Many of the criticisms Jflrgen Habermas makes of Heidegger depend on questionable interpretations of the latter's texts. However, it would be wrong to read Habermas's criticism as simply misinterpretation, as if once the scholars straightened him out, Habermas would come to agree with Heidegger. Much of what Habermas says stems from philosophical differences that are independent of and partly responsible for the wayward readings of Heidegger's text. While Habermas pictures Heidegger as going beyond views that see the origin of meaning and validity in the operations of a transcendental ego, he argues that Heidegger does not go far enough. Heidegger modified the neoKantian and Husserlian constituting ego into the being-in-the-world of Dasein (cf. WW 434).1 Habermas regards this as a decisive achievement, but one that is marred by Heidegger's refusal to take the next step into an intersubjective notion of validity. He sees Heidegger holding too closely to an approach where projected totalities of meaning make it possible to have individual meaningful propositions. As Heidegger talks variously about a world, an understanding of being, and a sending (Geschick) of being, he is speaking, according to Habermas, of such totalities; what changes as Heidegger's thought develops is their origin, not their function. In the early thought the understandings of being, and in the later thought the sendings of being overwhelm (because they set the conditions for) any intersubjective process of validation aimed at individual propositions. This priority of the totality over the individual proposition remains, early and late, while the locus shifts from Dasein to Being as Heidegger moves from an early decisionistic to a latter submissive attitude towards totalities of meaning (cf. DM, chapter VI).2