Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy (review)

Steven Galt Crowell. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning:Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii + 323. Cloth, $79.95. Paper, $27.95.

The "space of meaning" announced in the title of the present collection of essays (which represent the author's decade-and-a half engagement with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger) has both a historical and systematic referent. Historically, it refers to the fact that it is now "possible to recognize that what has distinguished philosophy in the twentieth century is not that it has concerned itself with language, but that, whether through the prism of language or not, it has concerned itself with meaning" (3). Systematically, it refers to the issues that emerge when the project of transcendental phenomenology is explored in a manner that effectively brackets the "animosities stemming from the collapse of the personal relationship between Husserl and Heidegger" (4), such that a phenomenologically transcendental ontology can be seen as both the consistent and necessary outcome of the phenomenological principles that guide both Husserl and the early ("phenomenological") Heidegger.

The book is divided into two parts, "Reconfiguring Transcendental Logic" (part 1) and "Phenomenology and the Very Idea of Philosophy" (part 2). It also includes a substantial introduction, "Reconsidering Transcendental Philosophy," a comprehensive bibliography, and a detailed index.

Crowell's introduction situates his investigation of the systematic referent proper to the space of meaning within the context of the more or less dominant trends in contemporary Anglophone and Continental philosophy. Thus he examines (a) John McDowell's attempt "to recover a philosophically defensible empiricism by overcoming the impasse--precipitated by Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given and extended to its apparently logical conclusion in Davidson's coherentism--of a 'reflection about experience that disqualifies it from intelligibly constituting a tribunal'" (14), and (b) John van Buren's case for an "anti-philosophical" (8) "young Heidegger" (7). Both are convincingly shown to come up short on the score of meaning: McDowell, because his empiricism appeals to a non-empirical concept--"meaning" (18); and van Buren, because his Derridian-inspired reading of Heidegger passes over in silence "the Heidegger who is concerned with the reflexive issue of the possibility of philosophy itself" (7), a possibility that, "in Heidegger's best [transcendental] moments, cannot be deconstructed because it is presupposed in every deconstruction."

Crowell's rich, probing, and profound account of the systematic referent proper to the space of meaning can at best only be indicated here. Part 1 presents a philologically rigorous and philosophically perspicuous genealogy of the concept of validity (Geltung) in neo-Kantian and phenomenological philosophy, by situating Emil Lask's attempt to develop a transcendental logic within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neo-Kantianism. Lask's identification of the space of meaning in terms of the reflective apprehension of "that which holds [gilt] without having to be [ohne sein zu müssen]" (60), which he conceived of as neither a natural nor a supersensible entity but as the non-sensuous validity wherein the transcendental meaning of formal and material objects becomes intelligible, is analyzed by Crowell with surgical precision from the perspective of the early Heidegger's Husserlian-informed critique and appropriation of it. Regarding the latter, Crowell shows that despite Heidegger's critical stance toward the subjective and objective formalism of Lask's transcendental logic--that is, its inability to account both for the role of subjectivity in rendering entities intelligible and for the differentiation proper to their material categoriality--Heidegger appropriates Lask's understanding of "the ontological difference between an entity and its meaning" as "not a difference between two entities [i.e., sensible and supersensible] but a difference between a straightforward and reflective grasp of any entity" (85).

Part 2 presents a sustained discussion of Heidegger's development of Lask's insight into the...