SOURCE: “Heidegger and the Phenomenological Reduction,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, December, 1975, pp. 212-21.

In the following essay, Seeburger explores Heidegger's relation to the Husserlian formulation of phenomenology through an analysis of Heidegger's understanding of the “phenomenological reduction.”

The explications of the preliminary conception of phenomenology point out that what is essential to phenomenology does not lie in its being actual as a philosophical “direction.” Higher than actuality stands possibility. The understanding of phenomenology lies solely in comprehending it as possibility.¹

Ever since the appearance of Sein und Zeit, the question of Martin Heidegger's relationship to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl has remained open. Heidegger's own statements on the subject, both in Sein und Zeit and in his later writings, are ambiguous. Perhaps the greatest difficulty surrounds the notion of the “phenomenological reduction.”

The reduction occupies a central place in Husserl's developed conception of phenomenology...