for programs of unification in mathematics since Riemann’s generalization of
non-Euclidean geometries in the 1850s; Klein’s unification of geometry around the
theory of groups and their invariants beginning in the 1870s and developing into
an encyclopedic movement at Göttingen from 1886 until 1913; and Hilbert’s
efforts at formal unification of vast areas of mathematics at the turn of the century
(DSB, 1981: 7:396–397; Paukert, 1990). Husserl created an even broader program
to unify science on its most general basis.
- Lipps was a former pupil of Stumpf, and thus another network grandpupil of
Brentano, whose act-psychology Lipps’s position resembled. Lipps was known for
his theory of empathy, as the active project of the self into external objects. His
psychological version of phenomenology was upstaged by the more radical object-
bracketing phenomenology of Husserl.
- Though publicly supportive of Scheler, Husserl referred to his work privately as
“fool’s gold”; later he would call Scheler and Heidegger his “antipodes” (Spiegel-
berg, 1982: 269).
- Heidegger overdramatized the extent to which the question of being had been
forgotten since the time of Duns Scotus. In fact, it had become a hot issue among
his own immediate network predecessors. Husserl bracketed the question of being
in order to study essences; Meinong multiplied the kinds of being. Heidegger took
the opposite direction from his teacher’s rival, searching for the univocal meaning
of being underlying all varieties.
- From Husserl’s viewpoint this was a merely naturalistic use, which he nevertheless
encouraged when meeting Jaspers in 1913. At this point Husserl was still looking
for allies (Natanson, 1973: 160). A key network contact in Jaspers’s development
was Erich Frank, a pupil of Rickert and Windelband, who in 1914 discovered the
virtually unknown Kierkegaard and shared this enthusiasm with Jaspers. In 1919
Frank’s Wissen, Wollen, Glauben, along with Jaspers’s Psychologie der Weltan-
schauungen, launched German existentialism (EP, 1967: 3:218–219). By 1923,
Heidegger was personally acquainted with Jaspers.
- In the pattern typical of creative groups, the personal relationships had formed
before either of them did the creative work which made them famous. Out of this
same period came a generation of younger scholars later to be famous in Ger-
man thought: Heidegger’s assistants Gadamer, Löwith, and Marcuse. Another of
Husserl’s assistants, Oscar Becker, forms the intermediary link as teacher of Apel
and Habermas (Gadamer, 1985: 141, 171).
- In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, there were controversies over Heidegger’s
involvement with Nazism in the early 1930s (Bourdieu, [1975] 1991; Farias, 1987).
None of these makes a convincing case that Heidegger’s politics determined his
philosophy. Bourdieu’s analysis, the most sociological, rests on the assertion that
the intellectual field is homologous to the surrounding social and political field.
Hence Heidegger did not need to be conscious that he was expressing in the
concepts specific to the philosophical field the same stance of the resentful provin-
cial middle class which gave rise to Nazism in the political field. But in fact the
intellectual field is not homologous to the social and political world; the one is
governed by the struggle for attention under the law of small numbers, with its
Notes to Pages 742–748^ •^1019
