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Heidegger's Lehrjahre The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years [Phaenomenologica 105]. Eds. John C. Sallis, Giuseppina Moneta, & Jacques Taminiaux. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. Heidegger's Lehrjahre THOMAS SHEEHAN Loyola University of Chicago For Prof. Otto Poggeler 1. HEIDEGGER'S Habilitation By July of 1915 the young Dr. Martin Heidegger was ready to apply for a license to teach at Freiburg University.1 Two years earlier, in the summer of 1913, he had obtained the doctorate in philosophy with his inaugural dis­ sertation, The Doctrine ofJudgment in Psychologism. He had then set to work on his qualifying dissertation (Habilitationsschrift), but events had conspired to interrupt him. On August 1, 1914 the First World War broke out, and between August and October Heidegger was in and out of active military service twice, both times with Infantry Reserve Battalion 113, once as a volunteer (ca. August 2-10,1914) and once as a draftee (October 9-20,1914). In both cases he was dismissed for reasons of health. 2 By the spring of 1915 Heidegger, then twenty-five years of age, had man­ aged to finish his qualifying dissertation, Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, 3 under the directorship of Professor Heinrich Rickert.4 (Husserl was still at Gottingen and would begin teaching in Freiburg as Rickert's successor only in the spring of 1916). On Friday, July 2, 1915, Heidegger formally presented the work to the Philosophy Department for their approval, and in an accompanying letter he petitioned for a qualifying examination: Freiburg in Breisgau July 2,1915 To the Esteemed Philosophy Department of the University of Freiburg. Concerning the application of Dr. Phil. Martin Heidegger of Messkirch (Baden) for the licence to teach: The undersigned respectfully submits his treatise, Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, to the esteemed Philosophy Department of the University of Freiburg in Breisgau. J.e. Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux (eds.), The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, 77-137. © Kluwer Academic Publishers. 78 Sheehan If this treatise should be found to be scientifically adequate, the under­ signed then respectfully requests the esteemed Philosophy Department to grant him the venia legendi in philosophy. If he should be admitted to the examination, the undersigned wishes to submit to the esteemed Philosophy Department the following three [topics] as [possible] themes of the requisite trial lecture : first, the concept of time in history second, the logical problem of the question third, the concept of number. With highest regards, he remains the esteemed Philosophy Faculty's most respectful Martin Heidegger5 Philosophy Department regulations dating back to 1894 required that along with this letter and other documents, the candidate supply the department with 'a rather detailed curriculum vitae' (ein ausfuhrliches curriculum vitae).6 Heidegger complied by submitting an extraordinary, handwritten 749-word Lebenslauf. This curriculum vitae, which forms the centerpiece of the present essay, I shall call 'CV-1915.' Two years earlier, on June 30, 1913, when he submitted his inaugural doctoral dissertation on the theory of judgment to the Philosophy Depart­ ment, Heidegger had also turned in a much briefer (130-word) handwritten curriculum vitae, which I shall call 'CV-1913.' (The original text of CV-1913, heretofore unpublished, appears below in Part Two, Section III.) A slightly amended form of CV-1913 was published in 1914 at the end of the book-version of the doctoral dissertation, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus, and has since appeared in an English translation. This slightly amended version of CV-1913 I shall call 'CV-1914.'7 However, the Lebenslauf that we are concerned with here - CV-1915, which Heidegger submitted with his qualifying dissertation on July 2,1915 - goes far beyond the two earlier texts and provides important insights into how the young scholar developed from his high school days, through his university studies, to his post-graduate work. I present here. an English version of CV-1915, made from the original handwritten text offive oversized pages that Heidegger submitted to the Philosophy Department. The paragraph breaks are Heidegger's own, and the numbers in brackets indicate the page breaks in his text. Curriculum Vitae 1915 I, Martin Heidegger, born on September 26,1889 in Messkirch (Baden), the Heidegger's Lehrjahre 79 son of the sexton and master cooper Friedrich Heidegger and of his wife Johanna nee Kempf, attented elementary and middle school in Messkirch. Beginning in 1900 I received private instruction in Latin, so that in 1903 I was able to enter the third-year class [Unterteria] of the Gymnasium in Con­ stance. I am grateful to Dr. Konrad Grober, at that time the rector of the minor seminary and currently the pastor of Constance, for decisive in­ tellectual influence. After completing the third year of high school [Un­ tersekunda] I attended the Berthold Gymnasium in Freiburg in Breisgau until reception of the high-school baccalaureate (summer 1909). During the fourth year [Obersekunda], when instruction in mathematics got away from merely solving problems and moved more onto theoretical tracks, my preference for this discipline became a really focussed interest [po 2], which extended to physics as well. Incentives for this came from religion classes, which led me to do extensive reading in the theory of biological evolution. In the last year of high school it was above all the Plato classes of Gymnasium Professor Widder, who died some years ago, that introduced me to philosophical problems more consciously, but not yet with theoretical rigor. After completing the Gymnasium, I entered the University of Freiburg in Breisgau in the winter semester of 1909, and I remained there without interruption until 1913. At first I studied theology. The lecture courses in philosophy that were prescribed at the time did not satisfy me much, so I resorted to studying Scholastic textbooks on my own. They provided me with a certain formal-logical schooling, but as regards philosophy they did not give me what I was looking for and had [already] found in the areas of apologetics through the works of Herman Schell. Besides the Small Summa of Thomas Aquinas and individual works of Bonaventura it was the Logische Untersuchungen of Edmund Husserl that [po 3] were decisive for the process of my scientific development. At the same time the earlier work of the same author, Die Philosophie der Arith­ metik, placed mathematics in a whole new light for me. My intense engagement with philosophical problems, along with the tasks of my own professional studies [in theology] resulted, after three semesters, in severe exhaustion. My heart-trouble, which had come about earlier from too much sports, broke out so severely that any later employment in the service of the Church was taken to be extremely questionable. Therefore in the winter semester of 1911-1912 I had myself enrolled in the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. My philosophical interest was not lessened by the study of mathematics; on the contrary, since I no longer had to follow the compulsory lecture courses in philosophy, I could attend a great quantity of lecture courses in 80 Sheehan philosophy and above all could take part in the seminar exercises with Herr Geheimrat Rickert. In this new school [po 4] I learned first and foremost to understand philosophical problems as problems, and I acquired insight into the essence of logic, the philosophical discipline that still interests me most. At the same time I acquired a correct understanding of modern philosophy from Kant on, a matter that I found sparsely and inadequately treated in the Scholastic literature. My basic philosophical convictions remained those of Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy. With time I recognized that the in­ tellectual wealth stored up in it must permit of - indeed, demands - a broad, fruitful exploitation and utilization. Therefore in my dissertation on Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus I took my bearings both from modern logic and from basic Aristotelian-Scholastic views and tried to find a basis for further investigations regarding a central problem of logic and episte­ mology. On the basis of this work I was allowed by ~he Philosophy Depart­ ment of Freiburg University to take the oral examination for the doctorate, which I passed on July 26,1913. The study of Fichte and Hegel, [po 5] intense engagement with Rickert's Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, the investigations of Dilthey, and not least of all lecture courses and seminar exercises with Herr Geheimrat Finke, resulted in the fact that my aversion to history, nurtured in me by my predilection for mathematics, was thoroughly de­ stroyed. I recognized that philosophy should not be oriented onesidedly, either to mathematics and natural science or to history, but that the latter, precisely as the history of spirit [Geistesgeschichte], can fructify philosophy to a far greater degree. My increasing interest in history facilitated in me an intense engagement with the philosophy of the Middle Ages, an engagement that I recognized as necessary for a fundamental development of Scholasticism. For me this engagement consists not primarily in a presentation of the historical rela­ tions between individual thinkers but rather in an interpretative under­ standing of the theoretical content of their philosophy. Thus my investiga­ tion into [po 6] Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus came about. This investigation likewise generated in me the plan of a comprehensive presentation of medieval logic and psychology in the light of modern phe­ nomenology, with equal consideration of the historical position of individu­ al medieval thinkers. If I am permitted to take on the duties of scientific research and teaching, my life's work will be dedicated to the development of this plan.8 Thus far CV-1915, an extraordinary text for the information it provides on the earliest intellectual development of a man now recognized as one of the Heidegger's Lehrjahre 81 century's greatest thinkers.
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