Christian Ferencz-Flatz

In four of his Marburg lectures, Martin Heidegger refers to Husserl’s interpretation of image consciousness. On first sight, his remarks seem to be nothing more than neutral renderings of Husserl’s statements. However, a more careful look shows that his interpretation differs in several significant points, and that, by focusing on the central difference between Naturding and Umweltding, which Heidegger brings into play, we can even develop a substantial line of criticism against the Husserlian conception.

Most historical accounts of the relations between phenomenology and film take their departure from essays written by Merleau-Ponty and Roman Ingarden after 1945. Thus, they completely ignore the period before the outbreak of World War II. However, if one indeed has difficulties finding any detailed analysis of cinema among the writings of “early phenomenologists,” the subject is nevertheless referred to by authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Moritz Geiger, Felix Kaufmann or Oskar Becker. The present article attempts to reconstruct the implicit conception of cinema which circulated in the phenomenological movement during the interwar period and thus arrives at some significant conclusions regarding the conservative tendencies of phenomenology.

In several of his early lectures and also in Being and Time, Heidegger rejects the traditional conception of “cultural objects” as objects comprising a primary layer of natural thing-reality and a secondary, subjective layer of value, opposing it a concept of “meaningfulness” as an immediate sense structure of situational life-experience. In opposition to the traditional concept, often associated in a more or less overt fashion with Husserl himself, Heidegger stresses that the foundational relationship we are dealing with here is actually directed the other way around: meaningfulness is not founded in natural reality, but instead the latter already presupposes the former. The present article aims to question this heideggerian critique by analyzing the concept of „foundation“ employed by Husserl and by tracing it’s evolution from the Logical Investigations to several later notations from the 1930’s, in order to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the term.

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