I will soon publish a book in Spanish entitled “Dación y reflexión. Una investigación fenomenológica” (Giveness and reflection. A phenomenological investigation). The book engages with the idea that there is dichotomy between a reflective and a hermeneutical understanding of phenomenology, the former founded and represented by Husserl and the latter by the young Heidegger.
The view that these two ways of understanding phenomenology are incompatible has been considerably influential for many years. It was suggested by Heidegger in several places of his early work, and has been elegantly articulated by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann in his book Hermeneutik und Reflexion. Der Begriff der Phänomenologie bei Heidegger und Husserl (translated into English in 2013). Heidegger’s and von Herrman’s incompatibilist position has not remained unchallenged, though. Steven Crowell, Dan Zahavi and Wenjing Cai, among others, have argued against it.
In the central chapters of the book, and in line with these critics, I defend the idea that the dichotomy between a reflective and a hermeneutic understanding of phenomenology, established by appeal to the use of reflection, is a false dichotomy. At the same time, I suggest that the anti-incompatibilist strategies developed by Crowell, Zahavi and Cai do not sufficiently focus on the issue that is at the heart of the criticism that Heidegger (and von Herrmann) address to the method of reflection: the reflective objectification of lived experiences. To put it shortly: Crowell endorses a broad understanding of reflection as a ‘questioning comportment’, that potentially turns the debate between a reflective and a hermeneutic understanding of phenomenology into a terminological disagreement; Zahavi offers a nuanced and rich typology of varieties of reflection in which an objectifying form of reflection still plays a central role; and Cai develops the idea of a ‘hermeneutical reflection’ that highlights reflection’s ethical significance but does not address the critical issue of objectification.
Drawing on Husserl’s methodological considerations in Erste Philosophie II (Hua VIII) and Zur Phänomenologischen Reduktion. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926 – 1935) (Hua XXXIV), and in particular on his concept of thematization, I propose that Heidegger’s and von Herrmann’s criticism can be resisted by investigating the distinctiveness of phenomenological reflection as a method for investigating subjectivity.