NDPR James Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality
Review of Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality
For James Luchte, Heidegger’s early philosophy is the phenomenology of ecstatic, original temporality as it develops in the years 1924 to 1929. Basing his text on the three components of the phenomenological method — reduction, destruction, and construction — Luchte divides his study into three distinct yet overlapping parts — Heidegger would call them equiprimordial ‘parts’: the [original] Phenomenon, the Destruktion, and the Topos [= building site] of ecstatic temporality. By way of a contrast with Husserl’s phenomenology, Part 1 eventually pinpoints Heidegger’s ‘phenomenological’ reduction quite precisely in “moments of vision, truth events, radical breaks amid system, eruptions: revolution, poetry, art and events of questioning” (47, 59). These moments “breach” our everyday familiarity of being, suspend the normality of our matter-of-fact existence — what Husserl dubbed the “natural attitude” — and disclose our unique being-t/here in the full finitude of its original temporality. We thus come “to ‘know ourselves’ as an ‘event’ amid a world” into which we have been thrown (48).