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yielding an a priori system of categories which encompasses the formal structure ofanything that can be thought. Husserl writes, “For psychology, the universal task presentsitself: to investigate systematically the elementary intentionalities and from out of theseunfold the typical forms of intentional processes, their possible variants, their synthesesto new forms, their structural composition, and from this advance towards a descriptiveknowledge of the totality of mental processes, towards a comprehensive type of the lifeof the psychic.” 6 In a return to Kant and Fichte, the foundation of all intentional structuresis thematized as “the transcendental ego,” the a priori source of possible experience.All intentional acts are traced back to an absolute horizon of transcendental subjectivity,a field of transcendental experience within which subject and object, self and other, areoriginally constituted.The Forgetfulness of Being in Reflective PhenomenologyIn a largely sympathetic 1925 overview of Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger identifiedthe three major discoveries of phenomenology as “intentionality,” “categorial intuition,”and “the original sense of the a priori.” 7 (GA20 27-75) “Categorial intuition” is Husserl’sdiscovery that the Neo-Kantian disjunction between intuited contents of consciousness (sensedata) and spontaneously generated formal structures (the categories) has no warrant inexperience. The assumption that categories, ideas, and expressions are imposed on thegiven by a synthesizing consciousness is phenomenologically unjustified. We have no intuitionof raw data. Rather we intuit pre-categorially structured data, which elicits a category.The categories are not filters that we place upon the data of sensation; they do notconstitute the ‘hard wiring’ of subjectivity. Rather, categories are derivations from a foretheoreticalstructure integral to the given. 8This “founded” nature of categorial intuition discloses the original sense of the a priori.The a priori is not a set of innate ideas, but a co-intuited structure that is transcendentally“prior” to the intuited thing. I have an experience of a desk, not just any desk, but thedesk upon which I work every day. Co-given with this intuition is the formal structure of“desk in general,” the essence, and more generally, the formal structure of “thing in general.”These formal structures are a priori, not in the sense that we bring them to the experienceof a thing, but in the sense that experience presupposes them as possible ways of interpretinga thing. Foremost among pre-categorial structures is being itself. The being of thesensible is given with the sensible, without however being itself sensible.And yet, Husserl remains blind to the implications of his discovery. The derivativenature of categorial language is left unaddressed and the ambiguity in the meaning ofbeing is not engaged. On the contrary, a traditional understanding of being is uncriticallyassumed. “Being for Husserl means nothing other than true being, objectivity, true for atheoretical scientific knowing.” (GA20 119). The question of the meaning of being cannoteven be raised when being is identified with objectivity. In a letter to Husserl, Heideggerunderlines the difference between Husserl’s reflective approach and his own: “We agreethat beings, in the sense of which you call the ‘world,’ cannot be clarified through a return6Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” trans. Richard Palmer, Journal of the British Society forPhenomenology 2, no. 2 (1971): 87.7Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA20, ed. Peter Jaeger (Frankfurta.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994); English: History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. TheodoreKisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), 135-6.8See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. John N. Findlay (London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1970), vol. 2, sec. 40-48.267