Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 18:02:27 +0200
Subject: Re:  Heidegger and Kant
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 07 September 1998

Stuart Elden schrieb:
> Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I have spent some time reading
> Kant und das Probleme der Metaphysik, along with the useful lecture course
> from 1927-8 on the first Critique (GA25). I think your reading is
> essentially correct, but it needs to be understood in terms of H's overall
> project in his reading of Kant.
>
> I would suggest that the central distinction between Heidegger’s
> interpretation of Kant and Kant himself (or at least the interpretation
> prevalent at the time) is the shift of emphasis in the Critique from
> epistemology to ontology. 

Or more radically: not epistomology but ontology.

> To take the example of time, in Kant we intuit
> through time, in Heidegger temporality is the basic constitution of that
> which intuits (GA25, 368).
>
> Heidegger notes, “already in the Transcendental Aesthetic there comes to
> light a peculiar priority of time over space. And in subsequent and more
> decisive sections of the Critique time emerges again and again at the centre
> piece of the transcendental, viz. ontological, problematic” (GA25, 111-2).
> Heidegger reads this problematic in a way that certainly furthers his own
> project, if not Kant scholarship generally. Time is not a feature of
> physical objects in an immediate sense, but when represented to us, they
> become temporal in a mediated way. 

Or: the truth of objects is temporal. They opens themselves to Dasein 
temporally.

> Because then both the external world and
> the internal world are dependent on the temporality of the perceiver, time
> is the formal condition of outer, spatial appearances, and therefore has
> priority over space (GA25, 148).
>
> This hierarchical ranking is continued throughout Heidegger’s early work. We
> can now perhaps understand Heidegger’s suggestion that “Dasein’s spatiality
> is ‘embraced’ by temporality in the sense of being existentially founded
> upon it… [but this] is also different from the priority of time over space
> in Kant’s sense” (SuZ, p 367). For Kant time has priority over space as it
> is the formal requirement for the experience of all objects; for Heidegger
> temporality is the basic constitution of Dasein and therefore spatiality is
> founded upon it. Not withstanding this difference, Heidegger has perpetuated
> the primacy of time over space found in, amongst others, Kant.
>
> This is part, though of Heidegger's central argument. If Kant is
> radicalised, and the Critique is seen as ontology not epistemology, then
> this reading holds. Heidegger's interpretation aims to dispute that of the
> Marburg school - cf KPM, GA25 and especially the Davos Disputation with
> Cassirer (now in GA3). Heidegger suggests that if we radicalise the question
> of the first Critique - how are synthetic a priori judgements possible? - we
> get the question of the ontological difference. The fact that Dasein is
> essentially temporal means that humans have unique access into this
> question.

This seems fair enough as a summary, Stuart. KPM and GA25 also complement each 
other nicely, since Heidegger dod not get as far as he wanted to in the lectures 
and put it in the book instead.

The question whether there is a transcendental logic beyond traditional formal 
logic is the ontological question as to the constitution of the objectivity of 
objects.

Michael
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