Mind Association

Heidegger, Kant and Time. by Charles M. SheroverReview by: Walter CerfMind, New Series, Vol. 83, No. 329 (Jan., 1974), pp. 133-136Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2252811 .

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BOOK REVIEWS I33

first-level and second-level concepts (nearly enough, of conflating pre- dicates and quantifiers). But it is not as if Hilbert ever imagined that existence was just another attribute: in this respect he knew perfectly well what he was doing. Had he not run together axioms and definitions he would not have given even the appearance of treating existence as a characteristic (or mark: Merkmal) of the concept e is a point (cf. p. 36). Frege's careful exposition of his distinction between levels of concepts, albeit worthwhile as documentation of his own theory of predication, is unoccasioned in the present context. And his claim, urged at length, that Hilbert's independence-proofs are fallacious turns likewise on the axiom- definition indiscrimination: once his axioms are understood in the re- ceived sense there is no gainsaying that Hilbert's reinterpretation manoeuvres (Sections IO-I2) establish their independence.

In his thirty-two page introduction, Kluge outlines the nature and motivation of Frege's critique of Hilbert-without, however, expressing any firm verdict concerning its justice. He apparently acquiesces in Frege's uneasy equation of concepts with properties (pp. xvii ff.). He argues, moreover, that 'Frege's objects are complete concepts; no more, no less. That is to say, Frege's objects are property-complexes on the Leibnizian model' (p. xviii). The doctrine here ascribed to Frege would, I venture, have been as intelliglble to him as it is to me. In the course of his argument Kluge claims (p. xix) that Frege accepted the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, but I am not convinced that the texts he cites in evidence unequivocally support this interpretation. In any case Kluge's version of the principle, viz. '(x)(y)(F)[(Fx Fy) D (x = y)]', is very strong indeed, entailing as it does that there is at most one object. A little later (p. xx) Frege is said to hold that the references of the con- stituents of a sentence are constituents of the reference of the sentence. But this is a doctrine which Frege explicitly repudiated (see M. Dummett, 'Note: Frege on Functions', Philosophical Review, lxiv (I955), 229-230).

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY V. H. DUDMAN

Heidegger, Kant and Time. By CHARLES M. SHEROVER.

Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, I97I.

Pp. xvii+322. $I3.95.

(CPR = Critique of Pure Reason; B & T = Being and Time tr. Macquarrie and Robinson; KPM = Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics tr. Churchill.)

In the Prospect (pp. 3-9) the author states his two interwoven themes. The first theme is that independent of B & T's phenomenological basis, Heidegger's examination of Kant's epistemology could have been, and in fact was, a point of departure for the main positions of B & T (p. 5). That Kant and Heidegger share 'the historic function of explicating the centrality of time in human experience' (p. 9) is the second theme. The development of these themes in the main body of the work is summarised

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134 BOOK REVIEWS

in the Retrospect (pp. 246-274). Kant and Heidegger are said to share the main persuasions of what Sherover calls critical empiricism; they are empirical realists and transcendental idealists, and they make time the centre and human temporality the ground of the subject's objectifying acts. Sherover equates objectifying acts with acts of transcendence-even to exist is called an act-and grounds them in the capacity for tran- scendence, which in turn is grounded in the capacity of Care and so on until the very ground of grounds is reached. In giving the slightly psycho- logical camouflage of acts and capacities to Heidegger's nebulous existential groundings, Sherover succeeds in making very clear-except to himself and his fellow existentialists-how much these groundings resemble the explanation of soporific effects through soporific powers. (For an example symptomatic of this and other sins, cf. p. 74.) Kant's fatal mistake was that he superimposed the physicalist conception of time as a sequence of nows upon his discovery that time is the pure form of human sensibility. He was thus forced into separating the timeless intelligible selfs from their appearances as particular human beings in the sensible world. Heidegger, on the other hand, discovered that human temporality is characterised by the ek-stasis toward the future. This dis- covery not only overcomes the Kantian dichotomy of intelligible and sensible self, but also leads to two startling conceptual revolutions. One revolution is expressed in the lapidarian, 'Higher than actuality stands possibility' (B & T, p. 63). The other revolution is the conception of no- thingness-Sherover's translation of the Nothing of What is Metaphysics? -as ground of Being. The Retrospect is followed by a Postscript, which I will discuss later.

Between Prospect and Retrospect there stretches the main body of Sherover's interpretation of Heidegger's interpretation of Kant (which stops with the Schematism). In his general remarks on interpretation in philosophy, Sherover commits the faux pas of quoting with approval N. K. Smith's admonition: 'It is always safer to take Kant quite literally. He nearly always means exactly what he says at the time that he says it' (p. 23). Sherover adds in all seriousness that this describes Heidegger's handling of the Kantian text, an outrageous statement which is in total conflict not only with Heidegger's theory and praxis of hermeneutics, but also with the defence offered by Sherover of Heidegger's violations of the Kantian text: 'Heidegger's intent is ... the elucidation of what he <Kant> "did not say, could not say, but somehow made manifest" ' (pp. I2, I33).

Besides, in a sort of Mafia justice, in order to mitigate Heidegger's imperial rudeness toward Kant, Sherover does considerable violence to Heidegger. He ignores Heidegger's explicit rebuke of all attempts to interpret CPR, even in part, as epistemology (KPM, p. 238) and diplo- rmatically asserts that CPR is not to be regarded as primarily an epistemo- logical treatise (p. 3I). Heidegger's extreme contempt for anything that smacks of epistemology would surely extend to Sherover's central effort to connect B & T with Kant's epistemology. The motive that Heidegger has in doing violence to Kant is the usual (cf. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense). He wishes to bring Kant to life, that is, to Heideggerise him. However, the motive that Sherover has in doing violence to Heidegger is,

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BOOK REVIEWS I35

like his violence, more modest. I suppose that Sherover's introduction of 'logical priority', 'raw given data' and similar phrases entirely foreign to Heidegger's world is to serve as a bridge to the epistemological pre- occupations of English and American philosophers. As desirable as bridges are, this particular bridge has nothing to stand on; for what Sherover means by 'logical priority'-the ground, source, root and even source-ground (p. I7I) and root-source (p. I42)-has little to do with its meaning in analytic philosophy, and in order to be at all applicable to Heidegger, Sherover's 'raw given data' should refer to the deliverances of moods rather than to sense data.

Except for these epistemological distortions, however, Sherover follows rather closely the main lines of Heidegger's interpretation of Kant. CPR as a whole is understood to seek the foundation of metaphysics in the existential finitude of man. Although Kant's inquiry was directed to the foundations of metaphysics as rigorous science, Sherover would probably explain the fact that Heidegger completely neglects the rigorous science as merely 'selective exposition' (p. 7). The Copernican revolution be- comes a double turn 'without <Kant> necessarily being aware of it' (p. 29),

a turn from beings to Being and a turn from Being to existential tran- scendence. Everything Heidegger does to CPR follows from his im- position on the Copernican revolution of these three basic conceptions of B & T: the distinction between beings and Being, the conception of ontology as metaphysic of Being and the choice of existential analysis as the methodically necessary beginning of the metaphysic of Being. Yet Sherover, who wanted to explain how the basic positions of B & T grew out of Heidegger's studies of Kant's epistemology, takes at least the first two of these three basic conceptions and their imposition on the Coper- nican revolution for granted, and thus defeats himself. As to the Tran- scendental Aesthetic, Sherover follows the Master who completely ignores its connection with the problem of mathematical synthetic a priori, but praises it as the first philosophical text in which human sensibility is grounded in existential finitude. Kant's casual remark that perhaps sensibility and reason have the same stem is taken as the main clue to unravel the Transcendental Logic and particularly the Tran- scendental Deduction of the Categories and the Schematism. Like the post-Kantian idealists, Heidegger and Sherover prefer by far the Deduc- tion of the first edition, which stresses the subjective (A XVII) aspect and the role of the transcendental imagination. But unlike these idealists who found in Kant's transcendental imagination the germ of the intellectual intuition they needed to know God and become one with Him, Heidegger and Sherover, living in godless times, see the transcendental imagination as the very acme of existential finitude in that it constitutes the horizon of time within which our experience is caught. However, the meaning of finitude, when divested of its religious confrontation with divinity, be- comes an emotional glue, covering banalities about human limitations (p. I67). In sum, Sherover shows that the analysis of human existence as practiced in B & T is the sort of thing that Kant would have meant by his 'metaphysics of metaphysics' if he had had the privilege of studying B & T and therefore known what the Copernican revolution really meant.

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I36 BOOK REVIEWS

I shall end this review with a few remarks on the Postscript (pp. 275-288) which is really Sherover's pro-ject into his ek-static future. He is going to- dig for even more authentic source-grounds than either Kant or Heidegger had reached. Kant had stopped at the transcendental imagina- tion, Heidegger at existential temporality. Sherover, still following certain hints of Heidegger, adumbrates rather elusively a radical modification of the transcendental idealistic position which he believes Kant and Heidegger share with respect to time. Going far beyond this, however, he proposes that 'the primal question' of philosophy is not Being but Becoming and an even more primal question, 'the ontological status . .. of the Possible-as-such' (p. 284). The Possible-as-such is introduced as the common ground of Being and time, although the only thing Sherover can tell us at present about the Possible-as-such is what he has already told us about Being and time; 'It is a crucial no-thingness' (pp. 286-287). It would seem that Sherover's philosophical future is not so ek-static after all. For 'ontological status' means in existentialist language the same as 'mode of Being' so that to ask for the mode of Being of the Possible-as- such would make our digger-into-the-ground-as-such dig in dizzying circles.

There is something deeply depressing in seeing a brain of Sherover's calibre after years of philosophical training and studies, produce a com- plex and difficult work which lacks any degree of logical and analytic sophistication and engages in an orgy of groundings that lead to nothing.

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK WALTER CERF

Reason and Reality. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Volume Five, I970-7I. Edited by G. N. A. VESEY. London: Macmillan, I972. Pp. XiX+243. ?3.95.

Some of the papers in this volume seem to me of outstanding interest, and none of them insignificant. May Brodbeck examines what is a central issue in the philosophy of Descartes, and indeed in all philosophy; how we are to distinguish between those of our 'ideas' which have something real corresponding to them, and those which have not. This paper con- firms me in my agreement with Husserl's dictum that Descartes was on the track of discoveries even more important than those which he actually made. Peter Geach points out the baneful effect of lack of historical perspective in the study of Spinoza. His work on the divine attributes, for example, can hardly be understood at all except against the background of medieval discussions of the topic. 'We shall again and again misunder- stand Spinoza if we do not realise that he has posed himself the same questions as Aquinas and other Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholastics, though he has answered them in his own way' (p. 25). There follows a useful exercise by J. J. MacIntosh in separating intellectual jewellery from dross in Spinoza's theory of knowledge. There are suggestions on what can be made of Spinoza's queer conviction that ideas (as opposed to propositions or judgments) can be true or false; and it is argued that this

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