No doubt other Catholic students on the periphery of German philosophy
had Brentano and Scotus available as cultural capital, without any real chance
of moving them to the center of attention. Heidegger’s own work remains
unexceptional until after 1916, when two things happen: he is passed over for
the chair in Catholic theology, and he meets Husserl, newly arrived at Freiburg.
Heidegger undergoes a conversion, away from Catholicism and into the new
movements of Protestant theology. Husserl, from an ethnic Jewish background
and now calling himself a “free Christian,” is suspicious of Catholic dogmatists
and receives him only after assurances of Heidegger’s conversion. Heidegger
becomes his assistant and favorite disciple. Heidegger had known Husserl’s
early writings but only as relevant to his abandoned interest in logic and
mathematics; it is personal contact in the network that jolts his emotional
energy and sets him to work using Husserl’s tools. By the early 1920s, without
publishing anything new, Heidegger is acquiring an underground reputation
as the most passionate and original thinker in Husserl’s stable (Gadamer, 1985:
15, 46–48; Dostal, 1993: 150–151). For now the phenomenological movement
is followed in some quarters with a fanaticism paralleling the followers of
Marxism or Stefan George. Husserl programmatically divided philosophy into
regional ontologies (material nature, animate life, persons) to be worked out
by the phenomenological method. Heidegger is assigned the regional ontology
of the historical sciences. This was to be Sein und Zeit, eventually published
in Husserl’s yearbook, established (in 1920) to bring together the results of
these phenomenological researches.
Heidegger’s social location made him more than a phenomenological dis-
ciple. His unique trajectory as lapsed Catholic theologian was reinforced when
he moved to Marburg as Extraordinarius (1923–1928). Marburg was the great
Neo-Kantian center, and its last head, Natorp, was treated by Heidegger with
great respect. Rickert, his own Neo-Kantian teacher at Freiburg, he regarded
with disdain; the epistemological and value concepts of Neo-Kantianism were
just the kind of bloodless philosophy which Heidegger regarded as forgetful-
ness of the ontology of being. The aging Natorp, though, had turned away
from the liberal ethicization of religion which had prevailed with Cohen and
the earlier Marburg school, and was grappling with the question of the indi-
viduality of God and of concrete worldly being. Neo-Kantianism was dying as
the spotlight shifted elsewhere. Nicolai Hartmann, the last star of the Neo-
Kantian lineage, was Heidegger’s rival on the young Marburg faculty, and he
too was deviating in the direction of subordinating epistemology to ontology;
even the Kantian critique presupposes a metaphysics, and the thing-in-itself
can be approached by using tools borrowed from Husserl’s phenomenology.
Hartmann recombined intellectual ingredients which overlapped with those of
Heidegger; but Hartmann remained more of a traditional Neo-Kantian, and
the result of their similarity was that Heidegger’s greater originality ended up
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^745