A Review by Eric Sean Nelson, Department of Philosophy, University of Toledo Published in Philosophy in Review, Vol. XIII, 3, June 2003. Email: eric.nelson@utoledo.edu / Homepage

    The central issue of current research into Heidegger’s early thought is whether and to what degree Heidegger remained committed to the transcendental philosophy of his teachers Husserl, Lask, and Rickert. Steven Galt Crowell’s excellent and provocative study traces the affinities and historical connections between Husserl and Heidegger by exploring their philosophical activity as a common contribution to a phenomenology of the space of meaning.

    Crowell’s work challenges some common beliefs about Husserl, Heidegger, and the apparent incompatibility of their thought. Instead of emphasizing the difference between the primacy of consciousness and epistemology in Husserl and the priority of the question of being and ontology in Heidegger, Crowell argues that they are both working out the transcendental space of meaning which is presupposed and enacted in all understanding and interpretation. Rather than interpreting Heidegger’s thought as a radical departure from Husserl in the name of concrete existence (existentialism), intuitive non-conceptual experience (mysticism), or the singularity and multiplicity of life (life-philosophy), Crowell argues that such labels distort Heidegger’s fundamental aims. We can only understand Heidegger’s project if we acknowledge his continued commitment to the project of phenomenology which articulates the transcendental space of meaning. Crowell thus argues that Heidegger’s approach transforms rather than destroys Husserl’s basic insights about meaning and intentionality. Heidegger did not reject but shifted the meaning of classic doctrines of Husserl such as categorial intuition, the reduction, the transcendental ego, and even Husserl’s later idealism. Crowell unfolds this argument through an analysis of the historical context and arguments of Heidegger’s early lecture-courses, Being and Time, his turn to meta-ontology, and his later thought. This is done from the perspective of Husserlian and Neo-Kantian problems about logic, language, and meaning.

     This reevaluation of transcendental phenomenology is developed first by considering the significance of Rickert’s Neo-Kantianism, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, and the mediating role played by Emil Lask for the young Heidegger. Crowell correctly emphasizes Lask, an older student of Rickert’s, who died on the Western front, as pointing the way for the early Heidegger. For Lask, ontology is not concerned with entities but with validity, and thus with transcendental logic. Such a logic accounts for the material of which it is to be valid through a doctrine of categories. Heidegger took up this idea as a logic of existence, or a formal approach to the concrete, and reinterpreted validity from the perspective of intentionality.

     Crowell is right to emphasize the transcendental motivation behind Heidegger’s work on logic in his dissertation and habilitation. Nonetheless, some difficulties arise in his discussion of Heidegger’s thought towards the end of the First World War. Crowell points out how Heidegger’s interest at that time in questions of existence, history, life, and religion has been overemphasized in the literature and has overshadowed his concern with logic, rationality, and validity. Nevertheless, these new questions did motivate a transformation in Heidegger’s thought, and in turn influenced his interpretation of the transcendental and formal. As such, given Heidegger’s emerging interests in 1917, which are at least presaged by his concern with singularity in the habilitation on Duns Scotus, we should note how Heidegger took up the impulses and questions of existentialism, life-philosophy, and the interpretation of religious experience. Heidegger reinterpreted the transcendental as immanent to life and developed a new logic of philosophizing which he called the formal indication of factical life.

     Crowell corrects previous interpretations that emphasized the concreteness of life and existence to the exclusion of the formal. He thereby points us to the primary methodological question of the early Heidegger—the formal indication of facticity. This is Heidegger’s transformation of Husserl’s notion of categorical intuition. Categorial intuition indicates that the categorial is already immanent in any apprehension of the given and that this implicit significance characterizes experience. Intentionality is thus the immanent structuring/structuredness of lived-experience itself rather than something superimposed upon it, and phenomenology is the self-explication of life. It is important to see the unity and tension of the formal and concrete that drives Heidegger’s questioning forward.

       It is appropriate that Crowell develops his argument for the transcendental Heidegger from his earliest philosophy through Being and Time to his later thinking. The understanding of the question of being as the question of the meaning and truth of being indicates the legacy of the transcendental in Heidegger’s thinking. Crowell’s book is clearly argued, and his thesis is well-constructed and supported. This work is to be greatly recommended, especially for its forceful presentation of the transcendental and formal side to Heidegger’s thought.