MARTIN HEIDEGGER
existentialists because he is one of them in his themes and ideas and in his treatment of them and in the language he uses, as well as in his debt to Kierkegaard and in his influence upon the others, especially upon Sartre. Heidegger’s philosophy, then, proposes to raise the question, What is Being, what is what is? His method derives from Husserl to whose chair at Freiburg he succeeded in 1929. Husserl’s standpoint in philosophy was not existentialist, but his influence upon existentialist philosophers is incalculable, and it is safe to say that existentialism in its modern phase would not have developed without him. Kierkegaard has profoundly influenced Protestant theology, and has influenced Jaspers and Heidegger, but it is as one of the developments of Husserl’s fruitful school of pure phenomenology that existentialism takes its place in contemporary technical philosophy. Husserl himself was a mathematician and logician, philosophically interested in the world of experience rather than in the experienced world. His method proposed to put the real world within brackets and disconnect the consciousness of it, switching attention inwards instead to the absolute world of experience itself, exploring and describing the structure of consciousness in its intuiting of essences, dispensing of meanings, and constitution of objects. His ambition was of the greatest, nothing less than to found philosophy for the first time on its proper basis in pure phenomenological description, uncovering in all their ramifications the root structures of all possible knowledge, ‘as it were, the secret longing of the whole philosophy of modern times’, a science towards which the fundamental thought of Descartes was already pressing, whose domain Hume almost entered, which Kant caught sight of but was not able to appropriate; a science of all sciences, not in order to appropriate and systematize their results, but, on the contrary, in order to constitute their beginnings, map their regional structures, and fix their defining essences. Such a science, with its unlimited programme of research, could only be inspired by the most radical rationalism, philosophically determined to force a way back to an absolute beginning, to accept nothing as given or problematic, and to get such a command of the essentially necessary structures of experience that the real world might be seen as a special case of various possible worlds and non-worlds all experiencable in principle. Such a project may be a mathematician’s dream, but it has many features of exceptional interest and has already proved itself as a remarkably stimulating and fruitful initiative. Husserl boldly refused 87