© 2010. Epoché, Volume 15, Issue 1 (Fall 2010). ISSN 1085-1968. 107–120

Kant, Heidegger, and the Circularity of Transcendental Inquiry

AVery GoldmANDePaul University

Abstract: While in Being and Time Heidegger criticizes Kant for presupposing the

very objects that he then goes on to examine, in his 1935–1936 lecture course What

Is a Thing? he argues that the differentiation of subject and object with which Kant

begins enables him to point to the temporal nature of thought. In following Kant’s

own description of his project, Heidegger deems the presupposition of the objects of

experience not detrimental to the inquiry, but determinative of its circular method.

In this paper I investigate whether such circularity offers an entrance to Heidegger’s

own hermeneutic circle.

Martin Heidegger, in the published version of his 1927–1928 Lecture course on Kant’s first Critique, entitled Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason, argues for the priority of time over space in the Kantian account of the forms of intuition.1 While space as the a priori form of outer sense distinguishes the limiting condition of all objects as outer appearances, time as the a priori form of inner sense distinguishes the condition of all representations (Vorstellungen); for representations, “as modifications of the mind, belong to in-ner sense.”2 The priority to which Heidegger calls attention is that of time as the condition of all thought, while space refers merely to those thoughts, or repre-sentations, that refer beyond inner sense to spatial determination. “All thinking,” Heidegger writes, “must aim at time as pure intuition.”3 This is not merely to say that all thinking is temporal, but also that if thought is to uncover its “ontological determination [ontologische Bestimmung],”4 if, that is to say, the conditions of the possibility of thought are to be uncovered, then they will be in time. Heidegger goes on to explain that the essential question of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is: “How is an original, a priori unification of time, as pure intuition, and the ‘I think’ as pure understanding, possible?”5

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Heidegger’s emphasis on the a priori form of time at the expense of that of space is at odds with Kant’s explicit claims in sections that he appended to both the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the General Remarks that end the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant adds a discussion of the priority of space over time for his analysis. He describes “the representations of outer sense” as “the proper material [den eigentlich Stoff] with which we occupy our mind.”6 And in a section added to the Analytic of Principles (Grundsätze), near the end of the Transcendental Analytic, in drawing a conclusion beyond that of the need for intuition for the possibility of objects of experience, Kant writes that “[i]t is even more remarkable [noch merkwürdiger], however, that in order to understand the possibility of things in accordance with the categories, and thus to establish the objective reality of the latter, we do not merely need intuitions, but always outer intuitions.”7 While all representations are temporal, only those that afford a spatial givenness beyond their temporal determination permit the designation of the “objective reality” of the categories.

Heidegger quotes this appended passage that argues for the priority of spa-tiality in the designation of the conditions of the possibility of experience in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, explaining that while Kant certainly stands in front of “a new insight [einer neuen Einsicht],”8 the authority of temporality has in no way been affected, for the spatial representations that are here distin-guished are themselves temporal, and so the temporal nature of all thought has not been transformed. What this “new insight” is, Heidegger does not address in this work.

One might be tempted to attribute Kant’s emphasis on space in the B edition to what Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics describes as his pull-ing back from the account of the transcendental imagination, the “unknown root [unbekannten Wurzel]” of the cognitive faculties.9 In his renowned analysis of the Schematism chapter of the first Critique Heidegger emphasizes the temporal nature of the a priori concepts of the understanding. He goes on to argue that the unity of intuition that thus underlies the categories is possible only through the creative act located in “the transcendental power of imagination [der transzen-dentalen Einbildungskraft].”10 Heidegger argues that in the B edition, particularly in the re-written Transcendental Deduction, Kant distances himself from the imagination as the source of the temporal nature of thought, emphasizing the understanding, the faculty of judgment, in its place.11 Could it be that likewise the emphasis on space rather than on time in the B edition marks Kant’s turning toward the understanding and away from the temporal dimension of thought?

And yet, the designation of the region of spatial appearances as that of possible experience, and the elucidation of the categories as a priori conditions of such cog-nition, would seem to indicate that the spatiality of appearances is integral to the

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Kantian project and is not an addition to the B edition. In the above quoted passage from the end of the Analytic of Principles, Kant goes on to argue that the temporal determinations that the categories afford depend upon spatial determinations. Kant explains this dependence of temporality on spatiality in terms of the three categories of relation, so echoing the claims of the earlier Analogies of Experience. The first of these Analogies, that related to the category of substance, is exemplary. The persistence in time that the category of substance promises depends upon a spatial determination in time; for time itself flows, and so the persistence needed for substantiality is born of “something persistent [etwas Beharrliches]” in it.12 What this means is that the temporal rule born of the schematized category is in need of spatial givenness to determine something according to the category. While Kant concisely explains the dependence of the temporal nature of cogni-tion on spatial determination in the B edition, the priority of space that is there described is clearly visible already in the A edition; in the sections that precede this note, those that follow the Schematism chapter and which belong to the System of all Principles (Grundsätze) of Pure Understanding in both editions of the first Critique, Kant elucidates how experience can be conceived as determined by the temporally schematized categories. These detailed discussions, particularly in both the Analogies of Experience and the Postulates of Empirical Thought, argue that the temporal rule of the schematized category remains empty without the spatial givenness in which the rule can be determined.

In neither his Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (course from 1927–1928), nor his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (published in 1929), does Heidegger address these lengthy sections, choosing to end his detailed investigations of the first Critique with his discussion of the Schematism. Such an emphasis avoids all discussion of the objects of experience that permit Kant the designation of the role of temporality. And yet, in a later lecture course (1935–1936), published as What Is a Thing? (Die Frage nach dem Ding),13 Heidegger addresses Kant’s Analytic of Principles (Grundsätze), arguing that in its analysis of the conception of objects with which Kant begins we catch a glimpse of the circularity that is fundamental to the Kantian project; and it is through Heidegger’s description of the circularity of the Kantian approach that we will be able to offer an interpretation of the “new insight” that Heidegger de-scribes Kant as offering in the B edition of the first Critique when he emphasizes the priority of space over time in the elucidation of experience. Notwithstanding Heidegger’s varied criticisms of Kant’s account of objects, and thus of the starting point of critique, such an interpretation will help to bring out the affinity between Heidegger and Kant, as Heidegger also embraces a conception of philosophy as a circular undertaking.

Kant explains that the Analytic of Principles, which follows the transcendental deduction of the categories, is a canon for the “power of judgment [Urteilskraft]”

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that helps us to apply (anwenden) the a priori concepts of the understanding to appearances.14 Such application follows two different routes; the first is that of the Schematism chapter in which Kant explains that space and time, as the forms of sensibility and the categories of understanding, are not irreconcilably distinct faculties; the a priori rules of the understanding are shown to be temporal rules and so the question of how these categories could possibly be applied to the spatio-temporally given is answered by the explication of the manner in which these rules already govern the temporal form of experience.

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Schematism chapter speculatively marks the source of cognition in the role of the imagination in which the temporalized category bespeaks the temporal nature of thought. Kant’s Analytic of Principles proceeds from this discussion of the temporalized categories to a much lengthier discussion of the way that these temporalized categories can be applied to ex-perience; this is to say that Kant has deduced the necessity of such categories (in the Transcendental Deduction), highlighted their temporal structure (in the Schematism), and now he is left to investigate how these categories can be empiri-cally demonstrated. Such an “application” distinguishes for Kant the principles (Grundsätze) that they afford.

Kant investigates four groupings of principles (Grundsätze), following the four groupings of categories; the first three groupings, those following from the categories of quantity, quality, and relation, describe the manner in which these categories can be viewed as governing appearances. It is in the fourth grouping of categories, the modal categories of possibility, existence (Dasein), and necessity, described by Kant in the Postulates of Empirical Thought, that Kant begins to address the designation of the terrain of experience with which his critical project has begun; for it is in this section that the examination of the principles governing objects raises the question of the sense in which such objects are offered to the perceiving subject. In his What Is a Thing? Heidegger describes the earlier three groupings of categories as distinguishing the thinghood (Sachheit) of the object, while the last, that of modality, distinguishes the standard (Maßstab) by which the existence (Dasein) of the object that is determined by the other categories can be measured.15

The categories of modality, Kant writes, “have this peculiarity: as a determi-nation of the object they do not augment the concept to which they are ascribed [beigefüget] in the least, but rather express only the relation to the faculty of cognition.”16 The Postulates, the principles of modality, are the rules that follow from these categories in their empirical use. These principles restrict the use of the other categories to their empirical use. The categories of quantity, quality and relation must apply only to possible experience if they are to distinguish objects and not merely logical relations. The categories of modality, and the principles stemming from them, designate the confines of the possible, actual and necessary,

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thus determining the outline of the relation of the conceptually determined object to the cognitive faculties, and in so doing, as Heidegger writes, Kant has “at the same time delimited being to the being of the object of experience.”17

This is not to say that the Postulates merely graft a completed conception of objects onto the cognitive faculties of the perceiving subject; rather, the principles that precede the modal ones, the Axioms, Anticipations, and Analogies, already depend upon the conception of this relation, and thus of being, that is only brought out in the Postulates.18 The preceding principles are already limited to the realm of possible experience in their examination of empirical objects.

The postulate of possibility begins Kant’s account of the modal principles. An object is deemed possible if it conforms to the conditions of experience, but merely in a formal and not in an empirical manner; if a thing can not only be conceptually determined but lies “under those conditions on which all objects of experience rest,” which is to say that such a thing could be spatially given, then it is deemed a possible object; for “space is a formal a priori condition of outer experi-ences” without which objects cannot be empirically given.19 Outer experience, as a formal condition, is necessary for an object to be deemed possible. If this formal condition is not met, if a thing that is thought cannot be spatially given, then its concept is empty, and thus even if the concept is not internally contradictory, it does not distinguish an object of possible experience. It is a necessary but not suf-ficient condition of the possibility of a thing that its concept not be contradictory. Thus, a thing can be judged an object of possible cognition when its conceptual determination corresponds with the a priori condition of space, when, that is to say, it can be empirically given.

An actual object not only meets such a formal criterion of experience, but is directly perceived as a spatial object, which is to say that the formal possibility is actualized by sensible intuition.20 This direct perception is the sensible givenness of the material corresponding to the conceptual determination. The actual object thus differs from the possible object only in so far as in the former the object is sensibly given. The actuality of an object marks something more than mere possibility, but this something more does not denote a furthering of conceptual determination beyond what the possible offers. 21 What must be remembered is that the modal categories do not add anything to the conceptual determination of the object. They affirm only the relation of the object to the cognitive activity of the perceiving subject. The realm of the actual does not exceed the realm of possible objects. This is because the actual differs from the possible only in so far as the formal conditions of experience that the possible exhibits are, in the actual, sensibly given.

The categories of modality thus explain the presuppositions of the other principles (Grundsätze). To examine the conditions of the possibility of objects of experience is to limit the investigation of cognition to what can be spatially

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determined. This designation avoids the metaphysical pursuit of cognition beyond the limits of possible experience. What should be evident is that such an explana-tion of the modal principles, the Postulates, subverts the order of the categories as Kant is working with a conception of possible experience not only throughout the Transcendental Analytic, but even earlier in the Transcendental Aesthetic where he begins the critical project by limiting the investigation of synthetic cognition to that which conforms to the spatial form of sensibility.

The question then is what does such a prior designation of experience as the realm of possible objects mean for the accomplishments of transcendental philosophy? Heidegger addresses such a question in his What Is a Thing? where in his analysis of Kant’s work he broadens his emphasis to include a discussion of the designation of experience that affords the analysis of the temporal origins of thought; and in so doing he offers an interpretation of the “circularity [Kre-isgang] of critique,” a circularity that far from being vicious, in fact, announces the method of Kantian critique. Heidegger points to such Kantian circularity by explaining that the principles of pure understanding follow from the unity of the forms of sensibility and the categories of the understanding. These a priori elements distinguish the region of experience, and it is this designation which permits Kant the proof of the principles (Grundsätze) that are there exemplified; and yet the principles, and this is particularly true of the Postulates, the principles related to the modal categories, designate the conception of existence (Dasein) that is at work in the Kantian conception of experience, and so, as Heidegger writes, “the principles of pure understanding are possible through that which they themselves make possible [Die Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes sind durch dasjenige möglich, was sie selbst ermöglichen].”22 Such an account of the circularity of Kant’s inquiry is precisely how, as Heidegger notes, Kant describes the “special property [besondere Eigenschaft]” of his transcendental method of proof, “that it first makes possible its ground of proof, namely experience . . . [daß er seinen Beweisgrund, nämlich Erfahrung, selbst zuerst möglich macht].”23 The Kantian principles (Grundsätze) both depend upon experience in order to be proven, and are themselves shown to be necessary for this conception of experience as they distinguish its confines.24

Kant offers a similar discussion of the circularity of his method, explicitly calling it a “circle [Zirkel],”25 in his discussion of the “transcendental unity of ap-perception.” This “I think” cannot be an object for itself and known phenomenally because it is the presupposition of all cognition. Kant explains that nothing more can be said of the thinking self, “this I, or He, or It (the thing), which thinks,” than it is the “transcendental subject of thoughts = x”;26 and such a subject, as the unity of apperception, can be “cognized only through the thoughts that are its predicates.”27 Kant explains that our philosophical inquiries uncover in this way a “perpetual circle [beständigen Zirkel]”:28 in order to say something about

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this subject, this transcendental unity of apperception, we must conceive of its predicates, the objects of thought, and yet, these objects always, already make use of that which they would purport to explain, as for Kant an object cannot be thought without presupposing such an underlying unity.29

While Kantian critique can be said to be completed in its circular system, Heidegger continues beyond such a methodological accomplishment in pursuit of what is demarcated by such a circular method. Heidegger describes this cir-cular structure of critique as exposing, beyond the structure of experience, “the between—between us and the thing [das Zwischen—zwischen uns und dem Ding]”;30 while Kant begins by presupposing the conception of objects that he then goes on to examine, Heidegger views such circularity, not as Kant would as the price to be paid for an epistemology that avoids skeptical conclusions, but instead as that which releases us from the demands of objectivity, and directs us to the temporal dimension that lies between the things and us, and which is both prior to, and foundational for, the traditional division of subject and object.

Heidegger’s claim is that the Kantian conditions of the possibility of experi-ence are merely the conditions for the types of objects with which Kant begins his investigation. Rather than beginning an inquiry into experience by presupposing a world of spatially extended entities, we should, Heidegger argues, investigate entities as they are encountered within the systems of meaning and involvements that Heidegger, in Being and Time, entitles “readiness-to-hand [Zuhandenheit].” We must examine our involvements in the world as they are experienced, as that is to say they present possibilities, their meanings, within the context of our in-volvements, rather than analyzing what can be abstracted from our involvements, what is present to us, and all others, as objects.31

Such an analysis of Kantian critique is further developed in Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik), which was published only two years after Being and Time.32 Heidegger’s well known argument in this work maintains that after having pushed against the unknown common root of the faculties of sensibility and understanding in his analysis of the objects of experience Kant “shrank back”33 from the transcendental imagination. In retreating from this radical account of the imagination, Kant returned to the traditional psychological investigation of the subject. Kant turned his back on the path that he had marked out, the path leading to the transcendental imagination which offered the subversion of the traditional view of being as what is present to a subject, and thus maintained the conception of being as what can be posited as an object with its dependence on the principles of reflection. Heidegger’s in-terpretation of Kant’s first Critique thus explains that the analysis of objectivity launched by Kant’s critical project directs beyond its restricted conception of experience and points towards the imagination as the temporal source of finite experience, the common root of Kantian dualism.34

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In What Is a Thing? Heidegger goes further, giving Kant credit not only for pointing beyond the objective, but so too for initiating the circular project of critique which permits the subversion of epistemological concerns called for by Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Heidegger argues that Kantian experience (Erfahrung) is not to be understood as a thing “present-at-hand (vorhanden),” it is not the object stripped of our engagement with it and so reduced to its quantifi-able elements; it is, rather, a circular happening that exposes the gap that is to be found in the attempt to examine cognition, a gap “between” subject and object that directs beyond such a cognitive dualism.

Such an emphasis on Kant’s designation of the region of experience does not mean that Heidegger viewed the Kantian dualism of subject and object, which is to say, the separation of objects from the subjects who perceive them, in any more generous a light. And yet, it does point to a growing concern on Heidegger’s part for the methodological structure that allows Kant to point to that which is most originary. This is evident not only in Heidegger’s What Is a Thing? but also in some of his late works, particularly his essay “Kant’s Thesis About Being,”35 in which he investigates Kant’s conception of transcendental reflection, the act that orders the representational field prior to critical inquiry, as well as his “Time and Being,” his 1962 lecture, in which he explicitly challenges his earlier attempt in Being and Time to designate the temporal prior to the spatial.36 But even more than three decades earlier, in his What Is a Thing? Heidegger can be seen to have introduced a discussion of Kant’s method, of the structure that permits Kant the analysis of cognition, through his introduction of the circularity that is at the core of transcendental philosophy; and in so doing Heidegger must surely be seen to be drawing some sort of a parallel between the circularity (Kreisgang) of Kantian critique and the description that he offers of his own project as examining the hermeneutic circle (Zirkel) of understanding (Verstehen).37

While explaining the hermeneutic circle in Being and Time, Heidegger writes that “what is decisive is not to get out of the circle [Zirkel], but to get in it in the right way.”38 What Heidegger means by this circle is that human experience is always characterized by a prior commitment that designates what can become meaningful. What is articulated, or understood, depends upon this prior structure, what Heidegger calls “this existential fore-structure [Vor-Struktur]” of Dasein.39 We cannot claim the independence of our interpretations as they are tied to the self-understanding from out of which they follow. This means that there is no way to avoid the “circle of understanding,” one is always, already in it, and what is im-portant, Heidegger argues, is how we undertake such an involvement. This means that one should not accept “popular conceptions [Volksbegriffe]” concerning this “fore-structure,” one should instead, Heidegger explains, be rigorously scientific in its analysis, and so develop, or rather uncover, this pre-articulation in a way that lives up “to the things themselves (aus den Sachen selbst).”40 Heidegger is not in

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this way claiming the Kantian noumenal realm of the “Ding an sich,” but rather the phenomenological things, the Sachen, to which Husserl called us.41 To rigor-ously investigate the “things” of our experience is not for Heidegger to conceive of them as the three-dimensional objects that form the basis of the Kantian analysis; rather, it is to pursue such things prior to their reduction to Kantian objects of experience, and in this way such an investigation is able to help elucidate the “fore-structure” that they exemplify. This hermeneutic “circle [Zirkel]” offers no external justification, no point from which its claims can be corroborated; its authority, or scientific rigor, comes from the analysis of the totality of this “fore-structure.” Only if such a totality has been unraveled, can an interpretation from out of this hermeneutic circle raise the possibility of “the ‘authentic’ existence of Dasein.”42

In Being and Time, after criticizing Kant for having presupposed the conception of objects that he then analyzes,43 Heidegger goes on to distinguish his concep-tion of the hermeneutic circle (Zirkel) of understanding from the circularity of traditional epistemological systems, from systems like Kant’s that presuppose a reductive, epistemological conception of objects. Heidegger writes: “This circle [Zirkel] of understanding [Verstehen] is not a circle [Kreis] in which any random [beliebige] kind of knowledge operates, but it is rather the expression of the ex-istential fore-structure of Dasein itself.”44 The hermeneutic circle (Zirkel) avoids an arbitrary conception of objects, expressing, rather, what Heidegger implies is a fundamental account of the experience of objects. And Kant is surely amongst those Heidegger is here addressing when he criticizes a knowledge of objects that replaces “the existential fore-structure of Dasein.”

But even in Being and Time we can see a certain ambivalence on Heidegger’s part towards the Kantian analysis of objects that allows him to point to the fundamental temporal origins of thought; later in Being and Time, rather than criticizing such epistemological methods, Heidegger appears to argue that such methods offer us access to the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger explains that we

must aim at leaping into this “circle [Kreis]” primordially and completely, so that even at the beginning of our analysis of Dasein we make sure that we have a complete view of the circular [zirkelhafte] being of Dasein.45

Here Heidegger uses both terms, Kreis and Zirkel; the method into which one must leap is a Kreis (the term he uses to describe Kant’s undertaking), while what this shows is the zirkelhafte nature of Dasein itself. We must enter the analysis of Dasein with a view to the whole, to the “circular [zirkelhafte] being of Dasein”; and yet, with such a view in mind we must still find an entry point, a means of beginning our analysis, and such an entrance Heidegger describes in precisely the language that he will come to use for Kantian inquiry: the “circularity [Kreisgang]” of the Kantian analysis of objects permits access to the more fundamental “circle [Zirkel]” of the understanding itself.46

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Such an emphasis on the positive contributions of the “circularity [Kreisgang]” of the Kantian method can be seen already in Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), published just two years after Being and Time; Kant’s transcendental undertaking, which had earlier been described as a “random kind of knowledge,” is said to offer access to the temporal nature of all thought; and in the lecture course of 1935–1936 published as What Is a Thing? Heidegger, as has here been discussed, emphasizes the “circularity [Kreisgang]” of the Kantian undertaking, not as a criticism of Kant, but insofar as the Kantian circle points us towards precisely that which is not recuperated in the cognitive dualism of his epistemology.

While developing such an account of Heidegger’s hermeneutic “circle [Zirkel]” of understanding in Being and Time cannot be undertaken here, it should now be clear why in the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes it as “remarkable” that in order “to understand the possibility of things as consequent upon the categories,” which is to say distinguish the unity of the understanding in terms of the categories “we need not merely intuitions but indeed always outer intuitions.”47 It is the designation of the realm of experience as that of spatially given objects that permits Kant the analysis of just such objects, and it is this circular undertaking that allows him to point towards the temporal nature of thought. And yet, it should also be clear that in Heidegger’s focus on that which is exposed in this Kantian “circle [Kreis],” his emphasis on that which is “between us and the thing,” he has ventured beyond Kant, highlighting in his What Is a Thing? that which evades determination at the expense of the Kantian emphasis on the thematization of what Heidegger describes as the “circular happening [kreisendes Geschehen]” of experience.48 And yet, what is also clear is that Heidegger recognizes the role played by Kant in the development of such a conception of “understanding [Verstehen]”49 even as he ultimately rejects the a priori concepts of the Kantian “understanding [Verstand].” And so, even with Heidegger’s earlier critique of the sort of objects with which Kant begins his analysis, Heidegger, already in his 1935–1936 lecture course, views the Kantian “circularity [Kreisgang]” of experi-ence as a methodological undertaking that allows us to enter the “circle [Zirkel]” of Dasein’s understanding “in the right way.”50

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995), 100–3; Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Ver-nunft, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), Bd. 25, 145–50.

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2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A98–9; Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), 3 and 4. Following accepted practice, references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will give the “A” and “B” pagination of the first and second editions. This passage is quoted by Heidegger in his Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 102–3; Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 149.

3. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 111; Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 162.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B67.

7. Ibid., B291.

8. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 136; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951), 181.

9. Ibid., 110; 147.

10. Ibid., 98; 131.

11. Ibid., 110; 147.

12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B227/A184; translation altered.

13. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, Ind.: Regenry/Gateway, 1967); Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987).

14. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B171/A132.

15. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 237–8; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 184–5.

16. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B266/A219.

17. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 240; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 186.

18. Ibid., 241; 187.

19. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B271/A224.

20. The category is that of existence (Dasein), while the principle (Grundsatz) that follows from it is that of actuality (Wirklichkeit).

21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A234–5/B287.

22. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 241; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 187.

23. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A737/B765; Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 187.

24. On this passage see Pierre Kerszberg, Critique and Totality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 87.

25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B404/A346.

26. Ibid., B404/A346. Kant capitalizes the terms “Er” and “Es.” Dieter Sturma explains: “Because the ‘I think’ is included in all of my experienced states [Weil das ‘Ich denke’ in allen meinen Erfahrungszuständen enthalten ist],” I cannot have any concept of it.

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See Dieter Sturma, “Die Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft in der zweiten Auflage,” in Kritik de reinen Vernunft, ed. Georg Mohr und Marcus Willaschek (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 402; see also Sturma, Kant über Selbstbewußtsein (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985), 41.

27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B404/A346; translation altered.

28. Ibid., B404/A346; translation altered. Kant also uses the term Zirkel negatively, distin-guishing his own method from that of “a vicious circle [ein fehlerhafter Zirkel]”; the circularity of the inquiry would be “vicious” if what is initially presupposed is accepted not hypothetically, or regulatively, but as actually existing (Kant, KrV, A693/B721). Kant also uses the term “Zirkel” with such a negative connotation in the Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals where he explains that in the inference from freedom to autonomy and then on to the moral law he has not introduced “a hidden circle [ein geheimer Zirkel]” in his reasoning. See Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99; Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Gesammelte Schriften (Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), 4, 453.

29. Patricia Kitcher, in her “Kant’s Real Self,” explicitly denies this in claiming that “Kant is simply confusing the order of proof with what we might call the order of conceiv-ability.” See Patricia Kitcher, “Kant’s Real Self,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 126. Kitcher recognizes that the unity of apperception must be presupposed in order to prove, or deduce, the categories, but she claims that this order of proof does not imply that the self cannot be thought by means of the categories, for what it proves is that “the only way that we can think at all is through the categories” (ibid.). Henry Allison describes Kitcher as having in this way reduced “the subject of thought to a system of ‘contentually dependent cognitive states’”; Kant is turned into Hume, the “ineliminable” nature of apperception is lost. See Allison, “On Naturalizing Kant’s Transcendental Psychol-ogy,” in Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66.

30. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 188.

31. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 102–7; Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 72–6. A phenomenological inves-tigation, if it is to avoid the legacy of Cartesian dualism, must begin its investigations with what is “ready-to-hand,” with entities that offer themselves as meaningful, useful for our purposes, and as offering a developed extension of our bodily involvements in the world. They are, Heidegger writes, our “equipment.” Beginning with entities so conceived, which is to say prior to the radical division of our subjectivity from objects of experience, avoids viewing the entities that surround us as artifacts cut off from our personal involvements or, rather, avoids viewing them at precisely that moment in which they do not serve their purpose but are broken and force us to look at them as merely physical things that offer themselves equally for analysis to all beings of our cognitive functioning. Such a reduced meaning, attributed to the entities that form the web of meanings within which we live, Heidegger calls “presence-at-hand [Vorhandenheit].” For Heidegger’s criticism in Being and Time of Kant’s conception of

Kant, Heidegger, and the Circularity of Transcendental Inquiry 119

objects in his “What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?) see Heidegger, Being and Time, 144; Sein und Zeit, 109–10.

32. Being and Time was published in 1927; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was first published in 1929.

33. “Kant ist vor dieser unbekannten Wurzel zurückgewichen” (Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 110; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 147).

34. John Sallis writes that the accomplishments of Kant’s first Critique, the dualism of faculties, etc., “effectively block the route that reason would take back to the common root.” See Sallis, Spacings of Reason and Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 71–2. Thus, for Sallis, the critical accomplishment implicitly covers up its own opening, it is “stabilized only at the cost of having its voice torn away from it” (72).

35. In this 1961 essay Heidegger raises such methodological questions by directing us to the Appendix that follows the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, the oft overlooked Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection (Von der Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe). See Martin Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” trans. Ted E. Klein Jr. and William E. Pohl, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1998), 337–63; “Kants These über das Sein,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 273–307.

36. In this late lecture, first published in 1969 in Zur Sache des Denkens, Heidegger criticizes his own earlier Being and Time for its attempt “to derive human spatial-ity from temporality [Zeitlichkeit].” See Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 23; “Zeit und Sein,” in Zur Sache des Denken (Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 29.

37. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153; while Heidegger uses the term Kreis to both broadly criticize epistemological systems, and later to describe the ac-complishments of one such system, the Kantian, he refers to his own circle with the Latinate Zirkel. It is precisely such a Zirkel that Kant claims for his own method.

38. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000), I, 45; Logische Untersuchungen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968), I, 10.

42. Heidegger, Being and Time, 288; Sein und Zeit, 312.

43. Heidegger, Being and Time, 144; Sein und Zeit, 109–10.

44. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153.

45. “Die Bemühung muß vielmehr darauf zielen, ursprünglich und ganz in diesen ‘Kreis’ zu springen, um sich schon im Ansatz der Daseinsanalyse den vollen Blick auf das zirkelhafte Sein des Daseins zu sichern” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 291; Sein und Zeit, 315).

46. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger describes the connection between “work [Werk]” and “art” as that of a “circle [Zirkel],” describing it as offering “the feast of

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thought [das Fest des Denkens].” Heidegger goes on to say that every step between work and art “circles in this circle [kreist in diesem Kreise].” Obviously, such a circle would demand further analysis that cannot here be undertaken, including that of connecting it to Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle of understanding. It should, however, be noted that in this passage Heidegger refers to the circle at issue as both Zirkel and Kreis. See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 18; “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957), 8.

47. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B291.

48. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 188.

49. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153.

50. As quoted above, Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 143; Sein und Zeit, 153. To conclude in this way is to argue against Paul Ricoeur’s assertion in his “Existence and Herme-neutics” that Heidegger rejects all such methodological questions, offering instead “to ground hermeneutics in phenomenology” by means merely of the ontological ques-tion. See Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 6; “Existence et Herméneutique,” in Le Conflit des interpretations: Essais d’herméneutique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 10. Ricouer describes Heidegger’s approach as the “short route [voie courte]” (ibid., 7; 11) to hermeneutics, contrasting it with his own “long route [voie longue]” (ibid., 10; 14) which takes into account semantics. Ricoueur explains that for Heidegger “[o]ne must deliberately move outside the enchanted circle [cercle enchanté] of the problematic of subject and object and question oneself about being” (ibid., 7; 11). What has here been argued is that while this might have been the case in his Be-ing and Time, in Heidegger’s later lectures and writings on Kant he recognizes the methodological importance of remaining, at least for the start, within the “enchanted circle” of Kantian inquiry.