Desubjectivation of Time and Self-Affection: Kant in Heidegger

Emilia Angelova, Trent University

Paper Submitted on September 1, 2010 for publication in Kant-Akten: Proceedings of the XI International Kant Kongress (Italy 2010) Heideggers interpretation of Kants Critique of Pure Reason (KrV)1 in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik2 is well known for its destruction of the categories and destruction of the faculties. Reason, as Heidegger argues, is receptive of its regulative ideas. That is, reason is receptive of its own spontaneity, and this moment is a selfaffectionreasons receptivity to its own spontaneity is reducible neither to a phenomenon nor a noumenon. This goes against a two-world view of noumena (that would put noumena in a metaphysically different world), in which reason as generating a regulative idea of freedom would be doubled by a reason as a free spontaneity in a metaphysically different world. The self-affection of reason is understood in terms of what Heidegger calls time as pure self-affection. The subject, therefore, is understood as the temporal backdrop of a synthesis that is itself an openness to time in reasons open relation with Being. In such a synthesis, times taking on the character of self-hood is affected by the very time that it is synthesizing, and there is no subject given in advance of this affection. Time as self-hood and time synthesized as a permanent object are strictly correlative.

Citations in English are taken from Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason. Norman

Kemp Smith, trans. London 1929. This text is referred in the available English translation of Heideggers Kantbuch.
2

Heidegger, Martin: Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Vierte, Erweiterte Aufl.,

Frankfurt am Main 1973/Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Richard Taft, trans. 4th ed. Bloomington 1990. References to this book are indicated by K followed by pagination in the German edition.
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To say that Heidegger attempts to desubjectify3 Kants notions of time and selfaffection means just that. Heidegger does not himself speak of reason as self-affection. But his view of time as pure self-affection, as I want to show in this paper, gives us an interpretation of the self-affection of reasonand of reasons thought of the thing in itselfthat escapes the errors of substantializing, epistemologizing, or introducing a twoworld view of either reason or the thing in itself. In his discussion of Kants dialectic (in section 29) Heidegger makes a few remarks about the I of the transcendental unity of apperception, namely, about the incompleteness of the I of the transcendental unity of apperception. Since his remarks arise in a discussion of dialectic, we can take these remarks about the incompleteness of the I of apperception as pertaining to the non-substantiality of the I of paralogism. Given what he has to say in the sections prior to and after section 29, it is clear that the incompleteness of the I of apperception is linked to an ecstatic temporality of the I. Heidegger writes of the transcendental unity of apperception that: The proposing of this lasting unity, as the sameness of the totality of the rules of affinity, is the basic impulse of the letting-stand-against-of . . . In such a proposing self-orienting toward . . . the self in this orienting-toward . . . is, as it were, taken outside./ In this way, the I propose accompanies [begleitet] all representing. But it is not a question of a nearby consummated act of knowing which is directed by thinking itself.4

I borrow this term from Dahlstrom, Daniel: Heideggers Kantian Turn: Notes to His

Commentary on the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In: Review of Metaphysics 45, no. 2 (1991): 351-74. On Kant on time and self-affection in the later Heidegger, see also Engelland, Chad: Heidegger on Overcoming Rationalism through Transcendental Philosophy. In: Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2008): 17-41.
4

K 145, Heideggers ellipses. Heidegger in this passage clearly opposes Kant to Fichtes

self-positing act as practice, cf. K 185. On Fichte as the true transcendental philosopher and how he transformed Kantian apperception into intellectual intuition, see the
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Key in this passage is Heideggers emphatic interpretation of the I think as an I propose, and as well his emphasis that the I propose, and thence the I, are not already consummated acts, but go with a pure self-orienting toward . . .. That is, the I think is not an act that can complete itself or the I on its own, as if the I could be a substance sealed into itself. The I think is a proposing, a Vorstellen, the act itself that must stand before, be oriented toward, that which it proposes. The I propose is not directed by thinking itself, as if first there were thinking, and then there is the thing to which thinking is directed. Further, in his use of ellipses Heidegger is indicating that this I propose has an importantly open-ended and temporal structure: what the I proposes is that which is yet to be determined, something that will arise in timeas will the I that proposes it. As Heidegger writes in the paragraph following the above passage: The I is the vehicle of the categories to the extent that in its preliminary self-orienting toward . . . , it brings them along [to a point] from which, as represented, regulative unities, they can unify.5 That is, the I is not a substantive, already unified thing, it is a vehicle of the categories, it is something arising in a self-orienting toward . . . , which occasions the representing of categories as unifiable. In the above passages, Heidegger clearly has in mind the argument from the opening sections on paralogism in the A edition of KrV, where Kant argues that the representation I think is only a vehicle that introduces all our thought, as belonging to consciousness. This concept or, if the term be preferred, the judgment I think, says Kant, is something that is itself transcendental and cannot be an object. It is only in transcendental illusion that human reason takes this vehicle of thought itself as an object, as a substantial thinking being; it is only in illusion that this vehicle of thought signifies the object of the rational psychologist:

commentary in Ameriks, Karl: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy. Cambridge 2000: 234-244.
5

K 145, translators brackets.

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[T]his is the vehicle [Vehikel] of all concepts, and therefore also of transcendental concepts, and so is always included in the conceiving of these latter, and is itself transcendental. But it can have no special designation, because it serves only to introduce all our thought, as belonging to consciousness. Meanwhile, however free it be of empirical admixture (impressions or senses), it yet enables us to distinguish, through the nature of our faculty of representation, two kinds of objects. I, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called soul.6 The I think of apperception is a vehicle that merely introduces our thoughts as transcendental predicates of the I think. That is, the I think or consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular objectit introduces predicates of something but it cannot introduce anything like a subject that bears those predicates. For Kant writes: [Of] the simple, and in itself completely empty, representation I [. . .] we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies [begleitet] all concepts. Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgement upon it has always already made use of its representation. And the reason why this inconvenience is inseparably bound up with it, is that consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object [. . .] 7

6 7

KrV, B400/A342, AA 03: 263.1-9/AA 04: 216.9-17. KrV, B404/A346, AA 03: 265.15-27/AA 04: 218-9. 20-3. For a reading of this passage,

see Henrich, Dieter: On the Unity of Subjectivity. In: The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kants Philosophy. Richard Velkley, ed. Cambridge, Mass. 1994: 17-55; and Henrich, Dieter: Bewutes Leben: Untersuchungen zum Verhltnis von Subjektivitt und Metaphysik. Stuttgart 1999: 97-115.
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We may recall that in the B deduction, the unity of the I is thus no longer correlative to the unity of the categories, it comes instead from self-affection. Heidegger argues that it is wrong to detach the categories from the I in a way that would make the I fall back on a subject as immanently bearing its own predicates. But he sees that Kants introduction of the self-affective I in the B deduction tells us something important, namely, that the I is not given in advance as substance but only as a pure subject as such that arises in the course of self-affection. The task of the B deduction is deducing the objective validity of the categories as something subjective in its origin and yet as necessarily applying to objects that are distinct from the self.8 While the A deduction had resolved this task by placing this subjective origin in pure imagination and remained putatively a subjective deduction, the B deduction thus makes a detour and places this origin in the unity of concepts of the understanding, what Kant calls a higher combination.9 But this means that the unity sought in the B deduction is importantly located in the object of understanding, which includes the manifold of space and time understood in that object; the higher combination provided by the understanding does not just combine or constitute objects within space and time, it combines the manifold of space and time themselves as unities. The problem is that such a combination does not meet the strong requirement that Kant himself stipulates in section 26, that concepts be constitutive of their object in accordance
8

Guyer, Paul: The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. In: The Cambridge

Companion to Kant. Paul Guyer, ed. Cambridge 1992: 123-61. On Kants deductions in KrV and what particular issues required that the later Kant had to continue working on the transcendental deduction, see Tuschling, Burkhard: Apperception and Ether: On the Idea of a Transcendental Deductions of Matter in Kants Opus Posthumum. In: Kants Transcendental Deductions. The Three Critiques and the Opus Posthumum. Eckart Frster, ed. 1989: 193-217. With respect to the notion of transcendental deduction and questio juris, see Henrich, Dieter: Identitt und Objektivitt, Eine Untersuchung ber Kants Transzendentale Deduktion. Heidelberg 1976.
9

KrV, B130-1, AA 03: 108.1-15.

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with empirical consciousness of a given manifold of one intuition.10 The problem in the B deduction, as Paul Guyer puts it, is that: Although one might have thought that an object was something distinct from any merely subjective connection of representations, requiring something in addition to the latter, Kant would now be defining an object as constituted by any conceptual connection of the manifold of intuition whatever, even if it did not involve any such contrast with the subject.11 Kant assumes in the B deduction that the subject is itself constituting the object, including the manifold of intuition out of which the object is synthesized, so Kant allows that the constituted object not involve contrast with the subject. The issue of objects incompleteness (of this higher combination) that emerges here is as follows. In the B deduction, Kant admits that completion of the deduction of the objective validity of the categories means recognizing that the unity of space and time themselves require a synthesis of the understanding. Behind this admission of objects incompleteness is a point well articulated by Guyer: For the purposes of the Transcendental Aesthetic the unity of space and timethat is, the fact that all regions of space constitute parts of a single all-inclusive space and all moments of time parts of a single all-inclusive timecould be treated as if merely given. [The B deduction recognized that] because nothing can be presented to us that is not presented to us as occupying some determinate region of space or time or both, therefore nothing can be presented to us by our senses that is not subject to the combinatory activity of the understanding and thus the categories.12 That is, Kants concern is that it is not enough to appeal to space and time as mere givens, they must be subject to combinatory activity and thence be included in the deduction of the categories. But, if the object is to be not merely given but also giving, productive, then the well rehearsed distinction between a constituting subject and a
10 11

KrV, B144, AA 03: 115.24-25. Guyer, 1992, op. cit., 151. Guyer, 1992, op. cit., 153.
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constituted object breaks down. This is why Kant introduces self-affection in the B deduction. If the unity of space and time themselves require a synthesis of the understanding, and if this synthesis is given not by a pure, consummated act of the I, but through self-affection, then (and only then) we can be granted a synthesis of space and time that does not break down the subject-object distinction (with which the completeness requirement is concerned), that is, does not violate the requirement that concepts accord with empirical consciousness of a given manifold of one intuition. In the B deduction, Kant thus introduces the theme of self-affection, as he writes of inner sense, the empirical representation of time, that it is paradoxical: [T]his sense represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected, and this would seem to be contradictory, since we should then have to be in a passive relation [of active affection] to ourselves.13 Kant is speaking of our intuition of ourselves as something that we ourselves affect in ourselves. The self that we intuit is an appearance that we self-affect. Kant writes: [The understanding] in respect of the manifold which may be given to it in accordance with the form of sensible intuition, is able to determine sensibility inwardly. Thus [it], under the title of a transcendental synthesis of the imagination, performs the act upon the passive subject, whose faculty it is, and we are therefore justified in saying that inner sense is affected thereby.14 The understanding, under the title of a transcendental synthesis of the imagination, acts upon a manifold given to it in accordance with the form of sensible intuition. It is thereby able to determine sensibility inwardly, it synthesizes it. In doing so, the understanding performs an act upon the passive subject (which has this understanding as its faculty). The result is a combination of the manifold being produced in the subject, by a faculty of the subject. But the combination is produced in accordance with the form of sensible intuitioncompleteness is satisfied through involvement with a passive subject. In other

13 14

KrV, B152-3, AA 03: 120.25-28. KrV, B153, AA 03: 121.6-12.

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words, we are here drawing a distinction between: an active understanding that works in accordance with the form of sensible intuition to produce a synthesis; and a passive subject for whom this synthesis appears as a combination produced by the understanding itself. The former side satisfies Kants general requirement that concepts accord with empirical consciousness of a given manifold of one intuition; the latter satisfies the demand of the B deduction that the unity of space and time themselves require a synthesis of the understanding. It cannot be underestimated that Kants insight into the schematism of time, too, bears on the challenge of incompleteness as a problem to which both the A and B deductions make contributions. Heidegger will interpret this self-affecting subject as the pure-subject, and self-affection as the self-affection of time, in which, as we said above, time takes on the character of selfhood in the act of synthesizing time as having objective permanence. For Heidegger, To the extent that it is itself only what it is in this I think, the essence of pure thinking as well as that of the I lies in pure self-consciousness.15 It is an inquiry in the ontological, not merely the ontic, character of time that is initiated by the problematizing of subject and object in Kants two deductions. Heideggers inquiry preserves, even as he transforms it, the special role for the pure concepts of understanding. In the A deduction Kant characterizes the transcendental essence of the I as follows: The fixed and perduring I (of pure apperception) constitutes the correlate of all of our representations [. . .].16 And in the chapter on Schematism, Kant characterizes the transcendental essence of time as follows: Time does not lapse [. . .] [time] is itself unchanging and perduring17; and in the First Analogy: Time [. . .] perdures and does not change.18 In both cases, of the I and of time, there is something perduringbut in both cases the perdurance, as Heidegger formulates this, is not that of time, but of temporality.

15 16 17 18

K 145. KrV, A123, AA 04: 91.15-16. KrV, A143/B183, AA 04: 102.36-37/ AA 03: 137.34-35. KrV, A182/B224f., AA 04: 124-125.31-1/ AA 03: 162.10-11.
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That is, to say that time or the I perdures does not mean that some thing, substance, or dimension, with a fixed a priori structure stays the same, rather it means that an ecstatic temporality remains open, unfilled, abyssal, that an origination of temporality perdures in its original openness. For Heidegger, Kant saw that time and the I are not graspable themselves as metaphysical entities present in a transcendent world apart from transcendental determinations of time, rather he saw these only as contingent pre-conditions of time. Heidegger thus argues that the I, pure reason is essentially temporal, and moreover: Time and the I no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds: they are the same. With his laying of the ground for metaphysics [in the A deduction] through the radicalism with which, for the first time, he transcendentally interpreted both time, always for itself, and the I think always for itself, Kant [in the A deduction] brought both of them together in their original samenesswithout, to be sure, expressly seeing this for himself.19 Both time and the I are originary (i.e., are open to an original temporality). It is this new and radical role that Heidegger now bestows upon time and the I because of the way that each is, particularly in the A deduction, always for itself.20 Keeping in mind the subject-object distinction that presents the basis for Kants destruction of the categories and of the faculties, two points about the I behind Heideggers claim about temporality are especially important to us. The first concern is with the challenges posed for representation as correlate and opposition. Since the I as perduring is the correlate of representations, perdurance cannot mean something like mental essence: Should Kant who worked out the paralogism of substantiality based on the particular laying of ground for ontology, have meant by the fixed and perduring I

19 20

K 185-86. For Sherover, this passage renders Kant a Leibnizian, that Kant saw the I and time as

monads. Sherover, Charles M.: Heidegger, Kant and Time. Bloomington and London 1971: 208, n189.
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something like a mental substance?21 The answer, of course, is no. The second concern is the question of the finitude of time. Kant could not mean that, albeit it is not a substance, the I is nevertheless infinite and eternal. This is because for Kant, The fixed and perduring I (of pure apperception) constitutes the correlate of all of our representations [. . .].22 The important point here is that the perduring I is a correlatum of our representations. As Heidegger writes, the I think as pure apperception can bring before itself in advance something within which what is objective becomes experienceable as the same throughout change.23 The fixed I is so called because as I think, i.e., as I place before, it brings before itself [something] like standing and enduring. As I, it forms the correlate of constancy [Bestndigkeit] in general. (ibid.) The fixity of the I, perdurance, is all and only a correlate of a constancy it generates in representations (in schematizing intuition). And this sort of fixity cannot be closed off, turned into something infinite and eternal, precisely because it is always a correlate to and affected by representations. In short, for Heidegger, the perdurance of the Kantian I is the correlate of a constancy of representations, where this constancy is a projection of the horizon of the unity of concepts of understanding. This constancy is not pre-given, it always hinges on this projective horizon of concepts. To put this in Heideggers own terms, the I is not only a relation of there-upon . . . [of the projection, des Hin-zu-auf . . .], but is a correlation of the back-into . . . [of the reflection, des Zurck-zu-in . . .], that is, what the I projects upon affects it.24 And so the I forms the Being-in-opposition-to [das Dawider] of the horizon that is a requisite for finite knowledgeit always abides in opposition to the horizon that projects the constancy that reflects back to the I. By bringing before itself the horizon of unity of the pure concepts of understanding, it determines them as grasping something within which what is objective is understood as

21 22 23 24

K 187. KrV, A123, AA 04: 91.15-16. K 187. K 186.

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the same25 despite change, and in this way the I opens up the horizon of self-hood in which it can abide as perduring. That is, the temporality of the I means something more than chronology, for it springs forth from itself yet from within the customary chronology.26 We can back up the above points about the temporality of pure synthesis briefly, by going back to Heideggers interpretation of Kants analysis of the imaginations temporal character, in the A deduction. In the Preliminary Remark Kant considers three syntheses, of apprehension, of reproduction and of pure recognition in a concept. It is usually understood by interpreters of Kant that these three syntheses of the manifold of appearance determine respectively the past, present, and future, where the past, present and future are understood on the model of properties of a time that is external to the syntheses and that underlies their possibility like an everlasting cosmological time or time of the soul, as for example, in Aristotle.27 Yet Heidegger argues that Kant in fact does not mean that the three syntheses each consummate a synthesis, as if they are recovering different moments of an external time, geared together and united by something external to them. Rather, they are unified in one, internally, the three together constitute a pure synthesis in general, pure synthesis as such. They are but one unifying pure synthesis in the modes of apprehension, reproduction and recognitionsynthesis as such has the character of either apprehension or reproduction or recognition. Importantly, for Heidegger the transcendental character of the three modes of synthesis is constitutive of the condition for the possibility of empirical synthesis, together they make possible the constitution of objectivity. The transcendental character of imagination in this role of pure synthesis as such is that: . . . in pure intuition, in pure imagination, and in pure thinking, there is already in each case a corresponding pure apprehending, pure reproducing, and pure recognizing synthesis which is also
25 26 27

KrV, B105, AA 03: 92.20. K 188. See Walsh, W.H. : Kant on the Perception of Time. In: Kant Studies Today. Lewis

White Beck, ed. LaSalle 1969: 160-81.

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constitutive.28 Each of the faculties, including the imagination, has a synthetic character involving all three of these syntheses; the last form of synthesis, of pure recognition, is thus constitutive of the subject. The subject is not understood as Aristotelian substance, something ontic that can be represented, but as the formal-ontological structure of representing as such. Kant requires of pure apperception that all our representations . . . are subject to time (ibid.). In that time is a pure self-affection, it is the temporal (ontological) character of the synthesis makes everything submissive to time. Kant is thus saying that the empirical selfs relation to itself is mediated by pure apperception: without pure apperception, identification as such, there is not even empirical synthesis. The three modes of synthesis, which as a whole constitute the subject, outline the temporal character of apperception, showing how the subject cannot be a substance. First, in the synthesis of apprehension which, Kant says, runs through the sensuous manifold of impressions, it is the mind that must already be saying in advance now and now and nowif it is to be able to encounter now this and now that and now all this in particular.29 Apprehension forms precisely the like of the now and the sequence of nows. Empirical intuition takes in the present in the now: the now is a receptivity in a pure synthesis which in itself forms that with which it is concerned. In apprehension, imagination is already found in intuition. Imagination as receptive and as apprehension, is not identical with imagination, but with the active faculty [ttiges Vermgen] of the synthesis, transcendental power of imagination [transzendentalen Einbildungskraft].30 Second, the synthesis of reproduction in empirical synthesis31 similarly has a transcendental status, it produces the bringing-forth-again. For Kant, this synthesis is reproductive since the mind can represent the being (something previously perceived) even without the presence of the object. On Heideggers view, it is imagination or the mind that brings forth the being represented earlier in order to represent it in a more

28 29 30 31

K 172. K 173. KrV, A 120, AA 04: 89.15-16; A102, AA 04: 79.12-13. KrV, A101, AA 04: 78.18.
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actual unity with the being perceived from time to time. In order for the mind to distinguish the no longer now as such, it must differentiate time, that is, it must in advance and prior to experience have brought forth again and unified with the specific now. Distinguishing the now as such (apprehension) and the after as such (reproduction) constitute a retaining forming of the no-longer-now that is in itself an at that time (every now is a now already just arrived): the origin of time as unity of present and a having-been-ness. Both modes, the synthesis of the past, conjoined with the synthesis of apprehension (as a synthesis of the present), are necessary conditions of the possibility of pure synthesis as original time-forming: without these modes the purest and first grounding representations of space and time could not spring forth even once.32 Third is the pure synthesis of recognition in a conceptand no mode of synthesis is more important than this one. Heideggers insight is that between Kants recognition and the future, which is what this mode corresponds to (since the object that is synthesized in the pure synthesis of recognition is time33), there is no connection whatsoever. The third mode, of the future, does not build upon, or succeed after, the first and then the second, in it time itself springs forth from time. Especially in respect of the third mode of synthesis, Kant thus opposes in the sharpest terms the I think in particular and reason in general to all time-relations.34

By way of concluding, Heidegger grants this discovery: As he thinks through the threefold synthesis of the transcendental power of imagination, Kant gains insight into apperceptive consciousness, and apperception requires that the perception as such always attends to what has presence [das Anwesende] as such (ibid.). Perception can attend to itself, it can turn-toward the Objekt and Gegenstand that brings it into apperception and thereby turn to the subjective time of the perduring I. Perception is

32 33 34

KrV, A102, AA 04: 79.4-6. KrV, A118, AA04: 88.3-8. K 178.

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referred to itself, is apperceptive, through anotherin time. But perception can turn to itself only through a synthesis of pure recognition that constitutes for the first time that which it is returning toas the same, a same that was never given beforehand. So the essence of pure inner sense is a springing forth of time in time: it is a springing forth of a time in which the I can perdure as the same, in relation to the time of the Objekt and Gegenstand. [T]ime as pure self-affection allows the pure succession of the sequence of nows to spring forth for the first time. . . .35 In this way, Heidegger derives his main point about the temporality, the subjectivity of the pure subject in Kant: it is not some fixed (innate) a priori transcendental unity, contained in a consciousness. Rather, it is the open temporality of relating to being that affects our concepts and representations.36 Importantly, reading into Kant the first steps of a desubjectivation of the notions of time and pure self-affection ties Kant to both distinct notions of primordial temporality, Temporalitt and Zeitlichkeit.

Notes

35

K 188. K 182. The text in Kant reads: The principle of the necessary unity of the pure

36

(productive) synthesis of the imagination prior to apperception is thus the ground of the possibility of all cognition, especially that of experience (KrV, A118, AA 04: 88.8-11).
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