Work and dissolution: A phenomenological interpretation of practice and perception in the early works of Husserl and Heidegger

The specific aim of this thesis is to provide an interpretation of the relation between Husserl's early texts on the phenomenology of time, perception and practice, and Heidegger's existential phenomenological analytic that he developed throughout the 1920's culminating around the publication of Being and Time. As a phenomenological interpretation of Heidegger's existential phenomenology, it will first work through Dreyfus' influential critique of Husserlian intentionality and account of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. Dreyfus' account of the relation between Husserl and Heidegger, and his existentialist interpretation of authenticity, overlooks the fundamental part that originary temporality plays for phen.omenology in general. Husserl's concept of time, as the constant dissolution of the retentional/ expectant primary memory of consciousness, simply is ecstatic temporality. Heidegger uses this notion of originary time throughout his early existential phenomenological analyses, yet while doing so, he reduces Husserl's phenomenology down to merely a subject's theoretical relation to objective sense data, a criticism that Dreyfus also follows. In defending Husserl's holistic phenomenology of perception, practice and time from such a rationalist interpretation, I will attempt to situate his theory of time within the existential analytic of Dasein. The dissolution aspect of retention will become the fundamental principle of originary temporality, and the basis of an outline of the conditional structure of lived experience as a whole