1.1 Neo-Kantian Critical Philosophy

Neo-Kantianism was the dominant movement in academic philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. The neo-Kantians sought a return to Kant after what they saw as the speculative excesses of German idealism. This mission to go “back to Kant” was complicated by the explosive growth in the sciences alluded to earlier. The problem, in short, was that Kant’s critical project seemed to be wedded to the logic, mathematics, and natural science of his day: for example, Aristotelian logic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian mechanics. The development of truth-functional and then quantificational logic, non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics called into doubt the necessary, a priori status Kant claimed for his findings.

Hermann Cohen’s “transcendental method” is designed to keep Kant’s critical philosophy in step with the historical development of the sciences. The transcendental method starts from the “fact of science” and regresses to the a priori conditions of its possibility. Cohen’s method is thus the “analytic” one of Kant’s Prolegomena, rather than the “synthetic” method of the first Critique. The analytic method takes the science of the day as established knowledge and asks what pure concepts make it possible. The synthetic method is far more ambitious: It seeks to respond to the Humean skeptic who challenges the objective validity of the concepts underlying natural science, in particular causality. In addition to abandoning the ambitious, anti-skeptical project of the first Critique, Cohen’s school of neo-Kantianism abandoned the dualism of sensibility and understanding underlying the division of that book into a Transcendental Aesthetic and a Transcendental Logic. In the words of Cohen’s fellow Marburger Paul Natorp, “In the end, ‘intuition’ no longer remains a cognitive factor which stands across from or is opposed to thinking. It is thinking, just not thinking in terms of laws, but thinking in terms of full objects” (Reference Natorp and Luft2015, 186). What this means is that the neo-Kantian transcendental method is not primarily concerned with experience in the sense that is important to phenomenology: conscious, “lived” experience as described from a first-person perspective. Rather, the “experience” whose conditions Cohen and his followers seek is natural science considered as a cultural artifact – as Cohen puts it, “considered as if laid out in ‘printed books’” (Edgar Reference Edgar2020; Stang Reference Stang and Damböck2018).

Orthodox neo-Kantianism divides into two main camps: the Marburg school and the Southwest or Baden school. The Marburg school of Cohen, Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer was largely concerned with the epistemology of the mathematical and natural sciences, as evidenced in Cohen’s work on infinitesimals and Cassirer’s work on the new logic, relativity theory, and the old quantum theory. The Southwest school of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert was primarily focused on the human sciences, especially their methodological differences from the natural sciences, including the crucial role of values in the human sciences. Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures contain discussions of both schools of neo-Kantianism, including Natorp’s challenge to the phenomenologist’s aspiration to “still the stream of experience” and Windelband’s and Rickert’s philosophies of history. What unifies the orthodox schools of neo-Kantianism is an opposition to psychologism, which, on their view, is the attempt to reduce normativity to the descriptive domain of psychology. As a case in point, Hermann Lotze famously distinguishes the validity (Geltung) of norms from the being (Sein) of real entities (Lotze 1884, Book III, Chapter 2; see also Stang Reference Stang and Lapointe2019). This opposition to psychologism distinguishes the orthodox neo-Kantians from, for example, F. A. Lange, who sought to reinterpret Kant’s Copernican revolution in naturalistic terms (Anderson Reference Anderson2005; Beiser Reference Beiser2014; Kusch Reference Kusch1995). Moreover, the Lotzean distinction exercised an undeniable influence on the early Husserl and Heidegger (Dahlstrom Reference Dahlstrom2009a).

By Being and Time Heidegger distinguishes himself from the orthodox neo-Kantians in three related respects. First, in articulating the foundational role of his phenomenological ontology vis-à-vis the positive sciences, he objects that the neo-Kantian transcendental method is a “logic that limps behind” rather than a “productive logic” (Reference HeideggerBT 30–31). This is a clear reference to Cohen’s method of beginning with the “fact of science” and regressing to its a priori conditions. Second, Heidegger holds that the foundations of the positive sciences should be sought not in a theory of scientific knowledge but rather in an ontology of the objects of the sciences. Heidegger’s 1928 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (the so-called Kantbuch), as well as his momentous Davos disputation with Cassirer, brings into sharp focus the distinction between the neo-Kantians’ reading of Kant as offering an epistemology or philosophy of science and Heidegger’s reading of Kant as laying the grounds for metaphysics. Third, Heidegger challenges the Marburgers’ repudiation of Kant’s “two-stem” model of knowledge by highlighting the importance of the schematism chapter of the first Critique.

1.2 Worldview Philosophy

1.3 The Basic Concepts of Phenomenology

In the Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger offers an etymological analysis of “phenomenology” in order to elucidate the phenomenologist’s rallying cry: “To the things themselves!” To heed this call is “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (Reference HeideggerBT 58). Earlier in the Introduction, he introduces the idea of a “basic concept” (Grundbegriff), providing examples of basic concepts from various positive sciences. Inquiry into the basic concepts of a science consists in an articulation of the “basic state of being” of the entities it studies (Reference HeideggerBT 30), and these basic concepts are drawn from “basic experiences” (Grunderfahrungen) (Reference HeideggerPIE 25). Heidegger thus endorses a basic Husserlian commitment to seeking the “origins” of philosophical concepts in experience: “Only as phenomenology is ontology possible” (Reference HeideggerBT 60).Footnote ⁴ A number of lectures leading up to Being and Time are concerned with giving accounts of the formation and function of philosophical concepts, and in Being and Time Heidegger implies that philosophy is undergoing a crisis in its basic concepts.

In the Logical Investigations and the Logos essay, Husserl issues similar warnings about philosophical concepts. Concepts like presentation, sensation, and judgment, he says, are ambiguous, combining psychological, epistemological, and logical senses (Reference HusserlLI v.1 174). Because conscious acts are intentional, they must be described by reference to their objects; because of this, it is easy to overlook the fact that “such subsidiarily described objectivity … has undergone a change of sense, in virtue of which it now belongs to the sphere of phenomenology” (Reference HusserlLI v.1 171). Similarly, whereas experimental psychologists describe perception, for example, as a real occurrence in a subject, phenomenologists are interested in the ideal or essential characteristics in virtue of which any real occurrence could count as perceptual; the fact that the same term is used in both inquiries is one of the “difficulties of pure phenomenological analysis” (Reference HusserlLI v.1 171).

Let me illustrate this difficulty about phenomenological concepts with a few examples. First, consider the concept of a content. Husserl claims that unclarity in the use of “content” (Inhalt) is responsible for a great deal of confusion in the study of consciousness. He distinguishes three senses of “content” – object meant, fulfilling sense, and meaning simpliciter (Reference HusserlLI I §14) – and resolves “never to speak of an intentional content where an intentional object is meant” (Reference HusserlLI V §17). These ambiguities, as well as the ambiguity between “real” and “ideal” contents, are responsible for a view like Brentano’s on which the object of an intentional act is a literal constituent of the act (Crane Reference Crane and Kriegel2017). Similar things could be said about the concepts of mental imagery and imagination. If one is not attentive to the “change in sense” these concepts undergo in phenomenology, one is naturally led to a view of the mind as a museum housing its intentional objects: “One should not talk and think as if an image stood in the same relation to consciousness as a statue does to a room in which it is set up” (Reference HusserlLI v.2 126). Finally, to use an example that Heidegger also highlights, consider the concept of an appearance. One of Husserl’s basic commitments is that objects transcendent to consciousness are only given in appearances. But if one is not careful to distinguish different senses of “appearance,” this could give the impression that these perspectival appearances are a veil separating us from things as they are in themselves. In the Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger is careful to specify the sense of “appearance” or “phenomenon” that concerns his phenomenology: not appearance as a sign or indication of something else, as in the symptoms of a disease, but rather appearance as something “showing itself from itself” (Reference HeideggerBT §7).

Heidegger is highly attuned to the ambiguous nature of most of the concepts used to describe experience. In the SS 1920Footnote ⁵ lectures Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, he argues that a new theory of philosophical concept formation is needed because of the ambiguity of basic concepts like presentation, life, and history. I return to a discussion of this method in the final section.

What, then, are the basic concepts of Heidegger’s phenomenology? The most obvious candidate here is his term of art for the ontological questioner: Dasein. “Dasein” literally means existence, but Heidegger is playing on etymology (as he often does): Da = there (or here), Sein = being. Other concepts used to describe essential features of the subject include being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), care (Sorge), disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), and the clearing (die Lichtung). Heidegger’s reason for coining these technical terms is to avoid as far as possible connotations and prejudices that more traditional terms like “consciousness,” “ego,” “subject,” “person,” and so on may carry. Heidegger thinks that these terms carry the danger of prejudicing the analysis of experience toward those comportments carried out in a “theoretical attitude,” which he thinks are derivative of more basic structures and comportments (this is the topic of the next section). To combat this tendency, Heidegger begins his analysis from the perspective of average everydayness. Heidegger’s theory of the “hermeneutical situation,” including the method of “destruction” that was supposed to be carried out in the uncompleted Part Two of Being and Time,Footnote ⁶ is designed to uncover the “phenomenal basis” from which the basic concepts of his phenomenology are to be harvested (see Section 4).

2.1 The Derivativeness Claim

This section is divided into two parts. In the first I summarize the main line of argument of Reference HeideggerBT §13. In the second I introduce the Husserlian notion of foundation that Heidegger employs in that section.

2.2 Three Senses of “Derivative”

Heidegger claims in Reference HeideggerBT §13 that knowing is “derivative” in two ways: it is founded on being-in-the-world, and it arises through a deficiency in concern. In this section I show that these are distinct, though subtly run together by Heidegger. I will argue for the following claims. First, we must distinguish three ways in which a type of intentionality can be derivative. Second, Husserl can accept that the types of intentionality toward which he directs the most attention are derivative in the first two ways. Third, while he denies that these types of intentionality are derivative in the third way, he is right to do so.

To see why these are different senses of “derivative,” it will be useful to distinguish two levels of analysis in Heidegger’s phenomenology. Heidegger draws a distinction between disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) and discoveredness (Entdecktheit). This disclosedness/discoveredness distinction parallels the more familiar ontological/ontic and existential/existentiell distinctions. Borrowing from John Haugeland’s helpful characterization of the distinction, the following points are important for my argument going forward:

1. 1. Intraworld entities can be discovered only because of or in terms of a prior disclosedness; disclosedness makes discoveredness possible…

2. 2. What is disclosed is not the same as the entities that are discovered in terms of it. According to some passages, what is disclosed is the being of those entities … but according to others, it is dasein … or even the world … (Haugeland Reference Haugeland and Rouse2013, 17)

Disclosedness, by the first feature, is a transcendental condition of discoveredness. “Dasein is its disclosedness,” and the various Existenzialien (essential features of Dasein) – including being-in-the-world and concern – are aspects of Dasein’s disclosedness. Thus, being-in-the-world and concern are transcendental conditions for entities being discovered.

There are different types of discovery. The kinds of discovery typical of “average everydayness” are practical “comportments” (Verhalten), such as producing and manipulating. “Just-looking” at entities’ present-at-hand properties – or to use A. D. Smith’s nice phrase, “gawping” at them (Smith Reference Smith2002, 105) – is another kind of discovery that emerges when Dasein steps back from its practical dealings or when they are otherwise interrupted. But now we can see why two different senses of “derivative” are subtly run together in Reference HeideggerBT §13. As types of discovery, both practical dealings with the ready-to-hand and “gawping” at the present-at-hand are founded on being-in-the-world, in the sense that being-in-the-world as a mode of Dasein’s disclosedness is a transcendental condition for these comportments toward entities. The sense in which “gawping” is derivative of practical comportment, however, is that the former emerges through a “deficiency” or abstraction from the latter.

The derivativeness claim is thus ambiguous. On one reading, it is the claim that knowing and the like depend on certain transcendental conditions being met – in particular, on the subject being structured in a particular way. On another, it is the claim that knowing and the like emerge by an abstraction from practical comportments. In the next two sections I will expand on these disambiguations of the derivativeness claim and argue that Husserl accepts it on both disambiguations. A third sense of “derivative,” to be discussed in §2.3, can be seen in Dreyfus’s claim that “absorbed coping” is prior to “representational intentionality.”

2.3 Is “Absorbed Coping” More Basic than “Representational Intentionality”?

Let me begin this section by clarifying that my criticism is directed primarily at Dreydegger – Heidegger as interpreted by Hubert Dreyfus – and not the actual Heidegger.Footnote ¹⁷ My argument can be understood as a dilemma: either Dreyfus gets Heidegger right or he doesn’t; if he does, then Heidegger’s derivativeness claim (on the third disambiguation) is false; if he doesn’t, then Heidegger’s account is no challenge to Husserl.

Dreyfus describes the difference between Husserl and Heidegger as follows: “Rather than first perceiving perspectives, then synthesizing the perspectives into objects, and finally assigning these objects a function on the basis of their physical properties, we ordinarily manipulate tools that already have a meaning in a world that is organized in terms of purposes” (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991, 46–7). If the relations between these stages are understood as relations of ontological dependence rather than temporal priority, this is a pretty good description of Husserl’s account of constitution:

Husserl’s view, as we have seen, is that although the personalistic attitude is the one we normally live in, the constitution of the objects of this attitude presupposes the constitution of material and animal nature. Dreyfus’s Heidegger would seem to deny this: on that view, “absorbed coping” is prior to “representational intentionality” in the sense that states with representational content only emerge when absorbed coping is interrupted (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991, 76).

A. D. Smith forcefully objects to such a view:

The claim behind Smith’s rhetorical question strikes me as obviously right: I could not relate to a hammer concernfully if I were not consciously aware of it.Footnote ¹⁸ As Husserl holds, the spiritual properties of the hammer are constituted on the basis of its already-constituted material properties. Heidegger’s (or Dreydegger’s) critique of such a view only gains any plausibility by relying on the false dilemma Smith points out: I am either non-representationally, practically engaged with an object, or I am passively gawping at it. But perception is properly understood as a founding layer upon which further apprehensions, including apprehensions of spiritual properties like functions or purposes, are built. Heidegger is presumably correct that gawping at an object arises only from a deficiency in practical concern, but the proper way to understand this is that the “change-over” to merely staring at an object consists in peeling away layers of constitution, not the emergence of representational content that was not there to begin with.

2.4 Taking Stock

The derivativeness claim is intended as a widespread indictment of Husserl’s consciousness-centric phenomenology. I have argued that there are three distinct ways that a type of intentionality can be derivative: (i) by depending on transcendental conditions, (ii) by being an abstraction from another type of comportment, and (iii) by emerging only from an interruption in another mode of comportment. Husserl accepts that perception is derivative in senses (i) and (ii). This shows that the derivativeness claim doesn’t force us to abandon Husserl’s consciousness-centric approach, though I did concede that Heidegger may be onto something in seeing Dasein rather than the intentional act as the subject of the deepest level of transcendental analysis. Interpreted in terms of sense (iii) – the sense in which Dreyfus reads the claim – the derivativeness claim is simply false. So if Dreyfus’s interpretation is correct, so much the worse for Heidegger. In any case, while some reason may have been found to supplement Husserl’s phenomenology with an ontology of the worldly, historical subject whose being matters to it, no reason has been found to abandon a consciousness-centric phenomenology for a phenomenology of absorbed coping. Indeed, I think it’s plausible that an adequate ontology of Dasein must include consciousness among its essential features. In the brief concluding paragraph of this section, I will shift gears to discuss a very different critique of Heidegger’s emphasis on practical comportment due to Lévinas.

2.5 Lévinas on Enjoyment

Section 2 of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity contains a fascinating and underappreciated critique of the practical orientation of Heidegger’s analysis of average everydayness. Lévinas posits a relation called “living from” or “enjoyment” that is irreducible to either Heideggerian concern or Husserlian representation.

Lévinas goes on to analyze aspects of enjoyment, including nourishment, the elemental, and habitation. We can’t get into the details of his analyses here, but the basic point is this. It would be a mistake to understand the experience of sinking one’s teeth into a juicy peach, feeling the warmth of the sun on one’s skin, or the comfort of feeling at home in terms of reckoning with tools for the accomplishment of one’s projects.

Lévinas claims not only that enjoyment is irreducible to Heideggerian concern but also that it is a counterexample to the “Husserlian thesis of the primacy of the objectifying act” (Lévinas Reference Lévinas1969). This is the thesis discussed earlier that practical and evaluative attitudes are founded on straightforward acts of intuition. I think Lévinas is on to something in highlighting what is phenomenologically distinctive of enjoyment, but it should come as no surprise that I reject his challenge to Husserl’s thesis.Footnote ¹⁹ Consciousness, it seems to me, is the ground upon which our natures as enjoyers, users, and knowers are built.

3.1 The Reduction(s)

Taylor Carman (Reference Carman2003) has made one of the most explicit cases that Heidegger rejects Husserl’s method of reduction. Carman sees Heidegger as making at least two complaints about Husserlian reduction. First, the eidetic reduction requires that the phenomenologist shift her attention from real, individual mental acts to the essential structures they instantiate. The problem with this shift for Heidegger, Carman says, is that in the case of Dasein, essence and existence cannot be so separated: “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (Reference HeideggerBT 67). Second, the epoché or transcendental reduction “consists in methodically turning away from everything external to consciousness and focusing instead on what is internal to it” (Carman Reference Carman2003, 80); and because of this “internalism,” Husserl ends up courting skepticism about the external world (Carman Reference Carman2003, 81). Both criticisms are highly contentious, but before evaluating them in more detail, let’s get clearer on how Husserl understands the method. This involves distinguishing both various steps of the reduction and various ways into the reduction.

The goal of the reduction, from my understanding of it, is to ensure that the subject matter of phenomenology has been adequately delimited. To do this, the phenomenologist must be careful to avoid surreptitiously importing naturalistic assumptions about what consciousness and intentionality must be like, instead describing it on its own terms as it is given first-personally. In order to accomplish this, the “natural attitude,” which contains a general thesis positing the existence of its objects, must be “suspended,” “bracketed,” or “put out of play.” What this entails is that it is inadmissible to draw upon any premises reliant on the thesis of the natural attitude when giving phenomenological descriptions. This rules out explaining consciousness in terms of concepts or claims derived from natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. Once the natural attitude has been suspended, “pure” or “transcendental” consciousness emerges as the theme of phenomenology. The phenomenologist’s task is to describe the “constitutive” achievements in virtue of which objects of various kinds and categories can be intended. This transcendental inquiry is “eidetic” insofar as it concerns not contingent facts about how human beings happen to have a world, but necessary or essential correlations between forms of consciousness and forms of objects.

As Iso Kern (Reference Kern1962) explains, there are three “ways into” (i.e., motivations for undertaking) the reduction for Husserl. The first is the “Cartesian” way employed in the first book of Ideas. Like Descartes’s methodical doubt, the Cartesian way is motivated by a search for an indubitable or apodictic starting point for philosophy. This is achieved by shifting away from “transcendent” reality to the essences of the “immanent” “region of pure consciousness”; whereas transcendent objects are always given in “profiles” or “adumbrations,” and thus fallibly, immanent objects are given both adequately (at all at once) and apodictically (guaranteeing the existence of its object). The second way into the reduction is the “way through psychology.” The details of this way need not detain us here, but as Drummond (Reference Drummond1975) explains, it is motivated by Husserl’s investigations of time-consciousness, which entail that the entire stream of consciousness is never given adequately. The third way into reduction is the most important for our comparison with Heidegger. The “ontological way” or “way through the lifeworld” is pursued in Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of the European Sciences. Here the discovery of transcendental subjectivity is motivated by reflection on the constitutive achievements in virtue of which we have a “lifeworld.”

This is the barest sketch of Husserlian reduction, but it gives us enough scaffolding to begin addressing the question of whether and in which respects Heidegger employs the method of reduction. Before returning to Carman’s criticisms, let’s look at Heidegger’s most explicit description of the contrast between Husserlian reduction and his own method. In the SS 1927 lectures Basic Problems of Phenomenology (intended as a draft of Division III of Part One of the “torso”Footnote ²⁴ that is Being and Time), Heidegger writes that in speaking of phenomenological reduction he is “adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent” (Reference HeideggerBPP 21). He continues:

Heidegger goes on to claim that, in addition to phenomenological reduction, he employs two other methodological devices: phenomenological construction and phenomenological destruction. I won’t have anything to say about phenomenological construction. Phenomenological destruction, however, is relevant to the present project in two ways. First, it is a central feature of Heidegger’s attempt to inject hermeneutical concepts into phenomenology, which I will explore in the final section. Second, and relatedly, it bears on the question of whether Heidegger’s phenomenology is a mere “philosophical anthropology,” and thereby to the question of whether he employs the method of reduction.

Husserl, recall, accuses Heidegger of anthropologism. Heidegger, however, claims that his project is distinct from both empirical and philosophical anthropology. Regarding empirical anthropology, he writes:

And on philosophical anthropology, he writes:

Heidegger seems to pursue this “complete ontology” or “metaphysics of Dasein”Footnote ²⁵ in lectures after Being and Time, where he mentions inquiries focused on Dasein’s embodiment, sexuality, and place within “beings as a whole.”

Nevertheless, as we’ll see in the final section, Heidegger does recognize a role for anthropology – specifically, ethnological studies of “primitive” peoples – in fundamental ontology.

What these remarks seem to indicate is that Heidegger retains some role for the epoché, to the extent that premises drawn from empirical anthropology, psychology, and biology are inadmissible in developing an analytic of Dasein. Recall that the analytic of Dasein is designed to provide a fundamental ontology, but not a complete philosophical anthropology. That is, Heidegger is interested in structures of Dasein that somehow bear on the question of being. On my reading, developed elsewhere,Footnote ²⁶ this means that Heidegger is asking how ontology is possible, that is, he is asking about the transcendental structures in virtue of which we can have philosophical knowledge of “the being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives” (Reference HeideggerBT 60). (Compare this to Kant’s project of putting metaphysics on the path of a secure science through a critical turn.) Insofar as this inquiry is transcendental (asking about conditions of possibility) and eidetic (concerned with essential features of Dasein), it would seem that Heidegger retains quite a bit of Husserl’s method.

Why, then, does Carman see him as rejecting the method so decisively? The first complaint Carman registers, recall, is that in the case of Dasein, existence cannot be suspended in the way required by the Husserlian eidetic reduction. It’s true that Heidegger claims that existence can’t be bracketed in Dasein’s case, but this strikes me as a red herring. Existenz is a technical term for Heidegger, referring to Dasein’s mode of being. It’s thus trivial to say that Existenz can’t be bracketed in an analytic of Dasein, but that does nothing to show that the general thesis of the natural attitude isn’t still bracketed for Heidegger. Second, Carman claims that Heidegger rejects the transcendental reduction because it shifts attention away from the external world to the internal world of “noeses” and their corresponding “noemata,” a move which courts a kind of skepticism. Carman’s mistake here, I think, is that he presupposes a contentious (and I think false) view of Husserl’s noesis-noema distinction and a related false view of the nature of phenomenological reflection. Carman seems to presuppose the “West Coast” or “Fregean” view of noemata, on which they are abstract senses that “mediate” between the subject and its objects.Footnote ²⁷ On the competing “East Coast” reading, noemata are aspects of objects – in short, their intelligibility.Footnote ²⁸ If the East Coast reading is right, the transcendental reduction is not a turn away from the world toward a subjectivity potentially tragically cut off from the world, but rather a shift in attention from objects’ empirical properties toward their correlation with subjectivity. If Heidegger is asking questions about what it is in virtue of which objects are intelligible to us – answers to which cannot appeal to premises drawn from empirical sciences – this seems to entail that he is taking on board quite a lot of Husserl’s method of reduction.

So why does Heidegger contrast his sense of “phenomenological reduction” with Husserl’s in the passage from the SS 1927 lectures quoted earlier? There he says that, whereas Husserl’s reduction leads back from involvement in the world of things and persons to noetic and noematic structures, his own reduction leads back from entities to their being. An issue that makes this contrast very difficult to understand is that there is significant disagreement in the literature on what Heidegger means by “being,” as I noted in the Introduction. On the intelligibility interpretation, Heidegger uses “Sein” to refer to intelligibility. On the metaphysical realist interpretation, he uses “Sein” in a more-or-less traditional way to refer to the various kinds and categories of entities. I’ve weighed in on this debate elsewhere.Footnote ²⁹ Carman is an intelligibility interpreter. Thus the Heideggerian reduction should be understood for him as shifting attention from entities to their intelligibility. But if a Husserlian noema just is an entity’s intelligibility (as Carman rejects, though wrongly in my view), the gap between Husserl’s reduction and Heidegger’s reduction seems to significantly close.

What if one rejects the intelligibility interpretation (as I do)? It is then important to get clear on what Heidegger means when he says he’s investigating the meaning of being. The question of the meaning of being “asks about being itself insofar as being enters into the intelligibility of Dasein” (Reference HeideggerBT 193). This doesn’t mean that being is intelligibility, but rather that the project of Being and Time is to explain how being becomes intelligible – in other words, how ontology is possible – through an analytic of the ontological questioner. This project would seem to involve the reductions: It aims at discovering essential rather than accidental features of the ontological questioner, pursues a transcendental question, and puts empirical premises out of play.

So far I’ve identified equivalents of Husserl’s epoché and eidetic reduction in Heidegger. We should also ask, though, whether Heidegger would accept or reject Husserl’s particular ways into the reduction. Here it seems likely to me that Heidegger would reject the Cartesian and psychological ways into the reduction. But it’s far less clear that he has any principled objection to the ontological way or “way through the lifeworld.” Indeed, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, it seems to me that the main task of Being and Time is to effect a shift from a description of the lifeworld to the transcendental life that makes it possible, and so “all of Sein und Zeit emerges from Husserl’s suggestion” of a third way into the reduction.

I’ve been arguing that Heidegger’s method in Being and Time involves a bracketing of the ontic sciences (epoché) and a shift from describing real subjects and their comportments to describing the essential features of Dasein (the eidetic reduction). There is one important respect, however, in which Heidegger restricts the scope of the Husserlian reduction. In §60 of Ideas I, Husserl brackets not only empirical sciences but also material eidetic sciences (regional ontologies). In my view, Heidegger’s objection to Husserl (mentioned in §2.2.1) that a world must belong to the pure ego entails that the material eidetic sciences cannot be so bracketed. This is because, insofar as Dasein is essentially being-in-the-world, the analytic of Dasein requires analyses of the world (in the sense of a referential totality of significance) and entities who owe their nature to the world. On this reading, the famous discussion of the being of equipment in Reference HeideggerBT §15 is indispensable to the analytic of Dasein, and so the reductions cannot be as thoroughgoing as Husserl envisions.

This is all far from decisive, but in this section I’ve given reasons to think Heidegger adopts quite a lot of Husserl’s method of reduction, albeit with one noteworthy restriction. We should also ask whether and to what extent he adopts Husserl’s methods of imaginative variation and eidetic seeing. But first, we should take a detour through Husserl’s anti-psychologistic arguments and the seemingly platonic theory of idealities he derives from them. As noted earlier, Martin argues that Heideggerians (Carman, whom he describes as “very unkind to Husserl,” is his main target) owe an account of how Heidegger can justify the modally qualified claims of his phenomenology with appealing to Husserl’s “expensive” “modal objects.” A brief detour into Heidegger’s attitude toward these modal objects is thus called for.

3.2 Platonism

Amie Thomasson (Reference Thomasson2017) writes that “Husserl’s view on essences has led many to dismiss his work as committed to a Platonist ontology of essences and to a mysterious epistemology that holds that we can ‘intuit’ them” (436). At first glance, Heidegger seems to number among such detractors.

Husserl distinguishes between ideal (atemporal, or in later works “omnitemporal” entities (Reference HusserlEJ §64)) and real (temporal) entities. We must recognize this distinction, he thinks, in order to avoid the pitfalls of logical psychologism. Logic concerns not real psychological occurrences, but ideal facts that, in conjunction with “basic norms,” generate normative constraints on real acts of thought. Throughout his career, Husserl is adamant that rejection of idealities – including logical laws, concepts/meanings, and species (universals) – is due to naturalistic prejudices. Moreover, he holds not only that we can “see” such idealities via a special method but also that intuition of idealities is entirely commonplace. The Logical Investigations is devoted to describing how this is possible:

Husserl’s investigations of meaning, formal ontology, and the structures of intentionality and knowledge are aimed at answering this question. Nor is this concern limited to Husserl’s early “realist” phenomenology. Even after his idealist turn, Husserl insists that no one who rejects idealities can grasp the subject matter of transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, on one reading, transcendental idealism for Husserl just is a commitment to certain idealities, viz., essential modes of givenness (Hopp Reference Hopp2020).

For Husserl, then, recognition of idealities is necessary to avoid psychologism (both logical and transcendentalFootnote ³⁰). In his 1913 doctoral thesis, “The Theory of Judgment in Psychologism,” Heidegger criticizes the theories of judgment of various psychologistic logicians of his day. As Martin (Reference Martin2005) argues, Heidegger’s primary concern in the dissertation is to explain how a single judgmental content can be identified across various acts of judging. Yet even in the dissertation, there are hints that Heidegger is dissatisfied with Husserl’s solution – namely, to posit a sphere of ideal meanings or contents. Indeed, Martin writes that

Martin goes on to claim that Heidegger’s rejection of both psychologistic and metaphysical theories of judgmental content is his first attempt to articulate the “ontological difference”: “The being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (Reference HeideggerBT 26). Although an adequate phenomenology of judgment must respect what Martin calls the “content identity condition,” a third realm is supposed to multiply perplexities. Heidegger is thus seeking a way to affirm Husserl’s (and Frege’s, and many neo-Kantians’) case against psychologism about logic without positing a special kind of object that explains how we can recognize a stable content in a flux of judgmental activity.

Heidegger makes his aversion to the real-ideal distinction clear in Reference HeideggerBT §44, where he claims that “no headway has been made with this problem in over two thousand years” (Reference HeideggerBT 259). He continues:

Heidegger makes this objection in the context of developing his theory of truth as “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit), his spin on the Greek notion of aletheia. It would take us too far afield to get into the details of this view;Footnote ³¹ suffice to say that his main objection in this section is that positing ideal contents sacrifices the directness of not just perception, but also judgment. Heidegger thus seems to be proposing a kind of direct realist theory of judgment. A prima facie problem for such a theory is that it struggles to account for false judgments, just as direct realist theories of perception struggle to account for hallucination. In any case, it does seem clear that Heidegger is keen to develop an account of judgmental content that avoids idealities.

The connection Martin draws between Heidegger’s rejection of idealities and his famous “ontological difference” bears exploring. One way of reading the ontological difference is as a rejection of reification of entities’ essences, natures, ways of existing, or what have you. Kris McDaniel (Reference McDaniel2016) and Howard Kelly (Reference Kelly2014), both of whom read Being and Time as a work of realist metaphysics, cash out the ontological difference in this way. For McDaniel, modes of being are “beings of reason” in the medieval sense – they exist insofar as true judgments can be made about them, but not in a full-fledged way. For Kelly, the ontological difference signals Heidegger’s commitment to Aristotelian conceptualism. I have discussed these views in detail elsewhere.Footnote ³² What matters for our current purposes is that this reading of the ontological difference might offer a clue for how Heidegger could steer the precarious middle ground between psychological and metaphysical accounts of judgmental content. The thought would be that attending to the being of an entity is not attending to an entity separate from it that it instantiates, but rather to attend to the entity in a particular way. On this proposal, since the mode of being of judgment in general is that of disclosure or uncovering, attending to a particular judgment’s content is just attending to its purporting to disclose or uncover an entity, and not an intuition of a separate platonic entity. I’m not sure whether this proposal can be made out, but it does strike me as the kind of strategy Heidegger would pursue for capturing Martin’s “content identity condition.” What exactly Husserl’s theory of idealities and essential seeing entails is itself a matter of considerable controversy and confusion, too; any assessment of whether a Heideggerian critique lands would have to await a judgment on what exactly Husserl’s “platonism” amounts to.Footnote ³³ I can’t pursue these issues further here, but I submit that this is a fertile area for further exploration of how a phenomenologist should think about propositions, properties, and other abstracta.

3.3 Imaginative Variation and Wesensschau

The final questions of this section are whether Heidegger employs Husserl’s methods of imaginative variation and the intuition of essences (Wesensschau). The latter notion was briefly addressed in Section 2, where I noted that Wesensschau for Heidegger is derivative of “existential understanding.” I’ll offer a tentative interpretation of this claim later. First, let me summarize Husserl’s understanding of these methods.

As noted earlier, Husserl believes that we can quite literally be presented with ideal facts and entities. Upon perceiving a red pomegranate, I can shift my attention to its particular redness – that is, its redness moment or trope. From there I can intuit the state of affairs that the pomegranate is red. I can then shift my attention to what these two pomegranates have in common – namely, the species red. And finally, I can intuit necessary facts involving the species red, for example, that nothing can be red and green all over. This last intuition is an example of synthetic a priori knowledge.

The last kind of intuition is achieved through imaginative variation. In order to discover essential features of the species F, I first call up an instance, x, of F in imagination. I then vary features of x arbitrarily, paying attention to whether x remains an instance of F. If I cannot remove a property G while still imagining x as F, this tells me that necessarily, any F is a G. Mutatis mutandis for necessary equivalence, incompatibility, and compatibility. Imaginative variation is thus supposed to be a source of modal knowledge.

As we’ve noted, the idea that we can intuit idealities has struck many as mysterious. The method of imaginative variation has been subject to scrutiny, too. The method has often been accused of circularity (Scanlon Reference Scanlon and Embree1997). The worry is that imaginative variation cannot be the source of modal knowledge, for its success relies on our already possessing an implicit grasp of when something does and when it does not count as an instance of some property. This circularity problem resembles Meno’s paradox of inquiry: either I know the nature of Fness or I don’t; if I do, the method is unnecessary; if I don’t, the method can’t be employed successfully.

We’ve already seen that Heidegger thinks that Husserl’s theory of idealities is an overreaction to logical psychologism. Is there, then, no room in his phenomenology for Wesensschau? Certainly the intuition of essences cannot be understood in the Heideggerian context as the grasp of what Martin calls “modal objects.” But there is reason to think a modified form of the Husserlian method is still quietly at work in Being and Time.

In the SS 1925 lectures History of the Concept of Time – which Theodore Kisiel sees as a first, phenomenological (rather than existential) draft of Being and Time (Reference HeideggerHCT xvii) – Heidegger surveys the three fundamental discoveries of phenomenology: intentionality, categorial intuition, and the “original sense of the apriori.” The second two discoveries are linked: categorial intuition is the means by which the a priori is grasped. By “original sense of the apriori,” Heidegger means to reject a Kantian understanding of the a priori as “a feature of the subjective sphere” (Reference HeideggerHCT 73).Footnote ³⁴ Instead, for him the a priori is concerned with the being of entities, and he sees phenomenology as returning us to the sense of the a priori at work in Parmenides’s and Plato’s ontologies. Anticipating a famous line in Being and Time, Heidegger claims that the investigation of categorial structure (being) must proceed via categorial intuition: “scientific ontology is nothing but phenomenology” (Reference HeideggerHCT 72).

Many of Heidegger’s most sustained discussions of methodology occur in the lectures leading up to Being and Time, especially lectures during the early Freiburg period. His most distinctive methodological concepts, for example, formal indicationFootnote ³⁵ and phenomenological destruction, are worked out in detail in these lectures. While method has retreated from front stage in Being and Time – for example, Heidegger mentions “formal indication” but without elaborating on the notion (Reference HeideggerBT 152) – reading that work in concert with the early method-focused lectures can often help shed light on the strategy of the later project. In an illuminating endnote to Being and Time, Heidegger echoes his praise for Husserl’s fundamental discoveries:

Here again we see an opposition to a subjective (constructivist) understanding of the a priori, as well as the suggestion that an a priori scientific philosophy will be a “genuine empiricism.” A “genuine empiricism,” I take it, is one that accesses the a priori using the “tools” Husserl gave us – namely, categorial intuition.

If I’m right that Heidegger still thinks of himself as employing categorial intuition in Being and Time, can we locate examples? Kris McDaniel (Reference McDaniel2013) suggests, I think plausibly, that “Heidegger follows Husserl in holding that essential features are given” (343). McDaniel argues that in the experience of tool breakdown, “[t]he metaphysical dependence of this wooden thing from me and my will, desires, beliefs, is made apparent…” (McDaniel Reference McDaniel2013, 343). The hammer, on the other hand, is given as constitutively dependent on our practices. McDaniel concludes that for Heidegger no ready-to-hand entity is identical to any present-at-hand entity, and moreover that Heidegger establishes this claim via something like Wesensschau.

I think Heidegger’s discussion of anxiety can be read as another place where Wesensschau is at work. In contrast to fear, which is “ontic” in that it is directed at a particular entity, anxiety is “ontological”: it is directed at Dasein’s being. In particular, “Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious” (Reference HeideggerBT 232). We can’t get into the weeds about the methodological role of anxiety and authenticity here,Footnote ³⁶ but it is noteworthy that anxiety, like tool breakdown, seems to be an experience through which the essence, nature, or being of some entity is revealed. Indeed, anxiety is itself a kind of existential breakdown – that is, a breakdown in our everyday way of functioning, in which we are absorbed in the world of the “crowd” rather than “individualized” in the experience of not being at home (uncanniness).

Even if Heidegger does employ Wesensschau, the fact remains that he sees it as derivative of “existential understanding.” What I want to explore in the remainder of this section is whether this instance of the derivativeness claim can help make headway on the challenge Martin poses to Heideggerians: to account for the modal force of Heidegger’s claims without appeal to modal objects. As a warm-up to meeting this challenge, let’s look briefly at a contemporary account of modal knowledge that similarly tries to dispense with modal objects. Thomasson (Reference Thomasson2020) rejects what she calls modal descriptivism, according to which the function of modal discourse is to describe the modal parts of reality. On her competing modal normativist view, the function of modal discourse is to “enable us to make explicit our ways of reasoning with rules,” in particular, semantic rules (Thomasson Reference Thomasson2020, 81).

Similarly, for Heidegger, ontology involves a making-explicit of the pre-ontological understanding of being: “… whenever an ontology takes for its theme entities whose character of being is other than that of Dasein, it has its own foundation and motivation in Dasein’s own ontical structure, in which a pre-ontological understanding of being is comprised as a definite characteristic” (Reference HeideggerBT 33). What is made explicit by the modal claims of ontology for Heidegger are not semantic rules, as they are for Thomasson, but rather an implicit grasp of the modal profiles of entities that Heidegger takes to be transcendental conditions of their showing up in experience. Haugeland (Reference Haugeland and Rouse2013) makes this connection between the understanding of being and modality explicit: “Disclosing the being of entities involves grasping them in terms of the distinction between what is possible and impossible for them” (196). If one prefers, like Crowell (Reference 61Crowell2013), to think of these conditions in normative terms, we get something even closer to Thomasson’s modal normativism – though, again, what modal claims make explicit on this model are prelinguistic conditions of the intelligibility of entities rather than semantic rules.

In the Sophist lectures of WS 1924–5, Heidegger analogizes his method to the Socratic theory of recollection. This is noteworthy when considering Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl’s method. Recall that the method of imaginative variation has been accused of a circularity reminiscent of Meno’s paradox of inquiry. The theory of recollection, of course, is Socrates’s response to this paradox: I can recognize a true definition of F when I see it by recollecting my implicit but forgotten knowledge of F. Similarly, if the intuition of essences is grounded in existential understanding, a vicious circle is avoided because imaginative variation involves the making-explicit of an implicit grasp of entities’ modal profiles – a grasp that is necessary for me to have a world at all.Footnote ³⁷

This is all pretty loose and impressionistic, and it remains to be seen whether such an approach could work as a general theory of modal knowledge. If it can be made to work, though, it would both help us understand Heidegger’s claim that Wesensschau is grounded in existential understanding and go some way toward meeting Martin’s challenge. Two last remarks on the proposed view. First, as noted in Section 2, in later works Husserl claims that pre-predicative experience involves “typical precognition,” which could be interpreted as playing a similar role to Heidegger’s understanding of being in explaining the source of modal knowledge. Second, notice that in praising Husserl’s “genuine philosophical empiricism,” Heidegger also notes that the “phenomenal basis” for such an empiricism needs to be properly prepared. Here, I believe, Heidegger is signaling the importance of reflecting on the presuppositions of one’s phenomenological description. And this brings us to a consideration of Heidegger’s hermeneutical turn in phenomenology, which is the topic of the next and final section.

4.1 The Hermeneutical Situation

For Heidegger, all experience is interpretive in the sense that it involves an “as” structure: entities are experienced as such-and-such. In the case of equipment, this means that they are experienced in terms of their “in-order-to” (Um-zu) or function. This experience-as is a kind of interpretation, which is a development or making-explicit of our background understanding of being. Interpretation involves a “fore-structure” with three components: a “fore-having,” “fore-sight,” and a “fore-conception.” Lafont summarizes these three components as follows: “interpretation is always relative to a particular context, perspective, and vocabulary” (Lafont Reference 63Lafont, Dreyfus and Wrathall2005, 277). Lafont gives examples of each element of the fore-structure: Our background understanding of a “totality of involvements” is a fore-having; the understandings associated with different modes of being (readiness-to-hand, presence-at-hand, existence, or care) are foresights; and concepts associated with particular understandings of being (e.g., in the case of presence-at-hand, substance) are fore-conceptions.

This theory of interpretation is supposed to hold quite generally, whether the interpretation is textual, ontological, historical, or natural scientific. On textual interpretation he writes:

Yet this entails neither that our fore-conceptions are unquestionable, nor that they are not beholden to the text being interpreted. Here is where the notion of a hermeneutic circle becomes important. On the one hand, Heidegger holds that something (a text, in this case) can only become intelligible in terms of a “projection” – an interpretive hypothesis, let’s say. Yet there’s nothing to guarantee that any given projection can be shorn up – this depends on whether it discloses what’s already there in the text. Heidegger notes that the fore-conception of an interpretation “can be drawn from the entity itself, or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being”; moreover, the fore-conception can be held “with finality or with reservations” (Reference HeideggerBT 191). I take this to mean that the circular structure of interpretation works as follows: I come to the text by projecting an initial interpretive hypothesis; I then see whether the text bears out my hypothesis, perhaps making small adjustments or abandoning the hypothesis altogether as the work of interpretation proceeds; I then continue interpreting in terms of my new “projection”; rinse and repeat.

Let’s look at some toy examples. As I read a work of literature, if I’m interested in understanding the author’s artistic plan rather than merely following the train of events described in the narrative, I form expectations for how the narrative can unfold depending on what I think the author is trying to accomplish – this is my “projection.” My projection will determine the significance within the whole that I assign to particular scenes. But my projection is beholden to the text itself: At some point the narrative might unfold in a way that I simply cannot make sense of with my interpretive hypothesis. I then adjust my projection: I thought this was a novel about the wrongs of colonialism, but it’s really about the moral indifference of the universe (or whatever). I now forge ahead with my new projection, which might be a key to unlock the deep significance of the work or blinders preventing me from seeing the work for what it is.

Second, consider interpreting a philosophical text. What lights up for an interpreter depends in large part upon the conceptual repertoire she brings to the text: a stock of philosophical concepts and questions, a map of the logical space of possible positions on a problem, background historical context (philosophical or otherwise), and so on. Especially in interpreting texts from philosophical, cultural, and historical contexts other than one’s own, it can often happen that the text is recalcitrant to one’s “fore-conception”: parts of the text simply won’t yield to interpretation. If one is interested in seeing the text for what it is, this should motivate a search for a new set of interpretive tools – a new “fore-conception.” Maybe I need to learn more about scholastic logic, or ancient Roman medicine, or the political and military dynamics of the Zhou dynasty, or what have you, in order to see the problems that are actually exercising the author – problems which might not be ours. Or my “fore-conception” might be self-consciously reconstructive: I can approach the text with a set of tools designed not to unlock what issues moved its author, but rather to uncover insights for addressing issues that move me.Footnote ³⁹ But again, interpretation can be circular: The text can motivate me to adjust my sense of the kinds of questions I should be asking.

How does this theory of interpretation apply to phenomenology and ontology? Recall Heidegger’s praise for the “genuine philosophical empiricism” of Husserl’s theory of the a priori I highlighted in the last section. The praise came with a caveat: “a priori research requires that the phenomenal basis be properly prepared.” He continues: “The horizon which is closest to us, and which must be made ready for the analytic of Dasein, lies in its average everydayness” (Reference HeideggerBT 75n). “Average everydayness” is a hermeneutical situation, so Heidegger’s point here is that certain phenomena only appear to a properly situated ontological researcher. This is both a basic tenet of phenomenology and a general feature of inquiry. Merleau-Ponty writes of perspective: “Although it may be the means that objects have of concealing themselves, it is also the means that they have of unveiling themselves” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty2012, 70). And it should be clear that researchers in the sciences gain access to their objects of study only in virtue of their “hermeneutical situations,” which comprise sophisticated sets of methods, concepts, equipment, and so on.

Heidegger is critical of Husserl, however, for failing to adopt the right hermeneutical situation. His worry is that Husserl’s hermeneutical situation – one associated with a “theoretical attitude” – prejudices Husserl’s phenomenology and ontology in favor of “derivative” comportments and modes of being. I already cast some doubt on this derivativeness claim in Section 2, but what’s important for this section is what sort of rethinking of Husserlian phenomenology Heidegger’s theory of interpretation entails. It seems to me that Ricoeur overstates the extent to which Heidegger’s hermeneutics requires him to unseat intuition from its foundational role in phenomenology. The purpose of interrogating the presuppositions of ontological inquiry is precisely to ensure that we get the right objects into intuitive view. Unless we do this, we can “wind up actually intending the object in some manner, but a kind of surrogate will, without explanation, have been inserted into one’s intuitions and concepts” (Reference Heidegger and McNeillPW 9). For example, suppose we want to give an ontology of the self; the worry is that with the wrong hermeneutical situation, we can wind up describing some “surrogate”: the person in Locke’s forensic sense, or the human organism, or a mere physical aggregate. This example is especially apt because in Division II Heidegger explicitly shifts the hermeneutical situation of his analysis to get more and more features of Dasein – those relevant to selfhood, authenticity, personal identity, historicity, and so on. – into view (Reference HeideggerBT 276–7).

An especially potent source of prejudice, Heidegger thinks, is the history of ontology. This is why he calls for a “destruction of the history of ontology.” This project is an application of a more general theory of phenomenological destruction, which is the topic of the next section.

4.2 Phenomenological Destruction

In the Introduction to Being and Time Heidegger announces that Part Two will contain “destructions” of three episodes from the history of ontology: Kant’s doctrine of the schematism, Descartes’s ‘cogito sum’, and Aristotle’s discussion of time in Physics D. Although Part Two was never completed, Heidegger did at least complete the destruction of Kant in the 1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where he pursues a “violent” interpretation of Kant’s theory of imagination.Footnote ⁴⁰

Heidegger thinks a phenomenological destruction is called for because fore-conceptions inherited from the history of ontology tend to hamstring our analyses without us even knowing:

Heidegger claims that in ancient Greek ontology, both ourselves and being in general were understood in terms of the world, and that this outlook has hardened into a tradition that has been mostly uncritically passed down through the Middle Ages, Descartes, and Hegel. To destroy this ontology is, however, not to simply discard it. Rather, it is to display the “birth certificate” of ontological concepts – to trace the concepts back to the genuine experiences from which they derive (Reference HeideggerBT 44).

I think it’s easier to get a grip on phenomenological destruction by looking to Heidegger’s discussion of the method in his SS 1920 lecture course The Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression. There Heidegger employs the method as a way of teasing out the ambiguity in certain fundamental concepts of philosophy. He explains the method as one of meaning clarification:

The idea here is that certain fundamental concepts – for example, history, world, death – are ambiguous between senses referring to different “object areas,” that is, modes of being. So, for example, “history” can refer to a domain of scientific inquiry, the object of that inquiry, or a feature of a people or form of life; ‘world’ can refer to the totality of present-at-hand entities, or a particular region (the world of mathematics), or one’s milieu, or a referential totality; “death” can refer to biological perishing, or demise, or the possibility of the impossibility of existence. The point of phenomenological destruction is to tease these senses apart and display their “birth certificates,” again so that “surrogates” aren’t inserted into one’s intuitions and concepts.Footnote ⁴¹

A technique that works in tandem with phenomenological destruction is the analysis of concepts drawn not from the philosophical tradition, but rather from other ways in which “Dasein expresses itself” (Reference HeideggerBT 262). Heidegger thinks that, suitably interpreted, concepts drawn from religious and mythical sources can counteract some of the distortive tendencies endemic to the ontological tradition. The idea is that the inertia of tradition inherited from the Greeks – perhaps the tendency to interpret everything, including ourselves, in terms of the concept of substance – can be counteracted by looking to the ways that religious or mythic Dasein have described themselves. The next three sections survey some examples of this technique.

4.3 Religious Sources: Luther, Augustine, and Paul

Shortly after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger’s student Karl Löwith described the work as a “disguised theology” (Kisiel Reference Kisiel1993, 423). This, if true, would entirely undermine the project of the book to provide a scientific phenomenology and ontology. Theodore Kisiel expresses precisely this worry when commenting on Heidegger’s admission that his analysis of authenticity is guided by “a definite ontical way of taking existence, a factical ideal of Dasein” (Reference HeideggerBT 358): “It opens up the old Pandora’s box of worldviews which can contaminate the very roots of a philosophy claiming to outstrip all worldviews” (Kisiel Reference Kisiel1993, 430). And as we’ll see shortly, the “factical ideal” of Being and Time is plausibly Augustinian and Pauline. How, then, can Heidegger rely on “ontic” and “existentiell” sources – those oriented toward particular beings (God) and ways of life (the Christian life) – without undermining his “ontological” and “existential” ambitions?

Heidegger’s answer to this question is found in the 1927 lecture “Phenomenology and Theology.” He starts this talk by clarifying that theology is a positive science. This means that it takes as given a particular subject matter – namely, the relation to Christ revealed through faith. Philosophy investigates the ontological foundations of faith in the following sense. Christian concepts – sin, faith, grace, and so on – have an “existentiell” content, that is, a content that sets the Christian life apart from the non-Christian. However, Heidegger claims that they also “include a content that is … existentielly powerless … they are ontologically determined by a content that is pre-Christian and that can be grasped purely rationally” (PT 51). The task of philosophy vis-à-vis theology, then, is to tease apart this ontological/existential content, that is, content that characterizes Dasein as such, from the doctrinal and practical commitments that characterize the specifically Christian life. Thus Heidegger can say in Being and Time that he is not making any “authoritarian pronouncements” about which ways of life “from an existentiell point of view, are possible or binding” (Reference HeideggerBT 360).

Let’s illustrate with three examples. First, Heidegger holds that the existential content of sin is existential guilt. Although he doesn’t mention Luther explicitly in his discussion of guilt in Being and Time, the influence of Luther on his thought is well-documented (see, e.g., the 1924 lecture “The Problem of Sin in Luther”). Heidegger defines existential guilt as our “being-the-basis of a nullity” (Reference HeideggerBT 331). What this means is that, in choosing a “potentiality-for-being” – that is, in taking a stand on who one is – one necessarily negates other possibilities. Existential guilt is a constant state of Dasein – “Dasein as such is guilty” – and it is the condition of the possibility of moral guilt or indebtedness (Reference HeideggerBT 332). Conscience calls us to face our existential guilt and thereby calls us to authenticity. The details of Heidegger’s account of authenticity don’t matter for our purposes. What’s important is that Heidegger claims to uncover existential content – that is, content that characterizes Dasein as such – underlying the Christian notion of sin.

Second, in the SS 1921 lectures “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” Heidegger analyzes Augustine’s account of temptation in Book X of the Confessions. Daniel Dahlstrom (Reference Dahlstrom2009b) provides a helpful account of the convergence between Augustine’s treatment of temptation and Heidegger’s account of authenticity. In particular, Augustine’s account of pride as secular ambition is plausibly a source of Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s tendency to fall into the public intelligibility of das Man. This tendency is a threat to our self-possession: for Augustine our continence, and for Heidegger our authenticity. As Dahlstrom notes, there are limits to the parallel between the Confessions and Being and Time: whereas Augustine analyzes the good life as one in which love is not disordered but rather ordered according to an objective ordo amoris, Heidegger is hesitant about this neoplatonic aspect of Augustine’s view.Footnote ⁴² This difference notwithstanding, Dahlstrom concludes: “… if we come to the conclusion that we need to spell out the ‘ontical way of taking authentic existence,’ the ‘factical ideal of Dasein’s ontic ideal’ presupposed by Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of Dasein’s existence, need we look any further than his reading of Confessions X?” (Dahlstrom Reference Dahlstrom2009b, 265).

Finally, consider Denis McManus’s (Reference McManus2015) illuminating discussion of Heidegger’s early lectures on St. Paul. In his letters to the Thessalonians, Paul criticizes those who incessantly brood over when the Parousia will come. As McManus explains, what these brooders are seeking is “knowledge of the date by which … one must get one’s house in order” (McManus Reference McManus2015, 250). The request for this knowledge betrays a particular relation to God – in particular, a kind of servile fear of God, rather than a desire to live one’s life standing before God and His judgment. On McManus’s reading, Heidegger transposes these two ways of anticipating the Parousia into two ways of facing one’s own death: “The reason the inauthentic’s ‘brooding’ on the ‘when’ of death ‘weakens’ it is that true readiness for death – like that for the parousia – is not knowing when it will happen but readiness for it to happen at any time” (McManus Reference McManus2015, 260). Just as an authentic comportment toward the Parousia requires a willingness to stand before God and His judgment, authentic comportment toward death requires a willingness to own one’s own judgment.

These summaries of Heidegger’s analyses of religious and theological concepts have of necessity been brief and sketchy, but they nonetheless serve as good examples of the hermeneutical technique I’ve identified. Even the “vague understanding of being” from which ontology begins “may be so infiltrated with traditional theories and opinions about being that these remain hidden sources of the way in which it is prevalently understood” (Reference HeideggerBT 25). Heidegger engages with religious and theological sources as a corrective to this infiltration. The thought is that Christian concepts – sin, pride, the Last Judgment – can be shorn of their specifically Christian content to reveal existential structures – guilt, das Man, being-toward-death – that characterize Dasein as such. He applies this same technique to mythological concepts, to which I now turn.

4.4 Myth and the Confrontation with Cassirer

In Reference HeideggerBT §11 Heidegger remarks on the value of ethnological findings for an analytic of Dasein:

For an instructive example of this approach, we can look at Heidegger’s review of the second volume of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on Mythical Thought. But first, let me give a quick overview of Cassirer’s project.

The three-part The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is Cassirer’s attempt to expand Kant’s critique of reason into a general critique of culture (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2021a, 9). For Cassirer, the human being is not fundamentally a rational animal, but rather an animal symbolicum (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1962, 26). Cassirer develops Kant’s account of the a priori categories of the understanding into a more general account of symbolic forms. Cassirer gives no general definition of symbolic form, but examples include language, myth, art, and science. A symbolic form, in short, is a system of symbols that we use to impose order and meaning on our experience. On Cassirer’s view, the same basic categories – for example, space, time, and causality – take on different “modalities” or “tonalities” depending on which “totality of sense” they belong to (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2021a, 27). The totality of sense characteristic of myth is determined by the “basic opposition” between the sacred and the profane, and this determines the tonality of categories like space and time. Space for myth is not a mathematizable manifold, but rather an oriented structure in which places and directions take on significance in terms of the basic opposition – the sacred space of the cathedral or cloister versus the profane space of the marketplace. Time, too, is given an “accent” or “rhythmic articulation” through the assignment of rites to particular times, holy days, rites of passage, and sabbath (Cassirer Reference Cassirer2021b, 108–9).Footnote ⁴³

Heidegger’s momentous debate with Cassirer over the interpretation of Kant at the Davoser Hochschulkurse in 1929 has been extensively analyzed.Footnote ⁴⁴ Another intriguing moment of the Heidegger-Cassirer confrontation comes in Heidegger’s review of Cassirer’s Mythical Thought. Heidegger focuses on the concept of “mana”: A kind of magical or spiritual force that Cassirer interprets as fundamental to the symbolic form of myth. Heidegger interprets mana in terms of Dasein’s thrownness into a world, that is, the fact that we do not constitute ourselves from the ground up but find ourselves in a world not of our making. A recognition of our thrownness gives all entities “the being-character of overpoweringness,” which is expressed in the notion of mana. Heidegger concludes the review with the following questions: “Which is the constitution of the being of human Dasein as such, such that it comes to its own self only by way of this detour through the world? What do selfhood and independence mean?” (Reference HeideggerKPM 189). Returning to the methodological remark from Reference HeideggerBT §11, we can see that for Heidegger the study of myth highlights a dimension of our existence – thrownness – that he thinks has been overlooked by a tradition oriented toward understanding being in terms of the self-sufficiency or independence (Selbstständigkeit) of a substance. Similarly, in Reference HeideggerBT §42 Heidegger discusses an ancient fable attesting to Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of itself as care. As with religious and theological sources, Heidegger holds that ethnological sources can play a positive role in an analytic of Dasein by combatting the hidden influence of an ossified tradition on our self-interpretation.

4.5 The Force of the Most Elemental WordsFootnote ⁴⁵

For a final example of the hermeneutical technique I’ve been discussing, let’s turn to Heidegger’s “ordinary language philosophy.” The suggestion that Heidegger has an ordinary language philosophy is apt to strike many readers as a howler. Indeed, Heidegger often stretches ordinary language to its breaking point, creating tortured neologisms to try to avoid the connotations of our received philosophical vocabulary. A case in point is the infamous saying Das Nichts selbst nichtet (“the Nothing itself nothings”), which Carnap diagnoses as a metaphysical pseudo-statement devoid of meaning (Carnap Reference Carnap and Sarkar1996).

Yet I think, in keeping with the method of meaning clarification discussed earlier, we can see Heidegger attending to the resonances of ordinary language as a way of combatting the dangers of tradition he highlights. I’ll give three brief examples by way of closing. First, consider the “in” of “being-in-the-world.” Heidegger wants us to resist interpreting this “in” on the model of cup being spatially contained in a cabinet. But fortunately, ordinary language already contains a different sense of “in,” one that captures some kind of involvement, as in when we say, “He is in love” or “She is in a band.” Relatedly, the “world” in “being-in-the-world” is not to be understood as the totality of present-at-hand entities – the physical cosmos – but rather as the various public and private environments we live in. Again, ordinary language contains this sense of “world,” as when we speak of a “man of the world” or the “aristocratic world” (Reference Heidegger and McNeillEG 120). We could also mention Jesus’s remark to his disciplines: “If you were of the world, it would love you as its own” (John 15:18). Finally, consider Heidegger’s distinctive use of “death” as the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all” (Reference HeideggerBT 307). Rather than focusing on death as the perishing of an organism or a person’s demise, Heidegger wants us to focus on the ever-present possibility of no longer being able to take up possibilities for how to live. I think we have something like this in ordinary language when we say, for example, that a relationship is dead. What this expresses is the permanent impossibility of engaging in a certain form of life with another person.

4.6 Summing Up

For Heidegger, “[p]hilosophy will never seek to deny its ‘presuppositions’, but neither may it simply admit them. It conceives them, and it unfolds with more and more penetration both the presuppositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions” (Reference HeideggerBT 358). In this section I have tried to show how this “unfolding” works through discussion of the various components of Heidegger’s hermeneutics: the hermeneutical situation, the hermeneutic circle, phenomenological destruction, and the uses to which he puts religion, ethnology, and ordinary language. The hermeneutical turn is certainly one of Heidegger’s most distinctive, important, and lasting contributions, but I remain unconvinced that it entails the rejection of a conception of phenomenology as a science – that is, as an intuitively grounded description of essential features of subjectivity.