The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1986) Vol . X X I V , No. 1

HEIDEGGER, KANT, AND T H E PROBLEM OF TRANSCENDENCE Albert0 Moreiras University of Georgia

This paper will focus on Heidegger’s repetition of the Kantian solution to the problem of transcendence. For Kant a laying of the foundation of metaphysics is possible only if the ground of the possibility of ontological knowledge is established. Ontological knowledge is only possible if there exists such a thing as transcendence for finite beings; in other words, if the knowledge of an object in general is at all possible for a human being. Kant’s laying of the foundation of metaphysics is in some ways an enterprise parallel to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. The question of transcendence is crucial to both projects, and it is therefore an essential aspect of Heidegger’s critique of Kant. But Heidegger’s critique underwent a substantial modification between Being and Time (1927) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929).

According to Seing and Time, in order to build a fundamental ontology it is necessary to give an “ontological analytic of Dasein”(36). In this respect “time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being” (39). In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger, still moving in the direction of his ontological analytic, concentrates upon Kant because Kant is“the first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the dimension of Temporality or has even let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves” (BT 45)’ Heidegger’s confrontation with Kant is a radical moment of the early Heideggerian project. Indeed it is a radical moment in the history of contemporary thought, as I shall try to show.

Albert0 Moreirasgot his Licenciatura in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He haspubIishedseveralorticIes on contemporary Spanish and Latin American authors. He is coeditor of rhe literary journal ULULA, and a doctoral candidate in Romance Languages at the University of Georgia. His dissertation (inprogress) is on rhe concepts of mimesis and phronesis in the works of Josk Lezama Lima. He is also working on a book about the Spanish poet Josk Hierro.

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For Being and Time Kant’s fundamental ontology failed because Kant “could never achieve an insight into the problematic of Temporality.”Two things prevented Kant from it: in the first place, he “took over Descartes’ position dogmatically;” in the second place, “his analysis of [time] remained oriented towards the traditional way in which time had been ordinarily understood.” As a consequence, “the decisive connection between time and the ‘Ithink’was shrouded in utter darkness; it did not even become a problem” (BT 45). But in 1929 Heidegger reinterpreted Kant seeking“to reveal the basic import of [the Critique of Pure Reason] by bringing out what Kant ‘intended to say”’ (KPM 206).* The result of such hermeneutical analysis was that Heidegger inverted his former assertion about Kant:

Time and the“I think”are no longer opposed to one another as unlike and incompatible; they are the same. Thanks to the radicalism with which, in the laying of the foundation of metaphysics, Kant for the first time subjected time and the “I think”, each taken separately, to a transcendental interpretation, he succeeded in bringing them together in their primordial identity-without, to be sure, having seen this identity expressly as such (KPM 197).

The possibility of finite ontological knowledge-of transcendence for a human being-was expressed by Kant in his formulation ofthe “highest principle of all synthetic judgments:” “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience”(CPR A 138, B 197). According to Heidegger it is only the identification of time and the ‘I think’-of temporality and the Dasein-which succeeds in securely establishing the possibility of transcendence of the finite being, therefore setting the “highest principle of all synthetic judgments” on firm grounds. Heidegger’s repetition of Kant in his Kant-book claims success in “loosening up” Kant’s laying of the foundation of metaphysics, “thus aiding this foundation . . . to realize its own primordial possibility” (KPM 208).

The question informing my inquiry is how was it possible for Heidegger to reinterpret Kant to the point of identifying the Kantian transcendental imagination with Temporality. The import of this was intimated by Heidegger himself, who considered his repetition of Kant a true overcoming of Transcendental Idealism. Heidegger’s Kant- interpretation enables him to reassess the philosophical tradition by condemning Post-Kantianism as paradoxically representing the death of philosophy.

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Heidegger first elaborates on the Kantian idea of transcendence and the transcendental in the context of his exposition and phenom- enological critique of the “Thesis of Modern Ontology” in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1 22-54). Kant calls transcendental “all

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knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with our mode of knowing objects insofar as this knowledge is supposed to be possible a priori”(CPR B 25; BPPh 127-38). The condition of all knowledge is for Kant the ego as “I think”. Kant characterizes the ego as res cogirans following Descartes. The“1 think”acc0mpanies all our representations in such a way that “it is only on the basis of the ‘1 think’ that any manifold can be given to me”(BPPh 127). Kant develops the Cartesian position with the notion of the original synthetic unity of apperception (CPR B 134-39). As synthetic unity of apperception theego becomes the ground of all being. Accordingly, the categories have to be defined as “the possible forms of unity of the possible modes of the thinking ego” (BPPh 129). The ego comes in this way to be “the fundamental ontological condition, the transcendental that lies at the basis of every particular a priori” (BPPh 129).

But Kant’s interpretation of the transcendental ego fails to give us a clue as to the ego’s specific mode of being. In fact Kant observes in“The Paralogisms of Pure Reason”(CPR B 399 ff.) that the transcendental ego’s mode of being cannot be adequately explained, for there is no possibility of an application of the categories to the ego as “I think”. As condition of the possibility of the“1 think”, the ego is at the same time the condition of possibility of the categories. “Since these categories are conditioned by the ego, they cannot be applied in turn to the ego in order to apprehend it. That which conditions absolutely, the ego as the original synthetic unity of apperception, cannot be determined with the aid of what is conditioned by it”(BPPh 144). The threat of a vicious circle precludes an ontological determination of the ego.

For Heidegger Kant’s failure comes from taking “the type of knowledge which is valid for nature as the sole possible basis for knowledge of the ego”(BPPh 146). Heidegger’s way out of this Kantian dead end is at the core of his turnabout with respect to the totality of the ontological tradition. Rather than accepting the fact that the ego cannot be ontologically interpreted Heidegger seeks to establish a new ontological interpretation of the transcendental subject, which finds its ground in a previous determination of the subject’s mode of being as distinct from that of extant entities. Categories would then not be applicable to an ontological apprehension of the subject. Being and Time had already laid out that previous groundwork. At this stage of his confrontation with Kant Heidegger’s task is to offer a concept of transcendence which holds fast to the discoveries of his analytic.

Transcendence, for Heidegger, must be understood in view of the basic constitution of Dasein, which is being-in-the world. Over against Kant’s concept of the transcendental ego, for Heidegger it is being-in- the-world which makes possible the apprehension of anything at all. Extants are encountered always as intraworldly beings. The concept of world, says Heidegger, “is what has hitherto not been recognized in

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philosophy” (BPPh 165). As already present in advance before the totality of intraworldly beings, world is the transcendent:

World is understood beforehand when objectsencounter us . . . The mode of being ofthe world is not the extantness of objects; instead, the world exists. The world . . . is the truly transcendent, that which is still further beyond than objects. and at the same time this beyond is, as a n existent, a basic determination of being in the world, of the Dasein. If the world is the transcendent, then what is truly transcendent is the Dasein. With this we first arrive at the genuine ontological sense of rransrendence (BPPh 299)

Transcendence meant for Kant the self-relating of the subject to objects in the synthetic unity of apperception. The original deter- mination of the mode of being of Dasein as being-in-the-world enables Heidegger to move beyond Kant by asserting that, since the Dasein is as such beyond itself, in the world, self and world are not two different beings, but “belong together in the single entity, the Dasein” (BPPh 297). The overcoming of the Kantian position is made explicit in the following words: “Transcendence i s . . . the presupposition for the Dasein’s having the character of a self. The selfhood of the Dasein is founded on its transcendence, and the Dasein is not first an ego-self which then oversteps something o r other. The ‘toward-itself‘ and the ‘out-from-itself‘are implicit in the concept of selfhood. What exists as a self can d o so only as a transcendent being”(BPPh 300). Heidegger goes on to say that the ground of transcendence is temporality. Temporality alone makes transcendence possible: “The ecstatic character of time makes possible the Dasein’s specific overstepping character, tran- scendence, and thus also the world”(BPPh 302).

The Critique of Pure Reason wanted to lay the foundation of the possibility of metaphysics. Correspondingly, Heidegger’s question as to the meaning of being must also ask about the conditions of possibility of the understanding of being. Kant’s transcendental ego is necessarily related to the Kantian conception of being, just as, for Heidegger, transcendence is first of all what makes something like understanding of being possible. Transcendence is rooted in temporality. Temporality is therefore the real condition of possibility of the understanding of being. But Heidegger’s first assertion about Kant in Being and Time was: “[For Kant] the decisive connection between time and the‘l think’ was shrouded in utter darkness; it did not even become a problem”(BT 45). Kant, then, could not possibly understand being. The question now is: Can Heidegger, after having reached that conclusion, still move fruitfully along the path of a repetition of Kant’s thinking?

The answer is probably no. In order to carry on an effective dialogue with Kant Heidegger was forced to modify his position. He does so when he is about t o start the task of investigating exactly in what way temporality makes possible the understanding of being: “when Kant tries t o conceive being as such and defines it as position, he manifestly makes no use of time in the common sense. But it does not follow from

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this that he made no use of temporality in the original sense of Temporality, without an understanding of being, without himself being in the clear about the condition of possibility of his ontological propositions” (BPPh 303). Heidegger is here clearly “understanding Kant better than Kant understood himself,” as the well-known hermeneutical maxim has it. The necessity of preserving the possibility of dialogue takes Heidegger to the interpretive position that was to become explicit in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: what needs to be elucidated is, not what Kant actually said, but rather what he “intended to say”(KPM 206). At any rate those statements constitute a middle point between Being and Time and Kant and rhe Problem of Metaphysics, where Heidegger affirms that Kant succeeded in bringing time and the “I think” together “in their primordial identity” (197). Heidegger is certainly still pursuing a repetition of Kant. An adequate trailing of it, even if focusing upon the specific problem of tran- scendence, must concern itself with what Heidegger immediately develops as an “explicit confrontation between the Kantian inter- pretation of being and the Temporal problematic” (BPPh 3 13).

Kant’s thesis, as it was formulated in the first Critique, reads as follows: “Being is manifestly not a real predicate, that is, a concept of something that could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the position of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves”(CPR B 626). The positive content of the thesis is that being equals position. If being equals position, existence means absolute position: “In the proposition ‘A is B,’ B is a real predicate adjoined to A. In contrast, in the statement ‘A exists,’ A is posited absolutely, and indeed with the sum total of its real determinations B, C, D, and so forth”(BPPh 45). Now, existence, according to Kant, has to do “only with the question whether such a thing is given to us in such a way that the perception of it can possibly precede the concept”(CPR B 272-73; BPPh 46). “Thus the specific character of absotuteposition, as Kant defines it, reveals itself as perception”( BPPh 46). A phenomenological analysis of the Kantian concept of perception, or of what is designated by perception, will determine it as a phenomenon the ontological constitution of which is best defined by intentionality: “What we concisely call perception is, more explicitly formulated, the perceptual directing of oneself toward what is perceived, in such a way indeed that the perceived is itself always understood as perceived in its perceivedness”( BPPh 57). Intentionality is the phenomenological name for the structure of directing-oneself- toward-or being-directed-toward: it is neither objective nor subjective in the traditional sense, but, as necessarily related to the phenomenon of transcendence, it constitutes the structure of the subject’s comportment as such.

As constituted by intentionality, subject-comportment is grounded in transcendence. Transcendence is rooted in temporality. Therefore, perception must be grounded in temporality too. The temporal mode

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that makes possible perceiving as such is of course the present: “The ecstasis of the present is the foundation for the specifically intentional transcendence of the perception of extant entities”(BPPh 315). On the other hand, the directional sense of the intentionality of perception is defined by Heidegger in the following way: “In perceiving, the Dasein, in accordance with its own comportmental sense, lets that toward which it is directed, the [intended] entity, be encountered in such a way that it understands this entity in its incarnate character as an in-itself’(BPPh 315). Heidegger has now reached the point in which he can restate Kant’s thesis: “On our interpretation, ‘being is perception’ now means: being is an intentional comportment of a peculiar sort . . . it is an ecstasis in the unity of temporality . . . being equals presence”(BPPh 315). The Temporal content of Kant’s thesis has been clarified. Heidegger has dissolved the concealments that were latent in Kant’s ontological terminology. Indeed, for Heidegger it is not just that “only through Temporal interpretation does Kant’s assertion that being equals position . . . acquire a realizable sense,” but also that Kant “surely understood the equivalence of being and position in the way we have interpreted him” (BPPh 317).

Heidegger’s restating of Kant’s thesis is to an extent the direct result of his phenomenological methodology: “only a phenomenological interpretation affords the possibility of opening up a positive under- standing of the Kantian problems and his solution of them” (BPPh 318). Heidegger’s confrontation with Kant takes advantage of the possibilities offered by phenomenology, although it was Heidegger himself who took phenomenology to a point where a new reading of Kant was made possible, since for Husserl the doctrine of being was still a doctrine of categories. Yet, Thomas Sheehan has explained how Husserl, in Logical Investigations VI, ch. 6, “Sensuous and Categorial Intuitions,” accomplished what Heidegger could take as the clue to set ontology on a new basis.3 According to Sheehan, Husserl’s fundamental achievement in that text is the demonstration of how the propositional categorial form can be intuitively fulfilled. The categorial acts comes to be considered as the letting-appear of the object as what and how it is: in its Being-dimension. The Being-dimension would no longer be a mere function of the synthetic apperception. Phenomenology attained here what the Kantian method thought impossible, the concept of categorial intuitions. Being was thus rescued from its traditional place in the apophantic assertion in the copula (cf. Kant’s thesis: “Being is merely the position of a thing . . .”). Being, as immediately given to the categorial intuition, reveals itself aphenomenon. “With his discovery of being as the presentness of beings, itself immediately present, Heidegger now had a clue for returning to Plato, Aristotle and the whole tradition, and for reading being in terms of temporality”(Sheehan 8). Heidegger’s position does represent a radical divergence with respect to Kant; and yet, Heidegger contends, only from that position is it possible to release and thus retrieve the Kantian accomplishment.

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Heidegger’s awareness of the decisiveness of the phenomenological method in this issue is shown at the end of the discussion of the Kantian interpretation of being in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Heidegger blames the transcendental method for not having been able to carry through the possibilities concealed in Kant’s sublated realization of the importance of temporality: “The reason why Kant calls being a logical predicate is connected with his ontological, that is, transcendental, mode of inquiry, and it leads us to a fundamental confrontation with this type of inquiry, which we shall discuss in the context ofthe Critique of Pure Reason next semester”(BPPh 317). The results of that confrontation were published by Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metuphysics.4 I shall now turn to this book in order to further examine the Heideggerian view of Kant’s concept of tran- scendence.

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The Heideggerian turn in the history of philosophical tradition must be seen in the light of the dialogue that Heidegger carried on with Kant. It is even possible to say that the overall significance of early Heideggerian thought resides in his rethinking of, and finding a phenomenological solution for, many of Kant’s fundamental problems. Heidegger was conscious of this: in fact, he explicitly says that the development that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel gave to Kant’s central concern of the transcendental ego “retarded” the possibility of a fundamental ontological interpretation of the Dasein (BPPh 153). Heidegger does certainly not disregard Hegel. On the contrary, he points out that the “overcoming of Hegel is the intrinsically necessary step in the development of Western philosophy which must be made for it to remain at all alive” (BPPh 178): Hegelianism is the end of philosophy. To overcome Hegel must mean to go behind him, find his source, that is, Kant, and move from it in a different direction. We can hardly be surprised when we read, in a footnote placed by Heidegger at the very heart of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, that the book’s crucial issue, i.e., the interpretation.of the transcendental imagination, “moves in a direction opposite to that of German idealism”(KPM 144). Heidegger set about the task of developing Western philosophy by bridging over German idealism to Kant himself, in pursuit of a fresh formulation of the fundamental ontological problems.

Heidegger’s repetition of Kant in the Kant-book works within the context of the Critique. As such, it moves toward a clarification of ontological knowledge. Clarifying means for Heidegger “loosening up” the contents of the Kantian text through a carefully close reading of it. Reconstructing this close reading seems the only way to penetrate the nature of the reinterpretation at hand. I attempt in what follows a short but faithful summary of the steps Heidegger takes in his repetition ofthe first Critique.

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For Kant ontological knowledge, as transcendental knowledge, refers t o the knowledge of the a priori conditions of human understanding. Any particular human cognition synthetizes two elemental constituents: the a priori concepts, o r categories, and the empirical impressions. We receive sense impressions through the forms of Anschauung, intuition. The forms of intuition, that is, the conditions of possibility of any specific empirical impression, are space and time. Space, being the form of external sense, and time, the form of internal sense, seem to refer to two distinct regions of experience. But Kant himself stated that all representations, whether internal or external, happen within time. Therefore, “time is the formal a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever”(CPR A 34; B 50). Time takes precedence over space. And then time“must be the dominant and essential element of pure knowledge and hence of transcendence as well, since it is pure knowledge which makes transcendence possible” (KPM 52).

The raw material of intuition must be processed and interpreted by the human subject. Kant calls categories the a priori universal principles that we impose upon empirical data in order t o make the knowledge of the object possible. Categories and time are, then, the pure elements of pure-that is, non-empirical or not-yet-empirical-knowledge. We are now taking them separately, but, as separate, they cannot be properly understood. Even less d o they work separately. “The question of the essential unity of ontological knowledge is . . . at bottom a question about the original unification” of pure intuition and pure thought, time and the categories (KPM 61). Such unification-the “ontological synthesis”-cannot be carried out by either intuition o r thought. Rather, it must be the affair of a different faculty. Kant will say that synthesis in general “is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever” (CPR A 78; B 103). The synthesis of imagination unifies the synopsis of the manifold in intuition and the synthesis of the understanding. The synthesis of imagination is therefore the pure ontological synthesis. In conclusion, “If the possibility of ontological knowledge is based upon the pure synthesis, . . . then the pure synthesis must manifest itself as that which organizes and supports the unified totality of the intrinsic, essential structure of transcendence” (KPM 75). Imagination thus becomes the basis of the possibility of transcendence.

The transcendental deduction of the categories is the analytical revelation of the structure of the pure synthesis of the imagination. It shows how pure understanding and pure intuition are a priori dependent on one another, and it also shows how the act of objectification, as carried out by the synthesis of the understanding, is possible. It establishes, then, the intrinsic possibility of transcendence for the finite being.

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Heidegger, already limiting himself t o the text of the first edition of the Critique, finds the basic accomplishment of the transcendental deduction in the revelation of “the mediating function of the pure synthesis [of imagination].” By this revelation, “the understanding loses its priority and by this very loss manifests its essence, which consists in having to be grounded in the pure synthesis of the imagination, a synthesis that is bound to time” (KPM 89). The discussion of the unifying function of transcendental imagination clarifies the nature of its connection with time. This is why, for Heidegger, the section of the Critique entitled “The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Under- standing”(A 137-48; B 176-87) “form[s] the heart of the whole work” (KPM 94).

Kant shows in those pages that “all conceptual representation is essentially schematism. Now, all finite cognition is, as thinking intuition, necessarily conceptual” (KPM 106). Schematism belongs then to the essence of finite knowledge. Consequently, “if finitude is centered in transcendence, transcendence must take place as a schematism. Therefore, Kant must necessarily be concerned with a ‘transcendental schematism’ as soon as he tries t o bring to light the intrinsic possibility of transcendence” (KPM 106). The core of transcendental schematism can be expressed in this way: Pure concepts must be grounded in schemata which procure “images” for these concepts if the sensibilization of concepts is to have place. Now, “the schema of a pure concept of understanding can never be reduced to any image”(CPR A 142; B 181). Heidegger contends that in the sentence just quoted “image” means “empirical aspect.” It is obvious that the categories cannot find their schemata in empirically-conditioned images. Heidegger’s conclusion is that “as pure intuition, time is that which furnishes an aspect prior to all experience” (KPM 108). Time must be termedpure image. In fact, Kant says: “the pure image . . . [is] time.” We must then accept that “as a ‘pure image,’ time is the schema- image and not merely the form of pure intuition corresponding to the pure concepts of the understanding” (KPM 108). “In this sense, the schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding ‘determine’ time” (KPM 109). The interpretation is not far-fetched, since Kant himself wrote: “The schemata are nothing but a priori determinations of time in accordance with rules”(Critique A 145; B 184). We can now see that transcendental imagination, as the possibility of the synthesis of time and the categories, is the ground of the intrinsic possibility of ontological knowledge, and therefore also of transcendence.

Section Three of Kant a n d the Problem of Metaphysics is the most controversial section of the book, insofar as Heidegger attempts in it to demonstrate that the first edition of the Critique is “essentially to be preferred to the second” (KPM 20); indeed, that the first edition contains a revelation of the true nature of temporality that could have altered the course of philosophy if Kant had not covered it up with his

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second edition. According to Heidegger, Kant saw that temporality is the ground of transcendental imagination and, because of and beyond that, it is also the basis of the self.

Transcendental imagination, as the ground of pure knowledge, must determine the essential constitution of man. The problem is now to understand in what way can the transcendental imagination have become such a dangerous instance that Kant was led to turn back from his discoveries and suppress, in the second edition of the Critique, the passages that speak of it as a fundamental faculty of the soul. For Heidegger, “the transcendental imagination itself must have provided the motive which led Kant t o turn away from it as an autonomous and transcendental fundamental faculty”( KPM 172). Heidegger points out two possible reasons: T o traditional anthropology, the imagination was considered a lower faculty. Can a lower faculty be permitted to determine reason? If so, the primacy of logic in “scientific” discourse disappears and the very architectonic of Western culture threatens collapse. The insight into the transcendental essence of imagination leads to an abyss. “By his radical interrogation, Kant brought the ‘possibility’ of metaphysics before this abyss. He saw the unknown; he had to draw back”(KPM 173).

There is another line of argumentation, although Heidegger does not distinguish it from the former. Kant’s book was a critique of pure reason. If pure reason is transformed into transcendental imagination, the Critique deprives itself of its own ground. Kant’s insight was not powerful enough to enable him to absolutely invert traditional positions. As it was, “the problematic of a pure reason [self-reinforcing] must inevitably thrust the imagination into the background, thus concealing its transcendental nature completely” (KPM 174). For all this, “the primordial essence of the transcendental imagination . . . opened up only for an instant”(KPM 175).

Heidegger’s repetition of Kant is centered around that very instant. He can be considered a Kantian precisely because he found and seized upon Kant’s discovery of the transcendental imagination, which for a moment threatened the edifice of Western culture in the XVIIIth century. Kant’s second edition of the Critique made modern philosophy what it was, a t the same time preventing it from becoming something else. Heidegger understates his point in saying: “the first edition is essentially to be preferred to the second. All transformation of the pure imagination into a function of pure thought-a transformation accentuated by German idealism following the second edition-is the result of a misunderstanding of the nature of pure imagination”( KPM 202). Where then resides the momentous character of transcendental imagination?

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In his Vorlesungen uber die Metaphysic Kant had analysed the faculty of imagination as consisting of the faculty of forming images,

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the faculty of reproducing them, and the faculty of anticipating them. As forming (present), reproducing (past), and anticipating (future), imagination, or the power of imagination, is in itself relative to time (KPM 180; Heidegger quotes the Vorlesungen). Heidegger’s thesis is that pure imagination, “since it is in itself relative to time,” must “constitute time origina1ly:”“Time as pure intuition is neither only what is intuited in the pure act of intuition nor this act itself deprived of its ‘object’. Time as pure intuition is in one the formative act of intuiting and what is intuited therein. Such is the complete concept of time” (KPM 180). Accordingly, Heidegger shows that the transcendental imagination “as that which lets time as the now-sequence spring forth is . . . primordial time”(KPM 181).

At the outset of the deduction of the categories Kant had stated that “all our knowledge is . . . subject to time, the formal condition of inner sense. . . This is a general observation which . . . must be borne in mind as being quite fundamental” (CPR A 99). Heidegger takes this warning literally and, through an analysis of the Kantian presentation of the three syntheses-namely, of apprehension in intuition, of reproduction in imagination, and of recognition in concepts(CPR A 95 ff.)-he proceeds to demonstrate not only that time pervades and makes those syntheses possible, but also that Kant did reach an idea of original time that went beyond the traditional conception of time as the now- sequence.5 In particular, Kant established the synthetic modes as time- forming. His analysis of the pure synthesis in concepts, by showing that it alone creates the prospective horizon of objectification as such, reveals that the most primordial essence of time is that “it temporalizes itself out ofthe future”(KPM 192). To sum up, the Kantiananalysis of the modes of the synthesis, in Heidegger’s interpretation, shows the transcendental imagination as intrinsically temporal in character.

Transcendence is the “being-as-self” of the finite self; the self must also have a temporal character. Heidegger complements his conclusion with his own definition of time: “Time is, by nature, pure affection of itself”(KPM 194). He now says, in a classical passage: “As pure self- reflection, time is not an active affection concerned with the concrete self; as pure, it forms the essence of all auto-solicitation. Therefore, if the power of being solicited as a self belongs to the essence of the finite subject, time as pure self-affection forms the essential structure of subjectivity . . . it originally forms finite selfhood in such a way that the self can become self-consciousness” (KPM 194-95).

Heidegger’s recognition of the self as temporality in Kant opens up a new understanding of being that for the first time in Western history overcomes the ancient ontological conception of being as produced- ness. In ancient ontology, production was the underlying horizon for the interpretation of beings and of the being of beings. This idea was absorbed by Kant, who certainly maintained that “a genuine cognitive grasp of a being in its being is available only to that being’s creator”

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(BPPh 150). It is not necessary to go into detail here concerning the lengthy Heideggerian analysis in this respect, and in those related to the old conception of being in the horizon of production (see BPPh 101-02, 106 ff., 114 ff., etc.). Even though, to be sure, “the being of a being means nothing but producednes for Kant” (BPPh 150), Kant never- theless made it possible for a new conception to come forward. The idea of being as producedness remained operative throughout German idealism, which made self-consciousness, i.e., self-conceiving, the only true substantiality. “For [Hegel] the essential nature of substance lies in its being the concept of its own self” (BPPh 153). But Heidegger’s repetition of Kant, by finding in Kantian philosophy the revelation of self-as-temporality, makes it clear that the Hegelian trap was not the only possible destiny of Transcendental Idealism. The conception of self as temporality, which Heidegger carried through in his own philosophical production, discloses the possibility of that overcoming of Hegel that Heidegger considered necessary for Western philosophy “to remain at all alive” (BPPh 178).6

Kant never realized his having brought to light primordial tem- porality as the ground for the understanding of being, but his analysis enabled philosophy to move in that direction. Heidegger’s repetition of Kant can now be considered a grounding of the Critique of Pure reason itself-and a grounding which displaces Transcendental Idealism from its stated pretension of having picked up the Kantian heritage. At the same time, it suggests that Heidegger’s own understanding of time can be elicited from the Critique.’ Heidegger himself placed the Critique as the basic ground of Heideggerian philosophy.

Heidegger’s insight into the Critique certainly advanced between Being and Time-where it was said that Kant left “in utter darkness”the decisive connection between time and the “I think”-and the Kant- book-where it was affirmed that time and the“1 think”“are the same” for Kant. Did that reevaluation amount to a global reinterpretation of Kantian thought? Already in Being and Time Heidegger considers Kant “the first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the dimension of Temporality” (BT 45). And, as William Richardson says, it is very possible that the Kant-book were conceived even before Being and Time.* It is safer and probably more accurate t o see Heidegger’s relationship to Kant as a hermeneutical process of dialogue and self-discovery. By means of just such dialogue Western metaphysics accomplished the momentous feat of “overcoming Hegel,” which means overcoming the tradition that was taking being as production and the subject as true substantiality. The possibility of finding anew the question of being was thus disclosed-being, that which no longer can be mastered by man posing as the Producer, demiourgos, God’s s ~ r r o g a t e . ~

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NOTES

I The interpretation of Kant’s thinking is part of the originaldesign of Beingund Time: see BT 64. Also: “If we put together Being and Time as published, Kunt and rhe Problem of Metaphysics, and . . . The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, we have in three volumes the entire treatise which Heidegger had originally wished to call ‘Being and Time’-even if not quite in the form then imagined” (Albert Hofstadter, “Translator‘s Introduction,” BPPh xvii). I will be quoting from the available translations: Being und Time, tr. by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York Harper & Row, 1962); Kunt and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. by J. S. Churchill(B1oomington: Indiana UP, 1962); The Busic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. by A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982). (This is a course of lectures given at Marburg in 1927; originally published in German in 1975); Critique of Pure Reuson, tr. by N. K. Smith, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1933).

2 Heidegger was soon accused by Ernst Cassirer of a manipulation of Kant’s thought. Edwin Alexander has dealt with the problems associated with Heidegger’s approach to interpreting Kant in “Heidegger’s Kant-Interpretation. Hermeneutical Violence,” Philosophy Today 25 (Winter 1981): 286-306. I agree with Alexander’s treatment of the issue, so any further reference to it seems unnecessary.

3 Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger: the Project and the Fulfillment,’’ in Heidegger: the Munundthe Thinker, Thomas Sheehaned. (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), xiii-xv; Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigarions, tr. by J. M. Findlay, vol. 2 (New York: Humanities,

But the texts for that course of lectures were published in 1977: Heidegger, Phonomenologische Interpretarion von Kunts Kririk der reinen Vernunft. Gesum- tuusgube, I1 Abteilung, Band 25 (Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman, 1977).

An excellent discussion of the traditional notion of time and Heidegger’s analysis of Kant in that respect can be found in Charles M. Sherover, Heidegger, Kunt, und Time (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971). 193-201.

How and in what sense the conception of selfas temporalitydiscloses that possibility is the subject of Being and Time.

1970), 773-802.

’ See Sherover 7. William J. Richardson, S. J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The

1 wish to thank Bernard P. Dauenhauer for helping me with this paper, which is Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 24.

dedicated to him.

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