been concerned with the phenomenology of time, although in his earlier work
it remained a subsidiary issue. In the 1920s, in parallel to Heidegger, Husserl
increasingly focused on time as central to the being of entities in general.
Husserl’s phenomenological “now” has “retentive” and “protentive” aspects,
not merely on the naturalistic psychological level of memory and anticipation,
but at a deeper ontological level. In Heidegger’s version, being in general is
historical, constituted in its past and its project into the future. Husserl strug-
gled inconclusively to work out the relations among time in general, the natural
time of the spatial world, and the historical time of human consciousness.^42
Heidegger seized on the conjecture that human Dasein, which is manifestly
temporal, is the key to the understanding of being in general as temporal. In
the end, Heidegger too foundered on the difficulty in leaping from the human
sphere to the more general one.
Several key points differ between the two philosophers. For Husserl, sub-
jectivity remains the privileged reference point. But Heidegger wishes to break
with any trace of the Idealist tradition; to assert the priority of the spiritual
subject waters down religious tension and makes salvation virtually automatic.
The Neo-orthodox theologians had already revolted against this easy form
of religion, and Heidegger sharpens the distinction on ontological grounds.
Dasein is being-in-the-world, and mortality rather than immortality is central
to it; there is anguish as to whether spiritual transcendence can exist at all.
Heidegger therefore jettisons the phenomenological epochê, which by bracket-
ing the reality of the world had left out the fundamental trait of Dasein.^43
Husserl was moving in the 1920s toward depicting temporality as central to
phenomenology; Heidegger greatly outpaced his teacher in dramatizing the
significance of the move by stressing that Dasein’s relation to temporality may
be authentic or inauthentic, cutting itself off from its deepest reality by evading
its own future, its death. A good deal of Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis
of the social world resembles that of other Husserl followers; both Heidegger
and Schutz see the ordinary world as constituted by taken-for-granted routines.
In Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), this is merely a tech-
nical analysis completing Max Weber’s social verstehen as the foundations of
economic action. For Heidegger it is a target for preaching, like the medieval
friar recalling worldly humans to meditate on their mortality.^44
Heidegger’s ontological project ended a failure. He never did demonstrate
the univocality of being. In 1962 he declared that it had foundered on the
problem of connecting Dasein and the extantness of the spatial world (Dostal,
1993: 160). Part II of Sein und Zeit, which was to reconstruct the historical
path by which Western ontology had gone wrong, was left unfinished because
of his inability to finish the last section of Part I, which was to move from the
temporality of Dasein to the temporality of being in general. Heidegger’s later
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^749