A Proposal for Translating Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant

Abstract

Translators of Heidegger’s interpretations of other thinkers face a challenge: they must contend not only with Heidegger’s distinctive choice of words, but also the terminology of his subject, whether it be Aristotle, Kant, or Schelling. The response by and large has been to focus on Heidegger’s turns of phrase, at the expense of the thinker he interprets. In this paper, I challenge this practice, using Heidegger’s interpretive works on Kant as a test case. If we overlook the terms of the author Heidegger interprets, we miss a major source of Heidegger’s phrasing, and lose the connotations that he invokes by using these terms. Further, such translations reinforce the damaging assumption that Heidegger’s interpretations venture far off-topic. I argue that when Heidegger references Kantian turns of phrase, these terms should be translated to match the standard English translation of Kant, and show how following this method of translation deepens our understanding of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. In the appendix, I provide two passages exemplifying this method of translation.