Heidegger's "Appropriation" of Dilthey before Being and Time

Heidegger's "Appropriation" of Dilthey before Being and Time ROBERT C. SCHARFF IN 199 4, in his famous Time-lecture to the Marburg Theological Society, Heidegger makes it "the first principle of all hermeneutics" that gaining access to history rests upon understanding what it means to be historical? Three years later, in Being and Time, he announces that he has achieved this understanding, for the purpose of his ontological questioning, through an "appropriation" of Dilthey's work, "confirmed and strengthened by the theses of Count Yorck. ''~ Now, thanks to the recent reconstructions of Heidegger's early lecture courses, we know that this appropriation process took nearly ten years, that Heidegger first worked out his conception of philosophy as a "hermeneutical way" in terms of this process, and hence that it contributed much more to the shaping of SZ than his published work suggests.~ In fact, the record shows that it was a Der Begriffder Zeit: Vortragvor der Marburger TheologenschaftJuli z924, ed. Hartmut Tietjen (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989); cited from the bilingual edition, The Conceptof Time, trans. W. McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 2o (author's emphasis). ' I refer, of course, to the famous opening line of Being and Time's Section 77, where Heidegger explainsthat his analysisof the problem of history (and the necessityof working it out in terms of Dasein's historicity) "has grown out of the appropriation [Aneignung] of Dilthey's labors" (Sein und Zeit [hereafter SZ], loth ed. [Tfibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963], 397). Cf. SZ, 72n., 4o3-4o4 . Citation of the John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) is omitted, since the German pagination is in its margins, and their translation is anyway sometimes altered. sOn the pre-SZ period generally, there is already a large and rapidly growing literature. On the "Dilthey connection" specifically, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesisof Heidegger's "Being and Time" [hereafter Genesis](Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. lOO-lO5, 133-37, 321-26, 347-48, 524-25n.49, and "Das Entstehen des Begriffsfeldes 'Faktizit~it' im Frfihwerk Heideggers," Dilthey-Jahrbuch4 (a986-87): 91-12o; John van Buren, The Young Heidegger:Rumor of theHidden King [hereafter Rumor] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), esp. 146-47, 2o8-22, ~78-79; Otto P6ggeler, "Heideggers Begegnung mit Dilthey," Dilthe~-Jahrbuch4 (198687 ): 121--59; Heribert Boeder, "Dilthey 'und' Heidegger. Zur Geschichtlichkeitdes Menschen," Diltheyund der Wandel desPhilosophiebegriffsseitdem ~9.Jahrhundert (PhiinomenologischeForschungen i6), ed. E. W. Orth (Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1984), 161-77; Charles R. Bambach, "Phe- [lo5] 106 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:1 JANUARY 1997 projected review article of the Dilthey-Yorck Correspondence--one in which Heidegger optimistically planned to include "a fundamental statement about Dihhey's work in general"--which got entirely out of hand and became the first, or what Kisiel calls the "Dihhey Draft" of SZ.4 In what follows, I shall put this new information about the DiltheyHeidegger connection to a somewhat polemical use. I want to suggest that if this connection is properly understood, it raises serious questions about the perspicacity of those many current readings of SZ's line of inquiry ("Weg") that privilege its phenomenological and transcendental ideas and link its concept of destruction (now all too readily referred to as "deconstruction") primarily with the history of metaphysics. What the record in fact appears to show is that the young Heidegger made the proper handling of all these famous ideas depend upon the prior question of what it means to "be historical"--as a philosopher and in one's own thinking--a question that he worked out through what he himself called a "destructive" appropriation of Dilthey's work. I begin by considering what there is about Dilthey's epistemological inquiries on behalf of the human sciences that leads the young Heidegger to think of them as presenting him with something to "appropriate." I explain how he reads these inquiries as displaying what he eventually calls Dihhey's "restive" movement toward the "question of [historical] life," and why he concludes that this restiveness is strong evidence that the Being-question was already--if always inaccessibly--"alive" in Dilthey. The usual practice has been to stress the distance between Heidegger and Dilthey--i...