The Neo-Kantian Sources of Heidegger’s Overcoming of the Encounter Problem

Abstract

One of Heidegger’s main targets of criticism in History of the Concept of Time is Husserl’s theory of intentionality. This criticism, however, has roots in Heidegger’s earliest thinking over the course of his student years and pertains to what Ernst Tugendhat called the problem of encounter as such. In this article I present how the critical appropriation of Rickert’s and Lask’s ideas shaped a unique interpretation of the subject’s existence in the early stages of Heidegger’s career, contributing to the (dis)solution of the encounter problem and anticipating an independent version of phenomenology more than a decade before the publication of Being and Time. These alternative sources of influence illuminate Heidegger’s own path, which is significantly different from Husserl’s from the very start. In particular, I show in the article how Heidegger’s critical appropriation of Neo-Kantian sources allows him already during the 1910s to see the derivative status of the theoretical subject-object dichotomy and to realize the need to investigate living subjectivity in its embeddedness in the world.