Multiple Heideggers? An Early, Still Prevalent Misinterpretation

Robert Welsh Jordan

<This essay was published by the electronic journal Current Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. On 17 July 2004 the journal's url was
http://www.url.edu/csph/Vol_01_winter00/default.HTM
that for the essay was
http://www.unt.edu/csph/Vol_01_winter00/rwjordan.HTM.
I have made one stylistic change; it is the phrase in ¶13 that is in bold faced sepia.

ABSTRACT. Since the earliest commentaries on Heidegger's Being and Time, its theory of judgment and of propositions has been widely misrepresented as relativistic, psychologistic, anthropologistic, pragmatic, etc. Even Edmund Husserl allowed himself to be persuaded to this point of view, to the great detriment of his phenomenological movement. And most of Heidegger's interpreters, whether friendly or hostile, have adopted this point of view, which normally includes the notion that there can be no fundamental difference between circumspective and apophantic forms of explication. This misreading ignores important aspects of the theory of propositional explication in Being and Time, ignores the fact that forms of interpretation would not be genera or species of interpretation, and is a clear instance of genetic fallacy. Yet it pervades the literature on Heidegger still.

"Multiple Heideggers? An Early, Still Prevalent Misinterpretation"

¶2. The misreading concerns primarily the relationship between understanding and the several forms of interpretation taken by understanding when what has been understood comes to be further understood in the way Heidegger calls "circumspective understanding" or else in the way called "statement" or "assertion". For Heidegger, all modes of interpretation or explication — including those practiced in the science of history — are ways in which understanding will be formed provided that certain conditions are fulfilled. The several ways understanding is formed when it occurs as interpretation are to be taken up in detail. Understanding is one of the two most original ways in which Dasein[1] is in the world. The other way is what Heidegger calls Befindlichkeit ['affectivity'[2]].

¶3. Insofar as Dasein's understanding occurs in the form of explication, it does so initially as what Heidegger calls 'umsichtiges Verstehen' ['circumspective understanding' in BT]. Circumspective understanding, therefore, is the original from which all other forms of interpretation are derived. Heidegger devotes himself most explicitly to circumspective explication and its derivatives in §§ 31-33 of BT.

¶4. The prevalent reading has correctly understood that these passages are essential for understanding Heidegger's conception of the nature of interpretation or explication and, therefore, also for understanding his views on propositional truth. The prevalent reading has also understood that this point is central to his conception of thinking's relation to the world and so to whatever views Heidegger might have held concerning proper methods of thinking and the possibility of theoretical thinking. But the prevalent reading has not correctly interpreted the passages themselves. Crudely stated, the prevalent but mistaken interpretation holds that, since Heidegger says that presuppositions are part of the essential structure of explication, all interpretation is essentially relative to the presuppositions of the interpreter and, aside from their own preconditions, to those presuppositions alone. Moreover, the story goes on, each person's presuppositions are uniquely his own so that interpreters — be they New Critics interpreting Melville, legislators interpreting the rate of illegitimate births among recipients of welfare, or dog fanciers interpreting the behavior of their pets — may do with their subject matter what they will, for the best they can do in the way of systematic explication is to remain absolutely faithful to their prejudices. In that case, each interpreter is limited only by what he believes he can get away with, provided he has to begin with a prejudice against unpleasant consequences.

¶5. This is a crude statement of a widespread interpretation of Heidegger, an interpretation so widespread as to be prevalent among those who seek to ally Heidegger with anti-foundationalism. It is almost as prevalent among friends of foundationalism who consider Heidegger to be among its enemies. Like many another crudity, it seems to have had a far more respectable origin. So as not to be setting upon straw men — and crude ones at that — I shall consider in detail the statement of this view as given by one of its most eminently respectable representatives, Karl Löwith. Löwith is chosen not as the parent[3] of the view in question but for the clarity with which he stated it and drew its implications and because his statement of it was given in English at a time when Heidegger was still relatively little known among English-speaking philosophers. Here, the reading that is to be shown up for a misreading will be called the Löwith-interpretation even though Löwith may not have been its primal source.

¶6. In his short, widely read book Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit, published in 1953, Löwith points up what Heidegger calls the 'circular' structure of understanding. All interpretative understanding is pre-structured by virtue of the interpreter's purpose, preconception, and slant or prospect on what he interprets.[4] Because of this pre-structure [Vor-Struktur] the circularity of interpretation is a necessity which can not be overcome. This circularity of understanding is conceived by Löwith to express a general belief that unprejudiced understanding is impossible. The question of how the text one is analyzing was understood by its author need not be posed because it can not meaningfully be posed. One can understand a text only from one's own point of view and in terms of one's own preconceptions. A text, if it could be viewed as a mere 'datum' would be no text at all; viewed by and of itself, without presuppositions the 'datum' means nothing, says nothing.[5]

¶7. Only the methodological presuppositions of the interpreter give meaning or sense to the text. The way in which Heidegger conceives of the methodological presuppositions — purpose, preconception, prospect — for textual analysis is based upon Heidegger's "analysis of Dasein." The fundamental principle of this analysis is that Dasein is not by nature something constant. For Heidegger, the 'essence' of man is not constant but is a possibility or potentiality to be, a potentiality which in each instance Dasein has projected for itself. This potentiality for being, which is projected ahead of itself by each instance of Dasein, is unique in each case. Therefore, the way in which each interpreter's approach to her subject is pre-structured by her purpose, preconception, and prospect will also be unique.

¶8. This interpretation of Being and Time is a re-statement of the position taken by Löwith in a 1942 publication on "M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity."[6] There, Heidegger is said to have formulated his notion of the circularity of explication in order to justify a more basic assumption that, for every instance of Dasein, its being is 'its own.' Löwith does not invite his audience to entertain the possibility that Heidegger agrees with Husserl in the conviction that similarity to other individuals is not excluded by an individual's being unique, even if each unique individual be unique in each of its parts as well and so be entirely and perfectly unique in this sense.

¶9. Heidegger claims that, because all interpretation must be pre-structured and so must be circular in some sense, the task of philosophical analysis — and all other forms of explication for that matter — is not to break out of this circular structure but to remain within it in the correct way. Philosophical analysis of Dasein has the added task of breaking into the circle in such a way as to make explicit the way in which all interpretation is conditioned by the pre-structuring of Dasein itself. Löwith interprets this pre-structuring as encapsulating Dasein within itself. By doing so, he totally misunderstands and misrepresents the openness that is a basic trait of intentionality, i.e., of Dasein's ways of being-in. Because of its own pre-structuring, Löwith alleges, Dasein can not break out of the sphere of Selfhood in order to be receptive [vernehmen] whether to revelation, to the nature of things, or to other persons. Dasein is always projecting its potentialities for being; so that as it moves forward, it moves forward into something that it has already projected for itself as its future. In meeting its future, Löwith concludes, Dasein is therefore meeting only its projected self. Dasein and its understanding must move within this circle. Therefore, he argues, Dasein can never arrive at anything other than itself [ist…immer nur bei sich selbst]. By leaving the openness of being-in completely unacknowledged, Löwith sought to pin on Heidegger the very view Heidegger himself sought to deny, uproot and to destroy. The extent to which Löwith's and like efforts later have succeeded would be astonishing were they not addressing an audience totally innocent of any inkling that anything so outlandish might be thought by a philosopher. Where only barter has been known, coins are no less alien than counterfeit. Innocently offered, the deception is perfect; pragmatically speaking, the difference is none. If Dasein has always been open to what there is round about it in all of its experience then whatever potentialities it projects will be potential ways of being open. To project an action or experience is not to do or to have it; it can be projected only as an outcome of a more or less definite kind. To be a projected outcome of some kind (however, specific) is not at all the same as being an outcome. Some outcomes are results of an action, but it does not make equally good sense to say of an outcome kind that it is the result of an action. Even if a completed act should turn out as projected, it should still be distinguished from the action through which it came to completion as well as from any kinds to which it belongs and to which indefinitely many similar acts on the part of indefinitely many persons may belong. These points were made repeatedly and convincingly by Alfred Schutz.[7]

¶10. By omitting them Löwith portrayed Heidegger as a clear cut subjectivist. What remains to be decided, Löwith maintains, is only whether this subject is — as it was for Hegel — a universal subject making its appearance in human form or whether the subject is indeed singular and unique in each case. Allegedly, the question cannot be decided because there is no way within the framework of Being and Time to say whether or not Dasein has more than one instance.[8]

¶11. For Löwith's interpretation of Being and Time, it is a simple consequence of the 'circularity' of understanding and temporality that the relationship of Dasein to other persons can be understood only in terms of my first person behavior. All that I can meet within the circle of my understanding is myself, even when my behavior seems to involve an understanding of persons other than myself.[9] By extension, the world can be in the first place only the totality of what is understood by Dasein. What Dasein understands it understands only through its circular self-comportment. The understood world therefore cannot be a 'natural' thing or even a totality of natural things; it can have only understood or interpreted members. Nature and so-called natural things are limiting cases arrived at by abstraction from the circularly understood world. 'Nature' and 'the natural' are privative concepts. The sense which they express is that of a derivative mode of being which Heidegger calls 'extantness [STM, presence-at-hand MR (Vorhandenheit)].' From this exposition, Löwith concludes that Nature as a whole or totality of what is, plays no role whatever in the ontology of Being and Time but simply vanishes into a vague and negative notion of what is merely extant [STM, present-at-hand MR]. 'Extantness' is a purely negative concept which includes everything that either does not exist — in Heidegger's sense of the word, a sense in which Dasein alone exists — or does not serve some end or purpose projected by Dasein.[10]

¶12. What is wrong with this reading of Being and Time? To put the matter into a single word — or rather a series of words with one underlying sense — whichat is wrong is the relativism, anthropologism, psychologism that is read here into the position of Being and Time. The supposed relativity of all understanding to peculiar and unique prejudices of each individual instance of Dasein is regarded as the origin of a number of errors into which Heidegger allegedly falls. Heidegger's supposed relativism is said to imply a denial of the possibility of objective validity to interpretation in the historical sciences — or in any science for that matter. On this reading, then, the position of Being and Time is said to deny to human beings the possibility of being open for or receptive to the Nature of things as they are in and of themselves whether the word 'Nature' be taken to mean a single all-inclusive totality of things or a specific realm, sphere, or substratum among the determinations of things. If this interpretation of Being and Time were correct, the criticism would apply no matter which of these senses of the word 'Nature' were accepted. For even if the Natural is conceived to be sharply distinguishable from the Historical, the Human, or the Mental, all understanding, all interpretation would be made relative to the unique presupposition of the interpreter.

¶13. How important and how widely spread this reading of Heidegger was is well illustrated by an exchange between the late James Edie and Otto Pöggeler, who surely considered himself to be if not a Heidegger-follower then a Heidegger scholar with great sympathy for his subject. The exchange occurred during the International Colloquium on Heidegger's Conception of Language in September, 1969.[11] Edie's response to Pöggeler's presentation emphasized that for Heidegger apophantic interpretation is derived from the concernful sort of interpretation termed "circumspection". It emphasized as well that apophantic interpretation is not only derived from circumspection but is also secondary while circumspective interpretation is primary: at least as Pöggeler and most others read Being and Time. This, it is said, commits Heidegger to something like a pragmatic theory of truth since it effectively denies that apophantic interpretation asserts anything at all. By giving primacy to circumspection, Heidegger makes perlocutionary acts and nonpresentational experience primary yet empty of cognitive content.

¶14. Edie accepted the standard misreading of Being and Time's account of interpretation, and he suggested that it implies that Heidegger is a skeptical relativist with regard to truth. As an antirelativist, Edie suggests that this account of the relation between apophantic interpretation and circumspective interpretation indicates that the whole analysis of Dasein is by Heidegger's own principles empty talk. Pöggeler's reply seems simply to accept this analysis of Heidegger's position and to allow that Edie has "shown quite clearly and accurately how one must deal with Heidegger's thought…"[12] Edie and Pöggeler are in accord on how to read the apophantic theory that they find to be implied by Being and Time.

¶15. The reading that they agree on does not allow that there can be any crucially important difference between kinds of interpretation or explication since all are derived from a single original and, it is alleged, exhibit, therefore, the same structure as their original.[13] The original sort Heidegger refers to as 'circumspective' explication. It is the kind of explication involved in practical activity whose purpose looks toward some end or 'good,' one which involves the needs or wants of Dasein.

¶16. A more detailed examination of the most relevant sections of Being and Time shows that Löwith's account has omitted at least one very important point. The following, somewhat closer examination of Heidegger's notion of interpretative understanding will not resolve the issue of whether Heidegger's thought, in both earlier and later periods, can or can not be considered as a coherent whole. What it does show is that the question can not be decided on the basis of what I have called the Löwith-interpretation. The view that, in Being and Time Heidegger took up a relativistic, anthropologistic, or psychologistic view of human understanding can not be used to prove that his later approach is quite different because this reading of Being and Time is itself false.

¶17. Löwith's interpretation of Heidegger's conception of interpretative or explicative understanding has already given us Heidegger's position in outline. Our task is to fill in some important gaps. Löwith is quite right in saying that, for Heidegger, no interpretation or explication is possible without some pre-suppositions.

¶18. But, for Heidegger, explication arises out of understanding and so we shall begin with this origin. Insofar as it has, or better is, understanding, Dasein projects its being upon possibilities. That something can be understood refers to the possibility that Dasein encounter it in some way. Understanding therefore involves the projecting of possibilities. This projecting need not and does not just happen; it can be and is formed. The formation of understanding is what Heidegger calls explication or interpretation. In explication, further understanding of something either turns out or does not turn out to be as it was projected to be. In explication, understanding does not cease to be understanding, "it becomes itself." To explicate something is to work out possibilities that have been projected by understanding. Understanding predelineates what is understood as something articulable; further understanding articulates or explicates what has already been understood.[14]

¶19. In this we begin to see what is meant by the 'circular' structure of understanding. Explication articulates (makes explicit) something that has already been understood, and this is the sense [Sinn] of the state of affairs that gets explicated. Understanding pre-delineates the sense of what is understood and pre-delineates it as explicable or articulable. Sense is the formal framework or scope within which understanding and further understanding (explication) must remain.[15] Picking up a previously seen hammer is an explication or further understanding of the sense of the hammer as it was earlier understood; the hammer is explicated or further understood to be heavy. That as which anything gets explicated — 'heavy' in the case of the hammer — must always have been disclosed in its possibility by virtue of the projecting inherent in antecedent understanding. Picking it up articulates the hammer as heavy. Understanding something as something is the characteristic structure of explication. It is only through the project of further understanding that something can be understood as something, i.e. explicated.

¶20. The original way in which Dasein explicates things is practical action in the sense of action which is concerned with providing for Dasein's wants and needs. "Providing", in this sense of the word, is the original from which all other forms of explication or interpretation are derived. In "providing" for its needs, Dasein always moves within an understood purposive context of ends and means in which the ultimate end has to do with some want or need of Dasein itself. Providing involves a purposing [Vorhabe]. The purposing involves in turn an understanding of some purposive context. Providing appropriates whatever it encounters in the light of its purpose. Whatever it encounters or understands it explicates in so far as what is understood is suited or unsuited for the purpose at hand. The sense of whatever is encountered is explicated only in the light of what is purposed. The purpose gives providing a slant or prospect [Vorsicht] in terms of which it explicates the sense of what it understands. The heft of the hammer is what makes it good for driving nails. Because of its purpose and slant or prospect, providing always decides in advance or preconceives the manner in which it will explicate what it encounters. As a way of explicating, providing is always grounded in purposing, prospecting, and preconceiving.

¶21. Providing is always pre-structured in this way. And all other ways of interpreting are derived from this original. We have no cause to wonder therefore that Löwith accuses Heidegger of making all interpretation relative to the presuppositions of the individual interpreter; the only question that can remain is whether or not this is the whole story.

¶22. That it is not the whole story is indicated by Heidegger's statement that pure understanding of world [providing] is "unauthentic understanding in its mode of purity."[16] Moreover, Heidegger tells us that explicating is able to "create concepts belonging to the entity that is to be explicated and to create them out of the entity itself, or it can on the other hand force the conceptuality belonging to this entity into concepts to which the entity in question is opposed…"[17]

¶23. How is such a "creative" explication possible in view of what has been said so far about Heidegger's conception of the nature of explication? On Löwith's interpretation, Heidegger would have to involve himself in some inconsistency in order to speak of any explication as open for or receptive to the nature of the entity as it is in and of itself. All ways of explicating or interpreting are derived from providing. But what Löwith overlooks is that the derivation of other modes of interpretation from 'providing' involves precisely a modification of this original mode.

¶24. To begin with, understanding explicates what is encountered within the framework or pre-structure of providing, Taken as a totality, the purposive contexts within which this kind of understanding moves make up the world in which Dasein is as being-in-the-world. But the sense of things encountered within this world is by no means exhausted by their relevance to or suitability for the satisfaction of Dasein's wants and needs. Immediately following his description of the as structure and the pre-structure (or presuppositions) inherent in 'providing' SZ §32, Heidegger turns to an analysis of "Statement as a Derivative Mode of Explication."[18]

¶25. Statement, which Heidegger also calls judgment, derives from 'providing', and statement can 'have' a sense only insofar as it is grounded in understanding. But statement or judgment also brings with it a modification of the entire structure of explication.[19] To begin with (in providing) whatever entities were encountered were appropriated to Dasein's purposing as goods [Zeug, MR equipment, STM useful thing] at hand. When any such entity becomes the 'object' of a statement, there is a sudden change in the purposing. The goods at hand — with which Dasein would otherwise be busied in carrying out some work — become something about which a declarative statement is made. This modification of purpose carries with it a modification in the slant or prospecting. Instead of looking away from what is encountered toward the satisfaction of some want or need, prospecting now looks at[20] (or respects) what it has encountered.

¶26. The particular example that Heidegger chose to illustrate this point concerning the modification of prospecting has proven to be of great, even horrendous consequence. The choice may have done much to corrupt interpretations of his original meaning. The example is the familiar hammer whose being in itself involves the complex of goods at hand to which it essentially belongs. Thus, respecting it is respecting something within the world. Insofar as straightforward statements about it disguise or disregard its utility and attend to it instead for itself, they disregard the complex of goods to which it essentially belongs as this tool. So the constituents which such statements explicate as belonging to the tool are constituents extant in it. In such a case, Heidegger says, "Foresight aims at something objectively present [Vorhandenes] in what is at hand [Zuhandenen]. Looking at or respecting (the modification of prospecting) is able to view in its own right the sense of what is understood: "What statement determines the extant entity to be is lifted out of this extant entity as such."[21] Only in this way does Dasein come to explicate things as having qualities or properties.

¶27. In statement or judgment, explication no longer conceives the sense of what is understood in terms of the purposive contexts of 'providing'. There is nothing in the analysis of this particular example which would imply that statement is at all bound to treat whatever it explicates as if it were something extant [Vorhandenes] within the world. Yet precisely that claim has often been read into the analysis.[22]

¶28. The point Heidegger was illustrating, however, is just that statement is not out to understand what is encountered only as what it is good for. The as of explication is leveled out so that all constituents of the entity's sense are on a par. None stands out apart from the others as what the thing is good for.[23] They are on a par regardless of whether they be extant entities or traits belonging to an entity whose way to be is not at all to be within the world but rather to be in the world. All this is achieved in simply making something the subject of a judgment, or in what Heidegger calls the declarative function of judging.[24] It should be emphasized however that what assertion declares or indicates must already have been disclosed in some way. The subject of a statement is never a free-floating sense but always a pre-given entity.[25] The opening up and leveling out of the full sense of what is understood is the function of declaring. In contrast, the predicative function of statement restricts what is stated. Here again, what is stated is what is judged about. In the statement, "the hammer is heavy," the predicate is the hammer itself. What the predicate states is the hammer in its being heavy. The predicative function of statement does indeed restrict or determine the sense of what is judged about, and this does imply an orientation with respect to what is stated. In the predicative function of statement a pre-structure re-enters. For, it is indeed the interpreter who chooses the respect in which the pre-given entity is explicated.

¶29. But the modification in which we are interested has already taken place through the declarative function. It is the leveling off of the as which makes it possible for the interpreter to determine what she interprets having initially glimpsed its sense as a whole. And it is this leveling off would make it possible for her to explore this sense further — if that were her purpose.

¶30. This point has been very seriously neglected in virtually all interpretations of Being and Time. And it has, to my knowledge, gone entirely unnoticed by those critics who agree with Löwith. It is an omission common to all who believe that, on Heidegger's view, interpretation must always be one-sided and forcible because it always is relative to prejudices that are unique and peculiar to the interpreter. When the modification inherent in statement is overlooked, objective scientific interpretation or theory must appear to be impossible.

¶31. What the foregoing analysis of statement is meant to show is not that historical understanding is presuppositionless. It shows in fact that statement itself is relative to the purpose of the interpreter. Yet it also indicates, but only indicates, that it is possible to overcome the one-sidedness of providing. The act of judging is what makes objectivity possible.

¶32. If this is so, then Löwith's reading of Being and Time cannot be accepted as definitive. To be sure, statement is derived from the circumspect understanding inherent in providing. In fact, judgment can have sense only in so far it is based on understanding and is a derivative form of explication. Moreover, Heidegger tells us that judging aims at something present at hand within what has already been explicated as ready. And he even says that judging disguises [verhullt] the readiness [STM, readiness at hand MR (Zuhandenheit)] of what is ready. But does this disguising of the entity's readiness, as Löwith implies, deprive the entity of anything? Is it just a privative mode of readiness? And if it is not then what is it that gets 'disguised' in the act of judging?

¶33. These questions have already been answered in effect. For we have already seen that judging does not detract from the sense that the entity has as something that has already been understood. In fact, the declarative function of judgment makes the entity as a whole with its open horizon of meaning accessible to explication for the first time. Judging involves a modalization of the manner in which the entity gets explicated. What it disguises is at most the extrinsic value (suitability) of the entity as means to an end. Asserting would not even do that if it were about Dasein as such insofar as it understands or interprets entities to be useful. And it was shown above that there is every reason to believe that such assertions are indeed possible.

¶34. Through its declarative function, statement or judgment makes the entity's meaning accessible as a whole. Judgment is what makes theoretical cognition [Erkenntnis] possible. But not all judgment is theory. In between explication that is all wrapped up in providing and pure theoretical judgment about any subject whatsoever there are many levels of stating. Among these, Heidegger names statements about events in the surrounding world, descriptions of things ready at hand, the description of a state of affairs, the narration of happenings. Statements that are not purely theoretical, he asserts, can not be reduced to theoretical declarative sentences without distorting their sense.

¶35. Heidegger does not at all believe that pure theory or science can somehow spring up full blown with the initiation of judgment. Nor does he believe that the sense of an entity as a whole thrusts itself clearly and distinctly upon Dasein as soon as the entity in question is subjected to judgment. Judgment, in the sense described, is simply what makes it possible for Dasein to purpose an investigation of the entity's sense for its own sake. And judgment is also what makes theory possible, whether natural scientific or historiological theory.

¶36. Speaking of cognition in the historical sciences, Heidegger says that:

The 'circle' of interpretative understanding harbors a positive possibility for the most original sort of cognition. But this possibility is genuinely realized only to the extent that interpretation has understood that its task is to guarantee that its subject matter is 'scientific' by elaborating the purpose, prospect, and preconception of its interpretative activity out of the subject matter rather than letting them be determined [vorgegeben] by fancies and popular conceptions.[26]

The most original and most creative kind of cognition is thought which is strictly or rigorously scientific, i.e. cognition which is grounded upon the subject matter it explicates. To show the full meaning of this ideal of scientific rigor would require showing how scientific cognition in the historical sciences is derived from the declarative function of judgment. That is something which can no longer be achieved within the scope of this paper.

Notes

[1]'Dasein' will be borrowed without italics as if it were an English word. This use follows the convention of Werner Brock [Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949)] and the translation of Sein und Zeit [Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962) hereafter cited simply as MR. The more recent translation by Joan Stambaugh [Being and Time (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996) hereafter cited as STM] uses a hyphenated variant of the same German word, Da-sein. When the translations agree in their terms, Being and Time will be cited simply as BT. Page numbers in BT will refer to the pagination of the German editions, given in the margins of both MR and STM as well as in the margins of Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914-1970. Band 2, Sein und Zeit, unaltered text with marginalia from Heidegger's "cottage copy," ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Vitorio Klostermann, 1977); cited hereafter simply as SZ.], The advantages of properly English terms like 'human existence' or 'human life' or 'personal being' are far outweighed for present purposes by their tendency to obscure the counter-Hegelian emphasis of Heidegger's transcendental thinking whereby the origin of the human is to be sought through the unique and individual entity he refers to as Dasein: "More original than human beings [der Mensch] themselves is the finitude of the Dasein in them." [Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951) p. 207]; the emphasis is Heidegger's]. As used here, 'transcendental' refers to the opposite of psychologistic, historicistic, anthropologistic, biologistic, linguistical, etc.

[2]'State-of-mind' in MR, 'attunement' in STM, 'disposition' in the "Glossary" to William J. Richardson's Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought, with Preface by Martin Heidegger (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963). When Richardson attributes to the Heidegger of SZ a conception of "…the relationship of knowledge as a derivative and necessarily deficient mode…," he appears to be under the sway of the misunderstanding to be scrutinized below.

[3] The earliest statement of this interpretation may well have been that of Georg Misch in his Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl first ed. (Berlin, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1930). Misch presented Husserl in May, 1929 an advance copy of the book's first part which deals primarily with Heidegger's BT. The book itself did not appear until June, 1930. Parts of it appeared in Philosophischen Anzeiger 3 (1929/30).

Misch wrote (loc.cit. p. 37) that one of the most essential goals of Heidegger's hermeneutics is to demonstrate that assertion is a derivative mode of an original knowing, a knowing which is included in the "constitution" of Dasein's being. "We cannot," he wrote, "quite accept his position on this; the status of 'intuition' in relation to theoretical behavior seems to be underestimated…" The primary issue, says Misch, is the relationship of the ontology of Dasein to logic. Heidegger's conception of the derivative status of assertion is said to be primarily about this relationship, and Misch adds that this relationship is what the demonstration is primarily about. He then asks, "How can that understanding that belongs 'primarily' to life-activity and out of which assertion is supposed to be derivable without remainder nevertheless be characterized as an 'understanding of being'?"

Misch goes on to argue that the attribution of "being" arises only in assertion itself so that an understanding of being presupposes categorial or logical form. So, it cannot be read back into a preontological stratum of knowledge that is supposed to precede all categorial formation. He continues, "Certainly, being does not admit, even when taken in the logical sense, does not admit of being resolved into mere objects [Gegenständlichkeit].

Like so many interpreters who were to come, Misch sticks dogmatically to Kantian and vitalistic use of the word object or Gegenstand. He seems unaware that the term had been relativized completely in phenomenological usage so that it refers to X if anything whatsoever might be truly said of X. To say that being or that anything whatsoever is not an object would be utterly absurd and self defeating. See "Husserl's Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (1917). 'Pure Phenomenology, Its Method and Its Field of Investigation,'" translated with an Introduction by R. Jordan in Husserl: The Shorter Works, Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston, editors (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 3-20.

[4] Karl Löwith, Heidegger. Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1953) p. 79.

[5] ibid. p. 81 f.

[6] In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (1942) No.1., reprinted in Karl Löwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, edited with introduction by Arnold Levison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966) 51-78. The article did not appear in German until 1958 when a somewhat revised version appeared in the Zeitschrift fur philosophische Forschung, volume XII, No.2. More recently, the German version has appeared in Löwith's Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960) pp. 68-92.

[7] Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1932; 1960, Springer-Verlag, 1960) 57-65 [English translation by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, The Phenomenology of the Social World with an introduction by George Walsh (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967) 59-65]; see also "Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action" pages 19-22 and "Choosing among Projects of Action" pages 67-73 in Collected Papers I, The Problem of Social Reality, edited and introduced by Maurice Natanson, preface by H.L. van Breda (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).

[8] Karl Löwith, "M. Heidegger und F. Rosenzweig, ein Nachtrag zu Sein und Zeit" in Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Zur Kritik der geschichltichen Existenz (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag,1960) 74 f.

[9] ibid. p. 76.

[10] ibid. 77.

[11] At Pennsylvania State University; papers from the Colloquium were included in Part II of On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Northwestern University Press, 1972); see Preface p. xiv. See 107-146 for Pöggeler's contribution, "Heidegger's Topology of Being" together with Edie's response.

[12] ibid. 141.

[13] This sort of reading treats the initial form of interpretation as if it were generic so that of its essential features would have to be found in all other forms of interpretation, as if the initial form were the genus of which all the other, derivative forms were species. The reading affords a rather clear example of genetic fallacy.

Moreover, the derivative modes of interpretation are not special cases of the initial way of interpreting. The several distinct modes of interpretation are only structurally analogous to one another; they are not homogeneous: the derivative modes need not have kinds of characteristics corresponding to sorts of characteristics essential to the initial mode in addition to characteristics which differentiate them from it. In Husserl's terminology, the several modes of interpretation embody the same formal universal but are not instances of some genus called "circumspective understanding".

[14] Martin Heidegger, SZ 154. What comes to be explicated must fulfill at least partially what was projected.

[15] ibid. 151.

[16] ibid 148.

[17] ibid. 150. Note on terminology: 'entity' is used here as in MR to translate Heidegger's Seiende, the term whose plural might otherwise be rendered as 'beings.'

[18] ibid. § 33.

[19] ibid. 158.

[20] "Only so does statement <STM, assertion MR> obtain the possibility of exhibiting something in such a way that we just look at it" [ibid. 158]. What is being referred to here seems to be the possibility of what is otherwise called "observation."

[21] ibid. 158. Here the translation is my own and is at least as accurate as that given by either MR or STM but is very different from either.

[22] The Löwith misinterpretation of Heidegger is taken for granted as something beyond question by Jean Luc Marion [in Reduction and Givenness. Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, tr. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998) 150-155]. Marion ends [155] an extended discussion of formal apophantics and formal ontology in Husserl with the conclusion that "formal ontology presupposes objectivity." He goes on to assert that Husserl "…does not even imagine any other mode of Being than the subsistence of the substratum, in the sense that Heidegger during that same period attempts to break through toward the existence of Dasein. The fact that Husserl had not even glimpsed that ontology could pass beyond logic (and thus predication) confirms precisely his inability to see that the objectivity of the substratum (of predication) had to be put into question…" Thus, Marion reads into Heidegger's presentation of assertion in BT an effort to pass beyond logic and predication to something else, presumably to absurd and self defeating utterances (see note 3).

[23] ibid. 158.

[24] It is worth noting that the traditional German term for what would occur in making something the subject of a statement or proposition is 'vorstellen' and is the term Husserl uses for the mental acts through which noemata come for the ego to have categorical form.

[25] ibid. 156.

[26] ibid. 153.