Abstract
ABSTRACT There is general agreement that Kant’s thought strongly influenced Heidegger’s. Nevertheless, there is still much work to be done in order to fully appreciate this influence. A central theme to disclose the relation between these authors is the role they give to the transcendental. In this paper I show that Kant’s account of intuition is the focus of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant in his Die Frage nach dem Ding, since Heidegger interprets Kant’s treatment of intuition as a delimiting of the modern mathematical tendency to determine everything out of pure reason alone. I argue that this interpretation is at the basis of Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s synthetic a priori in this work, the aim of which is to take this notion away from the sphere of the objects of mathematical physical science, and place it in the realm of everyday experience. I claim that Heidegger thinks that this move can only be accomplished by removing universality and necessity (epistemic certainty) from Kant’s a priori. Finally, I show that Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s synthetic a priori goes together with and illuminates his understanding of transcendence as das Zwischen, ‘the between us and things’.
Highlights
The influence of Kant’s transcendental idealism on Heidegger’s thought – especially on his early works and Being and Time1 (1928) – is undeniable
As Jeff Malpas and Steve Crowell suggest, more attention needs to be given to the role of the transcendental in Heidegger’s thinking, as well as Heidegger’s stance toward the tradition of transcendental thought as such (2007, p. 1)
Words in the Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason2 (1927/8) are illuminating in this respect: Briefly the problem is the following: How can understanding open up real principles about the possibility of things, i.e., how can the subject have in advance an understanding of the ontological constitution of the being of a being? Kant sees this correlation, one which we formulate in a more basic and radical manner by saying: Beings are in no way accessible without an antecedent understanding of being
Summary
The influence of Kant’s transcendental idealism on Heidegger’s thought – especially on his early works and Being and Time1 (1928) – is undeniable. Figuring out if Heidegger thinks that an object in Kant’s wider and improper use of this term corresponds to an object given by intuition alone, could be very helpful for achieving a proper insight into the way in which Heidegger proposes that we understand the philosophical foundation of our everyday experience.
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