Concerning the Phenomenological Methods of Husserl and Heidegger and Their Application in Psychology

It is fairly well recognized that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (18891976) were the two giants of phenomenological philosophy during the 20 century. The beginning of the movement took place, of course, with Husserl’s publication of his Logical Investigations, and Heidegger was his student who likewise first achieved worldwide fame in the twenties and thirties of the last century. Husserl was a mathematician, logician, epistemologist, and basically a philosopher interested in grounding theoretical and scientific knowledge. Heidegger, while touching upon scientific thought and the arts in his writings, was primarily motivated to think about the question of being and was interested in articulating issues related to fundamental ontology. Both thinkers claimed to use the phenomenological method: Husserl consistently, and Heidegger initially in terms of nomenclature, but what evolved for him as a method seemed radically different from what Husserl described. Because Husserl was a logician and an epistemologist, he was interested in grounding secure knowledge and because of his invention and use of the phenomenological reduction, he gave priority to careful description. Interpretation was, for Husserl, an articulation of the given object that was relevant to the experience, but not limited to the strictly given. For Heidegger, the question of being dominated his thinking, and since he traced the question of being back to Dasein, the being who raises the question of being, and discovered that Dasein has to interpret the meaning of being, Heidegger gives priority to interpretation. For him, “the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation.” So, for Heidegger, at least with respect to research into Being, priority is given to interpretation, and description is a type of interpretation.