The question of the subject: Heidegger and the transcendental tradition

Recent Continental European philosophy has converged on the rejection of the subject, or more broadly of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Though this rejection is most commonly associated with French Post-structuralism, it is equally important in Habermas' work. Habermas disagrees with French views on humanism, rationality and the enlightenment, but he joins them in their opposition to what he calls the philosophy of consciousness. A recent anthology by a group of French thinkers (Cadava, Connor and Nancy, 1991) bears the title: Who ComesAfier the Subject? 1 suggesting that the battle against the subject has been fought and won, the opponent vanquished for good. Where, its editors seem to ask, do we go from here? What exactly is the metaphysics of the subject, that is so resoundingly rejected by such diverse thinkers? It is generally portrayed as nothing less than the entire mainstream of modem philosophy, beginning with Descartes and culminating in its most extreme form in phenomenology and existentialism. It is centered in such notions as the cogito, the 'I think,' consciousness, self-consciousness, self-transparency, self-determination. In spite of its dominance, this tradition is thought to have been gradually undermined in the course of our century when philosophers began to take seriously some powerful ideas from outside the philosophical mainstream, notably those of false consciousness (Marx) the unconscious (Freud) and structuralist conceptions of language. By themselves, however, these extra-philosophical intrusions would not have been enough to bring on the full-scale repudiation of the mainstream tradition. Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, among others, have made valiant attempts to intergrate them into the mainstream. What was decisive, I think, in combination with the influences already mentioned, was the work of the * A version of this paper was delivered as The Aaron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in New