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Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental

R. Matthew Shockey
Philosophy Social Criticism 2008 34: 557
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708089199

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R. Matthew Shockey

Heidegger, Lafont and

the necessity of the
transcendental

Abstract Cristina Lafont’s recent reading of Heidegger offers a powerful

formulation of the widespread view that once one recognizes our ‘facticity’
and the role of language in shaping it, there is no room left to talk about
transcendental structures of meaning or experience. In this article I challenge
this view. I argue that Lafont inaccurately conflates what Heidegger calls
our ‘understanding of being’ with that which language discloses. In order
to show that the philosophical motivation for this conflation is unsound, I
also argue that Lafont’s own positive theory of meaning itself tacitly assumes
a distinction between factical and transcendental, and so rests on exactly
what she finds problematic in Heidegger. This still leaves a puzzle as to how
factical individuals are actually able to grasp anything transcendental, so I
conclude by sketching Heidegger’s method of ‘formal indication’, which is
meant to show precisely how this can be done.
Key words facticity · Martin Heidegger · language · transcendental
philosophy

Of the thinkers who have attempted to unify the linguistic-hermeneutic

and transcendental idealist movements of late-18th- and 19th-century
German philosophy, Heidegger stands as the most significant – certainly
the most influential in terms of 20th-century thought. It has been
thought by many, however, that his attempt – indeed any attempt – at
this unification must fail, for once one fully appreciates the linguistic-
hermeneutic insight that all understanding is historically positioned and
shaped by our contingent natural language, it would appear that there

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 34 no 5 • pp. 557–574

PSC
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and David Rasmussen
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453708089199

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
is no longer any possibility for latching on to any ahistorical a priori of
the sort that figures in the transcendental tradition. Postmodernists
and pragmatists have been perhaps the most vocal in pushing this view,
but one of the clearest articulations of it in reference to Heidegger comes
from Cristina Lafont, herself neither postmodernist nor pragmatist, in
her recent but already influential Heidegger, Language, and World-
Disclosure.1
Lafont argues that Heidegger, like others in the linguistic-hermeneutic
tradition, treats all reference to the world as conceptually mediated, and
that insofar as he tries to establish this view on a transcendental platform,
he ends up elevating the ‘conceptual schemes’ of natural language through
which our world is ‘disclosed’ to the status of fixed and binding a priori
structures, past which we cannot think – an untenable relativistic
idealism.2 Not content simply to show the problems in Heidegger’s own
thought, Lafont also sketches a positive account of how the conceptual
schemes of contingent natural language are both necessarily involved in
the disclosure of our world and yet not wholly determinative of our
thought about it. She argues that reference is not just a matter of concep-
tual specification but can also occur ‘directly’, as Putnam, Kripke et al.
have shown. This view, Lafont thinks, preserves the key insights of the
‘linguistic turn’ begun in German philosophy by Hamann and Herder,
and at the same time undercuts the need to appeal to any sort of tran-
scendental, a priori structures of thought or any universally valid forms
of understanding to ground the objectivity of our experience.
While the positive theory of meaning Lafont offers is, in many
respects, quite compelling, there is nevertheless much to object to in
her reading of Heidegger, particularly in her interpretation of his early
project of ‘fundamental ontology’ circa Being and Time.3 Vindicating
this project is, I believe, both possible and worthwhile, but fully doing
so is much too large a task for a single article. I aim in what follows to
aid in this task of vindication, however, by showing how Lafont’s exem-
plary attempt to show its invalidity fails. I will begin in the next section
(2) by presenting in a bit more detail Lafont’s view of the tension
between the factical, thrown nature of understanding and the alleged
universal, a priori, transcendental structures of meaning or being, as she
sees this tension present in Heidegger’s early work. By looking at how
Heidegger portrays his project as a Kantian, transcendental one, I will
show that it is wrong of Lafont to claim that he identifies the under-
standing of being with that which is embodied in the conceptual schemes
of natural language. Recognizing that then makes it possible to see being
(the transcendental) and the specific conceptual schemes of languages
(the factical) as located on two separate levels. Having established this
possibility, I will then show (3) that Lafont’s own positive theory of
meaning and understanding tacitly appeals to a set of what must be

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
regarded as transcendental – and thus by her own lights problematic –
concepts, by which views about language (including what meaning is,
how reference works, etc.) are articulated. Unlike Heidegger, however,
Lafont does not recognize the necessarily transcendental nature of these
concepts and thus sees no need to explain how such concepts are possible
or how we are able to make claims involving them. I will conclude (4)
with some somewhat speculative and perhaps controversial remarks
concerning Heidegger’s own methodology and the way he sees our
ability to grasp these a priori, transcendental concepts – thus to work
out the distinction between factical and transcendental – as depending
on our properly ‘performing’ our individuality or subjectivity in the
right way, a method encapuslated in what he calls ‘formal indication’.
I should like to note at the outset that it is difficult to begin to do
justice to the complexity of Lafont’s arguments in a short amount of
space, not least because her book tackles the entirety of Heidegger’s
career, throughout which she sees the same problems manifesting them-
selves.4 Thus here I will be operating in light of William Blattner’s asser-
tion, made in a review of Lafont’s book, that ‘our attitude must not be
to find mistakes in her interpretation of Heidegger, but to find a way to
resist the overall flow of her argument’.5 It is this overall flow that I aim
to present and, like Blattner, to try to resist (though my preferred way
of resisting is, as I will make clear, quite different from his and most of
her other critics). I shall thus consider only what I take to be the foun-
dational elements of her attempt to establish the existence of a tension
between the hermeneutic and transcendental dimensions of Heidegger’s
project, and, as already indicated, I shall confine myself to her discussion
of his early work. But it must be said that, even with these restrictions,
there are still many details I will not be able to touch on.

The ‘linguistic turn’ in German philosophy, as Lafont presents it, centers

around the idea that language – contingent, natural language – consti-
tutes thought. Lafont (following Charles Taylor) finds the inauguration
of the linguistic turn in J. G. Hamann’s response to Kant,6 who had, at
the end of the introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason, alluded to
the ‘common root’ of sensibility and understanding – the passive and
active faculties of the mind – but said that knowledge of this root was
for ever beyond our grasp.7 Hamann, however, identified language as
this common root, the result of which was that, in Lafont’s words,
language ‘enter[ed] into competition with the transcendental ego’ by
taking over its ‘power of constituting both experience and the world’
(HLW, p. 2).8 Because language is in every case a historical, contingent

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
phenomenon, this then entails a ‘detranscendentalization’9 of the Kantian
a priori, i.e. that which Kant took to be understood prior to any experi-
ence and that on the basis of which experience is made possible.
Language, like Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge, comes ‘before’ our
encounter with the world in both the (relatively trivial) sense that we
all find ourselves born into one that is not of our choosing or making
and in the (non-trivial) sense that it gives us the concepts through which
reference to and grasp of the world is possible. We may thus still see it
as, in this double sense, itself a priori, but unlike the Kantian a priori,
the linguistic a priori is contingent and variable. It provides for each of
us a ‘conceptual scheme’ by means of which we are able to categorize,
understand and deal with that which we find in the world, but each
such scheme is local and subject to change.10
Now, as an initial point, note that, at least in Kant’s own theory,
there could be no ‘competition’ between language and the transcenden-
tal ego of the sort pointed to here.11 For while Hamann is suggesting
that language is the ‘common root’, Kant thought the root could not be
known. Thus whatever place the transcendental ego has in his own
thought, it is not as root, and so whatever relation there might be between
language and transcendental ego, it cannot be one of competition
between two things, each of which might be the source of the two basic
faculties of knowledge. The issue of this ‘root’ aside – I will return to
it below – there is still a legitimate and serious question as to what role
language does play in the structuring or constituting of experience and
what giving serious thought to it does to Kant’s transcendental idealist
project. I note the present issue primarily to bring out the fact that from
the very outset, Lafont sets up the framework she is working in –
encouraged in how she does so by those figures in the linguistic turn to
whom she refers – as one in which it has got to be either language or
the transcendental ego but not both, and that is a way of presenting
things that threatens to beg a number of questions against both Kant
and Heidegger.
It is, nevertheless, in this framework that Lafont reads Heidegger,
whom she sees as essentially offering an updated version of Hamann’s
view, so let us now see what she says about him, keeping in mind the
worry just mentioned. She observes that ‘the fact from which Being and
Time starts, and which lies at the basis of Heidegger’s philosophy as a
whole’ is the fact ‘that entities appear to us as always already under-
stood in one way or another (as thus or thus), or, as Heidegger puts it
. . . “we always already move about in an understanding of being”’ (SZ,
p. 5/25)’ (HLW, p. xiii). That much is relatively indisputable (though
perhaps this is not the only fact that his philosophy is based on). But
what is ‘being’, an understanding of which we ‘move about in’? Obvi-
ously the answer to that cannot easily be given, for the basic task of

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
Being and Time was to show what being means. Any definition we find
will be at most a marking-out of something that stands in need of expli-
cation. Nevertheless, we may take our direction from a passage early in
Being and Time in which being is helpfully glossed and at the same time
distinguished from its sister concept, entity (das Seiende), the two of
which define what Heidegger called the ‘ontological difference’. Taking
the latter first, Heidegger tells us that entities are simply everything that
is – ‘everything we talk about, everything we intend [meinen], everything
towards which we comport [verhalten] ourselves in any way, also what
and how we ourselves are’ (SZ, pp. 6–7/26). Being is then that which
makes entities intelligible as entities, or, as Heidegger puts it, ‘that which
determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which [woraufhin]
an entity is in each case already understood’ (SZ, p. 6/25; emphasis
added).12 With this in view, we can see that the question of what it means
to ‘move about in an understanding of being’ is the question: how does
being render entities intelligible to us as the entities they are? Is it just
the ‘conceptual scheme’ of our language that is a priori in the two senses
noted earlier? Or is it something over and above that? And, if the latter,
how does Heidegger think we are able to come to talk about it?
Lafont’s own Hamannian interpretation of Heidegger takes being to
be that which gives the conceptually and symbolically articulated space
into which we are ‘thrown’ and in which we ‘factically’ exist – the space
of what Heidegger calls ‘disclosedness’ – its conceptual and symbolic
structure. And this, Lafont thinks, is nothing other than language, hence
her lengthy Chapter One, whose title nods to Hamann’s critique of
Kant: ‘The Role of Language in Being and Time as the Hidden Root of
the Disclosedness of Dasein’. To see if Lafont’s interpretation of being
and the way it renders entities intelligible is right, an obvious place to
look is in Heidegger’s discussion of that ‘existentiale’ of Dasein he calls
discourse (Rede).13 Other critics of Lafont, representing what is perhaps
the most dominant school of contemporary Heidegger interpretation –
what Blattner calls the ‘practice-oriented approach’ to Heidegger14 –
have argued that she fails to see him as grounding the linguistic in the
realm of non-linguistic social practice, and that his sense of discourse is
meant to capture the various forms of ‘taking-as’ that characterize such
practice. On this view, as, for example, Mark Okrent develops it,
language functions as a tool to make explicit and express various deter-
minate ways of taking the world to be that are in principle prior to this
explication.15 And, fleshing out much the same picture, Taylor Carman
stresses that there are various forms of communication, such as body
language and facial expressions, which are clearly non-linguistic, but
which we should think of as modes of discourse. He notes in addition
that Heidegger regards conscience as a mode of discourse, despite its
clearly being non-linguistic. This all leads Carman to conclude that ‘all

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
language is discourse but . . . not all discourse is language’.16 If this is
correct, then, given the essential link between discourse and the under-
standing it structures, Dasein’s ‘disclosedness’ cannot be identified with
the space of conceptual intelligibility, for that itself rests on a more
basic level of pre- or non-conceptual practice and non-linguistic space
of communication, and being must then be, as Hubert Dreyfus has long
insisted, just ‘the intelligibility correlative with our everyday background
practices’.17
Like these ‘practice-oriented’ critics of Lafont, I too think we need
to separate the specifically linguistic disclosure of the world from the
disclosure of being. But where the view Lafont’s critics present frees being
from language by locating it in non-linguistic practice, I want to show
that Heidegger locates it at a structural or ontological level, that is, a
level which is in the Kantian sense universal and necessary. (Practices
may or may not be dependent on language, but they are no more universal
and necessary than languages.)18 Which is to say, I will show that
Heidegger never makes the Hamannian move Lafont attributes to him.
(I will subsequently argue that his position does not entail it either.) He
does, I agree, hold some version of Hamann’s thesis that language is
essential to Dasein and its experience of its world, but, I will argue, this
is not what his claim that ‘we always already move about in an under-
standing of being’ is meant to express. Rather than motivate my own
view of the non- or pre-linguistic character of the understanding of being
directly through a detailed interpretation of discourse, however, I want
to focus more directly on the idea of being itself and Heidegger’s treat-
ment of that, particularly as he finds an analogy to it in Kant, to see if
we cannot open up some space between our understanding of it and
whatever interpretative scheme our language provides.
Now, as Lafont herself recognizes, Heidegger saw a strong parallel
between being and what Kant called synthetic a priori knowledge. In
fact, Heidegger took Kant’s account of this knowledge as an essentially
accurate account of the being of nature – understood as ‘the extant
[Vorhand(en)] in general’19 – for this knowledge is precisely that on the
basis of which it is possible to comport toward natural entities (Kant’s
‘objects of empirical knowledge’) as the entities they are. It is, in this
sense, that which renders them intelligible. If we then generalize this
picture as Heidegger was inclined to, we have an idea of different ‘regions’
of being besides just the natural-extant, including at least the ready-to-
hand (Zuhanden) and even Dasein itself, each with entities in it rendered
intelligible as the entities they are, based on some sort of a priori struc-
tures or principles which define what it is to be an entity of that region.
Our ability to comport towards these entities as the entities they are
will, then, depend on our understanding – typically just a tacit ‘pre-
ontological’, i.e. not explicit or ‘thematized’ understanding20 – of these
structures or principles.21

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
Lafont thinks that in drawing this parallel between being and syn-
thetic a priori knowledge – and entity and empirical object – Heidegger
runs into serious problems, for
. . . [o]n the one hand, with his interpretation of the ontological difference,
Heidegger is taking for granted the constructivism expressed in Kant’s
highest principle of synthetic judgments (namely, that the conditions of
possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions of possibility
of the objects of experience). After his hermeneutic turn, this principle is
interpreted in the sense that entities can be discovered only ‘by a prior
projection of their being’ (SZ, p. 362/414) . . . But on the other hand,
through this interpretation, that which constitutes the objects of experience
(the totality of synthetic a priori judgments) is detranscendentalized. It
can no longer be understood as a unique synthesis of apperception, valid
for all rational beings, but rather only as the plurality of linguistic world-
disclosures resulting from the contingent, historical process of projecting
meaning for interpreting the world.22
To generate the problem here – the tension between the a priority of
Kant’s conditions of the possibility of experience and the plurality and
contingency of ‘linguistic world-disclosures’ – Lafont has to assume that
Heidegger identifies being with that which language discloses. She must
believe that Heidegger is trying to elevate language to the status of
synthetic a priori knowledge, i.e. our understanding of being, or, equiv-
alently, that he is trying to ‘detranscendentalize’ this understanding. And
so when he implies that our understanding of being has, as Lafont puts
it, a ‘normative significance’ and ‘universal validity’ (P, p. 186), she must
see him as conferring this significance and validity on the merely contin-
gent conceptual schemes of the many and various natural languages.
Only then can she raise her primary objection, that Heidegger cannot
‘have it both ways’, ‘[h]e cannot claim that our understanding of the
being of entities is “essentially factical” (i.e. the result of a contingent
process of projecting meaning for interpreting the world) and, at the
same time, confer absolute authority to such an understanding in virtue
of its alleged a priori status’ (R, p. 231). And only then can she legiti-
mately see Heidegger as falling into a ‘linguistic relativism’ and ‘re-
ification of language’ (HLW, p. xii) – in short a ‘linguistic idealism’ (HLW,
p. 160, n. 48; P, p. 185).
Lafont’s assumption and the reading it drives are mistaken, however,
for as Heidegger works out his detailed reading of Kant both in his
seminar on the first Critique23 and in the famously ‘violent’ interpret-
ation of it that he gave in his published work, Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics, he, like Hamann, rejects Kant’s claim that the ‘common
root’ of sensibility and understanding is unknowable, but unlike Hamann,
he identifies this root not as language but rather as a third faculty of the
mind, and one that is every bit as ‘transcendental’ and non-linguistic as
those of sensibility and understanding, namely, the faculty of imagination.

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
And it is precisely on this basis that he sees Being and Time as a gener-
alization and extension of the project of the first Critique. Thus, whatever
limitations or difficulties Kant’s theory faces, Heidegger never says its
failure to give language its due role is one of these. He seems to be rather
resolutely holding on to a Kantian view of the a priori as something
intelligible and independent of language. At the very least one must
concede that if Heidegger did not want to separate understanding of
being from the disclosure of language, in his detailed discussion of Kant
he missed many opportunities to say so. That would have been the perfect
opportunity to acknowledge and endorse Hamann’s thesis that it is
language, rather than the transcendental ego, that has world-constituting
power. But he did not. Instead, Heidegger willingly claims a certain
version of Kant’s account of the faculties of the mind as a close prede-
cessor to his own account of Dasein – though himself disputing Kant’s
view about the unknowability of the common root. This suggests that
Heidegger would reject Hamann’s linguistic ‘detranscendentalization’ of
Kant, that from the outset Heidegger wanted to separate the transcen-
dental understanding of being from the immanent world disclosed in
the plurality of contingent natural languages.
While this is perhaps less than total proof that Heidegger wanted
to distinguish our understanding of being from the ‘conceptual schemes’
of our natural languages, it at least strongly suggests that the idea of
elevating contingent languages to transcendental status is an idea that
Lafont is imposing on Heidegger. We ought, therefore, as a matter of
charity if nothing else, to try to reconstruct his position in such a way
that we can see him as distinguishing – and thereby reconciling – the
Kantian a priori and the a priori of language, rather than seeing them
as in competition.

Lafont could and indeed on occasion does acknowledge that Heidegger

did not view his project as one of a Hamannian ‘detranscendentaliza-
tion’ of Kant, but, in the end, her concern is less with Heidegger’s own
view of his project and more with its philosophical presuppositions and
consequences. And with respect to these, she aims to show that by
bringing language into the mix and focusing on our ‘thrown facticity’,
Heidegger’s view entails this detranscendentalization, whatever he might
have thought about the matter.24 It is also clear throughout her discussion
that Lafont views the Hamannian move away from Kant as a philoso-
phically positive one. It requires some revision, specifically in its tendency
to think of all reference as conceptually mediated or indirect, but it is, on
the whole, she thinks, a genuine philosophical advance. I do not believe

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
it is, however, at least if it requires the sort of detranscendentalization
of being or a priori knowledge that Lafont says it does; but more to the
point, I do not think that Lafont can herself consistently see it as an
advance. To make my case for this I now want to show that her approach
to language and understanding, which is meant to stand as an alterna-
tive to Heidegger’s, has built into it an implicit transcendental character
that is quite close to the one she finds problematic in him. I also want
to suggest that such a dimension is inevitable in any philosophical project
that aims to show what things like meaning, language and world are in
general, and that part of Heidegger’s merit lies in his recognition of and
attempt to clarify this fact.
Consider, then, another of the many passages in which Lafont takes
Heidegger to task for his transcendentalism: she observes his ‘tendency
to speak of “referentiality,” “worldhood,” and so forth’ (HLW, p. 48),
and she rightly claims that this sort of ‘terminology points to the formal
point of view that an existential analytic of Dasein requires in order to
provide a fundamental ontology’ (ibid.). Given the nature of the objec-
tions she raises here, it is clear that what she calls the ‘formal point of
view’ is nothing other than the transcendental point of view she criti-
cizes throughout her book. Now, it is certainly appropriate to ask how
Heidegger thinks he can make formal, universal or transcendental
claims, especially given his views about our thrownness and facticity, for
there is at least a prima facie puzzle here (nothing in the foregoing is
meant to deny that). But apart from the issue of whether Heidegger has
an answer to this, Lafont cannot herself maintain that the basic fact that
our experience is shaped by our contingent linguistic inheritance by itself
deprives us of the resources for making formal claims about language,
world, etc., that are, if true, necessarily so. For it is obvious that even as
she rejects the need for (or even possibility of) a ‘fundamental ontology’
or ‘existential analytic of Dasein’, she herself traffics in general concepts
of meaning, reference, language, world, etc. – that is, she does not just
refer to specific entities or even types of entities, but to the world as
such, language as such and meaning as such. Which is to say, she is
committed to the possibility of talking about and philosophically eluci-
dating language, meaning and world as general, universal, determinable
concepts, concepts that get instantiated by specific, determinate languages
spoken by specific, concrete individuals.
This distinction between language as such on the one hand and
specific languages spoken by specific individuals in concrete situations
on the other already sounds a lot like a distinction between factical and
transcendental – certainly in talking about referentiality, worldhood,
etc., Heidegger does not seem to be after anything more transcendental
than the general concept of language in play here. His talk of ‘being’
can certainly sound much more grandiose, but to the extent that it does,

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
his rhetoric belies the philosophical content of his words.25 It is then
only fair to ask, given the nature of Lafont’s criticisms of Heidegger,
what basis she thinks she has for making formal or universal claims that
he lacks. And this is a question she simply does not address. It is conceiv-
able that the theory of direct reference to which she appeals might have
the resources for explaining how concepts of the sort mentioned here
may be employed and elucidated, but, so far as she develops it, it is a
theory about how language hooks up with specific things in the world,
not a theory that explains how we could so much as form or attend to
general concepts like ‘world’ or ‘meaning’.
A second feature of Lafont’s positive story about meaning and
language raises an additional and ultimately deeply related issue. Consider
that the theory of direct reference to which she appeals as an ostensibly
non-transcendental alternative to Heidegger has a central place for speech
acts, specifically the acts by which we indicate things (and manage to do
so even when our conceptualization of those things is off the mark). It
is clear that insofar as the category of speech act is central to an account
of language, the category of speech agent or language-user must be as
well. That is, such a theory of language is not self-standing but also
requires a formal account of agency, an account which says what it is
to be the sort of creature who can engage in speech acts. But as Lafont
develops her theory of meaning, she says nothing about the status or
nature of linguistic agency, again not even acknowledging the need to.
That would not by itself be a problem if her aims were different, but
note that, insofar as being a linguistic agent, the sort of entity who can
act in or through speech, requires certain basic capacities for interacting
with the world, a formal account of this threatens to quickly turn into
just the sort of transcendental account of the necessary faculties of
knower or understander that Kant or Heidegger offer. There may be
some sense in which what they say about understanding, sensibility and
imagination goes beyond what Lafont’s theory of language would require
– certainly in Kant, with his appeal to the noumenal this might be the
case – but there is also some clear sense in which they may be read as
engaging in a fairly down-to-earth, if still formal, account of those basic
capacities any agent in the world – including linguistic agents – must
have. Lafont thus cannot rule out this project as misguided or even un-
intelligible, for her own theory of language presupposes its possibility.
The remarks in the present section amount to an internal criticism
of Lafont’s positive picture with respect to certain of its unexamined
presuppositions. But these problems in her own positive views are, as I
have indicated, reflected in her reading of Heidegger, and not just inci-
dentally: what she sees as the deepest problems in his thought depend
precisely on the status of transcendental claims and the place and nature
of the ego or subject. Thus both her reading of Heidegger and her own

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
theory require, as a philosophical matter, an exploration of the concept
of the free subject or agent, and an account of how formal or universal
claims are possible. What is more, we can, in fact, see that any theory
of language in general will require the same sort of explorations. For
anyone who asks ‘What is language?’ (or any of the related subquestions,
e.g. ‘What is the “meaning” of meaning?’) is asking a constitutive or
transcendental question, a question that, when answered, yields knowl-
edge of what something must be if it is to count as a language. Such
knowledge will, if possible, necessarily be ‘universally vali[d]’ and ‘norma-
tive[ly] significan[t]’. Likewise its possibility will entail that individual
users of particular, historically shaped, factical and contingent languages
be able to grasp, from out of their ‘thrown facticity’, such knowledge.
Such a view and the philosophical project that rests on it may, indeed,
turn out to be incoherent; but it is obviously a project that many
philosophers engage in, most significantly in the present discussion
Lafont herself. Though she claims that it is not ‘feasible’ for Heidegger
to ‘abstrac[t] from natural, historical languages to something like “the
basic forms of a possible meaningful articulation of the understandable
in general”’ (HLW, p. 83), her own positive theory of meaning – and
the descriptivist one it aims to replace – cannot but do just that.
None of this, of course, challenges her view that descriptivist accounts
of reference are flawed and need to be supplemented with a theory of
direct reference. If Heidegger were in fact committed to the view of refer-
ence she ascribes to him, that would be a problem. And I think it is fairly
clear that, at the very least, he does not say much about how demon-
strative reference to things in the world works, nor does he give that a
central place in his account of how we understand the entities around
us. But this is a largely separate issue from the one at stake here, which
is about the intelligibility and possibility of explicating those concepts
of language, world, etc., that are ‘transcendental’ to the concepts by
which we speak of things in the world, i.e. those concepts that we need
to appeal to in giving any theory of meaning or reference. And insofar
as there is a question about how Heidegger can make reference to these
transcendental structures of being and of that entity who understands
them, we will see in the next section that Heidegger does have at least
the beginnings of an account of that.

We have seen that Heidegger himself wanted to distinguish the contin-

gent a priori of language from the necessary a priori of being, and we
have also seen that, despite her insistence on the invalidity of this distinc-
tion in Heidegger, Lafont herself cannot help but work with a distinction

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
between the particularities of this or that language and the basic consti-
tutive features of language as such. But there is still a question as to
how, given the undeniable fact that each of us must begin as a thrown,
factical entity, in the midst of the world, speaking a particular language,
we can in fact cotton on to such constitutive features of our language or
anything else that is universal and necessary for our factical experience
– that is, anything that falls at the level of what Heidegger calls ‘being’.
In the remainder of the article I want to say a little on the positive side
about Heidegger’s account of this. To do so I will look at his use of
‘formal indications [formale Anzeige]’26 to launch the existential analytic
of Dasein that forms the bulk of Being and Time, for it is here that we
see him showing us how we find the transcendental within our facticity.
My comments here are necessarily promissory and programmatic, and
perhaps controversial; nevertheless, what I say does, I hope, show at
least one intelligible possibility for addressing the issues raised.
Let me begin with Lafont’s own discussion of the idea of formal indi-
cation, which occurs in her response to charges Hubert Dreyfus raises
against her.27 Dreyfus claims that formal indication is the key to a general
idea of ‘non-committal reference’ which ‘starts by referring to some object
or class of objects provisionally, using contingent features, and arrives at
the referent’s essential features only after an investigation’.28 In this way
formal indication supposedly captures the same idea of indication central
to the theory of direct reference, which, if true, gets Heidegger off of the
descriptivist hook that Lafont has hung him on. But, as Lafont correctly
observes, this cannot be right, for formally indicated concepts are, as
Heidegger uses them, concepts that apply only to Dasein, not to objects
or classes of objects generally.29 Perhaps, she notes, Heidegger could have
extended this idea to make it what Dreyfus claims it is, but he did not.
Lafont’s observation of the Dasein-specific use of formal indicators
is enough for her to refute to her satisfaction the alternative reading of
Heidegger Dreyfus proposes. But we need to pursue the matter further,
developing a couple of points she makes in the course of responding to
Dreyfus and noting another key point that she does not make. The point
she does not make, but which is decisive against Dreyfus’ interpretation,
is that formally indicated concepts themselves pick out essential features
of Dasein, not, as he says, contingent features that serve only as a starting
point for getting to the essential ones. That is, one does not formally
indicate the fact that one has hair, or likes chocolate, or even that one
is a human being, and work from those features of oneself to something
more fundamental. One begins with manifestly central, ineliminable
aspects of oneself as Dasein and then works to explicate them, which
means elucidating the forms that they instantiate (care, temporality,
etc.). Formal indication is, in large part, a method of doing this without
prejudicing the investigation by importing earlier philosophical theories

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
of that which these formally indicated concepts point us towards. But
that it is essential features of Dasein – constitutive, ineliminable ones –
that formal indication picks out is beyond question.
Already here we have a pull towards the transcendental, and this
pull appears within that factical moment of actually engaging in the act
of indicating. To see more closely what this amounts to, we must look
at what ‘essential’ features of Dasein are in fact formally indicated. The
most basic are Dasein’s ‘mineness [Jemeinigkeit]’ and ‘existence [Existenz]’
(see esp. SZ §§9, 12). The latter picks out Dasein as self-determining (as
having its being ‘at issue’ for it, as Heidegger says30), while the former
picks it out as ‘in each case [ je]’ a first-person singular entity. It is only
mineness that Lafont says anything substantial about, and for brevity’s
sake I will also confine my remarks to it. So, first let me note that the
fact that mineness is formally indicated means that what it is to be a
first-person singular entity is held open for question. This is part of the
point of calling the indication ‘formal’ – formally indicating mineness
allows for the form or ontological structure of it – as opposed to its
factical ‘matter’ (though Heidegger does not himself use that term here)
– to become the subject of the subsequent investigation. So how does this
work? As Lafont herself recognizes, Dasein’s mineness is a ‘performative’,
‘token-reflexive’ concept (R, p. 233), i.e. one whose primary and proper
use refers to the one using it as its user. This means that to say ‘Dasein
is in each case mine’ is to make a claim which, despite its universality
– it may be said by any Dasein and it is true of each Dasein – must be
grounded in my understanding of it, for each ‘me’ who says it. In this
it begins from and captures the fact of one’s facticity, while nevertheless
moving beyond the facts of one’s facticity – i.e. one’s personal, psycho-
logical, or otherwise ‘ontical’ characteristics. This allows one to show
up to oneself as a self, the sort of entity who can say ‘I’ or ‘mine’.31 This
is succinctly put by Heidegger in his 1928 Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic32 course:
. . . [i]f we say ‘Dasein is in each case essentially mine,’ and if our task is
to define this characteristic of Dasein ontologically, this does not mean we
should investigate the essence of my self, as this factical individual, or of
some other given individual. The object of the inquiry is not the individual
essence of my self, but it is the essence of mineness and selfhood as such.
(242/188; emphasis added).

Thus we find, through our factical act of formal indication, the basis for
a formal articulation of what we are, our non-factical being, i.e. those
structures which constitute our ‘mineness and selfhood as such’, struc-
tures which will be the same no matter what language one speaks or
what other factical determinations one has. And we find the possibility
of doing this essentially built into our capacity to use ‘I’. This means

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
that, far from the transcendental being something foreign to the factical,
it is, for each of us factical individuals, there within our own under-
standing of ourselves as selves. Heidegger’s ontological analysis of Dasein
aims to do no more than develop this self-understanding.
I have not addressed the role of the concept of existence (Existenz),
the other initial formally indicated concept, in this development, but it is
equally central, for it is through the analysis of it that we find the concept
of possibility, which figures centrally not just in explaining what Dasein
is (it ‘is its possibilities’ [e.g., SZ, p. 181/225]33) but also in accounting
for our understanding of being (for our understanding of entities in their
being amounts to ‘projecting them upon their possibilities’ [SZ, p. 194/
239]34). And there are, of course, a few hundred pages of text that unfold
Dasein’s being in the direction these initial formal indications point. Part
of what we find in the course of this is the necessity of language in our
existence as Dasein. Exactly how this is to be understood needs a good
deal of examination (Heidegger himself wrestled with this issue more
than almost any other, as we see from the fact that discourse has no
stable place in the various conceptual structures of Being and Time35),
but whatever the details turn out to be, language cannot, given the very
foundations of the project, show up as something that makes exposi-
tion of the ‘essence of mineness or selfhood as such’ and all that follows
from it impossible. Lafont has offered us perhaps the most rigorous
examination to date of the tension between the linguistic-hermeneutic
approach to language and understanding and the transcendental one,
but both in our reading of Heidegger and in the very articulation of the
tension we find ourselves using concepts that, if valid, pull us out of
the contingencies of our language toward transcendental structures we
all participate in and yet are able to articulate. Much work remains to
be done to work out the details of Heidegger’s project, of course, and
a full vindication of it will depend on those details, but, at the very least,
I believe we can see it is a project free from the fatal flaw Lafont finds
in it, and thus a project worth pursuing.

Indiana University, South Bend, USA

PSC

Notes
Thanks to Chris Latiolais, Thomas Land and Clinton Tolley for conversations
and comments related to drafts of this article.

1 Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure (2000), here-

after cited as HLW. I also frequently refer to Cristina Lafont, 2002a,
hereafter cited as P, and 2002b, hereafter cited as R.

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
2 This is first articulated at HLW, pp. xiii–xiv. See the remark on Lafont’s use
of ‘conceptual scheme’ in n. 10 below.
3 Heidegger (1993), hereafter cited as SZ; page references will be given in
the form SZ/trans. Occasionally I will quote Lafont quoting Heidegger, in
which case I leave her translator’s translation of Heidegger intact, but I add
the reference to the German pagination. Otherwise, though I cite and have
relied extensively on Macquarrie’s and Robinson’s text (and it is their trans-
lation whose page numbers I offer), translations should be assumed to be
my own.
4 Lafont’s criticisms of Heidegger’s later work strike me as more just, which
means that part of what is at stake is just how much continuity to ascribe
to his thought. She claims that if we fail to read early and late Heidegger
as philosophically continuous, we will ‘overlook his specific achievement
. . . in the context of twentieth-century philosophy’, that is, its ‘decisive
blow against the foundations of the philosophy of consciousness’ – a term
she takes from Tugendhat, Apel, and Habermas that designates the subject-
centered, epistemology-dominated tradition of modern philosophy (HLW,
p. 2, n. 3) – ‘and hence the articulation of a new philosophical approach:
hermeneutic philosophy, which tacitly provides the basis for most contem-
porary German philosophy’ (HLW, p. 14). While it is certainly true that
Heidegger’s influence on 20th-century thought – and post-war French
philosophy must also, of course, be mentioned along with any reference to
recent German thought – stems as much from his writings in the 1930s
and beyond as from his work of the Being and Time era, that by itself does
not license a continuity claim between early work and late. Any such conti-
nuity must be first established on philosophical grounds, rather than be
taken as the basis for philosophical interpretation. Heidegger’s own remarks
on the matter, which should be taken with more than a grain of salt, are
indeterminate enough to allow for a number of interpretations in either
direction.
5 Blattner (2003: 490).
6 For brevity’s sake, and because none of my own claims depends on the
accuracy of the historical details of Lafont’s, I here only recapitulate her
recapitulation of Taylor (1985).
7 A15/B29 in the pagination of the standard Akademie edition of the Kritik
der reinen Vernunft.
8 Not noted by Lafont, but equally important, is the way in which Hamann’s
critique calls into question the nature of the mind as receptive, for language
is, in his view, the root not just of the understanding but also sensibility.
This is especially important when we consider that Heidegger’s own reading
of Kant accords a certain kind of priority to intuition over understanding
(Heidegger, 1977), hereafter cited as PIK.
9 The term appears throughout HLW.
10 See P, p. xv for the identification of ‘understanding of being’ with ‘concep-
tual scheme’. There is, perhaps, an innocuous use of this phrase, but given
that Lafont charges Heidegger with the assumption that ‘meaning deter-
mines reference’ and tries to assimilate his theory of ‘meaning’ to the
various descriptivist theories stemming from Frege, a worry arises that she
is attributing to Heidegger some basic form of scheme–content dualism of

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
the sort that Davidson has criticized. For that to be a plausible attribution,
one would have to read him as still operating within the very ‘philosophy
of consciousness’ paradigm he is obviously trying to undermine (which
Lafont, at least officially, recognizes, but this suggests the recognition is
superficial).
11 On why Kant thought this ‘root’ was not just unknown but unknowable,
see Dieter Henrich’s 1955 review essay of the 2nd edition of Heidegger’s
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (republished and translated in
Henrich, 1994: ch. 1). Henrich argues that for Kant the unity of the
faculties was conceived as a teleological one, one to be achieved through
their joint operations in the pursuit of ideal unity, not something pre-given
as the image of the root suggests.
12 Cf. HLW, p. 19–20 for Lafont’s own discussion of this passage.
13 For Lafont’s own most recent discussion of discourse see Cristina Lafont
(2005).
14 Blattner (2003: 490).
15 See Mark Okrent (2002). This builds on Mark Okrent (1988).
16 Carman (2002: 210). Let me note on the specific topic of conscience that,
while Carman is right to emphasize its non-linguistic character, it is far
from being pre-linguistic in Heidegger’s treatment of it. That is, there is no
conceivable way it could come to verbal expression, unlike, say, the struc-
tures of functional relations between tools one normally uses without
linguistically describing. It is not, moreover, like the other non-linguistic
modes of discourse Carman mentions, such as facial expressions and body
language, for it is a mode of discourse which takes place within a single
individual. Thus appeal to the non-linguistic character of conscience does
nothing to support Carman’s view that there is a basic non- or pre-
linguistic mode of discourse-involving understanding of intra-worldly entities
grounded in social practices.
17 Dreyfus (1990: 10).
18 Some of them will also say that the necessity of practices (whether there
are any at all) is stronger than the necessity of language (which may or may
not exist to explicate those practices), but if being is just the intelligibility
correlative to whichever of these practices we happen to have, then it is
just as much a relative concept as Lafont thinks it is in the position she
attributes to Heidegger.
19 PIK, p. 14. Relevant, extensive discussions of how Heidegger read Kant in
this period and saw his own relation to him may be found not only here
but also in Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1975) and
Heidegger, Kant und das Problem (1991), hereafter cited as KPM.
20 On the thematic see, for example, SZ, p. 4/21 (esp. translator’s note 2) and
p. 9/29; on the idea of the pre-ontological, see, for example, SZ, pp. 12f./
32f. and 15f./36f.
21 For a largely compelling account of how such regional understanding of
being works, see John Haugeland (2000). Though I disagree with Haugeland
about the nature of Dasein and the form its self-understanding takes, much
of my overall reading of Heidegger is shaped by his interpretation.
22 HLW, pp. xiv–xv.
23 PIK.

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Shockey: Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
24 This seems to be her view at, for example, HLW, p. 17.
25 Given the earlier discussion of Heidegger and Kant on the various tran-
scendental faculties, one might worry that in fact there is a lot more going
on with being than I am indicating here, namely some sort of story about
a transcendental ego of just the sort Lafont thinks Heidegger has no room
for. I will address this issue as I proceed.
26 This is a concept that has been the subject of fairly extensive scholarly
scrutiny, most extensively in Theodore Kisiel (1993). I bracket most of this
here, but see my ‘What’s Formal about Formal Indication?’ (n.d., un-
published paper), for a fuller treatment.
27 Dreyfus’ discussion is at his ‘Comments on Cristina Lafont’s Interpretation
of Being and Time’ (2002: 192–4). Lafont’s reply is at R, p. 231ff.
28 ibid., p. 192.
29 Martin Heidegger (1976: 410), cited at R, p. 232.
30 This is actually a much less transparent phrase than it is often taken as
being, as one can begin to see by noticing that it characterizes Dasein in
terms of a relation to its being – but being is, as we have been discussing
here, a basic ontological structure that constitutes it in each case as the sort
of entity it is. I offer an interpretation of this central phrase in light of this
understanding of ‘being’ in ‘What’s “at Issue” in Being and Time?’ (n.d.,
unpublished paper).
31 It is, incidentally, this relation of factical and ‘universal’ ‘I’s that allows
Heidegger to stress, as he often does at the beginning of his seminars, the
importance of individual self-engagement in philosophy. A theory of the
self is only possible when carried out as a project of self-understanding by
particular selves. In this, Heidegger remains within the ‘Cartesianism’ of
Husserl’s phenomenology (cf. Crowell, 2002).
32 Heidegger (1978).
33 Cf. SZ, pp. 43/69, 145/185, 146/186, 148/188, 295/342, and 387/439.
34 Cf. Haugeland (2000).
35 Discourse and falling are both at different points located as moments within
both the care (Sorge) and being-in (In-Sein) structures (which though essen-
tially linked are not identical), and as existentialia that in some sense hover
over the entirety of these structures.

PSC

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