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5. THE EARLY HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERLSean J. McGrathNotwithstanding Heidegger’s sometimes savage criticism of Husserl, Heidegger dedicatedSein und Zeit to Husserl “in friendship and admiration” and generously acknowledgedHusserl’s positive influence on his work. 1 Heidegger and Husserl agree that the propertheme of phenomenology is the meaningful as such. Heidegger departs from Husserl onthe structure and mode of access to the meaningful. Neither Heidegger nor Husserl aresystem builders, so a facile reduction of either to a set of theses is not helpful. Moreover,Husserl’s view changes over his long career, undoubtedly under the influence of the workof Heidegger, Scheler and his other students. Much of what the early Heidegger advances,finds some correlate in the later Husserl. The traditional contrast between Husserl as areflective phenomenologist and Heidegger as a hermeneutic phenomenologist is not withoutits problems. Nevertheless, it succeeds in underscoring Heidegger and Husserl’s divergenceon the question of the structure and access to the meaningful. By absolutizing the theoreticalcomportment to beings, Husserl compounds Western philosophy’s forgetfulness of thefore-theoretical (“factical”) sources of thinking, and therewith, the forgetfulness of being.Husserl re-inscribes the prejudice in his contention that intentionality, directedness to anobject, is the essence of thinking. According to Heidegger the subject-object relationshipis only one of many ways in which Dasein is comported to being. Moreover, it is a “founded”relationship. The most basic relationship of Dasein to being cannot be articulated in thelanguage of subject / object or noesis / noema. Prior to the project of knowledge, Daseinis immersed in everydayness, lost in practical concerns, which are determined by its unthematizedpre-occupation with its own death. In everydayness Dasein is disclosed, notas a subject / ego, but rather, as being that is always outside itself in the temporalizingpractical, social, and existential pre-occupations, which Heidegger formalizes as “care”(Sorge), “being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world.” (SZ 192)This paper follows a reverse chronology. I begin with an overview of the middle Husserl’stranscendental phenomenology, with attention to those details of it which Heidegger foundmost problematic. I then sketch Heidegger’s 1925 critique of Husserl. The paper turnsfrom this more familiar terrain to the young Heidegger’s early innovations in phenomenology:his effort to return to the fore-theoretical, and the method of formal indication. Inthis way I hope to shed light on what Heidegger means when he accuses Husserl offorgetting being.1Heidegger’s uncharacteristically generous tribute to Husserl in Sein und Zeit (Martin Heidegger,Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1996], hereafter SZ, 400, n. 5) must beread in context. Sein und Zeit was originally published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologischeForschung. That Heidegger is to some degree playing a political game here is clear fromscathing remarks about Husserl which appear in his correspondence at the time. See for example MartinHeidegger to Karl Jaspers, December 26, 1926 in Martin Heidegger / Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1920-1963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 71. Recent studiesof Heidegger’s relationship to Husserl include, Stephen Galt Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matterand Method of Philosophy,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, ed., A Companion to Heidegger(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 49-64; idem, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. PathsToward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). My readingof the Heidegger-Husserl dispute is indebted to Kisiel’s superb studies. See in particular, Theodore Kisiel,“From Intuition to Understanding. On Heidegger’s Transposition of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in idem,Heidegger’s Way of Thought, ed. Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz (New York: Continuum, 2002), 174-186; idem, “Heidegger (1907-1927): The Transformation of the Categorial,” in ibid., 84-100; idem, TheGenesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).265