Confronting necessity: Thinking crisis in Husserl, Freud, and Heidegger (Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger)

This dissertation examines key texts written by Husserl, Heidegger, and Freud---arguably the three most important thinkers in twentieth century European thought---during the same historical period of crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In an effort to pull Husserl a bit out from under the shadow of his charismatic student, Heidegger, I argue that there is a general kinship between the critiques articulated during this period by Husserl and Freud. In different ways, the responses of Husserl and Freud to the crisis could be characterized as historical critiques of prejudice, which manifest the impact of the materiality of the crisis in which the thinkers were embedded. Heidegger, in contrast, imagines the coinciding of freedom and necessity in the event of Being, and in so doing confronts the concrete historical crisis from out of a presupposed ontological framework. In contrast to Heidegger's effort to performatively retrieve the Greek beginning of philosophy, the thinking of Husserl and Freud takes the form of an embedded confrontation with loss, and thereby preserves an ameliorative role for rationality.