Why is Hume Never Used in Explaining Heidegger? A Theory which Ends up Blaming the Nazis for the Analytic/Continental split.

It's shockingly weird to me that none of the secondary sources I've read on Heidegger motivate his thinking in terms of Hume's problematics about causality and necessity.

In the two lecture series that led up to Being and Time (Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity and History of the Concept of Time) Heidegger introduces what will become his tool-being analysis specifically in terms of the neo-Kantian view that "value" (I don't have the German versions of these texts yet, so I don't know what the German word is) is something added on top of an experience already given. In History. . . he attributes this view to the Marburg School [Note: this is mistaken I should have written "Southwestern School," see newer post here) neo-Kantian (and director of his thesis!) Rickert. He also spiels "value" as "usefulness."

So here's a narrative. Hume raised skeptical doubts about causality and necessity. Kant said that these things are added by the mind to the phenomena, and this thought was articulated in a certain way by Marburg school neo-Kantians. Heidegger's tool-being analysis first and foremost just flips this on its head. Simply done, one would say that our pre-thematic engagement with modally rich usefulness (including what in Being and Time becomes known as  "thrown possibility") are primary, and the modally poor phenomenal experience Hume talks about is something that is abstracted from this.

Of course the interplay between handiness and objective presence becomes a lot more complicated in Being and Time, so much so that I don't think at the end of the day there is ever a phenomenal experience like Hume's (and Heidegger got this part from Husserl). But the fact is Hume motivated Kant and Rickert motivated Heidegger. And,in addition to being true, the philosophical story makes a lot more sense in terms of this.

So why is the story never told this way?

1. I think it's primarily due to anti-semitic academic politics during the Nazi era. Marburg school neo-Kantianism was considered Jewish in the Third Reich because of prominent members such as Cohen who were Jewish. Friedman's A Parting of the Ways goes into this some with reference to allegations (which he takes to be implausible) about Heidegger's relation to them in this very regard. Of course Heidegger also removed Being and Time's dedication to the Jewish Husserl in 1940, but Phenomenology had by then caught on all over the world, so despite the removal everybody still saw Heidegger as responding to Husserl and passed over his relationship with Rickert. But Marburg school neo-Kantianism never did spread prior to the Third Reich, so after it was suppressed by the Nazis in the Riech nobody abroad would view Heidegger in that light. Yes Heidegger worked for Husserl and eventually got his seat, but he was Rickert's student before that and he wrote his first thesis under him. And it's the Marburg school neo-Kantian Rickert he's responding to while making his key Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit inversion, the move most people take to be the key to all his thought. Though he only explicitly cites Rickert in History of the Concept of Time the exact same point about value not being added to the phenomena by the subject is stated in the relevant places in both Being and Time and Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity. So I think there is a very real possibility that the Nazi's successful suppression of Marburg has radically effected how we tell the story from Kant to Heidegger, and as a result profoundly effected the history of analytic and continental philosophy (see points 3 and 4, below).
2. Heidegger's historical lectures (starting with The Basic Problems of Phenomenology) are taken too seriously as an account of the dialectical landscape leading up to Being and Time. (2a) Most of these were written under the Nazi boot, both when he was wearing a couple of those boots (aligning your philosophy with politics will effect what you say) and when it was to some extent on his neck (and having uniformed agents in your classes, reporting back what you are saying, will also effect what you say). (2b) Heidegger's history tell us more about Heidegger's thought at the time he wrote the history than about either the historical figures or Heidegger's other works. This is pretty normal when great philosophers (e.g. Kant, Hegel, Russell) write about great philosophers (including, and especially, themselves). (2c) The phenomenology trope that we are in some kind of important intellectual epoch requiring resolutely new-fangled philosophy has never led to very good history of philosophy (consider the glut of really bad exercises in "rethinking" today) considered as history.
3. Analytic philosophy's greatest success probably involves giving humanity a much deeper understanding of the concept of necessity (the dialectic from logical positivist necessity=provability through Kripkean semantics to the contemporary standoff between realist Lewisians and Plantinganians, Dummettian positivist/neo-Kantian holdouts, and people who still have neo-Quinean worries today). Once you start to see Heidegger as motivated by the Hume-Kant problematic of necessity, then intellectual honesty forces you to hook his thinking up with this body of thought, and forces you to among other things learn Kripke's basic completeness proofs for modal systems. None of this is possible for people who have cartoon views about "analytic philosophy."
4. "Continental philosophy"'s greatest successes arguably involves developing an entirely different part of the Kantian heritage, that is the the problem of idealism and the connected problems of knowledge of totalities that Kant discussed in the Dialectic. So it makes sense to situate Heidegger with respect to this story of where we've gone from Kant. But since Hume's wake-up call has little to do with these issues, one might not think of Heidegger as having been motivated by the neo-Kantian response to Hume. [This latter tradition (which resonates strongly in Dummett, MacDowell, and Graham Priest in analytic philosophy) is why I'm reading Lee Braver's A Thing of this World this summer. Actually, me and Mikhail from Perverse Egalitarian are going to help host an on-line reading group on it starting in June. Official announcements to come.]