PHENOMENOLOGY AND ITS HISTORY: A CASE STUDY ON HEIDEGGER’S EARLY RELATION TO HUSSERL—AND A PLEA FOR THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN PHENOMENOLOGY

In order to better understand the notion of history proper to phenomenology, I un-dertake a brief case study. Namely, I investigate Martin Heidegger’s relation to Edmund Husserl in the years preceding Husserl’s appointment to Freiburg, with a special focus on an occasional writing by Heidegger from 1912. The application of historical method not only dismantles the teleological constructions which mark Heidegger’s own account of his early discovery of Husserl’s phenomenology, but also present a young thinker eager to absorb cutting edge, though not necessarily consistent, developments from contemporaneous philosophy. Heidegger’s early approach could also be conceived as a window onto an elusive brief period of phenomenology before its transformation into a Movement, thereby illustrating the positive contributions of the historical approach to the history phenomenology.