
had with Morris in autumn 1934 (see footnote 6 above in the appendix).
63. OH-VIII 12.
Language 469
their validity by far, in keeping with Husserls aim to provide a defense and
explication of the structure and conditions of rational science, while asserting
the latters intrinsic relationship to subjectivity. But it is no surprise that this
validity and relevance is tied to the way one has to recognize the correlativistic
character of that framing. Finks telegraphic note style makes the point: Self-
sufciency of the ideal = property of being-an-object. The exhibition of a
special intention directed to generality serves as counter-argument against
psychologism. Of course this is, once again, a feature appropriate for phe-
nomenologys starting point, but that only means that as the program ad-
vances critical reconsideration of it has to be given to it.
When, therefore, language in its full variety of kinds and functions is looked
into, sense as linguistic meaning (expression) is seen to be understandable
only if one goes back to the essence of language which means to refer
back to the question of the involvement of experience in being, the question of
lgow and onand the nal issue raised in a list of matters Fink had sketched
out to take up with Morris.
In keeping, then, with this recasting of the guiding orientation for explicat-
ing language, Fink has to conclude: Husserls theory of the transport beyond
time of ideal sense and his method of exhibiting identical sense in multiple
realizations is misleading: it is not identity in repetitions that is the essential
thing about sense. Sense is not like universal and instance. That is, while the
identity of sense so intrinsically typical of the ideal is an abstract identity,
one has to keep in mind how it differs from ontic identity. Moreover, while
interlinked, ideality and identity must not be confused.
Take ideality: If the ideal is pure formi.e., the meantness [Gemeint-
heit] that can itself become an object it must also be understood that
this ideality is empty. It has to do only with the empty forms for signica-
tions, with empty formal signication-structures and not with what is the
vital soul of a word or a proposition, even if one would characterize this latter
as identical-ideal signication. If, then, the ideality that natural-language
meaning has is to be distinguished from the ideality of logical objectness, then
the action to which the ideality of this linguistic meaning corresponds may
64. Z-XII 42a (emphasis Finks), EFM 2.

65. OH-VIII 9.
66. OH-VIII 1011.
67. OH-VIII 5, emphasis Finks.
69. OH-VIII A/1a, emphasis Finks.
70. Z-XV 17a, dated July 30, 1931. Here signication renders Bedeutung, in
keeping with Husserls usual usage, while sense is Sinn.
470 Language
well not be quite that which is said to function for logical objectness. Thus
Fink nds that the identical-ideal status of signication, standardly repre-
sented in Husserls treatment of language as resulting from the operation
of repetition, has to be seen as not actually formed by repetition; rather, it
only becomes accessible by repetition. Repetition thus only has pedagogic
value. The identity of the signication does not in itself relate to these
repetitions but is itself the condition for the possibility of repetition.
What is behind these assertions is Finks shift of the higher-level guiding
conceptual schema for fundamental transcendental constitution from object-
intentional acts to the process of temporalization. It is the latter that in the end
has to be credited with constitutively giving a thematic something its structure
and identity, which act-intentional efforta subjects object-aiming intentive
glance or regardonly serves to set the specic focus and x the mode of
orientatione.g., doubt, belief, and so on. (See 5.2.2.1.) A subjects repeti-
tious I can indeed corresponds to the identity in question, but the actual
efcacity for this identity lies not in the subjects performing of an I can in its
aiming glance but in the power of continuous temporalizing within which the
I can itself operates.
Ideality, however, does not amount merely to identity, though identity is
indeed a principle feature of the ideal; and for Husserl the same action that
constitutes identity constitutes ideality as well. While we shall return to ide-
ality, at the moment the issue is that the identity of empty logical objectness
just does not dene what the identity of sense-content might mean, once it is
realized that the constancy that some material content is supposed to possess
has to be accounted for materially in the structuring action of temporalization.
And taking up this point leads, in turn, to guring out in what way meaning is
or is not ideal. Unfortunately, Finks research on this whole matter is nowhere
brought together in a comprehensive statement, either in his notes or in his
nished written essays. Yet even when pieced together out of his many scat-
tered notes, it is a far larger topic than can be fully explored here, including
among other things the whole matter of the distinction between sensuous and
categorial intuition. Some summary indication, however, is needed and worth
attempting.
To begin with, Fink emphasizes that identity does not ipso facto indicate
ideality; identity has a different character depending upon the region of being
in which something displays unity and sameness. Kant, for example, showed
71. Z-XV 17ab. This is a point that Fink returns to repeatedly over the years, for
example, in a conversation with Landgrebe in 1935, Z-XIX II/2a, dated March 19, 1935,
point #2 (EFM 3).
Language 471
the specic identity and unity of real natural being as identity in change, its
identity lying precisely within alteration, a structural condition taken to fur-
ther detail in Husserls analyses. In contrast to this real identity of natural
beings there is the identity of an ideal sense-construct, a judgment, for
instance. There can be several utterings of the same judgment, but that does
not multiply the sense-construct itself; it only multiplies the statings of that
sense-construct, the judgment. In other words, one has to distinguish be-
tween the identity of a substance that holds through ontic alteration and the
identity of sense that stands constant in repetitions.
The reason for this difference is that what is identical in repetitions is not a
being. What the repetition repeats is the same relational determinacy, the same
intentional relating to the something in question, determining its individual
concrete occurrence in appearing at a specic point in time and place. Ac-
cordingly, the two cases of identity, that of the ideal and that of the real, both
gure into the temporal processes as constitutive result, but they do so dif-
ferently. The sameness that holds through multiple repetitions of the ideal is
not subject to the change or phasing variation that intratemporal occurrence
structures into all real, sensuously perceived phenomena. That time-less-ness
of the ideal is an ever-time-ness might seem to suggest extratemporality, but
it actually is omnitemporality. Having no phase-variant structuring, the
ideal is not individualized by time, Fink writes. But, again, while this may
seem to make the kind of temporality possessed by the ideal object describable
as omnitemporality (or even timelessness), what this indicates is the need
to shift the problem of the ideal out of the kind of intratemporal setting in
which ideal objects are usually considered because of the supposed perfect
analogy to perceptually experienced objects. That is, what if idealities are
no longer considered in the manner of intratemporal objects but rather, in
analogy to Kants taking the schematization of objects of experience as their
synthetic determination in time, by seeing the omnitemporality of ideality
as indicating its place among conditions for the possibility of experience,
namely, as one of the constitutive moments of time itself. Accordingly, the
72. Z-VII XIV/12a, from 1930 (EFM 2).

73. See Z-XV 75ab (EFM 2), a point that Fink marks as having to be explicated more
closely; it is still exploratory.
74. Cf. Z-XV 51a.
75. See the conversation between Husserl and Fink from July 10, 1929, in Z-I 149a
(EFM 1). At issue in their discussion is the identity in time of the ideality of the eidosof
the essencenot that of the sense of linguistic expression, yet what is the same about
the two idealities is the character of the temporality of each, which is the issue here.
76. See Z-IV 114ab (EFM 1).
472 Language
ideality of an ideal object would as omnitemporality mean possible at any

time. Setting aside the interpretation by Fink of a difcult and disputed text
in Kantand his extrapolation beyond itthe interest for us lies not in this
matter of Kant scholarship but rather in the direction of phenomenological
analysis that it opens up.
Fink nds that Husserl simply continued to work as if the idealparadig-
matically, the ideal as essence (eidos)simply ought to be situated in terms of
the objectness that, properly speaking, is intratemporal, despite the fact that
the ideal object does not at all possess the character of intratemporally pre-
sented objects, specically their individuation as the selfsame in continuous
change. This strongly suggests not a solution, but a genuine and fundamen-
tal problem that needs to be addressed, namely, that fundamental constitutive
processes are not being properly disclosed because of adherence to the cor-
relative act-intentional/object-structural schema. And if something other than
object-structuring components is to be disclosed as the constituting moment
of temporalityas was the case with de-presencing (see 5.1.1)then one
should expect here too that there may be something non- or pre-object-
structural that is responsible for the peculiarity of this other kind of object-
ness that is ideality.
Finks question, then, is this: Does the traditional trinity of time concepts
sufce here? Is it enough to interpret time simply as the horizonal unity of
present, future, and past? Could there be, he writes, a whole dimension of
temporality missing, the horizon of omnitemporality (timelessness), which
is the de-presencing of pure fantasy, the constitutive condition of the pos-
sibility of ideal objects, etc.? This is where Fink now envisions the per-
tinence of a fourth horizon of time, one not rooted in the functions of
the more original trinity, but which would be as primordial as the reality-
conditioning that lies in that standard trinity.
As these lines indicate, Fink proposes to disclose this other conditioning
agency by inquiring into the specic temporal grounding of the phenomenal
character of fantasy, not in the sense of free, idle dreaming but as a kind of
77. Z-IV 114b, my emphasis. Fink does not give a specic reference, but see KrV
A144/B184A145/B185.
78. See Z-IV 53b54a, notes on the Connection between the Eidetic and Transcen-
dental Reductions. Cf. also treatment of the special temporal character of ideality in 64
of EJ (EU), which Landgrebe was still working on at the time these notes of Finks were
written. Cf. also CMe, p. 127 (Hua I, pp. 15556).
79. Z-I 127a (EFM 1). The series of notes following this one continues the inquiry,
considering the de-presencing involved in possibility that would be different from that
which yields the triple dimensionality of the actual, viz., present, future, past.
Language 473
fundament-level possibility underlying the usual genera that offer the terms
with which it is designated. The analytic of imagination and neutrality is a
more specic one in the general analytic of possibility, Fink writes. The
phenomenology of possibility is the more universal title. The analytic study
of this larger genus would take up not possibility as the modality of proto-
doxic positing (such as gures so prominently in Husserls treatment of fan-
tasy and imagination) as, e.g., when an evening stroller would say, Well, it
might be a robber and not just a tree!but rather the kind of possibility that,
not oriented within the standard trinity (often to the future), is completely free
temporally, the possibility of fantasy that has the temporal horizon of om-
nitemporality. Rather than being some particular item actually occurring
within the temporal conditions of appearing, that is, in the normal temporal
action in which de-presencing functions to constitute selfsameness for the
temporally ever-changing in the now of intentional aim, the purely pos-
sible of fantasy is not related to a true de-presencing, that is, to the de-
presencing structuring temporal appearance in actuality. Possibility thus
stands in distinction from actuality, but is not its opposite. That is, Finks
inquiry into possibility as a dimension of its own means that one must keep
distinct two senses of opposition in the contrasting of the real with the
ideal. The real and ideal are opposed not because they are contradictory in a
common frame of determination but because the frame of constitution for the
one is not that of the other; they are thus simply contraries. In a way reminis-
cent of Leibniz (to whom, however, Fink does not make allusion in this regard)
the possibility of pure fantasy is conceived here as a sum-total of possibili-
ties as itself only a possible ensemble, and the correlate of transcendental
subjectivity in its totality.
80. Z-I 128a.

81. See the notes in Z-II (largely on Neutralitt and Bildbewutsein) and Z-III
(entitled Theorie der Imagination), both in EFM 1, and VB, 2834.
82. Z-I 132a. Here, once again, Fink mentions Kants chapter on schematization,
where the possible means that which conforms to the conditions of time.
83. See the example of recall in Z-I 133ab.
84. Again, Z-I 132a.
85. See appendix.
86. See Z-VII XIX/2b (EFM 2) and Z-XV 83ab (EFM 2). Cf. also Karl Schuhmann,
Die Fundamentalbetrachtung der Phnomenologie, Phaenomenologica 42 (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 23.
87. Z-I 129ab. See also Z-III 29a, where Fink distinguishes two kinds of possibility,
that of factual possibility, relating to conditions of actuality, and that of pure fantasy,
grounded in the depresencing of timelessness. See also Z-XI 50ab (EFM 2).
474 Language
The possible is to relate the actual, then, not as a function of the actual but
as another dimension concurrent with the actual in the working of the one all-
embracing system of temporalizing proto-process. Yet these two dimen-
sions are not separate, they interlace in many ways. One can therefore say that
there exists only one world actually, but that this one world is structured also
by sheer possibility, i.e., that some actions in this one actual world function
precisely in terms of the dimension specically of pure possibility, and some in
terms of both, but Fink does not show exactly how this is to be explicated.
One problem in this regard is that of piecing out how constitution and
human being both coincide and get distinguished, i.e., the problem of fantasy
(or imagination) in human experience, and the fantasy of possibility as such.
What is at issue here is not fantasy-objects in all their kinds or human acts
of fantasizing but rather the fundamental constitutive temporalizing that
grounds the fantasy element for any such objects and acts, and that therefore
converges with the grounding of the ideality element for objects that are ideal
and for the acts that intend them.
The linkage to the ideal and the eidetic is not accidental, for it helps to
indicate for fantasy the temporal uniqueness of the special all-encompassing
dimension of possibility that Fink has named and is trying to clarify. The
essence of fantasy simply cannot be claried without going into the problem of
the a priori; of decisive importance is the temporality of fantasy: the basic
character of fantasized time is already-come-to-be-ness [Gewesenheit]. Omni-
temporality is only comprehensible as a constitutive moment of temporality,
constitutive moments always already are. (Already-come-to-be-ness is not
pastness [Vergangenheit]). Fink is trying out already-come-to-be-ness as
a way of indicating the distinctness of the temporality of fantasy in contrast to
that of the normal three dimensions of actuality. Already-come-to-be-ness
means, in other words, that the dimension of temporality proper to fantasy is
already there as a dimension of the world in equal primordiality with, and
distinct from, the dimensions of temporality proper to actuality, in particular
the dimension of pastness with which fantasy-temporality might be con-
fused if it is asserted to be already in place. In other words, the already-come-
to-be-ness of the temporality of fantasy means that possibility is constitutively
a priori.
The main issues of the problem of possibility, fantasy, and ideality are thus
88. See 5.1.1.4 and 5.1.2.3.2.

89. See Z-I 152a.
90. Cf. Z-I 141ab.
91. Z-I 162b, emphasis Finks.
Language 475
laid out: (1) the specic, distinctive temporal structure of possibility and fan-
tasy; (2) the way the ideal, and especially the eidos, is constituted (by tem-
poralization), and then intuited (in intentional acts involving some kind of
sensuous presentation either perceptual or imaginative); and (3) the way
possibility and fantasy concretely gure into the actions and experiences of
human being in the world all of which leads inevitably to the question of
how transcendental constituting subjectivity ultimately has to be explicated. It
must be admitted that the investigative solution to this problem complex is
not fully clear, at least not in the notes and writings of Finks that we have.
Whether more was given in his lost book on time will never be known. Yet
what emerges from what we have seen is that Fink envisaged the basic con-
stitutive factor grounding the moment of alteration-free selfsameness in the
intending of both fantasy and eidos to be possibility as a dimensioning
moment of the swing of time, of temporality in its deploying of the dimen-
sions that structure the world as the theater of being. And with this we return
to the overall theme of this chapter; for the line of explication for the moment
of alteration-free selfsameness in ideality that we have just been following is
the approach that in critically renewed reconsideration can be taken as well
with regard to question of the sense and signication of language.
In this we recognize another case of the way phenomenologically specic
speculation reorients the analytic so as to allow the sense of the details of
concrete investigation to be drawn out in such a way as to integrate these
details in the full complex and capacity of phenomenologys program. Out of
the self-critique-driven shift in the higher schematic matrixe.g., from the
philosophy of reection subject-object schema to that of operative temporal-
ization as the constitutive dynamic of horizonal originationthe ideality that,
while at rst the province of logical validity, now becomes the core of linguistic
meaning gets interpreted quite differently. Accordingly, the true meaningful-
ness of language is not ultimately cast in terms of consummately effective
intentional aim reaching thematic object-being. Any truth and validity that
92. See Elisabeth Strker, Husserls Evidenzprinzip: Sinn und Grenzen einer meth-
odischen Norm der Phnomenologie als Wissenschaft, Zeitschrift fr philosophische
Forschung, 32 (1978), 330. English translation by Robert Pettit, Husserls Principle of
Evidenz: The Signicance and Limitations of a Methodological Norm of Phenomenol-
ogy as a Science, in Contemporary German Philosophy, ed. by Darrel E. Christensen
and others (University Park and London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1982), vol. 1,
pp. 111138.
93. See Z-I 13031, entitled The Problem of Fantasy.
94. See reference to Finks lost Time-Book in 5.3.1.
95. See Z-XV 79a (EFM 2). See also 5.1.1.4 and 5.1.2.3.2.
476 Language
language has as expression is more fully understood when the analysis of

expression is done with a view to the whole context of in-the-world situated-
ness as the condition for experience, so that consciousness is seen as structured
in its founding constitution not by the distinction between either the mental
and the bodily or the subject and the object but in terms of world-deployment
dimensions that antecede those distinctionswhich is the kind of transposi-
tion embodied, for example, in the experience of wakefulness. This is not the
displacement of analytic investigation by conceptual speculative transports
but rather the recharging of analytic scrutiny with fuller phenomenological
meaningfulness.
In whatever kinds of divergence, then, emerge between Husserl and Fink
and Fink regularly notes it when they do what has to be recognized is that
in great part divergence occurs because of Finks activating the critical and
reconceptualizing force of the speculative sphere in articulating the sense of the
analytic disclosures of concrete phenomenological investigation. (See 7.2.4.1.)
Developing this sphere is, methodologically speaking, equally as much a mat-
ter of the self-critique of phenomenologys guiding conceptionsintention-
ality, world as horizon, transcendental subjectivity, constitution especially at
the level of prototemporalizationas it is the careful reconsideration of the
sense of the ndings of detail. What it is not is sheer conceptual analysis or the
analytic of a priori truths, in a Wolfan manner. And it is a prominent feature
of the way the phenomenology of Husserls last years was being done in the
intimately cooperative relationship of the Freiburg workshop.
8.4. Language as Transcendentally Ambivalent, That Is,

Meontically Paradoxical
If it is the function of language to be the articulation of the phenomeno-
logically speculative, that is, of the sphere of the intelligibility and truth of
phenomenology, thenas mentioned at the very beginning of the chapter
language has a paradoxical, double truth character. This was made a central
issue in Finks 1932 document, pivotal in Husserls own reading, the Idea of a
Transcendental Theory of Method, as the Sixth Cartesian Meditation is sub-
titled. There Fink attempts, among other things, to make clear how language
just does not function in transcendental phenomenology as a perfectly ade-
quated instrument for expressing an equally perfectly straightforward tran-
96. The fuller conception of in-the-world-situatedness comprises what Fink calls the
In-Stances. See 5.1.1.2 and in 7.2.1 and 7.2.3. For wakefulness, see 4.4.2 and 5.1.2.3.3.
97. E.g., Z-IV 76a, Z-VI XVI/3b, Z-IX IX/2ab, OH I 28, and OH-VII 36.
Language 477
scendental reection. The approach Fink adopts for that purpose is to take up
the classic idea of an analogia entis and apply it to the distinction between
mundane and transcendental being, so that the way phenomenological reec-
tion would relate to transcendental processes is analogous to the way other
reection would be related to existent processes in the world. But, Fink
points out, all natural language originates and is structured to apply within the
natural attitude, i.e., to be an expressive capacity for conceptualizing things in
being in the realm of the constituted, whereas the processes of constituting
action that phenomenological reection is trying to reach are not processes in
being but precisely have the character of pre-being. If, then, language is
used to express pre-being, that is, to deal with that which is not-existent in
the sense of worldly existence, it is being used beyond what it is equipped
to express and refer to. More precisely, in this peculiar transcendental analo-
gization language functions in a way likened to its natural language uses
because it really is applying to and serving the ontication that transcen-
dental reection imposes upon pre-being in order to deal with it as a theme of
explication.
Husserl is well aware of the problem Fink raises here, as his comments to
Finks text show regarding an essence-imposed doubleness of meaning.
Indeed, in Husserls own published writings he repeatedly makes the point
about the doubleness of the sense of phenomenological descriptions as
psychological and as transcendental; but while it is a doubleness of mean-
ing for Husserl, Fink nds it has to be recognized rather as a transformation
of natural meaning into its transcendental sense. This is no mere preferen-
tial nicety in mere terminology; it bespeaks the problem of the specic method-
ological character of the transcendental-mundane duality of semantic value.
Husserl is inclined to think of the transcendental as retaining the positive
content of intentional psychology, but now given new status as transcenden-
tal, e.g., as noetic constitutive agency. Finks opting for transformation,
98. CM6, p. 73 (VI.CM/1, p. 82).

99. CM6, p. 85 (VI.CM/1, p. 94).
100. CM6, p. 90 (VI.CM/1, p. 99).
101. CM6, p. 91 (VI.CM/1, p. 101).
102. CM6, p. 91 (VI.CM/1, p. 100).
103. On ontication, see 6.4, 7.1, 7.1.1, 7.2.1, 7.2.2.1, 7.2.3, 7.2.4, and 7.3.3.2.
104. CM6, notation 298 on pp. 8788 (VI.CM/1, p. 96); also notations 317 and 318
on p. 91 (pp. 100 and 101).
105. CM6, pp. 86, 87, 9394 (VI.CM/1, pp. 95, 97, 1023). Husserl takes up this
usage after Fink in notations 305, 318, 334, 336, 337.
106. See, e.g., Hua IX, Der Encyclopaedia Britannica Artikel, pp. 288 and 292ff.;
478 Language
however, cuts more deeply. His choice of wording has two aspects to it: it
emphasizes the starkness of the opposition that the dimension of proposed
new meaning raises against the meanings native to the expressions that have to
be used, and it raises the issue of the unsettling kind of positive intelligibility
that meaning possesses in this context. It is not a simple correction of content
in ones understanding that allows the shift to the transcendental; instead, the
intended transcendental meaning registers a protest, a constant rebel-
lion, against the natural sense in the very expressions that articulate the
transcendental meaning. Husserl would like to allow a genuine doubleness
of meaning, and the genuine evidential intuiting that for Husserl would
allow genuine positive grasp of the transcendental structure in question. But
Fink offers no attenuation of the constant rebellion of the effort to express
the transcendental in natural words and sentences. Thus all transcen-
dental explications have a special inadequacy, he writes, all concepts and
sentences in one way or another fall short and in a particular sense fail before
the demand that is, it seems, placed upon every predication (but especially the
scientic). Moreover, despite the effort to remove natural associations
as much as possible, still one can never succeed in abolishing the divergence
of signifying that is present in every transcendental sentence between the natu-
ral sense of words and the transcendental sense that is indicated in them.
Against Husserls effort to allow and fortify positivity, Fink sees the need to
acknowledge a deep radicality in the problem, but one that in the Sixth
Meditation is not given full expression. Fink explains he just is not able in this
draft essay to carry out the extensive preparation needed to clarify the
issue.
But his notes do not have to be so cautious, not being intended for anyone
translation by Richard E. Palmer, Phenomenology, Edmund Husserls Article for the

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1927), in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. by Peter McCormick
and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), pp. 27
and 29ff. Also see Husserls notation 308 in CM6, p. 88 (VI.CM/1, p. 97), and Crisis 72,
pp. 262 and 264 (Hua VI, pp. 266 and 268).
107. CM6, p. 89 (VI.CM/1, pp. 9798).
108. Ibid., notation 309.
109. Husserls notation 311 in CM6, p. 89 (VI.CM/1 p. 98).
110. CM6, p. 89 (VI.CM/1, p. 98).
111. CM6, p. 89 (VI.CM/1, p. 98), Finks emphasis.
112. CM6, p. 98 (VI.CM/1, p. 107), emphasis Finks.
113. Husserls insertion in notation 338 and his marginal comment in notation 339 on
CM6, p. 98 (VI.CM/1 p. 107).
114. CM6, p. 96 (VI.CM/1, pp. 1056).
Language 479
but himself, and certainly not for readers without familiarity with the full
panoply of relevant distinctions and considerations. That panoply is what we
have in the note folders he has left behind. Much of what they offer relating to
the present point has been covered in chapters 5 through 7, leading up to the
way the transcendental concepts in question have to be protesting concepts
because in the meontic logic of failure (see 7.1.1) they are un-nihilation
concepts (this latter a point to be picked up in a moment). One cannot simply
and straightforwardly speak of transcendental subjectivity as something de-
nite and determinate as either pregiven before the reduction or produced
after it, simply because transcendental subjectivity in its proper role simply
is not, in any genuine sense of the word is. The result is that any attempt to
speak of it is like trying to talk about nothing as if it were something. The
whole phenomenological discussion of the transcendental, therefore, is an
ontication with a bad conscience; it can only talk about the transcendental if
it rst onties it into thematizable determinacy, and then, in reective crit-
ical realization of that very fact, only in constant protest against its own
procedure. And this whole critique-discussion of analogy reveals that, in
the absence of any possibility of an analogia entis, one should speak instead
of a analogia meontica.
If it is true that the disclosure of ultimate transcendental constituting power
and process cannot lie in phenomenological evidencing, then, while signitively
meaning words may indeed be intentionally fullled by intuitionally given
determinateness in being, this determinateness can, in rigorous methodologi-
cal critique, only be the seeming of the transcendental ultimate (see 6.4 and
7.2.1). There is an inner change that structures construed in their positive
transcendental sensee.g., the experience thinking, and every activity that
phenomenological reection sees to be transcendentally operativetake on
of themselves through the reduction, as Husserl explains it, whereas Fink
proposes a specic reduction of language, which, in carrying the reduction
of the Idea of being one step further, would show that the push to ultimate
origination places the action of scrutiny of the transcendental before noth-
ingness. For if the constitutive origination of the transcendentally con-
115. Z-V VI/19ab (EFM 1). See the end of 7.1.

116. All ideas from Z-V VI/19ab. See the discussion of logos hamartikos in 7.1.1.
See also Z-VII XXI/15a (EFM 2), which equates metaphysical concepts as me-ontic
with protesting concepts.
117. Z-IX 57a and Z-XI 90a.
118. CM6, p. 73 (VI.CM/1 p. 81), notation 236; see also p. 74 (p. 83), notation 241.
119. CM6, p. 93 (VI.CM/1, p. 103), with Husserls rejection of this in notation 327.
480 Language
stituted is antecedent to being, then transcendental originating process also

transcends the Idea of being. Here is precisely where the fuller concept of
meontic methodology is needed, but in his outline-draft of the transcendental
theory of method, the Sixth Meditation, Fink stops short of that. The spe-
cial correspondences between concepts of what is existent and concepts of
what is pre-existent, by which the logical obverse of the ontological
analogia entis would be claried, are too difcult to pursue within the con-
nes of this Meditation essay.
Fortunately, however, Finks notes do indicate how this clarication must be
attempted, precisely in terms of the paradox that marks it. But as shown
earlier, and as the Sixth Meditation also implies, the meontic nature of the
analogy here does not mean relinquishing the meaning of being but rather
means recognizing the originatedness lying at its very heartif to understand
being means to take it in the concreteness of its appearing, i.e., as structured in
the articulative horizonalities of the eld of living experience which is the
world. That is, if the meaning of being is to be kept rigorously bound to
the concreteness in which alone it comes to be understood, viz., bound to the
experience humans have of it in the worldthe very binding that lies at
the center of phenomenological methodologythen originatedness is intrin-
sic to being in any actual hold it has upon and in human thought about it as
ultimate meaningfulness.
To speak of all this, to express it, is to fulll two tasks, despite the paradox
of doing so: (1) to make clear the methodological and self-critical demands
and limits imposed upon exposition at this level, and (2) to think being in its
originatedness as the very way, the only way within phenomenology by which
to give articulate expression to the dimension of originating power and pro-
cess precisely in its radical inaccessibility. This is the essential task that Fink
assigns himself: to take up Husserls manner of descriptive differentiation,
but in a more rigorous formation of concepts, i.e., by moving beyond worn
out and ambiguous terms such as objectivity, etc. to allow, as the occasion
calls for, surges of renewal done with both restraint and Pathos.

122. CM6, p. 96 (VI.CM/1, pp. 1056).
123. One should refer again to the all-embracing quest in Crisis to address the enigma
of all enigmas, the deepest essential interrelation between reason and being [Seiendem]
as such (p. 13; Hua VI, p. 12).
124. Literally, occasional upswings in a restraint of Pathosgelegentliche Auf-
schwnge in einer Verhaltenheit des Pathos, OH-V 37 (EFM 3). The notes that follow
(3748) sketch out ideas for Finks 1935 Dessau lecture, then in preparation; see 7.2.2.
On Pathos see 6.3.4.
Language 481
One must clearly not take all this as the license to unbridled ights of fancy;
it is a restrained Pathos that, given the framework of the analogia meon-
tica, restores speculation to a meaningful role within the economy of phe-
nomenological methodology, namely, as the method of the un-nihilating [or:
un-nothing-ing], the meontic productivity, of the Absolute; for here the
speculative statement deals with the Absolute precisely as meontic.
In this connection one cannot leave unmentioned Finks clear grasp of how
this task reassumes the step taken by German Idealism, but without becoming
thereby, like it, essentially speculative philosophy; for Fink practices spec-
ulation within phenomenological integration, as explained and as spoken of in
the previous chapter (see 7.1.1). More and more, then, as Fink moves into his
own thinking, developing speculation within the bounds of phenomenological
method becomes a prime task. For example, within what he would sketch out
as his own System of Philosophy the third and nal part names meontic
cosmogony as methodologically speculation. As we shall see, one can
with justice regard Finks later work, in the books that begin appearing after
1950, as carrying out this task. But that lies beyond the present work, and
here is where this chapter can be brought to a close.
One more topic, now, remains to be treated in order to complete the study
of the collaborative labors in phenomenology that preceded Husserls death in
1938, and that is the issue of the community within which language is spoken
and written, i.e., the question of intersubjectivity and the aspect this takes on
in fully bidimensional phenomenology, namely, as analytic and speculative
within meontic integration. We turn, then, to the nal expository chapter.
125. Z-XI 90a (EFM 2). On un-nihilating [Entnichtung] see 6.4 and the last portion
of 7.1.
126. Z-XI 39a.
127. Z-XIV V/3a (EFM 2). Parts 1 and 2 of this System would be cosmology as
demonstration and phenomenology of spirit as reduction. Cf. also Z-XI 10a (EFM
2). The conceptions involved here gure also into the treatment of construction in
7.2.3. The folders Z-XXV to Z-XXX (EFM 4) show this speculative focus in Finks
thinking.
128. See 10.3, and the titles given in the nal pages.
9
Corollary Thematics II: Solitude and

CommunityIntersubjectivity
A preliminary systematic reection, one giving a rst look, a rst inkling

of something new, of the total revolution that has become necessary, is
what the Cartesian Meditations offer you. . . . But only after the Fifth
is real understanding going to come, and [with it] the urgent need to
begin over again from the First.
Husserl to Ingarden, November 13, 1931
Philosophy is not a private matter, and its proper meaning, the meaning
by which true method is acquired, is that it can only be realized in the
partnership that joins philosophers in their work in a progress that is
endless. So also it is part of the duty of every philosopher to make this
partnership possible, and to be thus able in clear understanding to take
up the method therein acquired.
Husserl, manuscript Foreword to the Continuation of the Crisis,
spring 1937
1. BIng, p. 73 (Bw, p. 280). Husserl continues by pointing out that even in this a
really systematic presentation and the sketch of the wider problematicthe system of a
phenomenological metaphysics, is not thereby carried out.
2. HA K III 16, from February 1937, Hua VI, Beil. XIII, p. 439, drafted as a Fore-
word to the Continuation of the Crisis (p. 435).
482
Solitude and Community 483
The signal successes that Husserl experienced in the late winter and
spring of 1929 marked a high point in his life, the irony of which began to
show already in the summer that followed, to become soon afterwardas
chapter 1 recountedmore painful yet as the years proceeded, until his life
came to a close in 1938. Nevertheless, what began to unfold in February 1929
was a remarkable renewal and a consummate achievement for phenomenol-
ogy. In that month Husserl had given his Introduction to Phenomenological
Philosophy at the Sorbonne in the Amphithtre Descartes, the very hall
named after the father of French philosophy. The two-part address and the
reception his thinking received in Strasbourg during a stopover visit on his
way back to Freiburg led to his revising his Paris lectures into what we have
now as his Cartesian Meditations. But as chapter 1 indicated (1.2), no sooner
was that revision nished than Husserl was forced to recognize that his hand-
picked successor in the rst chair of philosophy in Freiburg, Martin Heideg-
ger, was not at all what he had expected. He now saw that there was little in
common between himself and the person with whom he once saw himself to
be cophilosophizing in close concord; and the newly nished work, his
Cartesian Meditations, now showed as the reections of a philosophic en-
terprise in which he was standing alone.
Yet not quite alone; for Husserl had come to recognize the force of the
young assistant at his side, Eugen Fink, and Fink was now entering more
and more into his philosophic regimen. The community of research Husserl
had thought he would realize with Heidegger was in fact forming with Fink.
Husserl would not after all have to try his ndings on the sole touchstone
of his own thought; and his Cartesian Meditations, most notorious for
its theoretical stance of solipsism, was now to be taken up into a communal,
collaborative effort that not only belied the apparent methodological isola-
tion enjoined in this text but also had as an aim the countering of that very
restriction.
Yet these meditations in the manner of Descartes, precisely by reective
withdrawal into monadic egoic solitude heightened and embraced, are meant
to lead to the mitigation and, indeed, the overcoming of that very isolation by
the discovery of the multiple of ones own monadic egoity in perfectly equiv-
alent Others. However, in the present-day understanding of human existence
as essentially milieu-bound in human association, especially in the develop-
ment years, we tend to disbelieve that the immanence of the absolute transcen-
dental ego, the solus ipse that the ego nds itself to be in its own reections, is
precisely the path to the transcendence of the Other. We tend to share
entirely the sentiment Husserl himself expresses in a marginal note here that
3. See 1.2 for a fuller account of this whole situation.

484 Solitude and Community
I-language and my-language are indeed dangerous! But what exactly

is this danger?
Plainly the remarks of Husserls to Ingarden heading the present chapter
indicate that a proper reading of the Cartesian Meditations has to be a second
reading, a reading that in a total revolution would transform the meaning
one might gain of it in a rst reading; but to grasp this radical meaning we need
more than just the text of the Meditations as we still have it; for the text as it
stands is precisely what Husserl deemed needed to be revised in order for it to
succeed in inducing the proper readingeven if still a second readingof a
still preliminary systematic reection. In other words, we need to take into
account the full setting of the further revision work that Husserl wanted done
on this dense, problematic text; for it is within that setting that Husserl writes
what he does to Ingarden. In sum, the text of the Cartesian Meditations in
Husserliana I (and translations based on it) is a not quite successful introduc-
tory presentation, and by far not a nal statement of Husserls transcendental
phenomenology. It is a vivid example of the need for a transformative reading
in vigorous methodological self-critique, if the total revolution that the text is
meant to promote is to be grasped. But for this transformation to be possible
the material that would display how to achieve this total revolution in ones
understanding has to be already worked into the text, even if it needs the
second reading to be fully grasped. Hence the whole point of revising the
Cartesian Meditations: a thoroughly corrective rewriting to make a pro-
foundly transformative rereading possible; and this is what the documents in
VI. Cartesianische Meditation give us when we take these two volumes to-
gether with the 1929 text in Husserliana I. If to this set we then join Husserls
Crisis and start lling out these two assemblages of summary texts with two
further kinds of material: (1) the working manuscripts that Husserl produced
during the period in question, and (2) the manuscript notes of Finks, we shall
4. CM, p. 90 (42), translation made here more literal than Cairns does; see Hua I,
p. 243. Cf. Finks remark on the danger of the I in regard to a meontic philosophy
in Z-IX 39a, late 1930 (EFM 2).
5. See also BIng, p. 78 (Bw III, p. 285), in Husserls letter from June 11, 1932which
is just before Finks undertaking his second set of revision texts. Husserl mentions the
revisions in his letters to Ingarden from December 2, 1929 (two on this date), March 19,
1930, February 16 and April 4, 1931 (and Malvines letter of May 14, 1931), and from
February 10, 1932 (all in BIng as well as Bw III). On this whole revision process see CM6,
pp. xxxii.
6. See Kerns sketching of some of the manuscripts Husserl produced from 1930 on,
Hua XV, pp. xlivlxx. Other manuscripts from the same period currently being edited at
Louvain are, e.g., late manuscripts on the reduction, and those from the C-group on
temporality.
be able to appreciate the thematic and methodological contours of the full phe-
nomenological system as Husserl and Fink had once hoped to present it.
It has to be remembered that the revision of the Cartesian Meditations came
to yield to Husserls alternative idea of composing an entirely new systematic
work, and that, in the end, both projects were displaced by his turning to the
Crisis-writings (see 1.4). But this does not diminish in the least what the
attempt to revise the Cartesian Meditations accomplished. The texts in the two
volumes of VI. Cartesianische Meditation show what beginning again would
be like when done in full recognition of the transformation that self-critical
recasting and systematic integration required. That is, following the explicit
determination of systematic demands, which is what the Layout of 1930
summarizes, Fink sought to show how in anticipation of the inclusion of a
specic Transcendental Theory of Method (as a Sixth Meditation) and via
the reorientations that rigorously applied reduction-led requestioning im-
posed, the ve already written Meditations of Husserls had to be in no small
part rewritten. Thus what Finks revision texts (in VI.CM/2) offer is a whole
set of ways by which the approaches to introducing phenomenology that
Husserl standardly followed have to be modied or replaced in order to enable
readers to comprehend the total revolution their reading was meant to convey.
Some of this we have already seen; but inasmuch as the direction of the
modications needed is, in Husserls sense of the way the Meditations pro-
gress, set by the outcome of the investigation of the issues in the Fifth Medita-
tion, it is by looking thereagain under the impact of principles gained by
self-critique, especially in a transcendental theory of methodthat we can
nd some rst determinative points for redoing the whole set. Moreover, hav-
ing come through the lessons of chapters 7 and 8, we can now see more clearly
how internal analysis and external speculation interplay integrally.
9.1. Lessons in Meditation V for Beginning Again

Treating the revision of the Fifth Meditation poses considerable dif-
culty. For one thing, Finks revisions for the Fifth Meditation were never
7. Again, see the project of the new systematic work described in 1.3. In the present
study, for the features of phenomenologys methodological system see in particular 2.3,
3.3.3, 3.4.2, 3.5, 4.1, 6.4, and chapter 7 throughout. Finks manuscript notes are given in
the four volumes of EFM.
8. See the end of 1.2 and the treatment in 1.3.
9. See 1.3, 2.3, 4.2, and 7.1.1.
10. See Husserls own anticipation of these exigencies in CMe (Hua I), 63 and 64.
11. See 2.6.2, 4.1, and 4.2.
carried through to the end; the drafts for it break off before carrying out a
transformed transcendental analysis of intersubjectivity. Husserl, on the
other hand, has a huge number of manuscripts that relate to the themes of this
Fifth Meditation, as exemplied by Husserliana XV. Lastly, Finks own re-
search notes offer points and ideas pertinent to the themes of the Fifth Medita-
tion, but in scattered and sketchy fashion rather than in integrated treatment.
For purposes of the present study we have to limit ourselves to those points
that dene the critique-directed interpretive perspective that was operative in
this revision. Now the fact that this perspective was formulated by Fink rather
than Husserl underscores its methodological thrust. Having worked so cen-
trally on critique-interpretive elements, Fink was obliged in principle to work
them into the Cartesian Meditations revisions; but doing this meant han-
dling them integratively as the speculative moment bound in mutual intrinsic
effect with analytic specics. Moreover, while, as one might expect, this will be
visible in Finks revision drafts, it can also be discerned in Husserls manuscript
studies; for if one studies the texts selected for Husserliana XV it is striking to
see orientations and conceptions typical of Finks own work in notes coming to
the fore in Husserls thinking precisely as elements now of his descriptive
reinvestigation of long-standing thematic phenomena, here intersubjectivity.
We have to take up, then, some of the transformative, reorienting elements that
emerge from a critical look at the results of the Fifth Meditation in the form it
had been given by Husserl in 1929 (which, again, is the text in Husserliana I).
9.1.1. Meditation V, a First-Stage Analytic

Finks revision of Meditation V was to begin with Husserls Fourth
Meditation, adding material to one section, 39, namely, Text No. 12 of
VI.CM/2, and replace two other sections, 40 and 41, with a wholly new
12. According to Guy van Kerckhoven (unpublished Vorwort for VI.CM/1 and/2,
pp. xxiii and xxiv, note 3 to p. viii), Husserls wish to send his original 1929 version of
Cartesian Meditations to Alfred Schtz in Vienna for the purpose of producing several
copies is what occasioned Finks having to cut short his revision of the Fifth Medita-
tion. Fink then turned to producing the Sixth Meditation. See HChr, p. 413, entry for
July 7, 1932, and Bw IV, p. 485, in Husserls letter to Schtz, July 25, 1932. See also Guy
van Kerckhoven, Mundanisierung und Individuation bei E. Husserl und E. Fink: Die VI.
Cartesianische Meditation und ihr Einsatz (Wrzburg: Knigshausen and Neumann,
2003), pp. 2001.
13. See VI.CM/2, pp. 31821, for sketches for the portions remaining to be done.
14. The exception, however, is Z-XVI XXIII/1a23a, notes directly for Finks revi-
sions, which, while brief, are trenchant. For details see this subset in EFM 3.
15. By way of example see Hua XV, No. 23 (November 1931).
one, Text No. 13, thus providing the transition to the Fifth Meditation as
it would be itself modied. The Meditations that precede Meditation V,
Fink explains in Text No. 12, have conducted an analysis of egoic structures
that in principle form up (are constituted) within temporality. In particular,
the Fourth Meditation has been dealing with the passive genesis that gives
rise to habitualities, which are the concrete content of an egoic identity.
Temporality itself, however, the constituting factor antecedent to the struc-
tures that are being analyzed, is not taken up for analysis at all. It is only
indicated as the process-frame within which the forming up takes place that
results in what is the main focus in the Meditations, namely, structures of
subjective experience in the now, in the present. The analysis in the Medita-
tions, then, in its regression to a transcendental ego, has a limited compass; it
is but the rst stage of regressive inquiry which, eventually but not in these
Meditations, has to be followed by the explication of the constitutive gen-
esis of immanent time itself, of the form of its life.
It is the now-phase of the life of the transcendental ego, therefore, that is
being analyzed in the Cartesian Meditations, and this life in a now-phase is
regressively reached from a starting point, a lead, a clue, in the phenome-
non of human experience. Each of these, the terminus a quothe now-phase
of human experiential lifeand the terminus ad quemthe transcendental
egoic present-phasehas a pregiven context, a pregiven horizon, and there
is a strict parallel between the two horizons; for the whole validity of the
regressive move is grounded in the legitimacy of a constitutive structural
linkwhat Husserl represents as a parallelbetween these two pregiven con-
texts. In each case this pregiven and presupposed context/horizon is that of
temporality, human immanently experienced, temporally streaming conscious
life in the one case, transcendental originative temporalization in the other.
But in virtue of this absolutely fundamental feature the linkage, the parallel,
has limitations.
On the side of human immanent life the now-phase is not only set within the
pregiven horizon of temporality, it is also determined by pregiven conditions
of the reach or range of human immanent life, the limits within which its
totality is determined. Human immanent life is delimited by the coliving of
other humans and by a beginning and an end, by birth and death, that are
16. 40 and 41 are to be dropped, Fink explains (VI.CM/2, p. 242, note 381),
because their theme, the question of transcendental idealism, is to be taken up in the
Sixth Meditation.
17. VI.CM/2, pp. 23940.
18. VI.CM/2, p. 240.
dened in terms of an origination and relationship process intrinsically involv-

ing other humans. And while this range-delimitation is all quite straightfor-
wardly given on the human side, it is precisely not manifest on the transcen-
dental side: the totality of transcendental immanent time is wholly hidden,
and with it the temporal reach [or rangeReichweite] of the ego, Fink ob-
serves. But can we ever come upon a rst action by the transcendental ego,
the rst moment in which the building of its essential structuration begins? It is
the question that Fink asked Husserl in his rst recorded one-on-one discus-
sion with him in 1927: Does the pure stream of lived experience have a
beginning, an end? Does worldly talk of death and birth coincide with the
problem of the beginning and end of transcendental time-consciousness?
The difculty is that the way to answer the question is not at all suggested by
anything about the ego yet at hand in its now-phase; for all we have so far are
the pregiven conditions beyond the connes of the now-phase on the human
side. Fink writes: Here certainly are matters for investigation that as limit-
problems for egological phenomenology can only be raised in appropriate
form when constitutive inquiry has gained methodic security in the concrete
analytic mastery of the proto-modal problems. The provisional status of
the regressive analytic of transcendental egoic intersubjectivity that follows as
the Fifth Meditation is thus dened: it will take up the structural disclosure
of transcendental other-subjectivity only within the frame of the proto-modal
phase of the now, leaving the whole question of how limit-considerations will
require reinterpreting those disclosures for a later stage. Thus the question of
the range of transcendental egoic efcacity, a pivotal issue for ecology in the
problem of explicating ultimate origination, is precisely one of the mat-
ters that requires going back over the Meditations from the beginning in
more radical reconsideration, and hence, too, in corresponding revision and
rereading.
If it is true that, then, as Husserl statedcautiouslyto Fink in reply to his
question, that self-constituting temporality cannot begin and end, then the
parallel only goes so far, holding for some features and not others; the reach of
transcendental constituting life is unlimited, that of human life limited. This
breakdown of parallelism means, then, that one has got to settle the manner of
the precise nature of the relationship between the transcendental and the hu-
19. VI.CM/2, p. 241.

20. See the text from Z-I 24a in 2.2.
21. VI.CM/2, p. 242, the passage that ends Text No. 12.
22. See 2.5, 2.6.2 to 2.6.2.7, 5.2.2.2, and 5.2.3.2.
23. Again, Z-I 24a in 2.2.
man before even those features that have regularly been asserted to stand in
exact parallel can be properly interpreted. In keeping with this critical realiza-
tion, Finks Text No. 13 replaces the two sections Husserl had written to end
his Fourth Meditation (40 and 41), and adds substantial modications
(Text No. 14) to the Husserlian section that begins the Fifth Meditation
(42).
So one of the things the investigation into other-subjectivity does is to force
much more acutely recognition of the limits within which the rst stage inves-
tigation of the Cartesian Meditations is presented. For in introducing the
dimension of other-subjectivity, Meditation V proposes to open up the fuller
dimensions of transcendental life. But explication of the fuller dimensions of
being for transcendental life is pursued via explication of the fuller dimensions
of human experiential life, viz., via the explication of the way in which consti-
tution of my own human life involves the living human Other. Thus, in order
to make clear the character of transcendental lifei.e., the transcendental life
that will be mine and the OthersI must make clear the nature of the self-
constitution of a transcendental ego as a human being. Here is something else
that the Fifth Meditation does not set out to do and that is one of the central
issues in the methodological critique in the Sixth Meditation.
For example, the way in which the I and the Other are alike transcenden-
tallythat is, are each transcendentally an Iis asserted on the basis of the
way I and the Other are alike mundanelyi.e., are each an I perceiving itself
and the other as both humans; but just what really makes for this equivalence-
relationship? Are the Other and myself alike in being the human self-
apperceptive cladding taken on by true transcendental agency, or are we alike
in being each of us basically a true transcendental existence, from which
results the similarity of cladding in human form? Here is where the analy-
sis of empathy becomes important in disclosing the full scope of transcen-
dental life on the basis of leads in human intersubjectivity.
9.1.2. Limitations to Egological Meditation

The question that has to be kept foremost in mind here has to be this:
What exactly is really being shown in the course of the analysis? If the analysis
of the operation of what is called empathyEinfhlung, i.e., feeling into
24. VI.CM/2, Texts Nos. 13 and 14, pp. 24243 and 24450. Husserl afrms this
structural parallel in CM 45.
25. See 7.3.3.2 for treatment of this matter.
26. See VI.CM/2, p. 243, Text No. 13.
anothers experiencing as felt by the other in himself or herself leads to my

apperception of another subject-pole of perception and apperception, this
may well show the possibility that the other subject can perform a phenome-
nological reduction as I have. But this merely indicates the possibility of tran-
scendental intersubjectivity, and transcendental intersubjectivity is in no way
evidentially shown [ausgewiesen] by the possibility of plural performances of
the reduction. At best the possibility of plural performances of the reduction
allows a multitude of egologies, without demonstrating that they can have
an intrinsic connection with each other. The only linkage these many
reduction-performing transcendental Is might have so far is that they all start
out from the natural attitude; they are intersubjective only in having a
common point of departure, namely, that each reductive action begins as that
of a human subject moving to take a stance of transcendentality with regard to
the phenomenon of human empathetic mutuality each nds within himself or
herself. Indeed, the reduction by each of many phenomenologically reect-
ing individuals leads precisely out of the starting-point intersubjectivity of
human being back to solitary transcendental egos; a mere multiplicity of
reductions, each egologically conducted, is in no way capable of bringing to
light an intrinsic linkage in being that is maintained specically within the
sphere of transcendentality.
Methodologically the only way to do this, to clarify transcendental inter-
subjectivity transcendentally, is to disclose regressively hitherto anonymous
horizons that surround the transcendental givenness of the ego. And the
Fifth Meditation proposes to begin this by inquiring into the transcendental
implications of empathy, therein to see if Other means simply a human
Other, or if the unfolding of the constitutive intentionality of empathy leads
27. On the sense of Einfhlung and the inadequacy of translating it by empathy, see
Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and
the Phenomenoloy of Edith Stein, Phaenomenologica 144 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997),
pp. 918; the richness of Sawickis study requires considerable inection in the concept,
e.g., as shown in chapter 3 of her book.
28. VI.CM/2, pp. 24748 (Finks emphasis), Text No. 14, for the beginning of the
Fifth Meditation.
29. VI.CM/2, p. 247, Text No. 14.
30. Ibid., emphasis Finks. Finks speaking here of a linkage in being, Seinszusam-
menhang, occurs prior to the methodological critique of all talk about being in regard to
the transcendental. This critique is what the Sixth Meditation provides, so that a return
to the beginning actually has to go not directly from the Fifth Meditation but through
the Sixth.
31. VI.CM/2, p. 249; see also p. 245.
back to constitutive strata in which the Other is a transcendentally existent

Other. What, then, does the analysis of this anonymous horizon of em-
pathy actually reach?
9.1.3. Protomodal Limitations in Empathy

In order for an Other to be a transcendental Other, rather than a mere
intraworldly human Other, the whole phenomenal system of the in-the-world
interaction of humans, among themselves and with other entities, has to be the
product of the constitutive activity assigned to all transcendental egos, myself
and others, all capable of making the move of reduction. This is what empa-
thy properly interpreted transcendentally is supposed to deliver, but which it
can only do if the specic, unique structural feature of feeling into the other
is maintained. Empathy, to begin with, is essentially a reversible experience.
Unlike perception, which only goes one way, the whole sense of empathy is
that of opening to the Other as Other, as a someone like myself but precisely
not myself. In the reduction, therefore, the double-ended nature of the empa-
thetic experience has to be retained. The experience of empathy is only
brought to full transcendental form when both ends are reduced, Fink
writes. The job of the egological reduction of empathy, rightly understood,
includes the egological reduction at the end of the Other, the positing in being
of the Other as in itself a transcendental co-subject; and thus the egological
reduction includes the immanent self-transgressing of egology.
Here is one element of the hitherto anonymous horizon that surrounds the
transcendental givenness of the ego, now disclosed as a previously un-
noticed transcendental Someone Else rather than a sheer anonymity. With this
double-endedness, now, something more than mere perception can enter,
namely, communicative joint action and experience; but this point is not clar-
ied in the Fifth Meditation, that is, exactly how I and the Other go from
cosubjectivity to intersubjectivity, even if the ground for it is given in the
double-endedness of empathy. But still unanswered is the question whether or
not either I-end of empathy is properly the true transcendentally active consti-
tuting agent, given that this reductively transformative disclosure amounts
to retaining an eidetic egoic structure that originates in human mundane exis-
tence and then transposing that structure to the transcendental level. Whether
it is my empathy or anotherswith the latter being established as transcen-
32. VI.CM/2, p. 249, again in Text No. 14.

33. VI.CM/2, p. 255 (emphasis Finks), in the penultimate paragraph of Text No. 16.
Also see Z-VII XVI/1a, EFM 2.
34. VI.CM/2, p. 249.
dental if mine can be, because the two cannot be separated in this phenom-
enonthe question of the principle for the legitimacy of the parallel and
coinciding between the human mundane and the transcendental still stands
unresolved.
Besides this, however, and relevant to it, there is another serious issue. In the
case of either my egoity and empathy or those of another, or others, the
analysis lies restrictively and exclusively in the protomode of the experience
of someone else. The exposition lies only at the base-level problem of mo-
nadological intersubjectivity. There is a wide range of various kinds of
modications or inections of this protomode that indicates issues at
a higher level that have to be at least mentioned. To put it another way, there
is a lot more to the worldand to having a worldthan just perceiving
bodies and apperceiving immanent selves here and now; and this more must
also eventually be explicated in constitutive intentional analysis. So Fink be-
gins to sketch out this more in his text.
There is, rst of all, the way protomodal empathetic linkage to others is
methodologically restricted to the here-and-now present, secondly the way it
is abstractly or generically considered rather than concretely, and thirdly the
way it is considered under certain assumptions of the norm for the human.
9.1.4. Modications of Protomodality

The full breadth of the experience of the world is not adequately indi-
cated if one considers individual or cooperative action or experience only in
the here and now, that is, if the analysis is of me as only a here-and-now I and
of others as only here-and-now present others. The world is in principle more
than the mere correlate of experience in the protomodal zone of intersubjec-
tivity; writes Fink, and one of the horizonal references it has to include
further relates to the experiential community of those who are not present, i.e.,
to the zone, or, better, to the zones of absence that keep being iterated.
Must one not ask if the endlessness of the world can be given its constitutive
clarication if it is related only to consciousness in the here and now, even if
multiply active, or must it correlate with the modication of the protomodal
moment so as to include nonpresent others?
Furthermore, again beyond protomodality, we cannot consider only those
with perfect coincidence in the span of time in which I and they are in con-

36. See appendix.
38. VI.CM/2, pp. 26566. See appendix.
scious action beyond the present, i.e., that we display perfect contempora-
neity. It is neither required nor the usual thing for others joined with me in
some present preoccupation to be all exactly the same age. It is normal that
our time-spans overlap variously: we are older and younger rather than per-
fectly contemporaneous. In a word, intersubjectivity has a historical character,
and history is intrinsic to intersubjectivity. But as soon as this is realized, the
question has to be raised whether or not the transformation of mundane
intersubjectivity to its transcendental counterpart includes this interweaving
of time-spans in a transcendental historicity, which would seem to imply
only a partial coincidence in the temporal duration of different transcendental
lives! These are all difcult open problems that we also deliberately leave
open, writes Fink; for one cannot just blithely speak of a transcendental
historicity without recognizing the seemingly facile duplication on the tran-
scendental level of specically in-the-world human characteristics. Here is
where the whole metaphoric concept of a transcendental community of
monads needs to be reconsidered, once we move past the preliminary stage of
entry represented by the Cartesian Meditations into the framing of it in
revision. (See 9.3.2 and 9.3.3.)
So far the limitation of protomodality has been considered exclusively in
regard to necessary modications to its sheer presentness; now, however, one
has to consider the issue-raising modication that pertains to the generic char-
acter with which both myself and the Other (or others) and my own and the
Others (others) experience of the world have been treated. The Other, for
example, is represented only formally or abstractly as an individual; the fac-
tors that make for genuine individualitybeyond the perfect equivalence of
pure multiples or duplicates of polar egoic functionare simply not con-
sidered. Those features of a personality that come across through linguistic
communication are one matter that would have to be considered. Then there
is the fact that I and an Other experience the world not as the world-in-general
but as familiar surroundings, as a home (in the sense of a common home area
and community, an abode, Heim). There are, thus, others who are familiars
and others who are strangers, and the sense of everyone, in speaking of an
object or the world as for everyone, rst applies to those who share this
home, rather than to a neutral, generic everyone. The objectivity of objects
and the world is thus at rst a relative objectivity, although even within this
one can discern perhaps an element of unconditioned objectivity in nature,
which could be recognized as the bearer of that which is relative to ones
39. VI.CM/2, p. 267.

40. VI.CM/2, pp. 269 and 272.
home abode, and in this way as the one same universal underlying world-
structure that reaches through all different worlds. Finally, others are not
sexless others; there is always a dimension of differentiation in terms of fea-
tures that hold a generative reference, i.e., fathers, mothers, children, siblings,
relatives, nonrelatives. Co-humanity is not a collective we but a we in
generative relations, Fink writes. That is, the temporal life within which the
Other is empathetically discerned is a temporal life not bereft of generative
process, and this is part of the whole phenomenon of historicity. One should
also at least mention in this connection bodiliness and instinctuality!
So how does this all t into a transcendental monadology? It is a matter
here of only indicating the problems that remain open, remarks Fink, for we
havent even completed the intentional analysis of the simpler sort yet.
Finally, there is the kind of modication that pertains to the abstractly
conceived norm of intelligence and capability assumed for both the I and the
Other. Here Fink does no more than give a brief sketch; there is no draft
working out the points. The blind, the deaf, the mentally ill, the animal
(normal abnormality!) are mentioned in this sketch, but only the merest hints
of the issues are given, again, as always, in relation to the question of the
content and legitimacy of the transformation of the human into the transcen-
dental by the reduction. All these modications, Fink points out, are not
merely supplementary matters; they do not just add on to the protomodal and
leave it as it is. For one thing, one cannot even recognize that the Cartesian
Meditations have been conducted within the constraints of protomodality
until those matters that lie beyond it are disclosed in at least an indicative way.
But more than that, these modicational features affect the sense we nd in the
protomodal itself. Not only does the modication present a reference to the
protomode, but the protomode itself receives from the intentional modica-
tion a layer of sense that radiates back [to it]. In other words, the crucial

42. VI.CM/2, p. 274.
43. VI.CM/2, p. 274.
44. VI.CM/2, p. 275.
45. Text No. 17 in VI.CM/2 ends with the mere title for this third topic, but a brief
outline is given in the text-critical apparatus on p. 319.
46. Fink asks, for example, Is reduction done on an animal possible? for one could
pose the idea that the animal is an intentional modication of the human. VI.CM/2,
p. 319. See the brief consideration in chapter 8, note 20 (in the appendix).
47. VI.CM/2, pp. 25960, expression in brackets added. This brief methodological
point of Finks lies within the passage that Husserl marks as unintelligible (notation
391; see note 36 above). The image in the quoted sentence is not so much that of a
question is the extent to which these other structural features of egoic life and
experience both in myself and in others, and in all of us in community, affect
the ready transferability of those main descriptive structures that in the Car-
tesian Meditations (in their familiar form in Husserliana I) are explicitly
asserted for a transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity that stand in
perfect parallel to the human and mundane.
9.1.5. Complementary Indications on Openings beyond

the Protomodal
The text of Finks revision drafts are a guide to the kind of second-
reading reinterpretation that must be done of phenomenology as transcenden-
tal, but they too, like the Meditations themselves, remain introductory at
their more critical, transformative level. These drafts of Finks grow out of a
comprehensive perspective on transcendental phenomenology, the theoretical
principles for which are far more explicitly stated in his personal notes, as we
have seen. We must look now at those notes that link the Cartesian Medita-
tion revision texts for Meditation V to the points of Finks systematic
recasting that have been operative for a variety of themes in phenomenology.
This will make our understanding of Finks drafts for revising the Meditation
V much clearer in their import for the requisite reinterpretive rereading of the
entire set of Meditationseven in the revision proposals for the rst four
that Fink also has writtenwhile at the same time allowing certain themes to
be developed on the specic topic of intersubjectivity, the focus of the present
chapter. And in this double axis, of principles and of investigative specics, we
comply with the very pattern that the phenomenological systematic imposes.
The gist of the critical points of revision in Finks new texts for the Carte-
sian Meditations can be seen, for example, in his notes for tutorial instruction
for visitors come to study with Husserl. One can also see in these summaries
a little more of the opening Fink was working out beyond Husserls framing of
phenomenology in the Meditations. For example, in the notes prepared in
substantive layer loaded onto an existent base as that of a ray of illuminating light
showing new colors and contrasts in an already known surface. The operative phrase is
eine rckstrahlende Sinnesauage.
48. N-EF brings together texts also available in EFM 12, but not included in that
article are the short revision notes directly keyed to the Meditations in Z-XVI XXIII/
1a23a, EFM 3. One should also look at sections 2 C, D, and E in Finks 1930 Layout
for the System of Phenomenological Philosophy (in VI.CM/2, p. 7), which refer to and
cover the critical points for Meditation V.
December 1930, the narrowness within which protomodality restricts the

phenomenological explication is explicitly highlighted, and Fink uses the issue
of historicity to sketch out the direction in which the problem it raises has to be
resolved. What is important to recognize, however, is, once again, the way the
principles of this systematic perspective have specic import in the details of
the analysishere, the analysis of intersubjectivity. Already in November
1929, for example, in a seminar by Husserl on empathy in the fall of 1928
(his last, and broken off early), Fink could recognize radical deciencies in
Husserls theory of empathy, because of his (Finks) already active speculative-
level critique and recasting of investigation-guiding conceptions. (1) Hus-
serls intentional analysis follows an unexamined popular ontology, namely,
that the Other is there for me primarily as an existent object. (2) Husserls
approach is presentialistic, which is an alternate way of expressing the pri-
macy of protomodality. Finally, (3) Husserl characterizes empathy in terms of
a presentication component for the appresentation via which to take the
body of the Other as of an I equal to myself. This we have to reject, writes
Fink, for the Other is not object-perceptually presented at all in empathy. We
see here the continuity between Finks revision work for the Cartesian Medi-
tations and his earliest effort in rethinking the systematic anticipatory per-
spectives (Finks expression; see 2.3) that governed the analyses of detail in
Husserls investigations, and yet also tended to close off other ways of describ-
ing the phenomena, other ways that the phenomena themselves would allow
or, more seriously, call for, once the restrictiveness of the initial guiding con-
ceptions would be recognized in the work of descriptions of a higher kind
(Husserls expression; see 2.3) and countered. Since just this sort of work of
revision in phenomenology is what we have been following from the begin-
ning, we can now integrate points from earlier chapters with the way the
phenomenology of intersubjectivity would have to be recast out of the critique
of protomodality in the Cartesian Meditations.
9.2. Complements from the Broader Critique Context

Among critique-directed shifts in earlier chaptersor in alternate terms:
in correcting and developing speculative projectionsone shift stands out as
overarching. If human experiential life is the source of clues to transcendental
constituting process (see 5.1.1.3 and 7.1.1), then that experiential life must be
49. N-EF, pp. 10610, from Z-VII XVI/2a5b (EFM 2).

50. See the early pages of 1.2.
51. The points following are all drawn from Z-IV 87a88b, emphasis Finks (EFM 1).
52. See appendix.
taken in its full concrete deployment if transcendental constitution is to be

attained in its true character and function. This, now, is the core of the way
Fink, in a foreshadowing of the approach eventually to be embodied in the
Crisis-project, drafts his proposal for redoing the rst of Husserls Carte-
sian Meditations. It takes some judicious writing over several pages to redraw
the overt Cartesian line of Husserls original text to reect this reorientation,
but by the fourth section of the text with which Fink proposes to replace the
whole of Meditation I, it becomes quite clear: we nd included in the
apodicticity of the ego the full concreteness of [my] inner life. . . . Apodictic
evidentness bets me not just in a wholly general way, but in my whole experi-
ential life; and this means my whole concrete I-life as life in the world. This
is what is the absolute presuppositionless given. But, once again, the trans-
formation of the world to its radical sense for phenomenological analysis
has to mean the transformation of the whole fullness of the world, namely, as
comprising in the concreteness of my experiential life both my immanent life
and that which its whole vitality is activated to be of, the transcendent to it.
Consequently, only if it is possible to counter the naively taken worldly charac-
ter of this concrete living experiential whole of my being in the world can
transcendental subjectivity be brought to disclosure in its character. To do
this, however, we have to gain insight into the nature of the identity of
transcendental and human-natural life, that is, the way in which my human
immanence in its status as phenomenon comes by a kind of coinciding with
transcendental subjectivity.
These familiar pointshere made explicit in the rewriting-rereading of the
Cartesian Meditationslead to several elements to be melded with those
gained in the critique of the protomodality that, typifying the Cartesian Med-
itations as a whole, give them their status as preliminary.
9.2.1. The General Horizonal Grounding for the

Empathetic Manifestness of Intersubjectivity
The revision of the Cartesian Meditations, when looked at in terms of
the two critique points of protomodal restrictiveness and the fundamental
status of the full concreteness of world-structured experiental life, may seem
53. VI.CM/2, p. 151. Fink writes his where I have put [my], in that he is speaking
of what Descartes discloses for himself. But in the sentence following Fink shifts to
speaking of my experience (my emphasis).
54. See VI.CM/2, p. 170.
55. VI.CM/2, p. 181.
56. VI.CM/2, p. 183.
to be the attempt to correct a wholly mistaken and miscarried approach. That

and how such a negative view would itself be a serious mistake becomes clear
when we recall the methodological necessity by which proper explication of
constitutive process depends upon elements in the very situation of restriction
that has to be critically and methodologically resituated; and this can be seen
in this very issue of disclosing the Other as both egoically active in regard to
me as I am of the Other, and known by me as an Other in ways that ground
rather than derive from egoic action itself. Showing this is a complex and
subtle matter, and a summary is all that can be offered here.
In the fall of 1928 as he was following Husserls early terminated lecture
course on Einfhlung, two remarks of Finks in his notes on Husserls treat-
ment are telling. The rst remark makes the point that the antecedency of the
I to the We has to be phenomenologically determined differently from the
antecedency of the I to objects. One has to distinguish the I of existence
from the I of phenomenological procedure; for the latter is to disclose the
transcendental grounds of the former, rather than be those grounds ipso facto
as phenomenologically operating. And the heart of how to make this clear lies
in the transcendental thematization of temporality qua In-Stanciality, in
which genetic analysis rst gets its phenomenological rights grounded.
Finks second point is made immediately after, namely, that the problem of
empathy is not a constitutive problem of objectness, but is the constitutive
problem of the performance-community [Vollzugsgemeinschaft ]. These
two comments refer us to matters dealt with in earlier chapters, which we shall
turn to in a moment, after indicating a bit more of the context of the two
remarks.
In commenting on Husserls analysis of empathy Fink was aware of the
critique of Husserl on this very matter that Heidegger had made in Being and
Time and was making in his lectures in the fall and winter of 19281929,
his rst as Husserls successor. Like Heidegger, Fink saw it as necessary to go
behind subject-object intentional acts on the explication of empathy, but
against Heidegger Fink found that merely declaring the ground for empathetic
union to be Mitsein (being-with) did not actually resolve the problem but
only pushed it back to another level. Here Fink is integratively criticizing
57. U-IV 4445 (EFM 1), emphasis Finks.

58. Ibid., emphasis added.
59. U-IV, p. 45.
60. BTst, 26, p. 117 (SZ, p. 125).
61. See footnote 54 in 1.2.
62. See Z-IV 87b88a, from late 1928 or early 1929 (EFM 1), Z-XV 42ab (from the
both Husserl and Heidegger within the general move of regressive analysis by
which structural elements need to be explicated constitutivelythat is, in
terms of transcendental originationby reference to something about human
existence that is genuinely antecedent to human being, even if human being is
ontologically designated as Dasein in Heideggers sense. This takes us back,
then, to the point that the explication of temporality has to include the way
temporality shows as In-Stanciality; for In-Stanciality is the structure which
regressive analysis takes as the clue in human phenomena in order to disclose
transcendental conditionshere, the integration of transcendental constitu-
tive action across individuality, i.e., transcendental intersubjectivity.
9.2.2. Two Prime Features in the Grounding

of Intersubjectivity
Chapters 2 to 5 detailed the way in which, as phenomenological re-
gressive analysis proceeds, two structures grounding egoic act-intending
viz., world-horizonality and the performance factor of living conscious-
ness have to take over the role of basic constitutive effectuation initially
assigned to egoic act-intentionality, and do so because of the entre to con-
stituting process and conditions that reection on act-intending acts has pro-
vided. In other words, the construal of the egoic subject as constituting agency
is the step of inquiry that both validates the initiating disclosive effect of this
same construal and nevertheless, when phenomenologically reassessed criti-
cally, leads to its being relativized. In the end, it can only be considered as
transcendental when identiedspeculativelyas the self-objectivation and
self-enworlding of true transcendental constituting agency, in the full spread
of constitutive process especially in the fundamental mode of operative inten-
tionality. Here is how the two points just spoken of in the previous section
take on their signicance.
If, then, (1) it is in the horizonal In-Stance determinations that alone the
continuum of acts, the full content of the primordial sphere, can play out,
i.e., if it is in terms of In-Stance determinations that the features analyzed
within the methodologically chosen protomodality of the Meditations (and
of other writings of Husserls as well) are to be ultimately explicated, and
if, further, (2) these same In-Stancial determinations are the conditions for
early 1930s), and, again, from notes on revising the Cartesian Meditations, Z-XVI
XXIII/10ab.
63. On these see 2.6.2.6, 2.6.2.8, and 4.4.1 to 4.4.3.
64. Again, Z-IV 87b88a, quoted in 9.2.1.
phenomenological investigation itselfin that they are conditions for the very
life and action of consciousnessthen, because of the unique cross-boundary
status of the In-Stancial in phenomenological investigation, In-Stancial deter-
minations can only be made manifest in a regressive move that works its
description by retro-application. That is, ultimately the clarication of In-
Stancial determinations can only be articulated speculative-meontically (see
5.1.1.2, 6.3.6, and 6.4). Adequate cognition is only possible for the intra-
horizonal (only for objects), and in no way for horizons (In-Stances), Fink
writes. One cannot go in full, direct adequacy to these determinationsin
their being constitutively both (a) conditioned by the horizonally multidimen-
sionally productive action of proto-temporality, and (b) the very actuality of
that horizonal action in the particular instance of a concrete experiential en-
gagement with appearing phenomena in the world on the part of an actual
experiential being also intrinsically in-the-worldbecause the restricted focus
of the protomodal only allows explicit thematic givenness, viz., that of an
object in presence. And yet, this restricted focus is what the investigation must
start with, even if, once on its way, the investigation has to resituate that
starting point protomodality within the structures that are constitutively ante-
cedent to that protomodality, and that cannot be disclosed determinately ex-
cept indirectly, mediately, regressively through them. In short, the Cartesian
Meditations could not be written except as having to be rethought, rewritten,
and reread.
Tentative and scattered as they are, then, these indications of Finks for
positively determining the In-Stances are nonetheless needed and helpful, as
summarizable in the following way:
1. In-Stanciality is the concretization of temporality as a structural factor in

human existence. (Again, see 5.1.1.2.)
2. The I and the We have to be understood in terms of In-Stancial determina-
tions (9.2.1); and both the otherness and the corporeality of the Other are
to be determined in their sense primarily out of In-Stanciality, not from
objectness.
3. The In-Stanciality of my I and of the Other-I, and by implication therefore
of the We, intrinsically involves the existence of the I as an I; the Other, no
less than myself, is not simply a presumptive I but one recognized as exis-
tentially effectual.
65. Z-VII XXI/8a, EFM 2.

66. The elements all involved here will be taken up again in the next section, 9.2.2.1.
67. Again, Z-IV 87b88.
68. Ibid., together with U-IV 4445 (EFM 1); see 9.2.1.
These points can be brought into focus more sharply when the critical
characterization is made of the limitations imposed upon the topics of Medi-
tation V by the methodological restriction of protomodality. Therein one sees
that, concretely taken, empathy is not so primitive as to touch upon mere
objectness and mere subjectness; it could hardly work as empathy if that is all
it involved. Rather, empathy functions precisely via the range of habitualities
and peculiarities in the Others individual inner life, his moods, his close
thoughts, things that may not show on the objectlike surface. It is rather the
individuality, of the other, his or her uniqueness and distinction from me
and everyone else in higher psychic life, that becomes accessible to me
through communication and is not included in this general appresentation.
Though Fink does not mention it here, one should also argue for a similar
individuality precisely on the part of this living body that is rst per-
ceived. The living body itself, in its habitualities and peculiarities, is far from
being an undifferentiated neutral corporeality, particularly if the face is taken
into considerationnot to mention sexual and/or gender differences (which
Fink does mention in terms of the generative character everyone has; see
9.1.4). All this as the concretely living form of eidetically analyzable action
and conguration such as Husserl begins to detail in Ideas II certainly enters in
as soon as one begins to consider the communication by which higher psychic
life is expressed and discerned, i.e., as soon as one begins to consider gesture
and language.
Accordingly, when protomodality gets thematized and questioned and
thereby placed in its larger context, we can anticipate the recasting of dualistic
approaches to both body and language not just in revisiting and rereading all
ve Meditations but in phenomenology in general. The living body [Leib] is
more than an object, that is, it is an object that acts integrally as a subject, and
this breach in the sheer objectness of the object in questionwhich has
equally radical implications on what mind has to be taken to meanre-
quires an analysis specically betting the phenomenon of empathy precisely
as being the appreciation of the Other primarily and fundamentally as an
object-that-is-a-living-subject.
This, now, is what seems implied by Finks deepening of the problem of
empathy not as a constitutive problem of objectness but as the constitutive
problem of the performance-community. Let us approach what this per-
formance means by way of a closely connected issue. A note from the very
period of the revision work on the Cartesian Meditations takes up the issue of
69. VI.CM/2, Text No. 17, p. 269.

70. Again, U-IV 45, referred to several times now.
reection, criticizing its construal (1) in terms of the opposing of subject and
object, I and it-object, against each other, and then (2) in terms of taking the
subject also as an object in its reecting upon itself. In this traditional doc-
trine self-consciousness reection is a turning-back upon itself. Reection,
however, is better understood not in terms of thematic consciousness; its act of
iteration is not a thematizing-and-presencing of itself-as-object but rather
simply an expression-mode of performance-conscience.
Everyday self-understanding, i.e., an ordinary self-awareness in our
day-long activities, is not a thematic knowing, but is a living-therein, a
performance-knowing that nevertheless has acquired a certain objectivation.
Performance-understanding . . . is an understanding as a having. The knowing
a human has of himself is a non-objectal knowing. Here reection has its
grounding in a self-aware living very close in kind to empathy; it is the non-
objectal level of living performance whose fundamental process as temporali-
zation is an integration-in-its-operating that ipso facto unies its various di-
mensions. To put it another way: the awareness I have of another is grounded
in the same operation of consciousness wherein I live in implicit awareness of
my own consciousness. To focus consciously upon that Other is to work an
expressive modication of the base-level awareness of the Other that is analo-
gous to the expressive modication by which I can consciously focus upon my
own experienced being or any of its particular aspects.
It has to be admitted that the specics of this general picture remain sketchy;
it is not much more than a general conception drawn from the schema-shift
resulting from the methodological demand to pass beyond the dominant re-
strictive schema of protomodality. Further explication of it remains still to be
done in a transcendental phenomenology. All the same, a further point of
principle about it has to be reviewed, namely, how performance conscious-
ness, even were its elucidation worked out, can be taken as disclosive of tran-
scendental agency and process.
9.2.2.1. In-Stanciality, the Meontic Reading

Finks concept of the In-Stance is predicated upon two ideas, (1) that
there is a non-object-aiming intentionality operative prior to, and the condi-
tioning ground for, egoic act-intentionality, and (2) that the stratum of this
non-object-aiming intentionality lying within mundanely human being is the
71. Z-XV 67a, emphasis Finks, bracketed insertion mine. See 2.6.2.9, 4.4.3, 5.1.2.3.3,
6.3.2, and 6.3.4.
72. Z-VII XXI/14a, emphasis Finks (EFM 2).
best arguable legitimate gure for transcendental processes, even though it,
too, fails as ultimately improper in terms of the paradoxical meontic logic of
failure (see 7.1.1). The rst of these ideas pertains directly to the distinction
between the protomodal and the horizonal, while the second concerns the
issue of the parallel between the features of human psychological subjectivity
and the structure of proper and ultimate transcendental subjectivity. A full
transcendental thematization of temporality as In-Stanciality, then, re-
quires more than a straightforward positive second-stage reading of the Car-
tesian Meditations; it ultimately requires a meontically speculative reading
as well, according to the procedure explained in the previous chapter (7.1
to 7.2.4).
Given the methodological necessity of regressive analysis as the only kind of
approach that can be taken to the transcendental, and given the conception of
the transcendental as that whose whole function is to constitute, the status
of In-Stancial determinations is clear: the In-Stancial is the ontied gure of
the self-enworlding, self-objectifying of transcendental originative process in
the actuality-domain of the outcome, the result of that very process. But the
In-Stancial has a special status among constitutive results in that the In-
Stances are the ways of stationing within time, of being concretely structured
intratemporally, for that being which nds temporality to be the essential
structuring of its own being. (See 5.1.1.2.)
This stationing within time (and being) in various modes must not be con-
ceived in terms of object-intending acts. The self-objectivation of the tran-
scendental subject by which it becomes actual, and at the same time becomes
something it can itself come to know, is not a matter of making-itself-into-
an-object (into a Gegen-Stand), but rather of setting itself into the system of
In-Stances (Instnde). In the end, to be set into the system of In-Stances is to
be set into, and given concreteness within, the temporality of human exis-
tence, wherein the most important feature for human In-Stancial constitu-
tion is limitedness, niteness. Thus it is that features of niteness are
intrinsic to the possibility of experience, and thus it is that seemingly quite
untranscendental features have to be taken as possessing prime In-Stanciality:
The possibility of such a thing as an object rests on the comprehensive whole
73. See again U-IV 4445 (EFM 1), referred to frequently in 9.2.1 above.
74. See CM6, pp. 107 and 14142 (VI.CM/1, pp. 11718 and 156).
75. See 5.1.1.2, especially where Z-V VII/2b is briey quoted.
76. See again 5.1.1.2, the treatment around the brief citation from Z-IV 44b.
77. Z-IV 81a (EFM 1); see also the nal paragraphs in 5.1.1.2, where Z-IV 130a is
briey cited.
of In-Stances. Only out of the ecstatic horizon of In-Stances: historybirth

being-withfatedeath, can experience rst happen. With this we are
returned to the question of the Other.
However, there is an ambiguity in the way the In-Stancial is characterized
that has to be resolved if a meontic reading of In-Stancial structures is to be
done. The In-Stancial has been spoken of as horizonal, but there are several
meanings this can have. As we have seen in the critical situating of proto-
modality in the Cartesian Meditations, one element termed horizonal is that
which is left out of specic thematic focus in protomodal analysis. (See 9.1.4.)
The horizonal in this regard, however, is mainly that which is not in objectal
focus by thematic restriction, rather than by any inherent unthematizability.
The protomodal criterion relegates certain thematic material to the side, but
that material certainly can become thematic and objectally focal if the com-
pass is widened beyond the protomodal, as, indeed, happens in Finks text
itself, at least briey. Such material consists of items that are in horizonal
potentiality but are not themselves the horizonal frame-structure itself.
Thus we see the second sense of horizonal, namely, the horizonal itself,
the kind of structure that cannot in principle become objectally actual and
thematic because it is specically horizonal in its essence. Here the sense of the
horizonal in Finks critical elaboration has to do with the constitutively struc-
turing character of such factors as spatiality and temporality, especially in
their depresencing function. (See 5.1.1.1, 5.1.1.2, and 5.1.1.4.) But there is
a further sense as well, one that emerges directly from the horizonal in this
second sense when it is examined as to its constitutive origination. This is
the case for the originative character of prototemporality in its swing-
constitution of the primary dimensions of time. (See 5.1.2.3 to 5.1.2.3.2.)
This third sense of the horizonal is indicated in Text No. 14, the revision text
that would actually begin Meditation V, where Fink makes clear that the
problem is precisely one of disclosing and detailing the transcendentally hori-
zonal, that transcendental sphere of being that reaches beyond the ego
and that, in this context, betokens a transcendental intersubjectivity. This is
in principle not something already determined and merely lying there waiting
to be made intuitionally focal and thematic. Rather, here we are dealing with
something that lies beyond the conditions of determinacy, having to do with
originating these conditions themselves. Here we come back to the core
problem that Fink nds in the Cartesian Meditations and that comes to such
forceful detailing in the Sixth Meditation, namely, the problem of the meth-
78. Z-IV 55a (emphasis Finks); also cited in the nal paragraphs of 5.1.1.2.
79. VI.CM/2, pp. 24546.
odologically determinable status for the positive description of the transcen-

dental when all terms for its determination are only regressively applicable,
i.e., are drawn from that which is the result of the transcendental in its origi-
native action. This is the case when the closest thing to a proper conceptuality
is attained in In-Stancial determinations. One need only add here that the
plan was for these issues to be taken up not in the ve protomodal Medita-
tions themselves but in the two new Meditations Fink was to write, the
Sixth on the transcendental theory of method, and the Seventh on phe-
nomenological metaphysics and the absolute science of knowing. The
plan was only partially carried out, namely, in the composition of the Sixth
Meditation.
Accordingly, we shall progress toward treating this fundamental issue
through several themes pertaining to intersubjectivity.
9.2.2.2. The Performance-Awareness of Being With an

Experiencing Other in the In-Stance of Plural Humanity
If being-with is horizonal and antecedent with respect to perception of
both things-as-objects and the thing-as-object aspect of Others, that is, if
being-with is an In-Stance constitutively coincident with the experience of
temporality and the world, with living experience itself as temporalized and
worlded, then there must be a way to point to indications of this within the
range of details and structures that Husserls phenomenology has disclosed
and described, for example, in Meditation V.
There are three ideas that perhaps are most helpful here. The rst is that one
is not to look for some one single foundational element standing as base for
the coherence of other elements. Unlike the situation in which egoic object-
aiming gaze singles out one reduced area of focusin protomodal presence,
for exampleand builds out from it in a repetition of intentional object-
aiming, the play of In-Stancial structures conditioning object-aiming inten-
tionality is that of a globally encompassing complex. Thus the In-Stancial
account of empathic awareness of another as acting and experiencing for
himself or herself does not predicate some transfer of meaning from a rst-
known primary core to a secondarily known analogue. Neither is my own
80. On the aims of the Seventh Meditation, see the general tasks sketched briey for
the material to follow the rst ve Meditations in Z-XVI XXIII/16a. (The analysis of
temporality, mentioned in this note, would, however, be provided by Finks editing and
explanatory treatment of both Husserls Bernau manuscripts and the more recent ones he
had been writing, the C-group. (See the opening treatment of chapter 5, up to 5.1.) See
also 7.3 and 7.3.1.
being known rst either by itself or within protomodal restriction. Rather,

being-with another already belongs to man, with man taken to mean
the summation of In-Stancialities.
The situation is not one that would simply dissolve the egoic into the eld-
network of the In-Stancial. The I is not a mere appendage or simulacrum that
merely seems to have a function, exercising object-aiming intentionality. Egoic
thematic consideration of something, conducted in explicit awareness of that
action as thus focally aimed, may not be the model of primordial constitution,
but that does not mean it is without a distinctive effect of its own or without
specic value as egoic. Rather, one has to have a many-leveled view: Original
time is nothing other than the I in the concretization of its In-Stances.
The second idea, now, concerns the way in which one is already familiar
with this summation of In-Stancialities that ultimately would be recognized
(speculatively) as the concretization of originative time. To explicate this,
Fink sets Heideggers approach aside (though not without signicant inu-
ence from him) to work within Husserls transcendental program, albeit under
radical recasting. He begins with the situation from which the reduction be-
gins, a whole richly articulated complex of possible ways of being-amidst
things in the world, which is what Husserl calls experience [Erfahrung].
Experience is the name not simply for focal perceptual aim but is instead the
formalized title for all modes of being-amidst things, writes Fink; and the one
who carries through this experienceperforms itis an actual someone in
the concretization of the In-Stances, i.e., in the concretion of perfor-
mance. But this still leaves open what the sense of performance is, and for
this we turn to the third idea, relating to Husserls well-known analysis of
kinesthesia in his phenomenology of the body.
Husserls analysis focuses on the role that bodily sensation has in the percep-
tion of objects, but the question to be raised now is how kinesthetic sensation
that serves the aisthesis of other things can, as performed bodily movement,
be awareness of itself precisely in its going on. Granted that kinesthesia is a
necessary component, for example, in the tactile and visual discernment of
81. Z-IV 88a.

82. Z-IV 54b, emphasis Finks; see the treatment around the citation of this text in
5.1.1.2, and see also 5.1.2.3.1.
83. See Z-IV 27ab (EFM 1), to be compared with BTst, pp. 45 and 137 (SZ, pp. 48
and 146).
84. See Z-IV 27b; see also 5 of Finks Vergegenwrtigung und Bild (Studien, pp. 14
16). The translation of Sein-bei in Finks note as being-amidstan explicit borrowing
from Heideggeris Hubert Dreyfuss, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heideg-
gers Being and Time, Division 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 4445.
85. See 5.1.2.3.3 and 6.3.6.
things other than oneself, one must all the same ask: Does kinesthesia have
noematic correlates? Fink is compelled to reply that this cannot be the way
of its sensing itself in its own movement. Kinestheses, he writes, do not
themselves have an apparential moment, nor are they egoic accompaniments
to movement. And Fink rejects a thesis Landgrebe had proffered that the
I-ness of the I in self-understanding must be dened by the constancy of the I
am doing. For I-consciousness cannot be characterized adequately in terms
simply of function-consciousness (performance-consciousness).
If, then, the question of empathy is not a question of objectal conscious-
ness but rather one of how the community is constituted as a performance-
community, then the awareness of others intrinsic to performance has its
primary feature only in the very character of empathy as empathy, that is, as
pathic. It is as felt living, as feeling-awareness, that the consciousness in
question here is self-awareness, or awareness of others.
Fink, however, nowhere explicitly offers this suggestion, namely, that
performance-consciousness might be interpreted as living felt action, and that
In-Stancial dimensions of performancein principle, therefore, also being-
withshould be dealt with as felt in order not to be in any way thematic
intending. Yet it is implicit in his complementary emphasis on wakefulness
and on the pathic nature of life as such as we saw these two themes drawn
together, for example, in 6.3.4. If, therefore, the fundamental character of
experiential life is that it be living, and if living means being pathically co-
incident with ones own movement, if lifes own movement is a lived-felt
movement, an Er-lebnis, then any In-Stancial dimensions, i.e., any of the
various primary concretions of constituted life as human being, would be felt
dimensions; and this would be the consciousness factor of performance-
consciousnessincluding that of a performance-community. It may seem ba-
nal, but it comes down to saying that being-with is a living-feeling-with, em-
pathy is at bottom grounded in the felt withness that is intrinsic to living, to
temporally constituted being-human in the rst place; and the fellow-feeling
of empathy does not need mediation by perception in order to be effective.
In sum, an intrinsic feature of wakefully feeling ones own openness to and
placement within the world is that it is shared, and it is a sharedness that is
horizonal, not focal. Accordingly, while distinctness and difference may in-
deed be given through perceptually focused notice, and while some kinds of
perception may accentuate distinctness to the point of dominance, as for ex-
86. Hua IV, 18a; Ideas II, pp. 6063.

87. Z-I 137b, from Finks dissertation-preparation period, EFM 1.
88. Z-XI 63a, a text datable to 1932 (EFM 2).
89. Again, U-IV 45, emphasis modied.
ample in objectifying science, empathic sharing is cast as achieved basically in

antecedence to already grasped entitative separation and is not grounded by it.
Moreover, the empathetic sense is what permeates perception of the Other as
more than just another thing, as rather another selfin other words, it is what
grounds the analogizing that plays so central a role in Husserls analysis in
Cartesian Meditations.
9.2.2.3. The Materiality of Performance-Consciousness

There is, however, one further aspect of the whole analytic of empathy
that has not yet been dwelt on sufciently but is of fundamental signicance,
namely, that it takes cognizance centrally of the body. In Husserls analysis in
the Meditation V the body is that object the thematic perception of which
mediates discernment of the Other as not-just-body, as a coequal subject in a
second dimension, that of the psychic, even if this second dimension is
fused integrally to the rst, despite not being accessible as is the rst. But in
the approach taken by analysis in the reconsideration stage, wherein empa-
thy gets valorized as fundamental, performance-consciousness is an exercise
intrinsic to a phenomenon that is not differentiable in terms of the alternatives
of body and mind but has instead a character antecedent to that distinc-
tion. The body here is the living/lived body, Leib, not Krper, and the credit
for opening up this option is Husserls.
Nevertheless, the question must be raised about the way this lived/living
character of Leib affects how one conceives of its materiality factor precisely
in its character as living and lived. The analyses of body (Krper), living/lived
body (Leib), and material substance in Ideas II work in terms of a layering,
a hierarchical founding of successive qualitative strata of phenomena, from
sheer extension in body and material substance to differentiated kinesthetic
and expressive richness in living/lived body. Granted that these layers inte-
grate in the living/lived body, becoming transformed into the distinction be-
tween innerness and outerness, nevertheless features of each layer re-
main distinctive, dening them as layers rather than uniting them, serving at
best in a functional integration, for example, in a process of mediation for
cognitive apprehension; and materiality, accordingly, remains in a denite
sense extrinsic to the self-awareness of the living self in a residue of the Carte-
sian distinction between substance as extension and substance as thought.
What would materiality mean, however, in the context of performance-
consciousness, in the In-Stancial complexity that includes empathetic being-
90. See Hua VIII, 35.

with? What features of bodiliness come to the fore when the analytic shift is
made from the protomodal to its horizons? What is the precise meaning here
of nature around and confronting me and nature within and animating
me? How is my being as bound to structures and currents of living material
existence in the world, closely consorting with others in just these ways, to be
treatede.g., ones homeland and sustenance and the generative relations of
sexuality, birth, and death? (See the latter part of 9.1.4.) Central questions of
In-Stanciality in these respects require a phenomenological clarication that
cannot be made entirely intelligible in an ontological philosophy, Fink
writes. For captivation in the worldWeltbefangenheithas quite pro-
nounced features that underscore the subjugation to a cosmic order that
marks human being; nite being shows powerlessness with regard to both
its own being within and the being without that surrounds it. Powerlessness
is a feature of In-Stanciality. We live a limited span of time, we are exposed to
accidents of all kinds, and cognition itself exhibits limitation in its capabil-
ity. Then there are the regular experiences of sleep, dreams, fainting, apa-
thy, etc., sleep and fainting being conditions where consciousness is at its at
its extremity, namely, becoming simply passive. As living subjectivity human
consciousness may be an agency whose being is dynamic process, but its func-
tioning has no world-objectivating force, it is powerless.
From the point of view of the reduction, i.e., from the point of view of
transcendental constitution, human powerlessness is that of being subject to
structures around and within itself that are not of its own doing. Human being
is not the agency of the genesis of the world; human being is in the world, not
creator of it. The status of the world as (a) the overarching horizonal structure
for human experience and (b) an essential product of the constitutive dynamic
of prototemporality is exhibited within the world by the way nature is inde-
pendent from human power both in its role (a) as the all-comprehensive, all-
pervasive element in the milieu of human life and action, and (b) as a basic
internal constituent in human life and existence. And both this independence
on the part of nature, and the correlative powerlessness human being feels
91. Z-XI 82a. Finks word here, entirely, is more graphic: literally taken restlos,
without residue, i.e., without a remnant resistant to the explanation in question.
92. Z-XV 113a. See also EFA Z-XI 54a, Z-XV 22ab, Z-XVI 1a; also VI.CM/2, pp. 58
and 60.
93. Z-VI 30b.
94. See Z-XIII 39a and Z-XIII LX/5a.
95. Z-VI 11b. The German Ohnmacht can mean powerlessness as well as fainting.
96. Z-II 49a. See also Z-VI 40a49a, among many notes on sleep.
97. Z-VII XVII/31ab, emphasis Finks, dated September 1930, at Chiavari.
regarding it, are internal to human being precisely in its bodiliness, in the living
materiality of its being-in-naturewhich is the concrete form of its being-in-
the-world. At the same time, it must be said that this powerlessness is merely
the other side of the way nature is as well a ground precisely for the exercise of
the power human being in fact also haswithin its limits; and again bodili-
ness marks this.
For human being, then, concretely considered, constitutedness is manifested
in the sensuous materiality of experienced human bodiliness. The thereness,
mass, thickness, presence, resistance, and force that are felt and lived both
within oneself and as intrinsic features of ones place and action with others
among things are the core features from which the materiality of human being
must be reinterpreted. Correlatively, the awareness structured into the very
exercise of ones being, i.e., the felt performance-awareness of beingof ones
own being, of the being of others, and of the being of nonhuman material
thingsis where the dimensions of discernment other than that of the visual
begin to come into their own, that is, the more material, and materially sensi-
tive, tactile and kinesthetic gnostic capacities of bodily being. These are di-
mensions that the Crisis-texts aim to integrate into the phenomenology of
origination centered on the world-ground for human life and thought as a
constitutive result, though with ambiguities that Finks critique tries to think
through and resolve. Finally, it is only when these ambiguities are claried that
not only spirituality but materiality as well, via its character as sensuously
lived and felt owing being, can be recognized as clues to the nature of the
transcendental. (See 6.3.4.) In a word, human being, the human form, needs
to be taken as nature with a human face, as Husserl phrases it in a text
placed at the very end of Iso Kerns edition of materials on the phenomenol-
ogy of intersubjectivity. Yet this, too, must not be taken one-sidedly. Na-
ture may be a global external and internal condition, but in bearing a human
face it is no longer nature in its ordinary (or even scientic) sense; in acquiring
a human face and it is not just something with a mere additional unit of the
same. Nature now becomes another kind of nature, it becomes an individual
self, or rather many such selves.
98. One could also add, drawing intimations embodied in Finks notes one step
further, that, if the body is thus materiality, then materiality as such needs to be reconsid-
ered, to the point of its not being able to be a univocal conception. Materiality, in other
words, displays orders that cannot be properly explained in a reductionist theory of
nature.
99. See Crisis 2829, while Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception is a
further exploration in this direction.
100. Hua XV, p. 666, from September 2122, 1934.
101. The convergence, even accord, between (a) these ideas opened up in Finks
9.3. Phenomenological Monadology

Husserls texts were written in solitary rumination upon the object of
investigation, as were Finks research notes; but in seeing the Husserlian coun-
tervoice written right into Finks Sixth Meditation, one has graphic demon-
stration of the way in which the monologue of written formulation was
continually set within the dialogue of continual discussion. The practice of
Husserls last phenomenology was both monologue and dialogue, and reread-
ing the Cartesian Meditations means acknowledging the human face in
both reectively felt self and communicative manifestness with the Other, in
each case by virtue of embeddedness in the material dimensionality of the
temporalized world.
However, the Cartesian Meditations also highlight the moment of mak-
ing the methodological move within which a particular reecting individual
begins phenomenology, namely, performing the phenomenological reduction.
It is a moment of setting oneself as reecting I off against the communal life in
the world in which the I-person is found already existent. However much this
communal life must be returned to in the full amplitude of human mundane
existence from which the conception of transcendental subjectivity in its full
amplitude is to be gained, still, as Fink puts it, inasmuch as the phenome-
nological reduction reduces me in the form in which I have my world, i.e., in
my human communication, to the originality of transcendental life, it renders
me solitary. It is in solitariness/solitude that the moment of phenomeno-
logical access to and disclosure of what lies in and beyond egoic self-centering
is effected, Meditative self-consideration [Selbstbesinnung] is the basic move
of philosophy, as Fink writes in one of his notes in preparing his 1930 Draft
for the opening section of an Introduction to Phenomenology. And the
impossibility that anyone else can do my reecting for me is heightened in
the reduction-conditioned move of questioning my whole place and stand in
the world, such as the philosophic heritage of concepts and approaches con-
workespecially in conjunction with the reinterpretation of reection (9.2.2) and the

role of empathetic performance consciousness in intersubjectivity (9.2.2.2)and (b)
those Merleau-Ponty develops in his nal work, La nature: Notes, cours du Collge
de France, ed. by Dominique Sglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 33840, is striking and
intriguing.
102. See VI.CM/2, Text No. 14.
103. VI.CM/2, p. 248.
104. Einsamkeit in German can mean solitariness (the neutral descriptive condition),
solitude (the positively accepted state), or loneliness (painfully, or at least negatively felt,
isolation). Which of these senses ts a particular text depends, obviously, upon its the-
matic context.
105. Z-VII VIII/1a, EFM 2. See the appendix.
strue it for me. Ultimately, this is the retreat to the stance in which inquiry
into transcendental origins becomes possible, that is, inquiry into the orig-
ination of the world and into the constitutive process in which the being that I
am rst forms and continues on in its being.
The phenomenological moment of this radical kind of reective take on
oneself is, however, now itself given a critical reconsideration. As indicated
earlier (9.2.2), the notion of reection as simply an Is turning back upon
itselfin an action taken to be as efcacious in rendering present as is that of a
mirrors reection, but with no mirror at all here in the interior of myselfhas
to give way to another conception of its operation. If living subjectivity is both
life-in-the-doing and the self-awareness intrinsic to that life as temporalized,
i.e., is performance-consciousness, then the rereading of phenomenology
(of Cartesian Meditations or of other works of Husserls) requires recogniz-
ing the I-character of self-reection as a modal dimension of pre-egoic living
operation, and not a simple redirection of eyelike observation from an exter-
nal object to oneself as now objectied. Inner experience, Fink writes, in
contrast to outer experience, is not a thematic experience (object-experience),
but is unthematic, precisely performance-experience. And therefore reec-
tion is not thematization in the manner of objectifying; it is rather a par-
ticular way of intensifying [that] performance-experience. The thema-
tizing done in reection, then, is the articulative focus offered in the mode
of expressing the living performance that is already ipso facto felt self-
awareness. Egoic reection, even in its afrmation of the I, remains also, in
that afrmation, embedded in transegoic and infra-egoic life; and this has to
be recognized as intrinsic to any monadic characterization one might make
of the phenomenologically reecting self.
9.3.1. Transcendental Reective Thematization and

Monadic Egoity
Husserl had a certain fondness for the Leibnizian concept of the monad,
reected in the interest with which he followed the scholarly work of one of
his Gttingen students and a long-term correspondence partner, Dietrich
Mahnke. In the year after the summer revision work on the Cartesian Med-
106. Z-VII VIII/2ab.

107. See Z-IV 26ab, 27ab, and 57ab (EFM 1).
108. Z-VII XVIII/1a, emphasis Finks. See 2.6.2.8.
109. See Z-XV 67a. See 9.2.2.
110. See Bw III, pp. 391520. Mahnke had published Eine neue Monadologie, Kant-
itations in 1932, for example, Husserl had occasion in a letter to Mahnke to

summarize his conception of the transcendental monad and its intersubjec-
tive world, indicating, too, the open-system character of phenomenological
workespecially in the little French Mditations that, Husserl explains,
only opened the course to be taken in phenomenology. Finks work, now,
aimed at a ner determination of the general representation Husserl gave
Mahnke, and both Finks Sixth Meditation and his frequent notes on the
matter show the main lines of this undertaking. It is not some original
isolatedness but rather methodological retreat that is required, taken up in
order for transcendental realizations to be gained in ones own insights out of
the reduction-led analysis of phenomena. The mineness of my reective
status is functional, not entitative or primordial. What is genuinely mine is
found to be not self-enclosure but an opening to the All, and not to some
outside beyond the internal mine but rather in terms of the way the mine
itself is essentially structured as intentional of what appears to me, and as
communal in that intentional openness. In performing the reduction I come to
realize within my perspective-bound standpoint the far more ample function-
ing taking place in intentional action, the realization of how much more there is
to me than what is just mine, namely, that the differentiation, within the
egological phenomenon of the world, into the Primordial and the Other un-
folds rather than exceeds this phenomenon.
Reaching to the Primordial via regressive analysis within egoic self-
reection can lead to taking proto-constitutioni.e., the constitution of the
basic horizons of temporalized, spatialized being-as-intending and being-as-
appearingas itself egoic in form; and this is Husserls tendency. The process
of proto-temporalization becomes manifest as the core process in me that
studien-Ergnzungshefte 39, (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1917), pp. 69121, sending
a copy to Husserl, and he received his doctorate in 1922 in Freiburg with a dissertation
on Leibniz, Leibniz Synthese von Universalmathematik und Individualmetaphysik
(HChr, p. 261). See Husserls evaluation of the dissertation in Bw III, pp. 51617.
111. See Husserls letter to Mahnke, May 45, 1933, in Bw III, pp. 49599, with the
point regarding Cartesian Meditations on p. 496. On other matters in this letter,
namely, the sociopolitical situation unfolding under the Nazis, see the middle of 1.3.
112. See, e.g., Z-VI, subsets VI and VIII. Finks draft for Husserl as a reply to Mahnkes
letter of November 4, 1933, gives only the opening considerations for this ner treat-
ment: Mahnkes Fehlinterpretation . . . , Bw III, pp. 518519, and EFM 2 (Abschn. 4).
113. Z-VII VI/1a, emphasis Finks (EFM 2), notes sketching ideas for Finks 1930
Layout for Husserl (see 1.3). See also Z-V III/11a (EFM 1) and Finks 1934 draft for
Husserl of a reply to Helmut Kuhn (EFM 2; also published in Bw VI, pp. 24546, but
with Husserls changes and insertions integrated seamlessly into the text).
makes me able to be aware of it as of me, which it has to be. The egoity that
therefore accrues to proto-temporalizing process is imposed by the very pro-
cedure of phenomenology as reective and intuitionally anchored. But as tran-
scendental methodological critique makes clear, the form transcendental con-
stituting protoprocess takes on in this explication, and at rst perhaps has to
take on in order to be determinate in meaning and intuitionally thematized, is
an ontication. (See 7.1.1.) When this whole situation becomes manifest,
however, any such egoic attribution is relativized.
The egoity of reective cognition is thus the egoity not of transcendental
absolute originating process itself but of the thematic exposition of that pro-
cess. The I of this reection is accordingly the exponent (or expositor) of
transcendental processes, as Fink calls it in the Sixth Meditation; and Fink
makes clear there that this I, precisely as exponent, is not itself the subjec-
tivity that performs fundamental constitution. The transcendental expo-
nent (expositor) is the gure through which that Absolute comes to thematic
cognitive denition as ultimate constituting performance, a constituting pro-
cess already going on in order for the exponent to be able to work in the rst
place, but utterly beyond the exponents action.
9.3.2. The Transcendental Sense of Intersubjective

Monadic Plurality
This is the situation, now, within which to explicate more sharply how
intersubjectivity is transcendental, in explicit critical realization of the way the
conception of the intermonadic community, represented as constituting the
common world, is an ontication drawn from humanly experienced commu-
nity and fellowship. For one thing, in this ontication one must understand the
necessity of not equating the mundane human experience of the sameness of
several objectswhether on the part of an individual alone or by a commu-
nity of individualswith the transcendental constitution of any such objec-
tive unities; in the nal analysis, agent-subjective thematic action does not
represent the primordial modality of transcendental constitution. More gener-
ally, however, the assertion of monadic plurality for the transcendental is a
kind of overlay from the mundane, the real point of which is to express iden-
tity between the transcendental and the mundane. In this, however, the asser-
tion of identity generally leaves unmentioned and unconsidered the profound
114. CM6, pp. 40 and 59 (VI.CM/1, pp. 44 and 65).

115. See CM6, pp. 1089 (VI.CM/1, pp. 11819) and 14748 (16364).
distinctiveness that must be accorded this identity, given the methodologically

radical character of the transcendental. (See 7.3.3.2.)
The question of identity, therefore, requires making critical distinction and
clarication in several directions: (1) between the transcendentally originative
and the transcendentally originatedi.e., between the properly transcenden-
tal as constituting and the mundane as constituted and (2) in regard to the
kind of sameness by which to characterize the transcendental in terms of the
intersubjectivity of monadic equals. As for the rst issue, the identity between
the transcendentally constituting and the mundanely constituted, any identity,
or difference, here has to be understood radically otherwise than in the way
identity and difference stand within the framework of constitutedness in the
world. Figuratively put, the vertical axis of transcendental identity is funda-
mentally nonconsonant with the horizontal axis of mundanely constituted
identity (and difference). To vertical identity and difference there pertains
nothing of either individuation or substantial sameness and distinctness, in
terms of spatial or temporal determinability. The sameness in vertical iden-
tity can only be in terms of constitutive status, namely, between (a) proto-
constitutive performance and (b) individually distinct-subject experiential and
intentional action. (More will be said on this in a moment.) Regarding the
second question, the issue is the kind of sameness in the realm of the con-
stituted from which to draw in order to offer some interpretively appropriate
sense for characterizing the way many individual subjects are bound together
in a transcendental operation; for here each monadic individual is sup-
posed to have an identity with originative proto-constituting performance.
Between monadic subjects in their mutually bound experiential action as
displaying transcendental effect, the only effective element of integration
again, not in the order of a substantial samenesshas to be that of the being-
mode of intentionality, Fink writes, an intentional inter-entering [inten-
tionales Ineinander] that is not a mere cognitive relation but rather com-
munity in living [Lebensgemeinschaft ]. With this, though, we are returned
to points made above in 9.2.2.2 and 6.3.46.3.5, on the pathic transindividual
dynamic that generates and sustains the living of individual subjective be-
ings in the world (even when they do philosophy).
Now, in relation to these points of distinction and clarication, what makes
monadic individuality relevant, both in explicating the mundane level of
116. One has to remember that, phenomenologically speaking, the mundane fully
understood is a transcendental value, viz., that which is constituted in the world. See
Husserls remark in CM6, p. 150, notation 527 (VI.CM/1, p. 167).
117. See appendix.
world-structured being and the experience of being, and in achieving explicit

and detailed disclosure of transcendental origins in reection on ones own
world-structured being and experience, is its service to phenomenologys aim
of reaching eidetic insight in evidentially grounded demonstration, in what-
ever measure this is possiblewhich is unmistakably the burden of Husserls
work from Ideas on. The measure of that eidetic insight is what determines
the legitimacy of employing both egoity and monadic structure and interac-
tion in the regressive explication of the transcendental. But again, that mea-
sure of legitimacy requires explicit clarication of the phenomenological di-
mension in which this question of the special identity just spoken can be
addressed. As we have seen (7.2.27.2.4), that dimension is the dimension of
the speculative articulation of the sense of fundamental phenomenological
conceptual projections, and it falls to the transcendental theory of method to
make that clear, especially in its determination of the ultimate sense of specula-
tive positivity as meontic in character.
Finally, one need only recall that Finks resolution of this matter also de-
pends directly upon the critique of the unquestioned primacy in Husserls phe-
nomenology of the philosophy of reection schema, subject-object act-
intentionality, and upon its displacement. As explained above (9.29.2.2), it
comes down in the end to seeing that it is not at all mundanelike intersubjec-
tivity that makes objectivity possible but rather the genuinely transcendental
function represented by the intersubjectivity of the monads, that is, criti-
cally conceived in other structural terms. The progression toward the proper
delineation of primordiality means progressing through stages of ontifying
structural determinations, one of which is basically world-inherent monad-
intersubjectivity; in the meontic economy of intelligibility this means the ob-
jectication and self-disgurement of transmonadic primordiality into monads
in community, so that primordial constitutive originative action takes on this
constituted sense-form of living monadic intersubjectivity. Finally, too, the
successive stages of regressively disclosive phenomenological construal of the
transcendental is, correspondingly, a stage in primordialitys own descent
into its constitutive products, each stage disclosing, when critically reconsid-
118. See Ideas I (Hua III/1), pt. 4, ch. 2, which reads precisely as a statement of this
aim.
119. Z-XIV V/5ab, EFM 2.
120. On ontication as in-the-world positing, see Husserls annotations to 254 and
257, CM6, p. 76 (VI.CM/1, p. 85).
121. OH-I 4244 (EFM 3), from on or after November 14, 1934, the date on the rst
page of this booklet; see also EH-K, pp. 12829 (Studien, pp. 13637). Again, see 7.3.3.2
for the closely connected explanation given to Edwards in early 1934.
ered, that to be constitutive it must be more than solipsistic. From constitu-

tive action as individual to its being communal, to its being pre-subject-object
performance done by a plural subjectivity acting in consort, it must push back
to the level beyond any differentiation, there where constitution would be
explicated simply as proto-temporalization. Each (ontifying) disclosure of pri-
mordialitys descent is in fact a self-disgurement into the constituted,
which therefore, as a constituted appearance, must not be allowed to stand un-
qualiedly in the sense that is proper to it, as of the constituted. Only when
clarication gives any such constituted appearance the interpretive sense
proper to it as disgurement can that sense have a phenomenologically
correct role in characterizing the transcendentally constituting.
One needs to add here, nally, that in proceeding this way, viz., in giving a
measure of positive sense to the forms and functioning of phenomenologically
reective ontication of the primordial by designating them descent (or in
Neoplatonic vocabulary, emanation), one is proceeding in the mode of
progressive phenomenology, in its interplay with the aim and constraints of
regressive phenomenology.
9.3.3. History and the Transcendental Community

How to think of the meaning of history in a transcendental phenomenol-
ogy is a larger issue that cannot be settled by a few remarks, but the principles
are now laid down for getting a critique-stage grasp of doing so. The very
structure of history is set constitutively in world-horizonality and is in princi-
ple bound up with the temporal succession of human generations and the
human community; but, while history may therefore not be said to be a
feature unqualiedly proper to transcendental originative process in itself,
nevertheless because that process is both cognitively determinate only in on-
tied form on the one hand, and at the same time positively designatable in
this ontication as the descent of originative process into its originated
122. Husserls remark (annotation 243) on CM6, pp. 7475 (VI.CM/1, pp. 8384)
complements the point here: Monadic being, however, is not yet ultimate being and it is
constituted.
123. The term Emanation is used in OH-I 44, and in other places as well: see Z-IV
14a and 19ab, and Z-V III/6b (EFM 1); Z-VII 5a, X/3a, and XVII/8a; Z-XIII 58a; and
Z-XV 22ab, 29a, 38a, 47a, 62a, and 105b (all these latter EFM 2). Cf. 7.3.3.5. See also
the explanation of katbasiw in 7.3.3.5, note 284 in the appendix.
124. See VI.CM/2, pp. 78, and VI.CM/1 (CM6), 7. Cf. also 7.2.3.
125. See CM6, p. 63 (VI.CM/1, p. 71).
126. See 7.2.3; and in particular Z-VII XVI/5ab.
structurings, then, despite the inescapable meontic improperness of this desig-

nation, it is also meontically justied in that originative process is not, and has
no role, function, or determinability, except as unied with its originative
products. (See 7.1.1 and 7.3.2.) Moreover, one needs to keep in mind a spe-
cic, even privileged form of the binding of primordiality with its constitu-
tive product in the form of the In-Stanciality constitutive of human being
another result made explicit in the speculative redetermination of the concepts
that draw out and formulate the sense of, and guide, the ndings of phenome-
nological analysis. The In-Stances are concepts for the ways temporality is
constitutive of human being precisely both as manifesting primordial tem-
porality and as bringing primordial temporalitys functioning to its full range
of effectuation, in the form of temporalized self-aware experiencing agency in
the world. For only when the ongoing dynamic of primordial temporality is
actual in its constitutive resultantsfrom horizons to individuated being con-
solidated in its appearingdoes it have any determinacy and hence is it able to
be considered itself in terms of actuality. Here, then, is the phenomenological
speculative perspective within which history can take on transcendental signif-
icance, always, however, within the constraints of meontic paradox.
9.4. The Transcendental Sense of Human Solitude

As has been shown many times now, phenomenological reection, like
any reection, does not begin nowhere. Nor does solitary meditation begin
without antecedent insertion within a world of communication and fellow
feeling. When Husserl began his philosophic ruminations, and when Fink
came to Freiburg to begin his own work of wondering, each did so in with-
drawal from and return to a place, on the one hand, in the long historical
tradition of Western European culture and thought, and on the other in the
immediate circle of friends and colleagues with whom they conversed and
argued. So it was, too, at the end. The ten years of Husserls descent into
societal isolation were in the same measure an intensifying of cooperation and
dialogue unequaled by any other he ever had, while the ten years of Finks
labors with Husserl were the most sustained conversation of his life and at the
same time the instigation to the most solitary meditation. In each case these
pairings of opposites were enforced by the social and political situation of the
times. The work Husserl did, and Finks persistence in staying with him in it,
127. See Z-VII XVII/5ab, and 5.1.1.2, 5.1.2.3.1, 5.1.2.3.3, and 7.3.3.1.
128. It is with this perspective too that one would have to take up treatment of the
character of history in Husserls Crisis, and in particular in his essay Origin of Geome-
try (Crisis, app. VI; Hua VI, Beil. III), especially in comparison with Finks heavily edited
version of it published in Revue international de philosophie, I (1939), 20325.
led to a profound interior statelessness for both, though with important differ-
ences: it was ofcial and denitive for Husserl, imposed from the outside,
while for Fink it resulted from choices he himself continually had to make. But
beyond the biographical and personal signicance this intense collaboration
held, there are lessons in it of philosophical value for the present topic.
The point of phenomenology is to raise and pursue the question of the
meaning and origin of the world, and so the theme of the world had to gure
specically within the experience of these specic human individuals, this
Husserl and this Fink, not merely in an abstract hypothetical way but deeply
experientially. Indeed, individual human reection like this may be the princi-
pal way in which the specically transcendental experience of the meaning
of the world gains any meaningfulness in the rst place. Thus it is that on the
human side the experience of fundamental elements is gained precisely by the
withdrawal into solitude. Husserl would take refuge from the strain of work
or the depressing circumstances of the times by holidaying in the villages and
on the hiking trails of the Black Forest, while Fink rented a cabin in the valley
of the Oy near Oberstdorf in the mountains east of Lake Constance. The
cabin in the Oytal became both a retreat and a symbol around which reec-
tions on these fundamentals were collected in his notes. Fink envisaged a
diary of a recluse, the thoughts and writings of someone who sets himself
apart, who, aficted with the onset of self-reection, has to ee the kind of
situation where communal life is lived ofcially, and the [common] welfare
is regulated by the state. In this solitude, however, as the way to the
self, one comes to wonder about much more than oneself as a mere egoic
isolate. What comes together is the unity of theoretical issues of methodology
with the onset of philosophizing in ones own experience, for example, in the
terrifying feeling of original astonishment, in the bearing one has to the
whole, for which there are only inadequate words for the question, Where
am I, how am I come into the world . . . ? Epicuruss enjoinder, lye
bivaw (Live hidden away!), came to have a multilayered meaning for Fink:
withdrawal from the mass, solitude in the whole of being, and living in
secret. There may be Romantic, and certainly Nietzschean, overtones here,
129. OH-VII 24 (EFM 3), under the title Cabin in the Oytal, in a notebook from
early 1936 (bracketed insertion mine).
130. OH-VII 13 and 25.
131. Z-XXII 32, emphasis Finks (EFM 3), in one of the sessions, December 1, 1936,
for Dorothy Ott, who was herself an amateur of mountain hiking and climbing and surely
understood the point.
132. Z-XXII 3435; see also OH-VII 2425 and OH-IV 34. The motto and the ideal
increased in prominence through the later note collections contained in EFM 4, again in
the period of the zealous consolidation by the National Socialist German state.
but it was not an uncommon sentiment among Europeans, though its aim for
Fink was oriented by a specic philosophical theme. The monologic think-
ing practiced in places apart where the sublime was manifest, thinking in
solitude, was a matter not simply of being alone but rather of being
oneself, i.e., experiencing oneself in ones stationing in the whole of things.
The intensication of ones self-awareness, taken specically within ones in-
sertion in the being of the world, was an opening out beyond the ego-self into
the living whole of which it is a form and a feature. Philosophizing is a return
home, better a home-seeking, and, in linkage with the theme of chapter 6, a
moment for the self-possession of life and acknowledgment of the play
that is the essence of life. And in facing the political reality in which both
Husserl and Fink had to nd a way to keep to what phenomenology was
about, Fink writes: The essential man, who sees the meaning of life not in
labor but in play, i.e., in his metaphysical existence, is stateless. The soli-
tariness of the phenomenologizing I and the solitude of the recluse from an
increasingly Nazied society came together, being sustained by the larger
philosophical context of a phenomenology of radical community.
133. OH-VII 4748, in a note from 1936 under the title Htte im Oytal. See also
OH-VI 3, from early January 1936 or OH-IV 34 from 1935.
134. OH-VII 4849.
135. Z-XXV 29, from early 1937 (EFM 3).
136. Z-XXV 170, from the rst half of 1937.
10
Beginning Again after the End of the Freiburg

Phenomenology Workshop, 19381946
A work like ours is somewhere in mid-journey. To require results of it

means to misunderstand the essence of philosophy. Where we stand can
only be measured by the demarcations we have made. Where the path
we are taking leads later labors may show. What counts now is to keep
alert within us Hegels realization that in philosophy results are noth-
ing, the path taken is everything.
Eugen Fink, notes for his dissertation, 1929
Husserls late philosophy is not a gathered harvest, a permanent cultural

possession of the spirit, a house in which one can set up ones abode. All
is open, every path leads to free open space. It is a discomforting, chal-
lenging, and troublesome philosophy that has no use for partisans and
1. Z-II 38b (EFM 1), from the context (Z-II 37a. 38a. and 39a) clearly pertaining to
Finks Einleitung to his dissertation (Studien, pp. 119). Though this whole side of the
note-sheet, 38b, is lined through with a single long stroke, lining through in this way often
indicates not rejection but that the text has been taken care of in some way, usually by
being incorporated elsewhere in a draft writing. While 38b only corresponds in a general
way to points in the Einleitung, Finks later essay Die Entwicklung der Phnome-
nologie Edmund Husserls (ND, pp. 4574) elaborates the same thought further.
521
522 Beginning Again
discipleship, that above all sends everyone off on the path of ones own
reective thought.
Eugen Fink, 1959
. . . Doch selbst in der Verschweigung

ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor.
Rilke, Die Sonnete an Orpheus, II, 1
For phenomenology there was a silence in Freiburg. Husserl had died on

April 27, 1938, and within a year nothing of what remained of his life and
thought was left in that city. Between mid-September and the end of Novem-
ber 1938, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the young Belgian Franciscan
priest, Herman Leo Van Breda, all Husserls manuscripts were secretly rescued
from Germany and taken to safety in Louvain. Fink emigrated to Belgium on
March 16, 1939, to be joined by Ludwig Landgrebe from Prague on April 24
and Malvine Husserl on June 20.
The long Freiburg conversation, the last dialogue of origin for Husserls
phenomenology, was now ended. But another had begun, or rather many
others had begun, there in Louvain, conversations whose roots lodged deep
within the texts that were the soil of this phenomenology now in exile. Of
these texts Father Van Breda recounts that in the period between April 1939
and May 1940 Fink and Landgrebe produced twenty-eight hundred pages of
transcription from Husserls handwritten manuscripts; but the signicance of
that fact is circumscribed by two others.
One was the event that brought this work to an end: the invasion of Belgium
2. ND, p. 225, from Finks Die Sptphilosophie Husserls in der Freiburger Zeit, a
lecture for the Husserl celebration at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitt Freiburg on July 3,
1959, rst published in Edmund Husserl, 18591956, Phaenomenologica 4 (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1959).
3. See Van Bredas detailed account, Le sauvetage de lhritage husserlien et la fonda-
tion des Archives-Husserl, in Husserl et la pense moderne, ed. by H. L. Van Breda and
J. Taminiaux, Phaenomenologica 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 142.
Actually, a portion of Husserls manuscripts, about fteen hundred pages, had to be
rescued as well from Prague when in March 1939 Germany annexed that part of Czecho-
slovakia (Le sauvetage, pp. 15 and 31). These were texts that Landgrebe had tran-
scribed and kept in Prague for safekeeping.
4. Herman Leo Van Breda, Laudatio fr Ludwig Landgrebe und Eugen Fink, in
Phnomenologie Heute, ed. by Walter Biemel, Phaenomenologica 51 (The Hague: Mar-
tinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 5. For more detail, see Van Breda, Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les
Archives-Husserl Louvain, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, pp. 413 (English
translation, p. 153).
Beginning Again 523
by the German Army on May 10, 1940. Before noon on that same day Fink
and Landgrebe were arrested in Louvain by the Belgian authorities and held in
prison, while that evening German planes bombed the railway yard. Trans-
ferred shortly after to Brussels, on May 15 they and other German nationals
were packed into cattle cars and sent south into France, rst to a concentration
camp near Orlans, and then to one at St.-Cyprien on the Mediterranean coast
near Perpignan. Soon afterward the German invasion of France took place,
which, following sweeping German victories, swiftly led to the armistice of
June 22, 1940. With that, detainees were released, and Fink and Landgrebe
had to make their way back to Belgium, arriving in Brussels on July 10. In
Louvain, Fink found that the house in which he and his wife had been living
had lost its windows from the earlier bombardments, and the ceiling in two
rooms had caved in. The place had been ransacked, and many of their posses-
sions were gone. Neither Fink nor Landgrebe, however, would remain in
Belgium; because of the war situation they decided it would be safer to return
to Germany, Landgrebe to Hamburg and Fink to Freiburg, the latter arriving
in Freiburg in early November. Within three weeks of Finks arrival in Frei-
burg, after repeated interrogations by the Gestapo about his actions, he was
inducted into the German Army (on December 2, 1940). Refusing the offer to
rehabilitate himself by enrolling for ofcers training, the expected course
for someone who had gone through the German academic system and thus
was of the cultural elite, he was assigned as a common soldier to the job of
airplane spotter in the hills around Freiburg.
So the internal philosophical exile began again. It had set in when Fink
accompanied Husserl into exclusion from academic and cultural life in 1933,
5. An account of this ordeal published under Finks name in the Bodensee-Rundschau

of August 28, 1940, under the headline, A Interned Konstanz Citizen Tells His Story:
Abducted from LouvainSpies, Fifth Column, gives many of the details. No little
sensationalizing and patriotic sloganing, totally out of character for Fink, is editorially
worked into the supposed rst-person report.
6. From the report in the Bodensee-Rundschau. On the journey from St.-Cyprien Fink
found his wife at a camp near Bordeaux where German women had been interned, and he
brought her with him back to Louvain. Landgrebes wife, Ilse-Maria, had been allowed to
remain in Louvain, having just a few days earlier given birth to their second son (see Van
Bredas Laudatio, Phnomenologie Heute, p. 5).
7. See appendix.
8. See Van Bredas Laudatio (Phnomenologie Heute, p. 6). In Finks letter of Oc-
tober 1, 1946, to Felix Kaufmann (in the Eugen-Fink-Nachlass), Fink writes of his refusal
to enter the ofcers training school: I was determined at all cost not willingly to do
anything against humanity in this Nazi war.
524 Beginning Again
and he was returned to that same status now indeed, he chose it once again
against the offers of rehabilitation. Yet there had been a brief respite for
Fink by his taking the road of actual exile, by his emigration to Louvain in
1939. And here is the second fact that needs to be linked directly to the work
that Fink and Landgrebe did on the Husserl legacy secreted out of the father-
land that had disowned it and would have destroyed it. For Finkfor Land-
grebe too, though this is a matter beyond the scope of this bookthe conver-
sation with Husserl had ended, but the dialogue with his writings had not; and
the thrust of that dialogue for Fink was to continue the direction determined
for him by the critical rethinking that had been at the heart of his work with
Husserl from the beginning.
Once again, it is the documentation in the form of Finks own notes that
guides us here, and we nd there a multifaceted work of dialogue indeed. In
the two years after Husserls death, Finks notes turned to consolidating the
critical points that were embedded in the long track of his effort alongside
Husserl to rework and re-present phenomenology. From this we have, for
example, the large folder of notes entitled Re: Husserls Basic Problem,
which Fink characterizes parenthetically with the simple but trenchant word
Critical. At the same time, Fink continued his long-standing though dif-
ferent coming to terms with Heidegger, and, from the same years represented
by the Critical notes on Husserl just mentioned, there is a folder with the
title Notes on the Philosophy of Heidegger.
These silent dialogues with texts, however, were not the only ones Fink was
holding. His notes represent as well a rich assortment of live conversations in
which Finks double dialogue with the two teachers that had guided his under-
standing of phenomenology was explained in discussions with others in philos-
ophy who were also trying to come to terms with these same philosophic
progenitors. Foremost among these was Landgrebe, Finks fellow emigrant
from Nazism to haven in Louvain. The man who had brought them both there,
9. This phase of Finks life exemplies what he refers to under the theme of solitude in
his earlier notes. In fact this has become much more than a passing condition; it was a
perduring dimension in his life and thought. Thus there is the compilation of 110 entries,
Aphorisms from a War, 19401944, which Fink gives the overall title Hermitry
(EFM 4). Many entries from 1940 in Z-XXVI are also thoughts about the way retreat
into solitude was necessitated.
10. See appendix.
11. Z-MH-I (EFM 4), with given dates from 1939 after Finks emigration.
12. See Z-XXVI 71a, Z-XXVII 64ab, Z-XXVIII 9ab and XIX/1a2b, and Z-XXIX
310ab (all in EFM 4). Z-XXVIII consists entirely of notes from Finks various conversa-
tions.
Beginning Again 525
Van Breda himself, was also a frequent partner, and a close friendship grew
between Fink and Van Breda that would be severely cramped by the years of
war that came so soon after. Then, too, there was Alphonse de Waelhens, and
Hendrik Pos, who had studied under Husserl in Freiburg and visited him
several times in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Before all of these, however,
with the exception of contact with Van Breda, the rst person with whom Fink
held a conversation at Louvainand just two weeks after his own arrival
was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, come from Paris on April 1, for a scant week, to
read a selection of Husserls late work. Acting as interpreter, Van Breda re-
counts that this conversation between Merleau-Ponty and Fink was a long
exchange on how they viewed things, and an exciting one to boot; but
neither Fink nor Van Breda made notes on the conversation. In all these discus-
sions Fink drew relevant explications for his conversation partners from the
work he was pursuing, namely, integrating a critical stance toward phenome-
nonology with a delity to its essential philosophic dynamic, while developing
a positive philosophical treatment he could call his own centered on onto-
logical experience. Indeed, the largest folder of notes from the Louvain year
(Z-XXIX, EFM 4) is entitled Materials for Ontological Experience.
For Fink one of the unique things about the year in Louvain was that for the
rst time he was able to teach, to lecture in a university, a privilege he had
never been able to enjoy in Germany so long as he continued his association
with Husserl. In Louvain, for a special seminar on recent German philosophy,
Fink offered these four topics: (1) the critical exposition of the phenomenolog-
ical reduction, (2) Heideggers metaphysics of aletheia, (3) the way Hegel
begins Phenomenology of Spirit, and (4) the philosophical interpretation of
Rilkes Duino Elegies. It is no surprise that Fink had interests beyond
Husserls phenomenology, and there is a reason for this that is grounded in the
realization that the systematic of phenomenology had to be taken further. The
way this realization gets expressed in Finks notes after 1938, the year of
13. See Z-XXVI 100b, Z-XXVII A/II/8a, Z-XXVIII X/1a4a, 14a, 23a24b, 31a, and
32a38ball from September 1939 to January 1940.
14. See Z-XXVIII 1a7b and 20a22b, all from 1939, and Z-XXIX 202a, from Febru-
ary 1940.
15. Cf. HChr, pp. 238, 264, 316, 345, 364, and 414. Only one conversation with Pos is
represented in Finks notes, Z-XXVI 123/1a, dated April 3, 1940.
16. Van Breda, Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl Louvain, p. 413,
translation here mine. See 6.3.6, note 134, in the appendix.
17. From the attestation by Recteur von Waeyenbergh, September 30, 1940 (see note 7
above). See also Z-XXV 141a and Z-XXIX 248ab and 313b for brief sketches for
philosophically treating Rilkes Duino Elegies.
526 Beginning Again
Husserls death, and then translates into positions taken both in privately
dened writing plans and in public statements after World War II is what we
must now take up as the nal consideration for the present study.
10.1. Return to the University in Germany

It could not be that the whole experience of the period from 1933 to
1938, the years of societal exclusion with Husserl, and then from 1939 to
1945, the time of dislocation and war, would leave Fink unmarked by a dis-
tancing from the normal course of academic life. There had in fact been no
normal course of academic life in the entire twelve-year period, not for Fink,
not for many. At the wars end, then, an order had to be reestablished, but one
that could not be what had been in place before Hitlers rise to power, and
failed to repel it, or after the fascist reshaping of German institutions that
National Socialism carried out.
Freiburg at wars end was under French occupation. The French Army had
entered the city on April 21, 1945, and soon controlled the entire area. It was
thus under French occupational command that the reestablishment of univer-
sity life and functioning was begun, though carried out in the hands of univer-
sity personnel themselves. So, for example, investigative commissions were set
up to examine the role university gures had had in National Socialism in
Freiburg, the most famous in the present overall context being the one set up in
September 1945 to adjudicate the case of Martin Heidegger; but it was done
with imperfect gleaning of the guilty from the guiltlessindeed, in Finks eyes
it was carried out with far too much leniency. The same university old boys
seemed again to be in important positions, Fink remarked in private corre-
spondence. Nazi party members who had not been wild activists received as
penalty merely a modest reduction in income, 10 or 20 percent, which in fact
left them with far more than someone who for twelve long years had been so
stupid as not to join in the spiritual betrayal of German intelligence for the
sake of gaining ofce and honor, and who as a result, now in his fortieth year,
was still no more than a beginning lecturer earning not even enough to keep
his children in socks and shoes for the winter.
Such was Finks situation in 1946, holding a teaching position at the Univer-
18. On the nal days of the war for Freiburg see Thomas Schnabel and Gerd R.
Ueberschr, Endlich Frieden! Das Kriegsende in Freiburg 1945, Stadt und Geschichte
Neue Reihe des Stadt-archivs Freiburg i. Br., Heft 7 (Freiburg: Schillinger Verlag), 1985.
19. See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. by Allan Blunden (New
York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 30951.
20. This is how Fink speaks of the state of things in his letter to Felix Kaufmann from
October 1, 1946, in the Fink Nachlass.
Beginning Again 527
sity of Freiburg as Dozent, the entry grade. It had come about at the instigation
of one of Husserls few faithful friends in Freiburg in his last years and one of
the handful who had attended his funeral, Walter Eucken, dean of the Faculty
of Legal and Political Economy. Eucken wrote a letter to the Rektor of Albert-
Ludwigs-Universitt proposing that Fink be given a teaching position even
before he could present the required Habilitationsschrift. It was a special
case: Husserls name, as everyone knew, was closely bound up with Freiburgs
twentieth-century signicance. It was in Freiburg that Husserl had passed the
most decisive years of the life of his dedication to pure philosophical re-
search. The work of those years, the Husserlian Nachlass, was more than just
a body of literary remains; it was Husserls real philosophical lifes work.
And it was the Universitys duty to take into its ranks the man who held the
editorial mastery of this deposit. Husserl had personally told Eucken on many
occasions that Fink was the one who knew his Nachlass best, the one with
whom Husserl had discussed his nal philosophic ideas in the most detail,
the one who in a special way was qualied to carry on his lifes work.
Outside Germany interest in phenomenology was high, and having Fink as a
member of its professiorial body would help the University of Freiburg to
rebuild its once ourishing international intellectual relationships. Moreover,
Eucken pointed out, Fink had already held a Dozents position at the Univer-
sity of Louvain.
Euckens proposal gained the support of the Philosophical Faculty and
then of the Rektor himself, who in turn made the recommendation to the
Ministry of Culture and Education. The Rektor determined, however, and
apparently the ministry agreed, that Fink would have to complete his Habilita-
tion before the appointment could be made. Nevertheless, approval was given
that assistance be made available in the amount equivalent to the Dozent pay
that the actual appointment itself would provide. By the end of August 1945
that temporary assistance was in fact begun, but there was no foregoing the
21. Letter by Walter Eucken to the Rektor, June 4, 1945, in the Personalakten: Eugen
Fink, UAFbg. Finks Politische Geschichte meiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn (EFM
4, Abschn. 4) was probably written for this same occasion, as its date, June 1, 1945, ts
neatly with the date of Euckens letter. Moreover, Eucken refers to a report by Fink that
accompanied his letter.
22. Letter of Dean Brie of the Philosophische Facultt to the Rektor, June 14, 1945,
and the deans report to the Rektor of the faculty decision, June 23, 1945 (Personalakten:
Eugen Fink, UAFbg).
23. Letter from the Rektor to the Ministerium des Kultus und Unterrichts, July 5, 1945
(Personalakten: Eugen Fink).
24. Notice to the university cashier from the Ministerium des Kultus und Unterrichts,
August 24, 1945 (Personalakten: Eugen Fink, UAFbg).
528 Beginning Again
need for Fink to present a nished work, the Habilitationsschrift, in order to

qualify for the venia legendi, the ofcial authorization to teach in the univer-
sity and thereby to receive the ofcial appointment to a teaching post.
10.2. Continuation: Renewing the Phenomenological

Tradition of Edmund Husserl
It was the understanding of the University of Freiburg that Fink was
taking the Habilitation precisely as continuing the philosophic work he had
done in phenomenology with Husserl, indeed, that he was continuing the very
enterprise that Husserl had launched and pursued. This, too, was embodied in
the form in which Fink undertook to pass the Habitation, namely, by submit-
ting the study he had already conceived on Husserls advice twelve years ear-
lier as a Habilitationsschrift, the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. The very work
that had excluded Fink from academic opportunity and advancement would
now serve to gain it for him. Yet for Fink this was to be no mere continuation
in a doctrinal orthodoxy, something that would be incompatible with what he
had always been doing with and for Husserl. In the autobiographical state-
ment that accompanied Finks ofcial request to the Philosophical Faculty for
permission to present himself for the Habilitation, Fink wrote: Although I
would consider it a necessity imposed in the interest of intellectual history to
resume a tradition that was interrupted only owing to external forces, and to
lay out Husserls philosophy precisely in its yet unrecognized essence, still I
would never do this in the manner of adepts. For wherever philosophy is
experienced as destiny Hegels word holds: Regarding the inner essence of
philosophy there are neither predecessors nor followers.
There would be occasion soon after the ofcial proceedings for Fink to
explain his succession to Husserl with rather more dening, but for the pur-
poses of the Habilitation this afrmation of continuity sufced. At the same
time, Finks case was unique in that contrary to practice he was without a
professorial sponsor for his Habilitation work. The Sixth Meditation had to
be evaluated by someone, and the task was undertaken by Professor Robert
Heiss, who was installed as the new dean of the Philosophische Fakultt in
early 1946. Heisss two-page evaluation shows how completely effaced Hus-
serls thinking had come to be at the University of Freiburg. In the highly
developed special explicative viewpoint that the Sixth Meditation develops,
Heiss explains, the work genuinely escapes any critique that comes from
outside it. If one takes a standpoint within it, on the other hand, all that can
25. Lebenslauf dated December 18, 1945, Personalakten: Eugen Fink (EFM 4, Ab-
schn. 4).
Beginning Again 529
be said about it is that it has a clean style of thinking, its plan is precisely
worked out, and the development of its ideas is done with consistency. And
then Heiss adds: Of course for anyone not familiar with the train of thought
in Husserls late developments, there will be something a bit odd about the
workit is strange to see the way it operates wholly as the product of a
bygone thinking.
All the same, Heiss recommended the work be accepted owing to the un-
usual circumstances of Finks Habilitation: it was a matter of making up for a
Habilitation that ought to have taken place twelve years ago, not to mention
the fact that in approving it now the faculty would be ratifying in the most
univocal way the recognition that Husserls work had itself received in its
day. But whether or not Fink could now revalidate a kind of philosophic work
that once had been so inuential was something it was not for the Faculty to
decide. Heisss statement clearly implies that what was being done was less
a philosophical evaluation than a kind of political reparation (and Fink cer-
tainly realized this aspect in his case); and there was a curious twist to the
situation, itself indicative of how distant from the philosophical climate of
1945 Husserls work had become.
Heiss had been for several years during the war a respectful supporter of
Heidegger, in large part owing to the latters role in Heisss being named to the
second professorial chair in philosophy (despite Heisss area of expertise being
in psychology). Just before the matter of Finks Habilitation was being consid-
ered, a decision had been reached on Heideggers case regarding his role and
activity in the university under the now crushed National Socialist state. Hei-
degger was to be retired, but with abrogation of the normal privilege accom-
panying retirement, the continuing right to teach in the university. This was
therefore hardly the time to ask Heidegger for a judgment on Finks qualica-
tions, yet that is what was done; after all, Heidegger was the last holder of the
rst chair of philosophy at Freiburg and successor to the very Husserl whose
work was being represented by Finks Habilitationsschrift.
Just how consulting Heidegger was done is obscurethere are no docu-
26. Gutachten ber die Habilitationsarbeit Eugen Finks: Idee einer transzendentalen
Methodenlehre, dated February 16, 1946, Personalakten: Eugen Fink (UAFbg and EFM
4, Abschn. 4).
27. Ibid.
28. Cf. the opening paragraph of part IV of Finks Politische Geschichte meiner
wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn (UAFbg and EFM 4, Abschn. 4). See appendix.
29. On Heisss connection with Heidegger, see Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 281 (and
the whole context for this on pp. 27481); on the place of Heiss in the events surrounding
the University Senates decision regarding Heidegger on January 19, 1946, see Ott,
pp. 34243.
530 Beginning Again
ments regarding it in the university records in Freiburg. Fink, however, gives a

brief account of it in a letter he wrote later that year to Husserls son, Gerhart,
then living in the United States. And this is where the twist shows its sharp-
est turn. Finks success in receiving the Habilitation had given rise to the
rumor that he had done it under the sponsorship of Heidegger; and the rumor
had reached Gerhart Husserl. Gerharts reaction was swift and angry; if the
rumor were true, Husserls family wanted Fink to have nothing more to do
with the Husserl legacy, specically, the Husserl Archives and all its materials
in Louvain.
This was a bitter and painful moment for Fink, as his letter to Gerhart on
October 25, 1946, reveals. The rumor was not only false but incompatible
with the facts of Finks personal history since 1933, with the fact of his having
chosen the Sixth Meditation as his Habilitationsschrift, and with the real-
ities of the situation at the university under the French occupation. Heidegger
was no longer in ofce, and the only holder of a chair of philosophy at Frei-
burg was Robert Heiss, who as we have seen wrote the ofcial evaluation of
Finks Habilitationsschrift. However, Fink writes, the Faculty on its own
solicited yet another letter of reference from Heidegger; but he restricted him-
self to answering that as the work was fully authorized by Husserl it would
need no further attestation. Fink goes on to explain here too that his choice
of the Sixth Meditation was deliberate: It was for me an act of piety to take
the Habilitation as a student of Husserls precisely with the very work that he
had acknowledged as wholly in line with his own thinking and as a creative
continuation of his ideas. I wanted thereby at the same time to give expression
to the fact that I was taking up the academic ofce of teaching in Freiburg as a
resumption of a tradition that Edmund Husserl had brought into being. I
could have chosen another work, one that lies on a higher level and that gave
objective form to a ten-year-long intellectual development. But it is a matter
here of symbolically taking up again the thinking that is Husserls.
So it was that Fink received the Habilitation and the appointment as Doz-
ent; the summer semester of 1946 was his rst semester of teaching at Frei-
burg. But Freiburg was no longer a place in which philosophy could be
30. See the letter Van Breda wrote to Fink on August 28, 1946, in the Husserl Archives.
31. Letter of Fink to Gerhart Husserl, October 25, 1946 (in the Fink Nachlass), one of
two versions, the longer of which was not sent.
32. Letter to Gerhart Husserl, October 25, 1946. Finks letter to Van Breda, Octo-
ber 26, 1946 (in the Husserl Archives) goes over the same situation, though with sharper
expression of Finks feelings about the whole matter.
33. Finks rst course, entitled Introduction to Philosophy, was published shortly
Beginning Again 531
characterized as phenomenological. Under Heidegger, Husserlian phenome-

nology had been massively displaced, despite his having been installed in the
rst chair of philosophy precisely as Husserls successor. Yet even that nominal
lineage was broken off now with Heideggers being ofcially withdrawn from
the position. Heiss, holder of the other chair, frankly thought Husserls philos-
ophy was obsolete, not only as his evaluation statement of Finks Habilitation
shows but also as he expressed his view in a conversation with Fink in June
1946. Finks notes give a clear indication of how to trace the lines of what a
phenomenological philosophy would have to be after Husserl, as Fink under-
stood thingsthat is, after the caesura that, on the one hand, phenomenol-
ogy itself drew across philosophys historical development and therefore, too,
across its own program, and, on the other, after the violent rupture that the
twelve years of war and dislocation had wreaked in both phenomenologys
cultural context and its lineage.
There are two principal themes in this conversation of Finks with Heiss: the
character of the immediate past of philosophy and the character of philoso-
phys immediate future as it emerges from that past; and these set the terms for
evaluating Husserls phenomenology. For Heiss modern philosophy is domi-
nated by an oppositional condition. On the one hand there is scientic philos-
ophy, philosophy guided by the ideal of natural science: the formation of
rational instruments of dominational knowledge, of the mathesis universalis,
of the experiment, etc. Against this stand those in revolt: Pascal, Kierke-
gaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dilthey, etc. For these history [functions] as the
organon. Thus it is that Heidegger writes dialogues.
Fink, now, rejects the judgment that Husserl belongs to the scientistic side
of philosophy as thus characterized, although he certainly may appear to
belong to it. In truth Husserl signies the overcoming of scientism by the
philosophy of the absolute subject. Moreover, Fink wants to reject the very
framework that Heiss has given. It is not that it is entirely wrong; rather, it is
just not comprehensive or penetrating enough. The scientistic dependence of
philosophy is a broader condition than Heiss thinks. This dependency shows
not only in the primacy of the methods of thought practiced in the sciences of
nature but also in the primacy of the methods of thought practiced in the
sciences of spirit. And this overall dependence includes one further feature,
after Finks death as Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. by Franz-A. Schwarz (Wrzburg:
Knigshausen and Neumann, 1985). In his letter to Felix Kaufmann, October 1, 1946,
Fink also mentions a practicum on Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit.
34. Unterredung mit Professor Hei, dated June 24, 1946 (EFM 4, Abschn. 4), in the
Fink Nachlass.
532 Beginning Again
the primacy of poetry. The validation of poetry over and in place of the
methods of both kinds of science is another feature of modern philosophy, and
Fink nds romantic anti-intellectualism as philosophical insufciency. Thus
it is that for him Heideggers Hlderlin interpretations are like Schellings
positive philosophy of religion and revelation: they do not offer any path that
points into the future.
What is it, then, that does offer a path to the future? Finks own thinking
now shows itself. My thesis, Fink writes, is this: That play is the central
metaphysical concept in Nietzsche and also in modern philosophy insofar as
modern philosophy conceives being as creative. Heiss nds this too thin, but
for Fink it only means that Heiss has simply no inkling of the meaning of this
metaphysical concept. Play is the unitary phenomenon of the double vis-
ageApollo and Dionysos, Fink notes. Antecedent to the religion of art in
the modern period, the essence of play has to be grasped at its most profound
level.
On a standard level of taking the writings of philosophers as the expressions
of an individual worldview, to be contrasted with other worldviews in the
comprehensiveness of its scope and the value of its arguments, this might seem
to be little more than the recourse to vague irrationalities. However, in terms
of the whole background of Finks work with Husserl, his thesis on play has
rigorous methodological and substantive investigational grounds. For this is
no less than the demand that the level of ultimate origination be approached
and articulated within the constraints of the mutual binding of the most con-
crete analytic investigation of the experientially given with the careful elucida-
tion of the overarching conceptions that the experientially given, in repeated
requestioning, calls for and responds to for the articulation of their meaning.
What Fink actually said to Heiss was perhaps too compact an indication;
but when the track of his progress through the previous chapters here is re-
viewedespecially chapters 5 (in particular 5.3.2), 6, and 7and linked
further to the profuse notes from 1937 to 1940, then the work that Fink began
to present in 1946 with his rst university lecturing in Germany displays the
same kind of accord and divergence that he had already practiced at Husserls
side. One remark from a note written at the time of Finks emigration to
Louvain serves to make this point: Play as a speculative concept determines
the constitution of the being of the human, his nature!
35. Ibid., emphasis all Finks.

37. Z-XXVI 31b, emphasis Finks (EFM 4).
Beginning Again 533
We nd clear indications of this same import in the portion of Finks letter to

Gerhart Husserl just cited, where Fink explains that his taking up the teaching
post in Freiburg was the resumption of a tradition that Edmund Husserl had
brought into being, but that at the same time he could have chosen another
work, one that lies on a higher level and that gave objective form to a ten-year-
long intellectual development. In fact the Sixth Meditation, now accepted
as his Habilitationsschrift, embodies both features: it was itself a taking up of
a thinking that is Husserlsagain Finks phrasing in his letter to Gerhart
Husserlyet it opened up and spelled out some of the contours of a whole
dimension in and for phenomenology that had hitherto been stunted, namely,
the dimension of the speculative precisely as having to remain bound to con-
crete phenomenologically analytic disclosure. We have to see, now, the specic
way in which Fink takes up this speculative dimension in the context of his
own beginning again.
10.3. Critique and Continuation, with a Shift in

Dimensional Emphasis
The philosophic work that Fink did after the war is plainly different
from the work Husserl was doing before the war, and the claim of continuity
Fink makes is not the claim of faithful doctrinal repetition and unqualied
identity. Yet, in that Fink knew Husserls thought intimately, had participated
in its nal consolidation, and then went on to do something different, he is a
kind of paradigm for anyone who would nd Husserls phenomenological
work compelling and valuable for the sake of being able to move philosophic
thinking further. More than the mere sequential differentiation of individuals
normal in human tradition, here there is a rm systematic ground for both the
continuity and the difference. As just indicated, it lies in the methodological
structure that is constitutive of phenomenology, and this must set the terms for
any paradigm status Fink might have.
To tie together what has been given in the whole study in this book up to the
present juncture, let us return briey to Husserl in regard to one often repeated
point, namely, that phenomenology is not nished within the writings that
Husserl himself produced. As he explained in his Vienna lecture in May 1935,
the ideal of philosophical fullness in truth and evidential demonstration can
only be achieved relatively in any particular investigative program; but that
relative success requires two things. It has to be gained in some actual concrete
investigation, not in some merely hypothetical investigation imagined or pro-
posed in general terms; determinateness results only when one concretely sets
534 Beginning Again
to work and succeeds, at least in a relative way. And it has to be aware of its
limitations, it cannot be too facilely or too quickly taken as nal in its dis-
closures; for there is the constant danger of succumbing to one-sidedness and
to premature satisfaction, the result of which will be internal contradictions
within the program of phenomenology as a whole. Two limitations, then, have
to be overcome, as Husserls text goes on to indicate. One is the hasty pre-
sumption in thinking that the achievements of a particular investigation once
done can stand as they are, as a kind of rm descriptive ground the sense of
which is fundamentally and unambiguously set. This is to fail to grasp how
inescapably the accepted conceptions that one follows can color with presup-
positional interpretive content even description that is scrupulously faithful
to the thing [Sache]. The other limitation is not to realize that the genuine
sense of the matters thus described in careful material investigation, the full
overcoming of prejudicial suppositions about what something means, can
only come by keeping in view the place that the ndings thus made have in the
whole system of philosophic understanding.
Here is where the danger lies of thinking that phenomenology can be all
done in the work of some single philosopher, or indeed that even the basics are
fully laid out in their ultimate sense in Husserls work. The lines quoted at the
beginning of chapter 9, from Husserls draft for a Foreword to the Continua-
tion of the Crisis, imply precisely this. Equally important, however, is to
read what Husserl goes on to say immediately after, namely, that a philosophy
must not only show the path of discovery in its true method but also without
fail effectively place out of play prejudices that blind one to a grounding in
the thing itself [sachliche Begrndung], which is what makes it radical. But
the means for disclosing the contradiction hidden in prejudices and arguments
are not already in place at the beginning. At rst one has to have anticipa-
tions that range beyond the way conceptions in their still prejudicial construal
may cast things as they are being scrutinized, provisional as those anticipa-
tions may be; and it will be precisely the task of the investigation itself sys-
tematically to put these and all such matters into question. . . . Here Husserl
is thinking more of philosophy as it was prior to his phenomenology, but the
principle he asserts in terms of the radical principles of questioning that his
program instituted is enunciated as applying also to the work of phenomenol-
ogy itself.
There are two factors to be taken into account in this corrective process.
38. Crisis, p. 291 (Hua VI p. 338). The phrase in the next sentence comes from this
passage as well.
39. Hua VI, Beil. XIII, p. 439.
Beginning Again 535
One is the overwhelming power of mundaneity, the domination held by the

starting situation for philosophy and phenomenology, the unbreakable force
of the concrete form under which human reason in its being is integrated in the
world. And the second is that the realization of the extent and character of this
conditioning in mundaneity cannot be done haphazardly; it requires an inte-
grating view not only of the whole work of phenomenology but also of the
whole system of mundaneity precisely as the end product of constitution, viz.,
the world and being as disclosable within human being-in-the-world as ini-
tially mundane to itself. No line of knowledge, writes Husserl in his 1935
Vienna lecture, no single truth may be absolutized and isolated. Only by
mastering the totality of philosophys horizons of innity, only through this
kind of constant reexivity, this highest form of self-consciousness, can
philosophy fulll its function of putting itself and thereby a genuine human-
ity on track.
As we have seen repeatedly, elaborating this kind of comprehensive realiza-
tion is one of the main tasks Fink was performing for Husserl, viz., making
explicit the critical integrative implications of a systematic view of the whole
drawn up out of phenomenologys own reduction-driven demand for radi-
cality. Yet the implications of such a system-based critique for Husserls posi-
tion are not all harmless, they do not just leave everything the way it had been.
What Fink found early on was that this kind of critique required phenomenol-
ogy to allow for its own radical self-transformation. In a conversation with
Landgrebe from those interlude days in Louvain before the German invasion
of Belgium in the spring of 1940 Fink discussed the sequel he was planning to
his 1939 article on Husserls phenomenology in the Revue internationale de
philosophie. In his notes from that conversation Fink writes: There [in the
1939 article] the theme is an interpretation of the philosophy in Husserls
phenomenology; here it is a matter of the specic danger of phenomenology,
namely, the turn that perverts original philosophical motifs into an unphilo-
sophical dogmatic method of phenomenological research [description and
analysisguiding idea of universal science (radical and universal rigorous
science)theory of essencephilosophy of reectionetc.]. The sequel,
in other words, was to be critical, and radically so. Prior to this discussion Fink
had in fact worked out his ideas for the sequel and given it a title, Treatise on
Phenomenological Research. Unlike other presentations of phenomenol-
ogy, the basic position taken here would be that Husserls philosophy cannot
40. Crisis, p. 291, translation modied (Hua VI, pp. 33839).

41. Z-XXVIII XIX/1a, dated January 14, 1940, emphasis and nested parenthesizing
Finks (EFM 4). See appendix.
536 Beginning Again
be comprehended from its programmatic denitions and requirements, and

from what it proclaims as its aim, but rather that it is seen as philosophizing
precisely in the countermove to its own program.
In his notes pertaining to this Treatise Fink outlines its plan in terms of the
very principle of phenomenological self-critique that typies Husserls pro-
cedure and that Fink explicates as the continuous interplay of analysis and
speculation. (Cf. 7.2.2.) It is a matter not of rejecting the way phenomenol-
ogy begins but rather of retrieving and transforming its beginning in terms of
the gains of insight made by the investigations launched by it. The relationship
between (a) phenomenological investigation and (b) the theoretical ideas that
guide that investigation and the intepretive import that they offerin sum, the
philosophy in ithas to be inquired into; and the result is a critique that,
rather than any kind of censoring from the outside, is the detection and coun-
tering from within of silent persistent presuppositions, including those that
condition the way the very start of phenomenologys program is formulated.
This situation, however, is not simply a negative operationremoving pre-
suppositionsbut rather one of transforming the presuppositional into the
insightful.
This, now, is what Fink explains in his inaugural lecture at Freiburg on
July 26, 1946, that is, the occasion on which to afrm the claim embodied in
the character of his Habilitation, namely, that he was continuing the thrust of
his work with Husserl in phenomenology even while declaring openly that
there was a decided difference between himself and Husserl. Entitled The
Presuppositions of Philosophy, the lecture takes its starting point in the ques-
tion of how philosophy relates to the sciences, the very point of contention in
Finks conversation with Robert Heiss a month earlier. Husserl had uncom-
promisingly proposed phenomenology as rigorous science, but the distinguish-
ing mark of his program is that it is scientic in a far more radical way than the
sciences in going beyond the countering of presuppositions that they practiced.
With phenomenology the most fundamental and comprehensive presupposi-
tion of all is to be brought out of its unrecognized obviousness and be critically
considered, an endeavor that alone could set the framework for the truly
radical science that would now begin. What he [Husserl] places in question,
42. Z-XXVII 67a (emphasis Finks), which begins a long text on the Treatise
[Traktat].
43. See Z-XXVII 68a. The rst ve pages of this planned Traktat are preserved in
Z-XXIX CCCXVII/1a6b (EFM 4). The rest, Fink notes on the typescript itself (see the
last annotations to it in EFM 4), was lost in the events following Germanys invasion of
Belgium in May 1940, briey narrated in the rst pages of this chapter.
Beginning Again 537
as a presupposition that is never expressly made in the sciences, is the being of

the world, and he searches for its justication, not in argumentation but in a
method of research that inquires regressively into the sources of the sense of
believing in the being of the world. And he nds these sources in a hitherto
hidden living subjective internality. This is what Husserl was seeking speci-
cally in his uncovering of the life-world in the last of his writings, wherein it is
clear, Fink writes, pace Heiss, that scientism is itself overcome by radical
inquiry into the essence of science.
That, however, is only the rst level of consideration for phenomenology
and the question of science; there remains another. Husserl proclaims the ideal
of philosophys freeing itself from presuppositions; but is it actually the aim
of philosophy simply to work against presuppositions? Is philosophy only a
move of reduction, of always inquiring back behind already given presupposi-
tions and presuppositional material? Or is this regression only one essential
moment in philosophy? Granted, philosophy is not blindly to follow received
preconceptions; but is not philosophy itself, in its very own idea, a kind of
preconception, namely, in the active sense of a projection? And, though
Fink does not mention this on this occasion, does not Husserl in his Vienna
lecture allow just this kind of thing in speaking of anticipations that, as not
yet evidenced expectations, counter hitherto unrecognized presuppositions in
order to open up scrutinizing analysis of the given to further disclosures?
The sciences, Fink explains, pushing this idea further in his lecture, always
presuppose the idea of a being as being, of things themselves as themselves; they
simply assume the pregiven ontology of the life-world without ever asking
what this massive presupposition itself means or how it arises, although, to be
fair, the sciences also go beyond naive culturally formed life-world construals
in the discoveries that they achieve. But a pregiven ontology is always a by-
product of a philosophy, Fink asserts; it is, as it were, the solidied and now
stable lava bed from a past metaphysical projection. The living conceptual
positingsHusserls anticipationsthat constitute the horizons in which
things can be met, described, and studied, are not, however, themselves to be
met with as are the ordinary objects of inquiry. They are original only in
projection. Lifeless traditional pregivenness, however, is a mode of lapse, of
stagnancy and rigidity and the real death of philosophy. Where, however,
44. Eugen Fink, Die Voraussetzung der Philosophie, Antrittsvorlesung vom 26. Juli
1946 (EFM 4, Abschn. 4), [67]. The last phrase is in einer bislang verborgenen subjek-
tiven Lebensinnerlichkeit.
45. Antrittsvorlesung [7]. Cf. Z-XX 11ab, from late 1935 or early 1936.
538 Beginning Again
philosophy is alive, it is presuppositional as the projection of the substantivity

of all things [Sachheit aller Sachen], of the objectiveness of objects, of the truth
of all that is true, of the beingness of beings [Seiendheit des Seienden]. Being
alive in this ontological projection philosophy gives a grounding to the positive
sciences not by an unwarranted interference in their thematic domain but
rather by the express conceptual positing of the basic ideas about the nature of
being and of truth that guide the sciences. Moreover, for the sciences to be
themselves living, Fink explains, what is needed is for this ontological projec-
tion itself to be alive and active in them also. That the sciences themselves
might question the projections that found themthat biology might con-
stantly ask what life is, that historical science might ask what the historical
means, and so forthdoes not betoken a crisis in their foundations but rather
indicates that they have not become deformed into mere technical manipula-
tion, and that they are open to and meet philosophy precisely at the point of
their convergence with it.
So Fink, at this point in the launching of his own independent career pre-
cisely as taking up the work he had pursued with Husserl, has to pose a the-
sis that he himself explicitly states decisively distances him from Husserl.
Rather than aiming to be presuppositionless, philosophy has to see itself pre-
cisely as fundamental presuppositionality: The relationship between philoso-
phy and the sciences . . . can only be understood in its essential sense if
philosophy is rst conceived as ontological projection, as presupposition.
It is with this realizationthat pure freedom from the presuppositional has to
be questioned and qualied, and that regressive movement is only one
moment of phenomenologys workwith this we decisively distance our-
selves from Husserl, Fink writes.
Yet this decisive distance is itself qualied, or rather is held still in sys-
tematic continuity with Husserls phenomenology in terms of the incomplete-
ness that the last years of its development showed to be uneliminable by
virtue of the very terms of its program. (Cf. 6.4 and 7.1 through 7.2.4.) And it
is in Finks notes that are to be found both the clearest assertion of con-
tinuation and the sharpest formulation of the elements in Husserls work that
have to be criticized and transformed in a distancing from the unrecast letter
of his phenomenological ndings. This all is seen on the one hand in the
last folders of notes before the war, from Z-XXVI, Z-XXVII, Z-XXIX, and
Z-XXX, and on the other in the typed listing of fty-six points that grew from
47. Antrittsvorlesung [8], emphasis Finks.

48. Antrittsvorlesung [8], the closing paragraph of the lecture.
49. Antrittsvorlesung [7].
Beginning Again 539
notes in Z-XXVII and that Fink entitled Elements of a Husserl Critique

Spring 1940.
The four prewar folders just named give us the thoughts and sketches for the
other work Fink could have chosen for his 1946 Habilitation. This is what
Fink had been working on as Ontological Experience (mentioned earlier,
right before 10.1), which led to an offshoot called Treatise on Phenomenologi-
cal Research already mentioned. As his work at Louvain progressed, Fink
lled two folders with notes for these writings, the rst of which, explicitly
slated to be a Habilitationsschrift, bore the full title Ontological Experi-
ence: Treatise on the Limits of Phenomenology. Rigorously evaluating the
actual way phenomenology worked, Fink planned to delineate the in-principle
limits of phenomenological analyses, which thus made necessary speculative
reective thought [spekulative Besinnung]. This reective thoughtnot
reection in the sense of turning an interior gaze back upon oneself, but
Besinnung: careful, probing articulative dwelling upon comprehensive mean-
ingsis what is essentially projective, namely, as projecting the being of
what is [das Sein des Seienden] as the ontological projection already
intrinsically active in the very work of phenomenology precisely as solidly
anchored in and investigative of human experiencing in the world, especially in
the form of the concept of intentionality and the Principle of All Principles.
Husserls work here is essential, even if more as the antecedent to the genuine,
fully realized philosophical moment. A discussion of the relationship of phe-
nomenology and speculation, Fink writes, would be vague and general if it
could not refer to concretely carried out analyses in a working philosophy.
With this kind of philosophywhich Husserls indeed wasat hand, the
ontological positings lying in it are to be made explicit and the motivation
these have in regard to the problem of ontological experience made trans-
parent. Thus it is that Fink takes up the task of doing what Husserls phe-
nomenology had left undone, as he told Landgrebe in December 1939: I
50. Z-XXV is in EFM 3, and the remaining folders are in EFM 4. Finks Elemente
einer Husserl-Kritik is in EFM 4 (Abschn. 2); see the Beschreibung to Z-XXVII for
details on the preparatory notes for it.
51. See the lines quoted in 10.2 from Finks letter to Gerhart Husserl, October 25,
1946.
52. See p. 535 in the present section.
53. Z-XXIX 224a, Finks emphasis; see also 89a, 213a, 261a, and 318ab (EFM 4).
54. Ibid.
55. Z-XXIX 293a.
56. Ideas I (Hua III/1), 24.
57. Z-XXIX 286b, emphasis Finks. See also Z-XXX 38a39b and 54a55a.
540 Beginning Again
myself see the task of phenomenology to lie in getting philosophy going again in
phenomenology. Husserl construed phenomenology as in the main doing
evidentially demonstrated analysis, internal work in Finks characterization
(see 7.2.4 and 7.2.4.1), leaving external clarication vague and implied, and
in doing so Husserl left undeveloped the primary philosophical dimension,
ontological experience; for the essence of philosophy is the proclamation of
basic concepts as the interpretation [Interpretation] of that-which-is [des
Seienden].
Yet, in typical Fink fashion, the work in question was to be not the actual
explication of ontological experience itself but rather the preparation for it,
the delineation as carefully as possible of the problem, namely, of an experi-
ence of being that is a priori, that takes precedence over and springs out ahead
of all empirical experience. This would show Husserls work providing the
basic ndings precisely for developing the theory of appearing for ontvw on,
but only if one also recognized that there was more to phenomenology than
mere descriptive analytic scrutiny. It is a matter of showing how phenome-
nology in philosophizing overcomes its own methodologism, radicalizes it-
self in ontological projections, and thereby sets out for itself elds of analytic
research. It was therefore of the highest signicance to bring about the
developing of phenomenology into an explicit metaphysics, i.e., into an
explicit theory of appearing for ontvw on in its appearing. Husserls work
was limited in not turning much attention to the work of reecting precisely
on phenomenologys functioning ontological projection. The understand-
ing of ontological experience has to be understood, therefore, as comprising
both phenomenological descriptive analysis and speculation as essential, inte-
gral moments within it.
This is the context, then, for reading Finks Husserl Critique, which,
if taken alone and abstractly, could easily be thought to be a very harsh
indictmentindeed, Fink conceived the critique as notes, drawn from the
work on his lost Treatise on Phenomenological Research, not as a text to
stand alone. One could sum up what is needed to interpret it, and what the
58. Z-XXVII 64b, emphasis Finks.

59. See Z-XXV 125ab (EFM 4), very likely from 1937, but possibly 1938.
60. Z-XXIX 17a, emphasis Finks.
61. Z-XXIX 286a.
62. Ibid., emphasis all Finks.
63. The remark that opens the Husserl-Kritik speaks of it as notes from the time of
composing the half-worked-out Traktat, which was lost owing to the war. But any
distinct notes on which Finks typescript depends, if there ever were any other than in the
folders being spoken of here, are no longer extant.
Beginning Again 541
present context of study supplies, in Finks rubric: Phenomenology without

speculative elements is sheer psychology, but the task is openly to perform the
speculative contraband. For what distinguishes Husserls intentional anal-
ysis from intentionalistic psychology is precisely a particular interpreta-
tion of the being-for-us of that-which-is [Frunssein des Seienden]. One
could argue as well that in this Fink achieves the nal accommodation of
Husserl and Heidegger in a basically phenomenological systematic; for right in
his unquestionable inuence on Finks thinking Heidegger comes under cri-
tique, delimitation, and reevaluation as well. At this point, however, we
must bring the present study to a conclusion in another way.
Detailing Finks intentions as he was nally able to begin lecturing in philos-
ophy at Freiburg gives us two essential lines to followand perhaps for us to
develop further ourselvesin phenomenological philosophy after Husserl.
On the one hand there is Fink, dedicated not to producing further phenome-
nological analyses in Husserls manner but rather to treating the dimension
of ontological experience in the situation of living experience in the world,
within which phenomenological analysis, and all science, labors. On the other
hand there is the possibility of going on in phenomenological investigation of
eidetic detail, but now affected by being ever conscious of the ontological
projective factors that both guide and get concretely unfolded further in
such investigations. Here one must cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty as exemplary
in this regard; for his Phenomenology of Perception, his continuing study of
psychology, and nally his lectures at the Collge de France on the study of
nature are precisely an explicitly ontology-minded rereading and recasting
of psychological and biological science that show extraordinary subtlety and
power. Yet Merleau-Ponty did not work only in detail-analysis, he took up as
well what here is laid out as the phenomenologically speculative. This is prom-
inently manifest in The Visible and Invisible, under way even as he was
64. Z-XXVI CXXIII/3, emphasis Finks.

65. Z-XXVI 33a. See also Z-XXVII 34a, 38a, and 40a, and Z-XXX 24ab.
66. See the folder of notes on this very task, Z-MH-I in EFM 4, but also many notes in
Z-XXIX.
67. Merleau-Ponty la Sorbonne: rsum de cours, 19491952, no editor named
(Genoble: ditions Cynara, 1988).
68. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La nature: Notes cours du Collge de France, ed. by
Dominique Sglard (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1995).
69. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et linvisible, ed. by Claude Lefort (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1964). English translation by Alphonse Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). See in this connection my essay Con-
struction in Phenomenology (cf. 7.2.3, note 141).
542 Beginning Again
lecturing in biology and evolution at the Collge de France. Surely this inte-
grated doubleness of dimensions is no accident; but this is not the place to
explore its course in Merleau-Pontys development, even if one can certainly
document how he came to phenomenology in preparation for his Phenome-
nology of Perception, and in particular the inuences he gained from Fink. In
this regard the week he spent in Louvain in 1939 reading Husserls then still
unpublished late-period work was pivotal, as his frequent references to key
ideas in the works read there attestnot to mention the long discussion he
held with Fink. One must also note another connection, the conference in
Brussels in 1951 where Fink delivered his rst paper on Husserls phenome-
nology after 1940, International Analysis and the Problem of Speculative
Thinking, published in French and German together in 1952. Merleau-
Ponty was present at the same conference and presented a paper as well, On
the Phenomenology of Language, so that one may presume that they at
least met briey there. Unfortunately, we have to leave this intriguing conjunc-
tion unexplored here.
But to return to Fink. As we saw, Fink did not write a Habilitationsschrift on
Ontological Experience, but that issue did gure in his lecturing in the
winter semester of 19501951, posthumously published under the title Being
and Man: On the Essence of Ontological Experience. In general the publica-
tions he did bring out are the text of lectures given at Freiburg, and the titles,
such as Towards the Ontological Early History of Space-Time-Movement and
All and Nothing, display the frank prominence of the ontological dimension;
but it would be oversimplifying and false to think that this work is all specula-
tion and not analysis. As is evident in the lectures themselves, both the ones
70. See note 219 in 1.5 and note 74 in 4.4.3; also 6.3.6 (in the appendix) in connection
with my essay Eugen Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in
Phenomenology.
71. Die intentionale Analyse und das Problem des spekulativen Denkens, ND,
pp. 13957; Lanalyse intentionnelle et le problme de la pense spculative, in Prob-
lmes actuels de la phnomnologie, Actes du colloque international de phnomnologie
(Bruxelles, 1951), ed. by H. L. Van Breda (Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 1952), pp. 5387.
72. Sur la phnomnologie du language, ibid., pp. 89109. Reprinted in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 10522. English translation by
Richard C. McCleary, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 8497.
73. See appendix.
74. Eugen Fink, Zur Ontologischen Frhgeschichte von Raum-Zeit-Bewegung (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), topic of lectures in the summer of 1951; Eugen Fink,
Alles und Nichts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), lectures from the summer of
1958.
Beginning Again 543
just mentioned and others published in recent years, Fink does regularly work
a phenomenological analysis, but with a distinctive character. Providing nei-
ther explication of Husserls analyses nor a redoing of the kind of detailing
Husserls manuscripts display, Fink takes up ordinary life phenomena in their
plain everyday experiential basese.g., life and death, technology, political
power, love, play, the lineaments of learning and teaching in order to
open up within these phenomena the speculative elements of questioning that
offer projective insights of both indispensable signicance and irremovable
problematicity. In a world that a brutal war had brought to total undermining
and devastation, it was not academic doctrinal system-building that could
serve the renewal of philosophical understanding. Only a thoughtful, ever-
requestioning integration of concrete phenomena and truly ultimate issues
was legitimable.
However, to go beyond the brief indications of what Fink was taking up in
1946, as the philosophic task of continuation and difference, lies beyond the
bounds of the present work. This book has to end its following of phenome-
nology with and beyond Husserl at the point of this other beginning, different
from the beginnings Husserl found himself again and again undertaking. And
precisely in being this other beginning, I think Finks work offers a moment of
demarcation for how yet further beginnings would have to be found within
and beyond what is called phenomenology.
75. On these themes, see e.g., Eugen Fink, Grundphnomene des menschlichen Da-
seins, ed. by Egon Schtz and Frans-Anton Schwarz (Freiburg and Munich: Alber Ver-
lag), 1979.
76. See Eugen Fink, Erziehungswissenschaft und Lebenslehre (Freiburg: Verlag Rom-
bach, 1970).
Appendix
Longer Notations
Chapter 1
.NOTE :
Original Nachschrift in the Husserl Archives (N I 20): E. Husserl, Grundprobleme

der Logik, Nachschrift, E. Fink, WS 1925/26. On the inside of the cover is written:
Given me by Eugen Fink, 1932, Dorion Cairns. The text of the lecture course as
Husserl wrote it out is basically the main text of Hua XI. (See the following foot-
note.) In point of fact, Fink did take notes of some of the lectures he heard. EFA U-III
(not included in EFM) is a booklet containing notes from both Husserls SS (summer
semester) course in 1927, Natur und Geist (Hua XXXII) and his WS (winter
semester) course (19271928), Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. The latter
covers only a few pages, while the notes on the 1927 course are fairly complete,
although more sketchy than Finks Nachschrift of the same lecture course (in the
Fink Nachla, copy in HA).
.NOTE :
Absolute Wachheit gibt es nicht; alle Wachheit von tiefem Schlaf umgeben; die
dunklen Bewusstseinshintergrnde sind immer vorhanden. Nachschrift, Grund-
probleme der Logik, p. 3. The actual course of Husserls lectures that Fink fol-
lowed, as represented in his Nachschrift, is given in Hua XI only for the main part of
the lectures. (See Einleitung des Herausgebers, p. xiv, and Textkritische An-
merkungen, pp. 44346.) The rst portion of the manuscript text of the lecture
was adapted by Husserl into the opening section of his Formal and Transcendental
545
546 Appendix: Longer Notations
Logic and has been published in the critical edition of this text, Formale und tran-
szendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, Husserliana XVII,
edited by Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), as Ergnzender Text
IV. As a result the passage corresponding to the line quoted here is given in Hua
XVII, pp. 36264, but not in word-for-word equivalence. (Husserls lectures had
been in part delivered free of prepared notes, HChr, p. 322.) For more detail on the
complex manuscript situation of this lecture course of Husserls, see the English
translation by Anthony Steinbock: Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive
and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Dordrecht, Boston, and
London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), Translators Introduction, pp. xv
xix and xxivxxviii. Steinbock assembles all the texts relevant to the lecture course
in his edition (including those in the supplementary volume, Edmund Husserl, Ak-
tive Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung Transzendentale Logik 1920/21, Ergnzungs-
band zu Analysen sur passiven Synthesis, edited by Roland Breeur (Dordrecht,
Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000) in order to offer an inte-
gral presentation of this foundational set of analyses by Husserl.
.NOTE :
The notes in the rst half of Z-I (EFM 1) generally pertain to Finks writing of his
competition essay, the Preisschrift. Z-I 61a, referring to a Zeitbewutseinsmanu-
skript of Husserls, indicates that Husserl let Fink see some of the yet unpublished
ZB (Hua X). The fact that, even in his years of intense work with Husserl, Fink only
rarelywith the exception of his notes on the Bernau manuscriptsmakes specic
reference to manuscripts of Husserls requires one to be cautious about drawing
inferences from the absence of such references in this competition essay (and later in
Finks dissertation). In 1927 and 1928 Fink could not yet read Gabelsberg short-
hand; so, while some of Husserls MSS pertinent to the topics of Finks competition
essay may well have been in transcription (by Edith Stein or Ludwig Landgrebe), far
more would still have been in shorthand. See Zur Textgestaltung, Hua XXIII,
pp. 597ff.
.NOTE :
HChr, p. 337. In a brief note appended along with other documents to the ofcial
record attesting to Finks success in his dissertation defensemagna cum laude,
December 13, 1929Husserl afrms Finks position as Assistent as of October 1,
1928 (Personalakten: E. Fink, UAFbg). Finks position with Husserl shifted several
times in both ofcial institutional support and title: (1) second assistant, 1928
1930; (2) only assistant, 19301934; (3) working together with Husserl under no
ofcial designation after the implementation of the racial exclusion of Jewsin this
case against support for work with Husserland with only private support largely
but not exclusively from outside Germany, from 1934 until Husserls death in 1938.
See Finks Politische Geschichte meiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahan in EFM 4,
Abschn 4., p. [3], and other information indicated in notes to this document as well
as in the Einleitung des Herausgebers II, in Bd. 3.
.NOTE :
In contrast to later accounts (see EFM 4, Abschn. 4, Politische Geschichte meiner

wissenschaftelichen Laufbahn), the Lebenslauf Fink published at the end of his
dissertation in its separate publication (but not included in VB/I), Beitrge zu einer
phnomenologischen Analyse der psychischen Phnomene, die unter den vieldeu-
tigen Titeln sich denken, als ob, Sich nur etwas vorstellen, Phantasieren
befat werden (Halle: Karras, Krber und Nietschmann, 1930), gives October 1928
as the beginning of his work as assistant to Husserl, and this is surely correct. (See
also note 40 above in the appendix.) For a discussion of the discrepancy in Finks
own various accounts, see the notes to the document Politische Geschichte as well
as the Einleitung des Herausgebers II, in EFM Bd. 3. Some of the Bernau manu-
scripts, it seems, were worked on by Landgrebe for use in EU. See Finks notes
suggestive of this in L II 11, L II 12, and L II 13 in the Husserl Archives; also Hua
XXXIII, p. xxv, and especially the essay noted there (footnote 1) by Dieter Lohmar,
Zur Entstehung und den Ausgangsmaterialien von E. Husserls Werk, Erfahrung
und Urteil, Husserl Studies, 13 (1996), 47, 5155, and 6367.
.NOTE :
In Finks personal library we nd Rudolf Bachheimers Lehrbuch der Gabelsberg-

ischen Stenographie, fr den Schul- und Selbstunterricht, 3d edition (Leipzig: Verlag
von G. Freytag, 1921). The few examples of Finks own exercise of Gabelsberg are
brief phrases or short lines (Z-II 42a, Z-III 7a, Z-IV 91a, Z-X 2a, B-II 44a, 105b,
108b, 111athese last four occurring in transcriptions of Bernau MSSand B-III
yleaf) and show nothing of the uid ease of Husserls own graceful shorthand
script. Moreover, the probable datings of the rst four of these instances (late 1928
or sometime in 1929) argue against a mastery of Gabelsberg soon enough before the
end of 1928 for Fink to have done extensive transcriptions from the Bernau MSS.
Fink never made use of Gabelsberg for his own notes the way Landgrebe did both at
that time and in his later years. See 5.1.1.1, note 119, in the appendix.
.NOTE :
See Z-IV 76a (EFM 1), where Fink lists Husserls specic wishes for working up the
Bernau manuscripts into a presentable treatment, one of which, the problematic of
individuation, leads to issues in transcendental logic. He then mentions some-
thing of this latter work as already in press. This could only be FTL (Hua XVII),
the proofs of which Husserl had nished correcting by the beginning of July 1929;
FTL appeared in print by the end of that month (HChr, pp. 34749). However, the
issue of individuation and the temporality of ideal objects receives bare mention in
FTL (Hua XVII, p. 167 [141]). Only in 1939 with the publication of EU in Prague
was a fuller treatment published (64c). In Z-IV Fink goes on to give his own
conception for the revision, as he does more briey in Z-V v/2b (EFM 2), a note
written when the dissertation was nished for submission, or nearly so; for in the
same note series (Z-V V/1a) there is an outline of the treatment of time for VB/II,
i.e., the part of the overall plan not actually completed for the dissertation. Finks
initial conception for his dissertation gave it three sections, with the treatment of
temporality in the third, as will be explained in a moment.
.NOTE :
V-I 3840 (EFM.1). These tentative opening lines were lined through, but they
correspond closely with the second of two typescript plans given in EFM 2, B-I, Beil. I
[7]: Dispositionsentwrfte zur Edition der Bernauer Zeitmanuskripte (originals in
HA). Deciding how Fink was proceeding here is complicated because of the differing
indications in the notes. (1) The plan placed rst in these Dispositionsentwrfe
(EFM 2, B-I, [12]) is the one that in fact governs Finks further work on the
materials, and most of his notes and drafts basically follow it. (2) A carbon copy of
this rst plan, also kept at Louvain (designation P I 3/1), has the date 26. Januar
1929 added on in typing, where the original ribbon copy carries no date of any kind.
(3) In EFA V-I (EFM. Bd. 1) the date I. 1929 appears on an earlier page (30) that is
unrelated to the notes in question (V-I 3840) and is lined through. (4) B-III (in EFM
2), Finks earliest notebook devoted exclusively to the Bernau manuscript texts, gives
two plans corresponding to the two Dispositionsentwrfethat on pp. [12] and
that on p. [7]); and that in B-III 25, corresponding to the rst of these plans (Disposi-
tionsentwrfe), that on pp. [12], occurs earlier in the booklet than that one coming
later (on B-III 36) and corresponding to the second of these plans (p. [7]). This
suggests that Fink was considering two alternative plans for organizing the material
and that both had been conceived in the same period, that is, before or around the end
of January 1929. In any case, his further work shows that the rst of these two plans
for the edition is the one that gained precedence. But the work that Fink did would
continue to change, to become something quite different, as chapter 5 will show.
.NOTE :
Notes for VB/II appear well into the 1930s and as late as 1935. They are to be
found mostly in Z-VII (EFM 1), Z-IX, Z-XI, Z-XIV, and Z-XV (EFM 2). Husserl
planned to include VB/II in the planned JPpF XII; see Husserls letters to Ingarden,
December 21, 1930 (Bw III, p. 270), Felix Kaufmann, January 8, 1931 (Bw IV,
p. 180), and W. R. Boyce Gibson, January 7, 1932 (Bw VI, p. 142); but with
the change of the whole philosophical situation in 1933 (letter to Hans Lorenz
Stoltenberg, an expected contributor, June 11, 1934, Bw VI, pp. 43738), he was no
longer able to bring it out. See chapter 5, note 304, here in the appendix, on the
destruction of the apparently completed VB/II.
.NOTE :
The earliest version under this title was the text Husserl sent to the French transla-
tors, published, translated, in 1931 as Mditations cartsiennes: Introduction la
phnomnologie. The German text in Hua I is basically the same as what Husserl
provided for translation into French, though with differences and variations. The
English translation by Dorion Cairns, CMe, is based, once again, on the same basic
text as in the French and German versions just mentioned; but Cairns also made use
of another copy of the German (Typescript C) that differs in some passages from
the version followed in the Husserliana edition, and which conforms more closely to
the French translation. On the whole matter of these variants, see Hua I, Zur
Textgestaltung, pp. 22128. Guy van Kerckhoven has worked out the details of all
this in his unpublished Vorwort to VI.CM/12, note 3 to p. viii.
.NOTE :
Husserls notes on the pages in the second serial part of Mischs text indicate his
reaction to this representation. In the letter to Misch from November 10, 1930 (Bw
VI, pp. 28283) Husserl discusses Mischs misunderstanding of the real thrust of
transcendental phenomenology as this has been worked out beyond the stage of its
earlier concentration on logic, which Misch in his study seemed to have taken as
characteristic of phenomenology as a whole. Husserl says: For with the transcen-
dental reduction I was convinced I had gained ultimate actual, concrete subjectivity
in the entire fullness of its being and life, in its not merely theoretically operative but
all-inclusive functioning life: absolute subjectivity in its historicity. He then alludes
to the new systematic work in preparation, which had come to be sketched out in
the intervening months.
.NOTE :
On the daily contact, cf. Husserls letters to Boyce Gibson (July 16, 1930, and
January 7, 1932; Bw VI, pp. 140 and 142), and to Dietrich Mahnke (December 31,
1933, where Husserl says that his work is possible because of his having to go
through his ideas daily for two hours with my exceptionally important assistant
Dr. Fink; Bw III, p. 512). Malvine Husserl too testied to Finks regular presence
(letters to Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg from January 16 and May 31, 1930; Bw IX,
pp. 374 and 375). For the later years 1931 and 1932, C-HF is a clear record of the
same thing. On the regular walks, see both Husserls and Malvines letters to In-
garden, March 19, 1930, and May 15, 1931 (Bw III, pp. 263 and 274), and to
Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg (February 3, 1932; Bw IX, p. 401). In this last Cairns is
mentioned as often accompanying the two.
.NOTE :
See Husserls letters to Cairns from November 15 and 28, 1933 (Bw IV, pp. 33 and
36), and in particular to Albrecht, December 30, 1933 (Bw IX, p. 98). See also
Malvine Husserls letter to Cairns, January 1, 1934 (Bw IV, pp. 4142). An account
of the invitation and what came of it is given in Herbert Spiegelberg, Husserls Way
into Phenomenology for Americans: A Letter and Its Sequel, in Phenomenology:
Continuation and Criticism, Essays in Memory of Dorion Cairns, ed. by F. Kersten
and R. Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 18791. Finally, Husserls
former Japanese students were apparently mounting an effort to pilot him from
California to Japan. (Letter from Malvine to Gerhart and his wife, February 13,
1934, not in Bw but kept in the Husserl Archives.)
.NOTE :
As Patocka observes, Husserl never spoke disparagingly of Heideggers abilities,

despite the profound philosophical differences he held to be between himself and
Heidegger. Husserl recognized and admired genial talent when he saw it, even if it
stood opposed to his own thinking. See Die Welt des MenschenDie Welt der
Philosophie, ed. by Walter Biemel, Phaenomenologica 72 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1976), p. x. In fact Fink, too, continued to follow Heideggers philosophic
work at the university, still attending lectures when he could manage to in these later
years, which was not often. The only course he seemed later to have attended, in
part at least, is Heideggers 19351936 WS lectures entitled Grundfragen der
Metaphysik. See Z-XXXVIII/13 in EFM 3.
.NOTE :
To Landgrebe, who subsequently sent Fink a series of critical objections (cf. Finks
reply to Landgrebes points in his letter of June 5, 1934; EFM 2, Abschn 4); to
Hashime Tanabe and Goichi Miyake in Japan (letters from the two from, respec-
tively, June 12 and July 7, 1934); to Winthrup Bell in Nova Scotia, Canada (the
latters letter of May 22, 1934), to mile Baudin (letter of May 20, 1934); to William
Ernest Hocking (the latters letter from May 17, 1934)all in the Fink Nachlass.
Husserl sent a copy to Edouard Baumgarten (letter of October 20, 1934, Bw VII,
p. 26), and recommended it and Finks Kanstudien essay to Hans Lorenz Stolten-
berg, as an aid to reading his Formal and Transcendental Logic and Cartesian
Meditations (letter of June 11, 1934; Bw VI, p. 43738); and he adds: [T]o both of
which I fully subscribe (p. 438).
.NOTE :
Politische Geschichte, p. [3], EFM 4, Abschn. 4. Professor Lionel Robbins, of the

London School of Economics, was the one who arranged things in England (Hus-
serls letters to Felix Kaufmann from May 28 and July 9, 1935, and July 21, 1936,
Bw IV, pp. 209, 21112, and 22829, and Kaufmanns to Husserl, July 25, 1935,
Bw IX, pp. 21215). See the letter from Malvine Husserl to Felix Kaufmann from
July 30, 1936 (Bw IX, pp. 23031). On the American help from the Ott family, see
also the letters of Malvine Husserl to Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg, September 15,
1937 (Bw IX, pp. 49394), and to Gerhart Husserl, August 20, 1937 (Bw IX,
p. 263), and June 3, 1938 (in the Husserl Archive, not in Bw). Gerhart had also
received nancial help from Dorothy Ott in his difculties. (References to Q. Ott
in Bw Xp. 166can only refer to Dorothy Ott.)
.NOTE :
Letter of March 30, 1933, Bw VII, p. 89. Husserl had been reading the published
proceedings of a conference of the Socit Thomiste that Feuling had sent him,
in which Husserls phenomenology was the center of discussionLa phnom-
nologie, Juvisy, 12 Septembre 1932, Journes dtude de la Socit Thomiste, Les

ditions du Cerf. During a visit before the conference, where Alexandre Koyr and
Edith Stein had represented Husserlian phenomenology, Feuling had spent several
hours with Fink in which the latter had explained to him the nal development of
transcendental phenomenology. Feuling had valued these sessions in view of the
fact that Koyr and Stein had stressed the earlier form of phenomenology. Letter
from Feuling to Fink, September 27, 1932, in the Fink Nachlass.
.NOTE :
Letter to Rudolf Pannwitz, May 17, 1934. The full remark Husserl wroteunfortu-
nately not included in Bwis: Dr. Fink is a wonderful manno mere mouth-
piece! It is put in the margin next to a passage in which Husserl describes his
difculties, especially the all too human humanity that he sees all around and that
utterly lacks the ability to stand back and see aright, e.g., in the tranquillitas animi
of the non-participant onlooker. Yet despite it all he, Husserl, shorn of the right to
call himself a German philosopher, has nonetheless reached philosophic solitude,
free of the seduction of the school and the most secret vanities of fame, but it
has not come easily. (Bw VII, pp. 21819).
.NOTE :
Merleau-Pontys account of his reading is cited on pp. 42122 in H. L. Van Breda,

Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl Louvain, Revue de mtaphysi-
que et de morale, 67 (1962), 41030. English translation by Stephen Michelman, in
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Texts and Dialogues, ed. by Hugh J. Silverman and James
Barry Jr. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), pp. 15061. Tran-
Duc-Thao speaks of his reading it in a letter to Van Breda from September 27, 1943
(quoted in van Kerckhoven, unpublished Vorwort, p. xxxiv, note 31 to p. xiv). In
a letter to Herbert Spiegelberg, June 4, 1973, Van Breda explains that no trace of this
copy of the Sixth Meditation has been found among Bergers papers (quoted in
van Kerckhoven, ibid.)
Chapter 2
.NOTE :
VB/I, pp. 1213. There may well be a reection here of a point Husserl himself
perhaps expressed in one of his lecture courses. In Finks notebook on Husserls
lectures in SS 1927, Natur und Geist he writes (U-III 30, in EFA, not in EFM):
We thus stand before the task of the phenomenological reduction, which we for-
mally designate [ formal anzeigen] as noematization. The corresponding passage of
Finks typed Nachschrift of these lectures, p. 14 (given in Hua XXXII, pp. 264/30
31) does not give the closing relative clause here; nor does anything correspond to it
in Husserls now published manuscript from the lectures (HA F I 32, 163ab, Hua
XXXII, p. 149). While this clause may, therefore, be Finks own characterization,
nevertheless, Husserl adds a note here that at least some of what he presented in this
section was given nur mndlich, free of the text (pp. 169/19 and 149, annota-
tion 1).
..NOTE :
Letters to Felix Kaufmann, December 17, 1932, and to Alfred Schutz, October 25,
1932 (both in EFM 2, Abschn. 4). Kaufmanns review appeared in Zeitschrift fr
Nationalkonomie, 5 (1934), 42830. Schutzs review of Mditations cartsiennes
appeared in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 51 (December 18, 1932), 240416. (Cf.
Kaufmanns letters to Husserl, November 27 and December 19, 1932Bw IV,
pp. 189 and 190and Husserls to Schutz, September 20, 1932Bw IV, pp. 486
87; in this latter Husserl writes that he and Fink had talked over Finks suggestions.)
See also the draft for a critique meant for Helmut Kuhn, who had sent Husserl a
copy of his review of Mditations cartsiennes just published in Kant-Studien, 38
(1933), 20916. Apparently, this response (EFM 2, Abschn. 4, and Bw VI, pp. 243
47) was never sent.
...NOTE :
When Heidegger in this last lecture course in Marburg writes that we must make
intentionality itself into a problem (MH-GA 26, p. 168; MFLe, p. 134), it is hard
not to wonder if Fink had access to the material of this lecture course, at least at
some later date prior to his Kant lecture in reference to which he wrote the notes just
cited. (At the same time, undocumented direct conversation with Heidegger was a
way Fink could learn of this and other points.) There will be another occasion to
consider indications of the availability to Fink of material from this lecture course of
Heideggers (see 5.1.1.4). Both the questioning of the noesis-noema structure of
intentionality and the need for continued self-critique in phenomenological advance
(see 2.3) are unmistakable also in History of the Concept of Time, translated by
Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 46, 47, and 136
(MH-GA 20, pp. 61, 63, and 184). Signicantly, in Finks note listing particular
points on which reference to Heidegger should be made in his dissertation (Z-I
111a; EFM 1), Fink does not mention these themes. It is the ontological issue on
which Fink gives prime acknowledgment of Heideggers inuence.
...NOTE :
Fink distinguishes between the more comprehensive theory of knowledge proper

[Erkenntnistheorie] from the narrower analysis of the cognitive moment, i.e., gnose-
ology [Gnoseologie]. Theory of knowledge comprehensively taken comprises for
him two undertakings: (a) internal analysis, i.e., gnoseology, and (b) external analy-
sis, i.e., the ontology of knowledge, both of which are mundane, i.e., world-
contextual, in their native character. (OH-II 3536, OH-IV 22; EFM 3.) The Anglo-
American sense of the term epistemology is therefore not equivalent to Finks sense
of Erkenntnistheorie, and to treat it so is to mask the distinction here indicated.
Furthermore, to interpret cognition in terms of the correlational structure, i.e., in its

gnoseological character, is to focus on the internal dimension of the theory of
knowledge, which Husserl fails to distinguish from the external, or ontological.
See also Z-XI 19a (EFM 1, also in EF/CM-HS, p. 111).
...NOTE :
Another example of Husserls familiarity with Finks statements of his own interpre-
tive direction is his reading of Finks Dessau lecture (ND, pp. 744) and brief
annotations to it. Fink ends his essay with a strong statement about the meontic
character of the reduction, to which Husserl writes not a word of comment. C-HF
routinely presents Fink as showing an understandable deference toward Husserl, as
one might expect of a young man working with a distinguished emeritus professor.
For much the same reason a measure of reticence on Finks part is also to be ex-
pected. Finks notes for himself, however, were bound to be more unrestrained. This
is what is reected in the relatively few personal notes of actual conversations with
Husserl (e.g., Z-XII 4c; OH-VI 15; OH-VII 36). Husserl, on the other hand, tended
to understand the position someone else was proposing only when it became inte-
grated into his own thinking, only when it became his own. It is reasonable to think,
therefore, that Husserl had not exhaustively graspedthat is, appropriatedthe
ideas Fink was working over in his own mind.
Van Bredas comment to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in a letter from December 17,
1945, is pertinent here: I have just read your ne book on the Phenomenology of
Perception. . . . It seems to me that it is too strongly under the inuence of the Sixth
Meditation, which is a text by Fink, not Husserl. This text, as well as the article by
Fink in Kant-Studien, is basically a critique of the very bases of Husserls thought,
although the author has indeed hidden his opposition, and Husserl himself in his
splendid naivet did not notice itat least as concerns the article in Kant-Studien.
The present study basically accords with this assertion of Van Bredas, though it
lessens the stark oppositional character of it. Van Bredas letter to the French pub-
lishing house Aubier of December 17, 1945, speaking of the Sixth Meditation, is
in a similar vein: Fink did not like to have his draft widely known, because his
critique is basically quite severe. . . . At the time he wrote these pages it would have
been very difcult for him to express his thinking in a more straightforward way.
(Letters in the Husserl Archives.)
Chapter 3
.NOTE :
This is a paradigm case of the way a substantive issue, the nature of the transcenden-
tal I, comes under reconsideration in terms of several dimensions of systematic
critique at the same time: reviewing and countering navet in ones operating con-
ceptions, identifying different levels of analytic focus, drawing together and inte-
grating the results of the analysis of different topics, clarifying and interpreting the
guiding projections or higher descriptions in view of all this, in close relation-

ship to the concrete investigations of detail. Finally, there is the question of the
proper methodology for characterization on a genuine transcendental level. All this
is being worked out in Finks reections on the I in terms of the question of being in
his joint study of Husserls and Heideggers thought.
..NOTE :
A passage in Finks notes from Heideggers SS 1929 lecture courses seems to ac-
knowledge this problem, in the context of a discussion of Fichte: If the problem of
the possibility of representation [Vorstellung] is the basic problem of metaphysics,
the question of the possibility of representation is the question how a being that
understands other beings can nd itself in the midst of such beings. (EFA U-MH-III
102, corresponding to but more trenchant than MH-GA 28, p. 146: Wie mu
das Wesen des schon umgrenzten Ich weiterhin bestimmt werden, da in ihm die
Mglichkeit des Vorstellens als eines Wesensbestandes des Ich-Seins verstndlich
wird? See also EFA U-MH-V 51, i.e., MH-GA 31, pp. 135 and 314.
..NOTE :
The issue is deepened further when one takes into account Heideggers insistence in
SZ that, inasmuch as disclosedness is the fundamental thing about Dasein, Dasein
simply is its there, i.e., is Da-sein, as the term is rewritten in MH-GA 2. And
Heidegger immediately repeats the point: In that Da-sein essentially is its disclosed-
ness, and, as disclosed [my emphasis], discloses and discovers, it is essentially true
(SZ, pp. 22021; BTst, p. 203). The same thing is said earlier in the book, and
equally unqualiedly, in terms of the metaphorical element of light and opening up
to the light in the chapter Being-in as Such (SZ, p. 133; BTst, p. 125). Indeed,
being-in is the structure that has to be understood most precisely in order to grasp
how Dasein is Da-sein, i.e., is the da that is the basic determinant of the world-
character of the world as well as of the basic ontological character of any being other
than Dasein in Heideggers analysis (in particular, SZ, 18 and 31). The same
paradoxical point is brought up in terms of the same light-metaphor in the seminar
conducted jointly by Fink and Heidegger in 1966 and 1967 and published as Martin
Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraklit (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1970), pp. 22932
(English translation, Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 1966/
67, trans. by Charles H. Seibert [University: University of Alabama Press, 1979],
pp. 14245). It is Fink, not Heidegger, who elaborates the point.
..NOTE :
The reason for considering only Vorhandenheit at this point, without taking up
Zuhandenheit as well, is that here we are considering only the terms of the
relation of intentionalityviz., subject and objectas that is normally presented by
Husserl and accordingly interpreted critically by Heidegger (see Z-XV 29ab, 67a
68, 100ab, 125ab; EFM 2). Moreover, Heidegger himself makes this the contrast
between extreme kinds of being, for example, in his rst Freiburg lecture course
(EFA U-MH-I 23; MH-GA 27, p. 90). See also EFA U-MH-III 45; MH-GA 28A,
pp. 28384.
As in other cases, this term Vorhandenheit as Heidegger uses it does not trans-
late simply, and there is dispute about what serves best. The contrast is with Zu-
handenheit, which casts a thing as integrated into the eld of need, use, and interest
on the part of a human being in its day-to-day activities, and having its basic sense
precisely and exclusively as thus integrativehence translations emphasizing at-
hand-ness, e.g., handiness (BTst) or, in my own rendering, hand-readiness.
Vorhandenheit, then, means the way a thing stands out from the integrative sense
and manifestness in this original existential situation, and its sense as something
come to the fore as itself in some way, i.e., nonintegratively. Stambaughs objec-
tive presence in BTst is intended to bring this across but is difcult to read free of
the long-current sense of objectivity as the autonomous, in-itself entitative stand-
ing of a thing that allows the full knowability of its real properties. Kisiel offers
extant in its archaic sense of standing out, i.e., emerging from concealment or
standing forth openly to view, although it can also mean, simply, existing (indeed, its
derivation is similar). (See Theodore Kisiels review essay The New Translation of
Sein und Zeit: A Grammatological Lexicographers Commentary, Man and World,
30, (1997), 23958, specically p. 245.) However, in its contemporary sense ex-
tant means quite unequivocally that something is still in existence when it would be
expected no longer to be so, and this I nd interferes with ones taking it in the sense
that Kisiel intends, and Heidegger requires, for Vorhandenheit. I have conse-
quently opted for a somewhat awkward expression, presence out there, hoping to
maintain something of the traditional use of the term in German philosophy (which
does not connote anything to do with the hands, i.e., with utility or context inte-
gration) while indicating the neutrality needed to contrast with Zuhandenheit,
hand-readiness.
..NOTE :
The argument here is taken from Z-V VI/11ab, but cf. also Z-I1451146b; both in
EFM 1. On Ent-gegenwrtigung, see 5.1.1. It is worth mentioning that an analo-
gous difculty in the procedure Heidegger followed was raised by then contempo-
rary dialectical theologians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Traub. They questioned the
validity of transfering psychological terms (e.g., care, anxiety, idle talk) into
an ontological frame to dene in the latter the conditions for the possibility of the
former. The nature and validity of this transfer was questioned. (Karen Remmler
brought this criticism to my attention via the doctoral dissertation on Heidegger by
the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, Die kritische Aufnahme der Existential-
philosophie Martin Heideggers (Vienna, 1949; rpt. Munich: Piper, 1985). The refer-
ence to LehmannDer Tod bei Heidegger und Jaspers, Ein Beitrag zur Frage:
Existenzphilosophie und Protestantische Theologie (Heidelberg, 1938)and
TraubHeidegger und die Theologie, Zeitschrift fr systematische Theologie, 9

(1932), 686f.is found in Bachmann on pp. 1002.
..NOTE :
In this note Fink cites the phrasings by Heidegger about time and the world that
were introduced earlier in 3.3.2, footnote 56. In Heideggers Vom Wesen des Grun-
des, which Fink is discussing in the note at present in question (Z-XIV IX/1a2b),
time and temporalizing are only briey mentioned in one place (Wgm, p. 62),
without the celebrated phrasing quoted in footnote 56 in 3.3.2. The phrasing that
Fink cites in Z-XIV IX/1a2b, but not as a quote, is this: Zeit ist nicht, Zeit zeitigt
sich, Welt ist nicht, sie weltet. The only portion of this string of clauses that actually
occurs in the published text of Vom Wesen des Grundes is the second pair about
world, written Welt ist nicht, Welt weltet (Wgm, p. 60), which Fink supple-
ments with the rst pair of clauses about time on the basis of what he already then
knows of Heideggers thinking from elsewhere. Phrasing about time similar to this
can be found in SZ, for example, on pp. 328/3233 and 3637, 329/2627,
350/812 and 1516, and 420/37; but see also pp. 365/3336 and 436/14.
.NOTE :
Z-IV 66a, EFM 1; Cohen, Logik der Erkenntnis, p. 31. Finks only rewording is in
the second-last sentence here, replacing Cohens is with is made up of, and
underlining was. (Also, in the last sentence quoted here he does not, as Cohen
does, underline its own in its own origin.) In the very next section after this
passage, entitled The Logic of Origin, Cohen begins by speaking of Nicholas
Cusanus. For a classic, detailed discussion of how to read t t hn einai, and very
different in tenor from the present interpretation, see Joseph Owens, The Doctrine
of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1963), pp. 18088.
.NOTE :
Heideggers footnote is in SZ, p. 363; this point is analogous to Heideggers asser-

tion in his correspondence with Husserl over the article for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica that the mode of being of Dasein is what makes the reduction possible
(Hua IX, p. 601, in Heideggers letter of October 22, 1927; also in Bw IV, p. 146,
and in the following collection, p. 138). For Husserls comment on SZ, p. 363, see
Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Con-
frontation with Heidegger (19271931), ed. and trans. by Thomas Sheehan and
Richard E. Palmer, Collected Works VI (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), p. 401. See also
the similar query by Husserl to SZ, p. 365, line 4 (Confrontation with Heidegger,
p. 402). In the sentence immediately following the sentence Husserl questions here
(SZ, p. 365, lines 46), Heidegger characterizes temporality as the condition of the
possibility of the world.
Chapter 4
.NOTE :
Weltbefangenheit, rendered here as captivation in the world, could in fact be

rendered as prjug du monde, the term Maurice Merleau-Pontys uses in his Ph-
nomnologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); English translation by
Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962).
Merleau-Ponty, however, uses prjug du monde to mean the idea of a fully deter-
mined and objectively given universe of things and events, rather than the pregiven
sitedness of human being in the world, to which one does not have a thematically
focused orientation. (See Phnomnologie de la perception, pp. 11, 62, 296, and
316; the corresponding passages in the translation, pp. 5, 51, 256, and 273, do not
always reect the French formula.) It could well be, though no documentation
conrms this supposition, that Weltbefangenheit was one of the ideas that gured
in the conversations Merleau-Ponty held with Fink in 1939, during the week he
spent there from April 1 to 7; see H. L. Van Breda, Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les
Archives-Husserl Louvain, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, 67 (1962), 413.
Subsequently, Merleau-Ponty would have seen the term used in Finks Sixth Medi-
tation (see CM6, pp. 42 and 72; VI.CM/1, pp. 46 and 81), which Gaston Berger
had made available to him two years later (see 1.4).
..NOTE :
David Carr in Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserls

Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), for
example, follows this approach (e.g., pp. 20, 148, and 163ff.), as does Klaus Held,
in his Einleitung to Edmund Husserl, Ausgewhlte Texte, I (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1985), pp. 3334; so also Ludwig Landgrebe in his essay The World as a Phenome-
nological Problem, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1 (19401941),
3858. Landgrebes position there displays some of the very elements that Fink
takes issue with here and in 4.4.2. The question of the world as horizonal was a
frequent topic in discussions between Landgrebe and Fink; see Z-XIX II/3ab, /4a,
and /7a, all from March 1935 (EFM 2), and Z-XXVIII XIX/1a2b, from Janu-
ary 14, 1940 (EFM 4), this latter specically about Landgrebes article.
..NOTE :
Z-XIV VIII/2a; EFM 2. The German wording of the last clause is Welt der all-
inbegrifiche reine Enthalt. Cf. also Z-XIV II/2ab (EFM 2) and OH-IV 37 (EFM
3). Z-XIV II/2ab in particular claries Finks critical position with respect to Hei-
degger, as just one sentence from it indicates: It is not because Dasein as Transcen-
dence is ecstatic beyond all that is in being [alles Seiende] that there is the world,
it is rather because the world as the cosmic Containment also includes Dasein that
the ecstatic structure of Dasein is rst possible. On Finks critical yet apprecia-
tive stance regarding Heidegger, see Finks lecture course from 1949, Welt und
Endlichkeit, ed. by Franz-A. Schwarz (Wrzburg: Knigshausen und Neumann,

1990), pp. 16684.
..NOTE :
Finks interest in wakefulness shows in his reading of Husserls Ideas I. In his copy of
the book he underlines waches in waches Ich (Hua III/1 35, p. 73; Finks copy
is the 2d edition of 1922, signed Eugen FinkWS 1925/26), and in the bottom
margin he writes: But non-actuality [Inaktualitt] does not equal sleep! To be
distinguished are latent consciousness and sleeping consciousness. Sleep is sleep of
the I (attentionactivity, etc.). Cf. also MH-GA 28, p. 241, the essential points of
which are summarized in Finks Nachschrift, U-MH-I 77 (EFA, not in EFM), though
without particular underlining.
..NOTE :
One can see this in the various sketches for the inquiry, whether explicitly entitled
such, or in general thematic terms. Explicit outlines are found in Z-XV 105ab
(EFM 2) and Z-XX 1a (EFM 3); briefer indications are given in Z-XI I/2a, Z-XIII
29a (both in EFM 2), OH-VII 16, and Z-XX XX/2a (both in EFM 3). Sketches or
treatment of the substantive issues, without explicit reference to the title, are to be
found in many notes, with some of them, either by virtue of the designated theme or
because of proximity in location, clearly relating directly to the projected work, such
as Z-IX 25a, entitled World-Totality and World-Consciousness; Z-XIV II/2a,
entitled The World-Concept; Z-XV 14a, entitled World-Totality and World-
Consciousness (all EFM 2); Z-XXV 62 (EFM 3), entitled The Theory of the
World-Concept. (This last entry is apparently the draft of a letter intended for
Heidegger, in which Fink writes a request to him to look over the section entitled
M. Heideggers existenzialer Weltbegriff to see if there are any crass misin-
terpretations. It is not determinable from the Fink Nachlass if a letter like this was
ever sent to Heidegger. From other dates in Z-XXV the draft in question appears to
be from 1937.) Finally, there is mention of only the title in a few remaining instances
not already cited: Z-XVI 5a, Z-XVIII 4b, Z-XX 1a, 3b, and 13a, OH-VI 19, OH-VII
A/1a. Even as late as 1938, after Husserls death, it is mentioned, in Z-XXIII 15 and
26 (all these last texts in EFM 3).
..NOTE :
Nachschrift by Fink of Husserls SS 1927 lecture course, Natur und Geist, in the
Fink Nachlass (copy in HA), p. 9, a briefer approximation of Hua XXXII, 18,
pp. 11718. Finks formulation here makes the point regarding Kant more explicitly
than Husserls lecture text does, literally taken. Whether or not it captures Husserls
own wording in the actual lecturing cannot be determined. (See the editors Ein-
leitung, Hua XXXII, p. xi, n. 1). On Husserls lectures on Natur und Geist as
developing the idea of the life-world, see Guy van Kerckhoven, Zur Genese des
Begriffs Lebenswelt bei Edmund Husserl, Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte, XXIX

(1958), 182203.
..NOTE :
A matter related to this, which, however, will have to be left aside below, when the
effect of Finks thinking in the Crisis-writings is taken up (4.6), is the way in which
Finks interpretation of Kants contribution to bringing the world to philosophic
treatment differs from Husserls, for example, in Crisis, pp. 28 and 29. What Hus-
serl emphasizes is that Kant had not recognized the world as the pregiven horizon
operating in the fundamental life in which subjectivity experiences the actually
given. While Fink does not contest this assertion of limitation in Kant, he neverthe-
less nds Kants critique position pertinent to the second of two difculties lying in
the fundamentality of the in-the-world character of the living experiential subject,
the only form in which any such subject can be or can have actual experience. On the
one hand there is the issue of the kind of consciousness that would be awake to
the world precisely as horizonal (just taken up here, and see 4.6.3 below), and on the
other there is the paradox of the subject constituting and the subject constituted
being both identical and different (see 4.6.4). This paradox problem ultimately leads
for Fink to the speculative matter of the meontic, in which Kants conception of
the a priori character of the Idea of the world, beyond both experience and
being, is transformed within a radicalized transcendental constitutive phenomenol-
ogy that at the same time overcomes Husserls reection-philosophy restrictive-
ness (i.e., what is involved in the rst issue). How this solution works is indicated in
chapter 7 (7.3 to 7.3.3).
Chapter 5
..NOTE :
As the parenthetic phrase indicates, one should be more careful here and speak of
not only the temporality of the appearances but also the temporality of the act-
experiences in which an intentional act is directed via appearances toward the ap-
pearing object itself (whether, for example, perceived or imagined). In other words,
to noematic temporality there corresponds to noetic temporality. Both of these in
turn have their temporal characterand unityas set within the ow structure of
what Husserl terms absolute consciousness. See John Brough, Husserls Phe-
nomenology of Time-Consciousness, in Husserls Phenomenology: A Textbook,
ed. by J. N. Mohanty and William R. McKenna (Washington, D.C.: CARP and
University Press of America, 1989), pp. 24989.
..NOTE :
By Ingardens testimony (see his article Edith Stein on Her Activity as an Assistant
of Edmund Husserl, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22 [1962], 158)
Husserl had kept Steins elaboration of the early time studies locked away, as they
were only preparatory, taking it out during Ingardens visit in October 1927
which does not preclude Husserls having made it available to Fink. Heidegger
recounts that Husserl had introduced him to the same materials in April 1926 (Hua
X, Einleitung, p. xxiii). Heideggers work on Steins revision was completed by
July 13, 1928 (as Husserl remarks in a letter to Ingarden from that date, Bw III,
p. 241), so that Heidegger had to have had these texts in hand sometime toward the
end of 1927 and/or in the earlier months of 1928.
..NOTE :
In this passage Fink separates the Ent- to emphasize the sense of an action contrary
to presencing Gegenwrtigung, thus removing any possibility that one might read
the word as Entgegen-wrtigen; for this latter reading would only intensify the sense
of oppositional stance in the sense of gegen rather than introduce a negation func-
tion. He also italicizes Ent-. A similar separation of Ent- occurs in Crisis (Ent-
Gegenwrtigung, p. 185; Hua VI, p. 189), a case in which the original typescript
formulation is modied by Husserl (cf. Hua VI, p. 532). If Fink were responsible for
the original formulation there, which is quite incompatible with the meaning Ent-
gegenwrtigung has in Finks thinking, it would be odd that depresenting is not
explicitly characterized as horizonal; moreover, Husserls rephrasing weakens its
force (so to speak) and links it to an explicit thematic intending (through recol-
lection), against horizonal antecedency.
..NOTE :
Presenting and presencing are two ways of rendering the same German term,
which only occurs in philosophic usage, as here; but they offer different connota-
tions. Presenting is the normal translation (though usually in nominal form, pre-
sentation, rather than as a gerund), and means in general to make something
present to oneself. The emphasis is on the act of placing before, with the state of
being present taken more or less for granted as an accompanying condition or result
of the act. The neologism presencing, on the other handof currency now in
post-Heideggerian and deconstructionist usageemphasizes this very condition of
presentness as that which is specically achieved in the act of presenting. Thus either
term may be used, depending upon the emphasis one wishes to convey. Finks expli-
cation of Entgegenwrtigung, coupled with his critique of Husserls presentialism
(see 5.2.3.1) has the effect of introducing the shift of emphasis represented by the
second term. Thus while presenting and presencing (and their correlative negations,
depresenting and depresencing) may be used interchangeably, the shift of emphasis
conveyed by the choice of one over the other should be remembered.
...NOTE :
In this note (Z-IV 10a) Fink makes reference to a conversation with Husserl from
July 10, 1929, featured as well in Z-I 149a150b, on the intratemporality of the
ever-temporal, e.g., of the ideal. (Both in EFM 1). Finks approach, then, allows
resolving an ambiguity in the term genetic: it can mean the genesis effected within
temporal horizonalities, or it can mean the genesis of temporal horizonalities them-
selves. This is the distinction between the genesis done within horizonal world-time,
and the genesis of horizonal world-time. The rst is generally the topic of genetic
analysis, while the second is the ultimate term of regression, viz., to ultimate ori-
gin and origination. See 5.1.1.3.
...NOTE :
A comprehensive grasp integrating the considerations of 5.2.2.2 and of chapter 7

(for example, 7.2.3, 7.2.4, and 7.3.3.2) with the points in the present paragraphs
yields the folloing realization. There is no standing, streaming present without a
concretely and temporally proceeding actual experiencing, and this is precisely what
takes place as the living of a concrete actual human I. Otherwise put, the centering of
temporality in a concretely specic temporal now is never a purely formal matter
if it is to be transcendentally operative. Accordingly, that there be the fullness of a
specic concretely actual moment is a transcendental necessity, so that, however
historical and contingent and nite the concrete living I, the actual accumulative,
habituation-weighted human I, may be, it is fullling a genuine transcendental
role. This is what the In-Stance means. Finks thinking here offers a speculative-
interpretive and integrative reconceptualizing of temporalization on the basis of the
deepest analytic effort of Husserls time studies.
..NOTE :
Suggesting this last idea is the fact that the subset of notes (Z-V IV/111) com-
ing immediately after those dealing with the swing of time here (Z-V III/114)
contains a discussion on a thesis of Mrchens regarding the imagination (Z-V
IV/10ab), which, however, need only refer to Herman Mrchens work Die Ein-
bildungskraft bei Kant, published in Husserls Jahrbuch XI, the same volume that
contained Finks dissertation. Finks discussion of Mrchen emphasizes his own
analysis of time in term of depresencing. Mrchen had handwritten a set of de-
tailed notes from Heideggers 1928 SS lecture course (cf. Nachwort, MH-GA 26,
p. 289), but there is no evidence of a Fink-Mrchen personal acquaintance.
...NOTE :
Beil. II, IV, V, VI, VIII, X, XII, and XIII in Hua X stem from the Bernau manuscripts,
as Fink had already discovered in his study of them (see Edi Marbachs bersich
ber die Manuskriptgruppe L II, in HA). For the full extent of the material thus
included in the 1928 publication see the indications given in Hua XXXIII, Ein-
leitung der Herausgeber, pp. xvii and xxv, and Zur Textgestalgung, p. 393.
Material from the Bernau manuscripts was also used in Landgrebes editing of EU;
cf. Hua XXXIII, p. xxv and note 1, especially the article by Dieter Lohmar referred
to there, Zu der Entstehung und den Ausgangsmaterialien von Edmund Husserls
Werk Erfahrung und Urteil, Husserl Studies, 13 (1996), 3171.
...NOTE :
Finks transcript keeps the manuscript in its original order, while Hua XXXIII
parcels it out in accord with the ve-part thematic organization of the edition (see
Einleitung der Herausgeber, pp. xxxxxxii, and xlixl). When these separated
parts are assembled in the order of the manuscript sheaf itself, they go as follows: (a)
Hua XXXIII, pp. 21028/30 (Text No. 11, with Bl. 1 given on p. 398 and with Bl. 3
omitted), (b) pp. 232/12235/14 (Beil. VI), (c) pp. 228/31232/7 (Text no. 11,
continued), and (d) pp. 2048/4 (Text No. 2), which includes a brief passage with
diagrams at the end that is not in Finks typescript.
...NOTE :
Rudolf Bernet has drawn attention to the structural role absence plays in Husserls
analysis, the temporal absence that arises at the very heart of the presence of the
absolute subject to itself, (La prsence du pass dans lanalyse husserlienne de la
conscience du temps, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, 88 [1983], 179), and he
has made an insightful comparison between Husserls and Heideggers conceptions
of how time originates (Origine du temps et temps originaire chez Husserl et
Heidegger, Revue philosophique de Louvain, 85 [Novembre 1987], 499521). His
emphasis on Heideggers focus on horizon in contrast to Husserls on object con-
verges, without his knowing Finks notes, with Finks thinking on the same matters.
....NOTE :
See also HA C 17 III, p. 14 [57a57b], for a similar apparent word-form semantic

play on Husserls part, which in turn is parallel to one Fink has in Z-XII 39 (EFM 2).
Cf. also Finks 1939 essay, Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls,
Studien, pp. 2045. N.B.: In the citations from the C-manuscripts the original
manuscript pages are also given, in brackets. This will make it possible to nd the
passage referred to in the forthcoming edition of these manuscripts that will indi-
cate the original manuscript pagination: Spte Texte ber Zeitkonstitution (1929
1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. by Dieter Lohman, Husserliana Materialien (Dor-
drecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
...NOTE :
See Z-I 140a (EFM 1), Z-VII XVII/30a (Chiavari) (EFM 2), and OH-VII 21 (EFM
3). Fink nds the element of punctualism prominent in Husserls work even if at
the same time Husserl conceives the point of the now as including the not-yet
and the no longer, via protention and retention. See B-III 16 (EFM 2, Abschn. 2).
(See 5.1.1, p. 232, where this is exactly the point Fink asserts of Husserls work in
VB/I.) One of the most helpful distinctions Fink makes in regard to Husserls work,
one that would clarify many Husserlian texts but that, applied, would require their
detailed interpretative rewording, is that between a time-modality and a time-
horizon. For example, now is a time-modality, a position within time, whereas
the present is a time-horizon, the wherein of the modality of now, B-IV 7b,
EFM 2). This all gets complicated in the explication of the time-horizon (cf.
5.1.2.3.1), and it is behind making the distinction between two aspects in the pres-
ent critique of schema primacy, one pertaining to the time-modality of the now-
point, and the other pertaining to the time-horizon of the present.
..NOTE :
In Z-XIX II/8a (#5), in notes on conversations with Landgrebe in March 25, 1935,
Fink indicates that one major theme of the new Time-Book is retentional time-
constitution, in the primacy it has when taken prior to its abstract determination
as symmetrically on a par with protention within the stream of experiencing. There
is no further mention of this idea anywhere in Finks notes to make clear what he
means by it. Presumably it has to do with the pregivenness status of world horizon-
ality, namely, its present-perfectness (see the end of 7.2.4 and note 267 in 7.3.3.3),
that the world already has come to be and is.
..NOTE :
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Finks assistant from 1961 to 1970, recounts

having seen the text on one occasion. While working with Fink to prepare the
Bibliographie Eugen Fink (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), he had held in his
own hands the two bound texts respectively of the time-book and Part II of Finks
dissertation. (Personal conversation from November 3, 1988. Cf. also Hua XXXIII,
Einleitung der Herausgeber, p. XXXIX note 1.) Von Hermann also recalls having
seen a third bound manuscript as well, Part II of Finks 1939 article in Revue
Internationale de Philosophie, Studien, pp. 179223. This also seems to be lost.
According to Mrs. Susanne Fink, right after Finks rst heart attack in early 1975, he
collected and burned papers and things he did not want worked over after his death.
She thinks it possible that the time-book had been among them. In any case, none of
the three above mentioned bound volumes is to be found in his Nachlass.
Chapter 6
NOTE :
Hua XXXII, p. 147. Finks rsum of the lecture course has the following corre-
sponding passage: This required task of making [hitherto anonymously] perform-
ing life thematic and intelligible we can designate as the self-interpretation of life.
Life is not a whole that can be analytically broken down into its summative parts,
but instead is a continuous intentional tradition; for life is what it is always in an
historical way. Nachschrift, E. Husserl: Natur und Geist, p. 14, in the Fink Nach-
lass, Freiburg (the phrase in brackets is my insertion taken from the previous sen-
tence in the rsum itself). This passage is included in the portion of Finks Nach-
schrift that is given in Hua XXXII, pp. 26467, with this passage on p. 265; cf. also
the Nachschrift by Johannes Pfeiffer, Hua XXXII, pp. 26770, which provides a
more detailed, but less summatively pointed recording of Husserls lectured treat-
ment of this same theme. Part of Husserls lecture was given free of his prepared text
(cf. Hua XXXII, p. 149, note 1, and p. 169/20) or without a fully prepared text (cf.
Hua XXXII, p. xi, note 1, p. 156, note 1, and pp. 28485).
.NOTE :
For other earlier formulations see Guy van Kerckhoven, Zur Genese des Begriffs
Lebenswelt bei Edmund Husserl, Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte, 29 (1985), 182
203; Iso Kem, Die Lebenswelt als Grundlagenproblem der objektiven Wissen-
schaften und als universales Wahrheits- und Seinsproblem, in Elisabeth Strker,
ed., Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1979), pp. 6878; and Manfred Sommer Einleitung: Husserls Got-
tinger Lebenswelt in Edmund Husserl, Die Konstitution der geistigen Welt, Text
nach Husserliana Band IV, ed. by Manfred Sommer, Philosophische Bibliothek 369
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1984), pp. ixxlii.
.NOTE :
Nachwort zu meinen Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologic und phnomenologi-

schen Philosophie, JPpF XI (Hua V, pp. 13862). The date of composition is
indicated by its mention in a letter of Malvine to Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg,
July 10, 1930 (HChr, p. 364, and Bw IX, p. 380). (This volume of JPpF also
contained Finks dissertation.) The Epilogue was in fact the Authors Preface to
the English Edition, Ideas I (B-G), appearing in 1931; but it included several pages
of explanation at the beginning (Hua V, pp. 13841) not given in the Authors
Preface, while leaving out two paragraphs that conclude the Authors Preface,
announcing publication plans for Cartesian Meditations and thanking Boyce
Gibson for his translation.
..NOTE :
See SZ, pp. 110, 188, 192, 206, and 31516. In Heideggers lectures see MH-GA 27,
pp. 32728 (EFA U-MH-I 121). In Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, WS 1929/30,
Fink notes down Heideggers saying this: Philosophy is itself nothing other than the
attack made upon man, driving him out of everydayness and back into the ground of
things. And who is it that thus drives him? The Dasein in man, that he is and has to
be, and that from the ground up has no connection with the harmlessness of an
absolute subject. (U-MH-IV 11, emphasis Finks.) The last clause here is not in
the corresponding text of the Gesamtausgabe edition (MH-GA 29/30, p. 31), but it
could easily have been a comment added by Heidegger as he lectured. Heideggers
1925 summer-semester Marburg lectures, History of the Concept of Time, how-
ever, do offer an explicit critique of Husserl, very much in this direction (MH-GA
20, 11). Fink, taking his rst university studies in that same summer in Mnster,
had not been present. See 1.1.
..NOTE :
One should note here as well the next to last sentences of Finks Nachschrift of
Husserls Nature and Spirit lectures in the summer of 1927: Only phenomeno-
logical reection, i.e., the thematization in understanding [verstehende Thematisa-
tion] of the life that otherwise works anonymously, the reection that discovers, in
intentionally performing subjectivity, spirit in a much more original sense than any
enworlded spirit ever can be, is capable of delivering a radical understanding of all
ontic objectness and thus of providing as well a grounding of all sciences relating to
the world. (Nachschrift, p. 17; Hua XXXII, pp. 266267; cf. the corresponding
passage in the Pfeiffer Nachschrift, Hua XXXII, pp. 27879). The typescript pas-
sage, identical with that in Finks handwritten notes for the course, EFA U-III 36,
dated July 27, 1927, represents part of Husserls lecturing that was done without a
fully prepared text (see note 1 above; cf. also 2.4, note 38 here in the appendix).
..NOTE :
This idea is not entirely absent from Husserls own analyses, in the Bernau manu-
scripts, for example, in the nal manuscript of Finks arrangement, The Stream of
Experience and the I (see 5.1.2.1). Husserl speaks of the passive phenomena of
consciousness: original sensuousness, sensations, feelings, drives, the passive
being-carried-along-by of the I, things that do not spring from it as acts. Of these
wholly I-less tendings he mentions association and reproduction andmost
interestingthe thereby determined formation of horizons. This is the realm of
original time-consciousness, of an absolutely passive intentionality, precondi-
tion for the activity of an intellectus agens. While this latter is a matter of acts of
attention on the part of a wakeful I, there is also the passivity of wakefulness.
This is all in a single paragraph in EFA B-II 245246, Hua XXXIII, pp. 27576.
..NOTE :
OH-VII 2830, EFM 3. The notes for this discussionwhich Fink represents with
further notes from the date itself, January 29 (OH-VII 4446)proceed via the
interpretation of Nietzsche. For example, among other points is the rejection of any
conception of retrogression behind culture in order to seize natural life,
i.e., in a naive biologism oriented to pre-cultural life-values such as health,
strength, vitality. Nietzsches return to undisabled life and his formula beyond
good and evil are taken to mean the essential dynamism beyond all roles of life,
viz., the play that is bound to the Panic fundament. (OH-VII 3031, Finks em-
phasis.)
..NOTE :
Z-VII XVIII/1a (EFM 2), emphasis Finks, as is the hyphenation of Ver-gegenstnd-

lichungobject-ifying, to highlight its basic sense. There is an issue here, how-
ever, that does not come to thematic focus in Finks work, namely, that in the
intensifying of performance experience that is achieved in reections being an

expression-mode of performance awareness (expression-mode comes from
Z-XV 67a; see 2.6.2.8) one fundamental difference from performance awareness
enters that precisely allows for cognitive achievement, namely, the differentiation of
performance into something like the noetic and the noematic correlatives. With the
mode of expression, hitherto felt performance sense presumably comes in some
way to be recognized thematically and specically, that is, as articulated in terms of a
system of differentiations. This is absolutely pivotal, but how it comes about re-
mains unexplicated. (See the treatment in 7.1.2 and 9.2.2.2.) Nevertheless, one way
of explicating it is found in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, where both an
awareness intrinsic to performance and the rooting of worded expression (and of re-
ective consciousness) in a primary stratum of the thrust to meaning consolidation
have been sketched out. See his Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 38232 and 389
(Phnomnologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, pp. 43839 and 446)
for something closely like, respectively (a) Vollzugsbewutseinperformance-
consciousnessand (b) the Expressivmodus des Vollzugsbewutseins the mode
of the expression of performance-consciousness (again, from Z-XV 67a; cf. also
the telling brief point in EFM ZXXII II/6a, EFM 3; on the signicance of this folder,
Z-XXII, see note 6 to 8.1 in the appendix). On contacts between Fink and Merleau-
Ponty that may have contributed to this community of ideas, see Bruzina, Eugen
Fink and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosophical Lineage in Phenomenology,
in Merleau-Pontys Reading of Husserl, edited by Lester Embree and Ted Toad-
vine, Contributions in Phenomenology (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer,
2002), pp. 173200. See below, in the opening pages of chapter 10, the mention of
Merleau-Pontys meeting with Fink in Louvain in April 1940.
..NOTE :
Here one should mention two testimonials regarding Finks view of his Kant-
Studien article and the Sixth Meditation that, made by parties who did not have
the benet of acquaintance with the long critical work on Finks part from which it
stemmed, suggest a certain dissembling to Husserl on Finks part. One is from H. L.
Van Breda in a letter to Maurice Merleau-Ponty from December 17, 1945 (in the
Husserl Archives), where he suggests that Merleau-Ponty had been too strongly
under the inuence of the Sixth Meditation, which is a text by Fink, not Husserl.
Van Breda then remarks that this text, together with the article in Kant-Studien, is
basically a critique of the very bases of Husserls thought, although the author has
indeed hidden his opposition, and Husserl himself in his splendid navet did not
notice itat least as concerns the article in Kant-Studien. But while Fink may not
have frontally declared to Husserl the full measure of his divergence from him, he
certainly did lay out for Husserl the fundamentals of his critical thinking regarding
phenomenology; and Husserl recognized its import, even if the full extent of its
implications may have eluded him. There was, after all, a certain resistance in
Husserls thought habits that he himself had to acknowledge (see the second exergue
text to chapter 2). As for Fink, his attempt to work into phenomenology the recast-
ing it needed did not take the form of a blunt contrarying of Husserls customary
thinking; their work was the work of conversation and exchange, not doctrinal
dispute. Van Breda acknowledges this diplomatic exigency on Finks part in a letter
written to the French publishing house Aubier on the same day as his letter to
Merleau-Ponty, December 17, 1945, in a remark on the Sixth Meditation: Fink
did not like to have his draft widely known, because his critique is basically quite
severe. . . . At the time he wrote these pages it would have been very difcult for
him to express his thinking in a more straightforward way. (Letter in the Husserl
Archives)
The second testimonial is Herbert Spiegelbergs recollection of a late conversation
with Fink, telling how Fink said he was surprised at Husserls subscription to his
Kant-Studien article, in that Fink meant [the doctrine of the three egos] as crit-
icism. (Spiegelbergs Scrapbook, cited in an additional entry by Schuhmann for
p. 430 in a future revision of his HChr.) One of Finks notes from the latter half of
1937 (Z-XXV 197, EFM 3) makes much the same point: 6th Meditation = an
exercise in the sharp-sightedness that shows the consequences of the Husserlian
hypostasis of the transcendental.
.NOTE :
The kind of negation at play here is directly relevant to Finks choice of the term
meontic for the transcendentally originative as intrinsically beyond being. He seems
to follow the distinction between the Greek mh- and the Greek ou(k)-, viz.,
between a subjectively dependent attribution of the negative, and an utter, un-
qualied negation. In Finks choice of word, the meontic is a negation consequent
upon the incapacity in the conditions obtaining for the one making the assertion to
apply ontic designations to that which is under discussion, whereas the ouk-
ontic would suggest an absoluteness of negativity, an utter nullity. See Z-VII
XXI/9a (EFM 2), where the meontic is contrasted with the presumed reference to
Kants KrV, A29192/B34749. See also Heideggers mention of nihil negativum
MH-GA 26, p. 27172.
.NOTE :
Cairns mentions Finks speaking of the meontic on December 7, 1931, and on

January 20, 1932 (Conversations, pp. 57 and 67); and there are notes of Finks
where it is a subject of discussions with other colleagues, in particular Landgrebe
(Z-XIX II/3a, II/6b, II/8a, from March, 1935; EFM 3). Intriguing also is the fact
that at least one of Husserls manuscripts uses the term mh-on in a sense very much
like Finks: What goes beyond [the universe of pregiven being], in the manner of
constituting anonymity, that of latency, is a mh-on; it is not Nothing but rather [the]
presupposition of being from a forgotten temporalization that is not yet temporal-
ization of an on, and so is something to be disclosed afterwards, and as necessary to
the cognitive function, to bringing about that which is (and thereby brought to a
subsequent temporalization). HA B III 3/30b, bracketed insertion mine; Husserl

has no article. I am indebted to James Hart for telling me of this passage.
Chapter 7
NOTE :
A translation suggesting the relevance of this stanza to the way the thrust of chapter
5 (see 5.1.1.4) is taken up in the present chapter might run thus:
Beat the same time, know the terms of Not-Being,

the innite basis of your deep-felt swinging,
that you enact it completely this one time.
Adapted from Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. by C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1964), p. 81.
.NOTE :
The translation of Seinssinn as ontic meaning in Crisis, p. 153, is misinterpretable,

especially in view of the distinction, and relationship, between the ontic and the
ontological at issue in Heideggers Being and Time. The explicitation of the hith-
erto largely implied thesis on being and world that is being achieved in this nal
period phenomenology can be seen by comparing (1) passages such as this in the
Crisisespecially in its context in 42, and the preceding 41, where Husserl char-
acterizes the aim of full-scale transcendental phenomenology as the disclosure of
the living of consciousness by the subjectivity that effects the holding-good of the
world (Hua VI, p. 154, my translation)with (2) the way Husserl puts the issue in
his treatment of Kant earlier in Hua VIIe.g., p. 220, where the task is character-
ized as accounting for the ground of the being of this factic subjectivity and the
constitution of the world factically accomplished in it. Here the sense of the
concept of ground in play here becomes the pivotal question, referring us to a
higher level of transcendental inquiry. I.e., what is achieved is the recognition that
to inquire into the phenomenological origination of the world is to inquire into the
phenomenological origination of beingthat cosmogony is ontogony, as Fink puts
it in his Dessau lecture on Kant and phenomenology in 1935 (see 6.3.6, p. 356, and
3.5, p. 172).
..NOTE :
Fink writes the word Me-on in many ways: hyphenated and unhyphenated, in
Greekmh-onas well as transliterated. In some of his notes it is used to designate
the Absolute in the guise of God (transliterated and unhyphenatedZ-IV 66b,
EFM 1, and Z-XV 62a, EFM 2; transliterated and hyphenatedZ-VII XVII/32a,
EFM2), in others as the negative to being, the ultimate of Nothing, even if the
constitutive linkage to being has to be equally asserted (translated and unhyphen-
atedZ-I 105a, Z-IV 51b, 71b, and 112b; Z-V IV/1b, EFM 1; Z-VII XIV/6a, EFM
2; Greek and hyphenatedZ-V VI/4b, EFM 1, and Z-XXIX 27a, EFM 3).
..NOTE :
Fink took courses from Becker in WS 19251926 (Philosophie der Mathematik),

WS 19261927 (Schellings positive Philosophie), and SS 1928 (Philosophische
sthetik). Fink had also made a handwritten copy of the Nachschrift made by
Jimyu Kitayama of Beckers course (Grundfragen der Phnomenologie) from WS
19251926, before Finks arrival at Freiburg (EFA U-II, but not in EFM). Becker
had based part of this course (U-II, pp. 6974) on Heideggers lectures in WS 1920
1921 (Phnomenologie des religisen Lebens; cf. 12 and 13 in MH-GA 60, and
Nachwort des Herausgebers, p. 339). Beckers use of formal indication in
Mathematische Existenz is found on pp. 553 [113] and 565 [125], where he
makes reference to Emil Lask (p. 565 [125], note 2). Finks reading of Mathe-
matische Existenz is evidenced by his reference to it in his notes for his prize essay
and the dissertation. (See Z-I 62a, 64ab, 70b, and 71a, together with Z-I, Beil. I
[76].) Finally, it should be mentioned that Fink had also heard Heidegger treat
formal indication in his lectures in WS 19291930 (UMH-IV 98100; MH-GA
29/30, 70).
...NOTE :
See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1993), Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heideggers Method: Philo-
sophical Concepts as Formal Indication, Review of Metaphysics, 47 (1994), 775
95, Ryan Streeter, Heideggers Formal Indication: A Question of Method in Being
and Time, Man and World, 80 (1997), 41330, and Steven Crowell, Question,
Reection, and Philosophical Method in Heideggers Early Freiburg Lectures, in
Phenomenology: Japanese and American Perspectives, ed. by Burt C. Hopkins (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 20130.
...NOTE :
Accordingly, we nd in Finks rsum of Heideggers lectures from WS 1929, right

after Heideggers treatment of the limitations in the cognitive grasp of the essence
of the world and immediately before his discussion of formal indication, this
idea noted down: Questioning alone is what is philosophically decisive, for it is the
one and only thing that makes the object of philosophy thematic. The point in
Finks wording (EFA U-MH-IV 98, not in EFM) is more trenchant than in the
corresponding formulation of MH-GA 29/30, p. 423; in the Gesamtausgabe, two
pages intervene before Heideggers paragraphs on formal indication (p. 425).
..NOTE :
That this would not have been the only occasion for Husserls confronting Finks
alternative thinking is indicated, for example, by Z-XXV 42a. In this record from
November 4, 1937, of a conversation with Husserl, then still alert and active though
no longer with the energy to work steadily (see 1.5), Fink mentions the six theses he
offered. The rst was on Hegels theory of the philosophical statement as the key
to understanding his concept of the dialectic in the difference between static onti-
cal truth and dynamic, speculative truth, while the last thesis spoke of the task of
phenomenology as the positive comprehension of the possibility of speculative
thinking (emphasis Finks).
...NOTE :
In addition to frequently taking up Hegels thought in his notes Fink also has two
folders devoted primarily to Hegel, Z-VIII (EFM 2; see the following footnote), and
Z-XXIV (EFM 3), from 1938. Z-XXIX as well, from 1939, is mostly notes on
ontological experience (Z-XXIX 312a; EFM 4). See also Finks lectures from WS
19501951, Sein und Mensch: Vom Wesen der ontologischen Erfahrung, ed. by
Egon Schtz and Franz-Anton Schwarz (Freiburg and Munich: Alber Verlag, 1977),
which, however, move past the framework of engaging Husserl with Hegel to de-
velop Finks own philosophic stance.
...NOTE :
Z-VIII 2cd, EFM 2. This folder contains the notes Fink made for his tutorial in WS
19301931 for several Japanese scholars (Professors Tomo Otaka, Goichi Miyake,
Jisho Usui, and Miyumi Haga) who had come to Freiburg to study under Husserl.
The tutorial was devoted to the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the
same time, Fink was attending Heideggers lectures on Hegels Phenomenology
of Spirit, and he took notes summarizing them (EFA U-MH-VI). The similarities
and differences between Heideggers and Finks interpretations here are very clear.
Heidegger represents Husserls phenomenology as a phenomenology of conscious-
ness, in contrast to Hegels, which is not to be interpreted that way (U-MH-VI 13;
MH-GA 32, p. 40). The measure of Finks insistence on a nonpsychological inter-
pretation of Husserls phenomenology is seen dramatically in a comment of his from
much later: Phenomenology without speculative elements is sheer psychology, but
the task is to perform the speculative contraband work openly. Z-XXVI CXXIII/3,
from 1940 in Louvain, emphasis Finks (EFM 4).
...NOTE :
The profound double meaning of the terms Fink regularly uses in this speculative-
critical assertion of powerlesslessOhnmacht, ohnmchtig, and Ohnmchtigkeit
(see, e.g., Z-VII III/3b, VI/3a and /4a, VIII/5b, XVII/31ab, and XVIII/5a and
/11a; and Z-XV 22a, 76a, and 109a; all in EFM 2; also Z-XVI 1a, in EFM 3)lies
in the fact that, while these words literally mean without power, they also fre-
quently simply mean fainting and its result, being unconscious. But more than
the unmasking of the pretensions of the metaphysical elevation of subjectivity to
creative absoluteness over its cognita, the poignancy of this loss of power in the
losing of consciousness is also a loss of and loss to the world that cannot be missed
in the demonstration of its meaning that was offered by the waning of Husserls
powers in his last months and days, as he, in all his magnicant consciousness, came
to be no more.
...NOTE :
Even from the perspective of the conclusion of Finks work with Husserl, i.e., 1937
1940, when the changes in Heideggers direction of thinking have to be more fully
taken into account, Fink remains critical of Heideggers position. One point of
critique pertains directly to the system-based character of Finks meontic position.
For example, in 1939, after his move to Louvain, Fink contrasts Heideggers care
with his own play, and where Heidegger sees a pre-conceptual understanding of
being Fink sees the concepts proto-illuminative clearing [Urlichtung des Be-
griffs] (Z-MH-I 3a, EFM 4). He even writes that Heideggers concept of the pre-
ontological as pre-conceptual is false. (Z-MH-I 29a, emphasis Finks.)
..NOTE :
That Heidegger introduces construction as a term for a methodological device

and thus seems the source for Finks adaptation of itneeds to be explored further
(though not here), given its emergence within his explication of Fichtes use of it,
which in turn is an adaptation from Kants. In either of these cases, Fichtes and
Kants, the concept of construction is meant to indicate a way of providing intu-
itional presentation for a transcendental synthesizing process (a) wherein transcen-
dental reection proposes to thematize and explicate conceptually, and (b) that is
distinct from intuition in perceptual experience. See, for example, Kant, Kritik der
reinen Vernunft A713/B741A726/B754, and Fichte, A Crystal-Clear Report to
the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy, trans.
by John Botterman and William Rasch, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. by
Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 39115; cf. also Daniel Breazeale,
Toward a Wissenschaftslehre more geometrico, forthcoming in the Proceedings
of the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the North American Fichte Society, Montral,
May 1216, 1999), and Helga Ende, Der Konstruktionsbegriff im Umkreis des
deutschen Idealismus (Meisenheim: Anton Hain, 1973). See also Kevin Zanelottis
recent doctoral dissertation, Transcendental Constructivism: On Method, from
Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft to Fichtes Early Jena Wissenschaftslehre, Univer-
sity of Kentucky, 2002.
..NOTE :
In the contrast with Heidegger made here one nds the basis for interpreting the
apparent similarity between Heidegger and Fink in their respective use of the term
Instndigkeit. The term (in its nominal and adjectival usage) occurs repeatedly in
Heideggers Beitrge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), but one has to recognize that
Instndigkeit (also in both nominal and adjectival form) is frequent in Finks notes
in the half-dozen years before its currency in Heideggers Beitrge. (One should note
too that Heidegger often uses a variant, nonorthographic spelling, Instndlich-
keit; Fink does not.) Heideggers conceptdenition if one wishesof Instn-
digkeit is that it is the region of the human who is grounded in Da-sein (Beitrge,
174); or Instndigkeit is the relationship to being as the inherent abiding in the
truth of beyng [des Seyns] (as Ereignis) (Beitrge, p. 467, 266; cf. also 128). The
whole issue of similarity and difference, however, cannot be fully treated here, nor
can the question of how the convergence of concepts came to be. Instndigkeit is
not used in SZ, and any occasional occurrence of it in Heideggers work in the years
following SZ (and before the Beitrge project) shows no such systematic sense of the
term such as Fink provides (see 5.1.1.2). Indeed Finks usage of the term is found in
texts from as early as 1927 on (and regularly in 1928 and thereafter), whereas in
contrast Instndigkeit does not even occur in Finks Nachschriften of Heideggers
six lecture courses from WS 19281929 to SS 1931. From Heideggers return to
Freiburg for the winter semester of 19281929 on, Fink was in frequent contact
with him, as Heideggers position as Korreferent for his dissertation (see p. 18 in 1.2)
would suggest, but equally as indicated in Heideggers remarks in MH-GA 29/30
(pp. 53236) and by his dedicating this same volume to Fink. In sum, indications are
that stimulus to thinking would not run in one direction only, from Heidegger to
Fink, but could move also in the inverse direction, as it appears in the present
instancesomething that also took place in the later postwar years, as can be
attested by those who knew both thinkers well. This matter, however, is altogether
subordinate to the sense and value of the conceptions involved for the philosophic
issue in question. The question of who might be said to originate an ideaand
perhaps therefore in some specious sense to own itis not the main concern,
philosophically speaking.
..NOTE :
When the sketch of progressive phenomenology is put in conjunction with Finks

overview of the Husserlian manuscript groups C and D, an extraordinary outlook
emerges on what remains to be done in both interpretive scholarship on Husserls
work and further phenomenological development. For the direction of phenome-
nologys progressive reinquiry not only transforms the subjectivity that has been
the paradigm for the analysis of constitutive process of spiritespecially when
spirit is conceived of as egoic and reectiveto one inected in terms of eld-
intentionality and proto-passivity (Layout, VI.CM/2, pp. 78; Z-VII XVI/ 5b,
EFM 2), it also enjoins recasting, in terms of this same move to the radically funda-
mental, what nature and materiality mean within constitutive phenomenology
(Bericht ber die Transkription der Nachlamanuskripte Husserls, from Decem-
ber 1939 at Louvain, EFM 4, Abschn. 4, pp. [37]). One can only suppose that the
person who more than anyone else subsequently took up this direction of work,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was encouraged in that work by this perspective on Hus-
serls phenomenology.
..NOTE :
Z-XV 38a; cf. also Z-VII XVI/5b, the last portion of a long exposition dated Decem-
ber 3, 1930, and given for some Japanese philosophers studying with Husserl at that
time (see the annotations to Z-XV 1a and XVI/1a), and Z-XI 90aall three in EFM
2. Literally Fink writes Entnichtung zur Welt, unnihilating into the world,
which process should not be interpreted as an insertion into the worldthereby
supposed as already in placebut rather as the coming-about of the world as the
thereness of being in temporalized appearing and being-experienced, namely, as
that which the Nothing turns into in unnihilating itself by its originative act.
.NOTE :
On the transcendental aesthetic (which makes up regressive phenomenology)

see CM6, pp. 11 and 13 (VI.CM/2, pp. 1112 and 13); on nature and spirit, see
7.2.4 footnote 164 (here in the appendix), in conjunction with 6.3.2, noting the
themes in BPhenomenology of Protointentionality, of Book I, section 3, of the
Layout (VI.CM/2, p. 8), as well as the scattered indications in Finks notes, par-
ticularly the longer one in Z-V X/1ab (EFM 1); and on internal psychology and
transcendental phenomenology see the treatment in chapter 2 and 7.3.3.2, includ-
ing footnote 233, as well as Hua VI, Beil. XXIX (Crisis, app. X).
.NOTE :
See VI.CM/2, Texts No. 3 and No. 4 of the 1932 revision. These revisions of Finks
are clearly adaptations, to Cartesian Meditations, of the pattern set out in the
1930 Layout, as comparison between these texts and both (a) book I, section 1, of
the outline (VI.CM/2, pp. 46), and (b) the full-scale draft of this section (VI.CM/2,
pp. 10105) show. Fink makes clear in CM6 that the world has this priority because
in the end the world, transcendentally considered as the all-embracing structure of
being-as-appearing, is the rst and comprehensive telos of constitutive origination
and stands in antecedency to egoic reective life, especially if this latter is taken in
abstract autonomy. This, however, does not undercut the consummative role that
egoic reection holds in the phenomenologically achieved reective realization of all
this, as the taking possession of itself by originative life (see 6.3.5).
..NOTE :
Finks framing of the character of phenomenology in this note (Z-V III/6b)

Phenomenology is the philosophical unity of ontology and meonticis in form
strikingly similar to, and in sense deeply different from, Heideggers phrasing
Fundamental ontology and metontology in their unity form the concept of meta-
physicsin his last Marburg lecture course (MH-GA 26, p. 202; on Finks being
acquainted with the ideas Heidegger developed in this course, see 5.1.1.4, p. 256).
Heideggers metontology is conceived within the program that places being in the
transcendental horizon of time, as Fink phrases what Heidegger terms the tem-
poral exposition of the problem of being (Z-XV 30a, EFM 2). But for Fink what
has to be assessed is the extent to which Heideggers program does or does not
answer the question of the constitution of being. Ontological philosophy only
makes clear the way in which something in being [Seiendes] is if it is, but not that it
is. Constitutive phenomenology alone conceives being as meontic product (ibid.).
For Heidegger to go beyond ontology in met-ontology is to shift from (a) the stand-
point by which the basis for the analysis is a structure of the fundamental being,
Dasein, viz., the structure of temporality, to (b) the standpoint by which the basis for
the analysis is no longer temporality as of Dasein but temporality as the totality
within which to understand Dasein and everything else. A shift or turn [Um-
schlag, Kehre] is thus worked (MH-GA 26, pp. 196, 199200, and 201). For Fink
such a shift is not enough. The metontological as Heidegger conceives it is still
subject to the In-Stancial constitutive question; that is, the structuring of existence
in the world precisely in terms of totality conditions governing that existence rather
than in any way being grounded in that totality, must itself be inquired into con-
stitutively. This moves the inquiry beyond the scope of Heideggers shift, i.e.,
beyond the shift from one kind of being (Dasein) to being as such; it becomes the
move beyond even temporality as the horizon of being. Heidegger astutely insists
that one recognize the excess of Daseins being, viz., the excess of possibilities
by which it surpasses all factic being (MH-GA 26, pp. 24849), but Fink nds the
excess to be far more radical. It is found rather in having to think the condition of
originatedness as the opening beyond being, in the meontic character of ultimate
origination that can be constitutive of human being only in meontic surpassing (see
Z-VII XIV/1ab, cited in 6.4, and Z-IX 11ab).
..NOTE :
See 2.6.2.4 (and chapter 3 in general) and 2.5.2.1, respectively; the two brought
together can be seen in compact statement in OH-III 34 (EFM 3). The framing that
sets in under Kantian inspiration to circumscribe the Cartesian orientation can in
actuality be considered an implication drawn from the determination that imposes
the application of the epoch in the rst place, namely, the cosmological situation
wherein phenomenology must begin and with which it must remain engaged. Finks
original conception in his 1930 systematic plan in effect reverses the Husserlian
order made canonic in Ideas I. Phenomenology is constituted now not by the turn to
immanence but by the thematization of the world, and that thematization regulates
the way the turn to immanence would be carried out: phenomenology begins as
ultimately requiring cosmology, which, when nally taken up explicitly, provides
the interpretation that gives phenomenology its ultimate transcendental sense. This
is the point of the orientation that governs chapter 4 from its opening through 4.3.
See Z-VII XVIII/1a (EFM 2) and Z-XX XXV/1a (EFM 3).
...NOTE :
One of the determinative factors in the postwar attention to the theme of history in
phenomenology, for example, was the work of Landgrebe, represented in his Phan-
omenologie und Geschichte (Darmstadt: Gerd Mohn, 1967), Meditation ber

Husserls Wort Die Geschichte ist das grosse Faktum des Absoluten Seins, Tijd-
schrift voor Filosoe, 36 (1974), 10726, and Lebenswelt und Geschichtlichkeit
des menschlichen Daseins, in Phnomenologie und Marxismus, ed. by Bernard
Waldenfels et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977). Cf. also Paul Janssen, Geschichte
und Lebenswelt, and Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1966 (see esp. pp. 14650). Determinative as these studies have been for
the general understanding, they do not displace the contributions that Fink was
making prior to World War IIthe burden of this bookwhen he and Landgrebe,
each from his own involvement with Husserls work, talked over such themes as
history in phenomenology (see in this chapter notes 6, 30, 135, 199, 225, 255, 264,
and 279).
...NOTE :
See the brief treatment in 9.3.3, and note texts Z-IV 18a, 27b, 32a33b, and 70a;
Z-V II/1a, VII/3a and 4a, and XXI/18a (both folders in EFM 1); B-III 4143 (EFM
2); and Z-VII XVI/5ab and XVII/17a, #3 (EFM 2). Cf. also VI.CM/2, pp. 2829,
and CM6, pp. 12832 (VI.CM/1, pp. 14045). In one of Finks conversations with
Landgrebe, March 25, 1935, Faktizitt und Geschichtlichtkeit is given as one of
the topics, focusing, however, on the misunderstanding of essence as a structure
that is forever-in-its-being [immerseienden] and hence unhistorical, Z-XIX II/5a,
#12 (emphasis Finks); on this see 5.1.1.4, p. 254. Finally, it should be noted that the
problematic of history also has to be kept in close connection with the question of
nature, as Fink makes clear in Z-V X/1a and a topic in the same conversation with
Landgrebe just noted (Z-XIX II/5a, #5).
...NOTE :
The differences on dening the problem of human being that emerge between Finks
drafts of proposals for Husserl, together with notes on the themes in those drafts,
and Husserls own, can be seen by comparing, for example, (a) Z-XVIII V/13,
ideas for Husserls 1935 Prague lectures, M-III 4346, a typed draft for the same
purpose given Husserl on August 14, 1935 (EFM 3, but also HA P II 2/3941), with
(b) Husserls own text (Hua XXIX, pp. 10339). The topic of the denition of
man is a frequent one in Finks notes (e.g., Z-V VI/1a; Z-VII XVII/19a, XVII/31a
b, and XVIII/7a; Z-XV 49a and 62ab, Z-XX 4a, Z-XXV 29a, etc.).
...NOTE :
Letter to Edwards, pp. [34], emphasis Finks. Near the end of the letter Fink
remarks, Professor Husserl has worked out some quite comprehensive phenome-
nological theories on the great problems of traditional metaphysics (God, immor-
tality, teleology), that at least in the style of the new phenomenological way of
posing the question have to claim unconditioned validity, even if a lot of obscurity in
detail remains to have light shed on it (p. [4], emphasis Finks). Finks letter did not
give Edwards any consolation; in his reply to Fink from January 27, 1934, he
expresses his continued discomfort with the perspective phenomenology offers him
(letter in the Fink Nachlass).
...NOTE :
Here the principle spoken of in general form in earlier chapters (2.1, pp. 7778, 2.3,
pp. 8386, 2.7, pp. 12627, the opening paragraphs of 4.1, and 5.1.2) is nally
given its full statement. See also its treatment in CM6, pp. 79 (VI.CM/1 pp. 89).
The utility of this principle for critique and interpretation, and an application of the
points being made in the present section and the present chapter, are offered in my
review of Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science, edited by Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varel, Bernard Pachoud,
and Jean-Michel Roy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), Husserl Studies,
20 (2004), 4488.
...NOTE :
From Z-XXVIII XIX/1a2b (EFM 4), written after Husserls death and Finks emi-
gration to Louvain, and part of a conversation with Landgrebe on January 14,
1940, regarding the divergent treatment between them on Husserls problematic of
the world. Each was preparing an article for the new journal then being planned by
the nascent International Phenomenological Society, viz., Philosophy and Phenome-
nological Research, the rst issue of which contained Landgrebes article The
World as a Phenomenological Problem, 1 (1940), 3858. Fink, however, never
completed his proposed piece, to complement his 1939 article in the Revue interna-
tionale de philosophie, Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls (Stu-
dien, pp. 179223).
...NOTE :
It is in this sense as well that the developments in phenomenology as advancing the

thinking of transcendental origination introduces something new into the world,
i.e., as an activity in the world but not as change of the world itself or of the
transcendental process of world-origination as such. This is the kind of continuing
constitution of the world that Husserl speaks of in appendix XIII in CM6 (p. 188;
VI.CMVI/1, p. 213), the addition of something new within the world in the form of
the psychologizing of the transcendental. At the same time, there is another sense
in which one could say that even the constitution of the world is ongoing. Since the
constitution of the human existent in the world is the self-objectifying self-realizing
of originative agency as a being precisely experiencing the world, and since the
experiencing done by this being is one that takes place by being continuously re-
newed as the coursing of temporalized life, one could say that the ontied form of
constituting agency is this continuous world-experiencing. That is, though world-
constituting absolutely speaking is done and over with, it is manifested as a sustain-
ing of the world in the form of the experiencing of the world done by human being.
In this sense, then, the constituting of the world could be said to be itself always on
the march. This, at least, is how one might interpret Husserls remarks in his
notations 374 and 375 to pp. 1078 in CM6 (VI.CM/1, p. 118).
...NOTE :
Thus the situation of the stationedness [Eingestelltsein] of man as a being in the

whole of the world, or . . . the attitude/station [Einstellung] of mundanized subjec-
tivity (Studien, p. 11)i.e., the natural attitude transcendentally considered; or,
speculatively expressed, ennitization [Verendlichung] (see 7.3.3.2, p. 436)is
given the name katabasis (katbasiw), whereas the moment of self-thematization in
the reduction, in which the worldliness and mundanized station of subjectivity is
seen as a constitutive result of a nonworldly and premundanized origin, Fink calls
ekbasis (ekbasiw). These ordinary Greek terms for descent and departure, re-
spectively, have specic meaning in the Plotinian texts, but Fink adapts them to a
usage tting the meontic in phenomenology. He uses them to mean the inverse
actions of (a) constitutive origination on the one hand, and (b) the reective dis-
closure and understanding of constitutive origination, on the other, such that, in
the perspective of meontic speculative realization, on the one hand there is the
descent into mundaneitykatbasiwand on the other an exitekbasiw
from the natural attitude. Plotinus himself uses ekbasiw (departure, going out) as
a species of katbasiw (descent, going down), namely, as the term connoting a
movement into evil in an ontological sensei.e., as the extreme limit of outowing
attenuation of the power of the One, the Good, rather than as moral fault (Enneads,
I, 8:7). On this sense of ekbasiw see Giovanni Reale, The Schools of the Imperial
Age: A History of Ancient Philosophy, vol. 4, trans. by John R. Catan (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1990), p. 363. The inverse of katbasiw (or kata-
banv) for Plotinus is rather anbasiw (or anabanv) (ascent, go up), not ekbasiw.
...NOTE :
Fink obviously did not develop the ideas that compose the meontic without any
connection to other currents of thought. For example, a fairly full display of the
essential issues and elements that enter into the meontic can be seen in the essay
Alexandre Koyr offered Husserl for the latters seventieth birthday (see 1.2, p. 20),
Die Gotteslehre Jakob Boehmes, a translation of a long chapter on God in
Koyrs La philosophie de Jacob Boehme, which he had published that same year
(Paris: Vrin, 1929), pp. 30353. But this can only be considered a treatment of
possible ideas that Fink would have earlier come upon in various places; for the
concept of a meontic is found in his notes already as early as 1927 (see M-I 7,
EFM 1).
Chapter 8
.NOTE :
Dorothy Ott, a graduate of Smith College from Winnetka, Illinois, was prepar-
ing under Finks guidance a dissertation entitled The Problem of Evidence in Phe-
nomenological Philosophy, a copy of which is in the Fink Nachlass. In connection

with this project Otts family provided Fink with a monthly stipend for a one-year
period during trying times for both Husserl and Fink. (See chapter 1, toward the end
of 1.3, and footnote 199.) The tutorial followed Husserls Formal and Transcenden-
tal Logic, which Ott was studying; but Fink ranged freely over the themes of Hus-
serls phenomenology to reorient and recast the treatment of logic in terms of wider
concerns. One should also consult OH-VIII (EFM 3), notes on the far briefer pre-
sentation of language in phenomenology that Fink prepared for Charles Morris
in October 1934. Felix Kaufmann had met Morris in Vienna on the latters study
year in Europe while preparing a book on the concept of the symbol, as Kauf-
mann explained in a letter to Fink asking if he would be able to give some time to
instructing Morris on the topic of language in phenomenology (August 18, 1934, in
the Fink Nachlass). Kaufmann had read Finks manuscript copy of the Sixth Medi-
tation in July of that same year, and had returned it (letter of July 20, 1934, in the
Fink Nachlass). In the end Morris spent just two weeks in Freiburg. See HChr,
p. 452; also Bw IV, p. 204, Kaufmanns mention of Morris in his letter to Husserl,
October 9, 1934; Bw VII, p. 25, Husserls mention of Morris in a letter to Edouard
Baumgarten, October 20, 1934; and Bw VI, p. 295, Husserls letter to Morris,
May 1936.
.NOTE :
Z-XXII 2021, emphases Finks, espressions in brackets mine. Finks treatment here
in effects rejects the idea of language as an interposed grid, as a selective mediating
system that imposes some features and blocks others in the representation one
gets of an in-itself fully propertied reality. Against this Cartesian-like enclosure of
the mind behind interposed linguistic representation, or at least mediation, Finks
proposal is to interpret language in terms of the basic intentional thrust of con-
sciousness as opening to being, namely, as the concretization of this ontological
thrust and opening in a particular set of articulation possibilitiesfor example, that
in one language, in one concretization, the thing be taken as ontically primary;
alternatively, that the event or process have this standing.
.NOTE :
The sentence that precedes these quoted lines, beginning the explanation of

A-lhyeein, is surprising (emphasis Finks own): Disclosive is man (and the
animal and eventually God). The general way in which an animal is enthllend
would have to be as the basic wakeful openness to surroundings, though not per-
haps precisely (or fully) to surroundings as world, i.e., as the horizon of being as
appearing; and God would have to be taken as existing in this same world, though
how God could be in surroundings at all is puzzling. On the other hand, this
certainly underscores the character of Finks proposals as reopening the question
here against any dogmatization into a doctrinal answer, whether from Husserls or
from Heideggers work.
..NOTE :
See Morriss Logical Positivism, Pragmistism, and Scientic Empiricism, the second
essay, entitled The Concept of Meaning in Pragmatism and Logical Positivism.
Morris is not named in Finks tutorial, and there is no direct evidence that Fink had
studied his pragmatist position. There is, however, some convergence between their
respective work, e.g., between a set of points Morris makes in chapter 2 of the above
book and Finks statements, for example, in ZXXII I/3ab and II/79. Roughly
put, convergence can be seen in their arguing the insufciency of purely intra-
linguistic formal considerations to account for the material sense of words. Beyond
formal features, words (a) imply expectations about what can be experienced and
(b) exercise a special referential linkage to some actual something eventually expe-
rienced (Morris). This means that expectations are materially delimited, i.e., they
have determinate intentional sense and there is a specic way in which words with
their sense relate to an actual experienced object (Fink). These additional elements
thus intrinsically involve the speaker of the language, beyond the logic of formal
linguistic interrelations, in an engagement that is social (Morris) or intersubjective
(Fink).
..NOTE :
Once again, the evident similarity of this idea to a point that (along with others, e.g.,
the ontological predetermination lying in language) gures heavily in Heideggers
work suggests a direction Fink was encouraged in by his familiarity with Heidegger.
However, what Fink (with university study of his own on language and linguistics) is
doing in his treatment is making explicit the interweaving of methodological princi-
ples in terms of which to integrate the two dimensions of concrete phenomenologi-
cal detail-work and analysis-vivifying speculative insight. In this way a direction
common to both Heidegger and Fink is developed integrally within a program that
preserves Husserls immense and ground-breaking achievement even while extend-
ing it further.
..NOTE :
Relevant, too, is the way the sense-powers, e.g., sight and the phenomenon of light,
are sketched in terms of their world-openness and sense-spatiality, that is, in
terms of the eld- and horizon-structure of intentionality (Z-XXII D/1ab). The
direction of analysis here is to break down the dichotomizing conception of bodili-
ness as separable from the operation of knowledge and thought. Finks notes for
Morris indicate the general import of the same kind of task for understanding
language: The traditional formulation of the concept of sense involves an epis-
temological distinction between perception and understanding. This cannot be
retained phenomenologically. (OH-VIII 3, EFM 3.) Fink had also conducted a
tutorial on Aristotles Metaphysics for Dorothy Ott and his close friend Alfred
Riemansperger in the fall of 1936. The notes for this are in Z-XXI (EFM 3).
.NOTE :
A change Fink makes in refashioning his 1928 Preisschrift into his dissertation
relates to this point: pure fantasy is not, like memory, a presentifying [Vergegen-
wrtigung] that would be distinguished only by the absence of the positing that
memory includes. The two are in principle different; fantasy is grounded in the
specic temporal dimension of possibility, memory in that of actuality, which is
structured in the triple temporal dimensionality generated by depresencing. This is
the main issue explored in Z-I 129ab; also Z-I 141ab and 152a. Compare Studien
20 and Preisschrift 9 (especially pp. [58]f.), the latter in EFM I, Beil. I to Z-1.
Chapter 9
..NOTE :
The modications that Fink outlines are matters that Husserl has himself already
recognized. (See CMe/Hua I, 56 and 58.) It is therefore puzzling that Husserl
seems to have found the material Fink sketches out following the text just referred
to, where Fink gives the rationale for the sketched-out treatment he wishes to pro-
vide, difcult to graspunintelligible, Husserl writes in annotation 390, VI.CM/
2, p. 258. Perhaps rather than think the material unintelligible Husserl did not
quite grasp Finks point about the restrictedness that characterizes protomodal
analysis. Not long afterward, however, Husserl received the fuller statement of the
system-based critique of phenomenological method, Finks Sixth Meditation, in
terms of which at least this point would gain its fuller sense, i.e., the question of the
relationship between the protomodal and its modications, which Husserl in
CMe characterizes instead as the primordially constituted in relationship to the
secondarily constituted. This is just what Fink would see as an instance precisely
of privileging the protomodal. The proper sense of the distinction, then, is one that
Fink would see claried in the transcendental critique of methodology. See CMe,
58, pp. 13334 (Hua I, p. 161), for Husserl, and VI.CM/2, pp. 25860, for Fink.
See note 46 further in the chapter, within the question of the last of the modications
to protomodality.
..NOTE :
This question is deferred by Fink as beyond the scope of the Fifth Meditation.
Actually he is asking two questions: (1) whether the endless world-horizon is simply
a fundamental given to which human consciousness correlates in its life, or is con-
stituted by the consciousness had of it, thus posing the difference between natural-
attitude inquiry and transcendental explication; (2) whether the consciousness that
constitutes the world is a consciousness that is not denable as simply here-and-now
actual. The work of Cartesian Meditations is to answer the rst question in favor
of the second of its options; but to the second question it is not at all clear if the
answer can be so simple and direct when the full breadth of the world and of world-
constituting consciousness is taken into consideration.
..NOTE :
On this third deciency besides Z-IV 87a88b see Z-I 5b, 8a, 20a, and 122a
(EFM 1). David Carr, in Phenomenology and the Problem of History (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 92ff., argues that Husserls analysis is
conducted only in analogy to presentication, not with an admixture of it; but the
text of Husserls 1929 revision clearly has presentication as a key operative factor
(CMe pp. 115, in 52, and 12728, in 55, where Cairns has presentiation for
Vergegenwrtigung). The problem, however, lies deeper, namely, that, whether ap-
presentation is interpreted as mediated by presentication or not, it is still pre-
sentialistic. The Others being as both a being and an I (also in being) is, according to
Fink, not to be explicated in terms of object-presence to begin with.
In texts other than Cartesian Meditations as well Husserl tends to cast the media-
tion by which one egoic primordiality is broadened by access to others as Ver-
gegenwrtigungpresentication, for example, in C17V (1931), where he speaks
of empathizing presentication, as presentication at a second level (typescript,
p. 14). Later in the same manuscript empathizing appresentation is the term for
this operation of achieving community, in terms of the same object-presentational
intentionality that Fink nds to be too restrictive an experiential modality. The
characterization of the phenomenon in question that this results in cannot shed its
ambiguity and inadequacy. Husserl at one point even asks, Is community, intersub-
jectivity perhaps already there, and is empathy only a disclosive action? (p. 31); and
a little later he considers a kind of proto-empathy, better not called empathy at all
(for this implies explicitness) but rather a proto-intentionality that makes known
a continuity with others (p. 32). Cf. also Hua XV, Texts No. 19, pp. 33136, and
No. 20, pp. 33743.
Explorations like these in Husserls manuscripts convey the context of thinking
and rethinking that is considerably more open and malleable than the familiar
published texts of Ideas or Cartesian Meditations allow. Finks revision proposals
draw from this intense openness of reconsideration in Husserls phenomenology and
bring together different components of Husserls vast researches under the gover-
nance of the systematic and methodological corrective Fink urges as necessary for
transcendental phenomenology. Many of the points Fink tries to indicate inter-
pretively in their relevance to the critique of the Meditation V are touched upon in
C 17 III, as they are in other manuscripts of Husserls during this period.
.NOTE :
This entire subset of six pages (Z-VII VIII/1a6a)characterized by Fink on the

rst page as On the occasion of the draft for Husserl! and placed in a folder with
notes explicitly dated in 1930, though itself without a precise dateseems to be
an alternate sketch relating to 6 of Finks Draft for the opening section of an
Introduction to Phenomenology, VI.CM/2, pp. 6388 (see 4.2). The order of its
topics, however, corresponds better to the rst section of Finks Layout for Ed-
mund Husserls System of Phenomenological Philosophy, VI.CM/2, pp. 47 (see
the end of 4.1). The term Selbstbesinnung here could be rendered self-reection,
so long as one removed the connotation of a mirrorlike facing of oneself, as if of
another object.
..NOTE :
The points and quoted phrases in this paragraph are drawn from Z-XIII 57ab,
emphasis all Finks (EFM 2). This note is the rst of a series of notes that amplify
the clarifying points Fink made to the Rev. E. W. Edwards in January 1934 (see the
latter pages of 7.3.3.2). Z-XIII 61ab gives the opening lines of the letter Fink
sent Edwards on January 24 (EFM 2, Abschn. 4), and Z-XIII 58 gives points for
Finks discussion with Edwards, while Z-XIII, subset LIX, has Finks notes for his
Tatwelt essay, What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Do?
(see 1.3, p. 47), much of which relates as well to the themes of the discussion with
Edwards.
Chapter 10
NOTE :
An attestation dated September 30, 1940, by the Recteur of the University of Lou-
vain, H. van Waeyenbergh, regarding Finks appointment there mentions as reasons
for Finks having to return to Germany the ransacking of his house and possessions
during his internment and the uncertainty of continuing the original nancial ar-
rangement for his position at the University of Louvain (from the Personalakten:
Eugen Fink, UAFbg, and in EFM 4, Abschn. 4). A letter from Malvine Husserl to her
daughter, Elisabeth Husserl Rosenberg, already living in the United States, mentions
Finks having left Louvain with his wife on October 24 (letter of October 25, 1940,
in the Husserl Archives). According to a letter from Gerhart Husserl to Alfred
Schutz the attempt had been made to persuade Fink and Landgrebe to emigrate to
the United States (letter of October 1, 1940, in the Husserl Archives), but both
declined.
NOTE :
Z-XXVII (EFM 4), in which one subset, A/113, pertains to Finks 1939 article,
Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls (Studien, pp. 179223);
English translation by William McKenna, The Problem of the Phenomenology of
Edmund Husserl, in William McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E. Win-
ters, eds., Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenol-
ogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 2155, and a second, A/II/118,
pertains to his Husserl-Kritik (see below, pp. 53839 and 540). The dates in
Z-XXVII are from 1939 after Finks emigration to Louvain.
.NOTE :
To Heisss credit it must be pointed out that he supported Finks advancement to a

professorship in 1947, even if not as a regular chair-holder but as nichtbeamteter,
ausserordentlicher Professor. (Document dated March 20, 1947, Personalakten:
Eugen Fink). It was only a year later, on March 2, 1948, that the de-Nazication
commission, the Badisches Staatskommissariat fr politische Suberung, nally de-
clared Fink clean of any involvement during the Nazi periodnot an issue [nicht
betroffen] the decision reads (Personalakten: Eugen Fink, Aktenzeichen D 3 2503,
UAFbg). In bitter irony Fink remarks in one of his letters how under the eye of the
occupation forces the tiny minority of resisters to Nazism are treated as a quantit
ngligeable while the former Nazis in positions of power still play ball with each
other (letter to Felix Kaufmann, April 19, 1947, copy in the Fink Nachlass).
.NOTE :
The article in question, Das Problem der Phnomenologie Edmund Husserls, is

reprinted in Studien, pp. 179223 (see note 10 in this chapter, here in the appendix).
The notes from the conversation referred to here lay out Finks critique of Land-
grebes interpretation of Husserls treatment of the world. Briey, Landgrebe was
contending that Husserl never properly posed the problem of the world, and never
offered a clarication of the transcendence of objects. Landgrebes claim, Fink ex-
plains, is that Husserl always points only to transcendent things, thereby presuppos-
ing elds of transcendence as such. Finks response is to contest that the problem of
the world is a question of the constitutive clarication of the eld of transcendence,
as if a matter of how subjectivity gets out there beyond itself. Rather for Husserl
objectness is a structural determination at a higher level, viz., that of the inclusion of
transcendence in immanence. At the same time, Fink argues, among other points,
that the real treatment by Husserl of the world is to be seen in his late work, even
though the consistent subjectivism of that work as a whole does not explore fully
enough the true horizonal character of the world.
.NOTE :
Eugen Fink, Sein und Mensch: Vom Wesen der ontologischen Erfahrung, ed. by
Egon Schtz and Franz-Anton Schwarz (Freiburg: Alber, 1977). This text, taking
mainly Hegel as his point of departure, though with some consideration of Heideg-
ger, only covers part of what Finks earlier sketches proposed. E.g., in Z-XXIX 303a
Fink speaks of his intention to reconcile Husserl and Hegel in an overcoming of the
opposition between theory of knowledge and ontology; see also Z-XXIX 55b,
41ab, and 302a. In his letter to Felix Kaufmann, October 1, 1946, Fink writes:
Im working with great intensity now on a work that I want to count as the rst
that is my very own. Its called Ontological Experience ; and he speaks of it in the
context of what he takes to be his highest task, namely, to make the Husserl
tradition come to life again, especially in view of the events, disruptions, and
betrayals that had intervened in the tragic years now at an end.
Index
Abgrund (falling away of ground), 251, in phenomenology, 34, 36465

339, 379, 4045 a proto-standing, 264, 287
the Absolute temporalization of, 274
conceptualization and meaning in the totality of ontogonic becoming,
retro-application, 388 411
being and nothing together, 386 unity of existent and nonexistent,
and human being, identity and differ- 383n, 428
ence, 36365 un-nihilating of, 129, 363, 381
and (en)nitization, 273, 399, 405 absolute being
is ontogonic becoming, 377 absolute consciousness, not being at
meontic determination of: appearance all, 152
of time, 274 as meon regressively determinable, 171
meontic in the achievement of being, not an ontological region, 286
386 the ontical inquired into before its
and Music, 376 einai, 171, 37879, 386
is origin, 171, 273, 380 a proto-stand, 287
no being, 155, 2045n absolute dimension: meontic distance,
ontication in reection, 411 347, 377
ontication of, necessary in principle, absolute episode: the production of
411 world, 42829, 441
the ontication of the world, 405 absolute idealism
the Other, 44849 illusion of, 325
585
586 Index
absolute idealism (continued) animal

illusion of: charge against phenome- disclosive, 578
nology, 32930 and the reduction, 494
absolute knowing: has to founder, 156 anonymity
absolute philosophy, dialectical double move from, to the thematic, 124
truth of, 325, 330, 36465 of consciousness, 282
absolute proto-I, 298 anonymous functioning, 282
absolute subject: harmless idea, 154, 326 antecedency
absolute subjectivity of the I to the We, 498
the meontic construal of and constitu- regressively given, not the antecedency
tion, 378 of apriority, 249
world-play of spirit, 34445 antecedency of being and antecedency of
absolutum ab esse, 156 cognition, 43435. See also ordo
absolvence, meontic: Fink on Heidegger essendi and ordo
on Hegel, 4057 cognoscendi
act-intentionality. See also subject-object anthropologism, 365
correlation; subject-object transcendental, 366
intentionality anxiety, contactless, 463
critique of, 109 Anzeige, 460n
more than ray of objectication, 283 multiple meanings of, 396n
actuality See also formal indication
accrues to, not from, objects, 254 Apollo, 532
constituted in spatio-temporal depres- aporia in time-analysis, 328, 344
encing, 27980 the a priori
as horizon factor, 196 ground: origin, 16772
mode of temporalization, 254 Heidegger, 140, 168, 556
not an object property, 279 phenomenology: origin, 17172, 241,
a time-relationship, 279 250
aisthesis, 506 Aristotle, 466
Albrecht, Gustav, 3334, 40, 59, 418 assistant: sense of terms for, 5051
19 Austria, annexation into the German
aletheia (alhyeia), 525 Reich, 91
A-lhyeein; 459, 578 awareness

Alphus, Karl, 334n difference in manner of, 21516
anbaoiw, 577 pathic: horizonal, 347
analogia entis, 477, 479 pre-cognitional: clue to spirit as life,
analogia meontica, 479, 481 342
analysis pre-thematic in temporalization, 125
general characterization, 458 of temporal process, 415
and speculation
integrated in explicating ontological Basic Problems of Logic (Husserls lec-
experience, 540 tures WS 192526), Nachschrift
interplay of, 467, 536 by Fink, 545
anamnesis, 144 Baudin, mile, 72, 550
Index 587
Becker, Oskar, 158n, 227n being-in-the-world

discussion of formal indication, 389 transcendental as In-Stancial, 245
lectures in Freiburg, 569 being-there-with (Sein-bei), 160
philosophy of mathematics, 6 being-with (Mitsein)
becoming: the ontication of Nothing as horizonal and In-Stancial, 505
into being, 405 and intersubjectivity, 161
bedazzlement by things 188 Belgium, invasion by the German Army
being. See also Idea of being (1940), 71, 52223
coterminous with the constituted, 362, Berger, Gaston
436 copy of Sixth Cartesian Meditation,
expression of life, 333 55, 557
in categorial grasp and in existential visit in Freiburg, 55
grasp, 361n Bergson, Henri, 292
every being in time is constituted, 539 Bernau manuscripts, 15. See also Fink:
fundamentally being-as-appearing, Bernau MSS work
382 in the 1928 publication, 561
for Husserl, on the march, 442 meant for Husserls Jahrbuch, 32
meontic product, 574 question of the originative I, 305
is expression of life, 333 Bernet, Rudolf, 227n, 228n
no being can make sense outside tem- Heideggers focus on horizon in time-
poralized horizonality, 448 analysis, 562
one cannot fall out of, 353 absence in Husserls time-analysis, 562
spell cast by, 401 birth and death
as temporally appearing, 410 constituted ontic, not meontic determi-
transcendental surface, 436 nations, 440
worldliness of, 204n In-Stanciality, 441n, 504
Being and Time, 11, 22, 83, 129, 138, bodiliness, 494, 500501
140, 149, 233, 568, 579 constituted in basic constitutive pro-
and advancement at Marburg, 4 cesses, 296
construction in, 408 living material being-in-nature, 509
on existential totality, 146 10
inuence on Fink, 113n, 233, 237 body. See also living/lived body
grounding in Being and Time unclear and empathy, 496
to Husserl, 168 as kinesthetic, 6
the method in, 8486 levels of foundedness, 508
publication in 1927, 4 book burning, 3839
reading by Fink, 10, 84, 103, 183n boring site, metaphor for phenomenolog-
time as horizonality, 237 ical regression, 250
and transcendence, 133, 13536 Boyce Gibson, William Ralph, 1112
being and time: basic formula for tran- bracketing and noematic investigation,
scendental philosophy, 145n, 262 139
being-as-appearing: correlate to subjec- Brhier, mile, 62
tivity, 38283 Brentano-Aristotelian doctrine
being-for-us an ontological problem, 458 restitution of, 261, 28687
588 Index
Breton, Andr, 51n protomodality and its issues, 492

Bruno, Giordano, 3, 449 (see also protomodality)
and the meontic, 156 introduces fuller dimensions of sub-
jective life, 489
caesura in the history of metaphysics, and the transcendental horizon as
205, 384, 531 intersubjectivity, 504
Cairns, Dorion, 35, 36, 42, 148 rst revision (1929), 1920, 55
Finks mention of meontic logic, 381n, rst stage of regressive inquiry: in the
567 present, 487
given Nachschrift of Husserls Basic French translation, 19, 420, 54849
Problems of Logic, 545 Husserls aims re: metaphysical ques-
Husserl on Finks work, 106n, 42021 tions, 420
Husserl on Heidegger on phenomenol- Husserls magnum opus, 21, 23
ogy, 128 linkage to Finks work on time-
reading Finks revisions of Cartesian analysis, 426
Meditations, 183 necessity of a second reading, 48485
re: systematic presentation, 212 via Sixth Cartesian Meditation,
captivation in the world (Weltbefangen- 490n
heit), 18688 need for self-critique, 78
and the cosmic order, 509 new revision, 2327, 97, 1058, 275
facing the Sahara of phenomenology, new revision meant for Jahrbuch, 32
72 not a nal statement, 484
human being itself, 187 not the full system of phenomenology,
as orientation to things, 188 482
replacement for natural attitude, revision made Finks responsibility, 32,
186 34
a speculative concept, 187 preliminary, 97
Weltbefangenheit and prjug du and solitary reective inquiry, recast,
monde, 557 61112
Carr, David, on Husserls analysis of his- temporality not analyzed, 487
tory, 581 total revolution in rereading them, 484
Cartesian Meditations. See also empathy; typescript C, 549
Husserl: Paris lectures; written as having to be redone, 500
intersubjectivity Cassirer, Ernst: debate with Heidegger,
concreteness needed, 497 20
core problem, 5045 Cercle Linguistique de Prague, 48, 53
ego centering Cercle Philosophique de Prague, 5758
counterweight to situatedness of the I children of the world, 76, 86
am, 42425 circle in phenomenological method, 85,
to be overcome, 48384 96
Fifth Cartesian Meditation circumstance/Circum-Stance/surround
empathy (Einfhlung), 490 (see also (Umstand), 199, 243, 278
empathy) C-manuscripts, 41
initial main issues, 48689 and Chiavari holiday, 271
Index 589
effect on Finks work on the Bernau consciousness of the world

MSS, 289 fundamentally different type of con-
Husserls return to time analysis, 31 sciousness, 21516
and the living present, 235 non-thematic, non-act-intentionality,
main issue in for Fink, 295 194
proto-eld in, 199n wakefulness, 195
Cohen, Hermann, 381n constitutedness in terms of sensuous
Finks reading of, 556 materiality, 510
Vor-Sein, 15758 constituting power and constituted sub-
communication, 501 ject: radical difference and meth-
community in living (Lebensgemein- odology, 36162
schaft), 515 constitution
concepts in Heidegger, 14142
absolutive: absolved from esse, 393 I-less prior to egoic, 117
content-determinacy in the meontic, Manifestation, appearance of the
41213 Absolute, 407
meontic: protesting, ironic, 39394, a priori to transcendence and ontologi-
479 (see also language, double cal difference, 142
character of) of worldness and constitution of being-
ontifying, 36263 in-the-world, 244
philosophical vs. absolutive concepts, constitutive origination lies in non-
393 temporal pre-being (Vorseiendes),
of transcendental seeming (illusion), 379
Kant, 393 (see also transcendental construction, 16267, 178, 457
seeming/semblance/illusion) content-determinacy, 41213
of un-nihilation, 479 dened in terms of ontication, 410
conceptual expression and the methodol- and demonstrative exhibiting (Aus-
ogy of projection, 163 weisung), 16567
conceptuality exceeding the given, 16566
clarity of needed in philosophy, 383 in Finks plan for a new systematic pre-
84 sentation of phenomenology, 167
effectiveness of, 35960, 397 in Heideggers books and lectures in
concreteness, ultimate in meontic phe- the late 1920s, 16265, 4089
nomenology, 365 means of intuitional presentation, 571
conditioning and the conditioned, 146 in phenomenology, as meontic, 40914
Finks methodological critique of, and philosophical knowing, 163
16972 in progressive phenomenology, 167
consciousness as projection, 16266
as accession, not originative constitu- in the Sixth Meditation, 40911
tive agency, 196, 329 Containment: the pregiven world-for-life,
redened in terms of original openness 218. See also world: as
to the world, 281 Containment
and unconsciousness, beyond duality, correlativism
336 dened and criticized, 465
590 Index
cosmogony essentially nite being, 160

the coming-about of temporal horizon- existential physics of, 160n
ality, 410 and formal indication, 395
is ontogony, 568 less than ontologically attainable and
cosmological fact, 341 more than nothing, 397
cosmological-ontological antithesis and as not vorhanden, 14546, 151
absolute philosophy, 381 ontic-meontic doubleness not explicit,
cosmological problematic, 43031 396
cosmological religion, 447 original temporality and, 14647
cosmology: transposition of ontology, 203 paradox of, 554
cosubjectivity and intersubjectivity, 491 both ontic and transcendental, 152
Counter-Stance (Gegenstand), 199, 264, and philosophizing, 131
278 as play of the world, 136
object-stage of phenomenology, 243 a priori condition for itself, 14243
Crisis-writings and requestioning, 131
all too human interpretation by Hus- a self-apperception, not ultimate
serl, 447 ground, 156
beginnings, 59 singular existential totality, 412
and Cartesian Meditations, 484 speculatively the only absolute subject,
deepest problem, 174, 222, 369, 383, 405
401, 444, 480n temporality, 145n
deepest problem, Husserls and Finks and In-Stanciality, 499
recasting of the approach to, 434 as transcendence, 13334, 135, 340
(see also ens and verum) day (light), 199, 200
identity and difference between tran- depresenting/depresencing (Entgegen-
scendental and mundane subjec- wrtigung), 232, 274
tivity, 221 antecedent to protention and reten-
introductory and preliminary charac- tion, 236
ter, 369 and conditioning conditioned, 147
language, 453, 454 as constituting the horizonal, 27980
no ction of world-non-existence, 219 as containing and detaining
product of the Freiburg workshop in (Enthalten), 252
self-criticism, 211 Ent-gegenwrtigung, hyphenated,
prominence of the theme of life, 322 560
stages in composition, 6163 as the ow of time, 235
Critique of Pure Reason, 6, 20, 102, 156, guide for characterizing proto-
168n, 330n, 335n, 472n, 567 temporalization, 293
Cusanus, Nicholas, 157, 158n, 556 not content modication but horizons
for presenting/presencing, 236
Dasein, 395 not in time, 235, 236
ambiguity of resolved in In-Stancial not intentional experience but tem-
conception, 413 poral coming-about, 233
doubleness: transcendence and a being, primacy in Finks Bernau work, 261
405 for pure fantasy and ideal objects, 254
Index 591
and regressive inquiry into temporaliz- in Husserl and Heidegger, 257, 498
ing genesis, 241 99
time-horizonality, 146 as pathic, not objectal and thematic,
work on in Chiavari, 271 5078
Derrida, Jacques, 340n and performance-community, 487,
Descartes, Ren, 74, 311 499, 5012, 510
de-temporalizing (Ent-Zeitigung), 438 reduction of, 581
de Waelhens, Alphonse, 372 relevant to inner life, not to objectness,
conversations with Fink, 525 501
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 21, 26, 335, 531. See a reversible experience, 491
also Husserl: and Dilthey translation of Einfhlung, 490n
as philosophy of reection, 328 and transcendental status, 49192
sciences of nature and sciences of en, 4045, 448
spirit, 331 en ka pn, 157, 158n
Dionysos, 532 Ende, Helga, 571
disclosure, name of a problem, 460 en-nitization (Ver-endlichung), 405,
distance and closeness, 199 436
D-manuscripts, problem of individua- en-nihilate, alternate meontic expression
tion, 290 for annihilate, 381n
doubleness of meaning in phenomeno- ens and verum, a speculative issue, 467,
logical descriptions, 477 56364
dreams, 509 relation as already set up: alternative
positions and their critique, 465
Ebbinghaus, Julius Entgegenwrtigung. See depresenting/
course on Kant, 6 depresencing
on Kant on the world, 202 Enthalten, meaning of, 19192, 25253
Edwards, E. W., 439, 582 enthusiasm
einai, 171, 379 essence of play, 451
Eingestelltsein: stationedness, setting up phenomenologically dened, 46162
in the world (natural attitude), the ontological experience, 46364
18586, 361, 577. See also natu- epkeina thw ouoaw, 119
ral attitude Epicurus, 519
ekbasis/ekbaoiw, 450, 462, 577 epiothmh, 213
in Hegel, 450 epistemology, internal investigation, 460
Plotinian sense, 577 epoch (epoxh), 94. See also meontic
emanation, 517 epoch
Neoplatonic, 273, 314 action of, 76n, 946
empathy (Einfhlung), 490. See also Car- applies to both subject and object, 97
tesian Meditations: Fifth Carte- 99, 179
sian Meditation done by the psychological subject?,
and bodiliness, 501 (see also living/ 122
lived body) effect of, 9899, 219
double-ended, to be reduced doubly misinterpreted as exclusion of living
in Husserl, 14, 76, 257 existence, 326
592 Index
epoch (continued) expression and situatedness in-the-world,

not abstraction to psychic immanence, 476
94, 97, 210
re: good and evil, 352 fantasy, pure
opens questioning, 131 depresencing of timelessness, 473n
the question of the world, 174 as the depresencing of possibility, 556
re: world-captivation, speculative, 399 different from memory, 580
epoch and reduction, distinction sum-total of possibilities, 473
between, 99100 temporality of, 474
Er-lebnis as lived-felt movement, 507 feeling
Erste Philosophie II, 79 Greek feeling for the cosmos, 449
the essence, misunderstanding of, as as profound life-force, 200
forever-in-its-being and unhistori- roots of spirit, 201
cal, 575 Feuling, Daniel, 51, 445
eternity, 511 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 67, 160
eteron, 159 and life-philosophy, 335
Eucken, Walter, 70 and construction for Heidegger, 163
and Finks rst teaching position at 64, 571
Freiburg, 527 and eteron, 159
evidencing or evidentness eld-intentionality, 199, 274
apodictic, 497 a structure of the world, 207
at all levels (Husserl), 303 intentionality of its own: horizonal of
and external inquiry, 460 the present, 277
meaning of, a speculative principle, work in Chiavari, 271, 276
402 lling (lledness)
possible only in the world, 194 of the actual, 247, 253
and progressive phenomenology, 416 break in time-swinging, 253
and the speculative dimension, 400 and the focal, spatial lling, 253
401 and (ful)lled intentionality, 240n
in transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger-like, 276n
43031, 479 and eld-horizonality of the present,
existence (Heidegger), 84, 145 277
existentials, 340, 396 in gradation of presence, 272
formal indication, 393 in horizonality, 240, 252
as a priori, 14042 and individuation, 295, 305
as proper philosophical concepts, 392 In-Stancial, 247
Existenz, Daseins, 145 only done as In-Stancial experience,
experience (Erfahrung) 412
non-visual dimensions, 510 in terms of enworlded subjectivity,
totality of modes of being amidst 413
things in the world, 506 the time-plenum, 292
Experience and Judgment, 14, 260, 547. and time-swinging, 276, 307n
See also Landgrebe: editing Expe- nitization, 273, 404. See also en-
rience and Judgment nitization
Index 593
nitude systematic treatment, 271

constitutive result, 405 third section, rst MS, 265
most important feature of In-Stances, third section, rst MS, on gradation
5034 in lledness, 26569, 27576
Fink, Eugen third section, last MS, 263, 270n
1934 essay on Husserl, 4647, 72, cabin in the Oytal, 351, 354n, 519
34243, 182n, 582 Cartesian Meditations revision
1937 essay on Husserl, 521n rst revisions, 28, 183
1939 essay on Husserl, 197, 198n, First Meditation revisions, 100n,
348, 401, 535, 576, 582, 583 1058, 183, 209, 210
1951 Brussels paper, 197, 198n, 542 First Meditation, total replace-
1959 essay on Husserl, 226n ment, 183, 497
Abitur, 2 Second Meditation revisions, 98,
access to Husserls manuscripts, 8, 116, 208, 210, 220
232, 546 Third Meditation revisions, 122n
acquaintance with Heidegger, 19n Fifth Meditation revisions, 55, 83,
as anti-Nazi, postwar status, 626 48687
assistance on Crisis-writings, 60, Fifth Meditation revisions
6365, 119n, 121, 213, 21417, incomplete, 55, 485
431n Fifth Meditation revisions, Hus-
assistance on Crisis-writings: Prague serls query on intelligibility, 494
lectures, 212, 222, 350, 575 95n
assistance on Husserls Prague Con- general effect of, 48485
gress address, 335 second revision, 35, 1058, 184
assistant beginning in 1928, 2, 9, 547 caution in asserting the meontic, 440
assistant status with Husserl, 546 caution in characterizing Husserls
on assistants work, 258 work, 575
assistantship nancing, 2728, 4042, Chiavari work, 28, 27173
4748, 289, 578 most important task, 271, 275
authorization by Husserl, 51 competition essay. See prize essay
autobiographical statements, 16, 528n, contacts with Heidegger, 572
547 and continuing the tradition of Hus-
beginning beyond preliminaries, 75 serls thinking, 530, 533, 53637,
beyond both Husserl and Heidegger: 541, 583
meontic, 154 convergence with Merleau-Ponty,
in Berlin, 6 429n, 510n
Bernau MSS work, 16, 30, 41, 289, 548 conversation with Heiss (1946), 531,
difculties, 4950 53638
editorial manner, 26062, 288 conversations with Husserl
Finks aims, 261 1933: life-philosophy, 333
Husserls wishes, 26162 1936, January, 31718, 35152
nal MS in Finks ordering, 263 idea of philosophy, 35152
introduction, not completed, 288 intra-temporality of the ideal, 560
ordering of MSS, 262, 263 61
594 Index
Fink (continued) the speculative, 405

teleology of phenomenology and on world, 557
resistance stance, 351 critique of Husserl, 311, 524
temporality and ideality, 471n on empathy: deciencies, 496
conversations with Landgrebe, 55, horizonality, 3067
57n, 58n, 21617, 535, 557, 567. on life-world, 36973, 542
See also Landgrebe: conversations presentialism, 3034, 312
with Fink presentialism: empathy, 581
on Husserls moralistic teleology, transcendentalism, 310
353 world as horizon, 44344
misunderstanding of essence, 575 critique of Landgrebe on the world,
the meontic, 377 583
mysticism, 383 critique of reviews of Cartesian Medi-
philosophy in phenomenology, 539 tations, 98100
40 danger for phenomenology: remaining
problematic of the world, 576, 583 with initial orientation, 186n
time-analysis, 304n, 563 in Davos, 20, 134
transcendental onlooker, 358 decision to remain with Husserl, 40
conversations in Louvain, 373, 52425 44
on cophilosophizing, 259 deference and reticence with Husserl,
correspondence with Kaufmann and 317, 553, 56667
Schutz, 98100 on the denition of man, 350n
cothinking with Husserl, 212 and the denazication commission,
critique, early importance of, 80 583
critique of Heidegger, 557 difference from Husserl and Heidegger
ambiguity in Dasein, 340 the meontic, 205
anxiety, contactless, 463 temporalization, 248
a priori conceptions as constitutive Difference project, 66, 13133,
results, 14042 140n, 325n
care and play, 571 differences with Heidegger: anxiety,
on the conceptual in the understand- 463
ing of being, 571 construction, 409, 41213
construction, 165, 41214 language and truth, 458
formal indication not radical differences with Husserl, 54, 1078,
enough, 395 214, 22122, 33031, 372
Hlderlin interpretations, 532 on being: cosmogonic horizon rather
interpretation of Hegel, 4057 than correlational positing, 427
on Husserl, 570 Crisis-writings, 21518, 368n,
on Husserl on empathy, 49899 435n
on language, 458 on dening the problem of human
notes on, 524 being, 575
ontology, 57374 doubleness of meaning in language,
and recasting in phenomenology, 477
248, 249, 256 God, 44547
Index 595
a Heideggerian matter, 191, 304 rst discussions with Husserl, 7, 81

idea of philosophy, 408, 35152 82, 8990, 204, 209, 488
Kant, 559 rst ideas from Husserls lecturing, 5
life, 31718, 334 rst lectures attended at Freiburg, 56,
life as aware pathically, 346 202n
meontic philosophy of absolute rst university lecturing, Freiburg,
spirit, 205 52627, 530
metaphysics, basic features, 423 rst university lecturing, Louvain, 525
owing to the methodological good and evil not values of originative
dynamic, 476 life, 352
presuppositionality, 538 Habilitation (1946), 52730
primacy of the present and the I, as political reparation, 629
3037 options (1932) 4245
proto-process, 3028 options (1946) 539
revision of the Cartesian Medita- hearing Heideggers addresses, 134
tions, 183 hearing Heideggers lectures, 1213,
the science-character of phenome- 25, 129, 13031, 134, 145n, 154,
nology, 53638 159, 168
temporal horizonality, 3067 Hegels thought positively engaged,
thinking beyond limits, 317 403, 570
time-analysis, 236, 242, 285 Hermitry, 524n
transcendental and mundane sub- his own thinking: speculation in phe-
jects, 22122 nomenology, 481, 53943
wakefulness, 305 his role with Husserl, 52, 212, 329,
world explication, 21618 425, 480. See also Husserl: appre-
differences with Landgrebe, 507 ciation of Fink
discussion of language for C. Morris, his role with Husserl and beyond, 311,
578 525, 528, 530, 532, 53843
dissertation, 1719, 156. See also his task in manuscript work, 259
Presentication and Image Husserl and Heidegger
defense, 13, 25 accommodated within phenomenol-
and prize-essay: a difference, 580 ogy, 541
self-critique in, 7880 acknowledgment in dissertation, 17
draft for a letter to Heidegger, 558 critique of their treatment of hori-
draft for birthday homage to Husserl, zons, 242n
374 equivocation and ambiguity, 132
draft for Kuhn, 22021 33
early philosophic reading, 3 philosophic contrast imaged, 128
Elements of a Husserl Critique, Husserl, last visit with, 69
53839, 54041 Husserls achievement: breakthrough,
Edwards, letter to, 439n, 582 374
emigration to Belgium, 522 Husserls approach more radical than
eulogy for Husserl, 70 Heideggers, 4344, 151, 167
rst course with Husserl, 5 Husserls rst impression of, 5
596 Index
Fink (continued) part II: charge of no topos, 327

Husserls greatest service re: philoso- part II: countering charges against
phy of reection, 311 phenomenology, self-critical
Husserls moralistic teleology, 352 development, 32930
353, 447 part II: life-philosophy, 32425
Husserls role for him rejected, 352, part II: outline, 380
528 part II: phenomenologys preemi-
and Husserls shorthand, 16, 236, 546, nence, 329
547 lecture in Louvain (1940), on enthusi-
Husserls thought superior and inferior asm, 462,
to Hegels, 4078 lined-through text, status of, 521n
in Husserls work regimen, 2425, 30 maternal background, 43n
31, 3450, 54, 483 meontic mentioned in conversations
difculties, 5154 (with Cairns, Landgrebe), 567
time-studies, 238 methodologically new thinking, 212
inaugural lecture at Freiburg (1946), in Mnster SS (1925), 23
53638 postwar course, Natur, Freieheit, Welt,
intellectual debt to Heidegger, 17, 112, 283n, 310n
237 Nietzsche on life, 565
intellectual debt to Husserl, 17 Nietzsches contribution: the pathic,
intellectual situation with Husserl and 34348
Heidegger, 1113, 131, 172, 257 Nietzsches Philosophie, 67n
internal exile, 52324 not disciple-like Husserlian, 66
on Kant on the world, 23334 notes on Husserls course Fundamen-
Kant Society paper of 1935, 47, 66, tal Problems of Logic, 545
1023, 126, 350, 356, 568 notes on Husserls course History of
example of the speculative for Hus- Modern Philosophy, 545
serl, 401 notes on Husserls course Nature and
Husserls reading of, 4012, 553 Spirit, 36, 545, 551, 563, 565
ontogonic metaphysics, 66, 172, import of, 75
205, 356, 568 notes
Pathos, 4801 operative and thematic character of,
Kant-Studien essay, 4446 178
basically critique of fundamentals, speculative style of, 451
566 as paradigm for following Husserl, 533
critique of object-intentionality, 111 parallel to Hegel, 132
his view of, 56667 parents, 3n
Husserls approval, 4546, 1078, phenomenal memory, 5
330 phenomenology without the specula-
life-philosophy more abstract than tive is psychology, 541, 570
phenomenology, 34041 plan for the new systematic presenta-
paradox central to thinking re: life, tion, 2830, 32, 65, 88, 172,
340 18081, 212, 301, 375, 384, 415
part II, 45, 6667 Husserls interest in, 30
Index 597
Husserls reaction and Finks posi- System of Philosophy, 481

tion, 18183 systematic grasp, 35, 41, 65, 80, 87, 211
Husserls view of, 42021 systematic elaboration Finks respon-
draft for the opening section of, 29 sibility, 49, 294
30, 129, 18183, 301, 422, 511 systematic elaboration for Husserl,
specic features, 42122 180, 259
plan for writings in 1933, 324 time-study, Husserls leaving entirely to
plan for writings in 1934, 66 Fink from 1934 on, 294, 3089
plan for writings in 1935 and 1936, 67 time-study, stage one book. See Fink:
postwar lecture courses published, Bernau MSS work
202n, 542 time-study, stage three book, 29293.
Enleitung in die Philosophie, 530n See also Time and Time-
Natur, Freiheit, Welt, 283n, 310n Constitution
postwar phenomenological analysis, abortive, 310
54243 entirely new work, 309
prize essay, 9, 80n, 81, 156, 226, 227, main features, 309
229 primacy of retentional time-
prize essay competition, 79 constitution, 563
project on the world, 2026 time-study, stage two book
Habilitation idea, 43, 201 in two parts, 289, 29192
importance of Kant for, 2026 Husserls leaving entirely to Fink,
inuence of Heidegger, 203 294
sketches for, 558 introduction, 292
proposal for continuation of the no extant draft, part 1, 293
Crisis-text, 36970 problematic of the introduction, 393
radicalizing insight gained early, 232 time-study, strain in work on: reasons,
radicalizing interpretation, 25354 29091, 308
reading of Being and Time, 10, 103, time-study, postwar, in Alles und
183n Nichts, 280n
on reason and the clarity of concep- time-study, three stages, 226
tuality, 383 Treatise on Phenomenological
recasting Heideggers ideas in phenom- Research, 53536, 540
enology, 248, 248, 256, tutorials
reports on Husserls MSS, 180n on Aristotle, 48n, 579
resistance to the nationalization of life on Cartesian Meditations, 495
response to Heideggerian objections to for Dorothy Ott, 48, 57778
Husserls program, 36566 for Japanese philosophers, 97, 129,
return to Germany in 1940, 582 570
reversal of Cartesian approach, 574 unable to publish after 1934, 47, 342
Sein und Mensch: Vom Wesen der Onto- writing project: Ontological Experi-
logischen Erfahrung, 570, 583 ence, 464n, 539, 542, 525
sketch for full phenomenology of tem- young member of Kant Society, 3
porality, 274 Fink and Landgrebe
Spiel als Weltsymbol, 67n, 136 arrest and incarceration (1940), 523
598 Index
Fink and Landgrebe (continued) reduction as, 390

dialogue with Husserls writings, 524 and signicative intention, 392n
emigration, 71, 522, 524 foundering, 156n, 357, 450
ordering of Husserls MSS, 5758 conception of man as a being, 380,
return to Germany (1940), 523 428, 457
transcriptions done at Louvain, 522 of content positivity, 392
rst philosophy: for Husserl, 419 philosophy as, 408
the formal of presenting temporality, 35758
in Being and Time, 8586 of reective seeming, 36364
dened for temporality, 24748, 266 of time-analysis, 310
meontically: empty of cognitive infor- France, invasion by German Army, 523
mativeness, 392 Freiburg
in need of or incapable of investiga- intellectual situation with Husserl and
tional content, 127, 187, 285 Heidegger, 1113, 12829
in phenomenology: positive/negative, under French occupation, 526
397 functioning intentionality in Merleau-
progressive in meaning in time- Ponty, 197
investigation, 389 functioning subjectivity. See also perfor-
as purely indicative, 395, 411 mance consciousness
sketch, not yet lled out and genuine, beyond subject-object correlation, 464
389 meontic subjectivity, 325
Formal and Transcendental Logic, 34, fundamental ontology, preliminary stage
48, 61n, 67, 79, 97, 467, 54546, for the meontic, 366
550
Husserls proof checking, 21 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 31n
language, 45354 on Husserl, 110n
need for self-critique stated, 78 genesis
Ott tutorial by Fink, 48, 418, 454, ambiguity re: horizonality, 56061
57758 as cosmogony and ontogony, 410
formal indication. See also indication designation by retro-application, 433
in Beckers writings, 569 meaning origin, 432n
in Being and Time, 8586, 394, 409 not intra-temporal, 432
in context of ontication, 390 passive, 487
in Finks study years, 389 gesture and language, 601
Fink vs. Heidegger, 41213 givenness
Heidegger problematic for transcendental subjec-
misses meontic paradoxical sense, tivity, 40910
39596 philosophical, ontical, and phenome-
ontied disguise of the absolute, 393 nological, 166
in Heideggers late 1920s lectures, 39n gnoseological and ontological antece-
in meontic phenomenology, 39194 dency, 104, 105. See also ordo
as meontically paradoxical, 392 essendi and ordo cognoscendi
by ontication, 393 gnoseology, explained, 55253
parallel to Husserls zigzag, 85 Gnosticism 449
Index 599
God antecedency of accession and antece-

in the context of the cosmological dency of being, 150
problem and the speculative, assistance for Husserl, 65
445 care, 344
as disclosive, 578 critique by Fink. See Fink: critique of
in meontic metaphysics, 44647 Heidegger
in phenomenology, 419 critique of Husserl, 504
in philosophy of reection: phenome- refuted in the meontic, 36566
non for human being, 447 critique of life-philosophy and Misch,
and the teleology of reason, 444 33940
and transcendental totality, 445 Dasein and life-philosophy, 2427
Great Longing, 313n, 34748 debate with Cassirer, 20
Grimme, Adolf, 27, 35 and the denazication commission
ground and condition of possibility, dis- (1945), 526
tinction, 379 disappointment to Husserl. See Hus-
Grund, meanings of, 168n serl: disappointment with
Heidegger
habitualities, 457 entry into Nazi party, 38
Haga, Miyumi, 570 existential hermeneutic methodol-
Hartmann, Nicolai, 465 ogy, 8485
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 67, existentials, 340
149n, 154, 311, 525, 528, 531 Finks access to Marburg lectures, 256,
absolute nothing the rst thing in phi- 552
losophy, 188 and Finks Habilitationsschrift, 529
the Absolute as subject: too close to 30
human spirit, 450 rst lectures on return to Freiburg, 257
Being is the Nothing: not ontological freedom also a paradox, 15253
but meontic, 407 on freedom as ground, 16869
to be interpreted from the meontic, Husserls appreciation of, 34
4034 Husserls choice for successor, 4, 910
beyond Kant but with his schema, 149 Husserls philosophy of reection,
ekbasis, 450 149n
Faith and Knowledge, 180n and imagination, 14748
fantastic idealism, 441 implicit retro-application, 170n
Finks and Heideggers interpretations inuence on Fink, 91, 103, 129, 161,
of, 470 162, 175, 185, 203, 237, 248,
from the Hegelian speculative to the 304, 397, 431, 506, 552, 579
meontic, 4035 Being and Time. See Being and
Logic, 403, 406, 450 Time: inuence on Fink
opening as meontic, 377 being as region of nitude, 176 (see
re: the living concept, 403 also Heidegger: positive
Phenomenology of Spirit, 129, 525, contribution)
403, 406, 450, 570 construction, 408
Heidegger, Martin, 159, 292, 362, Nietzsche, 45n, 354n
600 Index
Heidegger (continued) a priori of ground, not of origin, 167

problem of ontology, 167 69
temporality, 1213, 254, 256 Rektor of the university, 3839
Introduction to Philosophy, 1213, Rektors Address, 39
13436 science camp, 44
Kant: world bound to Dasein, 149 speculative lan for phenomenology,
Kants cosmological horizon for the 12930, 151, 155
idea of being, 158 successor to Husserl, 2
Kants metaphysics, 159 temporal ecstasies and horizonality,
Korreferent for Finks dissertation, 18, 236n
92, 572 temporality: condition for possibility
lectures on German Idealism, 160 of the world, 556
lectures on Hegels Phenomenology of The world worlds, 340, 556
Spirit, 129 Time temporalizes, 556
Leibnizs question, 382 and topical reection, 325, 32728
and life-philosophy, 335, 33940 transcendence and freedom as forming
luminary theory of subjectivity, 142 the world, 340
at Marburg, 4 What Is Metaphysics? 134, 420
metaphysical Protofact, 409 as writing dialogues (Heiss), 531
misrepresentation of Husserl, 326 Heiss, Robert
motive for misunderstanding Husserl, conversation with Fink (1946), 531,
154 536
and nihil negativum, 567 evaluation of Finks Habilitations-
nominal editor for Husserls rst pub- schrift, 528, 530
lished time-analyses (1928), 15, relation to Heidegger, 529
232 support for Finks advancement, 583
On the Essence of Ground, 15253 Held, Klaus, 31n, 234n, 295, 307n, 557,
On the Essence of Truth, 134, 169 575
Origin of the Work of Art, 218n higher descriptions, 77, 88, 15354, 177,
ontology and the critique of self- 205, 271, 470, 49196, 55354
conceptions, 11314, 140 historicism, 328
paradox historicity, 422, 549
of ontological explication, 142 in Cartesian Meditations, summary,
freedom thrown into the world and 496
projecting the world, 341 history
glimpsed, 554 and coming-about of temporality, 432
heightening of the paradox, 164 for genesis, In-Stancial retro-
recognized by theologians, 555 application, 433
to be recognized in phenomenology, for Heiss, 531
22223 and human structuring in the world,
as philosophy of reection, 150, 325, 517
328 and intersubjectivity, 49394
positive contribution: being and ni- in meontic interpretation of ontica-
tude, 15455 tion, 517
Index 601
only takes place in the temporal fram- human being

ing of actuality, 433 the Absolute come to be as conscious
in Origin of Geometry, 518n experience and knowledge, 411
in phenomenology, inuence of Land- actualization of the constitution of
grebe, 57475 being on two levels, 413
pre-temporal and trans-eventual in bridge from being to nothing, 357,
meontic-speculative reinterpreta- 359, 380
tion, 433 coinciding with the transcendental, 497
of sense, 373 as disclosive: problem, not an answer,
Hitler, Adolf, 37, 115 459
horizon disgurement of the absolute subject,
ambiguity of in Husserls treatment, 365
442 foundering in understanding it, 380
and cashing in, 147, 236, 240, 242n, gap in the cosmos, 349
270, 307 (see also world: and in-between being, 462
cashing in) manifests constituted being and con-
different senses stituted agency, 322
lling in of, 193, 240 metaphysical gap in the cosmos, 349,
Finks critique of Husserls treatment 436
of, 3067, 44344 (see also Fink: ontological unattainability, 357, 391,
differences with Husserl: world 428
explication) ontologically a constitutive result, 114
the open and-so-forth, 442 open wound in the world, 436
the withdrawing/detaining function, powerless, 349 (see also powerlessness)
19192, 44344 privilege of in phenomenology, 411
horizonal consciousness, 110 puried in reduction, 100
horizonal experience, clues to the consti- and the question of non-being 380
tution of horizons, 198 in the situation of the natural attitude,
horizonal presenting/presencing and con- 115
crete lling, 252 the summation of In-Stancialities, 500
horizonality the transcendental in self-apperceptive
antecedence of, 11011 cladding, 489
modes of dimensional structure for human consciousness as the image of
appearing being, 199201 constituting agency, 229
non-spatial conditioning, 252 human I not effectuator of reduction, 99
re: null-state of non-presence, 267 human order, the concretization of con-
presencing and depresencing, 192n stitutive action, 361
pure horizonality makes being possi- human powers, division of, 332
ble, 276 human subject, self-realization of the
source not in constitution of human Absolute, 363
being, 23738 Hume, David, 74
horizon of horizons, delineation in terms Husserl, Edmund
of life, 348 access of being as forming of being,
horizon of the past and cashing in, 240 329
602 Index
Husserl (continued) difference with: living present as

acknowledgment of critiques, 330 origin of the world, 332
again a beginner, 24, 75 re: nature and spirit, 321
on America, 69 disappointment with Heidegger, 22
Amsterdam lectures, 11 23, 27, 37, 40, 483
analyses of passive synthesis, 197 editorial additions by assistants, 21
appreciation of Fink, 34, 4954, 69 emeritus lecturing annulled, right to,
appreciation of Fink: discussions, 292 59
assistant tasks: research, 258 emigration of his children, 59
Authors Preface to Ideas I. See Epi- emigration options, 59
logue/Preface to Ideas I Epilogue/Preface to Ideas I, 12, 24,
authorization of Fink, 51 564
awareness of challenge of MSS editing, life-philosophy in, 323
4450 on ever further inquiry, 375
on beginning again in the Cartesian evidencing at all levels, 303
Meditations, 482 feeling already egoic, 307
being basically object-being, 463 Fellow of the British Academy, 63n
Berlin, offer from, 4 eld-structures carried by the egoic liv-
bronchitis, 29 ing present, 307
Cartesian Meditations, new MSS for Fink on Husserls tenacious question-
revision of, 54849n ing, 75
chair following Rickert, 3 Finks dissertation mentor and Refer-
character of his lecturing, 74 ent, 18, 92
character of his MSS, 74 Finks eulogy, 70
cognitive antecedence and ontological on Finks freedom in time-book proj-
antecedence, 150. See also ordo ect, 4950, 291
essendi and ordo cognoscendi Finks Kant-Studien essay
convergence with Ebbinghaus on Kant, rereadings, 60
203 approval of, 4546, 330
convert to Protestantism, 37n rst published time-analyses (1928),
and cophilosophizing, 483 226, 260
on cophilosophizing: Fink and Heideg- edited text of kept locked away,
ger, 5354 55960
critique of Cartesian approach, 106 Formal and Transcendental Logic,
critique of Fink, tentative, 580 composition of, 14
death of, 68, 211, 522 grasp of Finks positions, 54, 108, 367,
description of, 5 441, 553, 56970
differences with Fink: awareness of golden anniversary of doctorate, 37
them, 19091, 294 Hegels thought, could not grasp, 403
difculty of systematic presentation, Heidegger, rereading (1929), 2223
34 on his isolation, 551
dilemma of new projects in 1931, 32 his philosophy deemed obsolete in
33 1946, 52829
and Dilthey, 31921 International Congress, Paris, 62
Index 603
International Congress, Prague (1934), Prague lectures, 58, 61, 292, 317, 318
5659, 311, 335 published writings propaedeutic, 97,
on his Jewish status, 39 176
Japan, possible emigration to, 549 and racial laws, 3738, 59
last months, 6870 real thesis on being, 151, 156, 176, 385
last phenomenology as monologue and recast by Fink, 427
dialogue, 511, 518 speculatively reinterpreted, 411n
lectures on empathy (1928), 14, 76, recuperation in Rapallo, 61
496 on the reduction of the idea of being,
letters to Fink, 289, 290 385
lifes work in his MSS, 35, 4950 relativity of the phenomenal for us,
manner of composing, 14, 2021, 34, 313n
61n removed from university list, 59, 317
manuscripts, Husserls residential move (1937), 63
archive discussions (1934), 56 retirement situation, 10
his description, 34 seventieth birthday Festschrift, 1920
inquiry in open and uid, 581 Sixth Cartesian Meditation, readings
rescued from Prague, 4950, 522n of, 36, 294, 322n, 476
and system-based interpretation, soul-baring to Albrecht, 3334
259, 440 subject-object schema, primacy of, 307
transferred to Louvain, 71 in Strasbourg, 19
medal from French Academy (1933), 38 tendency to philosophy of reection.
Misch, reaction to, 20, 2627, 549 See philosophy of reection: Hus-
mission in life, 20 serls tendency to
more radical than Heidegger. See Fink: time-analysis
Husserls approach more radical three stages in, 226
than Heideggers rejection of intentional sense-neutral
my being as entemporalizing- matter schema, 228
entemporalized life-stream, 315 turn away from Cartesian approach in
Nachlass entrusted to Fink, 49, 51 practice, 21814
and Nazi salute, 5859 use of tobacco, 68
new systematic presentation, 27 Vienna lecture (1935), 58, 292, 533
his own plan for, 28, 180 working holidays
occasional expressions, 392 Chiavari, 28, 181, 271, 275
offer from UCLA, 42 Kappel, 49
paradox: his strength cause of his lim- Tremezzo, 21
itation, 303 Schluchsee, 40
Paris lectures, 11, 17, 19, 483 Husserl, Edmund, and Fink
Paris lectures revised. See Cartesian this book on, xivxv, xviii, 2, 89, 127
Meditations dialogue and solitude, 51819
passive phenomena (sensuousness, Husserl, Edmund, and Heidegger
feeling, wakefulness), 565 agreements, 137
philosophical institute at Pontigny, 63 differences, 128, 13132, 137, 144,
pleurisy, 61, 63, 68 154
604 Index
Husserl and Heidegger (continued) not in being, 263n

on Encyclopaedia Britannica article, ontological unattainability of, 118,
405 133
Husserl, Gerhart, 59, 530, 533 as opening step, and relativized, 499
Husserl, Malvine origin or result, 285
emigration, 71, 522 phenomenologizing, escapes from and
on Fink, 5253, 70 appears in world-time, 207n
in Husserls last months, 68 and pole-structure, 285
Husserl, Wolfgang, 38 pure, harmlessness of, 139 (see also
Husserl Rosenberg, Elisabeth absolute subject: harmless idea)
conversation with Fink on Husserls as reecting exponent, 514
last days, 59 of temporality: I am doing, 264
recollections, 69 as wakefulness, 196, 296, 3046
hyletic elds, 415 the I-am, a fact-enactment task (Tat-
handlung), 160
the I the I can
abstract and concrete, 297n of act-intentionality: non-constituting,
ambiguity of re: the epoch, 120 279
apodicticity of in human experience, and identity, 470
435 horizonality and, 191
can be an empty concept, 160 ideality
critique of, by being radicalized, 114 as empty pure form, 469
18, 513 an example of speculative reinterpreta-
de-egoizing (Ent-Ichung): not by dis- tion, 47576
solving but by radicalizing, 305n, fantasy, 474
438, 51314 and identity, 46870
doubleness in C-MSS: originative of need for reconsideration, 469
and in time, 297302 not as identity in repetition, 469
doubleness of, Husserls attempt to as objectness, questionable, 472
resolve the paradox, 29899 as possibility, 47275
exemplum crucis for ontological phi- temporal character of: omnitemporal-
losophy, 336 ity, 47172
focus on, and act-intentionality, 179 idealism
formally and concretely considered, epistemological, criticized, 465
28587 in meontic integration meontically
In-Stancial, and original time, 246, reversed, 4045
391, 506 phenomenological: meontic meaning
and In-Stancial integrality, 248 of, 329, 366
language of, dangerous, 38283 Idea of being
as not-in-time, 118, 207n, 24647, reduction of, 151n, 163n, 385, 479
26465 transcending to originative process,
only possible in time, 239 47980
of original temporalization, 26365, Ideas I, 7, 12, 23, 79, 188, 192, 235, 427,
3028 557
Index 605
conducted in natural attitude 175 Cartesian Meditations and Finks

critique of standpoint in, 1012, 111 Kant-Studien essay, 55
English translation, 1112, 24 on Husserls lecturing, 74
as initiating stage of phenomenology, on Husserls prot from discussion
97, 18586 with assistants, 228n
object-intentionality as initial orienta- news of Husserls nal illness, 68
tion, 80, 18889 innate ideas, 328
on origin-level consciousness, 125 inner experience not thematic but perfor-
prospects for revision of, 12 mance experience, 124, 358, 512
temporality, 8990, 262 In-Stance and In-Stances
world, 192, 219 and absolution: the falling away of
Ideas II, and living/lived body, 501, 508 ground, 251
identity. See also ideality: and identity and cognitive givenness, 500
constituted in temporality, not by in concomitant play, 505
object-aiming, 470 lling, 41314
character relative to different regions nal integration-stage of phenomenol-
of being, 470 ogy, 24344
ontic and constituted, 440 and Heideggers existentials, 249
identity and difference as horizonal structures, 504
between mundane and transcendental I included, 506
subjectivity, 22123, 323, 434 Integral, 43233
between the Absolute and human integrated structural whole, 24748,
being, 364 5057
in the Crisis-writings, 36970, 434 limit-structures re: nitude, 248
intersubjectivity and transcendental and materiality, 50810
constitution: the issues, 51516 meaning of, 244, 250
resolved in speculative meontic inter- meontic character explicit, 41213
pretation, 43637 in meontic interpretation, summary,
identity of being and nothing: speculative- 41112, 5023
meontic identity, 407 modes of the self-constitution of abso-
illusion. See transcendental seeming/ lute subjectivity, 287, 462, 594
semblance/illusion ontic-meontic doubleness explicitly
immanence and transcendence, 497 grasped, 396
on the ground of wakefulness, 195 pathically shared dimensions, 507
ultimately not epistemological, 179 positively eidetic, and meontic, 41214
Immisch, Klara, 70 and retro-application in regressive
immortality, 439 investigation, 500
Inbegriff, translation of, 211n, 220 retro-application transcendentally
indication. See also formal indication charged, 244
as indexical, 392 summary, 500
as within the realm of constitutive temporalization as actual life, 246
resultants, 392 ways of stationing within time, 503
Ingarden, Roman, 1415, 259, 420, Instndigkeit, in Fink and Heidegger,
482 57172
606 Index
integration in phenomenology 17273 as-if philosophy, 393

intelligibility, ultimate: dialectic of the and awareness of space and time,
conceptual and transconceptual, 2067
368, 381, 383 beyond the supersensible, 384n
intentional experience a modication of and captivation in the world, 188
time-intentions, 239 and concept of life, 335
intentionality. See also subject-object on conditioning and the conditioned,
correlation; subject-object 168
intentionality construction, 571
beyond immanence and transcendence, cosmological horizon for the idea of
466 being, 176
in internal and external analyses, 435 critique of the possibility of knowing
more than subject-object correlation: the world, 204. See also Fink:
performance intentionality, 333 project on the world: importance
as object-oriented, 102, 10912 of Kant for
of temporality: anterior to and origina- Finks reading of, 3, 103n
tive of world, 342 on identity and unity, 47071
ultimately beyond subject-object and the meontic, 156, 158, 567
schema, 179 and the merely thinkable, 15657
wider than act-consciousness, 19495 as philosophy of reection, 149, 150,
internal and external treatment, 418, 540 325, 328
dened and illustrated, 458 play of life, 136, 340n
interrelation between reason and being, and topical reection, 325, 328
222. See also Crisis-writings, regression to the conditioning, 170n
deepest problem thinking nothing as something, 385
intersubjectivity, 441 worldliness of being, 204
and absolute temporality, 306 Kant and Husserl, convergence and dif-
in Cartesian Meditations: summary, ference re: world, 203
496 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
and cosubjectivity, 491 22, 129
in constitution, 441 reading by Fink, 148, 420
as In-Stancial, 458 katabasis/katbaoiw, 450, 577
monadic, polar, 441n descent, 51617
as ontication of the transcendental, in Hegel, 450
51617 Kaufmann, Felix, 55, 98, 213, 220
introduction for Morris in Freiburg,
Jaegerschmidt, Adelgundis, 70 578
Japanese philosophers in Freiburg read Sixth Meditation, 578
tutorial by Fink, 97, 129 review of Cartesian Meditations, 552
Jaspers, Karl, 325, 328 Kern, Iso, 510
Kierkegaard, Sren, 531
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 158, 311, 362 kinesthesia, 415, 506507, 510
antinomies and Finks interest, 83, temporality of, 292
2045 Kisiel, Theodore, 232n, 552, 555, 569
Index 607
knowing double character of, 47678

a relationship not to but in the world, in full meontic radicality, 48081
210 and horizonality, wakefulness, and per-
a movement driving forward, 345, 461 formance consciousness, 46667
knowing and being, 382. See also integrative bond of t on and lgow a
Crisis-writings: deepest speculative issue, 457
problem in joint internal analysis and external
bond of, an external, speculative ques- inquiry, 468
tion, 458 language and sense, problem of, 456
Koyr, Alexandre, 577 57
Kozak, J. B., 57 latent mode of that-which-is, 456
Kraus, Oskar 42 the natural attitude and pre-being, 477
Kuhn, Helmut not a mediating grid, 578
Finks draft reply to, 213, 220, 513n, and the question of the origin of
552 world-horizonality, 466
review of Cartesian Meditations, 220 and ontication 477
phenomenology coterminous with,
ladder of ascent, cannot be tossed aside, 453
387 in the protosituation, 555
Landgrebe, Ludwig, 23, 55, 187n, 259, reduction of, 479
26061, 547, 557 in regressive and speculative treat-
assistance on Crisis-writings, 215, ments, 467
431 in regressive inquiry, 454, 456
assistant to Husserl, 5, 9, 10 restricted construal, 453
conversations with Fink, 314, 350, in the Sixth Meditation, 47678
373, 524 (see also Fink: conversa- the standing-ready of, 455
tions with Landgrebe) in terms of objectness: ideality and
editing Experience and Judgment, 14, identity, 468
35, and Formal and Transcenden- words dangerous before transforma-
tal Logic, 226n tion of sense, 322
emigration to Belgium, 522 the language situation, 464
Habilitation, 10, 27, 42 latency, 567
inuence in phenomenology re: his- and being, 276
tory, 57475 lye bivaw, 519
last visit with Husserl, 69 Leib. See living/lived body,
ordering Husserls MSS with Fink, 57 Leibhaftigkeit (thereness-in-the-esh):
transcription of Husserls MSS, 77n, lledness in now-centrality, 268,
546 276
transcriptions of Husserls MSS in Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 254, 382n,
Prague, 522n 427
language concept of monad, 512
Adamic character, 566 and possibility, 473
antecedent grasp of being, 455, 464 Lon, Xavier, 19
as articulation of the speculative, 476 Liebert, Arthur, 61
608 Index
life reconceptualized without prioritizing,

concretely playing intentionality, 313 33438
creation of being, 377 life-philosophy, 2627, 319. See also
essence of under Fink: Kant-Studien essay:
performance, 33637 part II
play: beyond xing in nal essence, abstract and one-sided, 360
350 as against naturalism, 200
play of being, 314318 charge: phenomenology has no topos,
spirit, 33334 327, 359
world-creation, being-forming, 333 charges all fall away in phenomenol-
historical, thoroughly, 316 ogy as meontic, 365
immanent, limits and totality of, 487 and concept of life, 335
is spirit, 333 context for Husserls last phenomenol-
living temporality, 32122 ogy, 32324
meaning in phenomenology: issues, lesson of:
323 in emphasizing lifes dynamic char-
meontic denition of, 337 acter, 339
neither rational nor irrational, but main counteraction re: life, 331
pathic, 344 negative, 35556
ontological unattainability of, 337, more abstract and one-sided than phe-
361 nomenology, 34041
and question of identity and difference as philosophy of reection, 356
of the I, 368 unmovedness of spirit in the world, 343
operative concept, 322n life-world
the play of freedom, 316, 33738, 352 ambiguities of in Crisis-writings,
primordially transitive, 335 37071
prominence of theme, 31415 ambiguity: sum-total vs. horizonality,
reversal (peritrope) in inquiry, 361 218
spirit, 333 core of Crisis-writings, 21213
taking possession of itself, 314, 316, Finks doubts about, 44344
318, 34951, 357 and the idea of science, 213
term of natural attitude meaning, 322 infrequent in Finks notes, 371n
23 life-element generally unexamined,
as that in which world comes about, 320
372 phenomenology of incomplete, 218
See also transcendental life reception as pre-scientic being-in-the-
life and play as primal dynamism, 313, world, 320
46263 and scientism, 536
life and spirit living/lived body (Leib), 508
antinomy overcome in pathic world- the materiality factor, 50810
view, 344 more than an object, a subject, 501
reconceptualized via the reduction: and grasp of the Other, 501
temporal intentionality, 334, 336, living present (lebendige Gegenwart),
34348 226, 232, 262, 277, 315
Index 609
also: primordial present, 226, 263 selbst), 88, 89, 130, 159, 177,
in the Bernau MSS, 236n 389, 416
in the C-MSS, 235, 322 Meon, Me-on, mh-on, 157, 15859, 171,
the ultimate transcendental I, 295 384, 449
in Finks dissertation, 233 in a Husserl manuscript, 567
in Finks stage two time-study, 289 not as in Plato or Aristotle, 158
in Husserls Basic Problems of Logic, variously written, various meanings,
235 56869
life originative of the world, 332 the meontic, 107
and multiplicity of Is: a problem, beyond the ontological, 155
3056 continual theme in Finks work with
and spatiality, 307n Husserl, 367
living process, the life of self-reection, development of basic elements in phe-
358 nomenology, 367
living proto-source, not in time as living dialectic of ultimate intelligibility, 367
present, 297 68
Logical Investigations, 7, 45354, 458, distance from gnostic or Neoplatonic
468 exaggerations, 45051
logical objectness, empty: not dening of explicit only in Finks notes, 366,
sense-identity, 470 385
logic of failure 479, 384 in Finks 1934 essay and 1935 Kant-
of foundering, 384, 393 (see also Society paper, 366n
foundering) gained early by Fink, 157
integration across the caesura, 385 in Kant-Studien essay, part II, 366
logic of origin, 381 limits and transforms positive analysis,
lgow, 457, 459 363
lgow and on, question of mh and ou(k), 567
basis for investigation of sense, 469 methodology of Being-and-Nothing,
logos hamartikos, Lgow amrtikow, 384, 385
393 neither dualism nor monism, 45051
London School of Economics, 48, 550 not directly named in the Sixth Medi-
longitudinal intentionality, 232 tation, 385
and the In-Stances, 247 an outline, 377
the phenomenology of transcendental
Mahnke, Dietrich, 39, 319, 512 illusion, 36565
Masaryk, Toms, 59n philosophy a system sustained as foun-
materiality dering, 479
and constitutedness, 510 resolution of charges by life-
and horizonal factors, 415, 5089 philosophy, 365
in Husserls MSS, 572 shows Finks independence from both
need to reconsider as non-univocal, Husserl and Heidegger, 425
510n speculative nal inquiry, 175
in terms of living/lived body, 508 third solution for philosophy, 153
the matters themselves (die Sachen the ultimate level of interpretation, 377
610 Index
the meontic (continued) and the speculative, 541

and the via negativa, 450 Visible and Invisible, 541
meontic absolute metaphysica generalis, 427
the move into being, 38081 metaphysical existence, stateless, 520
the ontical inquired into before its metaphysical gaps in the cosmos, 359.
einai, 37879, 385 See also human being: metaphys-
meontic cosmogony methodologically ical gap in the cosmos
speculation, 481 metaphysical questions, Husserls charac-
meontic dialectical dynamic, 407 terization of, 419
meontic economy of intelligibility, 516 metaphysics
meontic epoch, 357, 380, 428 nal clarication of the world and
meontic integration, 93, 387, 404, 451 human being
meontic methodology, not fully in Finks plan for the new systematic
expressed in the Sixth Medita- presentation, 420
tion, 480 ontogonic, 172, 205
meontic origin: all ground falls away, but of philosophy: system theory, 37778
becoming already has happened, of play, 314, 318, 352
405 for Husserl: nal clarication of the
meontic phenomenology, sets spirit mov- world and human being, 420
ing, 200 of spirit, 335
meontic philosophy/philosophizing, 139 metaphysics in phenomenology, 25, 421
of absolute spirit, 205 22, 482n, 505
catastrophic, un-humanizing, unfor Fink: centered in the world as hori-
nihilating, 363 zonal, 425
delity to the world, 383 rst sketch by Fink, 423
meontic relationship: of origin and orig- line of thematic progression, 426
inatedness, 378 ontogonic, 427
meontic revolution, 156 second sketch by Fink, two versions
meontic truth: constitutive, not ontologi- for the Seventh Meditation, 424
cal truth, 333 summative characterization, 42127
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2, 510n, 551, two sketches by Fink, 421
553, 572 two sketches by Husserl, 421
at Brussels (1951), 542 methodologism, 540
and construction, 408 Metzger, Arnold, 73
convergence with Fink, 429n Misch, Georg, 319, 335
conversation with Fink, 525, 557 study of phenomenology and life-
and Finks work, 54142, 56667 philosophy (see also Husserl:
functioning (operative) intentionality, Misch, reaction to)
197 misinterpreting Husserl, 326
La Nature, 51011n, 541n and topical reection, 325, 327
Louvain visit (1939), 52542 Miyake, Goichi, 550, 570
Phenomenology of Perception, 54, 197 monadic individuality and eidetic insight,
prjug du monde, 557 51516
and Sixth Meditation, 55 monads, 439, 442
Index 611
monad-transcending unity, Husserl inde- negative: of contrariety and of inap-

cisive, 446n plicability, 362
moralism, Husserls, 353, 447 negative theology, 157
Mrchen, Herman: Nachschrift of Hei- NeoKantianism, 465
deggers SS 1928 lectures, 561 Marburg school, 157
Morris, Charles, 465 Neoplatonism, 177, 273, 517
discussion with Fink, 468 Neutralittsmodikation in Finks early
study in Vienna, visit to Freiburg, 578 work, 7
mortality and death, 83n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 314, 333, 362,
mundane-human concepts, necessity of 531
and their selection, 12324 and concept of life, 335
mundanity Finks reading of, 3, 67, 103n
as end product of constitution, 535 Finks reading of vs. Husserls, 352
overwhelming power of domination and play, 532
as a transcendental concept, 515n re: feeling for the world, 347
Munich and war, 71 re: phenomenology of life, 318
mysticism, 37783 re: topical reection, 325, 328
value and life, 356
naivet will to power, 344
and phenomenological investigation, 93 world-feeling as pathos of cosmology,
phenomenological re: constitution, 107 200
pre-reduction, 88 night, 199200, 372
transcendental, 76 nihil negativum, 567
the Nameless, 285 noematization, 91, 109, 122, 139, 195
a proto-stand, 283 96
in temporal analysis, 229, 264, 272 as formal designation of the reduction,
natural attitude. See also Eingestelltsein 551
constitutive result, 245 meaning of, 109n
Ideas I conducted in, 175 noesis-noema correlation and schema
paradox of as conditioning frame, 175 not for analyzing temporality, 23031
recasting by Fink, 18587 critique of in Finks dissertation, 7880
speculatively expressed: katabasis, needs delimitation, 159
ennitization, 577 schema at all levels, 8891
sum of self-apperceptions of transcen- shift beyond, 161
dental subjectivity: In-Stance, 245 non aliud, 157, 158
nature the not, radical, 362, 367, 56768
another kind of: the human face, 510 the Nothing
in Husserls MSS, 290, 572 advantage of positive terms for, 380
as independent from human power, to be experienced in the philosophical
572 question, 380, 384
phenomenology of, 509 the meontic meaning of, 379
Nature and Spirit, Husserls lectures SS not empty in dialectical conceptuality
1927, Nachschrift and notes by but living in the philosophical
Fink, 203, 316, 545, 550, 558 question, 397
612 Index
the Nothing (continued) ontological-transcendental and

thinking of as something, 385, 479 cosmological-transcendental cate-
Nouw, 448 gories and Ideas, 204
noumena in the negative sense, 156, 158 ontologism criticized, 46566
the now ontology
in Ideas I, 235 Heidegger: being in the frame of the
more than simply now, 231 world, 161
and the present, distinction from, 562 Heideggers ontology and meontology,
63 57374
Husserls conception of, as in Leibniz
on kat oumbebhkw, 158 and Wolff, 427
ontication, 391 Husserls more radical than Heideg-
with a bad conscience, 394, 479 gers, 161 (see also Fink: Husserls
at the same time meontication, 381, approach more radical)
400, 437 of knowledge 133
non-ontic productivity, 437 and meontic, unity of, 428
positing as in-the-world, 516n as a problem, 135
of primordial temporality, 300 as pregiven, 537
of the radical not, 363 of the subject: direct way to problem-
redetermined in the speculative, 358 atic of the meontic, 361
in the Sixth Meditation, 386 ontvw on, 158, 540
unnihilation, 4045 maximal being, 463
ontogonic metaphysics, 66, 172, 356, operative intentionality, 499. See also
359, 401 functioning intentionality in
inquiry into the origin of being, 42728 Merlau-Ponty; performance
ontogony, 17172 consciousness
and cosmogony, 410 ordo essendi and ordo cognoscendi, 101,
ontological difference 104, 32829, 441
and Dasein, 134 origin
and understanding of being, 142 as beyond givenness, 166
ontological experience, 525, 53941 and ground, 165, 17172
as a problem in both analysis and spec- logic of, and the meontic, 381
ulation, 464 as meontic, in terms of pre-being, 157
See also Fink: Writing project: Onto- not properly speaking a region, 170
logical Experience 71
ontological idealism, 150 and originatedness, a speculative ques-
ontological opacity, 11819 tion, 273
ontological philosophy, limits of (Fink), original time in the concretization of In-
428 Stances, 246, 391, 506
ontological projection, 54041 originatedness and ultimate meaningful-
philosophy as, 538 ness, 480
as speculative, 539 originating and originated, more than
ontological terms and the transcendental, non-proper representation: the
562 question of validity, 308
Index 613
origination the substance of life, 312

not psychological, 281 Pathos/pyow
otherness of, 241 meaning of, 343n
two levels of, 25455 not as opposed to reason, 345
ultimate, not temporal, sequence, 255 at once spirit and life, 346
originative process is only as its term, Patocka, Jan, 55, 57
41011, 432 on the Kantian shift in the Crisis-
originative temporality and writings, 430n
temporalization conversations with Fink (1934), 353
means originativeness of horizons, 287 Husserl noticing Fink, 5
life-that-is-not-in-time, 336 visit with Husserl (1934), 55, 57
originative time in reective thematiza- performance
tion: the problem, 270 meaning of: execution, 337
in pure a priori status, 146 and essence of life, 336
Otaka, Tomo, 48, 570 non-temporal, non-ontological, meon-
the Other, 257, 44849 tic, 337
as I, 489 performance community (Vollzugsge-
human or transcendental, 49091 meinschaft), 498
the meontic other also to itself, 449 performance consciousness
Ott, Dorothy, 48, 462, 519n antecedent to act-intentionality, 179
dissertation on evidence, 57778 the awareness of time, 357
nancial support for Fink, 578 non-thematic, non-act-intentional:
nancial support for Fink and Gerhart functioning intentionality, 197
Husserl, 550 in terms of pathically shared horizons,
Finks tutorial on Formal and Tran- 507
scendental Logic, 47778 and reection, 24748, 28387
tutorial with Fink on Aristotles Meta- and world-horizonality, 216
physics, 599 performance experience: gure for abso-
lute consciousness, 283
paradox performance intentionality
in Being and Time, 152 re: spirit and life, 333
logic of its intelligibility, 302 performance-understanding: a having,
in the Crisis-writings: subjectivity non-objectal knowing, 502
for and in the world, 322 peritrope (reversal) of lifes performance
parallelism between transcendental and of the world, 361
psychological subjectivities, 121 the person, emergent in the play of life
23 itself, 353
speculatively recast, 438 phenomenological analysis, always pas-
partial, 488 sage beyond the present, 304
Parmenides, taut noein ka einai, phenomenological idealism, meaning
335n recast in the meontic, 329,
Pascal, Blaise, 531 366
passion phenomenological immanence: not
the dynamism of spirit, 345 human immanence, 112
614 Index
phenomenological inquiry phenomenological-meontic integration:

as ontication of constitutive pro- reversal of disgurement, 387
cesses, 386 phenomenologizing in the guise of a
regressive in character, 146 human cognizer, 284
regressive inquiry into the concretely phenomenologizing I, theory and critique
given, 301 of, 98
phenomenological integration, reversal phenomenology
of disgurement, 38687 antecedent analysis plus the philo-
phenomenological knowing is meontic, sophic moment, 539
377 basic two-dimensional movement itself
phenomenological metaphysics. See inquired into, 532
metaphysics in phenomenology beginnings transformed, not rejected,
phenomenological method as ever- 536
renewed questioning, 397, 408. and cognitive science, 576
See also phenomenology: dynamic concrete investigation and critique of
of investigation; philosophy: fun- limitations, 53334
damental question ever-renewed; of consciousness: limits to intentional
the speculative question analysis of, 159
phenomenological onlooker, 100, 359. continuity and difference in, 533
See also transcendental onlooker contrast to Dilthey: focus on life-
not in world-time, 128 world, 31920
phenomenological philosopher: the critical-speculative drive, 12930, 151,
player of the world, 354 155
phenomenological philosophy as specula- critique and radical self-
tion, 44950 transformation, 535
Phenomenological Psychology, Hus- danger specic to phenomenology,
serls lectures on, 121 53536
phenomenological reason, theory and dialectic of ontication and meontica-
critique of, 76 tion, 365, 400
phenomenological reduction dynamic of investigation, of reques-
as access to functioning subjectivity, tioning, 93, 131, 135, 200, 467
46364 enspiriting of life and enlivening of
meontic annulment of world- spirit, 333
captivation, 404 full truth, 130
and ontological difference, 138, 141 governed ultimately by turn to the
42 world, not to immanence, 574
regress to origin, 171 hermeneutic, 84
summons character, 115 hermeneutical criticism of, 84, 139
and un-humanizing, 115, 13940 Husserl and Hegel: not psychological
phenomenological reection or ontological analytic, but
gives being-character to pre-being, inquiry into the Absolute, 403
386 and initial construals, 217
un-nihilates the Absolute-Nothing, integration in, 534
381 its countermove to itself, 536
Index 615
its topos: a metaphysical gap in the Phenomenology of Internal Time-

cosmos, 359 Consciousness. See Husserl: rst
no single truth can be absolutized, 535 published time-analyses
not deduction but regression: meta- phenomenology of life
phor of the boring site, 250 grasp of life by itself, 349
not deduction but reduction of the living temporality, 32122
world, 400 and temporality: the living present
ontogonic metaphysics, 356 prior to the world, 33132
open system, 87 Phenomenology of Spirit. See Hegel: Phe-
pathos of: the passion of thinking, nomenology of Spirit
34346 phenomenon: the demonstrable, 144
philosophy of the absolute subject, philosopher
531 caricature of: the good disciple, 352
as philosophy re: ontology, 129 player of the world, 354
radical philosophy of life, 34849 transcendental functionary, 423
the rigorous striving of the concept by philosophy, philosophizing
Husserl, 129 absolute, nitely beginning, 375
science of its own distinctive kind, 182, of the Absolute, un-nihilating, 363
351, 53637 catastrophic, excess, un-humanizing,
and the single philosopher, 89, 130, 363
534 development by speculative projec-
and speculation: needing concrete tions, 45960
analyses, 464 done in partnership in endless prog-
speculative integration of being and ress, 482
truth, 402 eo ipso theology, 445
the system of life, 313 essence of, 540
a system without completeness and essentially living in enthusiasm, 462
closure, 408 essentially untimely, 353
systematic treatment, 24, 49, 87 of existence
the dynamic, 32, 8789, 12627, as against naturalism, 200
159, 177 in Finks Kant-Studien essay, 324
theoretical assertion plus methodologi- experimental metaphysics, 67
cal critique, 360 as foundering and ever-questioning, 408
theory of the appearance of the Abso- fundamental question ever renewed,
lute, 407 135, 458
theory and critique of, 77 home-seeking, home-coming, 353, 520
transformed from Kantian to Carte- of identity, 133
sian approach, 430, 574 learning of the creative power of life,
transformed in its systematic achieve- 356
ment, 376 lifes taking possession of itself, 314,
unity of ontology and meontic, 428, 316, 318, 349, 354, 520
573 living experimentally, 354
world-inherent transcendental inquiry, neither analytic nor speculative exclu-
210 sively, 457
616 Index
philosophy, philosophizing (continued) positivism, 465

non-compliance with the established possibility
order, 350 distinct from, not opposite to, actu-
not a career but a revolution by life, ality, 473
350 fourth/fth horizon of temporality,
as open endeavor, 521 280, 472 (see also time: fourth
a passion, 312 dimension)
passion to know the world, 174 the horizon of omnitemporality: fan-
the play of freedom, 352, 317 tasy, 473
questioning, 355 main problems of, 475
source in the passion of thinking, 346 mode of temporalization: deactualiza-
status as ontology preliminary, 155 tion 254n
surmounting the world, 165 as pertaining to the world, 474
taking oneself down to the ground, 349 phenomenology of, 473
un-nihilating the Absolute, 129 relation to the actual, 473
ways to start: ontology or theory of in temporality and in human experi-
knowledge, 132, 336 ence, 27475n
philosophy of reection, 325, 341, 356 possibility, fantasy, and ideality: main
critique by Fink, 67, 104, 32729 problems, 474
delineation by Fink after Hegel, 328 powerlessness (Ohnmacht), 404, 57071
and God, 44547 fainting, 509, 570
Husserls tendency to, 318, 327, 341 and In-Stances, 509
42, 468, 516 and the reduction, 509
means, not goal in Husserls phenome- pregivenness
nology, 153 encompassing both subject and object,
overcoming in phenomenology, 329 214
30 Fact neither contingent nor necessary,
Prague lectures and, 318 and Singular neither individual
superseded in the meontic, 366 nor multiple, 42930
play, 313, 402 three kinds, 429
and enthusiasm, 46263 pregivenness of the world. See also
the essence of life, 520 world, pregivenness of
metaphysical concept central to Nietz- culmination of the meontic, 38485
sche, 532 issue of privilege, 180
metaphysics of, 67, 314, 318 living-present pregivenness, 296
methodological and investigational in meontic phenomenology, 366
grounds for, 532 as starting point, 106
pure performance of life, selfin transcendental, not human con-
performance, 337 sciousness, 219
and temporalization, 136 precludes the world being imagined as
play of life, Kant and Heidegger, 136 non-existent, 219
Plotinus, 158n, 44849, 577 and presubjection of subjectivity 341
poetry, 532 pregivenness of world-time, captivation
Pos, Hendrik, 625 in, 215
Index 617
presence and presentness primordial temporalization

distinction between, 272 the depresentializing and de-egoizing
modes of world-time, 210 of, 305
value in the world, not of it, 194 and the stream of the collective
the present appearances of the world, 296
a eld-horizonality of its own, 277 principium individuationis: transcenden-
as living passage, 235 tal, 11617
not itself in time, 236 Principle of All Principles, 153, 162, 320,
remembrance of, 278 539
the temporal lling of actuality, 253 progressive phenomenology, 167, 172,
presentialism 517
core of act-intentionality, 303 further directions via C- and D-MSS,
Finks critique of Husserls, 255, 3034 572
Husserls, 102, 112, 288, 496 and genesis, 187
of the living present, 30910 in the Sixth Meditation: speculative
primacy of the present, 303 interpretation, 416
and the principle of evidentness, 303 speculative inquiry into origination,
presentication (Vergegenwrtigung), 93, 41516
132n, 231 projection, 16266, 408, 418
Presentication and Image (Finks dis- and signitive intention, 164
sertation). See also Fink: See also systematic projections
dissertation protentionality, 274
Parts 1 and 2, 1819 protentions and retentions in the now,
original title, 81n, 547 232
Part 2: question of un-humanization, protest by transcendental meaning
115 against natural sense in language,
Part 2: temporality, 234 477. See also concepts: meontic:
outline, 66 protesting
presenting/presencing (Gegenwr- proto-association, 415
tigung), 231, 23536, 560 proto-drives, 415
conditioned by depresenting/depres- proto-impression, 89
encing, 239 proto-intentionality, 240, 391, 415, 426,
differentiation of meaning, 272n, 581
560 proto-I of temporality, 26465, 283,
present-perfectness (Perfektivitt) 295302
of transcendental constitutive achieve- and monadic I, 440
ment, 417, 563 not gained by abstraction, 297n, 315
and the horizonal, 444n ontied, 300
presuppositions, to be transformed, not proto-life/proto-temporalization/proto-
simply removed, 305 spirit, 296, 338
primordial impression, not a temporal protomodality
atom, 232 in Cartesian Meditations: summary,
primordiality, reached by progression 49596
through stages of ontication, 516 and concreteness in being, 493
618 Index
protomodality (continued) racial laws, 3738, 59

and generative reference, 494 radical reection: not drawn to a goal,
horizons of absence in, 492 but driven by a dynamic, 461
and monodalogical intersubjectivity: Rapallo, 61
modications, 492 reciprocalness
and the normal and abnormal, 494 of ontication and meontication,
provisional rst phase of analysis, 38081, 383n
488 in Sixth Meditation, 381n
restrictiveness methodologically nec- reduction. See also phenomenological
essary, 49798 reduction
proto-noematization, 91 and the animal, 494
proto-relationship: applies to both subject and object, 216
Hegel: the absolute only as being- caesura in the history of metaphysics,
other, 404 205, 384, 531
origin and the originated, speculative, catastrophe of existence, 115, 325
403 central to critique of charges against
proto-stand (Urstand), 264, 283, 287 phenomenology, 331
proto-stream as set into time, as and freedom, 131n
enworlded and entemporalized, and the Idea of being, 163n, 385, 479
3012 of language: Husserl and Fink, 479
proto-temporalization (Urzeitigung) in terms of Nietzschean drive, 34344
the coming-about of temporality, 379, no stage of can be absolutized, 439
390 phenomenology speculative as the the-
paradox of analyzing, 29394 ory of, 408n
telos: actualization of the world, 391 radicality of, 107
the psychological radicalization of, 110
ambiguous parallel to the transcenden- result of: solitude, 51112
tal, 12023 thematization of the Absolute beyond
turns into transcendental phenomenol- being, 151
ogy, 369, 422 and un-humanizing, 13940
Cuxh, 448 un-naturalizing of spirit, 101
punctualism 303, 562 unnaturalness of, 9596
pure consciousness reductive relations, principle of the non-
and living human being: beginning and reversibility of, 440
ending, 248 reection
not an ontological region, 158 alternative characterization, 124
catastrophic thinking, 381
questioning and answering, maintaining cognition of the temporal in experien-
not lling a gap, 461 tial lling, 241
question of being expression mode of performance expe-
in critical-speculative philosophy, 130 rience, 282, 502, 512, 566
in Heideggers lectures, 131 founders as reective seeming, 36364
in transcendental phenomenology, 92 intensication mode of performance-
93, 11314 consciousness, 124n, 258, 512
Index 619
lifes taking possession of itself, 573 Rickert, Heinrich, 3

(see also philosophy, philosophiz- Ricoeur, Paul, 176, 455n
ing: lifes taking possession of Riemensperger, Alfred, 48n, 579
itself) Rilke, Rainer Maria, 224, 375, 452, 522,
modeled after subject-object percep- 524, 568
tion (Husserl), 282 Ritter, Georg, 70
problem of being done in time, 270 rizvmata pntvn, 304
speculatively expressed: ekbasis, 577 and the meontic, 385, 450
temporalization, paradox of reective Robbins, Lionel, 550
turn to in C-MSS, 296 Rockefeller Foundation, 4142
regression to origins in ones conscious roles in life, 350
life: the In-Stance, 244 Ropohl, Heinz, 9
regressive analysis
anchored in the constitutively origi- Sawicki, Marianne, 490n
nated, 3078 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 67
and egoity: methodological critique, Schluchsee, recovery, 40
51314 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3
only one moment of phenomenologys Schutz (Schtz), Alfred, 55, 98, 213, 220,
work, 538 291n, 486n
protomodal phase provisional, 488 review of Cartesian Meditations, 522
regressive disclosure: three stages of, 243 sciences of nature and sciences of spirit,
regressive inquiry (reduction): catastro- 338, 531
phe of human existence, 361 scientism overcome in phenomenological
regressive phenomenology, 517 thinking, 53132, 53637
from concrete being to the horizonal, seeming/semblance/illusion. See tran-
415 scendental seeming/semblance/
of the intentionality effecting the illusion
meaning: being, 373 Seinssinn, translation of, 568
as transcendental theory of elements, self-conceptions
111 as constitutive problem, 11314
Reichstag re, 37 constitution of, 139
remembering or expecting, primary and critique of, 93, 11214
secondary, 232 and time-analysis, 263
remembrance of the present, 278 transcendental critique, 11719
repetition, access to, not constitution of self-critique
the identical-ideal, 470 in Cartesian Meditations, 78
residuum, phenomenological, 97 in Formal and Transcendental Logic,
Husserls caution against, 94 78
retentionality, 274 in phenomenology, 7778, 86, 93, 130
retro-application, 146, 16970, 379 in phenomenology: Heidegger, 8586
and levels of origination, 255 of phenomenologys guiding concep-
malum necessarium, 170 tions, 93, 476
in reective analysis of temporaliza- self-reection
tion, 241 of life, radically reconceived, 35859
620 Index
self-reection (continued) protesting concepts, 39394

as living process that cannot be pres- reduction of idea of being, 151
entially grasped, 358 and reduction radicalized, 144
as a modal dimension of living opera- relevance to C-MSS, 300
tion, 412 import for rereading the Cartesian
in world-time, 18283, 582 Meditations, 484, 490n
sensation, kinesthetic, 5067 transcendental exponent, 514
sense on transcendental theory of elements,
becomes transcendental by inner 111
change, 479 and Viennese colleagues, 55
the concreteness of the appearing of within and beyond the tradition of
things, 456 Husserls thinking, 533
not in terms of distinction between per- sleep, 116, 509
ception and understanding, 579 closure to the world, 195, 281
not in terms of universal and instance, not as a pause in constitution, 196
469 solitude/solitariness (Einsamkeit)
an order of heterogeneous phenomena, meanings of Einsamkeit, 511n
468 methodological retreat disclosing
treated in philosophy of reection, 468 openness, 513
sense-powers and world-openness, 579 not the original state, 513
seriousness, 462 by the reduction, 51112
Seventh [Cartesian] Meditation, 505 and stationing in the whole of things,
two versions, 424 51920
signitive intention and projection, 164 space, symbol of absolute co-existence,
silence, 199, 200, 217 306
singularity, 42, 396 spatiality
situation eld-intentionality of the present, 277
Finks understanding of, 18485 and lling, 253
in phenomenology, 76 fourth dimension of time, 277
of the world, 183 as surround/circumstance, 199, 208
Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 36, 377 as extension, 200
clarication of reduction, 99100 speculation, 457
and construction, 165 anchoring to the intuitionally
critique of self-conceptions, 117 exhibited, 400
critique of subject-object correlation, and continuing the tradition of Hus-
102 serls thinking, 533
formal character of statements, 127 establishing legitimacy in phenomenol-
for Habilitation, 36, 106, 201, 527 ogy, 399403
as Husserl-Fink dialogue, 511 as exceeding, 17172
Husserls rereadings of. See Husserl: general characterization, 458
Sixth Cartesian Meditation, in Husserls work, correctly taken,
readings of 399400
and ontogony, 411 as integrative: language, sense, and ide-
progressive phenomenology, 416 ality, 475
Index 621
restored to meaningful role in phenom- in the world, incompleteness of, 153

enology, 481 spirituality and materiality: both clues to
sense of as not reecting, 481 the transcendental, 510
sphere of intelligibility and truth in stages and levels in phenomenological
phenomenology, 476 analysis, 77, 86, 87n, 88, 103,
in time-analysis, 272 108, 111, 122, 127, 17778, 243,
within phenomenological integration, 259, 26869, 37677, 451
481 individual and community, 516
the speculative principle of integrative non-conict,
as meontic interpretive integration, 440
398 state, 350
in phenomenology, 66 Stein, Edith, 258n, 259, 288, 550
in systematic treatment, 15354 editing Husserls rst time-analyses
two opposing conceptions, 4023 (1928), 1415, 65, 232
speculative deduction, precluded, 440 transcription of Husserls MSS, 546
the speculative fact, 15354 work on time-analysis MSS, 260
speculative formulations: abbreviations Stieler, Georg and Martina, 70
of analyses, 466 Stieler, Martina, on Husserls death, 70
the speculative problem, dened, 45758 subject
speculative projections, as guiding ana- metaphysical gap in the cosmos, 341
lytic work, 45960, 46566. See (see also human being: metaphys-
also systematic projections ical gap in the cosmos)
speculative proto-relationship, 399, 403 ontological unattainability of, 153,
the speculative question 361
speech, 455 priority of cognitive accessibility, 328
and development in philosophy, 459 subjectivity
60 constitution of as individual I: re-
maintains questioning, 461 interpreted meontically, 414
spirit the enigma of, 222
absolute life, 4078 essence of is nothing subjective, 160
as designation for the ultimate, 311 living and concrete, the enworlded
for Hegel, 450 proto-I, 3012
immobility of, 200, 343 meontically, no power over constituted
incompleteness of, 34142 being, 404
not adequately treated by Heidegger, mundane and transcendental: distin-
34041 guishable in terms of en-nitizing,
ontologically unattainable, 361 436
as passion, a power of existence, 310 only a preliminary term for originative
reconceptualized, 333, 338 (see also process, 281
life and spirit) ontological opacity of, 365
two main directions, 335 subject-object correlation (schema)
in terms of pathos, 34248 in Crisis-writings, 216, 431n
self-realization of, in self-reection, critique of, 97, 1024, 105, 10912
34344 equivocation of in Ideas I, 1035
622 Index
subject-object correlation (continued) and resistance, 351

and Heideggers critique of Husserl, temporal dynamic: as excessive, 279
13839 temporal lledness with the world, 315.
initial in investigation, 139 See also lling
intra-worldly, 102 temporal horizonality
ontic character of, 100 and cashing in, 236
second-level problem, 103 depresenting/depresencing, 23233
underdetermination, 1024, 109 not sense-intentionality but latency,
world-inherent structure, 210 233
subject-object intentionality temporality (Zeitlichkeit). See also orig-
rst-stage phenomenology, 19798 inative temporality and
an initial determination (Fink), 238 temporalization
oumfilosofein, 53. See also Husserl: and as conscious: problematic of its anal-
cophilosophizing ysis, 26970
surround/circumstance, 229 as constituting precludes being con-
instances of: distance, closeness, stituted, 118
silence, night, day, 199 and constitutive origins, 88
syntax, 456 differentiation of temporalities, 305
system embraces immanence and transcen-
the architectonic of levels of truth, 377 dence, 230
basics of Husserlian, 87, 165, 37677 essence of human being, 90
systematic critique: summary of factors, as experienced time and as primordial
53435, 55354 constituting, 230
systematic projections, 8788, 15354, in Finks dissertation, 7981
162, 165, 177, 205, 271, 49596 formal structure of, and depresent-
as anticipations, 53637 ing/depresencing plus In-Stancial
anticipations to be revised, 534, 537 lling, 247
38 form for content in the ow, 266, 285
as exceeding, 172 as longing, 313
as ontological, 53738 (see also onto- nearly absent in Crisis-writings,
logical projection) 292n
as speculative element, 154 noetic and noematic, 559
system-conscious interpretation, 457. See non-spatial ow, 252, 255
also Fink: Bernau MSS: systematic not analyzed in Cartesian Meditations,
treatment; Fink: systematic grasp; 487
phenomenology: systematic not constituted by noetic acts, 277
treatment paradox in treatment of, 14548
in phenomenological self-critique, 109
Tanabe, Hashime, 550 pregiven context for Cartesian Medi-
teleology tations, 487
of constitution, 422, 433, 461, 573 principle of individuation, 6, 253, 547
God and, 419, 444 swing of, 238 (see also time-swinging)
moralistic, 353, 447 thematized as In-Stanciality, a basic
of reason, 444 move, 498
Index 623
temporality and spatiality, comprehensive dimensions of temporalization is

horizonality of the pregiven world, 251 context-relative in the notes.)
temporalization (Zeitigung). See also ontication of, 157, 177
originative temporality and phenomenology of: to be done in con-
temporalization crete investigation, 225
cannot show in temporally condi- world-time an unbounded continuum,
tioned presence, 35758 209
different constitutions for the ideal and time-analysis
the real, 471 foundering, 310
entemporalized 298 problematic of beginning, 29394
ve-fold and swinging, speculative, and the question of being and experi-
416n ence, 281
inquiry into approaches the non- a reversal, 224, 309
ground abyss (Abgrund), 379 and speculation, 272
a non-event, non-action, non- summary schema, 274
performance, 241 time and space llability, 253
original unity of, 275 integratively taken, 27778
humanly experienced: starting point, Time and Temporalization: Finks
not the nal goal of investigation, stage two time-book. See Fink:
241 time-study, stage two book
proper level of transcendental activity, Time and Time-Constitution: Finks
111 stage three time-book, 289, 293,
re: spirit and life, self-performance, 3089
336 begins with world-time, against tran-
thematic reection on, a retro- scendentalism, 309
application, 241 destroyed by Fink, 310, 563
with or without the I, 248 little of Husserls MSS, 309
terminus ad quem, the transcendental a reversal in approach, 309
now, 487 time-consciousness
terminus a quo, the human now, 487 beginning and end of stream, 8283,
theogony, 129 488
yevrein, as passion, 377n ow-structure determinative, 22830
thesis on being and world. See Husserl: inner, meaning of term, 28182
real thesis on being problem of the conditioning and the
three egos in Finks Kant-Studien essay, conditioned, 22930
359, 567 time-constitution I-less, 239
t t on, 458n time-constitutive intentionality, a charac-
time. See also original time in the concre- ter given ultimate ow by reec-
tization of In-Stances tion, 298
experienced temporal ow nite, 209 time-ow
fth dimension, possibility, 280, 556 diagramming, 268
fourth dimension: possibility, 472 not in time, 266
fourth dimension, spatiality, 277 (NB: time-horizons: in the all-at-once coming
the numbering of these other about of temporal structure, 237
624 Index
time-intentions, primacy of, 110 trenchancy of, 161

timelessness the whole function of which is to con-
is omnitemporality, 47 stitute, 503
of ideal objects 254 transcendental and world orders, differ-
time-modality and time-horizon distinc- ence between, 1045
tion, 56263 transcendental being, ultimately not a
time-swinging, 208, 274, 27880, 307, kind of being, 362, 385
347, 504 the transcendental constituting absolute,
as depresenting/depresencings, 253 in post-preliminary phenomenol-
lling and stopping by the ontical, 253, ogy, 249
276 transcendental experience as deeply
forming the world horizonally, 37273 human reective experience, 519
and the meontic absolute, 386 transcendental explication
metaphorical, 276 the logic of not speculative deductive,
and possibility, fantasy, and eidos, 475 440
suitability as a term, 256 inadequacy of, 478
and world-origin, 252 transcendental exponent (expositor), 514
einai, 556n
t t hn transcendental horizon, 504
interpreted in terms of pre-being, 157 transcendental I
t on and lgow, integrative bond of, and the being of: investigation in the
the question of truth, 457, 459 C-MSS, 29599
topical reection, and philosophy of the being of: contention on between
reection, 325, 327 Husserl and Heidegger, 133
topology in 1930s, 327 exemplum crucis of ontological philos-
topos ophy, 118, 133
questioning of, an external inquiry, transcendental intersubjectivity
460 community in living rather than in cog-
for reection: life, 327 nition, 515
hyperouranios, 327 merely possible, or evidentially
vs. utopic, 460 shown?, 480
totality and totalities horizon of, 504
certain totalities elude being presented, transcendental life
164 and analogy, 116
in phenomenology, 81, 8283, 87, 88, condition of possibility for contingent
178 and necessary being, 424
in terms of presents, 303 true concreteness, 360
Tran-Duc-Thao, 55, 551 transcendental monadic community, 424
transcendence (Heidegger), 3334, 141, transcendental onlooker, better: tran-
161 scendental witness, 358, 37778.
the transcendental See also phenomenological
analogization, 477 onlooker
doubling of the psychological, 123 transcendental origination and ontica-
reached not in one leap but in stages, tion in determinacy, 412
11920 transcendental phenomenology, works in
Index 625
conceptual meaning and lan- I-intentionality, 239

guage, 376 and the In-Stances, 247
transcendental reection truth as disclosure: a speculative prob-
variant of wakeful I, 299 lem, not an answer, 459
and the transcendentally reected
upon 28387 ultimate intelligibility: dialectic of the
transcendentals, in medieval philosophy conceptual and the trans-
402 conceptual, 368
transcendental seeming/semblance/illu- ultimate of origins: prior to temporality,
sion (Schein), 123, 147, 170, 390 world, and being, 119
91 underdetermination
and the speculative, 399 of subject-object correlation, 102, 105,
to be nullied, 363 109
phenomenology of: knowing the sem- of the I, 118
blance, 36364 understanding in phenomenology: link-
always in the right, 436 ing the conception to the experi-
transcendental spontaneity, 143 ential, 380
transcendental subjectivity understanding (Verstehen) in life-
accession to, problem of, 409 philosophy: focuses on part of life,
concrete and absolute, 301 signicance, 338
determined in its being by depresent- the undone, in Husserls phenomenology,
ing/depresencing, 242 53940
givenness of, 117 un-humanizing
harmless act-center, 161 (see also abso- as absolutive, 437
lute subject: harmless idea; the I: constant in Finks concerns, 115
pure, harmlessness of) extent of, 95
identity and difference with mundane how possible, 115, 20910
subjectivity, 102, 283, 515 (see and the question of being, 114
also parallelism between transcen- in the reduction, 100, 10910, 361
dental and psychological thinking as, 363
subjectivities) undoing being set up in the world, 361
living entemporalized, 424 un-nihilation/un-nothing-ing
ontication, 514 concepts, 479
worldlessness of, 249 interpreted, 573
Transcendental Theory of Method, 36. origination, 405
See also Sixth Cartesian Usui, Jisho, 570
Meditation
the transnite, 158, 227n Vaihinger, Hans, 393
transverse and longitudinal intentionality values products of, not properties of life,
and gradation in lling, 272 35253
and horizonal function, 284 Van Breda, Herman Leo, 551
spatialization of the interplay of pres- conversations with Fink, 372, 52425
ence and non-presence, 272 on Finks views of his Kant-Studien
transverse intentionality essay, 551
626 Index
Van Breda (continued) passivity also, 565

on Sixth Meditation, 553 pre-egoic openness to the horizonal,
transfer of Husserls MSS to Louvain, 305
522 more than an existential, 195
visit to Freiburg (1938), 71 non-I-polar, 28586
van Kerckhoven, Guy, 64n, openness-to-the-world, 195, 281
reason for Finks not nishing his Car- and plurality of Is, 306
tesian Meditations revisions, totality concept of existentiality, 145
486n Windelband, Wilhelm, 3
venia legendi, 528 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 104n
Vergegenwrtigungen, translation of, Wolff, Christian, 427
231, 232n. See also Presentica- wonder and questioning, 34748, 460,
tion and Image 519
via negativa (via negationis), 377, 383, world
386, 448, 450 absolute phenomenon, 442
VI. Cartesianische Meditation. See Sixth absolute surface, 436
Cartesian Meditation antecedent to contingency and num-
import of edition for rereading Carte- ber, 42930
sian Meditations, 486n a priori projection, 14344
Vienna Circle, 465 Ariadne thread, 181
von Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm, on avoidance of the paradox in constitu-
Finks lost texts, 563 tion, 193
Vorhandenheit being-as-appearing, primary fact,
as meaning pregivenness, 151 382
translation of, 555 being as experienceable, 158
Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit, 554 and cashing in, 1912, 216 (see also
55 horizon: and cashing in)
Vor-Sein (Vorseiendes), 15758, 379 constitution of, the absolute episode,
411
Wagner, Robert, 37 constitution of, the un-nihilating of the
wakeful I, transcendental reection a meontic absolute, 38081
variant of, 299 constitutively done and ready, 191,
wakefulness, 166, 274, 284, 466, 475, 218, 44344
476 as Containment (that detains), 150,
being awake to the world, 215 19192, 193, 218
more than an existential, 195 awareness of, 19396
in Crisis-writings, 214 presenting/presencing, 192n
horizonal space, horizonal time specic modalities in awareness, 206
embracing both immanence and continuing constitution of, 217n, 441
transcendence, 207 42, 57677
and horizonality, less non-appropriate cosmological approach to, 193
for the Absolute of origins, 31214 doubling of, 219
in Husserls 192526 lecturing, 6 encompasses both subject and object,
in Ideas I, 558 179
Index 627
endlessness of, 492 as surround/circumstance, 217, 199

the issues, 58081 sweep of time-swinging, 253, 280, 378
ction of its non-existence, 219 theme of: the Ariadne thread, 178
eld-features primary for conceptualiz- the there of appearing, 382
ing the world, 372 as the total Circum-Stance, 278
rst actualization of the Absolute as and transcendental intersubjectivity, 442
the originated, 428 universal totality encompassing that-
rst telos of constitutive origination, which-is for us, 371
573 wholeness couched in terms of itera-
given horizonally, 217 tion, 191
the glow of Dasein, 150 withdrawing function, 192, 443
horizon of horizons, 348 See also Fink: project on world
as horizonal integrality constituted in world-concepts: space, time and actu-
proto-temporalization, 208 ality, 194
as horizonality: beyond object- world-feeling
intentionality, 109 description in Nietzschean terms, 347
in human awareness, 19395 48
for Husserl transcendentally pathic awareness, 347
unnished, 442 questionable term, 201n
includes the human subject, 192 and transcendence for Heidegger, 201n
and all its objects, 179 world-horizonality
investigation of as such not yet really Containment and presencing/depres-
done, 17577 encing, 192n
on the march, 57677 trans-singularity, 396
neither one nor several, 189, 42930 world-ness of the world, an existential,
not a subjective a priori form, 193 149
not sum-total of things, 189 world-origination
not to take in terms of objects, 371 always already done in triple pregiven-
phenomenon of passage, 25253 ness, 429
and philosophy of reection, 21718 the world-problem. See Crisis-writings:
pregivenness of. See also pregivenness deepest problem
of the world world-structure, presupposition of, cri-
precludes being imagined as non- tique of on transcendental level,
existent, 219 116
and the problem of ultimate origins,
205 Zeitigung der Zeit. See also
questioning of, a kind of drive, 343 temporalization
range of play, 253 and genesis, 16970
realm of being, 362 as In-Stance-setting, 285
as the sense: being (Seinssinn), 373 paraphrastic translation of, 151, 137,
singularity of, 42425, 42930, 432 233
and the speculative, 205 zigzag, 76, 85
status of re: human powerlessness, 509 zu Grund richten (Zugrunderichten),
sum total of In-Stances, 245 meaning of, 115n, 349n
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chapter 1. Contextual Narrative: The Freiburg Phenomenology Workshop,

1.1. Eugen Fink, Arrival in Freiburg 2

1.2. Fink as Assistant to Husserl, First Years: 19281930 10

1.3. Fink as Assistant to, Then Collaborator with, Husserl: 1930

1.4. The Final Breakthrough: 19341937 54

1.5. The Ending, and Another Beginning 68

Chapter 2. Orientation I: Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary 73

2.1. The Phenomenological ReductionDone Only by Being Redone 75

2.2. Issues That Force the Move Beyond Preliminaries: 19271928 81

2.3. The Nature of Husserls System 83

Chapter 3. Orientation II: Who Is Phenomenology? Husserl

3.3. The Issues in Finks Critique of Fundamental Ontology 137

Chapter 4. Fundamental Thematics I: The World 174

4.6.4. Identity and Difference between the Worldly and the

Chapter 5. Fundamental Thematics II: Time 224

5.2.2.2. Bringing the Living Present/Transcendental Proto-I

Chapter 7. Critical-Systematic Core: The Meonticin Methodology and in

Chapter 8. Corollary Thematics I: Language 452

Chapter 9. Corollary Thematics II: Solitude and Community

9.3.2. The Transcendental Sense of Intersubjective Monadic

Appendix: Longer Notations 545

1. Chapter 10 tells briey of this, and refers to sources for more.

2. See VI.CM, in the table of abbreviations below.

In his later years Husserl was painfully conscious of needing a comprehen-

counter the contingency of human action if this dynamic is what is recognized

6. See EFM in the table of abbreviations, section 2.

8. See, e.g., Hermitry: Aphorisms from a War Journal, in EFM 4.

Bw Briefwechsel. Edited by Karl Schuhmann with Elisabeth

Hua Husserliana: Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. 1950

Hua XV Zur Phnomenologie der Intersubjektivitt, Texte aus dem

CMe Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenol-

SZ Sein und Zeit. 10th edition. Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Ver-

MH-GA 3 Reediting of KB by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.

EFM Die letzte phnomenologische Werkstatt Freiburg: Eugen

Problematik. Teil II: 19391946Band 4: Finks ph-

KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by R. Schmidt, Phi-

HA Husserl-Archief te Leuven (Archives-Husserl Louvain),

Contextual Narrative: The Freiburg

For me philosophy is not a matter of career, but of personal destiny.

Philosophy is never done nowhere. If it is not the work of a particular

daily contact, in Freiburg, during a period of social and political upheaval.

1.1. Eugen Fink, Arrival in Freiburg

in the summer semester of 1925, he followed courses mainly in German lan-

thought, of articulate consciousness explained as a pinnacle of self-aware

16. See appendix.

There is every indication that Finks initiation into phenomenology was

21. The prescribed topic is given in VB/I, p. 1, footnote 1.

27. See appendix.

statement of evaluation explains. There is no indication who wrote this

31. Gutachten ber die der Philosophischen Fakultt eingereichten Preisarbeiten,

1.2. Fink as Assistant to Husserl, First Years: 19281930

42. HChr, p. 329.

follow philosophical developments there, discussed with Husserl his proposal

had begun a course of his own as emeritus professor, The Phenomenology of

Husserls explanation in a letter to Alexander Pfnder (January 6, 1931) for asking

It is with earnest and deep-felt appreciation that I wish to thank [Professor

and time-consciousness. Here, too, the completion of the dissertation de-