Philosophical Review

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger; James S. ChurchillReview by: Lewis White BeckThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1963), pp. 396-398Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183173 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

addition of an arbitrary conjunct to the antecedent do not hold even approximately. There are difficulties in introducing any analogue of detachment. Such facts should be realized before one attempts to describe the meaning of "probable."

WESLEY C. SALMON

Brown University

KANT AND THE PROBLEM OF METAPHrSICS. By MARTIN HEIDEGGER. Translated with an Introduction by JAMES S. CHURCHILL. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, I962. Pp. xxv, 255. $7.50.

It is well to have this book, already influential in Germany, available in a satisfactory translation. The translation is as good as the text permits; the few places where it is nearly unintelligible in one language correspond to those which are nearly unintelligible in the other. Though I defer to the Heidegger scholar on this matter, I believe that this volume may be one of the best points of entry into Heidegger's work, since here he is commenting on a text familiar to the reader, who can use his knowledge of Kant as a kind of "control" for his understanding of Heidegger.

After the period of idealism which professed to take its origin in Kant had ended in systems which not even their authors could believe would be understandable-or, if understandable, acceptable-to Kant, neo-Kantianism made its "return to Kant" by reading him as an epistemologist or at least as a "metaphysician of experience." The metaphysics was gradually extruded, and the job the neo-Kantians tried to do was eventually taken over by positivists and phenomenol- ogists. About a generation ago, however, efforts were made by ex- members of the Marburg school, such as Nicolai Hartman and Heinz Heimsoeth, to do-or to find-metaphysics and ontology within a Kantian framework. It is in this tradition-best known to us through a recent translation of Gottfried Martin's Kant's Ontology and Theory of Science (trans. by P. G. Lucas; Manchester, 1955)-that Heidegger's work stands. I do not mean, of course, that the metaphysical theories of Martin, Heimsoeth, Max Wundt, and Hartmann resemble that of Heidegger; I mean these remarks only to show some of the intellectual geography of this work and movement.

The book is, in substance, divided into two parts. The first is an ingenious and stimulating commentary on the Aesthetic, the Deduction

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in the first edition, and the Schematism, treated as a five-stage "laying of the foundation of metaphysics," introduced by the challenging claim, "The Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with 'theory of knowledge' " (p. 21). It is an effort to reach a level of conditions of experience more fundamental than the clarified objective or public experience which was problematical for Kant. It seeks the "essence of finite subjectivity" and transcendence which are preconditions of the highly reflective and objectively oriented experience which Kant analyzed. Thus Heidegger always moves on a level below the explic- itly formulated questions to which Kant thought he had an answer, and raises questions which Kant could not answer or, more likely, which Kant did not recognize as being problematic at all. If the Analytic is a metaphysic of experience, Heidegger wants to write prolegomena to it.

The second part cuts itself off from close adherence to the text. It is an exposition-to me extremely obscure-of what Kant "intended to say" but did not say because he recoiled from "the abyss of meta- physics." But even in the first part, the author is not a slavish commen- tator, and he confesses that he has had to "resort to violence" to get out of Kant what he wants and what he candidly admits Kant did not see. In this respect, Heidegger is more open than most commen- tators, who commit the violence but call it by a politer name. But the euphemism would be out of place in the face of such violence.

What Heidegger needs, and what he sees as the root of Kant's Analytic and architectonic, is the theory of transcendental imagination as the "to us unknown" common source of intuition and under- standing. In the first edition, imagination is placed alongside intuition and understanding; in the second, it occupies a much less exalted position. Heidegger concentrates on the first edition, and with great skill he shows the connection of imagination with the synopsis and syntheses of intuition and apprehension. Pure intuition is identified with pure imagination, and this has strikingly impressive results for the interpretation of how the temporal form of intuition can itself be an intuition (Critique, A2o-B34). Because Heidegger has argued from the beginning for the prerogative of intuition over understanding, he is them emboldened to base understanding on imagination (if not identify them) instead of retaining, as Kant insisted on retaining, understanding and intuition as autonomous and making the synthesis of understanding regulative for that of imagination. This does give rise to an interesting and insightful interpretation of the schematism, but soon runs into obscurities expressed in such un-Kantian and unin-

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telligible terms as "sensible reason," "creative intuition," and "recep- tive spontaneity." And it so mangles the Kantian architectonic that "primordial time" and "transcendental apperception" are identified (P. I97)-an identification that I cannot criticize because I find no sense in it at all.

At least one thing becomes clear in all this: the effect is to play down the rational as such (pp. I 73- I 74) and to convert understanding into a human-all too human-faculty, to make the philosophical problem first into an anthropological problem and then into a -problem of the fundamental ontology of Dasein,1 and to find the Kantian sources of this metaphysics in the Analytic instead of the dialectic and Critique of Practical Reason. In a perhaps significant slip of his pen, Heidegger says that Kant wished to replace "the proud name of an Ontology" with that of "transcendental philosophy" (p. I29); but what Kant actually said was that it was to be replaced by "the more modest title of a mere Analytic of pure understanding (Critique, A247- B303). While transcendental philosophy and Analytic for Kant are not sharply sundered, so that Kant could have said what Heidegger says he said, obscurity and speculation more easily pass under the former title than under the latter.

The student of Kant and of the much-contemned "theory of knowl- edge," however, can profit by a careful study of what Heidegger has to say about pure intuition, the three-fold synthesis, and schematism. The rest of the book will, I believe, be of more interest to those who want to get at Heidegger through Kant, and not at Kant through Heidegger.

LEWIS WHITE BECK

University of Rochester

PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS: A CA TEGORIAL ANALYSIS. By EVERETT W. HALL. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960.

PP. I71. $4.00.

Modern philosophy usually claims to have freed itself from the traditional task of building philosophical systems. Many critics of this new freedom are easily discounted, for they grind an axe for some antique system or they omit unprejudiced investigation of modern arguments, or they lack feeling for interests current in the field. Not so

1 Dasein is left untranslated in the text. This is perhaps fortunate, since the translator says (p. xvii, n.): "The meaning of Dasein can perhaps best be conveyed by stating . . . that it is roughly equivalent to Kant's 'pure reason' without the rationalistic overtones of this term."

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