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Page 163 of Eckart Förster's The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction*contains a footnoted dig about Heidegger I just don't get. The sentence in the text is:

Fichte's discovery is unprecedented in the history of philosophy: it is the insight that the proposition 'I am' expresses an utterly different kind of being than any existential proposition about a thing or state of affairs:¹⁴ "The initial incorrect presupposition, and the one which caused the Principle of Consciousness** to be presupposed as the first principle of all philosophy, was precisely the presupposition that one must begin with a fact. We certainly do require a first principle which is material and not merely formal. But such a principle does not need to express a deed [Tatsache], it can also express an action [Tathandlung], if it is permissible to wager a proposition which can neither be explained nor proven here" (GA 1,2:46; W 1:8) (164).

This is how Fichte is able to come up with non-divine instances of Kantian "intellectual intuition,"*** non-sensory experiences that, like concepts, are active. Just as for many theists (Kant included), God's creation and knowledge of the world are not two separate acts, for Fichte we become selves by the very act of gaining knowledge about ourselves.***** This makes self-knowledge radically different from normal varieties of empirical and a priori knowledge.

O.K. So here is the footnote:

¹⁴Ernst Tugenhat (1979, 36)****** attributes this discovery to Martin Heidegger. In this matter, however, Heidegger's merits are merely those of an "innovator" who has negleted to name his sources.

I don't have the Tugenhat book, and my German reading is currently too bad to be of much help anyhow. Does anyone know what's being referenced here.

Ontological difference? If that's it I would trace the insight to Hume's dialogues on religion, where the assumption that God is a being is shown to be inconsistent with the role God is playing in various arguments for her existence. That the self is not an object? Isn't this already in Hume and Kant in some way? I'm woefully ignorant in pre-Modern philosophy, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are earlier versions that motivated Hume and Kant. 

It must be that Heidegger discusses the "I am" somewhere in a Fichtean manner, but then could he just be unknowingly recapitulating Fichte? Or would that have even been possible for someone educated largely before the "back to Kant" movement's depredations? Remember that Heidegger's dissertation advisers were the two most prominent Southwest school neo-Kantians, and his first lecture series is on their work. All of these people were steeped in German Romanticism and Idealism. It's only with respect to the students of their students that the forgetting began.

In any case, I'm mystified by the dig and wish Förster had explained it. It seems pretty important to me. Given the exciting state of contemporary scholarship concerning Heidegger's place in the back to Kant movement,******* I think that anxiety of influence issues with respect to Heidegger and the German Romantics and Idealists is going to be an explosive are of research over the next thirty years or so, and moreover that nothing will be the same after we've gone through that.

[Notes:

*If you read one new book this month, you could do far, far worse. It attains Beiser (this, this, and this) and Safranski (this, as well as some untranslated books involving Goethe) levels of greatness.

**Reinhold's fundamental principle, critiqued by Schopenhauer's teacher Schultze, that "In consciousness, the subject distinguishes the representation from the subject and the object and relates the representation to both." Neither Schultze nor Fichte thought this was false. They just argued that it was not originary, in exactly the sense that Heideggerians mean by the terms.

***One of Förster's primary claim is that much of the extant scholarship confuses intellectual intuition with intuitive understanding, which is to do the work of Spinoza's third way of knowing, and for Kant both involves understanding parts in terms of wholes and required a robust account of teleology. Förster shows that Fichte was moved by problematics involving intellectual intuition and Goethe was moved by intuitive understanding. I think that Hegel will be presented as addressing both, but I'm not there in the text yet. I've heard from people that Förster argues that Schelling botches intuitive understanding. I will be at that point in the text tomorrow. I"m very nervous about this, because Graham Bounds and I have a paper arguing that intellectual intuition in Schelling's identity philosophy period has evolved from his critique of Fichte into something that functions as Spinoza's third way of knowing.****

****A weird kind of academic anxiety! You are simultaneously nervous that the person will have shown: (1)  your interpretation or argument to be irredeemably mistaken, or (2) that there's no point in working on the project any more, because the person has already established your point.  By Thursday I'll be free of this fear, one way or the other.

*****Some extraordinarily exciting scholarship has come out on Robert Brandom and Fichtean themes has come out very recently. I hope to be able to dedicate two weeks to this next Fall.

******Tugenhat, Ernst. 1979. Selbstbewußtein und Selbstbestimmung. Sprachanalytische Interpretationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

*******The most interesting work on Heidegger in the last few decades has included a growing awareness of the large extent to which Heidegger's entire corpus must be understood in the neo-Kantian framwork: eg. Lafont, Crowell, Malpas, Friedman, Mitchell, Thomson, Harman etc. etc. etc. Lots of great philosophy comes out, and lots of this raises the issue of Heidegger with respect to the German Idealists. Dale Jaquette's book on Schopenhauer makes a pretty compelling case with respect to Schopenhauer, but there is vastly more to be said.]