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Man and Worm 28: 197-240, 1995. 197 (~) 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Why students of Heidegger will have to read Emil Lask *

THEODORE KISIEL Department of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb IL 60115, U.S.A.

A truly in-depth understanding of Martin Heidegger's lifelong expression of a debt of gratitude to Emil Lask (1875-1915) has long evaded even the earliest students of Heidegger. The most recent articulation of this puzzlement comes to us from Hans-Georg Gadamer's "Reminiscences on Heidegger's Begin- nings," along with a startling hint and suggestion toward its resolution.l In order to examine Lucien Goldmann's claim that Heidegger's analysis of the environing world in fact stems from Georgy Lukfics, Gadamer turns to the latter's recently discovered Heidelberg Manuscripts, written at a time when Lukfics had been in close contact with Lask. A careful reading of these manuscripts suggests that Lask, in the last two years of his life (1913-15), underwent an anti-idealistic turn by way of a study of American pragmatism, and it is in this context that Lukfics discusses the environing world in terms which are astoundingly similar to those later used by Heidegger in Being and Time. Could it be that Heidegger was privy, by way of third-party infor- mants, to this late development of Lask's thought, which is not particularly in evidence in the posthumously published Collected Writings of Lask?

As of this writing ! have not been able to verify any of these connections. An examination of the posthumous final volume of Lask's Collected Writings, with at least one manuscript dating from as late as 1914 and first published only in 1924, indicates at most only a strong proclivity toward the traditional roots of pragmatism in the practical philosophies of Aristotle and Kant (especially as mediated by Fichte). However, with the recent publication of Heidegger's lecture courses of 1919, the most crucial aspect of Gadamer's tale appears to receive direct verification from the early Heidegger himself: "Lask discovered in the ought and in value, as an experienced ultimate, the world w h i c h . . . was factic. ''2 Thus it seems that, simply on the basis of the works published during Lask's lifetime (later published as the first two volumes of the Collected Writings) available to the young Heidegger (1907-1917), the early Heidegger

* This article was first written in 1988, but never published in its originally intended vehicle. It has over the years been widely circulated as an unpublished manuscript and as such cited in the literature. The present text has been updated and abbreviated somewhat, deleting especially those portions that found their way relatively intact into my The Genesis of Heidegger 's BEING AND TIME.

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(1919-1929) did find some help from Lask in his breakthrough to an "analysis of the environing world" and so to the "hermeneutics of facticity," which Heidegger himself identifies as the very first steps taken toward his opus magnum, Being and Time (hereafter BT). 3 If this is correct, it would prove to be the very first tangible evidence that we have of the direct influence of Lask on the more hermeneutically minded early Heidegger, beyond his obvious influence on the Early Writings (1912-16) 4 of the logically minded young Heidegger.

In approaching the still-puzzling issue of Lask-Heidegger, two recent inter- preters, Istvdn Feher and Steven Crowell, 5 necessarily take their point of departure from the earliest works of the young Heidegger and then leap over to the 1925 lecture course and the works that follow. I do not wish to repeat their excellent labors on the topic, but instead to continue their good work, in a way making it more complex by bringing in the period to which they did not yet have access, namely, Heidegger's courses of 1919, which have just been published. My first aim is to introduce and examine this new material on the question of Lask-Heidegger and so (at least on this issue) to mitigate the outstanding gap between Heidegger's juvenilia (1912-16) and BT (1927). Examination of this intermediate phase should at least fill in the somewhat broader comparisons to which they were forced to resort, adding aspects which their lack of evidence perhaps led them to overlook confirming their comparisons or, if necessary, revising them. I shall at least try to meet their papers halfway, as it were, coming at the issue of the relation Lask-Heidegger more from the perspective of Heidegger himself precisely around the point in time (1919) at which he first truly finds his own voice and begins to articulate his unique hermeneutical approach, setting it off sharply and polemically from the neo-Kantianism with which he had previously allied himself.

As a propaedeutic to this task it will be necessary especially to analyse the young Heidegger's habilitation work (1915-16) in some detail, in which the influence of the neo-Kantians, especially that of their "point-man," Lask, was at its peak. The very length of this exegesis is a record of the repeated surprise over how much latent Lask is in fact contained in the habilitation work and how important this proves to be for Heidegger's immediate conceptual development.

I. Preliminaries

A summary of some of the more salient points of the articles by Crowell and Feh6r, especially the ones upon which I hope to build, will serve to spell out the dimensions of the problem, with an eye toward delimiting and focusing a

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more manageable area of discussion and establishing some of the leitmotifs which will follow. I wish to highlight two major themes for discussion:

1. Crowell's article raises the question of the nature of philosophy in relation to its basic domain, whether its "logic of logic" is to be regarded as an aletheiology, a logology, or a phenomenology. When Heidegger equates all of this with ontology, he is of course at once posing the question of the convergence (or in medieval terms, "convertibility") of being with aletheia and logos (which Heidegger quite early on prefers to translate "semantically"_ as "meaning" rather than as "reason"). In comparing this original domain of the Urwissenschafi (primal science) of philosophy, both Crowell and Feh6r uncover similarities in terminology between Lask and Heidegger which begin to suggest how deeply Lask's terms have infiltrated the language of BT: Lask's prejudicative, pre-oppositional "panarchy of the logos" is a domain of meaning and not of beings; whence the ontological difference, in which beings or objects are "in truth" (intelligibility, clarity). This original domain is structured by the Urverhiiltnis (primal relationship) of categorial form and matter, which for Heidegger (as we shall see) reflects a truncated noematic version of the phenomenological Urverhdltnis ofintentionality. The categorial form reflects or indicates a certain Bewandtnis (relevance, bearing) o f the matter, the "circumstances" or "appliant implications" of the matter itself, just as in BT the tool is defined by its Bewandtnis (appliance) in and through the referential structures of the environing world. Finally, the priority of this original realm is such that even the cognition of it always contains a precognitive lived element, such that it is simply "1 ived through" and not itself known. I live in the category as in a context such that I simply experience its illumination; I thus "live in its truth. ''6

When such terms recur in Heidegger, a prior reading of Lask can only add to and deepen our understanding of their sense as well as their source. But, of course, Lask is no longer read - whence the specific examples of the subsidiary theme of Oblivion in scholarship, surfacing by and large in several footnotes. And so most of us are typically unaware of how much latent Lask permeates the fabric of Heidegger's texts at this time. This applies especially to the habilitation work of 1916, where the half-dozen overt references to Lask do not begin to convey the extent to which he had already left his mark on Heidegger's way of thinking about things logical and ontological] The following is accordingly a first attempt at bringing the shadowy figure of Lask, this "spearhead" of the neo-Kantian tradition lurking in the background of Heidegger's development, out into the open. It is a plaidoyer for reading Lask, from which you too might be rewarded, in baffling your way through some tortuous terminology in, say, Heidegger's Kant-book or his early lecture courses on logic, with the experience of ddj~-vu.

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2. Feh6r's article, "The Problem of Irrationality and the Theory of Cate- gories," in part attempts to identify the problem situation in neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy out of which Heidegger's thought arose: the resistance to Hegel's panlogism by insistence on the insuperable irrationality of the "matter" given to thought. Indeed, Lask himself quite early identified the locus classicus of this problematic in his dissertation of 1902, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (in Volume I of the Collected Writings): Fichte was the first to explore the various polar pairs in terms of the "hiatus irrationalis" (I, 84, 173ffetpassim), the abyss between the empirical and the apriori, the individual and the universal, quidfacti and quidjuris, intuition and concept. Fichte also saw the problem of the "irrational" individual in its full panoply of possibilities, not just the minimal epistemological sense which starts with the multiplicity of "bare" sense data, or the so-called "brute" facts of history, but also the more cultural senses: the historical individual in its fullest manifestations of freedom and human emotions (the hero, genius, artist: I, 17, 196, 205ff), the historical deeds of the Divine revealing Itself (I, 226ff, 240ff) through interventions in human history in what is since called a Heils- geschichte. These more surcharged manifestations of"irrationality or "brute facticity" (I, 173; 284: so Fichte) thus mark the entry into history of the unexplainably new, unprecedented and creative (II, 206, 238).

The degree to which this tradition is now forgotten - Oblivion again! - is measured by the fact that scholars have only recently discovered that the locus classicus of the early Heidegger's crucial term Faktizitdt is indeed this neo- Kantian tradition and can be traced back to the above-mentioned discussion in Fichte's later period (I, 173, 179, 188,214, 235,238; 284, 290). 8 The further task of evaluating what significance this historical root has for Heidegger's sense of facticity will clearly have to reckon with Lask as well as Natorp, Rickert and Windelband.

Noteworthy in this very same context of the historical problem-situation motivating Heidegger's thought is a likewise nearly forgotten (!) French study of early 20th-century German philosophy, which treats Lask at some length along with the ascendant school of phenomenologists. The study was written by the Fichte scholar, Georges Gurvitch, and appeared in 1930, at a time when phenomenology had not yet completely overpowered neo-Kantianism. 9 Gurvitch finds the irrational hiatus manifesting itself in Husserl's positivism of material essences ineluctably irreducible to one another (65), in Scheler's emotional intuition of value essences (Chap. 2), in Lask's moment of logical nudity even of logical (categorial) forms (164f), in the alogical dispersion of forms through their matter, thereby making forms themselves opaque to one another (169 = Lask II, 63). All of these currents, and more, fuse in Heidegger's hermeneutics of existence (210), for example, in the irreducible


equiprimordiality of existential categories, in the thrownness of emotive disposition, especially in the uncanniness of Angst. "Anguish is the sentiment of the abyss, of the impenetrable and opaque hiatus irrationalis in which human existence is plunged" (215f), out of which the finitude of its radical temporality is reflected (229).

2. Propaedeutic to1919

The high praise of Lask that we find in the juvenilia continues unabated - if anything, it escalates in philosophical circles in a postwar atmosphere of the heroization of"fallen" philosophers like AdolfReinach and Lask- in Heideg- ger's lecture courses of 1919. This is in striking contrast to the sharp polemic mounted here against the major representatives of neo-Kantianism, Windel- band, Rickert and Natorp, in order to promote the cause of phenomenology. In siding with Lask against Lask's teacher, Heinrich Rickert, Heidegger notes that he was already expressing such criticisms as a student in Rickert's sem- inars in 1912-14 in reports on Lask's "Theory of Judgment," and "encoun- tering great resistance" from Ricl~ert. l° This autobiographical testimonial indicates how early and how intensively Lask began to exercise his catalytic function, for which Heidegger both in his youth and old age repeatedly credits him, of mediating between Rickert (thus "back to Kant") and the then already powerful influences of Aristotle and Husserl (that is, of his Logical Investigations; Ideasldid not appear until 1913). In his 1919 course on "Phe- nomenology and Transcendental Value-Philosophy," Heidegger observes that Lask "went beyond Rickert under the guidance of insights from the Logical Investigations, without however taking the step into phenomenology," even though he was well along on the way toward it. I I

What Heidegger is presenting to his students here was in fact common knowledge in 1918. Lukfics, for example, alludes to the phenomenological aspects of Lask in his obituary of that year. And Gurvitch in his 1930 study makes these aspects explicit: Lask's expansion of Kant's transcendental logic beyond Aristotle's categories of nature dictates that such categories themselves must have categories in order to become objects of knowledge. In turn, such categories of categories or "forms of forms" imply a precognitive moment in which the initial forms first present themselves as simply given in their "logical nudity," in being lived (vdcu) before they are known: ergo Husserl's categorial intuition (Gurvitch 160f= Lask II, 73ff, 126ff, 190). The very language of Lask's descriptions of the categorial forms enveloping (but not absorbing) their matter cannot help but remind Gurvitch of an objective counterpart of Husserl's intentionality: The forms are essentially in need of completion and fulfillment (erj~llungsbediirfiig); their basic attribute is that

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of pointing toward (Hinweisen) and being valid of(Hingelten) their matter; they are through and through and nothing but a relation, a Hin-; thus the primal region of Logos casting light upon its manifold "something" can be described as a Strahlenbiischel von Relationen, a bundle of rays of relations (Gurvitch 166f-- Lask II, 58ff, 173ff, 330, 367-374).

1912: And Heidegger? The very first thing that the young Heidegger found in Lask, announced in the superlatives of first discovery in his 1912 review of "Recent Studies in Logic," is the demand to situate philosophy clearly and squarely in the Third Reich of the Logos as against that of entities, whether 1) physical or 2) metaphysical. Here we have the first appearance in Hei- degger not only of the theme of the ontological difference but also that of its oblivion "in the entire course of the history of philosophy," which since Plato typically lapsed into "hypostatizing the [3] logical into [2] metaphysical entities." Lask's theory of categories is to be included among the great efforts of the past for having clearly singled out this domain of the logic of philosophy which, as a "logic of logic" whose categories are always "forms of forms," of course still bears upon the material-constitutive logic of nature (structured, say, according to Aristotle's categories of being) as well as upon the more remote and general formal-reflexive logic. In relation to the former, the constitutive categories of philosophy are always insuperably paired with the constitutive categories of being (nature) in a dual seriality (Zweireihigkeit) whose very union of form and matter is the source of meaning or better, is itself meaning. This constitutive relation in turn secures the basis for the more remote general-reflexive categories, beginning with the self-identical "something in general," which are without substantive or constitutive content since they are generated strictly in the sphere of the subjectivity. 12 (The contrast offered by the reflexive category will play a crucial role in the next decade of Heidegger's methodological development of the "formal indication.") Although perceiving the advantages of the sharp separation of logic from grammar in the logical interpretation of intractable grammatical forms such as the impersonal sentence, Heidegger will eventually, in a continuing endeavor to remain in touch with the concreteness of the human situation, oppose Lask's "metagrammatical subject-predicate theory" as he expands his own investigations beyond a theory of categories to a theory of grammatical significations in the habilitation work of 1916.13

1915-16: The habilitation work represents the high point of Lask's influence on Heidegger. The reader steeped in Lask senses it even in the casual use of terms: das All des Denkbaren as the scope of any system of categories (154); Strahlenbiischel (277), Formgehalt (249, 265, 322), Gegenstands- bemgichtigung (160, also 110, 119, 122), Herrsehafisbereich (dominion: 161, 179f, 256) and finally the study of the "dominion of logical form" (325), a


somewhat more open reference to the subtitle ofLask's Logik der Philosophie. More in the mainstream of the argument of the habilitation, which applies the insights of modem logic to a Scotian theory of categories and speech significations, is the repeated Laskian insistence (153,205,229f), reinforcing Scotus, that Aristotle's categories do not constitute the totality of categories but only a particular class of a particular domain of actuality, that of the real; that the meaning-giving acts of a speaker (especially if they are taken to be 'real') as well as his signifying intentions (either thought or spoken) as opposed to the "valid" ideal objects of such intentions belong to different domains, each with its own governing regional category (especially validity versus reality) differing in meaning from other such region-constituting forms; if these different domains have their own logic, then there must be a logic which unifies and differentiates them, and this "logic of logic" (230) will in turn have its own categories. What then is the master "category of categories," "the ultimate and the highest, behind which we cannot inquire any further" (157: a formula that recalls Dilthey's regarding life), the moment that pervades any cognizable object, "objectness as such" (158)? Fusing the insights of his neoscholastic and transcendentalist mentors, the young Hei- degger answers with ens commune ut maxime scibile (156f), the primary transcendental which is convertible with unum, verum, bonum (158), the "something in general" (159) "which is the condition of the possibility of knowing any object whatsoever" (157), in short, the matter of a reflexive category!

Reflexive Categories. Among the neo-Kantians, Lask especially has studied the reflexive category (e.g. identity, difference, unity, multiplicity, plurality: Heidegger [277] refers to Lask II, 137ff). Its reference is to anything there is. It can thus be called the es gibt (II, 130, 142,155, 162ff, 254), that highest and purest form which is at once the thinnest and emptiest, which buys transparency at the price of depletion (II, 158, 10 68), which is "parasitical" (II, 163) upon the constitutive forms and is "created by the subjectivity" (277). The negative terms suggest that the reflexive category would be a prime example of the hyperreflection and excessive intellectualizing that Lask traces back to the Greeks (II, 202ff). But as a "mere" surrogate of constitutive categories and dependent upon them, the reflexive category plays an indispensable albeit subordinate role in the field of categories. After all, Lask observes at one point in their defence, what would we do without words like "and" and (!) "other"? (II, 164). Of course Lask, who seems inclined to include the mathematical among the reflexive categories (II,142, 167), might therefore be more predisposed to be positive about them, whereas the young Heidegger devotes many pages (162, 173-193) to distinguishing the transcendental one (= reflexive identity) from the numerical one.

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Heidegger thus links this neo-Kantian discussion with that of the medieval transcendental unum. Any ens or 'something' is at once one with itself and different from anything else. Any thing is therefore a relation (!) of "heterothesis" (Rickert's term), and this identity and difference which makes the one and the many "equally primordial" (gleich urspriinglich !: 158, 166, 172, 323) is in fact the minimal order or "determinateness" necessary in order to apprehend any object at all (160, 166, 172f). At this most primitive level of (pre-objective!) givenness, "there is (es gibt) no object, no object is given, when the One and the Other is not given" (173 citing Rickert); when we think of an object, we at once think of the one and the other. Even the barest "thing," here the pure logical object, is never isolated; "in itself" it is always already a relation in context.

These minimal logical relations recur in the grammar of the noun and verb, e.g. in the simple sentence ens est. Equiprimordial with the noun ens is the state-of-affairs esse. "Every object has its relational nexus (Bewandtnis), even if it is only a matter of being identical with itself and different from something else" (323). The apparent tautology ens est necessarily involves a heterology; a pure monism without opposites (with its implicit non-esse) cannot even be thought (Rickert).

Invoking the unum which belongs to every ens adds nothing new to the object - based on a privation, "not the other," it has no positive content (163)

- and yet it brings a clarity to the object by imparting some initial order to it, without which it could not be thought or apprehended (166). In short, it imparts "form," removing the object from the realm of heterogeneity or "absolute multiplicity," that limit concept at the outskirts of any theory of categories (197). At this most primitive level of consideration, we most clearly see the first function of the much bandied word"form" in a theory of categories. Form means order (222), logos. "When we say that empirical reality manifests fi particular categorial structure, this means that it is formed, determined, ordered. The natural environing world ( U m w e l t ) . . . is already categorially d e t e r m i n e d . . , it stands in an order" (197). Logicians accordingly like to speak of the "logical place" of a phenomenon. Any cognizable phenomenon requires a particular place according to its content (yielding its Gehaltssinn), a particularization or determination which, as an order, is itself only possible on the basis of a relational system (yielding its Bezugssinn). "Whatever has its logical place fits in a particular way into a relational whole" (154).

Adding the supernatural to the natural world brings us squarely into the medieval lifeworld (Erlebniswelt: 351) whose order of analogy is far more complex than the univocal relations articulated by the reflexive categories above (197ff). Scotus went further and regarded this world to be primarily and radically composed of individuals each with their own form of individual-


ity (haecceitas), their own "this-here-now" (Daseint), where the individuating categories of place and time suggest neither a univocal relational system nor an analogically graded world, but a "boundless multiplicity" or "heterogeneous continuum" (Rickert) of equiprimordial "irreducible ultimates" which borders on the equivocal (194t). And yet the young Heidegger insists that the reflexive categories play a "predominant role" precisely in the complex of relations of identity and difference operative in the spectrum defined by univocity, analogicity and equivocity as these manifest themselves and function in judgments and speech significations (277, 346). A comparison of this spectrum of signifying functions with the reflexive categories reveals some remarkable similarities:

1. Both are clearly products of subjectivity. This connection between the categorial artifices, which Lask asserts are "created by subjectivity," and signifying functions "which originate in the use of expressions in living thinking and knowing" (277; my emphasis) is one reason why Heidegger in the end will see the need to go beyond Lask's notoriously "halfsided" (349) I4 transcendental logic, which gives "primacy to the objective-logical" (II, 376), in order to "set the problem of the categories within the problem of the judgment and subject" (343), and still further, to set the fullness of this still schematic structure of intentionality within the concrete fullness of life (344, 348ff). In fact, Heidegger came upon this "translogical" (347) task precisely in his study of the medieval theory of significations which, in its exploration of unified ideal-real structure of speech acts and their contents, "manifests a sensitive and sure disposition of attunement to the immediate life of the subjectivity and its immanent contexts of meaning" (343). In this same context, Heidegger tantalisingly suggests that the variety of domains in any category system, even though they are differentiated from one another primarily in objective accordance with the actual domains themselves, at least to some extent receive their identity-difference correlations from the "subjective side" which finds expression in the reflexive categories (346).

2. On the other hand, like constitutive categories, reflexive categories are still "determined by matter," even though it is no longer "specific matter" but rather a "diluted content reduced to mere contentness" (277). Signifying functions like analogicity, which differentiates an identical meaning in accord with different realms of actuality, are even more subject to this meaning- differentiating "principle of the material determination of any form whatsoever" (PMDF: 252ff). Such functions are moreover objectively anchored by the objective constellation of linguistic expressions and their directions of fulfillment (277f).

3. Finally, Lask attributes generality especially to the reflexive category, since its application is determined by no particular form or content (278).

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But in contrast to the categories of natural reality and much like the reflexive category, linguistic forms of meaning also manifest a peculiar dilution and indeterminateness, which is precisely what makes them applicable to "anything whatsoever," the very matter of reflexive categories (2560.

Constitutive Categories. The above comparison suggests the sorts of cor- respondences which the young Heidegger is seeking to establish between the orders of language, knowledge and being (modus significandi, intelligendi, essendi) by way ofa categorial scheme. As he moves from the transcendental unum to verum, does he uncover a richer and less superficial scheme than univocity and heterology, one more adequate to the analogical multiplicity of the domains and individuals which enter into the ultimately governing order of being? The first step is not particularly promising. Verum adds knowabil- ity to being which is really nothing new for, as we have seen, this note is already contained in unum (209). Is there more than bare univocity implied in the general statement of verum, "it can be known"? Indeed. For what we have here is nothing less than the "essential union of the object of knowledge and the knowledge of the object" (344, 208), in short, the complex order of intentionality, which now becomes the "operative concept" (Eugen Fink's word), the "constitutive" category in Heidegger's modernizing interpretation of the medieval categories, This reversal from the subjective-reflexive to the objective-constitutive category will unfold by way of a parallel reversal in the ordering relations between form and matter which, it goes without saying (and apparently, in Freiburg in 1915, Heidegger did not have to say who his terminological source was), will be thoroughly permeated by Lask's hylomorphic account. 15

An object known is an object 1) determined by knowledge 2) by conform- ing to a knowing subject, thereby undergoing a forming through knowledge. "Form is really the factor which bestows determination" (209). To be determined is to be "affected" (betroffen: touchO in Gurvitch's French account of Lask) by form. The object thus comes to be 3) in knowledge, in the knowing subject, in anima. But the ens in anima is no longer a real being. Its being known has transformed it into an ens rationis, an ens logicum, for which moderns like Lotze (and so Lask) have found "the felicitous expression 'validity'" (211). 16 The "is" of a judgment, where truth ultimately resides, no longer means "exists" but rather "is valid for." What then is the relation between the domains of real being and "unreal" ideal meaning, validity? Hei- degger answers in both directions across domains: The non-validating kind of reality is given only in and through a validating sort of meaningful context (221). Or more in line with the above "introverting" analysis of the relation of knowledge: "It is only because I live in the validating element that I know about the existing element" (222).


Lask often expressed the same Husserlian point regarding living "in truth" and thus knowing about things in highly suggestive hylomorphic terms (II, 82, 86 ff, 124, 190ff): I know the matter o f thought in a mediate way only by living in the form through which I know. The form is immediately experienced but is itself not known. I live in categories as in contexts in which and through which I know the things "included" in and by them. Matter is encompassed, embraced (umgriffen), surrounded or environed (umgeben) by the form; it is enveloped (umhiillt), enclosed (umschlossen), trimmed (verbri~mt) in the form (II, 75f). This quick survey of just a few of the clearly exploratory and sometimes inventive metaphors used by Lask to express this insight is perhaps not an idle exercise, in view of the controversy generated by Lucien Goldmann and Georgy Lukfics: One could wonder whether such terms were suggestive enough to the early Heidegger in order for him to make the leap from "category" to "world" (cf. above, my opening paragraph), which is a central thrust of his first major breakthrough. If we already live in the encompassing forms, finding ourselves already ensconced in them and operating out of them toward the heterogeneous matter, then it is clear enough why "the problem of the 'application' of the categories loses its meaning." Is this the "transcendental-ontic interpretation of the concept of the object" implied in Lask's transcendental logic of which "he in the end was perhaps not fully conscious," which would yield "a satisfying answer on how 'unreal,' ' transcendent' sense guarantees us true actuality and objectivity" (348f)?

Form shapes and determines objects and thus determines the order (world) in which the object finds its place, without which it could not be known. What is new here, over and above the self-identification opposing it to other (external) objects in the unum, is the internal correlation of form and matter "within" the object. If form is regarded as the active determination of the matter to be known, " 'embracing ' [umklammern] the matter encountered in givenness, getting it as it were within its power" (223), if form is always directed to a matter which is never totally absorbed by it and thus always remains other than it, then the logical object itself noematically reflects the structure of intentionality. "Forms are nothing but the objective expression of the different ways in which consciousness is intentionally drawn and related to the objective" (261). The purported form-matter dualism is bound by the unity of intentionality in the "boundlessness of truth" (II, 125ff). Accordingly, the regional category governing the logical realm is not validity but intentionality (225). 17 And yet, whenever Heidegger makes this point, thus modifying Lask's Lotzean formulation (II, 97ff), he almost invariably equates intentionality with Hingeltung, validation o f . . . (223,225), Lask's preferred term to describe the functional relationship of form to its matter in the logical object. Upon first transposing his notion of Hingeltung into


traditional hylomorphic terms, Lask observes that the objects of validity are intrinsically "enclitic," they have a fundamental need to "nestle against" and "lean upon" an other, and "this dependence, this need to be toward an other and for an other, in accordance with a venerable terminology can be called the form character of validity" (II, 32f, 93f). The kind of"reality" which belongs to "esse verum" is a relation, that of Gelten, and before it is a relation in a judgment between subject and predicate (21 lf), it is a relation of form and matter "within" the object itself, which, it may be recalled, is itself an external privative relation with any other object!

Deficient "empty" forms stand in need of "fulfillment" by matter. Thus far, it has only been noted that forms "encompass" and "affect" matter without totally absorbing or permeating it. Thus far, form has been the active deter- minant in our "introverting" account, determining the matter of thought in order to draw it into the compass of knowledge. We must now turn outward from the order of knowing toward the order of being, to their interface where consciousness "encounters" the object, where it is "struck" by things and things are "given" to it (223), or in our present terms, where form "hits" (meets, touches) matter and, by the very nature of the encounter, is itself hit, affected, determined. The reversal in the direction of "determination" is crucial, reflecting not only the transformation of Kantian inwardness into phenomenological outwardness but, more to the point being made here, also the transformation of a hitherto univocal reflexive category of truth as "pure" validity into a constitutive category amenable to the "order of analogy in the world of real sensory and suprasensory objects" (224). More specifically, this reversal gradually develops, at first as a suggestive undercurrent (193, 198, 206f, 222,229), which then surfaces rather late in Heidegger's text (252-263), in order finally to become one of the central themes in his Conclusion (344- 9), by way of the above-mentioned "principle of the material determination of form," i.e. of the determination of form by matter, which in language and content is clearly an outgrowth of Lask's "doctrine of the differentiation of meaning" (II, 58ff, 102,169).

What exactly does matter, traditionally the receptive "substrate," do to form? Heidegger provides the answer quite early (193): "Form is a correlative concept; form is form of a matter, every matter stands in a form. Matter moreover stands in a form befitting it; put differently, form receives its meaning (Bedeutung) from matter." Put in reverse once more, form accommodates ("tailors": II, 59) itself to a particular matter such that it is itself particular- ized by meaning. Meaning is thus the fruit of the union of form and matter. Meaning is that very union, which is why the ultimate answer to the question "whence sense?" cannot really be "matter" but instead "by way of matter" or "relatedness to matter." The "moment of meaning" is the "relatedness of


the validlike to the outside" (II, 170). The answer is not at all surprising in view of the "operative concept" of intentionality which governs the analysis. From the standpoint of "pure" form, meaning is an "excess" arising from its reference "to a something lying outside of it" which Lask views as a kind of fall of pure form from the realm of "pure" validity into a "lower" realm mediating the univocal homogeneity of the logical realm (sic Heidegger, 224) with the "multiplicity of all that is alien to validity," with the "opaqueness, impenetrability, incomprehensibility" and "irrationality of matter" (II, 59- 61, 77). Form accommodating itself to the multiplicity of matter yields the "impure" middle realm of meaning. The "moment of meaning" is accordingly the "principle of individuation" which particularises and differentiates forms, the "principle of plurality in the [otherwise homogeneous] sphere of validity (II, 61), multiplying forms as it specifies them. Form "burdened" with meaning thus becomes the fuller and more "specific" constitutive form, "the categorial determination called for by non-validating matter," which "lets the essence of matter shine through, as it were" (II, 172, 103). The constitutive form is accordingly an intrinsic "reflection of material determination" (II, 65: the only occurrence of Materialsbestimmtheit in Lask; note, however, that Heidegger's term in his principle is invariably without the intermediate 's'). It is a more determined form which has undergone a Formbestimmtheit (II, 58) 18 relating it to a particular matter; i.e., it is a form oriented toward being fulfilled by its own very particular content.

What does the young Heidegger draw from this hyperreflective quasi- theological story of the genesis and nature of the constitutive category? Leaving aside the Plotinian overtones, Heidegger quickly brings the counter- Kantian, phenomenological thrust of the analysis in tandem with the central thrust of his own investigation, namely, the task of distinguishing and at once characterizing the various realms of reality (174, 229, 342). He does this by identifying the starting point and specifying the attitude toward the constitutive category and its domains which he has in common with Lask: "That there are different domains of actuality cannot be proved a priori by deductive means. Facticities can only be pointed out. What is the sense of this showing, this demonstrative display?" (155). Or, in discussing the mathematical domain in regard to its constitutive category of quantity, he observes: "To give a schoolbook definition of it will not be possible, since it is an ultimate, something which is 'last.' Its essence can only be described, pointed out (notificari)" (189), "read ofF' (abgelesen: 197,257,263,346) 19 from the actuality itself. However, the articulation of especially the non-sensory, logical and psychic domains is "enormously difficult," where even the language is lacking and we tend to fall back upon the physical domain of nature for inadequate and ponderous circumlocutions. But it is precisely in such instances

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that the indeterminate "dilution" of reflexive categories plays an indispensable starting role in developing more suitable descriptive categories (257). It is therefore not out of line, and even necessary, to embark first upon some "general considerations" (156) oriented toward explicating the "descriptive content" (143f) latent in certain traditional approaches to the Problem of Categories. For the systematic treatment of a philosophical problem cannot really be separated from a concomitant historical treatment (354, 138ff). But in the end, this "strictly conceptual" historical approach is "one-sided" and will have to be completed by a systematic retum to the full concreteness of life (342ff).

Lask likewise opposes Kant's "purely logical" deduction of the categories, because they are after all "not logical through and through . . . but arise from alogical material" and so find their order in a material logic; "we can determine their place only by way of a detour across this matter, persistently looking at it and regarding its stufflike nature" (II, 62f). Also, contrary to Hegel's panlogism, the individual forms are not intertwined by reciprocal logical relations. They stand before us in a reciprocal heterogeneity and irreducible multiplicity. The pure forms in which we stand at most give us the inner light by which to regard their matter, since it is also being reflected from the impenetrable surface of matter's brute facticity. In our encounter with this interface of facticity, we can only accept its alogical order of being and resign ourselves to the limits of reason.

The young Heidegger, concerned with the explication of texts and concepts in the process of"doing a dissertation," nevertheless already displays a remarkable propensity for cutting through the verbiage of exegetical content in order to expose and describe the moments of "brute" encounter at the interface between knowing and being, or speaking and being. This is particularly evident in his handling of 'simplex apprehensio' versus 'judicium' (209- 223), but it also surfaces in the categorial problems of analogicity (197-207, 275-8) and the differentiation of forms of signification (252-263). At this stage, I must be content with a cursory summary of these themes by tracing them with some dispatch back to their intersection in the fulcrum "principle of the material determination of form" to the "ground and keystone of the knowledge of an object" (247), in short, back to "the matter itself."

The truth of"simplex apprehensio," of simply having an object, has as its opposite not falsehood but rather non-acquaintance [Nichtkenntnis], not being conscious of But in a certain sense, simply pro-posing [Vor- stellen] something, simply bringing it to givenness, can also be called false, when it apprehends the object in a determination not befitting [zu- kommenden: Lask's term for form-fitting e.g. II, 333] it. This intrinsically


false meaning can nevertheless come to consciousness. Even if it does not admit of objective fulfilment, it is still something objective, a "quid nominis," a meaning independent ofjudicative characterisation. Because the given precisely as given always becomes an object, simple pro-posing is in turn always true . . . . The truth is consummated in givenness and does not extend beyond it. (209f)

With these sentences which introduce his one sustained account of the judgment, t teidegger first clearly broaches the radical prejudicative level of direct acquaintance with "bare" givenness, which Lask liked to call the "supra- oppositional" stratum precisely because it precedes the judicative opposition between true and false sentences. And yet, at this rudimentary level, there is another, more pervasive, and "boundless" truth, "the truth in itself" which is identical with meaning (II, 129) which in turn, as the fruit of the union of form and matter, is identical with the object populating this level, the "ideal object" then much discussed in the war against psychologism. The conflation of terms tells us where we are within the relation of intentionality, namely, "oriented toward objectness (modus essendi) in the noematic realm" (252), the realm of meaning pure and simple.

Modus essendi activus. A similar conflation occurs between the "modes" or orders (ratione) of being, knowing and signifying, precisely by way of the above limit-possibility of a misfit meaning, therefore false, which nevertheless achieves objectness and is therefore true (intelligible, meaningful). The question is really that of the scope of the sphere of meaning (ergo of a category system) in order to have it include every possible object of knowledge, including privations, fictions, perhaps contradictions like "square circles" (they were excluded on p. 162), indeed non-being itself. "After all, 'non ens' is also an object of knowledge, enters into judgments, is apprehended in meanings and signified by words" (230), which accordingly has its own actuality, if not reality. Putting the question at its simplest: We speak and think about reality. Granting the indispensable role of the first two modes (significandi and intelligendi), how are we to understand the third (essendi)? What then are we to include in "reality"?

The three orders conflate when we take speaking and thinking "passively," i.e., noematically, in terms of their object or "matter" of concern, namely, reality. Their matters converge and coincide with the governing matter of reality, the "about which" of their concern. This is the universal reality-principle, the "principle of the material determination of every form" (253,256, 257,259). It dictates that the particular forms of signification (say, of parts of speech) be derived or "read off' (257,263) from the "givenness" (modus essendi) of reality in its "form differentiating" or "meaning differentiating function" (256, 258). But what about privative meanings like "blind," which refer to some-

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thing lacking or missing in reality, therefore absent from reality? The young Heidegger's initial response: "Form can also be determined from somewhere else, with the proviso that the form does not contradict the matter for which it is to be the form, i.e., p r o v i d e d . . , that the matter tolerates this forming" (254). And his solution: A privation is to be understood as an ens rationis. Its reality is precisely its being known (255). There is more to reality than meets the eye. The modus essendi must include "not only the real actuality of nature but also the non-sensory logical, the known as known, and thereby anything objective whatever. The modus essendi coincides with-the universal domain of ' something in general,' circumscribed by the primal category ofens" (256: emphasis mine). His conclusion: "The forms of meaning (modi significandi) are thus read off under the guidance of the given (modus essendi), which in turn is givenness only as known (in the modus intelligendi)" (263). One might also add that the modus essendi would in turn also have to include the linguistic modes of signification which it serves to articulate and differentiate. Thus, for example, when he identifies intentionality with Lask's Hingeltung, Heidegger likewise brings "assertibility" into the equation (223).

What then is reality? "The modus essendi is whatever can be experienced and lived (das Erlebbare), in the absolute sense whatever stands over against consciousness, the 'robust' reality which irresistibly forces itself upon consciousness and can never nor again be put aside and eliminated" (260). The overriding sense of facticity emanating from ttiis passage has been build- ing ever since Heidegger mentioned the fact of different domains of reality, whose very difference cannot be proven but only pointed out, shown. 2° "Whatever gets pointed out stands before us in its selfness and, graphically put, can be grasped immedia te ly . . . . Regarding the immediate there can be no doubt, probability and delusions. For, as immediate, it has, as it were, nothing between itself and the apprehension (simplex apprehensio)" (155). And we get hints of it in the analogical distribution of an identical meaning differentiated "in each case" (je) in accord with "the inherent differentiation of meaning coming from the domains of reality themselves," and so "determined by the nature of the domains" to which the meaning is applied (198f, 229). A few years later, the small German distributiveje, so easy to ignore (it often is by translators), becomes the veritable mark of the facticity of Dasein, which in formal indication is "in each case (je) mine."

But by now, it should be evident that the young Heidegger is also working at cross-purposes with his mentors regarding the basic "noetic" character of this rudimentary level of givenness and meaning, reflected in terms like simple apprehension, direct acquaintance (Kenntnis), pre-judicative cognizance and finally 'lived experience' (Er-leben). Is it living or knowing, or perhaps both at once? What exactly is the modus essendi activus (262; latter emphasis


mine) analogous to the active noetic correlate in the orders of knowing and signifying? What is the character of the immediate experience corresponding to immediate givenness? This question of a rudimentary "understanding of being" is at least speculatively "mirrored" in the remarkable "backtrack- ing" into the Scotian text (or, if you will, "re-duction" or "deconstruction" of) which we have been following. The crucial pages (259-262) bear closer scrutiny, inasmuch as they are invariably missed or botched or balked by virtually all commentators, much to their detriment, especially in understanding the much-remarked Eckhartian footnote in the Conclusion (344), which refers more or less explicitly back to those pages. In the words of one commentator, "it would make no sense to speak of a modus essendi activus" apparently because, when it comes to the given, all that one can ultimately say is "that is how the things themselves are. ''2! But "brute" facticity is not the last word for medieval man, who can always go on to say "God made it that way"; likewise not for the young Heidegger, who is still operating wholeheartedly out of the medieval worldview (351; his Vorhabe in common with "Scotus"). And it is precisely those allusions to the ultimate baseline of medieval experience, namely, to that "distinctive form of inner existence anchored in the transcendent Ur-relationship of the soul to God" (351), that he now draws out of the Scotian text.

Heidegger begins his final "backtrack" here by observing that all three modes, though they converge noematically by being one in their matter, nevertheless differ in form, in the regard in which that matter is taken, where he clearly includes the modus essendi among them (259f). What then is its form, especially if we recall that "forms are nothing but the objective expression of the various ways in which consciousness is intentionally related to the objective" (261) What is striking here is that "Scotus," even though he never explicitly speaks of a modus essendi activus (as the young Heidegger explicitly does, p. 262), nevertheless invests this mode with a particular ratio, thereby making it"approach the character of a determinateness of form, which must correspond to the character of an act." What then are "the acts in which immediate givenness actually becomes conscious"? (262). The answer can no longer be put off: "The modus essendi is the immediately given empirical reality sub ratione existentiae. There is something significant here which must be noted: Duns Scotus characterizes even this empirical reality as standing under a "ratio,' a point of view, a form, an intentional nexus [Bewandtnis]; this is nothing less than what is nowadays being said in the following terms: Even 'givenness' already manifests a categorial determination" (260). In Rickert's words, what we have here are the "most rudimentary logical problems" which force us to "draw even 'prescientific' knowing into the sphere of our investigation" (260). Or in our terms, the immediate experience corresponding to

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immediate givenness is that o f "a categorial determination," it is a categorial experience, in short, it is what Husserl called a categorial intuition.

Lask's way of putting it is particularly telling in this nexus of thoughts and thinkers. In a fascinating but elusive chapter on "Living and Knowing," Lask speaks of an immediate experience not only of the so-called "sense- data," but in particular of the non-sensory as it is in its first occurrence, "as a pretheoretical something" in which we first simply live before we know it. So far, this only repeats what has been said above regarding Lask's transposition ofHusserl 's "categorial intuition" into his own framework. But then he continues in a decidedly "mystical" vein with his descriptions and examples. In brief summary: our first experience of categories is such that we are "lost" in them in "pure absorption," for example in aesthetic, ethical or religious "dedication" (Hingabe: II, 191; but also 56, 85, 103, 129, 132 et passim) in which we find ourselves simply "given over" to the given form, meaning value (II, 191). This is the life especially "deserving" of philosophical study, "not brute lactic life but rather the sphere of immediate experience replete with value, of life already made worthwhile" (II, 196).

And this is precisely what the young Heidegger finds in the medieval experience of reality sub ratione existentiae, namely, the immediate experience of the transcendental verum and bonum convertible with esse existentiae, according t ° which "to be" is at once "to be true" because reality is in intrinsic conformity with the mind of its Maker. Or, put in a term relating to the above discussion of the transcendental realm of meaning, the scholastic doctrine of ontological truth, of the conformity of being with (especially the divine) intellect, yields the result that being is intrinsically intelligible, and so, put noetically, intellectualizable by intellectually disposed beings. The latter also yields, inasmuch as being is primum in intellecto and so the primum intelli- gibilium, what Heidegger will later prefer to call an initially pre-ontological "understanding of being" (BT, H. 7) definitive of Dasein.

But what is especially tantalizing in this nexus is not so much the early anticipation of this keystone of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology: in early 1919, "understanding" is openly identified with categorial intuition; shortly thereafter, the Husserlian experience of truth in evidence, Selbsthabe, is used to express the fulfilment of the self in authenticity, thus placing the medieval equation of being and truth on the level of personal conation. What is especially fascinating is the shadowy presence of Laskian terms like Hingabe and Bewandtnis within this nuclear fusion of terms outlining the rudimentary transcendental realm of intentionality and meaning, and so planted into the seedbed out of which Heidegger's concepts will grow. The multi-faceted Hingabe (submission, resignation, self-abandonment, devotion, dedication), used by Lask first in a pre-decisional way, i.e., finding oneself

WHY STUDENTS OF HE1DEGGER WILL HAVE TO READ EMIL LASK 215

already absorbed in meaning, puts us in a direct line toward not only pre- volitional Befindlichkeitbut also the more volitional, Eckhartian Gelassenheit (letting-be, releasement, abandonment). The young Heidegger uses the term Hingabe once, to characterize the medieval's high regard for tradition in the attitude of "absolute devotion to and passionate immersion in the transmitted body of knowledge." This "giving of oneself over to the matter" explains why "the value of the subject matter" prevailed over that of the subject (140). Aside from being an early articulation of authentic historicity, this is the earliest example in the text of the intentional receptivity implicit in the "principle of the material determination of form."

PMDF. The principle itself first clearly emerged, according to Heidegger's retrospective summary in the Conclusion, by way of a study of the medieval doctrine of significations. "Duns Scotus's task of analyzing a particular level of act, that of the modus significandi, forces him to go into the sphere of acts as such and to establish some fundamental matters regarding the individual levels of acts (modus significandi, intelligendi, essendi) and their relationship to one another" (343). (After a year's time, the young Heidegger's textual discovery is still very much on his mind!) He continues: "The very existence of a doctrine of significations within medieval scholasticism reveals a fine disposition to tune in on the immediate life of the subjectivity and its immanent contexts of meaning, without however acquiring a precise concept of the subject" (343). Nevertheless, this retum to a fundamental sphere of subjectivity, the levels of acts, "leads to the principle of the material determination of every form which, in its turn and for its part, includes the fundamental correlation of object and subject" (344). It is from this most fundamental correlation of the "understanding of being" suggested by the above modernizing of the medieval verum that "Eckhart's mysticism first receives its philosophical interpretation and appraisal in connection with the metaphysics of the problem of truth" (344 n.).

But Heidegger did not hold his course on medieval mysticism and Eckhart, announced for the winter semester of 1919-20. Thus, the very first clear application that we got from Heidegger's publications of such "mystical" structures of receptivity, in particular, of the attitude of"letting be" inherent in the unio mystica, took us from the sublime to the mundane. In the "absorption" of the craftsman in his world of"handy" tools, in his "submission" (BT; H. 87) to that world which meaningfully organizes his tools, tasks and materials, the truly responsive craftsman understands, "knows how" to let his tool serve its purpose by yielding to its tasks and being compliant to the appliant material

'that it works, i.e., to let it take its course along the paths prescribed by his world, to let it "do its thing"; or, in Heidegger's words, "to let something handy be so-and-so as it already is and in order that it be such" (H. 84). From this

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letting serve, deploy, comply and so letting be, we can in turn quite naturally "read off" the very being of the handy tool, its being-such and so-and-so, namely, its appliant deployment, its Bewandtnis (H. 84ff)! In applying Lask's alternative word for form and order to a "system of relations" (H. 88) far richer than that schematized, say, by a reflexive category, the early Heidegger has clearly traveled some distance from the old hylomorphic framework he himself once employed. Although he himself never wrote what he, in his critique of Lask in the Conclusion of 1916, already deemed indispensable, namely, "a fundamental investigation of the value and limits of this form- matter duplicity" (347), he nevertheless indicated the direction of such a deconstruction shortly thereafter, in his critique of thinkers like Natorp. 22 But even this story is too long to be told here, especially in regard to a word like Bewandtnis, in my opinion the most difficult of the early Heidegger's words for the translator. But some light can perhaps be thrown on this translator's problem by summarizing how the young Heidegger first appropriates this word from Lask.

Bewandtnis, as an alternative word for form (logos, ratio), quite naturally first appears with the introduction of the concept of form (165). In relation to matter, it is a "how" word, the way in which matter is taken, viewed, faced, regarded, namely, "as" such-and-such or so-and-so. To the question "How?" one answers "So!" Bewandtnis thus specifies the "with regard to" (hinsichtlich), the "in view of" (gegeniiber), e.g. matter"as to" its quantity, the regional category generating and ordering the domain of mathematics (177). One problem: Is such an ordering regard noetic or noematic? Is Bewandtnis the regarding that orders or the order that results from the regard, the facing or the facet? Or should perhaps, thirdly, the direction of the regard be stressed, i.e., the perspective, angle, slant, tilt, inelinatio (329), bearing, which gives the object a noematic 'bent' or 'twist', thus highlighting a certain facet or aspect of it? Thus, in the sentence ens est, the verb-form 'declines' the noun-matter in a certain direction (329), bringing out a specific aspect or face(t). Accordingly, being "something," being a "what" (Et-was), is called the "primal face" (Urbewandtnis) of everything which is and can be an object (288). (Soon, eidos is called the "look" of an object by Heidegger.) So far, in my translation of two places out of the text, I have vacillated between the first two, more generic senses, going from the noematic "relational order" to the noetic "intentional ordering." Let me try a few more passages in conjunction with the third sense, the sense of direction (directed stance, bearing), beginning with its first appearance: "All that stands 'over against' and 'in relation to' the I in experience is somehow apprehended. The relation of 'vis-h-vis' itself is already a certain regard (a respectus), a bearing (Bewandtnis) which it has with the object" (165). Accordingly, once the minimal order of the


reflexive category is in place, it can be said: "Through the unum, there is [it has] a certain bearing with the object" (166; emphasis mine). The bearing is together with the object: In other words, the noetic bearing-towards (or upon) is immediately correlatively reflected in the noematic bearing of the object. Thus, Bewandtnis always "analytically needs an object upon which it can, as it were, support itself" (330). The prepositions are ultimately the key to understanding our term, which itself is a preposition in disguise controlling a cluster of prepositions. In one fascinating passage, Lask brings many of them together, emphasizing the most important: "To know something thus always means: to have something else before oneself, namely, a categorial form in regard to or concerning ["touching"] it, to apprehend the truth about and clarity over it, to be aware of the objective bearing which it has with it, thus always to experience something about it and around it" (II, 82). 23 Even the unemphasized prepositions are worth pondering, as anyone who has studied the early Heidegger's analysis of the world "around" (um) us knows; perhaps even someone who just thoughtfully looks "about" in order to ponder what that world is "about" and says "about" us. Then consider the hapless translator already suspended between two overlapping but not really coincident linguistic networks of prepositions; add to that the transposition from a hylomorphic to a mundane network; and there you have the problem of translating the net surrounding Bewandtnis from Heideggerian German into the King's English (as well as virtually every other language)!

A last, albeit still incomplete look at the Conclusion, 24 to flesh out a bit further the young Heidegger's project of a "translogicar' philosophy of life, will provide a springboard into the 1919 courses, whose basic thrust is likewise geared "Toward the Definition and Mission of Philosophy." 25 The operative concept defining the object of philosophy in 1916 is intentionality, which is no longer to be regarded as just a theoretical attitude, but is to find its concre- tion in the fullness of the "living spirit" (Friedrich Schlegel's term), which in turn is a "historical spirit in the broadest sense of the word" (3480. The ground shifts from an epistemology to a metaphysics, and the metaphysics of truth now becomes a metaphysics of history with truth as its telos. On the one hand, in keeping with the full medieval sense of verum, Heidegger would seek insight into the ultimate "still point" of intentionality correlative to the realm of"supra-oppositionality" (348) in a study of the phenomenon of mysticism, especially Eckhart's account of it (344n, 352). On the other hand, in keeping with the modernizing of such categories, such a metaphysics of God and the world (206) will include "the task of an ultimate metaphysical- teleological interpretation of consciousness, [for] in it the value-laden already lives in primal authenticity insofar as consciousness is a meaningful living deed which realizes sense" (348). This statement of purpose has a Fichtean

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tone 26 and has already surfaced in Lask's singling out of "the sphere of immediate experience replete with value" (II, 196), which includes ethical, aesthetic, religious as well as theoretical values, as the true and full object of philosophy. This sphere is in fact history, the arena of"value formation" (352) correlative to the living spirit in "the entire fullness of its accomplishments" (350). History so understood and "teleologically construed in the manner of a philosophy of culture must become a meaning-determining element [i.e., a form-differentiating matter, a reality-principle] for the problem of the categories" (350). Such a broadly based "cosmos of categories" governed by the principle of analogy, in replacing the current "inadequate and schematic table of categories," would provide the conceptual means "to bring to life and to comprehend individual epochs of intellectual history" along with the "qualitatively filled and value-laden lifeworld" correlative to each. The young Heidegger is interested especially in the "medieval worldview," which is "so radically and consciously teleologically oriented" (350f). This, after all, is what he himself ultimately expects from his own modernized metaphysics - a "genuine optic" (348) . . . a worldview!

While it to some extent presages what is soon to come (the historical ego immersed in the environing world), Heidegger's statement of the return to historical life clearly still relies heavily upon the vocabulary of the transcendental philosophy of values. In the context of this Conclusion, Lask is the only one of this persuasion who is openly confronted (347-9), in both praise and criticism, and more (as we have seen) in conjunction with the two tasks propaedeutic to this third, namely, domain differentiation and the inclusion of subjectivity in the transcendental realm. 27 In Lask, Heidegger sees a kindred spirit in the effort to return to the concrete, where "supra-oppositionality" is an especially "fruitful element" in bringing together a number of competing epistemologies. But the obverse to this are the complications thereby introduced into the problem of opposition and thus of value. How are values and their negative poles distinguished? Is the value of validity a form of"ought" or a peculiar sort of "being"? These are the questions that Heidegger hopes to clarify by the return to life, which he assumes, as Lask does, to be already fraught with values. In explicit conjunction with such questions stemming from Lask and in response to the need to supplement Lask where he has not gone far enough, the young Heidegger promises a more thoroughgoing investigation on "Being, Value, and Negation" (349n). This promise is in some part fulfilled by the courses of 1919, but only after undergoing one final, crucial purification, which amounts to a #~r&/3a~ ~& ~AAo 7~vo~.


3. 1919

In view of my chosen theme, treatment of the revolutionary courses of 1919, which blaze the trail that eventually leads to BT, must be selective and sparse. At this stage, I am more interested in how the early Heidegger is developing from Lask's neo-Kantian context rather than where he is going. 28 The following retrospectives will simply serve both to bridge the gap and to measure the leap between 1916 and 1919. My first question: What now happens to the young Heidegger's concluding philosophical hybrid of a phenomenological neo-Kantianism laced with medieval metaphysics? The focus of the question now falls upon the neo-Kantianism, already partially transformed because of the hybridizing, in part through Lask. For the first task of the 1919 courses is to set phenomenology off as sharply as possible from neo-Kantianism, especially the branch called "transcendental value-philosophy," beginning with Windelband and ending with Lask. In view of his own close alliance with this branch, the courses represent for Heidegger a personal exercise in self-deconstruction that involved a distantiation from his former teacher, Rickert.

A sharp contrast is dictated by the very proximity of the two schools. In 1919, both approaches in particular lay claim to the venerable ambition of establishing philosophy as the "primal" or "original" science (Urwis- senschaft). Both seek to determine origins and ultimates, the first and the last things, the underived from which all else is derived, which can only be "shown" or "pointed out" but not "proven," thereby inexorably implicating the original science in a circle, assuming in the beginning what it wishes to find in the end. What, for example, is the "original leap" (Ur-sprung: ZBP 24, 31, 60, 95 = 160, 172, 247 in the habilitation) of thinking or knowing, the point from which it gets its start? Phenomenology places this search for origins under the motto, "zu den Sachen selbst." The young Heidegger adds a metaphysical note to this regress toward origins, this search for the "primal leap," by asserting that philosophy's real mission is to get beyond the surface of things and to aim at "a breakthrough into true reality and real truth" (348).

It is therefore striking when Windelband uses the same word to describe the neo-Kantian quest in terms which are unequivocally opposed to all "metaphysical hypostatizing." For the primal science is not metaphysical but instead "critical," and the breakthrough that it seeks is not toward reality but toward reason. It is not after what actually is but what ought to be, those normative values in every sphere of human activity - cognitive, practical, emotive - which are universally valid even when they are not in fact so acknowledged. Thus the "fundamental fact of philosophy" (cf. ZBP 153) is the 'conviction' (!) that "there are" such norms. "Philosophy is thus the science of the normal


consciousness. It searches through the empirical consciousness in order to establish the points of saliency within it where such a normative universal- validity 'leaps out'." Working on the basis of the conviction that "here and there" within the movements of natural necessity of the empirical consciousness a higher necessity "now and then" appears, "philosophy looks for those points at which such a necessity breaks though" (my emphasis). According- ly, the very idea of philosophy, as the science of the consciousness of these norms, is itself an ideal concept realizable only within limits. As a product of the human spirit, it is closely tied to the history of that spirit, which in the pursuit of its particular problems on occasion makes the "breakthrough" to the consciousness of universal norms. The history of philosophy is in like fashion teleologically oriented, depicting in its progress an ever deeper and more comprehensive grasp of the normal consciousness. But the teleological necessity which it exposes, whenever and wherever "the immediate evidence of normative validity comes to light," neither explains nor describes "brute" reality as such, its natural necessity or the acknowledgment thereof. The critical- teleological method is indifferent to factual acknowledgment. Philosophy's sole role is simply to show that, in such necessities in fact acknowledged, there is another necessity whose validity must be acknowledged uncondition- ally, if certain goals are to be (ought to be?: sollen "unclear" here. See ZBP 154) fulfilled. These are the norms which have to hold if the human being wants its particular activity to be fulfilled in absolute fashion: for thinking to be true, for willing to be good, for feeling to apprehend beauty. 29

Even the young Heidegger had begun to point out the ambiguities of"being" in this formidable system of values built upon Lotze's distinction between being and validity (347). And from early 1919 on, the early Heidegger will embark on a path which, in SS 1920, leads to the explicit naming of"facticity" as the positive leitmotif of his thought, in effect adopting a term from neo- Kantianism in blatant provocation against it. But before taking a look at this course of development, one should at least note that the later Windelband himself yields to "a certain metaphysical pressure" (357) within his System and makes room for a metaphysics precisely in his philosophy of religion. One therefore cannot exclude one final possibility of rapprochement between him and the young Heidegger, who clearly also has a philosophy of religion on his mind (147f, 344n) in his quest for a "breakthrough to true reality and real truth." Windelband's essay is entitled, "The Holy," which is identified as the goal, norm and ideal of religion. The holy is not just one more value alongside the others but rather the value which comprehends the others. The "crux of the holy" (ZBP 145n) is moreover not just the unity of the true, good and beautiful, but also their reality. It is the absolute telos ("true reality and real truth"!) which 'lifts' the distinction between being and value. "The holy


is thus the normal consciousness of the true, good and beautiful experienced as transcendent reality." Religion is transcendent, meta-physical life. Thus, at the very limits of the reflection carried out by the critical sciences of values (logic, ethics, aesthetics), there emerges a belief in the really real, "the conviction that the norm of reason is not our invention or illusion, but rather a value which is grounded in the ultimate depths of the reality of the world." 30

The early Heidegger therefore has grounds to conclude, on the opening day (February 7, 1919) of his course on "The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews," that the critical science of values, despite its anti- metaphysical animus, "based as it is on the basic acts of consciousness and their norms, has in its system an ultimate and necessary tendency toward a worldview" (ZBP 12). And breaking with his own earlier desire for a metaphysical "optic" as well as with the entire tradition of philosophy, he proposes, as an opening thesis, that philosophy and worldview have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The course thus places itself in pursuit of "a brand new conception of p h i l o s o p h y . . , which would have to place it outside of any connection with the ultimate human questions" (ZBP 11). And if philosophy is still to be the Ur-science, this would necessarily entail an entirely new conception of Origins and ends, the first and the last things. Philosophy itself, in its entirety, now becomes a problem: in its starting point, subject matter, method, and goal. What then is The Idea of Philosophy?

As promised in the Conclusion of 1916, the course moves, albeit slowly and laboriously, to displace the neo-Kantian starting point for the original science in "the fact" of thinking and knowing with the phenomenological starting point in life and experience. Situating the original domain of philosophy beyond the theoretical in a "pretheoretical something" at once overcomes the circularity of presupposition and proof which characterizes the neo-Kantian Idea of philosophy. The principles and structures developed in 1916, largely by way of Lask's catalytic role, play a significant part in this movement of displacement. The following selective summary of the course 31 will focus on the strategic use of those principles and structures - PMDF, reflexive versus constitutive categories, Hingabe, etc. - in that deconstruction and regression toward the original domain of the "environmental experience" and of"life in and for itself."

The Principle of the Material Determination of Form surfaces already in the second hour, in the specification of the Idea of the primal science. As a Kantian Idea, as an infinite task, it must be left open to further determination. Any further determination of the Idea depends on the content of the object of the Idea, i.e., on the "regional essence" or categofial character of the object which motivates the search (ZBP 15). The problem of Material Determina-

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tion then gradually but inexorably displaces the teleological determination that the "forms and norms of thought" provide. In order to found the laws of thought in an ideal and normative manner rather than in actual fact, the teleological method is at first sharply set off from the genetic-psychological method. But in order to offset the abstract constructivism of the early Fichte's "dialectical-teleological method," the "critical-dialectical method" allows for, in fact is in need of, a "material clue" or "guideline" (Leitfaden: ZBP 37 = 263 of the habilitation!) simply to find the points at which the goal of reason is "realized." Thus, for example, philosophy "borrows" from psychology the material distinction of psychic functions into thinking, willing and feeling, on the basis of which it then proceeds to articulate the normative domains into the true, good and beautiful. But in the end, psychology offers only the formal characteristics: "The real content, the formations of rational values, is first shown in history, which is the true organon of critical philosophy. The historical formations of cultural life are the real empirical occasion for the critical-teleological reflection" (ZBP 38; correcting the last word from Bestimmung to Besinnung). The quotation also recalls the young Heideg- ger's third task for a "cosmos of categories," of factoring in the Material Determination of "history in its teleological interpretation along the lines of a philosophy of culture" (350).

Psychic and historical matter provide the "impetus" that "motivates" the bestowal of norms. The operative concept of intentionality is clearly in evidence as the early Heidegger gradually draws the givenness of matter and the giving of normative forms into an indissoluble intentional unity. The noetic side involves a first attempt to unravel the neo-Kantian tangle of validity, value and oughtness. For the weak link of the critical-teleological method is its noetic hinge: It is in search of the universal valid values which "ought to be" acknowledged once they are "pointed out." But acknowledgment is not the same as consent or approval, which is the "Yes" response Windelband really wants to a valid judgment, but cannot demonstrate. In what "form of experience" does validity "give itself"? "Does it correspond to a subject- correlate of an original kind or is it a founded phenomenon, perhaps even extremely founded?" Heidegger points to the direction he would take: "In the end, validity is a phenomenon constituted by its subject matter, presup- posing not only intersubjectivity but the historical consciousness as such!" (ZBP 50f). And oughtness? "How does an ought give itself at all, what is its subject-correlate?" (ZBP 45). Is its object-correlate always a value? Clearly, the reverse does not always hold. The value of the "delightful," for example, gives itself to me without a corresponding experience of the ought. This entire tangle of experiences calls for an "eidetic genealogy of primary motivations" to set things fight (ZBP 46, 73). For that matter, even to call the


valuable an "object" is already wrong. Like validity (es gilt), the valuable is best expressed in an intransitive impersonal sentence. "The value is not, but simply ' v a lue s ' . . . In the experience that is 'worth taking', ' it values ' for me, for the worth-experiencing subject" (ZBP 46; correcting urteilende with wert- er lebende, "worth-experiencing"). The Heidegger of 1919 is already finding that language is not "up to" the "new typology of fundamental experience" that he wishes to express.

The complaint about language is not incidental. It puts us in touch with the very "nerve" of the course. It explains why this course, despite its intri- cate structure and laborious development, created a sensation and started the "rumor of a hidden king in Academe" (Hannah Arendt) circulating through post-war Germany. The rumor reached Gadamer a year or two later of an "extremely individualized and profoundly revolutionary lecture course" in which Heidegger had used the audaciously idiosyncratic phrase, es weltet. 32 This was his first course after the war, in the extraordinary "war emergen- cy semester" of early 1919. Without further ado, let me present the capsule summary of the entire course contained in the progressive sequence of impersonal sentences, common German idioms except for the two aforementioned idiosyncratic coinages, which are intoned on its pivotal pages (ZBP 46, 61, 73, 75):

es gilt, es soll, es w e r t e t - es g i b t - es weltet, es er-eignet sich

The very fact that the most basic constitutive categories of neo-Kantianism and hermeneutic phenomenology are separated here by Lask's formulation of the reflexive category par excellence, Es-Geben (ZBP 67, 69 = Lask II, 130, 142, 155, 162ff), now gives substance to the methodological claim we discovered in the young Heidegger (257): In those instances when language fails us, the very indeterminacy and dilution of reflexive categories can "play an indispensable starting role in developing more suitable descriptive categories."

But have we been prepared in any way for the impersonal content now emerging from this ultimate regress to the Ur-sprung, to a non-objective realm which "is" not, but instead gives, values, worlds, etc.? Have not all the prior descriptions of the fundamental stratum of meaning (intelligibility, truth) made allusion to at least an "ideal object" to describe it? What precedent could there possibly be for an impersonal, non-objective, even non-entitative realm of experience? How are we to fathom, let alone think of, a pretheoretical realm which precedes and underlies the distinction between subject and object while at once describing their dynamic intentional unity? We have indeed been prepared for this "breakthrough" of 1919 by both the young Heidegger and

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Lask. The exemplar, the model of prefiguration offered for this reduction to the ultimate pretheoretical situation is the unio mystica. The so-called "mystical element in Heidegger's thought" (Caputo) is operative from the very beginning of his career, and will be used here as a guiding clue in the central phenomenological task of articulating the structures of immediacy. It is perhaps significant that Oskar Becker, in his transcription of this course, adds a footnote to es wertet: "Compare es west ['it essences'] in Eckhart" (this verbal already appears on p. 202 of the habilitation). Going far beyond what Windelband and Rickert ventured to do in their "transcendental empiricism" (ZBP 40), where matter is a mere appendage to the teleological method, Lask gleans the following description of the material realm from Fichte's "middle" period, in his most extreme "positivism" (I, 148): "The 'really real' is what you 'really live and experience,' the givenness which happens to you, 'filling the flowing moments of your life,' the self-forgetting and immersion of dedicative intuition." This is life at ground-level, "raised to the first power," so to speak; or in reverse, it is "the sinking of consciousness to its lowest power. .... Whatever occurs in this sphere is what is called 'reality,' 'facts of consciousness' or 'experience" [Erfahrung]."

ls Lask/Fichte here describing the mute life of the dullard, "the limiting case of dull abandon to the given" (dumpfes Hingegebensein), 33 or is it the immediate contact with the very source of life, the "mystical" stirrings of the initial upsurge of meaning in human experience? In short, is this immediacy mute or meaningful? The first alternative applies if we rule out the possibility, like good Kantians, that our most immediate experience is already "categorially" charged. The latter option is clearly the early Heidegger's direction of interpretation, if we were to judge simply on the basis of his continued use of Lask's language for categorial intuition in his own descriptions. "The only way to get at this original sphere is by pure dedication (Hingabe) to the subject matter" (ZBP 61; 65). "Let us immerse ourselves again in the lived experience" (ZBP 68). To escape unwarranted opinions, free-floating theorems and speculative excesses, "the phi losophers . . , throw themselves into history, into robust reality" (handfeste Wirklichkeit = p. 260 of the habilitation!) and "give themselves over to its richness and its movement" (ZBP 135). For this primitive level of direct acquaintance or "taking cognizance" is already "characterized by a pure and undivided dedication to the subject matter. It operates first of all in the very stuff of natural experience." It is subject to different levels of clarity and so can be improved upon. It can become the preparatory form of the theoretical but is also the "primal form in the religious" (ZBP 212).

It is in fact toward this boundary issue of immediacy ("Mute or meaningful?") that Heidegger now, at the very fulcrum of the course, directs his


thought experiment, which aims to reduce everything to the level of the es gibt (there is, it gives; thus, "there is given"), that is, to the level of "brute" facticity, of the sheer and naked "there it i s . . . and nothing else": Is there something? Is there even the "there is"? Everything is now made to hinge on such boundary questions reminiscent of Leibniz's famous question. "We are standing at the methodological crossroad which will decide the very life or death of philosophy; we stand at an abyss: either into nothingness, i.e., absolute thingness, or we somehow manage the leap into another worM, or better: for the first time into the world as such" (ZBP 63). 34

The issue leading up to this critical juncture is in fact the material determination of the forms and norms of thought by their psychic matter. The joining of the issue begins when the matter and the ideal norms are drawn so closely together that Heidegger can entertain the anti-Kantian question: Is the giving of matter perhaps also the giving of ideals? For in a certain sense, "everything is psychic or mediated by the psychic." Can we perhaps arrive at an "objective level" within the psychic itself at which the ideal norms could be grounded? Can psychic processes be so regarded such that they at once give the ideal? How is the psychic itself as a total sphere, perhaps as the primal sphere of origins, to be given? (ZBP 60). "We can only get at the sphere by pure submission to the subject matter." Without bringing in assumptions or theories, we must fall back upon a description "pointing out the facts befitting the 'thing itself ' ." Just the facts (Tatsachen) of the thing (Sache) itself, of the psychic? Description? "But description itself is a psychic phenomenon [and thus also] belongs in the thing itself. What is that supposed to mean, to have one thing describe another? Is description really a way of connecting things?" (ZBP 61). "We are thrown from one thing to another, which remains mute like any thing" (ZBP 65). Can we even speak of things when there are only things? "Is there even one thing when there are only things? Then there would be no thing at all, not even nothing, for with the total domination of the thing itself there is not even the 'there is.' Is there the 'there is'?" (ZBP 62).

And yet, there is still something in the interrogative movement itself, "Is t h e r e ' . . . ? " What does the interrogative experience itself give us? If we simply immerse ourselves in the experience itself, in its movement toward what motivates it and nothing else, and now diligently seekto avoid stilling the movement through the blatant reification ("absolutizing ofthingness") o four previous reflection, we really do not find anything either psychic or physical. The "object" of our present reflection is a living experience and not "a mere entitative occurrence." It is even questionable whether we have an "object" here. "The living-out of an experience is not a thing which exists in brute fashion, beginning and ending like an encountered process. The 'relating to'

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is not a piece of a thing attached to another piece, the 'something.' The living and lived of experience are as such not like entitative objects stuck together" (ZBP 690.

In fact, this particular experiencing is itself not only non-objective but also impersonal. For is it really I myself, in full personal involvement, who asks, "Is there something?" Not really, precisely because what is asked about (Gefragtes) does not touch me personally. The experience is related to an I (n 'importe qui) but not to my I (ZBP 69).

Finally, what is asked about, that toward which 'T ' live in the experience, the content of the question or its "hold" (Gehalt) and so its "hold" on me. For in any experience, intentionally understood, there is a "pull" (Zug) toward something, such that the noematic pole, in its directive sense (soon to be termed the Gehaltssinn), motivates the experience. In this experience, something is asked about something in general. What is being questioned (Befragtes), 35 the matter of the question, is "something in general." What is asked about, what stands in question, the form that the question takes, the actual content (Formgehalt) of the question, is the "es geben." In both form and matter, the question contains the emptiest, the most general, the most theoretical of the reflexive categories. From Lask, we have learned that "givenness" is the very minimum that can be said about the most minimum. It is so devoid of substantive meaning that we have a tendency to fill in the phrase with examples. This very "pull" reflects a certain dependence of the phrase on something more concrete which itself will have to be explored. Even apart from its interrogative quality (which in fact proves to be irrel- evant in this course), this experience both noetically (the empty ego) and noematically points beyond itself to another kind of experience upon which it depends and (presumably) from which it arose. "The sense of the something, as primitive as it obviously is, in its very sense proves to be the motivator of an entire process of motivations." "Where is the sense motivating the sense of the 'es gibt' to be found?" (ZBP 671).

At this point, therefore, an entirely different experience is described, namely, the environmental experience, an experience not so much "of" as "out of" the immediate world around us (Umwelt), an experience which by its very contrast serves to develop the issue at hand. Looking around for an example, Heidegger selects the mundane, habitual, common and yet in its way individualized experience of walking into class and "seeing your desk." If we "reduce" the more current theoretical constructions as we describe, what I see are not brown patches on rectangular shapes, or a box which I eventually construe as a schooldesk, I simply see my desk at once, quickly noting also at once anything that might be out of place or unusual about it, a book on it, and the like. Others more or less familiar with things academic


will also see "this pupil's desk." Even a total stranger to such things, say, an African native suddenly transplanted into this classroom, will not see "a something which is simply given" (reflexive category) but perhaps something to do with magic or a good defense against arrows or, at the very minimum, a something "which one does not know what to make of or do with." In this limiting case, therefore, what is experienced is not so much logically contradictory as contrary-to-sense, such that this sense-alien experience of the useless still belongs to the same class as that of the meaning-full desk All these things (books, pens, cars, campus, trees, shade, etc.) give themselves directly out of the immediate context of meaning encompassing us which we tend to call the "world." Much like Lask's objects known only through the constitutive categories in which we live, such things receive their significance from that meaning-giving context encompassing us, whose activity can then be described as "worlding." If we then take our campaign against reification one step further, then the true locus of our experience is not in objects or things which "in addition are then interpreted as signifying this or that," but rather the signifying element itself now dynamized and set in motion, the "It" that "worlds," which in conjunction with Lask has already been called the "transcendental realm of meaning (intelligibility, truth)." "The meaningful is the primary, [for] it gives itself immediately, without any detour of thought across the apprehension of a thing. Overall and always, it signifies to me, who lives in an environing world, it is wholly worldlike, 'it worlds '" (ZBP 73; 71ff). But is this impersonal es welter, this completely constitutive es gibt, so to speak, really an impersonal experience? Contrary to the reflexive es gibt with its abstract I, my own and temporally particular I is in some way wholly present "with" the worlding experience. In fact, in the "seeing" involved here, my I goes out of itself completely and immerses itself in the world in total absorption. This impersonal experience of the historical I wholly "given over" (hingegeben) to its world is thus the opposite of that of the theoretical I almost totally remote from its objectified es gibt. The experience of this indifferent I is only a rudiment of the "living through" (Er-leben) of experience in the full sense; it is in fact an un-living (Ent-leben) of experience. All that is left is an "impoverished I-relatedness reduced to a minimum of experiencing." Correlatively, the object is re-rooted (ent-fernt), extracted from its authentic experience. The objectified occurrence, a psychic process (Vor-gang) for example, simply passes the cognizing ego by, immobilized like a thing. By contrast, "in seeing the desk I am there 'with it' with my whole I, it resonates with this seeing in total harmony, we said, it is an experience properly (eigens) for me." It is my proper experience because it appropriates me and I, in accord, appropriate it. This experience is accordingly not a process but an event appropriate to me, a propriating event (Ereignis). "This

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living-through does not pass by before me like a thing posited by me as an object; rather, I myself properize it to myself and it properizes itself (es er- eignet sich) according to its essence." Such an "event" is something entirely new, outstripping all talk of psychic and physical, subject and object; even "inner" and "outer" make no sense in this context. "Living experiences are properizing events insofar as they live out of the proper and life lives only so, in accord" (ZBP 75; 73ff).

This is vintage Heidegger already in early 1919 (March 21), openly pro- nouncing for the first time - and surprisingly quite e a r l y - his very last word for Being at the end of his career of thought, the singulare tantum of das Ereignis. Later more explicitly tied to the ecstatic and expansive "reach" of time, the properizing event was, is and remains through and through the very contextualizing (later called "regioning") of that expanse of meaning that we call the world. If "life" itself is called an "event," the overriding historical and temporal connotations of this word should not be ignored: the historical "e-vent" in particular refers to those abrupt but meaningful turning points that restructure a historical world (Incarnation, Hegira). 36 The 1919 course as delivered (evidenced in student transcriptions) dwells on these connotations more than the printed "Ausgabe letzter Hand": Event as the basic "trait" (= "pull" or Zug) of life refers to its "happening" charac ter -" I see myself happening, taking place" - and so to its "immanent historicity." Theoretization therefore involves a "dehistorizing, unworlding, designifying" (synonyms!) of life. Heidegger therefore rejects the Laskian word "irrational" as a characterisation of the dynamic facticity of life (ZBP 88, 117). Life is a dynamism without nihilism. In the last hour of the course (April i 1), Heidegger does in fact divide the e-vent of "world-ing" into its two parts, as two sides of the same coin, and gives primacy to the suffix, to the (structuring, articulating meaning-giving) dynamism of "life in and for itself. .... It's world-ing, It's proper-ing." In worlding and properizing, this "It" is accordingly a preworldly as well as pretheoretical something; "It" is in fact the "original something" (Ur-etwas). 37 B is indifferent to any particular world and especially to any particular object-type. It is not yet differentiated and not yet worldly; ergo a preworldly something. Its "not yet" is the "index for the highest potentiality of life." This potentiality is the basic 'trait' of life, to live out toward something, to "world out" (auszuwelten) into particular lifeworlds. Life in itself is motivated and has tendency, it has motivating tendency (= "thrown project" in BT) and tending motivation. "But this means that the sense of something as that which can be experienced implies the moment of 'out toward,' 'direction toward,' 'into a (particular) world' - and in fact in its undiminished 'vital impetus'." (ZBP 115)


"It is out of this preworldly vital something that the formal objective something ofknowability isfirst motivated. A something of formal theoretization. The tendency into a world can be theoretically deflected before its demarca- tion as a world. Thus the universality of the formally objective appropriates its origin from the in-itself of the streaming experience of life" (ZBP 116). In short, the universality of formalisation has the direct access to the "original something" (Ur-etwas) which phenomenological intuition wishes to have. The reflexive categories derived from formalization are not "parasitical" upon the constitutive categories of the world, as Lask thought. Their contentlessness reflects a freedom from the genera and species generated in the theoretical generalisation of the world, a freedom which makes them philo- sophically useful, as we have seen more than once above. Traditionally, what philosophy seeks is at once comprehensive and fundamental, and the pure and simple universals of formalization come closer to that than the mundane order of strata caught up in a complex web of genera and species in ever-increasing generalization.

Pure and simple as it is, however, the form of formalisation nevertheless reflects an object which, as Lask already noted, "at once alludes to the 'standing over against' in the relation to subjectivity" (II, 72). Add to this the "heterothesis" essential to identifying one object from another, and the phenomenological ambition to "go with the flow" of original life and to describe this "1 iving out toward" from the inside out, as it were, is simply thwarted by the escalating diremptions of formalization (ZBP 111 f, 117). Why should formalization then be regarded so positively? What does it really contribute to phenomenology's own, enormously difficult category-problem, that of finding the right words for its pretheoretical sort of descriptions of the dynamism of life? Looking beyond this "minus," the prejudice of diremption, we have in fact come upon a third "plus" which we can now add to our list. In addition to its proximity to the comprehensive uniqueness of life and the methodological flexibility and freedom offered by its contentlessness, the formal category of "object in general" in fact magnifies its relation to subjectivity, what Heidegger will soon call the relational sense (Bezugssinn) as opposed to its content sense, what it "holds." The one thing that the formal category lacks, as Heidegger will point out in subsequent courses, is the dynamic "sense of actualization and fulfillment" (Vollzugssinn). Formalization, so to speak, does not let its phenomenon follow through to its natural conclusion, but instead immobilizes it into an object. Nevertheless, there are methodological lessons to be learned from formalisation. Phenomenology needs only to improve upon the schematization of formalization and expand it into the full intentional structure dictated by the phenomenon of life. Small wonder, then, that Heidegger will shortly (WS 1919-20) call the "open" methodological

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concept that points the way and guides the explication of phenomena without prejudice, i.e., without falling into standpoints and regional limitations, the "formal indication" OCormale Anzeige: In BT, "existence" is the formal indication; in this essay, it is what hitherto has been called the "operative concept" of intentionality; for Lask it is perhaps "matter-needy forms." Each in fact schematizes the same "tendency.")

SS 1919. The critique of transcendental value-philosophy and of its cultural "system of teleological idealism" (ZBP 121) continues relentlessly and without pause in the following semester- a scant month later in this postwar year - with Heidegger now hoping to apply the developed apparatus of the previous semester in what, from the opening remarks, promises to be a full- fledged "phenomenological critique" of that historical stretch of philosophy whose waning moments he experienced first hand as a student and involved participant. The promise is breathtaking in its scope and "ruthless radicalism." Genuine critique is no mere contrasting of standpoints in order to demolish the opposing one, pointing to its logical deficiencies or inner contradictions and marshaling counter-proofs to defend one's own. Phenomenological critique can never really be negative. "It overcomes and points behind confused, half-clarified and false problems only in pointing to the genuine sphere of problems." Critique here is "positive attunement to the genuine motivations" and original tendencies operative in the stated problems of a philosophy in order to take them back 're-ductively' to "their genuine phenomenological Ur-stratum" from which their immanent sense originates. Phenomenological critique is in fact only set in motion by those philosophical intuitions which already in some fashion are traversing "fields of genuine problems." Phe- nomenology itself can only profit from such critiques of intellectual history, gaining further insight into the "principles of all intellectual life" as well as into the very "principiality" of all principles which ultimately is its one and only interest, the "quale of phenomena which is the genesis and terminus" of all inquiry (ZBP 121-8).

The promise of the course is not fulfilled, beyond this brilliant statement - the very first by Heidegger- of the method and intent of phenomenological "destruction." 38 The exegesis of the texts of Windelband and Rickert displays some moments of insight, but is by and large shallow and pedestrian, especially when compared with later similar efforts like the Kant-book of 1929. And unfortunately for us, Heidegger never gets as far as Lask's texts. We must therefore make do with his promise to do so, dwelling on the probing footnote and several other, more general textual references that he does give us in the context of his opening remarks. At this stage, I must also be brief, leaving something to do for other (hardly a swelling number), perhaps more devoted readers of Lask.


Heidegger targets three groups of problems for reduction to the Ur-stratum of motivation from the "system (III) of teleological (I) idealism (II)": the problems of(I) value, (II) form and (Ill) system. Lask is mentioned in conjunction with all three problems (ZBP 121ff):

I. "Lask discovered in the ought and in value, as an experienced ultimate, the world, which was non-thinglike, non-sensorily metaphysical, as well as not unthinglike, extravagantly speculative, but rather was factic" (ZBP 122). This sentence, cited in part in my opening paragraphs, may now be examined more closely. We have already come across this "ultimately experienced" dimension in the above discussion of Lask's "panarchy of the logos." 1) Is it factic? But Lask explicitly told us that philosophy takes its material not "from factic life but from the sphere of immediate experience replete with value, of the life that is worthwhile" (II, 196). This objection is really only verbal, since the contrast here is between two levels of facticity, the purely sensory manifold familiar to orthodox Kantians and the likewise immediately experienced sphere of aesthetic, ethical, and religious values constituting our cultural but "pre-scientific life" (II, 185). As Lask describes it, already constituted categorial forms can also be immediately experienced as "logically naked," and thus assume the position of factic "matter" in the "logic of logic" that is philosophy. In fact, this factic human (cultural) life already replete with meaning becomes the main topic of such a philosophy, the philosophy of Dasein. 2) Is it worldly? Only if we twist the image of the categorial form encompassing its matter into a context which also embraces the I who lives that f o r m . . , which is exactly what Lask's texts, following Husserl's sense of categorial intuition, repeatedly suggest. 3) Is it the environing world of the useful pragmata, of"utilitarian values," the early Heidegger's first paradigm for the world? It seems not. Both in its conceptual roots and in its culmina- tion in a worldview, the teleological context described by Lask is directed more toward the eternal and ideal norms of the "higher" practical life, and not toward the mundane world of practical "things," especially if this is also regarded from its source in life, in its motivating archeology. Es weltet and es wertet may be equiprimordial, but they are not the same. One is more likely to find a precedent for Heidegger's sense of the environing world in Husserl or Dilthey. Dilthey is in fact named here as an influence on Lask's book, Fichte 's Idealism and History. 39 Indeed, Dilthey's distinction between the natural and human (cultural) sciences is reflected in Lask's first book in the distinction between an epistemological and a cultural sense of"irrational" individuality.

II. Lask's categories are at once value and form, telos and arche. Under Husserl's influence, form began to be regarded transcendentally in terms of formal and material apriori. Thus we have the problem of categorial divi-


sions into regions. For philosophy of culture, this meant the problem of the totality of cultural values and their rank ordering (ZBP 123). In a note on Lask's problem of form (ZBP 121n), Heidegger relates it to the Husserlian problem of eidetic essence, sense and content as well as to his own problem of meaningfulness as such, which he has already identified with the problem of the environing world. The specific page reference to Lask (II, 381f) falls in the context of a discussion of the distinction of formal from material logic correlative to the distinction of the non-objective (i.e., the domain of judgments) from the objective region, with primacy given to the latter in view of its "supra-oppositionality." The discussion is Husserlian in tone, and hardly an anticipation of Heidegger's sense of the environing world. And yet, in this early period (1915-22), Heidegger repeatedly identifies the regional division of values with regional worlds. For he tends to speak of the "1 ifeworld" (first Erlebn&welt, but by 1918 also Lebenswelt) in the plural, more often than not classifying them according to the neo-Kantian axiology into the scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious lifeworlds, to which he sometimes adds the political and the social (ZBP 4, 5,18,133,208,210, 214).

III. Under "systematics," which includes the aforementioned problems of hierarchizing of values in a historical culture and the categorial division of material regions, Heidegger refers to the Conclusion of Lask's "Logik." In a reference to Hegel's dialectic, "heterothesis," Rickert's coined word, appears, as well as in two other places in this year (ZBP 123; 117,209), suggesting once again that the habilitation structures are still very much on Heidegger's mind in his phenomenological critique of Lask's use of"form-matter duplicity" to circumscribe his panarchy of the logos. Does not matter, the mark of facticity, inescapably serve a theoretical function here? (ZBP 117) Does not "logical form", as the subtitle of the "Logik" declares, always retain "dominion"? Thus, Heidegger's conclusion under this heading: "The systematics itself approximates the Hegelian heterothesis, which at the same time is also seen in the theoretical sphere of objects: form-content duplicity" (ZBP 123).

If not yon oben her by a dialectic of concepts, how is the panarchy articulated into, e.g., rank orderings of the true, good and beautiful? Heidegger's unequivocal reply: yon unten her, from the very "matter" of life, resurrected and made replete with meaning like the medieval Scotian's modus essendi, and given full hegemony. Thus the "expression" of life can (must) be understood as a genitive-"subjective." In the last class of Winter Semester 1919--20, Heidegger calls this self-articulation of life a "diahermeneutics." Against Kant, intuition is given primacy over the concept and then, yon unten her, "intuition" and "expression" are made equiprimordial. Life manifests itself, gives itself, expresses itself. In his early book on Fichte, in his development of Husserl's doctrine of categorial intuition, Lask flirted with these


thoughts but never, it seems, followed the anti-Kantian conversion through to the end.

In a final seminar exercise on January 20, 1920, in which he apparently outlined his plans for a course in the coming semester called "The Phe- nomenology of Intuition and Expression," Heidegger makes some "Remarks on Lask" It was the only part of the entire semester's exercises that Oskar Becker recorded in his notebooks:

Lask's concept of knowledge is obtained "backwards," and not from concrete experience. It is a limit concept from which we must free ourselves. Problem of the "Logic of Philosophy," of the Ur-science, which is a science of itself. Every life is an expressive content and is formed. Intu- ition in factic life is the self-giving element, directly, without complication and c o n f u s i o n . . . Immanent relations in life, which we must experience as gestalts o f expression . . . . I must live in experience, I must be it, it must "flow from me as from an original source [herausquellen]." An isolated pregiven experience cannot be had, but only a coherent continuity o f experiences.

Notes

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Erinnerungen an Heideggers Anf'ange," Dilthey-Jahrbuch 4 (1986- 87): 13-26, esp. 23t".

2. Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. The early Freiburg courses of 1919, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 56/57, edited by Bernd Heimbtichel (Frankfurt: KIostermann, 1987), p. 122; 121n. It should be noted that the entire first section (pp. 121-126) of this Intro- duction, entitled "a) Leading Theses for the Lecture Course," is not found in the extant student transcripts of this course of Summer Semester 1919. Either these opening pages were not delivered or the student scribes cut on opening d a y . . , which is not unheard of.

3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper,1962). Hereafter cited as BT. In referring to this translation, I shall use the more universal 'H' numbers found in the margins, which is the pagination of the German edition; in this instance, H. 72 note (which in the English is in an appendix). In view of the historical nature of my article, references to Lask will only be to the first two volumes of the Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Eugen Herrigel (Tt~bingen: Mohr, 1923), hereafter cited simply by Roman numerals (I & II) usually in the body of the paper. Naturally a study of the manuscripts in Vol. III, presumably not available to Heidegger in 1919, would also serve to confirm or disconfirm the various theses.

A remark on scholarly Oblivion: Lask's Gesammelte Schr!ften are hard to come by in my part of the world. Imagine, then, my mild surprise when I received Herbert Spiegelberg's old copy of Vol. II, with his handwritten marginalia, on interlibrary loan from Washington University at St. Louis. Moreover, it turned out to be Rickert's partially uncorrected page proofs which, as Spiegelberg duly records on the title page, were transmitted to him on May 1924 by Rickert's assistant, August Faust. This chance occurrence would not be worthy of note if it were not for the fact that Spiegelberg, in his otherwise thorough history

234 THEODORE KISIEL

of The Phenomenological Movement, never mentions the proto-phenomenologist Lask. On the other hand, the events of the intervening years may in part account for that oblivion, as reflected in the career and tragic end of Faust, by that time professor in Leipzig, shortly before war's end in 1944.

4. Martin Heidegger, Friihe Schriften (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972). A later edition appear- ing in the Gesamtausgabe (as Vol. 1; also Klostermann, 1978) also includes Heidegger's 1912 review of (in part) Lask "Neuere Forschungen tiber Logik" from which I shall cite, but otherwise I will be citing (in the body of this article) the pagination of the 1972 edition, which is to be found in the margins of the 1978 edition.

5. Steven Galt Crowell, "Lask, Heidegger, and the Homelessness of Logic," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23 (Oct. 1992): 222-239; lstwin M. Feh6r, "Lask Luk~ics, Heidegger: The Problem of Irrationality and the Theory of Categories"; Christo- pher Macann (ed.), Martin Heidegger: CriticalAssessments, Vol. II: History of Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 373~05.

6. This relationship between living (or 'experiencing' = erleben) and knowing, crucial for what follows, first takes shape in Husserl's discussion in the Sixth Logical Investigation (§§ 8, 39) of tacitly experiencing truth as identification in knowing the identical object. Cf. my articles on the Husserlian aspects of Heidegger's thought: "Heidegger (1907-1927): The Transformation of the Categorial," Continental Philosophy in America, edited by H.J. Silverman, J. Sallis & T.M. Seebohm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1983), pp. 165-- 185, esp. p. 178; "On the Way to Being and Time: Introduction to the Translation of Heidegger's Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs," Research in Phenomenology XV (1985), pp. 193-226, esp. p. 201. The Laskian phrase "to live in truth" thus first appears in Heidegger's gloss of Husserl's Sixth Investigation in Summer Semester 1925: Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 20 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), p. 70; English translation by T. Kisiel, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), p. 52. Cf. also p. 94 (69) of this very same section in the course, where the one mention of Lask is to remark that he was influenced in his investigations on the logic of philosophy and the theory of judgment by Husserl's treatment ofcategorial intuition.

Heidegger introduces the phrase "in truth" in BT, H. 221, as if it were common parlance. It is, of course. But shortly before (H. 218, note), he had identified Lask as "the only one outside of phenomenology who has positively taken up" these portions of Husserl's Sixth Investigation, from which Lask's Logik der Philosophic (1911) was especially influenced by the sections on Sensory and Categorial Intuition and his Lehre vom Urteil (1912) by those on Evidence and Truth. The investigation of these even more specific interconnections made by Heidegger might well prove fruitful for the understanding of all three parties in this philosophical 'triangle.'

7. As the director of the habilitation, Heinrich Rickert, observes in his final report, (the young Heidegger "is in particular very much obligated to Lask's writings for his philosophical orientation as well as for his terminology, perhaps even more than he himself is conscious of." Rickert's report is reprinted in German verbatim in Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger's Lehrjahre," The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years, ed. J.C. Sallis, G. Moneta, and J. Taminiaux, Phaenomenologica, Vol. 105 (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1988), p. 118.

8. T. Kisie•• ``Das Entstehen des Begriffsfe•des `Faktizitat• im Fr•hwerk Heideggers••• Di•they- Jahrbuch 4 (1986--87), pp. 91-120, esp. pp. 92-94 and note 6; Christoph von Wolzogen, " 'Es gibt': Heidegger und Natorps 'Praktische Philosophie'," Heidegger und die praktische Philosophic, edited by A. Gethmann-Siefert & O. POggeler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 313-337, esp. pp. 321-3 and note 23 (where Lask is mentioned only in pass- ing). The early Heidegger actually refers to Lask's Fichte book at least once in summer semester 1919, tf we assume quotation marks around the word "Fichte" in the edition of the course (cf. note 2 above), p. 123, line 4. There is more than one good reason to make such a change in that context and from a study especially of the other internal


references on that particular page. For one thing, as it reads now, Dilthey is influencing Fichte, dead almost twenty years before Dilthey was born. But there is also a larger reason: This Volume (56/57) is another one of those editions (e.g., Vol. 20 & 55) in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition) which is teeming with the most primitive of reading errors, and therefore must be read and used with caution. The course on the last 10 pages of the edition, for example, is riddled with at least 25 errors, in some instances totally obfuscating the sentence and context. The correction proposed above is at least detectible from the printed page, without the handwritten original. It is likewise a good example of how the lowly punctuation mark can make a big difference, in this case yielding a bit of information which is crucial for our topic. (I shall be noting other corrections below, as I cite from this Volume (= ZBP).

9. Georges Gurvitch, Les Tendances actuelles de la philosophic allemande: E. Husserl- M. Scheler-E. Lask-M. Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1930, 1949). The neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann is also treated, but only Lask is mentioned in the subtitle, among three phenomenologists, suggesting that he was still in high repute, seven years after the appearance of his Collected Writings and one year after the Cassirer-Heidegger debate at Davos. Cassirer in particular would continue to promote the cause of neo-Kantianism with some success, by emigrating to America. When asked by Ernst Cassirer at Davos whom he would include under the rubric of neo-Kantianism, that "scapegoat of the newer philosophy," Heidegger notably does not mention Lask and Paul Natorp, the two from whom he had learned the most. Heidegger also alludes to the "problem of the irrational," in conjunction with Cassirer's conception of the "inconceivability of freedom." Cf. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 4th expanded edition (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973), pp. 246, 257.

10. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, p. 180f. Heidegger gives 1913 as the year, but university records place him in Rickert's seminar on "Epistemological Exercises in the Theory of Judgment" already in Summer Semester 1912, and Julius Ebbinghaus mentions that he first met Heidegger in a Rickert seminar in SS 1914. Cf. Bernhard Casper, "Martin Heidegger und die Theologische Fakultat Freiburg 1909-1923," Freiburger DiOzesan-Archiv 1 O0 (1980), p. 534-541, esp. p. 538. Ebbinghaus' "self portrait" is in Ludwig J. Pongratz (ed.), Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1975), Vol. II1, esp. p. 31.

11. Ibid, pp. 177, 180. 12. "Neuere Forschungen tiber Logik," Friihe Schriften (1978 ed.), pp. 24-26. The erroneous

citation here (25/19) of Logik der Philosophie, p. 138 (= II, 137), carried over by the Gesamtausgabe edition from the original review article of 1912 obfuscates the already complex set of relations being described here. The hyphen really belongs to Seins- (sic) in order to yield (across several other words) the word Seinsgehalts.

13. Compare Ibid., pp. 32ff, Heidegger's 1912 review ofLehre vom Urteil, with his remarks against it in his habilitation work of 1915-16, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, in Friihe Schri~en (1972 ed.), p. 236f. It should become evident, from what follows, that the babilitation work deserves far more attention among Heideggerians than it has hitherto received. Hereafter, the many citations of the habilitation work which follow, simply by page number and typically in the body of the text, will follow the pagination of the 1972 edition; cf. note 4 above. These numbers are to be kept distinct from those referring to Lask which are preceded by a Roman numeral; cf. note 3 above.

14. At this point in the analysis of Heidegger's relationship to Lask I shall be interjecting Heidegger's final assessments and projections from the all-important Conclusion (341- 353) written in 1916, a year after completion of the body of the work, in order to expedite this gloss. Contrary to the interpretive tendency to highlight the figure named at the very end of this Conclusion, Hegel, it should be observed that the two most frequently mentioned figures there are Oswald K~ilpe and Lask, the most creative representatives then of two of the "most significant and fruitful epistemological directions" of the day, namely, critical realism and transcendental idealism, who in fact stand quite close to each other across this divide and whom the young Heidegger is seeking "to draw into a higher

236 THEODORE KISIEL

unity" (346n). Both died in 1915. And both have suffered the fate of scholarly Oblivion. Ktilpe receives treatment in a short article in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967) but Lask is not even mentioned in any of its eight volumes. Even in the foreign literature, I know of no article that develops their relationship, as outlined in Heidegger's Conclusion, to any real extent, let alone a full-scale treatment. This will remain a desideratum even after the present article, in view of the fact that they define major parameters of the philosophical problem-situation out of which the early Heidegger emerges. It was precisely this epistemological complex of parameters in conjunction with the ascendant "metaphysical" problem of historical life and consciousness which struck Paul Natorp in his reading of this Conclusion, as reflected in his personal notes (Signature MS. 831 in the Natorp Nachlass in the Marburg University Library; thanks to Dr. Uwe Bredehorn, its curator). Natorp was so impressed with the young Heidegger's book that from 1917 on (as reflected in his letters to Husserl) he made overtures to bring Heidegger to Marburg, and succeeded in getting a position for him at the seat of the "Marburg School" finally in 1923.

15. In a book important for its early chapters in breaking new ground on the historico- philosophical background of the early Heidegger's thought, Jeffrey Barash's single reference to Lask is to note that such Laskian hylomorphisms "thoroughly colored" the young Heidegger's descriptions of intentionality. This is at least a first crack in the Oblivion surrounding the issue Lask-Heidegger. Other than this, there is only Gudopp's book where we actually learn more about the Marxian way of doing 'cosa nostra' of scholarship than about this issue. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Histor- ical Meaning, Phaenomenologica 102 (Dordrecht/BostordLancaster: Nijhoff, 1988), p. 127, n. 74. Wolf-Dieter Gudopp, Der junge Heidegger: Realitgit und Wahrheit in der Vorgeschichte von "Sein und Zeit," Vol. 102 of "Zur Kritik der btirgerlichen Ideologic" (Frankfurt: Verlag Marxistische BlOtter, 1983). A perusal of the literature on the theme "Heidegger and Logic" would also uncover a startling ignorance of this keystone to the de facto starting point of Heidegger's lifelong reflections on the "matter" of logic.

16. Gelten as a "felicitous [German] expression" comes directly from Lask (!1,101), one more sign of the young Heidegger's reliance on Lask even for incidental phrases. Such rhetoric surrounding truth as "validity," this "linguistic treasure" (111) of the German language ("gelt?"), adds a bit of drama to the deconstruction of it, when later, in BT (H. 156), validity is denounced as "this word idol," and phenomenological "pointing out" (showing) gets top billing over Kantian "determination" among the functions of a judgment (H. 154).

17. The same vein of critique is marvelously expressed in Rickert's letter to Lask on May 28,1915: "The object of knowledge as you formulate it is no object at all, not a 'counter- stand' (Gegen-stand) but only a 'stand' and thus an 'object fragment.' Its consideration is one-sidedly 'objective' and accordingly 'artificial,' while an all-sided and thus unbiased mode of consideration would take into account the subject in precisely the same measure as the object, and thereby come to the result that the 'Ur-region' is to be found in a togetherness of subject and object." Before this missive reached him at the front, Lask was himself reached by "object fragments" and so met his death. Our sources put it thus: Gadamer (note 1): " . . . bevor ihn die Granaten zerfetzten." Heidegger (note 8): "seine Leiche ist verschollen." Rickert's letter is cited at the very end of Michael Schweiz's article in Kantstudien 75 (1984) 227.

18. Undistinguished from the aforesaid material determination, "form determination" refers to a passive or receptive (more in keeping with intentionality) determinateness rather than an active determining. On the other hand, can matter itself be regarded as active, even in the context of intentionality? We shall see. Cf. Heidegger's usage of Formbestimmtheit on pp. 230, 255, 259, 261; but on p. 259 we also have Formbestimmung!

19. I am highlighting this very early usage ofabgelesen in part because of a personal involvement in this telling word, which reflects a more hermeneutically nuanced sense of phenomenology already in the young Heidegger. In early 1982, upon sending my errata list for the German edition (propaedeutic to my translating it) of Vol. 20 (= SS 1925) of the


Gesamtausgabe to Heidegger's literary executors, I was first challenged by them and their advisors on only one change: My replacing Abhebung there (p. 425, lines 23 & 26) with Ablesung seemed incorrect, " 'Abhebung' in this context is a word used by Husserl" (card from Dr. Herrnann Heidegger on June 2, 1982). In other discussions, I was even told that abgelesen was not the kind of word that Heidegger would ever u s e . . , despite its use two pages later in the same context. This painful (etymologically understood) 'experience' did serve one useful purpose, however; it sensitized my reading eye for this term whenever it surfaces in the Heideggerian opus. I also have no problem with Jacques Derr ida- whose ear for puns and the like is unfortunately too sensitive, and so not sensitive enough - making a mountain out of this seemingly minor word upon its first appearance (out of 8) in BT (H. 7). Cf. his Marges de laphilosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 149ff.

20. Heidegger himself, in a letter to Karl LOwith in August 1927, identifies the habilitation as the place where "I first had to go all out after the factic in order to make facticity into a problem at all." The entire letter is published in Zur philosophischen Aktualitiit Heideggers, ed. Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto P6ggeler, Vol. 2, lm Gesprgich der Zeit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), see p. 36 here.

21. John D. Caputo, "Phenomenology, Mysticism and the 'Grammatica Speculativa': Heideg- ger's ' Habilitationsschrift'," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5 (1974): 101-117, esp. p. 107. Oversight of this hidden agenda of a pre-understanding of being in the habilitation work and, with it, the loss of a precious opportunity for insight into the phenomenon of mysticism, is especially detrimental to Caputo's particular interests in Heidegger. Moreover, he perpetuates and even magnifies the mistake in various ways in his later books on the relation of Heidegger to medieval scholasticism and mysticism. Small wonder that, having missed this noetic dimension of modus essendi he goes on to speak of"the realism of the Habilitationschr!{frft," which prevents Heidegger from seeing the "mystical elements" of the "event" of truth until after the "turn" of 1930. (Heidegger was in fact developing such insights and, for that very reason, already making the turn in 1919!) Cf. John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Athens: Ohio UP, 1978), p. 152. There is more warrant for asserting that Caputo himself has allowed subliminal vestiges of scholastic realism to get the best of his phenomenological training. A counterdose of transcendental idealism h la Lask might have averted the wrong turn by recalling the aspects of Divine Idealism operative in the scholastic doctrine of ontological truth. In this regard, I missed the works of Albert Dondeyne in Caputo's book Heidegger and Aquinas (New York: Fordham UP, 1982). Cf. also Roderick M. Stewart, "Signification and Radical Subjectivity in Heidegger's 'Habilitationsschrift'," Man and Worm 12 (1979): 360-386, esp. p. 365, who notes the active modus essendi with some astonishment and does not know what to make of it.

22. Cf. my "Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes 'Faktizit~t,'" pp. 103, 107. The critique there of Natorp's use of the mathematical law of infinite series, where the converging determi- nations of form serve to approximate the X of the individual self, is already anticipated in the habilitation work (204, 196). Cf. also Lask's dissertation on Fichte (I, 176ff, 183ff) on the early use in the years following Kant of this quasi-mathematical 'asymptotic' strategy as a way of bridging the irrational hiatus between finite reality and the Kantian ideal. Unfortunately, I must also forego discussion of the more elaborate critique of Lask which follows Heidegger's comments on "form-matter duplicity" (347).

23. Cf. also il, 30, 66, 69, 76, 83 etpassim, where Lask invariably uses the phrase "objektive Bewandmis." Perhaps the real problem in translating the term comes in understanding the preposition and impersonal form of its most common idiom, "es hat eine Bewandt- nis mit etwas." This undoubtedly contributed to its translation as "involvement" in BT (H. 84, translators' note), though "implication" would have been more suggestive of the "hermeneutic 'as" that is involved here. For more on this logos-word in the transition phase from 1925 to 1927, cf. my Translator's Introduction, "On the Way to Being and Time," p. 214f& note 30; the fact that Heidegger, in this transition, substitutes Bewandtnis for "orientation" and "significance" bodes well for our translation of"bearing" or "appli-

238 THEODORE KISIEL

ance," which include both of these initial meanings. The German also includes a sense of termination, fulfillment, finality, stasis, suchness borne out by the joining of the forces of these two elements being brought to bear upon each other, coupled with an expression of acquiescence or compliance to the power issuing from their hold upon each other: in thought and other public domains, "letting it hold" (gelten lassen); in praxis, "letting it apply" (bewenden lassen); in mystical union, the "letting go" ofreleasement. For even the latter analogate contains its "force" of"validity."

24. To avoid an even more complex and extended discussion, I have made short shrift, for example, of the evaluation of Lask's Lehre vom Urteil, especially in its relation to Heidegger's felt need expressed in his Conclusion to expand the discussion to the judgment and the subject. (Why are these two conjoined? Heidegger at this time has clearly not yet overcome the onto-theo-logic monopole of the judgment.) But this would have entailed going back to the 1914 thesis on The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism, especially on the negative judgment, which plays an important role in the 1919 courses. These issues would have also introduced Aristotle into an already complex equation of thoughts and thinkers.

25. To demonstrate my wholehearted approval of this very Heideggerian "bibliographic cover- title," Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, given by the editor to this purported "Ausgabe letzter Hand" containing the three lecture courses of 1919, I shall hereafter refer to this GA-Volume 56/57 as 'ZBP,' usually in the body of the article; in this case, ZBP 218. As I see it, Heidegger launched his career in 1919 not as a philosopher of being or of life, existentialist, etc. etc. but as a philosopher of philosophy, a metaphilosopher, and not only maintained but magnified that discourse from outside of philosophy to the very end.

26. Natorp (cf. note 14 above) notes after this key sentence of the Conclusion, "Fichte?" I have therefore underscored the two words in the sentence which probably made Natorp hesitate. For this is not the textbook-Fichte, the early Fichte of the 1794 Theory of Science, who teleologically deduces all the norms of r ea son - and so of reality, including history - from the creative deed of the I alone by way of a constructive dialectic (cf. ZBP 37, 134,143). Lask's book on Fichte and history gives us at least some of the specifics of what the difference between this "critical-teleological" method (to be discussed below) and the "metaphysical-teleological" approach of the later Fichte might be: The initial step is in acknowledging the underivability and autonomy of the material factor in knowing and acting, whereby e.g. Kant's formal norm, "Act according to your conscience," is supplemented by the material principle, "Act according to your individual determination and destiny." Thus, by way of the Principle of the Material Determination of Form, "Fichte's ethical-teleological conception" yields the "teleological intuition" into the "supra-empirical values of our higher determination" already operative in "the immediate experience of the individual's outer world of the senses" (I, 154f). This in fact is the origin of the "value-individuality," the fundamental concept of Fichte's philosophy of culture and history. It is also a radical about-face in his Theory of Science. The actuality of life, formerly a mere limit of the pure I, now becomes the sum-total of all concrete values (I,162). This new object of "value-individuality" in turn "overflows" into the method, making it "metaphysical." "Not just cold reflection, but also immediate feeling, intuiting, emotivity, lived experience are also demanded of philosophy" (I, 198). Small wonder, then, that the young Heidegger appeals to the Romantic Schlegel (348) for the object of his philosophy and calls for the "empathetic understanding" (350) of this "living spirit." And the two applications he makes of the teleological method, to the theory of significations (247) and to "The Concept of Time in Historiology" (357ff), from the criteria suggested above, must also be regarded as metaphysical. On the background to the latter application, cf. my "On the Dimensions of a Phenomenology of Science in Husserl and the Young Dr. Heidegger," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 4 (1973): 217-34.

27. For another analysis of these three tasks, see now Steven Galt Crowell, "Making Logic Philosophical Again," ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren, Reading Heideggerfrom the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 55--72.


28. For a more detailed account of these courses, see now Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's BEING AND TIME (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The University of California Press, 1993, pb 1995), Chap. 1.

29. Wilhelm Windelband, Praludien: Aufsiitze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Ge- schichte. Vols. I and 1I (TObingen: Mohr, 51915), I, 3748 ; II, 10%111, 119: Durchbruch on I, 461 48; II, 119.

30. Ibid., II, pp. 305, 296ff. There is clear evidence that Heidegger made an intensive study of this essay in 1917-18 in conjunction with a projected review of the book by Rudolf Otto bearing the same title, Das Heilige, as well as a very neo-Kantian subtitle. There is much to be done on this virtually unknown Interregnum (1917-19) in Heidegger's development, focused in large part on a phenomenology of religion, but as a start, cf. my contribution to Otto P6ggeler's Festschrift, "War der frOhe Heidegger tatsachlich ein 'christlicher Theologe' ?," Philosophie undPoesie, edited by A. Gethmann-Siefert & K.R. Meist (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Fromann & Holzboog 1988). Also my Genesis, Chapter Two.

Another important part of Windelband's essay bearing upon Heidegger's terminological development is its shift in emphasis from the teleology of"reason" manifested in the three forms of normative consciousness, sometimes called the logical, ethical and aesthetic conscience, to a more archeological stress on its "antinomic" structure, which is in fact the favored Laskian stress on the hiatus irrationalis, the "coexistence of the norm and its contrary [natural necessity, brute reality] in the same consciousness"; this "divided consciousness" is the "primal fact" from which critical philosophy starts, and so its "problem of all problems" (1I, 300, 302). No doubt for polemic reasons, the early Heidegger will diligently avoid sanctioning the term "conscience" for several years. In 1919, he merely alludes (ZBP 45) to Windelband's reference (1I, 111) to a scoffing remark by Schiller on the Kantian tendency "to shove what it cannot prove into the conscience."

31. A summary of the course based simply on extant student transcripts is to be found in my "Das Entstehen des Begriffsfetdes 'Faktizitat, '" pp. 96-101. That summary is necessarily a bit cruder, but contains significant points which are not in the published version of the course, like the clearcut fourfold distinction of the 'something' and the remarks about worldview at the end (p. 100); see now the "KNS-Schema," Figure 1 in my Genesis. Especially insightful is the transcript of Oskar Becker, who was not at the course, but later composed a schematic "selection of the most essential" from the transcripts of Franz Josef Brecht and Gerda Walther. Fraulein Walther went on, perhaps in part under the impetus of this course, to write a rather eclectic book on the phenomenology of mysticism shortly thereafter, upon which Heidegger heaped nothing but scorn. Perhaps in part because of 'bubbling' early reactions like hers, Heidegger did not give his course on mysticism in WS 191%20 and tended to avoid the subject in those early years. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizitiit), Gesamtausgabe Vol. 63, "Early Freiburg Lecture Course of Summer Semester 1923," edited by Kate BrOcker-Oltmanns (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988), p. 74 & note.

32. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heideggers Wege (Tt~bingen: Mohr, 1983), p. 141. 33. Jonas Cohn, Religion und Kulturwerte, "Philosophische Vortrage" of the Kantgesellschaft

(Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1914), p. 21. Heidegger refers to this article in ZBP (145n). in his 6th edition ofDer Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (1928), Rickert refers to the increasing interest in Lask's philosophy of religion, but I know of no study on the subject, let alone on Lask's "mysticism."

34. Lask likewise writes: "What is at issue here is nothing less than the very life and death of philosophy" (II, 89). But what is at issue for Lask is the philosophical institution of the search for the categorial forms of the non-sensory forms already operative in our experience, and for the forms of those forms of the forms, etc. This, from Heidegger's perspective, is clearly a turn away from the already operative categorial intuitions toward ever escalating theoretizations of them. Ergo Heidegger's final assessment of Lask: he

240 THEODORE KISIEL

was the first to see the problem of the theoretical in ovo, but this very problem is difficult to find in him since he in turn wanted to solve it theoretically (ZBP 88).

Heidegger's thought experiment of the total reification of the world clearly bears close comparison to Husserl's experiment in Ideen I (§ 49) of world-annihilation. Jacques Derrida's commentary on Husserl's Origin of Geometry carries this tradition one step further by way of his thought experiment of the "world-wide burning of libraries."

35. I have added this terminology from BT, H. 6, not only to relate this discussion of the structure of a question to a later development of it, but also to raise the question of whether, aside from its use here as an illustration, there is really a point to a formalized question like "Is there something?" What does it ask for (Erfragtes)? Is the Erfragtes collapsed into the Gel°ragtes here? Later, in examining formalisation, Heidegger discovers that its product lacks a Vollzugssinn, i.e, it does not follow through to some sort of fulfillment. In short, such a question does not seem to be situationally motivated.

36. Through such examples, it is possible to trace a direct line of descent to the very selection of the term Ereignis in 1919, by starting from Heidegger's demonstration lecture of 1915 on "The Concept of Time in Historiology," where he is still utilizing Rickert's principle of "value relation" in selecting such historical concepts for historiology: see Friihe Schr!ften, p. 374. The history of primitive Christianity became a central concern during Heidegger's religious Interregnum of 1917-19: see my Genesis, chap.2. As Lask's early book suggests, the evangelical theology of Heilsgeschichte in the 19th century was much influenced by Fichte's account of"factic" divine interventions in human history.

37. On the last hour of the first course of 1919, see my Genesis, pp. 50-56. The four-part KNS-Schema is also discussed on pp.21-24.

38. The methodological term Destruktion in fact first appears in WS 1919-20 and undergoes a great deal of definition in SS 1920. But note that Lask, out of Kant, also talks of the Zerst6rung der Metaphysik (lI, 8,126 et passim).

39. ZBP 123. See note 8 above on the error in the published edition regarding this reference to Lask's "Fichte" book. In fact, Heidegger in his marginal note in the autograph refers to a specific chapter in the original edition of that book entitled "Das Ding an sich und die lrrationalitat des individuellen," Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tt~bingen und Leipzig: Mohr, 1902), pp. 124-135 [= GSI, ! 27-138].

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