CHAPTER 8
Martin Heidegger's self-confessed youthful fascination with Edmund Husserl's massive Logische Untersuchungen veritably from cover to distant cover bore its fruit in a plethora of works and academic exercises, first in his years as a university student, then in his early years of teaching as an instructor in Freiburg and as an associate professor in Marburg: its Prolegomena in a first dissertation on logical psychologism in 1913, the Fourth Logical Investigation on a pure apriori grammar in the second dissertation on Scotus in 1915, the already hermeneutical First Logical Investigation on expression and meaning, especially its discussion of occasional expressions that find their ultimate meaning only in an individuating context, in seminar exercises begun in Winter 1921-2.1 But it is the Sixth Logical Investigation on a Phenomenology of Knowledge, and especially its Sixth Chapter on Sensuous and Categorial Intuitions - made the subject of a detailed 'deconstruction' in the lecture course of Summer 1925 (GA Bd. 20, 63-99; 47-72) - that came to be recalled over the ensuing years, beginning with the Old Heidegger himself. Almost 40 years after his detailed gloss of this single chapter introducing the notion of categorial intuition, Heidegger singles it out as a particularly 'captivating' theme within the Sixth Investigation, especially in regard to the old Aristotelian line that 'being is said in many ways,' the theme of the 'manifold meaning of the entity' (SD 86). And ten years later, in the Seminar at Zähringen in 1973, Heidegger once again points to this chapter on categorial intuition, which broadens the notion of intuition far beyond that of sense givenness, because Husserl here 'brushes' (touche, effleure; berührt oder streift) the question of being in particularly allusive passages that prefigure both the question of the truth of being and the issue of the ontological difference: It is in these two senses that categorial intuition for Heidegger is 'the focal point [le point brûlant, der Brennpunkt] of Husserlian thought' (GA Bd. 15, 373; Fr. Ed. 311).
What are we to make of this confession extracted from the Old Heidegger by Jean Beaufret's seminar-line of questioning in 1973? Is it to be construed as an indication that the Heideggerian problematic of a fundamental