FREUD TO DERRIDA directions the system presented in Ideas I One the one hand he extended the phenomenological method in order to undercut some assumptions that Descartes had left unquestioned, so that his epoche became more radical than Cartesian doubt On the other hand, he endeavoured to combine his methodological solipsism with a solution to the problem of intersubjectivity that would establish the existence of other minds His final position was a transcendental idealism which he maintained was the inseparable conclusion of phenomenology (CM 42) Some of the results of his later reflections were published in two works that appeared in the year after his retirement: Cartesian Meditations and Formal and Transcendental Logic The Existentialism of Heidegger Two years earlier one of Husserl’s pupils had published a book that was to have a much greater impact on philosophy than either of these The Sein und Zeit of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) claimed that phenomenology, up to this point, had been too half-hearted It purported to examine the data of consciousness, but it employed notions like ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘act’, and ‘content’ which were not items that it had discovered in consciousness, but items inherited from earlier philosophy Most importantly, Husserl had accepted the framework of Descartes in which there were the two correlative realms of consciousness and reality Only one of these, consciousness, was the subject matter Husserl had adopted for phenomenology But the first task of phenomenology, Heidegger maintained, was to study the concept of Being (Sein) which was prior to the cleavage between consciousness and reality The experience that leads us to contrast these two as polar opposites is the primary phenomenon to be examined We must therefore go back behind Descartes in order to get clear about the nature of philosophy, and take as our starting point not consciousness but Being But it will not suffice, Heidegger warns us, simply to return to the categories of Plato and Aristotle, which already have an element of artificial sophistication The Presocratics provide the best examples for a thoroughgoing phenomenalist to imitate, because they pre-date the formation of a professional philosophical vocabulary with all the presuppositions such a vocabulary entails Heidegger would set himself the task of 83