Time and Subjectivity: Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Kantian Notion of Time

Abstract

In this chapter I explore some of Heidegger’s ideas about time. But one cannot consider Heidegger’s thought without taking account of other philosophers who influenced him and against whom he is reacting. It is essential to Heidegger’s thought that philosophers never deal with pure uncontaminated problems but always with problems as they have been handed down to them by other philosophers and obscured, as well as illuminated, by them. So I consider Heidegger in relation to three other philosophers: Aristotle, Kant and Husserl. The first of them, Aristotle, interested Heidegger for several reasons. One is the enormous influence exerted on German thought and culture by ancient Greece– the ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’.1 Another is that, although Heidegger’s philosophical positions often seem more Protestant than Catholic, he, was brought up and educated as a Catholic. He was, therefore, steeped in the Aristotelian tradition of the Catholic Church. A third reason for his interest lies within the phenomenological movement itself. One of its pioneers, Franz Brentano, was a devote Aristotelian. Heidegger tells us that the first philosophical work he read was Brentano’s book, The Manifold Meaning of What Is, According to Aristotle.2