In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,1 Martin Heidegger’s principal concern is to distance Kantianism from the neo-Kantian epistemological interpretation in order to make the Critique of Pure Reason the harbinger of the phenomenological revolution. It is not unreasonable to assert, in this respect, that Heidegger’s reading is the systematic counterpoint to Cohen’s. The opposition can be read (1) in their understandings of Kant’s problematic, (2) in their explanations of knowledge, (3) in the importance they accord to one or the other of the Critique of Pure Reason’s two editions, and (4) in the meaning that each thinks should be given to the term “object.” I shall analyze these four oppositions in order to better tease out (5) the general lessons to be drawn from Heidegger’s reading of Kant.
The Marburg school’s epistemological interpretation can be summarized, in Heidegger’s eyes, in several theses: The transcendental method is the analysis of the conditions of possibility for a fact. The only universal fact is positive science (mathematics, physics). Transcendental investigation is thus exhausted in an examination of the judgments at work in the sciences. Consequently, philosophy’s object is scientific judgment, its guiding problematic is that of objective validity. Against this reduction of the Critique to a simple theory of knowledge, Heidegger’s argument consists in showing that judgments’ truth presupposes the prior constitution of regions of meaning. The ontic objectivity of the judgment “7 + 5 = 12” presupposes a more basic ontological objectivity. In this sense, Kant becomes the precursor to Husserl’s assertion that before any act of judging there is a universal ground of experience, a ground that is postulated as the harmonic unity of possible experience. “Hence, what makes the comporting to beings (ontic knowledge) possible is the preliminary understanding of the constitution of Being, ontological knowledge.”2 To put it differently, Kant—in Heidegger’s eyes—starts from the problem of a Metaphysica Specialis (beings in the most eminent sense—God) that, in order to be resolved, presupposes the problem of a Metaphysica Generalis (beings in general, beings qua beings). This dual problem is clearly not at all new, because it is a problem, in its very duality, throughout the entire history of philosophy. For Kant, inquiry into beings in general does not call for a determination of their relation to the most eminent being (God) but rather an interrogation of the Being of beings—on this point if Kant is not an innovator, he at least revives one possibility in Aristotle’s metaphysics.3 Knowledge of beings is possible only on the basis of knowledge of beings’ ontological structure; that is, in order to understand a given object, it is first necessary to inquire about what gives it being as an object. Kant’s problematic is thus an ontological problematic in the sense that he does not investigate judgments as such (as Hermann Cohen does) but uncovers the Sachverhalt [facts] that makes these judgments possible. Far from being exhausted in an epistemology of the exact sciences, the Critique of Pure Reason is consecrated to establishing the foundations of metaphysics.4 But if any vision of ordinary reality presupposes an implicit grasp, or understanding, of the structure of the Being of beings, if—to use Husserl’s simpler terms—every object presupposes an “original ground” upon which it manifests, then what in the Critique will be this ground upon which any understanding of the object depends? The “Aesthetic,” or as Heidegger prefers to call it, temporality.5 This is the second point of Heidegger’s disagreement with Cohen.
Hermann Cohen’s epistemological bias entails, in Heidegger’s eyes, the marginalization of the transcendental aesthetic—intuition appears as a simple auxiliary faculty that all genuine knowledge must reduce. This is attested by the (entirely Leibnizian) importance that Cohen places on the principle of intensive magnitudes,6 which allows him to effect a reduction of intuition to passivity. But Heidegger criticizes this view, seeing in it a return to a pre-Kantian problematic. With this reduction, Cohen would define sensibility’s passivity as a lesser being compared with an absolute—active and creative—knowledge of its object.7 Consequently (and in conformity with the metaphysical tradition), finitude is still understood as an accidental negativity, as an extrinsic limitation that knowledge must work to reduce. Against this bias, Heidegger’s entire interpretation rests upon the “Transcendental Aesthetic.” The transcendental aesthetic is the original ground upon which objects appear. Thus, the intuition—far from being what must be overcome to achieve genuine knowledge—becomes what makes knowledge possible. This is why, going directly against the Marburg school’s orientation, Heidegger writes, “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily intuiting.”8 All knowledge is irremediably and structurally receptive, always already tied to a preexisting object, forever dependent upon an original gift. Truth is constituted by, in, and through temporality. Contrary to the idealist interpretation that emphasizes activity, Heidegger accentuates passivity and posits the idea of a positive finitude—positive in that finitude, far from being the sign of an imperfect being in contrast to an absolute of knowledge, becomes the very thing that makes knowledge and truth possible.
This promotion of the aesthetic, this reading of finitude from temporality, dominates the whole of the interpretation, because Heidegger tips the entire system in the direction of the “Aesthetic.” Indeed, spontaneity is to be understood from this ground, this intuition. The categories, as products of spontaneity, do not externally come about on top of passivity but must be attached to the synthesis of temporality (rather than to the table of judgments). In this respect, the categories and the intuition have a common source—the imagination. Here again this movement betrays the guiding thread of Heidegger’s interpretation: reading the critical project from an affirmation of finitude and connecting it to the valorization of passivity in humanity. In the same way, the essential place accorded to activity in Cohen’s interpretation and to passivity in Heidegger’s can be seen in Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer, at Davos, about the Critique of Practical Reason.9 To Cassirer, who claimed that Kant transcended human passivity with his statement of the moral law as pure form, Heidegger replied that only the feeling of respect makes it possible to understand practical reason. Here again it is passivity—that is, a certain form of gift (feeling)—that shows the Kantian truth. This desire to give feeling the same role that intuition plays in pure reason most fully embodies the Heideggerian concern to make finitude—understood as an irreducible passivity—the alpha and omega of the Kantian message. In summary, if finitude is absolute in Heidegger, this is principally because the absolute is finitude. These two antithetical interpretations clearly do not emphasize the same passages in the Kantian oeuvre, nor do they situate it in the history of philosophy in the same way.
The controversy about the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason seems to have lost its intensity today: even though Kant’s immediate successors made it a subject of dispute (Karl Leonhard Reinhold championed the second, the orthodox Kantians the first), even though the German commentators at the beginning of the twentieth century made it one of the crucial points for an understanding of Kantianism, contemporary interpreters no longer see anything conclusive at stake.10 However, the meaning of this revision is not unimportant, because with the second edition (and in particular the rewriting of the transcendental deduction), Kant seems to orient critique toward an epistemological problematic—that is, he seems to regard the Critique’s contribution to philosophy to be a demonstration of judgments’ objective validity. It follows that choosing to emphasize the first edition (Heidegger) or the second (Cohen) is opting either for the ontological problematic or the epistemological problematic. If we analyze the most important revision, namely the total replacement of the transcendental deduction in the second edition, various signs give evidence of this epistemological reorientation:
(a) Kant suppresses the subjective deduction,11 whose psychological accents ran the risk of masking the problem of scientific judgment and of uniquely marring the critical enterprise of subjectivism. To put it more generally, the subjective deduction posed the question of the genesis of mental faculties, the objective deduction was attached to a description of the internal functioning of knowledge.12 The suppression of the subjective deduction thus testifies to the desire to be rid of a genetic explanation.
(b) While the imagination appears in the first edition as the fundamental faculty, in the second, it is entirely subordinated to the understanding. This promotion of the understanding is even more apparent if we consider that three syntheses are at work in the first edition—the syntheses of apprehension (sense), of recognition (concepts), and of reproduction (the imagination)—while in the second edition, these three syntheses disappear in favor of the sole synthesis of the understanding, and the “I think” becomes the only synthetic unity. The second edition sanctions, as Heidegger would have it, the dismissal of the productive imagination as the principal faculty of synthesis. In opposition to Alexis Philonenko,13 it does not at all seem to me that the Heideggerian reading of a devaluation of imagination in the second edition is “contradictory and unfounded.” Heidegger’s interpretation is nothing other than a reading made by a good number of commentators who do not claim to be Heideggerians. On this point, H. J. de Vleeschauwer writes, “The deduction [in the first edition] revolves around the function of synthesis. The intuitive world or nature consists of the ensemble of phenomena, synthetic products of a material diversity and pure concepts. In sum, the deduction is only the schematic construction of this intuitive world, effected by the superposition of synthetic operations realized by the pure subject in an irrationality given in advance,” and adds in a note that “this is also where the omnipresence of the imagination—a synthetic faculty—comes from in the 1781 deduction.”14 But more profoundly (because all the commentaries on Kant could turn out to be “contradictory and unfounded” as well), the displacement indeed attests to an emphasis on the epistemological perspective. The chapter on the schematism, retained in both editions, is not by itself able to answer the question of the imagination’s status, because according to the two editions’ different emphases, it could be read as the unveiling of an origin (first edition) or as the description of a mechanism (second edition). The problem is to know if, as the second edition would have it, the imagination is a simple exterior connection whose function is to tie together the only two sources of knowledge (understanding and sensibility), or if the imagination is the source itself of the understanding and sensibility. To put this differently, Kant affirms the duality of sources of knowledge (understanding and sensibility) and simultaneously the trinity of mental faculties, since the understanding, imagination, and sensibility are the three original sources of the soul. How, therefore, are we to understand the imagination’s role? Is it a simple intermediary (second edition), or the original source of the two sources of knowledge (first edition)? If the imagination is given as the origin of the two powers of knowledge, then the transcendental schematism must be read as the principle of the methodological constitution of objectivity. We thus return to the initial alternative: is Kant limited to clarifying the conditions of objectivity, or does he rather pose the question of the source, the genesis, or the provenance of the sources of knowledge (the understanding and sensibility)? We can very well understand why the Marburg school, repudiating the question of origins, will give the second edition a more Newtonian appearance (in the sense of an updating of laws without questioning their origins). With this devaluation of the imagination, Kant seems to justify Cohen’s promotion of the Analytic and therefore to legitimate the epistemological interpretation.
The first edition speaks of the object as a transcendental object = x. For the second, the given object is the object of knowledge, such as it is intuited and thought with concepts.15 This is a key difference that can encapsulate the conflict between these two interpretations. In the second lens, the real is understood as a phenomenon; more precisely, the object is reduced to a scientific experiment, because what is given is the conjunction of a category and an intuition. On the other hand, in the first edition, the object has an undeniable transcendence. Beyond the scientific experiment, there is only an irreducible opacity, a mysterious exteriority. Heidegger’s interpretation is based upon this alterity’s mystery—certainly not to reduce it but rather to magnify it. The Kantian message comes down to an assertion of the irreducible that is the real. This obviously could not hold for Cohen’s interpretation, for the simple and good reason that, in conformity with the second edition, he means by “object” the connection between a category and an intuition, that is to say, a scientific experiment. With this basis, it is clear that Cohen could not conceive any opacity of the object without sinking Kantianism into, to say the least, an absurd relativism of knowledge. Indeed, an assertion of the object’s unknowability would mean (with respect to the second edition’s definition of the object) the unknowability of science. As we can see, the difference in interpretation hinges upon these definitions of the object—but this difference is not as Heidegger understood it. Cohen does not deny the finitude of knowledge, he considers that as given and asks about what a finite subject can know. If by object we mean mathematical knowledge, it would in fact be a little bizarre to assert that the object is opaque, transcendent, and exterior to the thinking subject. Cohen’s task is thus not to reduce finitude but to describe the mechanism of knowledge. On the other hand, Heidegger increases finitude because he chose the first edition’s definition of the object. And yet the two definitions are not contradictory, they simply adopt two different points of view. In both cases, indeed, knowledge is limited. Cohen, contrary to received opinion, never denied this fact ([a denial supposedly effected] by attempting to reduce the Aesthetic in order to go back to a Leibnizian point of view). His epistemological bias simply inflects the questioning: the philosopher is not interested in constantly referring to this unknowable about which nothing can be said; his task is to describe the mechanism by which we arrive at what is known. To constantly point out the thing’s irreducible alterity, for Cohen, does not make philosophy a positive enterprise but rather sinks into a pathos of the unknowable. Philosophical inquiry, if it means to be something other than an eternal dwelling upon the opacity of reality and its inexpressible mystery, must determine how what is known is known. Thus the difference between these two readings of Kant is fundamentally explained by this difference in perspective (which takes its source in the shift in perspective between the first and second editions and the dual definition of the object). Heidegger emphasizes the meaning of the object as an opaque other, as existence; Cohen emphasizes the definition of the object as an object constructed by the sciences.
That said, I have established that, however we understand this clearly capital and decisive difference, the orientation of the questioning remains unchanged: if one means to go back to a prepredicative existence and the other means to apprehend the constitution of the scientific object, the fact nevertheless remains that in both cases the question that is taken as decisive is the question of our relation to the object (to the world, to beings). To put it succinctly, in both cases, the question asked is the question of reference ad extra. In terms of the orientation of their interests or concerns, Cohen and Heidegger can be compared and both can be contrasted—without absurdity—to the other orientation that Emil Lask identified, a path that is hidden, obscured, and abandoned in Heidegger’s ontological perspective as well as in Cohen’s epistemological perspective.
We should recall the scope of my enterprise here—I am considering only Heidegger’s reading of Kant, not Heideggerianism in general. I am concerned only to demonstrate that his reading is not a rupture in the reception of Kant, just a different response to what is always the same question, namely, orientation toward the object or reference ad extra. Thus, my task is not to critique Heidegger’s reading. This is why I have not pointed out, for example, with Ernst Cassirer, Heidegger’s difficulty in explaining Kant’s mention, as early as the Aesthetic and thus from the first edition of the Critique, of an Intuitus Archetypus, which allows Kant to specify intuitive knowledge as finite. Nor need I be surprised, as is Alexis Philonenko, by the complete disregard given to the second edition in this reading of critique. Nor have I shown, as Jules Vuillemin has done, the extent to which this reading makes Kant the greatest skeptic in the history of philosophy. I have not taken up any of these criticisms because disputing Heidegger’s reading of Kant is not my purpose. My concern is simply to show that Heidegger, like Cohen or Helmholtz, interprets critique from only one perspective, namely, the problem of reference. For this reason, I will quite simply be contented, for an evaluation of Heidegger, with the following reasoning: Let’s accept the philological, hermeneutic, and philosophical correctness of Heidegger’s interpretation. Let’s accept the absolute well-groundedness of the thesis of radical finitude and the pertinence of the Kantian response to the question, “What is Being?” And having done so, let’s ask the question, What in this orientation prevents the other orientation—how does it condemn the approach of self-reference? To put it differently, from what I have shown about the questioning that gave birth to German idealism (from Salomon Maimon to Hegel), how could their questioning be considered a transgression, in the sense of a return or a restoration “of everything that Kant had thrown to the ground”? Indeed, even if we agreed with all of Heidegger’s theses, even Hegel could not, stricto sensu, be called “anti-Kantian.” Or, to put it in terms other than those of the history of philosophy, even if Heidegger’s chosen path (anchoring the categories in the existential) is viable, what in this choice would condemn eo ipso the other path? Heidegger does not invalidate the other route; he obscures it—which is not the same thing. Having established this point, I can now further clarify and better understand the meaning of Heidegger’s two nodal theses about Kant—radical finitude and the question of Being—theses that, better than any other, express the chosen orientation.
The thesis of radical finitude is probably the must subtle and the most difficult point of the Heideggerian interpretation. Since Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, we have had the habit of saying that Kant radically distances himself from prior philosophy in that he no longer posits finitude as a lack stemming from God. What is posited as prior in the Aesthetic is finitude; God is relativized in light of it. In other words, the difference between finitude and infinite knowledge is no longer quantitative but qualitative. Heidegger repeats this schema for the whole of the Critique, because he wants to make the sentiment of respect the analogue of the gift by intuition. To accept Heidegger’s interpretation of finitude inevitably leads to accepting the whole of his interpretation. We cannot posit the radical finitude of the subject in the Critique of Pure Reason as he does and accept the Critique of Practical Reason’s idea of an absolute autonomy, which he rejects, because this latter idea relativizes the theoretical finitude of the subject. The subject of the Critique of Pure Reason would indeed appear as a lesser being with respect to the absolute subject of the Critique of Practical Reason. Thus, Kant would fall back into the classical schema of a finitude relativized by the consideration of an absolute.
If we accept the correctness of Heidegger’s interpretation, a question nevertheless arises in critique itself and without escaping finitude: How does Kant know that we are finite? What kind of knowledge makes it possible to posit finitude as an absolute? As Jules Vuillemin says in his conclusions about Heidegger, “We will probably repeat over and over again that Kant discovered finitude, but always with the condition that Kant himself is exempted from this finitude—the eternal Kant of thought.”16 This little joke is obviously more serious than it seems, insofar as it locates the problem of the possibility of Kant’s own discourse. In order that the claim of finitude be considered as something other than an arbitrary assertion, an unjustified decision, it is even more necessary that judgments about a priori forms of knowledge are justified, and that the discourse that makes their description possible is able to be exhibited. But, as Manfred Meier notes, if the Kantian viewpoint would itself again articulate statements about the constitutive moments of knowledge, it does not have the opportunity. Indeed, “the pure forms of the intuition and the categories of the understanding are precisely not objects of a sensible intuition,” that is to say, of finite knowledge.17 It follows that, “considered in this way, the Kantian kind of a priori knowledge … is transformed into a dogmatic position, for the possibility that it can be known and demonstrated remains and must remain without justification.”18 I should underline here that the term “dogmatic” is used in Meier’s article in its strict Kantian sense, not as a “defamatory argument.” Indeed, in Kant, all knowledge is dogmatic that is not concerned about its own presuppositions. It follows that, if Heidegger’s interpretation—that is, radical finitude—is true, we are led to the following alternative: either, to secure Kant’s assertion, we must examine the presuppositions that make this assertion possible (Lask’s and Fichte’s metacognitive path); or else the assertion of radical finitude is a dogmatic statement that a Kantian, in conformity with the demands of critique, cannot accept. The dogmatism does not reside in the proposition’s contents but in its status. The assertion of finitude as absolute can be an entirely and authentically dogmatic assertion, resulting (like any dogmatic proposition) not in the liberation of a space for reflection but rather the enclosure of a territory.
And yet if we now take up the connection that Heidegger and his followers establish between radical finitude in critique and its supposed transgression (by restoration of the seventeenth-century conception) by the post-Kantians, we are forced to recognize that this connection is illicit. The kind of question that is asked has changed since Aenesidemus, because as we have seen, the question that launched German idealism can be put thus: “What allows the assertion of this finitude as absolute?”—that is, it is a question that concerns the saying and not directly what is said. Thus, to give only one example, with respect to finitude in Kant, Hegel brought his criticism to bear on this point. How, he asked, if we posit that the limitation is absolute, do we explain our knowledge of this limitation?19 Put differently, Kant posits an “absolute” (finitude), what kind of knowledge is it that posits this absolute? This question, which comes from the post-Kantians as a group, is not at all anti-Kantian and, as I have shown, is absolutely not dogmatic in the Kantian sense. Any positing of an absolute (whatever content one gives to it) supposes, for Kant, reflection upon the presuppositions that allow this positing. It follows that the thesis of radical finitude, even if it is the epitome of critique, does not allow any judgment about the questioning of its legacy. This questioning is not a return to the seventeenth century,20 it is simply different. This difference is summarized in a question that Heidegger does not address in his reconstruction of critique: what is the status of the philosopher’s discourse? Which is the relation of the “saying” to the “said.”
I have thus amply demonstrated what I needed to show, namely, that Heidegger’s reading, with respect to Cohen’s, does not constitute a change of question or of orientation but is a different answer to the same question. The orientation remains identical, even if the paths are different. I can show the same thing through an analysis of the second great characteristic dimension of the Heideggerian reading, namely, the question, “What is Being?” and the theme of a “return to the thing itself.”
To understand Kant, Heidegger starts from the Husserlian theme of “return to the thing itself.” The problematic is about Being, existence, the subject’s relation to the other, in the sense that any knowledge supposes an original gift, is tied to an alterity that is not itself. And yet it is difficult to see how the other of the active subject is not ad extra. To be sure, it is not an object as understood by science or knowledge, an object held under the philosopher’s gaze; but it is nevertheless an other for the subject, an other that is given to the subject, not created by it. This Nonsubject is transcendence, exteriority, what is “always already there.” The Kantian subject is defined as an opening to this other that it neither creates nor posits but receives. And yet, in my view, whether the object is defined as an inexpressible exteriority or as the physical world, whether the subject is understood as an “opening to the other” or as the subject of scientific knowledge, this changes nothing about the fact that the question is about the subject’s relation to an x, an original or transcendental ground. To put it in a less-paradoxical way (for it is obvious that Heidegger would refuse to define his questioning as the subject’s relation to an object), if we consider the Levinasian theme of the Other, close to the Heideggerian philosophy, we see that this Other’s anteriority is postulated, and it is through its revelation that I achieve subjectivity. In this framework, even if the Other is not an objective being in the scientific view, even if it is no longer an object represented by an active and knowing subject, the fact nevertheless remains that what must be thought is a reference ad extra as other, alterity, transcendence.
And yet, even if Kant would answer this question in Heidegger’s way, there is still no a priori justification for reading the other orientation—embodied in the theses that I have defended in light of the first post-Kantians’ model—as so many (dogmatic) answers to the question of knowledge’s relation to some other term (the object as some x). Indeed, my analysis has shown how philosophy can orient itself toward a questioning that is no longer concerned with objectivity or alterity but rather with the philosopher’s relation to his own operations, or the relation of knowledge to itself. Consequently, if Heidegger’s reading of Kant were entirely accurate, it would allow neither an understanding of nor a judgment about the validity of this orientation and therefore does not authorize the invalidation of another kind of questioning.
From a more general point of view, these interpretations of Kant (Cohen’s and Heidegger’s) thus cannot serve to evaluate a questioning that cannot be understood as an answer to the question, “What is Being?” nor as an approach to this different problem, “How is knowledge of an object possible?” This is why these two positions (Cohen’s and Heidegger’s) both paradoxically embody a single orientation, confronted with an interrogation that starts in an entirely different direction. On one side, the question concerns a subject’s relation to an object (or Dasein’s to alterity); on the other, the question concerns an x’s relation to itself. This is why, however important these interpretations of Kant may be, however valid (philologically and philosophically) they may be, an interpreter is entitled to highlight their strange proximity: reference first and self-reference not even questioned.
At the end of my reading of these readings of Kant, what conclusions should we draw?
1. First of all, the source of the reflexive deficit that leads to the omnipresence in contemporary philosophy of the theme of the end of philosophy is indeed found in this “race to reference” that characterized the past two centuries, whose genealogy I have just outlined and in which Heidegger paradoxically finds himself side by side with Cohen. On this point, we can consider Helmholtz as the mirror in which contemporary philosophy can easily gaze to find if not all its choices at least its principal orientation. Even Heidegger, who considers himself to have broken with all forms of neo-Kantianism, does not, in his reading of Kant, deflect the fundamental trend—consideration of reference ad extra and abandonment of self-reference.
2. Next, this history of the “race to reference” to the detriment of the problem of self-reference allows us to put contemporary philosophy in its proper perspective. To be sure, we could take into account that this philosophy is divided between the Continental paradigm, embodied by phenomenology in all its aspects, and analytic philosophy, whether of the first or second wave; to be sure, we could look beyond this division to go back to their common source—which is precisely the demand for referentiality at work at the debut of phenomenology as well as at the beginning of analytic philosophy. But this demand for referentiality itself, far from being a challenge to Kantianism, is its most accomplished construction. Since Kant, and following Helmholtz, the philosophical problematic has been understood as the problematic of reference. Such is the true source of contemporary philosophy in the diversity of its movements; such is the origin of the aporias that run through it today.
At the end of this analysis, I have been able to contextualize the theme of the end of philosophy and to go back to the sources of the concealment of self-reference. Before judging that I have accomplished my entire task—analyzing, then challenging, and finally contextualizing the theme of the death of philosophy—I must ask a final question, about the history of philosophy.
Indeed, if, as we saw in the introduction, a certain historicist conception of philosophy21 is tied to the theme of the death of philosophy, then overcoming the theme of its death will lead us to overcome historicism. But doesn’t this overcoming of historicism entail the stance of a “return to” a particular philosopher or a particular moment of philosophy, set up as the only worthy one? The reinvestment of an old position, defining (without smile or inhibition) philosophy as a science—doesn’t this lead us to replace a current statue of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Kant with a statue of Fichte or Hegel? What status should be given to the history of philosophy? Will its clear articulation allow us to break with historicism without for all that claiming to return to a past that is no more? It is only with the answer to this question that my overcoming of the death of philosophy can be entirely accomplished.