Kant and Heidegger are often pitted against one another, particularly in some of the crasser characterizations against Heidegger as a hopeless Nazi who completely rejected the moral image of the world described in the last chapter. But, what is forgotten in this characterization is that Heidegger began his own philosophical journey through a controversial interpretation of Kant which indeed influenced his pathbreaking work Being and Time. In a certain sense, Heidegger developed the notion of the transcendental imagination integral to Kantian philosophy and drew out its significance for his own existential, ontological understanding of Dasein. Heidegger argues that Kant and his attempt to uncover a new scientific ground for metaphysics sought to resolve the seeming paradox of how a creature limited by finitude could achieve universal and necessary knowledge.1 As Heidegger tells us, Kant does so by uncovering the truth that all of our knowledge derives from the very finitude that is also a limit and a restriction on pure reason.
Heidegger is deeply critical of traditional rationalist metaphysics and suggests to us that the essential limit of finitude is both restrictive and enabling. The enablement made possible by grasping the limit of theoretical reason is subsequently transformed in how Kant understood the central role of transcendental imagination. This central role enables us to open what Heidegger calls a horizon of objectivity, giving us a field of knowable objects that appear to us as a rule-like and lawful nature, allowing us to claim truth for knowledge of the world around us. For Heidegger, finitude and transcendence are two sides of the same coin. And, we can only understand why if we fully come to terms with the significance of the role that the transcendental imagination plays in both our receptiveness to the world around us and in our understanding of that world. Heidegger begins his analysis of how a finite creature must relate itself to the beings that make up our world by suggesting:
A finite, knowing creature can only relate itself to a being which it is itself is not, and which it also has not created, if this being which is already at hand can be encountered from out of itself. However, in order to be able to encounter this being as the being it is, it must already be “recognized” generally and in advance as being, i.e., with respect to constitution of its Being. But this implies: ontological knowledge, which here is always pre-ontological, is the condition for the possibility that in general something like a being can itself stand in opposition to a finite creature. Finite creatures need this basic faculty of turning toward ... which lets-[something]-stand-in-opposition. In this original turning-toward, the finite creature first allows a space for play [Spielraum] within which something can “correspond” to it. To hold oneself in advance in such a play-space, to form it originally, is none other than the transcendence which marks all finite comportment to beings. If, however, the possibility of ontological knowledge is grounded in pure synthesis and if ontological knowledge nevertheless constitutes precisely the letting-stand-against of ... , then pure synthesis must be revealed as that which complies with and supports the unified whole of the inner, essential structure of transcendence. Through the elucidation of this structure of pure synthesis, the innermost essence of the finitude of reason is then unveiled.2
This elucidation of what pure synthesis entails is what Heidegger pursues in detail to show us how Kant rejected the traditional metaphysical notion of the mediational role of the imagination. Instead, Heidegger argues that the transcendental imagination is the formative core of this necessary pure synthesis. Transcendental knowledge, for Heidegger, entails transcendence in a unique sense of the word as we just read. It is only if we understand human knowledge as transcendental and necessarily entailing transcendence that we can fully grasp how and why Kant’s theory of the imagination creates an earthquake in traditional Western metaphysics. For Heidegger, Kant’s explanation of why synthetic a priori judgments are possible demands an inquiry into the transcendence that allows human beings to have knowledge of Being. Heidegger is clear about the possibility of a priori judgments, suggesting:
In synthetic a priori judgments, however, which are now the problem before us, it is a matter of still another type of synthesis. This [other type of synthesis] should bring forth something about the being that was not derived experientially from it. This bringing-forth of the determination of the Being of the being is a preliminary self-relating to the being. This pure “relation-to ...” (synthesis) forms first and foremost the that-upon-which [das Worauf] and the horizon within which the being in itself becomes experienceable in the empirical synthesis. It is now a question of elucidating the possibility of this a priori synthesis. Kant calls an investigation concerning the essence of this synthesis a transcendental investigation. “I entitle all knowledge transcendental that is occupied in general not so much with objects as with the kind of knowledge we have of objects, insofar as this is possible a priori.” Hence, transcendental knowledge does not investigate the being itself, but rather the possibility of the preliminary understanding of Being, i.e., at one and the same time: the constitution of the Being of the being. It concerns the stepping-over (transcendence) of pure reason to the being, so that it can first and foremost be adequate to its possible object.3
Thus, Heidegger concludes that for Kant:
With the problem of transcendence, a “theory of knowledge” is not set in place of metaphysics, but rather the inner possibility of ontology is questioned.
If its truth belongs to the essence of knowledge, then the transcendental problem of the inner possibility of a priori synthetic knowledge is the question concerning the essence of truth of ontological transcendence. It is a matter of determining the essence of “transcendental truth, which precedes all empirical truth and makes it possible.”4
It is only against the background of Heidegger’s interpretation of how synthetic a priori judgments are possible that we can fully grasp his argument that Kant poses the problem of transcendence as the inner possibility of any ontology. Only then can we understand Heidegger’s claim that Kant’s theory of the imagination was not only a watershed in Western metaphysics but also led Kant to confront an abyss which, according to Heidegger, led him to make substantive revisions in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Heidegger echoes this idea with brevity when he tells us, “Transcendence, however, is finitude itself, so to speak.”5 We will return shortly to why Heidegger believes that Kant’s theory of the transcendental imagination brought him to such an abyss, but for now let us return to Kant’s own insight into what Heidegger names the finitude of subjectivity.
For Heidegger, finitude in Kant is demonstrated by how pure reason cannot reach objects of experience except through the sensible intuition of space and time. These are the finite limits laid out by the transcendental imagination and put forth by Kant in his transcendental aesthetic found in the Critique of Pure Reason. According to Heidegger, Kant breaks with the traditional mediational role of the imagination by presupposing the formative role of the imagination in both sensibility and understanding. The imagination, in other words, is not a derived function that comes after sensibility or after understanding; instead, Heidegger argues that in order to turn toward objects, or “take them in stride” as he writes in his own unique language, we must initially grasp how the pure understanding is rooted in pure intuition. Again, to quote Heidegger:
In order for the horizon of the letting-stand-against as such to be able to function, however, this character of an offering needs a certain perceivability. Perceivable means: immediately capable of being taken in stride in intuition. Hence the horizon, as a distinct offering, must present itself in a preliminary way constantly as a pure look. From this it follows that the letting-stand-against of finite understanding must intuitively offer objectivity as such, i.e., that the pure understanding must be grounded in a pure intuition which guides and sustains it.6
There must be an image of a horizon of space and time before objects appear before us in their affinity, connectedness, and thus also in their differentiation from one another through their temporal spacing. Heidegger uses the example of substance to help us understand this complex point being made by Kant. Substance in Kant is something that persists in time. It is only by “looking” at time that we can get a preliminary view of the image of persistence which as such remains the same in the temporalization that moves it through one “now” to another. Substance, in other words, is not simply a present being. It is a being that we grasp as persistence in time, and we can only do this if we have a primordial image, a pure image, of time itself. Heidegger believes that he is expanding on Kant’s own argument that “the pure image of all magnitudes (quantorum) for outer sense is space; for all objects of the senses in general, it is time.”7 In other words, as Heidegger reads Kant, time gives us a pure image that pre-forms the horizon of all that is experienced in empirical intuition, but since this act of pure intuition belongs to the transcendental imagination what is thus pre-formed therein must also be imagined.
But, what is this strange something that is imagined, and by definition no thing because it makes the appearance of things possible? This strange something is precisely the horizon of possibility presupposed by the empirical intuition of all actual objects.
The imagination forms the look of the horizon of objectivity as such in advance, before the experience of the being. This look-forming [Anblickbilden] in the pure image [Bilde] of time, however, is not just prior to this or that experience of the being, but rather always is in advance, prior to any possible [experience]. Hence, from the beginning, in this offering of the look, the power of imagination is never simply dependent upon the presence [Anwesenheit] of a being. It is dependent in this way to such a small degree that precisely its preforming [Vor-bilden] of the pure schema Substance, i.e., persistence over time, for example, first brings into view in general something like constant presence [ständige Anwesenheit]. In turn, it is first and foremost only in the horizon of such constant presence that this or any “present presence of an object” as such can show itself. Hence in the Transcendental Schematism, the essence of the power of imagination—to be able to intuit without the present presence [ohne Gegenwart]—is grasped in a way that is fundamentally more original. Finally, the Schematism also shows quite straightforwardly and in a far more original sense the “creative” essence of the power of imagination. Indeed, it is not ontically “creative” at all, but [is creative] as a free forming of images. The Anthropology shows that the productive power of imagination as well is still dependent upon the representations of the senses. In the Transcendental Schematism, however, the power of the imagination is originally pictorial in the pure image of time. It simply does not need an empirical intuition. Hence, the Critique of Pure Reason shows both the intuitive character and the spontaneity in a more original sense.8
Imagination in Kant, then, plays a central role in sensible intuition because of its capacity to pre-form its perceptions in light of this possible something that must be presupposed in the presentation of all objects. Even at the most primordial level of sensible perception the imagination has a certain autonomy. The peculiar way in which the imagination is placed at the root of both receptivity and understanding in its spontaneity explains why for Kant the imagination is not after the fact of our world, but it actually forms it. In Heidegger’s reading, the imagination is thus both in sensibility and in understanding, a transcendental freedom in that it serves as the a priori precondition of all objectivity.
As we have seen in the case of “substance” we see an object as presence because we have a temporalized view of it as being in the horizon of the “here and now.” We see an object as permanent, as a substance that persists in time, because we view it against the temporal horizon of what it means to last through the succession of “nows” yet still remain in its form. The imagination is not ontically creative, which is why Kant emphasizes that he is not an idealist in the sense of either Berkeley or Descartes. Yet, there is no object which appears to us that is not viewed in the pure image of time that gives us a horizon of both possible and actual objects. Many neo-Kantians have tried to challenge the metaphysical notion of sensibility in Kant and reduce the Critique of Pure Reason to being a successful deduction of the categories of understanding that need not rely on the transcendental imagination.9 Even if one does not accept Heidegger’s reading of Kant, as it is certainly controversial, it is difficult, if not impossible, to deny that Kant’s transcendental idealism turns on this metaphysical notion of sensibility and the central place that the imagination plays in our very reception of objects. But, Heidegger rightly notes that, for Kant, the imagination is not just presupposed by sensation but also by understanding. And if it were not the root of both, then it would not have created the abyss that Heidegger argues Kant was brought before. As Kant tells us, understanding owes to the imagination the capacity to shape, differentiate, and connect in general (i.e., make synthesis). This very power of synthesis points to a more primordial unity of sensation and understanding brought about by the imagination prior to the separate functioning of either faculty. As Kant writes, “This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with great difficulty.”10
How does the act of synthesis precondition the understanding? The first thing to recall here is that understanding is first defined by Kant as the faculty of rules. As a result, the understanding must presuppose those unities which guide all possible modes of unification in the act of representation. But, these regulated unities, or categories as Kant usually calls them, must be included in an act even more primordial if they are to be represented and ultimately to be connected to our “making sense” of objects. In order for us to be given a law-like or rule-governed objective field that is represented as such, then the schematism must play a central role in connecting the rule-like function of the understanding with the differentiation of objects as rooted in the unity of the transcendental apperception: the “I think” which makes possible the conceptualization of the many as unified in a law-like nature.
Heidegger distinguishes Kant’s difference from empiricism by summarizing the role of the schemata when he suggests, “This initial sketching-out [Vorzeichnung ] of the rule is no list [Verzeichnis] in the sense of a mere enumeration of the ‘features’ found in a house. Rather, it is a ‘distinguishing’ [Auszeichnen] of the whole of what is meant by [a term] like ‘house.’”11 Heidegger argues that the “I think,” or the transcendental ego, does not exist alone or in its own right but is itself rooted in the productive imagination which projects the unification of all possible and actual objects. The “I think” in other words projects itself against the pure image of time and can only grasp itself in its permanence as it remains the same through the temporalizing of its own being. Kant underscores this point when he argues in the third section of the transcendental deduction that “only the productive synthesis of the imagination can take place a priori.”12 What this denotes is that the deduction of the categories of the understanding originates in the synthetic act of the imagination in which, and against which, the transcendental “I” must project itself as the basis of what in turn represents the world of objects beyond it. Heidegger underscores the significance of the dependence of the deduction of the categories on this particular reading of how they must be integrally tied to the transcendental “I” of apperception as follows:
The representing of unity, as pure thinking, necessarily has the character of the “I think.” The pure concept, as consciousness of unity in general, is necessarily pure self-consciousness. This pure consciousness of unity is not just occasionally and tacitly carried out, but rather it must always be possible. It is essentially an “I am able.” “This pure, original, unchangeable consciousness I will now name Transcendental Apperception.” The representing of unity which lets something stand against it is grounded in this apperception “as a power.” Only as the constant, free “I can” does the “I think” have the power to allow the Being-in-opposition of the unity to stand against itself, if in fact linking remains possible only with reference to an essentially free comporting. The pure understanding, in its original holding of unity before itself, acts as Transcendental Apperception.13
As Heidegger reads Kant, he is the first Western thinker to think of the unthought aspect of human existence as the root of all knowledge. This unthought cannot be objectified because it lies behind us and shapes both who we are as finite creatures and how we know such finitude amid the possibility of its beyond. The imagination is, in this sense, the secret behind our vision of a law-like universe in which we can sketch out what an object is through the central role of the schematism. The imagination, in other words, resists the objectifying tendency Heidegger has already so militantly refused in Being and Time. Heidegger is much more on the side of Kant than he admits in his famous 1929 Davos debate with Ernst Cassirer, a debate to which we will return in the next chapter.
Of course, it is undoubtedly the case, for those who wish to emphasize the central role Kant played in grounding scientific law, that Kant did indeed tell us how our determinate judgments of nature can claim to be true. But Kant only did so, as Heidegger reminds us, in a way that challenges some of the most basic assumptions of Western metaphysics, such as in the antithesis of reason and sensibility or the opposition of the permanent soul and the temporal self. The “I” of transcendental apperception is only abiding as it presupposes a horizon of identity and permanence in a primordial image of time. How things are, and how they are knowable after Kant, including objects in their so-called immediacy, can no longer be thought of, then, without addressing the subject in time whose understanding of the world can only proceed through a horizon of possibility rooted in what Heidegger describes as the a priori freedom that underlies both understanding and sensibility. Again, to quote Heidegger:
“Experience,” understood as experiencing in distinction from what is experienced, is intuiting which takes things in stride and which must let the being give itself. “That an object is given” means that it “is presented immediately in intuition.” But what does this mean? Kant answers: “to relate the representation {of the object} to experience (be it actual or still possible).” This relating, however, wants to suggest: in order for an object to be able to give itself, there must in advance already be a turning-toward such an occurrence, which is capable of being “summoned.” This preliminary tuming-one’s-attention-toward ... [Sichzuwenden zu] occurs, as the Transcendental Deduction shows and as the Transcendental Schematism explains, in the ontological synthesis. This turning-one’s-attention-toward . . . is the condition for the possibility of experiencing.
And yet, the possibility of finite knowledge requires a second condition. Only true knowledge is knowledge. Truth, however, means “accordance with the Object [Objekt].” In advance, then, there must be something like a with-what [ein Womit] of the possible accordance which can be encountered, i.e., something which regulates by giving a standard. It must open up in advance the horizon of the standing-against, and as such it must be distinct. This horizon is the condition for the possibility of the object [Gegenstand] with respect to its being-able-to-stand-against [Gegenstehenkönnens].14
Ultimately, Heidegger openly acknowledges his debt to Kant in Being and Time; indeed, as thinkers like Richard Kearney have suggested, Dasein can be read as a recasting of Kantian insight into the finitude of subjectivity imposed by both the reproductive and productive role of the transcendental imagination. As Kearney succinctly poses in reflection upon what is often seen as dense Heideggerian analysis, there is “no Sein without Dasein, no Dasein without time, and no time without imagination.”15
Undoubtedly, Heidegger goes beyond Kant in privileging facultas praevidendi over and against the other two aspects of the imagination, facultas formandi and facultas imaginandi, which respectively give us images of the past and the future. However, this privileging of the projection of a future horizon can, and to my mind should, be thought as Heidegger foregrounding the significance of the a priori freedom he associates with Kant’s transcendental imagination. His project does indeed seem, then, to be a reinterpretation of Kant rather than a break with his thinking, as Cassirer constantly reminds him during the debate at Davos. And, the heart of this recasting and foregrounding of the a priori freedom of the imagination remains wedded to the pride of place of our freedom as finite beings. Indeed, in a thought-provoking reinterpretation of the relationship between theoretical reason and practical reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, we see Heidegger deepening something like the moral image of the world envisioned in the last chapter. Heidegger notes that the feeling for respect found in the Critique of Practical Reason is nothing less than respect for the moral law itself. It is best understood by connecting the self-imposition of the law that defines us as persons with the receptive and intuitive function of the imagination.
The moral self manifests itself in action and duty; the person is not some natural being that is just there, the person who is submitting to the law is also projecting himself or herself as a person who acts morally. This projecting, for Heidegger, involves the basic possibility of authentic acting. We do not know ourselves to be moral apart from our enactment of the law and the imagined projection of our personhood. As we saw in the last chapter, Kant himself was suspicious of the role of the imagination in practical reason. Yet, we should be able to use Heidegger’s rephrasing how we receive the moral law as a fact of reason. In the reworking of respect as susceptibility or having a feeling for the law, Heidegger is arguing that the imagination should not just play a role in practical philosophy as hypothetical experiments in the imagination such as the one developed by John Rawls. Ultimately, Heidegger’s reading of the imagination explains how we can receive the law and, indeed, form ourselves as persons even as we manifest ourselves in accordance with the moral law:
Respect as such is respect for the moral law. It does not serve [as basis] for the judgment of actions, and it does not first appear after the ethical fact to be something like the manner in which we take a position with respect to the consummated act. On the contrary, respect for the law first constitutes the possibility for action. The respect for . . . is the way in which the law first becomes accessible to us. At the same time we find therein: this feeling of respect for the law does not also serve, as Kant puts it, for the “grounding” of the law. The law is not what it is because we have respect for it, but the reverse: this respecting having-a-feeling for the law, and with it this determinate manner of making the law manifest, is the way in which the law, as such a respecting having-a-feeling for in general, can be encountered by us.16
In Heidegger’s reading of Kant, it is due to our susceptibility, or having a feeling for the law, that we can also feel ourselves called to manifest our person as it is necessarily in relation to other persons. Thus, this moral person, then, is not rooted in an empirical faculty of the soul as in previous metaphysical explanations of why human beings can feel it right to be moral.
Heidegger argues that Kant should best be read consistently with the larger body of his own argument, especially in the Critique of Practical Reason, as suggesting respect is a moral feeling providing us with the transcendental structure of receptivity of both the subject of theoretical reason and the moral self of practical reason. As such, he challenges the dualism of theoretical and practical reason, at least as it relates to Kant’s argument that the transcendental imagination should have no place in practical reason because the moral law is not a schematizable object. To quote Heidegger:
The self-submitting, immediate, surrender-to . . . is pure receptivity; the free, self-affecting of the law, however, is pure spontaneity. In themselves, both are originally one. And again, only this origin of practical reason in the transcendental power of the imagination allows us to understand the extent to which, in respect, the law as much as the acting self is not to be apprehended objectively. Rather, both are manifest precisely in a more original, unobjective, and unthematic way as duty and action, and they form the unreflected, acting Being of the self [Selbst-stein].17
In a profound sense, Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason is such that the moral self is also understood to rest on the transcendental imagination, does not undermine the moral image of the world inherent in Kant’s critical philosophy and the other great works of German Idealism, but instead helps us to understand how we can have the possibility of a view of the world that includes our freedom as basic to our finitude since this moral image can itself be understood to inhere in the faculty of receptivity. In this manner, I would argue that Heidegger should be read to deepen our understanding of being human as a nonobjectifiable project of freedom rooted in the finitude of our being pointed toward death. Yet, in distinguishing his own position from the existentialism of Sartre which foregrounds “man’s” freedom even if in a way different than Heidegger and his reading of Kant, Heidegger no doubt backs away from these extraordinarily provocative pages on the role of the transcendental imagination in practical philosophy. To understand why he does so we have to trace a fundamental shift in his assessment of Kantian critical philosophy and the place Heidegger gives it in emphasizing the a priori freedom of the transcendental imagination. We have to return again to Heidegger’s reassessment of what he took to be Kant’s finest accomplishment: the demonstration of the possibility of an object with the Kantian notion of truth as Gegenstehenkönnens.
Heidegger frankly acknowledges his debt to Kant in Being and Time. As we have seen, Kant’s notion of the imagination, as well as the relationship of time to the imagination, serves as a point of philosophical departure for Heidegger in his conceptualization of Dasein as being “thrown into the world” in the past and yet projected toward a future of possibility. For Heidegger, it is Kant who first shows us the necessary connection between the questions What is a thing? and Who is man?:
What Kant hit upon and what he constantly tried to grasp anew as the fundamental happening is that we human beings have the power of knowing what is, which we ourselves are not, even though we did not ourselves make this what is. To be what is in the midst of an open vis-à-vis what is, that is constantly strange. In Kant’s formulation this means to have objects standing against us as they themselves, even though the letting encounter (das Begegnenlassen ) happens through us. How is such possible? Only in such a way that the conditions of the possibility of experiencing (space and time as pure intuitions and the categories as pure concepts of the understanding) are at the same time the conditions of the standing-against of the objects of experience.18
As we have seen, Heidegger accomplishes another Copernican revolution by profoundly rethinking the significance of the subject. Heidegger notes the change in the meaning of that word: subject. The subject undergoes a change in the course of philosophical development from being what underlies, as for example the modern subject of a sentence and the matter of the thing, to its modern meaning as the person in the subjective. But, in Kant there is another fundamental shift in that now the “thing that underlies” is our own thinking through of the highest principle of synthesis in the transcendental “I” of apperception.
For Kant, as we have seen, the unity of all things, and of space and time, indeed of all necessary connections, is possible only through the unity of the “I think.” The necessary representation of the oneness of our thinking is what underlies, to use Heidegger’s phrase. For example, when we count units we take them along with this “I” and unite them as we go on thinking. We must represent the subject that counts two as the same subject that counted one. If we drink a glass of wine, to give another example, the subject that sees yellow must also be the subject that tastes the wine, otherwise the taster and the viewer would not be the same and there would be no experience of drinking such wine. The subject in this sense, then, “bears” persistence in the thought unity of the experiencer. This highest synthesis, for Kant, entails what Heidegger calls transcendence in our relationship to objects. We only encounter objects in Heidegger as this relation between the human experiencer and thinker as this relation, in turn, is only possible if we postulate and represent an “I” that endures in time. Without this necessary between, as Heidegger tells us, there would be no field of objectivity, no object defined as Gegenstand, in Kant’s unique sense of the word, and therefore no metaphysically sound explanation of the objectivity of our judgment.
Heidegger explains the relationship between his own notion of transcendence and Kant’s transcendental idealism as follows:
The transcendental is what concerns transcendence. Viewed transcendentally, thought is considered in its passing over to the object. Transcendental reflection is not directed upon objects themselves nor upon thought as the mere representation of the subject-predicate relationship, but upon the passing over (Überstieg) and the relation to the object as this relation. (Transcendence: 1. Over to [the other side]—as such [Hinüber zu—als solches] 2. Passing up, passing beyond [Über weg.]) (For Kant’s definition of “transcendental,” compare Critique of Pure Reason, A 12, B 25. In a note (Academie edition, op. cit., xv, No. 373), it reads as follows: “A determination of a thing with regard to its essence as a thing is transcendental.”)19
This necessary transcendence opens up Heidegger’s exploration of what this “necessary passing over” means for Dasein as a “dimension” which “reaches out beyond things and back behind man.”20 Heidegger underscores, in the most profound sense, that things are not the same after Kant, and neither are we. The thinking of this “between” changes how things are revealed to us, and how we in turn are related to ourselves as other to them. We know things, then, as we transcend them. But, this transcendence is only possible in that we must be with things in the first place as they are actually other to us. Since we are not God, we are not ontically creative. We are not in this sense transcendent. We meet instead with our world through a transcendence that is unique to a finite rational creature whose thought partially shapes the world around us. This transcendence in Heidegger’s terms is thought of in Kant as the essence of how we can know things and yet are other to them. This otherness becomes crucial for Heidegger in the thinking of Dasein and freedom as transcendence in Being and Time.
In Kant, as we say, this “I think” can never be an object, although there is a “me” that is an object in the phenomenal world as all phenomenal objects must be in time. The “I think” then is instead the unity we must represent in the process of knowing sensory objects. For Heidegger, this “I” resists objectification because, as the basis for our grasp of the world, it must be represented as necessarily behind us, but as “necessarily behind” it is ungraspable. Again, as we discussed earlier, this ungraspability of the “I” is what makes the root of knowledge itself unknowable. In this sense, the “I” is a limit to what can be objectified and turns itself into a graspable “what.” This “I,” as such, at least as Heidegger reads Kant, points to Heidegger’s fundamental insight into how human beings are always before and after themselves. The ultimate unity of the “I think,” as being discussed, explains why, in Kant, rational logic is no longer valid, independent of the receptivity of intuition. Sensation, then, is no longer separated from thought, nor is it reduced to confused thought that must be clarified through derivable axioms. Rather, the sensory given and rational thought in their connection are two different, and yet necessary, conditions of any experience.
Thought can only be true if we think its necessary foundation in our own finite thinking. As human and finite, then, our axiomatic thinking is limited to its role in the makeup of sensory experience. And, this experience is only made-up through the transcendental imagination. What a priori means in the most basic sense is this valid but limited role of our thinking and judging which has already occurred whenever we experience an object as Gegenstand. We do not add on our thought after we experience something. Underscoring this point, Heidegger suggests, at length:
That which shows itself (Sichzeigendes) must have in advance the possibility of coming to a stand and constancy, so that what encounters, what shows itself, i.e., what appears, can come before us at all as standing before us (Gegenstehendes ). However, what stands in itself (Insichstehendes) and does not fall apart (Nichtauseinancierfahrendes) is what is collected in itself (Insichgesammeltes), i.e., something brought into a unity, and is thus present and constant in this unity. This constancy is what uniformly in itself and out of itself exists as presented toward. (Die Ständigkeit ist das einheitliche in sich von sich aus An-wesen.) This presence to it is made possible with the participation of the pure understanding. Its activity is thought. Thought, however, is an “I think”; I represent something to myself in general in its unity and in its belonging together. The presence (Präsenz) of the object shows itself in the representing, in which it becomes present to me (auf mich zu Präsentwerden) through the thinking, i.e., connecting representing. But to whom this presence of the object is presented, whether to me as a contingent “I” with its moods, desires, and opinions, or to me as an “I” that puts behind itself everything “subjective,” allowing the object itself to be what it is, this depends on the “I,” namely, upon the comprehensiveness and the reach of the unity and the rules under which the connecting of the representations is brought, i.e., fundamentally upon the range and kind of freedom by virtue of which I myself am a self.21
Heidegger and Kant agree that we know our world only through an approach to nature. The role of philosophy in Kant is to think the fundamental principles of such an approach. Kant was deeply convinced that the Newtonian approach to nature was truly basic to all human experience; clearly, Heidegger argues to the contrary, insisting that approaches are historically variable, if not variable through our will or agency. But that disagreement, in all of its significance, still does not keep Heidegger from attributing to Kant his status as the thinker that demonstrates to us how we ground our scientific principles in a deeper metaphysical grasp of the essence of our being. Kant’s specific way of thinking “the between” and his delineation of a knowable object as Gegenstand approaches nature through the domination of what Heidegger calls the mathematical.
The central problem of critical idealism lies precisely in how we grasp objects and thus come to know ourselves as a particular kind of maker of our world. It is the integral connection between the grasp of the object as Gegenstand, the domination of the mathematical, and Kant’s own humanism in his ethical philosophy that Heidegger understands as inseparable aspects of Kant’s great critical system. Heidegger’s turn from his provocative insight into the role of the transcendental imagination in Kant’s moral theory, and indeed from the project of critical philosophy, turns on Heidegger’s understanding that our freedom in Kant is inseparable from a particular kind of thinking of “the between” linking human beings to the world around them. Indeed, Heidegger turns from his own development of transcendence as the heart of human freedom in Being and Time because this work still remains tied to human beings as a particular kind of maker under the domination of the mathematical. To understand this movement we need to review how Heidegger understands the shift that takes place in the creation of modern science.
Heidegger argues that the basic character of modern science is missed if one says that it only differs from earlier science by being experimental. Modern science is experimental but only in a specific sense. The modern notion of the experimental is the result of nature now coming to us in an axiomatic form. An experiment in modern science always first sets up a hypothetical framework in which the results of an experiment are to be judged. Heidegger argues that objects, in, say, science, found in ancient Greece are both understood and indeed made in a way similar to the way we make and develop knowledge of tools, which is ultimately dependant on practice. Heidegger gives us the example of how we come to use a weapon, suggesting that the weapon builder must have advanced knowledge of how the weapon is to be built and this knowledge determines the structure the builder will give to such an object when he makes it according to the plan inherent in such weaponry. This form of foreknowledge is what Heidegger identifies as the mathematical, as it was broadly construed in Greek philosophy. The mathematical, however, shifts its meaning from the foreknowledge we have of tools that demand we lay out a plan in advance for their creation or production. Heidegger demonstrates this shift in the mathematical in the broader meaning by giving us the example of Isaac Newton and his first law.
Famously, Newton argued that every body left to itself moves uniformly in a straight line. The phrase “every body” is already a key to the significant difference. For, we are no longer analyzing how we make specific objects like tools. We skip over the specificity of the thing as we abstract what is common to all bodies. In a related manner the idea of motion also changes its meaning. In Aristotle the capability for motion lies in the nature of the body itself. The kind of motion of the body and its relation to place depends on the nature of that body. Thus, for example, the velocity of natural motion increases the nearer the body comes to its proper place. Even velocity is expressed in this way as dependent on the fundamental nature of that body. Earthly bodies move downward in Aristotle because earthly things have their proper place under the fiery realm. To summarize, each body has its place according to its kind, and it moves toward that place with more or less velocity according to its nature. But this account of motion is fundamentally rejected by Newton. Motion is now understood axiomatically as an assertion about the law of motion for every body indifferent now to its nature. This law reduces motion to a change of relative position as measurable distance between places. With this law as an example, Heidegger argues that the very idea of nature has itself changed:
Therefore, the concept of nature in general changes. Nature is no longer the inner principle out of which the motion of the body follows; rather, nature is the mode of the variety of the changing relative positions of bodies, the manner in which they are present in space and time, which themselves are domains of possible positional orders and determinations of order and have no special traits anywhere.22
Nor do we get these kinds of scientific laws from observing experience and then generalizing from it. As Heidegger tells us, scientific laws abstract from actual bodies. We come to know what is true of all of them but only if truth is conceived in a particular way such as in the mathematical. As Heidegger explains in reference to Newton’s law:
How about this law? It speaks of a body, corpus quod a viribus impressis non cogitur , a body which is left to itself. Where do we find it? There is no such body. There is also no experiment which could ever bring such a body to direct perception. But modern science, in contrast to the mere dialectical poetic conception of medieval Scholasticism and science, is supposed to be based upon experience. Instead, it has such a law at its apex. This law speaks of a thing that does not exist. It demands a fundamental representation of things which contradict the ordinary.
The mathematical is based on such a claim, i.e., the application of a determination of the thing, which is not experientially created out of the thing and yet lies at the base of every determination of the things, making them possible and making room for them.23
To summarize, for axiomatic science all things are only as we mathematically make them. Nature works for us within the terms we present. This insight is the basis of Kant’s famous claim that we only know in nature what we have put into nature. That the experimental is another aspect of its axiomatic character is what makes modern science unique.
If Heidegger “turns” from Kant’s critical philosophy, and indeed on the interpretation offered here it is a “turning” in his earlier writing which attempts to radicalize it, he does not do so because Kant is wrong. Kant, indeed, has it right in his metaphysical grounding of the mathematical. In later work by Heidegger he emphasizes that Kant’s humanism, which springs from the delimitation of theoretical knowledge and what can be known axiomatically, is still tied to a system of transcendental idealism and thus ultimately the subject finds itself framed by the mathematical. Thus, for Heidegger the way in which questions of the subject of moral freedom and agency are raised in Kant ultimately ensnares us in the forgetfulness of who we truly are as the guardian of Being. In all of his work, Heidegger has reminded us that beings inevitably reveal themselves to us by our approach to those beings. But, Being is not identical with the beings that we approach. Being is a possible interaction, “the between” to use a phrase from Heidegger. This “between” is a “third” which is in a sense “first” because it is something behind us which lets us be.
Being as beings is only partial disclosure, and this partiality is, in turn, different in our historical approaches to Being. Our partiality is the necessary result of our finitude. It is this otherness of Being that forms all beings as what gives all things to come to be and perish. Heidegger attributes this thinking of Being to the pre-Socratics and as “what lies behind all that is,” or what reveals itself in presence but is as such never present. For Heidegger, since Plato Being is taken instead as what is already defined and constituted. Being is what is actually formed, present, and what works. Heidegger in his thinking turns on the structure of technology which frames us as Gestell. Not only might human beings blow up the world with their fancy technological machinations, but technology itself has, for Heidegger, gone too far in making human beings its own appendage: making humanity into a thing whose “nature” can only articulate itself within this limited frame of technological projecting. It is in such a world that all things, including ourselves, come to be graspable only as formed, calculable objects. Things, then, are reduced to standing in reserve for their possible use by modern technology. As Heidegger writes:
What kind of unconcealment is it, then, that is peculiar to that which results from this setting-upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. The word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock.” The word “standing-reserve” assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the revealing that challenges. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.24
For Heidegger, this particular kind of enframing deepens the danger of turning nature into an object for us, which is a particular form of objectification. The calculable complex is what we draw on, but we who draw on these standing reserves become their servant.
For Heidegger, this ensnarement is a particular kind of destiny as to how Being presents itself, or perhaps more precisely, withdraws itself, in that we have been banished, indeed rendered homeless, by the very hubris of modern technology. This is a primary danger for Heidegger because it fundamentally and violently blocks the gift of Being to us and therefore undermines what Heidegger will try to salvage as a non-metaphysical salvation of the dignity of Dasein. We are for Heidegger lost in the illusion that we are the lords of the earth, for we ourselves are now captured and incapable of even knowing and thinking our own capture. We challenge nature, we force nature to yield to us and in the course of so doing destine ourselves to being consumed by what we purportedly create. Heidegger continues this line of thinking and suggests:
Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.25
Dasein, for Heidegger, is thrown into the truth of Being and it is only, in a certain sense, through us that the gift of Being can be received. But, in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger tries to reevaluate his own writing in Being and Time to suggest not that Being is dependant on us, but that it is our destiny to be the shepherd of Being so that Being can illuminate itself as well as hold itself in its otherness. Since Being is the gift of all that is in the world, it is in a certain sense simultaneously in-and-beyond-beings as what yields to their becoming and yet is not identical with any being in particular.
Thinking attests to the unfolding of Being as the ultimate destiny of Dasein. Heidegger’s rethinking of what it means for Dasein to ek-sist is that we will think from within our own destiny, which is to hold ourselves open to the nearness of Being even if as we hold ourselves open, Being only reveals itself as the most profound absence. More precisely, we experience the absence of Being because Being has withdrawn its gift as we try to hold sway over beings. As Heidegger tells us in his rethinking of what our thrown projection into our historical being now means, that it is not Dasein but Being itself which sends human beings into their essence and therefore calls them home. For Heidegger, Marx and Hegel—as two great thinkers—reflect on this homelessness in the fundamental estrangement of human beings from themselves. Indeed, Heidegger speaks favorably of historical materialism à la Marx precisely because it is for him all about the history of this estrangement:
What Marx recognized in an essential and significant sense, though derived from Hegel, as the estrangement of man has its roots in the homelessness of modern man. This homelessness is specifically evoked from the destiny of Being in the form of metaphysics, and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up as such. Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts.26
Again, as Heidegger always tells us, the great thinkers are not wrong per se, but they are, whether or not they know it themselves, speaking the truth of Being as it is revealed to them. This is why we do not refute any of the great thinkers, for rather then refute them we instead think how Being comes to be revealed in their works.
Revelation in a history is nothing less than the history of Being as it can only find itself in such great philosophers. Heidegger suggested:
The happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of Being and from it. Being comes to destiny in that It, Being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: it gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously. Nonetheless, Hegel’s definition of history as the development of “Spirit” is not untrue. Neither is it partly correct and partly false. It is as true as metaphysics, which through Hegel first brings to language its essence—thought in terms of the absolute—in the system. Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of Being. Whatever stems from it cannot be countered or even cast aside by refutations. It can only be taken up in such a way that its truth is more primordially sheltered in Being itself and removed from the domain of mere human opinion. All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish. Strife among thinkers is the “lover’s quarrel” concerning the matter itself. It assists them mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same, from which they find what is fitting for them in the destiny of Being,27
Does Heidegger reject the dignity of man by writing that “man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being”?28 Certainly, Heidegger would not agree and would instead suggest such a glossary reading of his intention overlooks his more profound insight. Indeed, Heidegger tries to tell us that it is a metaphysical notion of human beings as rational animals that degrades Dasein and violates the dignity of Dasein. For, we are not, in Heidegger, simply an animal that thinks. We are in a profound sense different from animals in that our body is a project that turns on the meaning we give to it in our struggle to turn the thrownness of our past into an authentic future in which we turn toward our own finite destiny of death. The human being, then, is not fundamentally reducible to an organic thing; whatever the most serious animal-rights activists might think, Heidegger is arguing that we are not one among others and that it degrades human beings to abandon them to the essential realm of animal existence. We are “other” to ourselves in Heidegger precisely because we are “in time” as was said in the beginning of this chapter. Of course, Heidegger in a sense is challenging one notion of dualism in which human beings live as subjects amid objects, but this does not mean that he in any way wants to reduce human beings to another kind of thing, even organic.
Our otherness, however, as Heidegger interprets moral agency in Kant, lives but in our thrownness (Geworfenheit) into our true essence in which we come to care for the dignity of ourselves as the site in which Being can disclose itself and be acknowledged as the gift, indeed the ultimate gift. As Heidegger explains, there is an integral connection between care for our dignity and our care for Being as shepherds:
But “substance,” thought in terms of the history of Being, is already a blanket translation of ousia, a word that designates the presence of what is present and at the same time, with puzzling ambiguity, usually means what is present itself. If we think the metaphysical term “substance” in the sense already suggested in accordance with the “phenomenological destructing” carried out in Being and Time, then the statement “The ‘substance of man is ek-sistence’” says nothing else but that the way that man in his proper essence becomes present to Being is ecstatic inherence in the truth of Being. Through this determination of the essence of man the humanistic interpretations of man as animal rationale, as “person,” as spiritual-ensouled-bodily being, are not declared false and thrust aside. Rather, the sole implication is that the highest determination of the essence of man in humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of man. To that extent the thinking in Being and Time is against humanism. But this opposition does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of man. Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough. Of course the essential worth of man does not consist in his being the substance of beings, as the “Subject” among them, so that as the tyrant of Being he may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited “objectivity.”
Man is rather “thrown” from Being itself into the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are. Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being. But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such a destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of Being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is experienced as “care.”29
Metaphysics in Heidegger, then, is reductive in that it reduces Being to actual beings and seeks to study them in such a way. Thus, we lose the experience of Dasein as the site in which Being reveals itself and instead identify ourselves anthropologically as the maker of values. Indeed, for Heidegger understanding ourselves as the maker of all values and therefore grasping ourselves as having the highest value because it is humanity that gives value to the world is still a dangerous form of subjectivism.
Valuation is subjectivism because it says that Being is only as we give it a particular form of validity in that we say that it is something valuable. But this act of valuing still turns Being into objects of value for us as well as making ourselves lord of all things, therefore, falling prey to the very danger to which we are destining ourselves in the era of technology. Again, to quote Heidegger:
But what is a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivising. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid—solely as the objects of its doing. The bizarre effort to prove the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing. When one proclaims “God” the altogether “highest value,” this is a degradation of God’s essence. Here as elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being. To think against values therefore does not mean to beat the drum for the valuelessness and nullity of beings. It means rather to bring the clearing of the truth of Being before thinking, as against subjectivising beings into mere objects.30
For Heidegger, the word ethics comes from “ethos”; we ponder the ethos of Dasein when we think about our true dwelling in this world. To think about our true dwelling in this world is inseparable for Heidegger from thinking about the truth of our Dasein as the one who exists to be the shepherd of Being. This thinking is ontological in one sense, and indeed Heidegger called this kind of thinking the fundamental ontology, but in his later work he even critiques this notion of fundamental ontology in that it still remains caught in something like the radicalization or ontologization of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Even the word ontology, then, if it seeks to ground Being in some primal element of humanity—even paradoxically an element that is not an element in that Dasein is only a future projection—still ties us into trying to think the gift of Being by thinking ourselves first or before it. We are instead only ourselves through Being as it gives itself to be in us.
So, what is to be done? In the deepest sense of the word nothing if doing is to remain in the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger tells us that from Plato through Aristotle, thinking itself becomes a form of techne; thinking becomes a process of reflection in service to doing and making. For Heidegger, then, we must turn from a thinking that renders itself practical so that we can truly think. Does thinking accomplish anything? Yes, but only in Heidegger’s own unique sense of the word accomplish. For Heidegger, indeed, thinking is a kind of action if we mean by action the accomplishment of some effect. What we do in thinking is accomplish the relation of Being to the essence of Dasein. Thinking does not make or cause such a relationship and at some level Heidegger is rejecting Kant and the notion that the world we live in is the one we think. Thinking, instead, now tries to hold true to the offering of Being as it takes us over in language. We do not express Being but if we do, if we can accept the gift of Being, then we can reveal it in poesis, for as Dasein reveals Being we come to dwell in its truth as the gift of our own being as well as the gift of all other beings. If we can accept this gift called thinking, then we might once again—if we ever did—be able to dwell in the truth of who we are.
Being is ultimately the home in which all things are rooted. As Heidegger tells us, this home is protected by the great thinkers who are the guardians of Being. When we think of ourselves as the guardians and render ourselves patient before this gift, we can accomplish our true essence by allowing it to unfold. To lead anything into its fullness is to accomplish it. This is why Heidegger tells us that only “what is” can be thought, and thus accomplished. But, this “what is” in Heidegger is not present beings, but it is the “isness” of all those beings which gives them to be at all. Thus, if there is a “solution” to the ultimate danger, if there is to be a freedom for humanity worthy of its name, it must be the freedom of Being to reveal itself. Thought in this way is connected to the freedom of Being in that human beings can think the realm of the destiny of Being and therefore we are never fated to take up our dignity, even if paradoxically it is our highest destiny. In Heidegger, our freedom entails that we think this destiny against the fate of the so-called technological revolution that tells us even we only have meaning through our efficiency and utility. As such, Heidegger redefines freedom:
Freedom governs the free space in the sense of the cleared, that is to say, the revealed. To the occurrence of revealing, i.e., of truth, freedom stands in the closet and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees—the mystery—is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the free, goes into the free, and brings into the free. The freedom of the free consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing on its way.31
Too many commentators misunderstand Heidegger’s pitting of destiny against fate and therefore interpret him as denying freedom altogether. Whatever one makes of this definition of freedom, the dignity of humanity is still in accord with what Heidegger calls freedom. By doing nothing in the sense of reducing our thought to the service of things, we can open ourselves to questioning. Thus, our thinking that claims our destiny as the guardian of beings can itself become a saving power in that it preserves the higher essence of Dasein as what can open Dasein to its guardianship.
We are endangered as well, of course, and Heidegger certainly recognizes such. We are endangered with obliteration. But, given that humanity is never reducible to its bare life or its bodily existence, it is not even obliteration that is the worst danger: it is ourselves enframed and imprisoned so that we cannot enter into the more original revealing and return ourselves to this world as our true home. When we challenge nature we refuse it as a gift. Thus, the thinking that questions fate but poetically holds on to the destiny of the dignity of Dasein as the shepherd of Being might, just might, create an opening to a poetic dwelling that might enhance the saving power inherent in the grace of Being. Again, Heidegger writes:
Thus, questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the essential unfolding of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindlessness we no longer guard and preserve the essential unfolding of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.
The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.32
Does Heidegger produce nihilism or promote it as some sort of necessary destruction so that out of the ashes some new world might arise? Not at all; Heidegger’s entire point is that human achievement alone may never banish this danger and, indeed, we can never directly encounter it because it does not directly come from us.
Nihilism is not the thinking of the namelessness for Being, if by namelessness we mean uncapturable by any of the names of beings. Practical nihilism, as defined here, is enframement by technology. So, far from seeking to produce nihilism in the sense just given, Heidegger is actually trying to think a way through this enframement so as to illuminate how it ensnares us. In this other way we might hold on to the saving power of Dasein. So, it is a serious error to call Heidegger’s thinking nihilistic. Nor, as we have seen, does he reject a special place for human beings in the universe which has always been at the heart of all humanism. What he rejects is that this special place is reducible to our dignity as the makers of all value. Emmanuel Levinas agrees with this fundamental perspective, suggesting it is in and through the moral ethical action of human beings that holiness is brought into the world. Holiness, in Kant, is the human orientation toward freedom through the great regulative ideal of the kingdom of ends. It is this orientation and the ideal, one that is never present but always an aspiration for struggle, that yields a moral image of the world in which we can be not only different but also better in the sense of living more justly together. For Heidegger, on the other hand, holiness comes to irradiate the world around us only when Being has been illuminated and experienced in its truth. We do not bring holiness into the world for at best we can only prepare for it. I sincerely hope that I have presented Heidegger in the profundity of his thought so he can be rescued from false accusations of destructive thinking. For, Heidegger sought to “do no other” but to save Dasein from a seeming fate in which we are nothing other than commodities and utilities without purpose other than to serve the great god of money and the ultimate technological structure which we now call the Military Industrial Complex, whose sole purpose is to produce capital for a handful of human beings on this planet.
Yet, at the end of the day there is a fundamental difference between those that still hold we certainly need to rethink this moral image of the world that Kant first illuminates and those who, like Heidegger, argue that what is to be done now is that we must heal ourselves by questioning technology with the slight hope that Being might ascend into grace. Evil in Heidegger does not consist of the baseness of human nature, but instead in “malice of rage.”33 Such rage can only come from the concealment of Being since if we were to grace ourselves with our true dignity we would be able to receive Being. Our rage, to use this word deliberately, is an impotent resistance to the technological enframing that has taken us over. I do not want to deny the elitism in Heidegger, for it is certainly present, and indeed I want to emphasize here that it is Kant who first fundamentally breaks with elitism in that each and every one of us can heed the categorical imperative and struggle to live our lives in the freedom it provides and demands of us. But, at the same time we need to confront Heideggerian pessimism in Heidegger’s own meaning. Even in his most despairing moments suggesting that only God can save us now, to paraphrase, Heidegger is hoping that we can be saved so that we can be returned to our proper place as the shepherds of Being.
So, can we preserve the moral image of the world defended, even reimagined as all aesthetic ideals must be continually reimagined, against Heidegger’s pessimism about all subjectifying attempts to change the world? Heidegger, in a sense, takes his place and claims to take his place as one of the great thinkers of Being who thus can show us, or at least question, the truth of Being as it has been revealed. We can know the history of Being as it is thought in the great thinkers; thus, we can know how we are enframed and why we can do nothing about it or why we cannot humanize our world in a Marxist dream of socialism because this too will fall prey to the errancy of technology. While Heidegger is clear about the gift of Dasein, he stands paradoxically contrary to his own deontological premises in Being and Time, which offers us a knowledge of human finitude yet without fate to find itself comported away from or disclosed toward the trueness of our guardianship as shepherds of Being. Yet, if we cannot know Being in its entirety by its definition, then how can we know how we have been fated “to be” by the unconcealment of Being from us? How can we know that there is only one destiny that remains open for us if we seek to preserve the dignity of man? How do we know that this moral image of the world might not take us into a different relationship, not only with each other but, perhaps by so doing, with technology and with other beings with whom we share this planet? Dasein, laying claim to its dignity, may find momentary unconcealment in heeding the call by any other for hospitality.
In The Philosophy of the Limit, I argued that the force of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s own definition of truth as errancy—the errancy inherent in that Being is a gift that we cannot claim—turns against any notion that we can know our fate, distinguish it from our destiny, and decisively reject the great ideals of the European enlightenment—freedom, equality, and fraternity—as if these were to be inevitably tied to a resubjectification of our world that would once again ensnare us in the error of technology and the ultimate danger to the dignity of Dasein.34 But, how does Derrida’s deconstruction engage Heideggerian pessimism? Here I do not intend to review the extensive body of work Derrida left behind after his death. There is so much that could be said about Derrida’s lifelong engagement with Heidegger and the spirit of Heidegger’s writing. But, I do want to bring to the fore a certain sense of Derrida because there have been such grievous misunderstandings about deconstruction in some academic circles in the United States. So, I will emphasize how a “certain” Derrida, to use one of his famous phrases, deconstructs Heideggerian pessimism in the name of an ethical responsibility that is inseparable from Derrida’s highly original engagement with the meaning of hospitality.
Famously, as we have seen, Heidegger writes that the oblivion of Being has allowed the distinction between Being and beings to be eclipsed so that we are in danger of disrespecting our own dignity as the unique being whose destiny it is to care for the gift of “how all that is has come to be.” Derrida engages the Heideggerian text in his essay on différance by turning Heidegger’s own conclusions against themselves. If, as Heidegger writes, Being both reveals and conceals itself, indeed if truth is necessarily involved in what Heidegger terms errancy, then we cannot know what the truth of Being is. Even if we were to take seriously Heidegger’s call for us to witness to the danger of techne we must remember that if Being hides itself, then we are not in the position to assert what has been hidden, for things might always be otherwise.
Indeed, if Heidegger is to think such danger, then this thinking itself entails thinking the trace of what, even if concealed, has left its mark on the oblivion of the distinction between Being and beings. To quote Derrida:
Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has not site—erasure belongs to its structure. And not only the erasure which must always be able to overtake it (without which it would not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance), but also the erasure which constitutes it from the outset as a trace, which situates it as the change of site, and makes it disappear in its appearance, makes it emerge from itself in its production. The erasure of the early trace (die frühre Spur) of difference is therefore the “same” as its tracing in the text of metaphysics. This latter must have maintained the mark of what it has lost, reserved, put aside. The paradox of such a structure, in the language of metaphysics, is an inversion of metaphysical concepts, which produces the following effect: the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace. It is no longer what every reference refers to in the last analysis. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized reference. It is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace.35
It is impossible, as Derrida tells us, to think différance except from within metaphysical inscriptions because in a certain sense it is the movement of all things into time and space that allows things to even be at all. It is not the gift of some static Being known only as the trace of what has been withdrawn, but the movement of spatialization and temporalization that must be there if things can appear to us. Here, Derrida seems to be echoing Kant in that he is writing of the necessary temporalization and spatialization of all experience for human beings of the things around them. But, in his attempt to be true to Heidegger, Derrida is also arguing that this trace of the force of movement is not simply a transcendental horizon for us, but must indeed be actually thought if we are to be able to engage with the world around us as it presents us with things marked in their singularity.
This “marking off’ of things is something like an interval which allows things to be present only by pointing to the force of “presencing” that is both beyond them and at the same time present in their temporalization and spatialization. Again, to quote Derrida:
Let us go on. It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as a present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance of the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporalization). And it is this constitution of the present, as an “originary” and irreducibly nonsimple (and therefore stricto sensu nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protentions (to reproduce analogically and provisionally a phenomenological and transcendental language that soon will reveal itself to be inadequate), that I propose to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or différance. Which (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporalization.36
As a force that points beyond itself, and as Derrida tells us force is only one of the many approaches one can make to différance, it both allows things to be presented and at the same time disrupts the idea of any notion of absolute presence. But, it also disrupts the notion of the division between the ontic and the ontological difference, such that it is seemingly frozen into an epoch that we can historically apprehend as the unfolding of the truth of Being. This disruption, for Derrida, which is paradoxically a force that allows things to come into being and yet is never actually present per se, is the basis of what Derrida dares as Heideggerian hope:
There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.
From the vantage of this laughter and this dance, from the vantage of this affirmation foreign to all dialectics, the other side of nostalgia, what I will call Heideggerian hope, comes into question. I am not unaware how shocking this word might seem here. Nevertheless I am venturing it, without excluding any of its implications, and I relate it to what still seems to me to be the metaphysical part of “The Anaximander Fragment”: the quest for the proper word and the unique name. Speaking of the first word of Being (das frühre Wort des Seins: to khreon), Heidegger writes: “The relation to what is present that rules in the essence of presencing itself is a unique one (ist enine einzige), altogether incomparable to any other relation. It belongs to the uniqueness of Being itself (Sie gehört zur Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). Therefore, in order to name the essential nature of Being (das wesende Seins), language would have to find a single word, the unique word (ein einziges, das einzige Wort). From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word (denkende Wort) addressed to Being is (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird). Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being is always and everywhere throughout language.”37
In a certain sense Derrida writes that différance is not even adequately thought of as force if it is to be thought as something present or at hand in things themselves. It is the beyond that is indicated, and yet only indicated, by things that are in space and time and in a profound sense forced “to be” if there are to be singular beings. What I want to emphasize here is not whether or not Derrida is successful in displacing Kantian critical idealism as he suggests must be done if we are to deepen our understanding of how Being gives things to be only in time and space as that this is a gift from something other than ourselves and is irreducible to the conditions of possible knowledge for us. I obviously do not think Derrida is entirely successful in this displacement, or perhaps more strongly put, that we can think the truth of Being beyond our experience of it as finite creatures. But, this being said, Derrida from the beginning of his writing holds out that deconstruction is an experience that points beyond the presence of things and our knowledge of them to what is other to them, and that even if we cannot know this other—indeed by definition as an experience of the impossible we cannot know it—it must not be forsaken if we are to attend to the gift of Being; for, this gift (es gibt) is never reducible to what is given, as Heidegger eloquently writes.
However, is this holding on to the trace illuminating the trace of what is beyond some sort of negative theology as Jürgen Habermas argues? Not at all. For what Habermas misses in Derrida is that Heideggerian hope is inseparable from the ethical demand of hospitality on us. If all things in a play of forces are irreducible to a static Being that withdraws and conceals itself from the beings who are to illuminate its gift, then we cannot with certainty differentiate between Being and beings, for what is “other” is only indicated in beings themselves. Of course, to write on hospitality is to echo the great ideal which Kant writes about in “Toward Perpetual Peace.” Hospitality, in Kant, is explicitly anti-imperial and extraordinarily radical. This right to visit, for Kant, this right to be treated well when one is a foreigner, carries with it the inverse responsibility that those who visit do not violate the hospitality that is offered. It is precisely in hospitality that Kant condemns what we would now call imperialist actions. He is almost prophetic when he writes:
If one compares with this the inhospitable behavior of civilized, especially commercial, states in our part of the world, the injustice they show in visiting foreign lands and peoples (which with them is tantamount to conquering them) goes to horrifying lengths. When America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth were discovered, they were, to them, countries belonging to no one, since they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In the East Indies (Hindustan), they brought in foreign soldiers under the pretext of merely proposing to set up trading posts, but with them oppression of the inhabitants, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, rebellions, treachery, and the whole litany of troubles that oppress the human race.38
Derrida is, of course, in accord with Kant’s anti-imperialist spirit. And, indeed, many of his specific political proposals—such as the “city of refugees,” which would allow refugees a space of freedom from persecution for their so-called illegal status in big cities throughout Europe—is certainly consistent with this spirit. Many of these refugees have fled their home countries because of the inhospitable behavior of the state. For Derrida, then, hospitality is tested in our openness to the stranger who seeks shelter among us.
In Derrida we can never know that the other to Being may not present itself to us in an actual human being. Perhaps there could be no other way for this other to present himself to us, so we must attend to this other as if this other may well be the messiah for whom we have waited. Levinas, and we will return to his ideas in the next chapter, always insists that the other man is my neighbor—and he uses the word man, as Luce Irigaray reminds us—because he is my universal brother in my humanity. But, for Derrida, there is no promise that the figuration of the other will appear to us in human form; truly, the other might actually be other than human and we would not be able to know in advance that this is indeed the other who will redeem us. Derrida makes the distinction between those whom we invite and those who visit us, as the larger notions of visitation and invitation are used to distinguish the seemingly incompatible sides of hospitality. Derrida knows that the demand for hospitality in our world is exceedingly real, which is why he advocates and defends the institutionalization of the “city of refuge.” Thus, we are called to prepare ourselves by developing something close to a radicalized culture of hospitality. Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to argue that hospitality is culture itself, and here again he echoes Kant’s mocking of the so-called European states of high culture who fall into the state of nature when they land on foreign soil. So, we must prepare in both politics and ethics to shelter refugees and those who seek shelter within us.
For Derrida, again echoing Heidegger, since we cannot know who is to arrive we must also be open to the incompleteness and inadequacies of any of our preparations. Derrida explains to us:
But, on the other hand, the opposite is also nevertheless true, simultaneously and irrepressibly true: to be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken [surprendre], to be ready to not be ready, if such is possible, to let oneself be overtaken, to not even let oneself be overtaken, to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent, violated and raped [violée], stolen [vole] (the whole question of violence and violation/rape and of expropriation and de-propriation is waiting for us), precisely where one is not ready to receive—and not only not yet ready but not ready, unprepared in a mode that is not even that of the “not yet.”39
Indeed, Derrida refers to deconstruction as the experience of the apprehension of this impossible hospitality. It is impossible because we cannot prepare for who is to arrive and what it might mean for us. It might, to paraphrase Derrida, even take us by surprise with a truly frightening visitation in the form of an animal or a specter. This being might only appear as monstrous because we view this other as shut out from the reach of humanity, but for Derrida it is simply not enough to grit our teeth and extend our vision so that we can see as human what we have formally denied as seeming like ourselves. For, if we are truly to welcome the other as other, if we are truly to accept and dare to open ourselves to the gift of what might be truly different from what is now, then we must be willing to yield even our idea of what is human as the basis of any act of welcoming.
We are ultimately responsible to extend ourselves to the breaking point of all that is familiar to us and must refuse to make it familiar by saying, “After all, this other is truly like ourselves.” Derrida elaborates on this point, suggesting:
If every concept shelters or lets itself be haunted by another concept, by an other than itself that is no longer even its other, then no concept remains in place any longer. This is about the concept of concept, and this is why I suggested earlier that hospitality, the experience, the apprehension, the exercise of impossible hospitality, of hospitality as the possibility of impossibility (to receive another guest whom I am incapable of welcoming, to become capable of that which I am incapable of)—this is the exemplary experience of deconstruction itself, when it is or does what it has to do or be, that is, the experience of the impossible. Hospitality—this is a name of an example of deconstruction. Of the deconstruction of the concept, of the concept of concept, as well of its construction, its home, its “at-home” [son chez-soi]. Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; deconstruction is hospitality to the other, to the other than oneself, the other than “its other,” to an other who is beyond any “its other.”40
Heidegger tells us that as beings thrown into the world, we are in a certain sense “guilty” and called to an attention that we cannot adequately give. This is an unusual use of the word guilt because it is associated with our finitude and the danger of a lack of attention which inheres in such finitude, particularly when it refuses the stark confrontation of death. But, Derrida deepens the Heideggerian understanding of guilt by suggesting that those of us who have survived what he often refers to as the infinite horror of our world have placed upon us a demand for our forgiveness by the other that has gone before.
Derrida constantly reminds us that the unforgivable occurred not only in Auschwitz but also in apartheid, Rwanda, and Palestine. To take on this a priori acceptance that we must be forgiven by the other who has gone before us is integral to the compassion that Derrida insists can only arise if we open ourselves to suffer what the other has gone through even while knowing we can never do so.
Besides, regarding everything for which Auschwitz remains both the proper name and the metonymy, we would have to speak of this painful but essential experience which consists in reproaching oneself as well, in front of the dead, as it were, with having survived, with being a survivor. There would be, there is sometimes is, a feeling of guilt, muted or acute, for living, for surviving, and therefore an injunction to ask for forgiveness, to ask the dead or one knows not who, for the simple fact of being there [être là], alive, that is to say, for surviving, for being here, still here, always here, here where the other is no longer—and therefore to ask for forgiveness for one’s being-there [être là], a being there originarily guilty. Being-there: this would be asking for forgiveness; this would be to be inscribed in a scene of forgiveness, and of impossible forgiveness.41
We are always, in a profound sense, guilty of giving too little and arriving too late. Derrida is serious when he writes that none of us is in a position to have a good conscience. But, this forgiveness, which is inseparable from attending to the gift of how we are left to be, is integrally connected to the passivity and the patience demanded by what he writes of as an impossible hospitality. It is impossible because we must be willing to take in what is beyond our experience and therefore might shatter the very idea we have of it. And, again to return to Habermas and his insistence that this is negative theology, we have to see that since we cannot know who is in advance this other that comes to us we must always be willing to invite her in and shelter her. Thus, this is not some kind of negative gesture on Derrida’s part in which we pray to the trace of the other and hope that they might arrive. Truly, these others are arriving among us all the time. And, we must create institutional structures from a “city of refugees” to immigration laws so as to actively reach out to this other.
Some of these thoughts on hospitality may seem abstract and perhaps deserve a more illuminating example. I am a part of a peace group, Take Back the Future, which was asked in 2002 by the Muslim Circle of North America to participate in a demonstration outside the former immigration services office. Muslim men from many different countries were being asked to reregister their legal status because they were citizens of countries being dominated by governments supposedly affiliated with Islamic fundamentalism. This is a mundane example of how the other arrives with a demand that we live up to our hospitality. Our group aimed to accomplish just that, and we did indeed demonstrate in support of these groups; although, sadly, we were one of the only groups of white U.S. citizens who participated. It is this kind of arrival that Derrida tells us we must take infinitely seriously, for we can never know that we might find ourselves redeemed by giving shelter to this other. Redemption, in Derrida, is hospitality; it is not some future forgiveness that may be bestowed on us. It is how we ask for forgiveness by taking on what is other to ourselves that makes us responsible, and it is in this responsibility that we find an opening to the future of how we can shape the world around us into a radically different place.
Truthfully, there is a certain sense in which Derrida argues this is a messianism without the messiah because this emancipatory promise is not only always available to us but something that is always asked of us. Again, to quote Derrida:
Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains undeconstructable as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural Messianism, a Messianism without religion, even a messianic without Messianism, an idea of justice—which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights—and an idea of democracy—which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today [permit me to refer here to the “Force of Law” and the Other Heading]. But this is perhaps what must now be thought and thought otherwise in order to ask oneself where Marxism is going, which is also to say, where Marxism is leading and where is it to be led [où conduire le Marxisme]: where to lead it by interpreting it, which cannot happen without transformation, and not where can it lead us such as it is or such as it will have been.42
So, we cannot simply affirm that things will always be different, and suggest this is meeting our responsibility. We must always offer hospitality. To offer hospitality we must take positions and negotiate so that there are actual institutions that seek to realize this ideal. Of course, hospitality is not an ideal as Kant described ideals and it is also not reducible to ideals precisely, because if we are truly hospitable to the other we may have to revise what we mean by something like the word ideal itself.
Derrida has written that the affirmation of the gift of Being should be affirmative in that we attend to the forces of différance that allow things to always be otherwise. For Heidegger, our hands are already dirty as finite creatures. We cannot simply affirm things as they are or as they might be otherwise, for we are always already in a concrete situation that puts demands on us to live up to hospitality. Thus, we are called to negotiate:
Let us begin by distinguishing affirmation and position. I am very invested in this distinction. For me it is of the utmost importance. One must not be content with affirmation. One needs position. That is, one must create institutions. Therefore, one needs position. One needs a stance. Thus, negotiation, at this particular moment, does not simply take place between affirmation and negation, position and negation: it takes place between affirmation and position, because the position threatens the affirmation. That is to say that in itself institutionalization in its very success threatens the movement of unconditional affirmation. And yet this needs to happen, for if the affirmation were content to—how shall I say it—to wash its hands of the institution in order to remain at a distance, in order to say, “I affirm, and then the rest is of no interest to me, the institution does not interest me ... let the others take care of that,” then this affirmation would deny itself, it would not be an affirmation. Any affirmation, any promise in its very structure requires its fulfillment. There is no promise that does not require its fulfillment. Affirmation requires a position. It requires that one move to action and that one do something, even if it is imperfect.43
In Derrida, we cannot wait, we are called to act now, and indeed to pay attention to those forces that are marginalized or excluded that lie at the very heart of our responsibility to the future. Ultimately, as I argued many years ago in The Philosophy of the Limit, deconstruction is fundamentally ethical in that it serves as the protector of what is still yet to come.44 The limit of theoretical knowledge stands against Heideggerian pessimism in that it is impossible to know definitively what is possible or impossible in terms of political change. Thus, we cannot know that our activities to reform the world will necessarily enhance the oblivion of Being by reinforcing the subjectification of everything. We must not only think, but we must also act if we are to be hospitable. Deconstruction is inseparable from this call to action; we do not wait for God or moan about the absence of God. But, can the moral image of the world, even if it need be radically rethought after deconstruction, survive deconstruction?
Derrida tells us again and again that the great ideals of humanity, freedom, and equality are never obsolete, and this is not just because they are ideals and never reducible to historical reality. In a deep sense, how do we negotiate, how do we engage with legal and political institutions without these great ideals? If we are called to negotiate then we are called to negotiate with ideals themselves. Thus, as I argued in The Philosophy of the Limit, we are responsible to the context into which we are thrown and this historical context includes no less than these ideals, damaged as they are by the horrific reality of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.45 Because it calls us to take positions, deconstruction as it seeks fidelity with hospitality is aligned with nothing less than practical philosophy.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 50.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 10.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 11.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 64.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 63.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 274 (A142/B182).
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 92–93.
See, for instance, the works the Marburg School, such as Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Dimmler, 1885).
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 273 (A141/B180).
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 67.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 238 (A118).
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 55–56.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 83.
Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 54.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 110–111.
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 112.
Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1967), 242.
Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 176.
Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 244.
Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 188–189.
Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 88.
Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 89.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 322.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 332.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 243.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 239.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 245.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 233–234.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 251.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 330.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 340–341.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 260.
See, generally, Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 24.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” 13.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” 27.
Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 329 (8:359).
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 361.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, 364.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, 382–383.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59.
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 25–26.
See, generally, Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992).
See, generally, Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992).