Dahlstrom Kant Heidegger

Heidegger's Kantian Turn: Notes to His Commentary on the "Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft"
Author(s): Daniel Dahlstrom

Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Dec., 1991), pp. 329-361
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
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HEIDEGGER'S KANTIANTURN: NOTES TO
HIS COMMENTARYON THE
KRITIKDER REINEN VERNUNFT'
DANIEL DAHLSTROM
An the spring of 1928, approximately one year after the publication

of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger concludes a seminar on Kant's Kritik
der reinen Vernunft with the following remark:
Some years ago, as I studied the Kritik der reinen Vernunft anew and
read it against the backdrop of Husserl's phenomenology, it is, as it
were, as though scales fell from my eyes and Kant became for me an
essential confirmation of the Tightness of the path on which I
searched.2
With the publication of several of Heidegger's lectures at Marburg

and Freiburg, it is now possible to appreciate the full force of this
remark. For roughly a decade, during years so fateful to Heidegger
the philosopher and Heidegger the citizen, he was clearly preoccupied
with Kant's critical philosophy. The first book he published after
Sein und Zeit, and presumably the first installment towards the
projected completion of that torso, is Kant und das Problem der
Metaphysik (1929). Indeed, the latter, which he reissued four times
and occasionally expanded, is arguably the only book after 1927 that
is not simply a lecture or compilation of lectures issuing from Hei
1
This paper could not have been completed without the generous sup
port of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The refinement of the
paper was aided by the lively exchange with members and students (in
cluding Mr. Hans Ruin) of the Department of Philosophy of the University
of Stockholm, following the presentation of an earlier version of the paper
on May 17, 1990. I am also grateful to my colleagues, John McCarthy,
Thomas Pr?fer, and Robert Sokolowski for helpful comments on specific
portions of this paper.
2
Martin Heidegger, Ph?nomenohgische Interpretation von Kants Kri
tik der reinen Vernunft, Winter Semester 1927/28, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 25,
ed. Ingtraud G?rland (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), 431.
Hereafter this will be cited as "PIK." All translations in this essay are
my own.
Review of Metaphysics 45 (December 1991): 329-361. Copyright ? 1991 by the Review of

Metaphysics
330 DANIEL DAHLSTROM
degger's hand. Yet even thisis misleading, since Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik is based upon lectures delivered earlier at
Marburg. The final portion of Heidegger's lectures in the winter

semester of 1925-26, published as Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahr
heit, and the entire lectures of the winter semester of 1927-28, pub
lished as Ph?nomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der
reinen Vernunft, are devoted to the first two hundred pages of the
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV). The lectures delivered in the
spring semester of 1927, published as Grundprobleme der Ph?no
menologie (1927), contain critical studies of Kant's conceptions of
being and subjectivity in the KrV.

Heidegger's interest in Kant does not wane when he moves to
Freiburg to take up the chair vacated by Husserl. Not long after

his arrival, in the summer semester of 1930, he is offering lectures
on Kant's conceptions of causality and freedom, later published as
Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1930). Five years later Hei
degger devotes the entire winter semester (1935-36) to the "Doctrine

of Transcendental Principles," lectures that, unlike most of the oth
ers, Heidegger published during his lifetime as Die Frage nach dem
Ding in 1962.3
Assembled, these studies undertaken during what might be
called Heidegger's Kantian decade (roughly 1926 to 1936) practically
constitute a commentary on the KrV. The following essay sketches
the scope, significance, strategy, and soundness of that commentary
as a whole.
There are at least three reasons why Heidegger's commentary
on the ?TrFwarrants scrutiny. First, since consideration of Kant's
philosophy is projected as the first installment of the second, un
part of Sein und Zeit, the commentary can be expected to

published
3 are to be
The lectures containing Heidegger's "Kant-Commentary"
found in the following volumes of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann), listed here chronologically and with the abbreviation to be
used in this study: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. Walter Biemel,
Bd. 21 (1976), hereafter cited as "Logik99; Die Grundprobleme der Ph?no
menologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Bd. 24 (1975), hereafter
cited as "GP"; Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ed. Hartmut Tietjen,
Bd. 31 (1982), hereafter cited as "WmF"; Die Frage nach dem Ding, ed.
Petra Jaeger, Bd. 41 (1984), hereafter cited as "FD." A note on quotation
marks: when I am mentioning, not using a word or words, single quotation
marks are employed; when I am quoting an author, double quotation marks
are employed.
HEIDEGGER'S KANTIAN TURN 331
provide clues to the unfinished business of that project.4 Second,

given the profound affinity Heidegger finds between the critical phi
losophy, suitably interpreted, and his own fundamental ontology,
the commentary also helps clarify the peculiar sense in which Sein
und Zeit embodies a transcendental philosophy (the trappings of
which, along with phenomenology, he later
disavows).5 Third, pre
cisely where it is excessively tendentious, Heidegger's interpretation
not only challenges traditional readings of the KrV, but far more
importantly it outlines a central part of the argument for his basic

contention that knowledge or the possibility of experience, even as
Kant explains it, is based upon understanding being in terms of
temporality, conceived as an original, yet finite, transcending.

Of course, anyone even vaguely familiar with Heidegger's read
ings of the history of philosophy can appreciate that the use of the
term 'commentary' here
verges on equivocation. His so-called
"thoughtful dialogues" seem

oftenmuch more like rapacious mono
logues. Heidegger himself acknowledges that his interpretations

are "violent," aimed not so much at determining what a philosopher
"had in mind" or said, as at unpacking what the philosopher was
trying to say or should have been trying to say.6

It is not surprising that Heidegger is often criticized for twisting
beyond recognition the significance Kant gives to certain notions.7
4
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (T?bingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 39-40,
hereafter cited as "SZ"; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 4th, ex
panded edition (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), p. XVI, hereafter
cited as "KPM."
5
Compare the following: (1) Heidegger's advice on how to understand
his departure from "an earlier standpoint," namely, the hermeneutics of
SZ; (2) his reference to "phenomenology and all hermeneutical-transcen
dental questioning"; and (3) his equation of ontology and transcendental
philosophy in, respectively, "Aus einem Gespr?ch von der Sprache," in
Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 95-9; Nietzsche II (Pful
lingen: Neske, 1959), 414; and KPM, 84, 24-5. For a criticism that Hei
degger's elaboration of Lichtung and Ereignis nevertheless remains in the
tradition of a transcendental philosophy, see my "Die Macht des Denkens,"
inNach Heidegger: Die Aufgabe des Denkens, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher
and Jacques Poulain (Wien: Passagen, forthcoming).
6
"Gerade bei dieser zentralsten Aufgabe m?ssen wir r?cksichtslos
und mehr denn je nach dem trachten, was Kant hat sagen wollen?oder
gar nach dem, was er h?tte sagen sollen"; PIK, 338. See also PIK, 346
and KPM, p. XVII.
7
See Ernst Cassirer, "Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik: Be
merkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-Interpretation," Kant-Studien
(1931): 16-17; Heinrich Levy, "Heideggers Kantinterpretation," Logos 21
(1932): 6-8.
Yet for a generation of German philosophers in the Wilhelmzeit,

correcting the critical philosophy was very much la vogue n?okan
tienne. "To understand Kant is to go beyond him," Windelband
announces as he prefaces his program for a Kantian philosophy he
labels Kritizismus in Pr?ludien.8 Similarly, Hermann Cohen speaks
of "the weakness in Kant's foundation," a "basic mistake," and "an
internal harm to thinking by virtue of his terminology."9 In "Kant
und die Marburger Schule," Natorp testifies to a substantial but
unintended agreement among Cohen and his students "about the
"10
necessary corrections to the doctrine of Kant. Perhaps the central
such "correction" in reconstituting
consists as a function of thought
the role Kant assigns to intuition. Seizing upon Kant's insight that
every synthesis is an act of understanding rooted finally in apper
ception, the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism attempts to derive
all that is constitutive in knowing from the understanding.11 While
much of Heidegger's "phenomenological" interpretation of the KrV
is an attempt to counter this correction with one of his own, like his
Marburg predecessors he reads the KrV not primarily for its internal
consistency or its author's intentions, but rather for its adequacy.12
8
Wilhelm Windelband, Pr?ludien, 5th, expanded edition (T?bingen:
Mohr, 1915), Preface to the first edition, p. iv; see also Heinrich Rickert,
Wilhelm Windelband (T?bingen: Mohr, 1929), 6; and Paul Natorp, "Kant
und die Marburger Schule," Kant-Studien (1913): 193: "Eine Auseinander
setzung mit ihr [der Philosophie Kants] erkennt noch jeder, der in der
Philosophie vorw?rts will, als seine erste Pflicht." See also Hermann
Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Cassirer, 1922), p. XII.
9
Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 12, 27. See also Paul Natorp,
Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 3d edition (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1923), 46: "Aber hier ist nun Kant sehr leicht aus seinen eigenen
Voraussetzungen zu
korregieren."
10 von selbst ergeben, da?
"So hat besonders auch das sich ungesucht
?ber die notwendigen Korrekturen an der Lehre Kants unter uns, trotz
mancher Unterschiede der Formulierung im einzelnen, doch eine grosse
sachliche ?bereinstimmung obwaltet"; Natorp, "Kant und die Marburger
Schule," 196. See also p. 193: "Die Rede von einem orthodoxen Kantian
?simas der Marburger Schule war niemals begr?ndet."
11
"Also aus keinen voraus gegebenen, gleichsam feststehenden Denk
punkten und mit diesen zugleich gegebenen, ebenso festen Lagen solcher
Punkte gegeneinander, sondern aus dem Quell einer unersch?pflichen
Denkbewegung, atts dem Quell der Methode allein kann das synthetische
Urteil, das eigentliche Urteil ?berhaupt als synthetisches, sich erzeugen";
Natorp,12 Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 46.
See Cassirer, "Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik," 18. An
elderly Natorp and a youthful Heidegger were briefly colleagues at Marburg.
Though potentially as arbitrary as it is fruitful, the criterion

of adequacy must nevertheless be based upon what Kant actually
said. In other words, the degree of success of Heidegger's inter
pretation, by his own standards, depends upon the extent to which

he can show that the project of Kant's critical philosophy, on its
own terms, aims or should aim at the resolution of difficulties
capable
of a more adequate description and resolution in terminology quite
external to the critical philosophy.13 As a result, there are two
perspectives can critically

that be brought to bear on Heidegger's
commentary. Its success, even where he acknowledges its "violence"

and its pretension to demonstrate what Kant should have said, turns
on the accuracy of his understanding of what Kant did say as well
as the trenchancy of his argument that the same theme demands
the sort of analysis given, for example, in Sein und Zeit. In line
with the first of these critical perspectives, the concluding segment
of this paper demonstrates that there is plenty of room to criticize
what Heidegger presents as a straightforward reading of a doctrine
central to his "phenomenological interpretation": self-affection.
With some notable exceptions,14 the bulk of Heidegger's studies

of Kant between 1926 and 1936 focus on Kant's theoretical philosophy
and, in particular, on the sections concerned with what Heidegger
Cohen, who retired in 1912 and moved to Berlin, died in 1918. See Hei
degger, "Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Lehrstuhls seit 1866," in Die
Philipps-Universit?t zu Marburg, 1527-1927 (Marburg, 1927), 681-7.
13
That is to say, only through an understanding of what Kant explicitly
says will it be possible to show what he intended or should have been
intending to demonstrate. At the same time, the interpreter must make
the pretension of giving a more adequate account of the subject matter
than Kant does.
14
Heidegger turns to Kant's ethics in the last forty pages of WmF
and he discusses the moral significance of transcendental subjectivity in
Logik, 220-6; GP, 172-218; KPM, 150-4; and PIK, 315-16, 375. On the
deemphasis on Kant's moral writings see GP 201: "Wir erhalten ?ber die
Seinsart des Ich aus der Interpretation des Ich als moralischer Person
keinen eigentlichen Aufschlu?." In this connection see "Seinsvergessenheit
oder moralphilosophische Naivit?t? Heideggers Interpretation der prak
tischen Philosophie Kants," in Zur philosophischen Aktualit?t Heideggers,
Bd. 1: Philosophie und Politik, ed. Dietrich Papenfu? and Otto P?ggeler
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991), 167-79.
provocatively calls "Kant's ontology," namely the Transcendental

Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic.15 In Vom Wesen der
menschlichen Freiheit, Heidegger devotes about fifty pages to the
Third Antinomy, and in Grundprobleme der Ph?nomenologie, he ad
dresses the concept of being within the Transcendental Ideal and
briefly indicates implications of Kant's account of the Paralogisms
(Kant's critique of rational psychology or the doctrine of the soul).

But Heidegger's main interest in Kant during this decade is in the
first half of the KrV, where Kant claims to demonstrate how syn
thetic a priori knowledge underlying mathematics and natural sci
ence is possible. Thus, before 1930 Heidegger labels the doctrine
of schematism the "core" of the KrV, and after 1930 he speaks of
the System of Principles as "the decisive step."16 This interest over
a decade is graphically apparent in the chart printed in the appendix
at the end of the present essay.17
Given the scope of his reading of the KrV, it is also
noteworthy
what sections are not addressed or are only
briefly treated. The
Amphiboly chapter is barely mentioned, despite what from Heideg
ger's perspective is a most intriguing account of the notion of "noth
ing" (das Nichts).18 Neither the "world" antinomies nor the dis
tinction between "world" and "nature" is discussed. Surprising,
15
To speak of "Kant's ontology" is provocative for the (neo-Kantian)
epistemological interpretation of the KrV. Kant himself gives mixed sig
nals in the KrV, claiming that "the proud name of ontology" must give
way to "a mere analytic of pure understanding" (B303), yet placing "On
tologia" in apposition to "Transzendentalphilosophie" (B873). In his lec
tures, at any rate, Kant equates ontology and transcendental philosophy
as the system of principles of the possibility of experience. He speaks of
"Die transcendentale Philosophie ist die Ontologie"; Kants Werke XXVIII,
X, p. 679; "Ontologie ist die Wissenschaft welche Begriffe a priori zur Er
kenntnis der Dinge enth?lt. Sie wird auch genannt Transcendentalphi
losophie,"; Ibid., p. 617; and "Die Ontologie enth?lt die ersten Principien
aller Erkenntnis, die der Erfahrung korrespondiert"; Ibid., p. 474. See
also pp. 7,174-5, 390-1, 470, 576, 622, 650-1, 711.
16
For the earlier view, see Logik, 358; PIK, 168, 194, 209, 213, 431;
KPM, 17109,191. For the later view see FD, 130,146.
As already indicated by the opening quote, Heidegger hardly dis
guises his enthusiasm for Kant the philosopher. He regards Kant as a
"model," as "the primary and last scientific philosopher in the grandest
style since Plato and Aristotle," and as the philosopher who does not
"swindle" and can be "trusted completely"; GP 467-8. See also PIK, 309,
337, 426, 431; SZ, 23-4, 39-40, 427n.
18 der Metaphysik,"
See, however, Martin Heidegger "?berwindung
in Vortr?ge und Aufs?tze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 81.
too, is the brevity of Heidegger's treatment of the Paralogisms.

Though he contends that the KrV9s basic achievements depend upon
an implicit and largely undeveloped understanding of transcendental
subjectivity, Heidegger does not take the time to elaborate Kant's
own attempt to come to terms with the traditional account of the
subject.19 Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about the consid

erable time and energy Heidegger devotes to the study of what he
calls "the positive part" of the KrV, namely, the Transcendental
Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic.20
II
The significance of Heidegger's commentary can be gathered

from how, in his mind, the critical philosophy testified to the "right
ness of the path" of his own philosophical thinking. The expression
"rightness of the path" in German (Richtigkeit des Weges) carries
with it the connotation of a direction (Richtung), neatly capturing
the fact that the critical philosophy possesses a positive and a neg
ative significance for Heidegger. The critical philosophy turns from
the path of traditional ontology and points in the same general di
rection as does Heidegger's early project of fundamental ontology,
though the turn is not radical enough and Kant frequently returns
to the old road.21 Or, as Heidegger repeatedly puts it in his most
comprehensive study of the KrV, Kant repeatedly "wavers" or "os
cillates" (schwankt) between the path of traditional ontology and
the new directions into which his honest examination of the phe
nomena ought to propel him.22 Similarly, in KPM Kant is said to
"shrink back" from the possibilities for explaining transcendence
19
One wonders how, for example, Heidegger reads Kant's intriguing
remarks at B422-3n in the light of his interpretation.
20
386.
21PJ?T,
The metaphor suggests, perhaps misleadingly, that ancients, Kant,
and Heidegger aim at the same destination. Like Hegel, Heidegger simply
fails or refuses to entertain the more sober thesis of a family resemblance
among uses of "to be" in the history of philosophy.
22
PIK could well be read as variations on the theme of Kant's wavering
(Schwankung). Heidegger accuses Kant of "wavering" (or in more col
loquial American, of "waffling") in his accounts of the thing in itself (PIK,
100), the table of judgments (PIK, 259,289), the deduction (PIK, 305), and
appearances (PIK, 339). There are additional "waverings" between psy
afforded by construing the temporality of transcendental imagi

nation not simply as the "middle," but as the common "root" of the
two "stems" of knowledge: sentience and understanding.23
Precisely for these reasons, one significance of Heidegger's
commentary on the KrV is the part it plays in the unfinished?or

at least unpublished?second part of Sein und Zeit, the dismantling
(Destruktion, Abbau) of the history of ontology with a view towards

exposing temporality as the hidden or neglected source of traditional
ontological horizons and conceptions. This positive appropriation

of the past is meant to assure the authenticity of the concepts wielded
in fundamental ontology.24 In the context of this project Kant is
said, on theone hand, to continue the tradition of ancient

ontology
and its co-incidence with a specific interpretation of time, uncritically
assimilating what 'to be' means to the temporal structure of the

sheer presencing of something (die temporale Struktur des reinen
$>Gegenw?rtigens<^ von etwas). On the other hand, Kant is also

said to be "the first and only one" to investigate temporality as the
ground of transcendence, that is to say, as what enables the human
subject to encounter or relate to a particular being (Seiendes) at all.25

From the standpoint of the project initiated in Sein und Zeit
there are at least three ways in which Kant's deliberations in the
KrV represent to Heidegger a fruitful departure from traditional
ontological assumptions, confirming to him the "rightness" of the
he was taking. In the first place, as already noted, Kant iden
path
chology and logic (PIK, 323-4), between notions and categories (PIK, 301
2), and between psychological and transcendental orientations ^PIK, 343).
Above all, prefiguring a central theme of KPM, Kant is said to waver in
his elaboration of the imagination (PIK, 216,280,412). For a brief review
of Kant's "schwankende Ontologie," see my "Heideggers Kant-Kommentar,
1925-1936," in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 2 (1989): 355ff.
23
KPM, 155-82,189-90.
24 ist notwendig d.h. ein
"Konstruktion der Philosophie Destruktion,
im historischen R?ckgang auf die Tradition vollzogener Abbau des ?ber
der Tradition zur Nichtig
lieferten, was keine Negation und Verurteilung
keit, sondern umgekehrt gerade positive Aneignung ihrer bedeutet"; GP,
31.
25 das
SZ, 23-6; KPM, 67; GP, 423-9, esp. p. 426: "Die Transzendenz,
?ber-hinaus des Daseins, erm?glicht es, da? es sich zu Seiendem, sei es zu
Vorhandenem, zu Anderen und zu sich selbst, als Seiendem verh?lt." On
"transcendence" and "transcendental," see Charles Sherover, Heidegger,
Kant and Time (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), 16, 32,
125, 240, 287.
tifies time as a source of what 'to be' means (at least for a certain
region of beings). In language more familiar to Kant, time is not
itself an object, but rather a condition for something's being an
object at all. Reality and existence are distinct categories, but

without the determination of time?specifically, utime determina
tions a priori" or "transcendental schemata"?categories have "only
logical significance" (B185-186).
Secondly, Kant elaborates a sense of time that is distinct from
and presupposed by determinations of time in terms of (on the basis
of, or as one among) particular beings. By singling out the pure
intuition of time in contrast to empirical intuitions (objects given
and the
sighting, hearing, and so on, of them) within time, and by
demanding schemata as a priori determinations of time for things
to be able to be experienced, Kant testifies to his insight into the
necessity of distinguishing time from any particular being (Seiende),
and of distinguishing how time (for Heidegger, the meaning of 'to
be') and particular beings are respectively given to the human sub
ject. In Kant's account, then, Heidegger finds his own distinction
between an "original," "ecstatic" sense of time ("temporality"), pro
viding the meaning for being, and various "derivative," "vulgar con
ceptions" of an "endless time"?conceptions assimilating time to
things or aspects
of things in time (for example, subjective or ob
jective, psychological or physical conceptions of time, clock time, or

an endless succession of nows).
Thirdly, according to Heidegger, Kant regards the unity of that

original sense of time as both
(that is to say, equivalently) the way
of being most basic to the human subject and the ground for un
derstanding other modes of being and, indeed, for experiencing other
beings. This third significance of the critical philosophy for Hei
degger is, in other words, the rough parallel he draws between his
account of how the transcendence of being-in-the-world (genitivus
subjectivus or, better, genitivus appositivus: "Das Dasein ist das
Transzendente9926) is possible, and the extent to which, in his view,
Kant successfully articulates the transcendence of the human
knower (genitivus subjectivus, though not genitivus appositivus). In
26
GP, 426. Genitival paradigms are as follows: the refinancing of the
debt (genitivus objectivus), the debt of the city (genitivus subjectivus), and
the city of New York (genitivus appositivus). These are in no way meant
to exhaust the kinds of genitives.
both cases, when understood in its original sense, time does not,
indeed, resolve the pseudo-problem of how an isolated subject moves
beyond itself to an object; but it does explain how human existence

is "always already outside itself" and, hence, "in-the-world."
Heidegger drafts this parallel in terms of three theses con
cerning self-affection: (1) the original (ecstatic) sense of time is

(identical to) self-affection, (2) Self-consciousness is dependent upon
self-affection, and (3) self-affection provides the underlying structure
to the transcendental schemata. Heidegger bases the first thesis,
the identity of time and self-affection, on Kant's claim that time is
"the way the mind is affected ... its very self" Since
by (B68).
time is not yielded or given by experience, it is necessarily the effect
of the mind itself on itself.27 He reasons further that, apart from
this manner of affecting itself, there is no Self-consciousness.28 The
distinguishing of the Self in the sense that it becomes an object for

consciousness and distinct from other objects presupposes or, better,
arises out of self-affection. If equivocation is to be avoided, the
'self in 'self-affection' must be distinguished from the 'Self of 'Self
consciousness.' Moreover, self-affection provides the basic structure,
not only for Self-consciousness, namely, for the way the human sub
ject is an object to itself, but, correlatively, or rather more basically,

for anything to be an object to the human subject. So understood,
self-affection exemplifies the figurative syntheses or transcendental
schemata.29 Time as self-affection is thus in a sense both presub
jective and preobjective. In self-affection, in other words, time is

to itself or becomes an 'object' to itself, as a condition for
given
able to constitute a Self and, equivalently, to encounter some
being
other than that Self. On the basis of these three theses Hei
thing
concludes that the idea of pure self-affection determines "the
degger
27
Heidegger utilizes what might be called "the critical, disjunctive
dilemma" at work in Kant's proposal to entertain the Copernican hypoth
esis in regard to knowledge. See B124-125: "Entweder. . .der Gegenstand
die Vorstellung, oder diese den Gegenstand allein m?glich macht."
28
Or, in terminology dominating the structure of the Transcendental
Analytic, I know (or am conscious) a priori that I am only if I know how I
know and am. In this case, knowing how I know (or am conscious) and
knowing how I am are equivalent. See note 58 below.
29 und Beweis in Kants
Logik, 341-5. See Manfred Baum, Deduktion
Transzendentalphilosophie (K?nigstein/Ts.: Athen?um, 1986), 139-40,148
9, 155, 205.
innermost essence of transcendence" and provides "the transcen

dental original structure [Urstruktur] of the finite self as such."30
Because on this interpretation time as self-affection underlies
the possibility of knowing oneself (apperception) and objects at all
(schematism), Heidegger construes Kant's account of transcendental
subjectivity as an anticipation of the fundamental ontology of "hu

man life," or Dasein31 Dasein understands what 'to be' means and
does so in terms of time, and this very understanding is inseparable
from what itmeans for the human subject to be (and what itmeans
for the human subject to be includes the possibility of its access to
other modes of being).32 Heidegger sees in the critical philosophy
an anticipation of a radically different view of time as well, though
there can be little doubt that he is transposing his own account of
an original, ecstatic sense of temporality onto Kant's transcendental
conception of time. Herein lies the real source of the unorthodox
thesis that time is self-affection, a thesis that Heidegger cannot
articulate within the bounds of Kant's account of time. Time as
self-affection, Heidegger us, tells is the sheerturning toward itself
(reines Sich-zuwenden-zu) in the sense of letting itself stand opposite

itself as such (das Gegenstehenlassen als solches). It is, moreover,
precisely in this sense that time makes possible Self-consciousness,

as well as consciousness of an object.33 Time here is obviously not
meant by Heidegger as some indeterminate conduit between an al
ready present subject and object, whatever that could mean. Time
is self-affection?and thus is the structure for Self-consciousness
and its equivalent, consciousness of what is other than the self?
30
340.
31KPM,. . 184-5; Logik,
". das wir Dasein nennen (menschliches Leben)"; Logik, 150n.
32
"Seinsverst?ndnis ist selbst eine Seinsbestimmtheit des Daseins. Die
ontische Auszeichnung des Daseins liegt darin, da? es ontologisch ist"; SZ,
12. It is noteworthy in this regard that Heidegger's interpretation of the
ecstatically temporal character of the unity of the three kinds of synthesis?
apprehension, reproduction, and forecognition?in the first edition of the
Transcendental Deduction appears to follow his interpretation of apper
ception resting upon self-affection as a primordial sense of temporality in
the second edition of the Deduction. This sequence suggests that the ac
count of the presencing and absencing of temporality involved in self-af
fection may have been more basic than the account of the three ecstases
of temporality ("gewesend-gegenw?rtigende Zukunft"; see SZ, 326).
33
KPM, 183.
precisely inasmuch as time is a persistent projecting onto a horizon
(is always ahead of itself) that in this projecting more or less retains
(comes back to or recovers) and maintains (presents) itself.34

Even casual readers of the KrVc^n appreciate the radicalness
of the three theses mentioned above, especially the second one. Kant
calls the synthetic unity of apperception "the supreme principle of
every use of the understanding," (B136) and, in an intriguing footnote
that suggests far more than it explains, he states that this unity of
apperception is "the highest point, to which one must affix every

use of the understanding, even the whole [of] logic and, after it, the
Transcendental Philosophy" (B134n). Whether or not these state
ments in the final analysis are inconsistent with Heidegger's claim
that apperception presupposes self-affection, they make plain the
radical implications of this interpretation. If Heidegger can es
tablish on Kant's terms that self-consciousness is not possible with
out the mind affecting itself and that self-affection is equivalent to
the original sense
of time, then he will have demonstrated how tem
porality underlies, in Kant's own words, "every use of the under
standing, even the whole [of] logic."35

This last observation introduces another key aspect of the posi
tive significance that the critical philosophy holds for Heidegger in
the context of early twentieth-century philosophy in Germany. In
direct contrast to the neo-Kantianism of Cohen and Natorp, Hei
degger shifts the center of gravity of the positive part of the critical
philosophy from the understanding to sentience. That is to say, he

shifts it from the logical forms of judgment, the synthetic activity
of the intellect, and apperception, to the
transcendental schemata
of imagination, the pure form of sentience, and self-affection. By
34
". . .das stehende und bleibende Ich vollzieht das Gegenstehenlassen
von solchem, was nicht nur eine Relation des hin-au-auf . . . , sondern
eine Korrelation des Zur?ck-zu-in ... ist und so das Dawider bildet"; KPM,
186. See also Logik, 339.
351 bracket "of" in order to call attention to the fact that Kant may
have intended die ganze Logik to refer not to the entirety of logic, but
merely to the entire Transcendental Logic. Such a reading is not implau
sible, though it would seem to rule out the possibility of deriving the logical
forms of judgment from the notion of apperception in its equivalence to
(if and only if) the objective definition of judgment, something that Kant
in his notes seems to have envisioned and that Reich has attempted to
reconstruct. See note 54 below.
insisting that for Kant knowing is basically an intuiting, Heidegger

is attempting to demonstrate that Kant does not share the neo
Kantians' "logical prejudice" that truth is the property of a theo
retical judgment (assertion), and/or is to be understood, in the final
analysis, in terms of the structure and character of such judgments.36
Despite the considerable difference between what Kant means

and what Husserl means by 'intuition,' Heidegger links the neo
Kantian attempt to eliminate or reinterpret the role intuition plays
in the KrV to a failure to appreciate Husserl's account of knowledge
in terms of intuition, and his analysis of truth in terms of empty
and filled intentions.37 However dubious the linkage, Heidegger's
linking of the roles played by intuition for Kant's and Husserl's
analyses of knowing helps put in focus one meaning of his remark

that he read the critical philosophy "against the backdrop of Hus
serl's phenomenology." Husserl's conception of the intentionality
of knowing provides Heidegger with his fundamental insight into
the "transcendence problem." Against the backdrop of Husserl's
analysis of truth, the problem of transcendence is for Heidegger not

the difficulty addressed by Kant in the Refutation of Idealism (or
as Kant also
puts it, the problematic idealism of Descartes), namely,
"How a subject comes out to an object," but rather, "What makes
it possible ontologically that a particular being (Seiendes) can be
encountered within the world and, being encountered, can be objec
tified?"38
Nevertheless, Heidegger in turn criticizes Husserl for failing
to unpack adequately (1) what 'to be' in general means, and (2) what
36
Logik, 51, 83; Cohen, Die Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 57; Natorp,
Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 38-49. According
to Heidegger, Lotze is the pivotal figure in the entrenchment of the logical
prejudice. Lask's reading of Aristotle's Metaphysics 9.10 suggests, at least
from a theoretical perspective, its limits along lines later exploited and
reinterpreted by Heidegger, though without reference to Lask. See Logik,
62-88,170-90; Emile Lask, Die Lehre vom Urteil, in Gesammelte Schriften,
erster Bd. 1, ed. E. Herrigel (T?bingen: Mohr, 1923), 144-6, 293-4.
37
Logik, 51-2; PIK 83-4. For Kant an intuition is either empirical
or pure, but in both cases it is a way the mind is passively, immediately,
and sensually related to some individual x (for example, this color, the one
all-embracing space). Talk of categorial intuitions of universals and facts
is thus utterly foreign to Kant's terminology.
38
SZ, 366. According to Heidegger, the Refutation of Idealism is
hardly a refutation, but far more a confirmation of this thesis: "Kant hat
die Descartes'sche Position nie ?berwunden und auch grunds?tzlich nie in
it specifically means in the case of intentionality (the being of the

intentional and transcendence itself).39 Moreover, he attributes
these failings to Husserl's own embrace of a subtler form of the
logical prejudice?one that construes the intuited identity of a filled

intention as a fact having "the sort of being of a proposition or
propositional structure: ideal being."40 Thus, with its emphasis on

how in the final analysis transcendental knowledge and "transcen
dental truth" (B185) are matters, for Kant, not of judgments, but
of the temporality of self-affection and prejudgmental schemati
zations, Heidegger's commentary on the KrV apparently cements
his differences, not only with Marburg neo-Kantians, but also with
certain key aspects of Husserl's phenomenology.
This criticism is, however, suspect in a number of respects. The
criticism, articulated by Heidegger in his lectures in the mid-twen
ties, focuses principally on Husserl's discussion of truth in the Log

ische Untersuchungen and on his attempts to refine the notion of
subjectivity in several published and unpublished works up to that

point. Although Heidegger mentions to his students the existence
of what he calls Husserl's Untersuchungen ?ber das immanente Zeit
bewu?tsein, his extended account of the advances and the shortcom
ings of Husserl's phenomenology includes no discussion of those
investigations (some of which were, of course, edited by Edith Stein

and brought out
by Heidegger in 1928 as Edmund Husserls Vorle
sungen zur Ph?nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewu?tseins).41 Perhaps
this silence is simply due to the fact that Heidegger was unaware
Frage gestellt"; see Logik, 292-3. In this connection, as a member of the

University of Stockholm faculty reminded me, it is not clear how Kant's
insistence on distinguishing thinking and knowing is to be reconciled with
Heidegger's
39 interpretation.
By contrast, Heidegger finds the latter theme in Kant's account of
the temporality of apperception, namely, self-affection, which makes tran
scendence or, in the critical philosophy, knowledge of objects possible; see
Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffes (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1979), 124, 140, 147, 165, 178.
40
Logik, 112-13. The lectures on logic move from this criticism of
Husserl and his contemporaries to the first installment of Heidegger's
commentary on the KrV. This criticism of Husserl may stem from Lask's
observation: "Nach Husserl gehen 'die logischen Pr?dikate wahr und falsch'
die 'Inhalte' 'im Sinne idealer Aussagebedeutung' an, w?hrend 'Richtigkeit'
dem Urteil zukommt, das den wahren Inhalt zum Objekt hat. LU I, 1900,
176 Anm., vgl. auch II, 594ff"; Lask, Die Lehre vom Urteil, 297n; see also p.
425.
41 zur Geschichte
Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena des Zeitbegriffs,
Summer Semester 1925, ed. Petra Jaeger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 20,2d., revised
of the more important texts or their contents at the time of his
lectures, however unlikely that seems, given the proximity and

closeness of the two philosophers to one another
during Heidegger's
years as Privatdozent in Freiburg (1916-23).42 In any event, these
texts weaken considerably the force of much of Heidegger's criticism,
and, to the extent that Heidegger was aware of their contents, they
give added meaning to his remark that he felt confirmed in the path
his thinking was taking by studying the KrV anew "against the
backdrop of Husserl's phenomenology."
In Kant's distinction between the a priori schematization (tem
poralization) of the categories and empirical determinations of time,
Heidegger claims, with some justification, to find something like the

distinction, elaborated in Sein und Zeit, between the original tem
porality and the temporal character of what is in time. The latter

distinction parallels that between the meaning of 'to be' (the pres
encing and absencing involved in ecstatic temporality) and things
present and absent, as well as that to which they are present and
absent. Yet a quite similar distinction surfaces in Husserl's de
scription of absolute consciousness, and far more

clearly it than
does in the context of Kant's allusions to a synthesis of self-con
sciousness and time. For example, Husserl refers to absolute con
sciousness as the experience (Erlebnis) of perception of transcendent
or immanent objects that cannot itself be understood as the per
ception of an object. The preobjective temporality of this absolute

consciousness is "objectifying, but not objectified," and only by virtue
of "the absolute being of this flow of consciousness" are objects what
they are.43 That the original sense of time does not presuppose but
rather is presupposed by the temporal character of things within
edition (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 126. See, however, Ru

dolf Boehm's misgivings about the 1928 edition in his "Einleitung des Her
ausgebers," in Edmund Husserl, Zur Ph?nomenologie des inneren Zeit
bewu?tseins (1893-1917), Husserliana X, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. XXIX.
42
Nevertheless, Rudolph Bernet claims inexplicably that "a direct in
fluence" of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness on the devel
opment of Heidegger's own understanding of time "can be ruled out as a
practical matter." See his introduction to Edmund Husserl, Texte zur
Ph?nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewu?tseins (1898-1917), ed. Rudolf Bernet
(Hamburg:
43
Meiner, 1985), pp. LX, LXIX-LXX.
Husserl, Texte zur Ph?nomenologie des inneren Zeitbewu?tseins
(1898-1917), pp. 150-2; cf. p. XXXV. See Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian
Meditations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 154-8.
time (Innerzeitigkeit), and hence cannot itself be meaningfully de

termined in the terms (for example, sequence and
contemporaneity)
of the latter, is a centerpiece of Heidegger's own reflections and of
his reading of Kant; but it is already very much in evidence in Hus
serl's lectures.44
Much more, of course, can and should be addressed in order to
do justice to Heidegger's complicated lineage with Husserl. As far
as the present topic?Heidegger's interpretation of Kant?is con
cerned, however, the Husserlian backdrop is more essential in a

positive sense than Heidegger seems to have been able or ready to
acknowledge. What does acknowledge

Heidegger is that Husserl's
analysis of truth
represents a genuine advance, clarifying where
and how Kant went wrong?even if Husserl, in Heidegger's mind,
remains with Kant a victim of an ontology taking too many of its
cues from the natural sciences.
Heidegger singles out at least three dogmas in the critical phi

losophy that hinder Kant from exploiting the breakthrough his
thinking otherwise represents.45 The first dogma is the exclusive
disjunction of the two sources of cognition: the faculties of sentience

and intellect, or what is entertained immediately and mediately,
namely, intuitions and concepts. The disjunction is announced in
Kant's compandious claim that "all intuitions, being sensuous, rest
on affections, while concepts rest on functions" (B93). Because Kant
44
Husserl, Texte zur Ph?nomenologie des inneren Zeitbew?tseins (1898
1917), 199-200,235-7; Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, 158. Illustrating
the advantages of Heidegger's formulations even as he indicates the dif
ficulties attending both philosophers' terminologies, Thomas Pr?fer sug
gests a plausible explanation for Heidegger's "misinterpretation" of Hus
serl in regard to the theme of inner time-consciousness in "Heidegger,
Early and Late, and Aquinas," in Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenolog
ical Tradition, ed. Robert Sokolowski (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Uni
versity 45 of America Press, 1989), 200-1, 208-10.
Heidegger mentions two other dogmas in addition to the ones dis
cussed here, each corresponding loosely to a postulate of pure reason, though
Heidegger does not identify them as such. Because of "an old dogma,"
namely, "the doctrine of the immortality of the human being and of the
so-called spirituality of the human being" (Logik, 291-2), Heidegger claims,
there is resistance to grasping the fact that at bottom human existence is
not only essentially temporal, but also spatial (in senses quite different
from any other sort of thing). A fifth dogma is "the undiscussable com
prehension of the concept of being of the esse as esse creatum"; Logik, 331.
See also GP, 209-13.
holds fast to this traditional dichotomy, Heidegger contends, it is

not shown "to what extent intuition and thinking, being-given and
being-thought, in terms of their sense, are dependent [angewiesen]

on one another."46 Of course, in a sense the imagination supplies
an answer for Kant, but anyone familiar with the differences be
tween the two editions of the Kr V recognizes how much Kant wavers
in determining the supposedly mediating role of the imagination.47
The most serious consequence of this first dogma, however, is Kant's
tendency to dissociate time from the self along the lines of the dis
tinction between intuiting and thinking such that, despite the doc
trine of self-affection, "it is established a priori that bringing them
together at all is impossible."48
The second dogma is the assumption of the primacy accorded
the meaning of being drawn from that region of beings loosely des
ignated as 'nature,' and both determined and circumscribed by
mathematical sciences of those beings. That
meaning is nothing
other than being present-at-hand (Vorhandensein), and it ultimately
sabotages Kant's insight into an original sense of time, presupposed

by the construal of time in the natural sciences. It bears noting in
this connection that Heidegger's own philosophy of natural science
(and of the history of natural science), elaborated at the outset of

both PIK and FD, is decidedly Kantian. That is to say, he views
(modern) natural science as a kind of methodo-logically based ob
jectification (Vergegenst?ndlichung) of a region of particular beings,

along the lines of what Kant calls the "Copernican Revolution."49
While both the role Kant assigns to the subject's own projections
in the investigation of nature and his careful assessment of the
46
Logik, 282-3; see also 343. Note, however, Heidegger's sympathetic
treatment of Kant's use of the terms "sensations" (Empfindungen) and
"empirical intuitions" (empirische Anschauungen) in PIK, 96-7.
47 . . .
Whereas Kant refers to "three subjective sources of knowledge
sense, imagination, and apperception" in the first edition of the deduction
(A115), the second edition explicitly subordinates the imagination to "sen
sibility," even though the transcendental synthesis of the imagination is
"the effect of the understanding" (B151-152). Note, with this change in
mind,
48
that the schematism chapter was not rewritten.
Logik, 406; see also 400ff. This dogma, incidentally, resurfaces in
neo-Kantian efforts to construe the "I think" as a purely logical subject
or even a mere concept, something that is, Heidegger insists, never enter
tained by Kant. See Logik, 327, 329.
49
PIK, 17-56; FD, 55-108.
prospects of self-knowledge testify to his insight that not every being

is an object, Kant nevertheless construes nature as a region of beings
in the sense of the sum of everything that can be experienced as
objects. It can be so experienced precisely because the objectness

of the objects?or what makes it possible for something to be an
object?is the (spontaneous) work of human understanding and
imagination. If the initial analyses of Sein und Zeit sometimes

convey a picture of the world as though it were one big gas station
where everything other than Dasein and Mitdasein is available
(ready-to-hand), the KrVis oriented to something like the contrived

images of a telescope or microscope: extensive and intensive sentient
magnitudes ever accessible (present-at-hand), but also endlessly
determinable (observable, experimentable, measurable, trans
formable).50
Heidegger cannot, of course, fail to see that, for example, Kant's
antinomies, his contrast between persons and things, and his cor
responding effort to distinguish theoretical and practical reason,

testify to a profound sensitivity to basic differences in ways of
being.51 That very differentiation and their merely hoped-for unity,

however, suggested by aesthetics and
teleologies, equally betray the
limits of that understanding. Commenting on the third antinomy,
Heidegger complains that "freedom is proposed in the sense of a
transcendental concept of nature."52 In addition, Kant does not
provide "any real opening" as to its mode of being on the basis of

the interpretation of the moral person. Moreover, he fails to de
termine "the
unity of the theoretical and
practical I" in an original
way, a failing matched by the indeterminacy of the relation of the
person to the "empirical I."53
The increasing importance of the system of the critical philoso
phy?its theoretical structure, roots, and aims?for the investi
gation of morality, aesthetics, and teleology further underscores the
complaint Heidegger is lodging. If the categories are, indeed, de

rived from the fact that they are forms of logical judgment, and
logical judgments, according to Kant, are precisely judgments about
50
Of course, since nature is itself only determinable by virtue of the
objectification projected by the human subject, the image (nature) afforded
by the51microscope or telescope is for the sake of the gas station (world).
GP, 197-8; WmF, 228-36.
52
238; see also 220, 246, 255.
53WmF,
GP, 207-9. See also note 14 above.
objects (even if "in sensu l?gico9954), what role can or should they
have in the investigation of actions or beautiful forms and the ex
of them? Why should the critiques of practical reason and
perience
aesthetic and teleological judgments also have the same structure
as the critique of pure reason with its doctrine of elements and
doctrine of method; and why should the subsequent Critiques have
a Transcendental Logic divided into an Analytic and Dia
lectic?55
The third dogma is the equation of a priori and subjective where
"subjective" suggests a disembodied realm of consciousness to which
the subject has a privileged, private access. Heidegger calls this
equation "Descartes' dogma", "the Cartesian position," and even

"the Cartesian presupposition." The dogma is actually a derivative
of a fundamental thesis that reads as follows: "Given immediately
and above all else, that is to say, given a priori, is the ego cogito.9956
On the basis of this thesis and without the benefit of Husserl's elab
oration of intentionality, Kant falsely presumes that everything that
is a priori must be a cogitatio. The result is a set of dubious theses
central to the KrV, for example, the reduction of the intuitions of
space and time to a state, propensity, or activity of the mind; the
confining of time to the inner sense; and the problematic of the

relation of apperception to the world.
The articulation of these three dogmas is not particularly novel.
German idealists appreciated that the dichotomy between active
and passive sources of knowing was not the end of every possible
analysis, and that the exclusive disjunction of these sources was a

mere contrivance. Criticism of the so-called "Cartesian Dogma"
could just as well have been voiced by Husserl or Wittgenstein.
54
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), inKants Werke, Bd. 5, Academy
edition, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 203. Cf. Klaus Reich, Die Vollst?ndigkeit
der kantischen Urteilstafel, (Berlin: Schoetz, 1948), 32.
55
Of course, since the logical forms of judgment (the categories) pro
vide the structure and parameters for everything that can be thought, they
must have a determinant role in the discussion/presentation of nontheo
retical (moral, aesthetic, teleological) subject matters. Nevertheless,
Schopenhauer's criticism that Kant was often carried away by his style,
by his fondness for a certain gotische Bauart, should not be dismissed. See
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 580.
56
"Was zun?chst und vor allem gegeben ist, ist das ego cogito, die
cogitationes"; Logik, 278. See also Logik, 289-90, 340, 353.
What is distinctive about Heidegger's interpretation, however, is

his insistence that Kant rises above these clear symptoms of Seins
vergessenheit and begins to disclose the sense of temporality that
underlies the various uses of the verb "to be."
Ill57
The critical philosophy's positive significance for Heidegger has

been presented in the form of three themes?the insight into the
temporal meaning of being, presupposed by the encounter with par
ticular beings; the awareness of the thick, ecstatic character of the
underlying temporality, its irreducibility to a mere sequence of nows

or a succession of presencings; and, in the final analysis, the temporal
nature of the human subject insofar as it is transcendent. These
are, however, not so much three distinct themes as they are three
progressively denser and more appropriate statements of what, in

his reading of the KrV, confirmed to Heidegger the rightness of the
path his own thinking was taking. That is to say, the third theme
(the identification of time with self-affection as the condition for
Self-consciousness and the transcendental schemata) subsumes and
explains the first theme (that what "to be" means is temporal) and
the second theme (that this temporality is meant in an origi
nal sense).
Although Heidegger's strategy for reading the KrV is oriented
towards his own understanding of temporality, there are elements
of that strategy that are not tied to this specific interpretation. For
example, by construing the Doctrine of Schematism or the System

of Principles as the core of the KrV, Heidegger ties the structure
and significance of the Transcendental Deduction (B) to the argu
ment of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole. Thus, Kant him
self characterizes the distinction between the Transcendental De
duction and the doctrine of the ensuing section (The Transcendental
Doctrine of Judgment containing the Doctrine of Schematisms and
System of Principles) as a distinction between the demonstration
57 of Heidegger's commen
This section deals with the initial strategy
tary. For a more detailed review of the respective strategies in Logik,
PIK, and WmF, see my "Heideggers Kant-Kommentar, 1925-1936" in
Philosophisches Jahrbuch (1989): 344-67.
that, and the demonstration how, "the categories from the side of
the understanding contain the grounds of the possibility of all ex
perience in general" (B167). On Heidegger's reading of the KrV,

the former demonstration is incomplete without the latter. In other
words, the Transcendental Deduction does not stand on its own but
depends upon the Doctrine of the Schematisms and the Analytic of

Principles.58
Heidegger's strategy is, furthermore, similar to neo-Kantian
rein ter pre tations of the KrV in at least two important respects.
First, like his Marburg predecessors, Heidegger not only is dissatis
fied with the apparent unevenness in the construction of the KrV,
specifically, the lack of symmetry between the two doctrines of ele
ments, the Aesthetic and the Logic, but also links that imbalance
to the unresolved unity of the two basic sources of knowing, namely,
sentience (Sinnlichkeit) and understanding (Verstand).59 Second,
borrowing from Cohen, Heidegger attempts to demonstrate the ori
gin (Ursprung) of the transcendental determinations of knowledge.60
The content (aim and conclusion) of the commentary, however,
is decidedly antineo-Kantian. The neo-Kantian interpretation
58
While this strategy has been recently urged quite independently of
Heidegger's reading by, for example, Detel and me, Heidegger himself
probably appropriates it from Ernest Curtius and Alois Riehl. See Ernest
Curtius, "Das Schematismuskapitel in der KrV" Kant-Studien 19 (1914):
352-3, 362-3; Alois Riehl, Der philosophische Kritizismus (Leipzig: Engel
mann, 1908), 532; Wolfgang Detel, "Zur Funktion des Schematismus-Kap
itels in Kants KrV," Kant-Studien 69 (1978): 40-5; my "Transzendentale
Schemata, Kategorien und Erkenntnisarten," Kant-Studien 75 (1984), 38
"
54; and my 'Knowing How' and Kant's Theory of Schematism" in The
Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Richard Kennington (Washington, D.C.:
The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 71-85. This strategy of
making the demonstration that the categories apply to experience depen
dent upon the demonstration of how they apply extends also to the much
discussed problem of interpreting the two steps to the B deduction; see
B144 and note 28 above.
59
PIK, 77-9, 167. On Heidegger's reading, the Transcendental An
alytic ought to end with the numbering of paragraphs in the second edition
(the Deduction), since what follows (Schematism and Principles) is con
cerned with the unity of sentience (Transcendental Aesthetic) and under
standing
60 (Transcendental Logic).
Heidegger's talk of "Ursprung" in the introduction to KPM, 20-1,
recasts Cohen's own use of the term. See Cohen, Logik der reinen Er
kenntnis, 36-7. That it was, moreover, perfectly clear to Heidegger that
his reading of the KrV shared these similarities with the neo-Kantian
strategies of interpretation is evidenced by his respectful words for these
aspects of their interpretation; see Logik, 271; PIK, 79.
emphasizes the primacy of the understanding alone, that is to say,

the primacy of acts of purely intellectual synthesis and constitution
(namely, judging) and the logical forms of judgment (namely, cat

egories) for originating any transcendental determine dons of
knowledge. As for space and time, they are reinterpreted as cat
egories, so that no determinations of knowledge a priori are incon
sistently attributed to the passivity of sentience.61 Cohen's own
Logik der reinen Erkenntnis is an attempt to give logic a "new shape"

and "a new foundation" as a logic of knowing's origins, "to which
nothing may be given."62 Those origins are to be established solely

in thinking, the basic form of which is that of judgment.63 "Ban
ished now," Cohen writes, "is every thought of the representation
and all the spectres associated with it, above all the ambiguous 'in
tuition' [Anschauung]."64
Heidegger's strategy, on the contrary, is to show that Kant's
major work is "only then understandable, when one has seen and
keeps in mind, that for him knowledge proper is intuition."65 Kant's
argument succeeds, Heidegger contends, only to the extent that it
appeals to pure sentience (reine Sinnlichkeit) as the underlying sig
61
In a striking manifesto of this approach (Logik der reinen Erkennt
nis, S. 605), Cohen says, "What is then the whole meaning of logic? We
are of the opinion that the ancient thinker of Elea has indicated that
meaning for all eternity. We have, however, construed the identity of
thinking and being in the strict sense, in that we assumed: there may be
permitted no problem in being, for which thinking would not be in a position
to draw up a solution."; Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 605. See also Natorp,
Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 48: "Es gibt f?r das
Denken kein Sein, das nicht im Denken selbst gesetzt w?rde."
62
Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 36-7, 13.
63
"Grundform des Seins, das ist die Grundform des Denkens, ist also
nicht die Grundform des Begriffs, sondern die Grundform des Urteils";
Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 47. See also Natorp, Die logischen
Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 36-7.
64
Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 57. To be sure, the decisive
character of intuition does not so much disappear as get replaced. In
Natorp's words "it only ceases to signify an utterly independent and, in
the last analysis, dominating factor of knowing opposite thinking"; see his
"Kant und die Marburger Schule," 204-5. "Aber als 'reine' Anschauung
n?hert sie sich doch wieder sehr dem Logischen und fa?t sich mit diesem
in enger Einheit zusammen, ja sie scheint sich auf der H?he des Kantischen
Systems ganz wieder ins Logische aufzuheben, indem die 'Synthesis', die
anfangs den unterscheidenden Charakter der 'Anschauung' bezeichnen
sollte, gerade zur Urfunktion des Denkens wird"; Natorp, Die logischen
Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, 2.
65
Logik, 114-15, 56-67; see also KPM, 21, 23-4.
nificance of all the conditions of the possibility of experience, in
cluding the categories of understanding and their supreme principle,

pure apperception. What Heidegger interprets as pure sentience
in this connection is not some blind sensibility, but the a priori
synthesis of the manifold of pure intuition by a transcendental fac
ulty attributed by Kant himself?at least in the second edition of

the KrV? to sentience, namely, the transcendental imagination.66
What Kant calls "the pure intuition of time," Heidegger claims, is
"the basic way of being of the self, in which it, of itself, lets itself
encounter another, lets other things be of concern to it, in Kant's
terms, lets itself be affected."67 Since that pure intuition includes
the form of one's own inner sense and "the formal condition a priori
of all appearances at all" (B50), this synthesis is equivalently a self
affection and a "figurative synthesis" of time (B154). That is to
say, it is a transcendental schema, making possible the experience
of objects in time.
Heidegger's interpretation of the KrV turns, then, on showing
that, where its arguments and discussions are trenchant, they rest
upon a self-understanding of human existence (and, in general, an
understanding of what "to be" means) that is at bottom temporal

(zeitlich). "Temporal" has, as noted earlier, a distinctive sense for
Heidegger that is rather remote from Kant's characterizations of

the pure intuition of time, self-affection, or the transcendental sche
mata produced by the
imagination. Heidegger employs the term
"temporal" to characterize the fact that the way in which human

existence or being-in-the-world is present?and that means
equiva
lently its transcendence, that is to say, "the possibility of experi
ence," or the way in which things are able to be present to and

known by it68?is inseverable from the past into which that human
66
Pursuant to this strategy of exposing Kant's appeal to an original
temporal synthesis at crucial junctures in the KrV, Heidegger pounces on
six paragraphs in the Transcendental Logic and, indeed, the six paragraphs
introducing the Table of Categories within the so-called "metaphysical
deduction," where Kant speaks of synthesis as the effect of the imagination
(B103). Calling these six paragraphs the clue to "the innermost problem
atic" of the KrV, Heidegger reveals his strategy: "It will be shown that,
without laying the imagination at the bottom of the questionable synthesis,
the Kantian exposition remains incomprehensible"; PIK, 281.
67
339.
68Logik,
"M?glichkeit der Erfahrung ist demnach gleichbedeutend mit
Transzendenz"; KPM, 113. "Das sich selbst erschlossene In-der-Welt-sein
versteht mit dem Sein des Seienden, das es selbst ist, gleichurspr?nglich
being has "always already" been thrown and, he insists, more im
portantly, from the finite future it is constantly projecting.69 We

exist as something that both "has been around" and "is making
things present," precisely by being always "ahead of ourselves" and
never completely "within" past or present. Temporality, this thick,
ecstatic sense of time, the inevitable interplay of presencing and
absencing, is what, in the final analysis, in one way or another, de
termines what 'to be' means, whether in the case of human
existence,
a tool, or a formula (Da-, Zuhanden- or Vorhandensein).
Heidegger's commentary takes its start from the premise that

the transcendence or, in Kant's own terms, the "transcendental
knowledge" that must
be presupposed for there to be experience of
objects at all rests upon this ecstatic-horizontal sense of time.70 His
strategy is to show that this sense of time must be presumed to be
the appropriate, even if not explicitly intended, meaning of the vari
ous ways in which, according to Kant, time is determinately availed
by us in regard to transcendental knowledge?that is to say, the
conditions of "the possibility of experience."
IV
Of all the places Heidegger pursues his strategy of exposing the

foundational role played by time in the KrV and interpreting time
in that role ecstatically, arguably none is more important than the
doctrine of self-affection. Earlier I mentioned three theses con
cerning self-affection that underlie Heidegger's reading of the tran
das Sein des innerweltlich entdeckten Seienden, wenngleich unthematisch

und sogar noch undifferenziert in seinen prim?ren Modi der Existenz und
Realit?t"; SZ, 324. "Das faktische Dasein kommt vielmehr, ekstatisch
sich und seine Welt in der Einheit des Da verstehend, aus diesen Horizonten
zur?ck auf das in ihnen begegnende Seiende"; SZ, 366.
69
"Die Gewesenheit entspringt der Zukunft, so zwar, da? die gewesene
(besser gewesende) Zukunft die Gegenwart aus sich entl??t. Dies der
gestalt als gewesend-gegenw?rtigende Zukunft einheitliche Ph?nomen
nennen wir die Zeitlichkeit"; SZ; 326. "Das prim?re Ph?nomen der ur
spr?nglichen und eigentlichen Zeitlichkeit ist die Zukunft"; SZ, 329.
70
While fairly typical among neo-Kantians (see, for example, Lask's
critique of Husserl in Die Lehre vom Urteil, 425-6), Heidegger's use of
"transcendence" instead of "transcendental knowledge" is of central sig
nificance, since he understands transcendence, in the sense, not of Wissen,
but of a pretheoretical Verstehen.
scendental philosophy in KrV as an anticipation of the fundamental
ontology of Sein und Zeit. The first two of those theses are examined
in the final segment of this paper as a means of raising the trou
blesome, central issue of the soundness of Heidegger's commentary.71
According to Heidegger, the first thesis, the identity of time
and self-affection, while "the result of phenomenological analysis,"
is "nothing other than what Kant says."72 If we look at the text
Heidegger has in mind when he makes this

claim, however, it can
hardly be sustained. He is referring to an addition in the second

edition where Kant addresses the ideality of space and time. Kant
notes that what is entertained in advance of all action of thinking
is an intuition, and, if it contains only relations, it is the form of
intuition. "Since it [the form of intuition] contains nothing except
insofar as
something is put in the mind," Kant reasons, "the form
of intuition can be nothing other than the way the mind?i.e., an
inner sense in terms of its form?by its own activity, namely, by
this positing of what it entertains, is thereby affected by its very
self" (B68).
Plainly, Kant does not
identify time here as self-affection, but
rather as the way or manner, or simply as that through which, the
mind affects itself. To speak, on this basis, of "time as self-affec
tion," or even to declare that "time is essentially self-affection," is
a true but misleading representation of Kant's remark, leaving un
stated that what must be understood is that "time is the manner
[die Art, wie] of self-affection."73 The claim that time is essentially

self-affection is at best m?tonymie from a Kantian point of view.
Hence, Heidegger's presentation of that claim, not as what Kant
should have said, but as a literal restatement of what he did say, is
simply unacceptable.
Complicating matters is the fact that the manner of self-affec
tion has to be understood in a quite distinctive sense. When we
71
Space limitations alone make it impossible here to give a similar
criticism of the third thesis (that self-affection is the structure of the tran
scendental schematism).
72
"Die bisherige Kantinterpretation hat diesen eigentlichen Sinn der
Zeit vollkommen ?bersehen, obwohl an einer Stelle Kant ausdr?cklich das
Ph?nomen der Zeit so fa?t"; Logik, 339.
73
"Zeit ist nach Kant die urspr?ngliche, universale reine Selbstaffek
tion"; Logik, 339. "Die Zeit is ihrem Wesen nach reine Affektion seiner
selbst"; KPM, 183.
speak of a manner of painting or the manner of Robespierre, we
ordinarily take it for granted that "manner" refers to more than a

single possibility. (There are
other manners of painting; Robes
pierre could have acted differently.) Time, on the other

hand, as
the manner or mode of self-affection, is the only way the mind affects
itself a priori. It is the sole a priori and universal condition, yielded
and constituted by the mind itself.
That time is the unique way the mind affects itself provides
some rationale for Heidegger's claim that time as self-affection is
the self's fundamental way of being; nor is such talk of the self's
"being" necessarily inconsistent with Kant's critical restrictions.

Kant himself does not refrain from noting that, while "my existence"
(mein Dasein) is given and throughdetermined the act expressed
by "I think," I determine"

"the manner, how my existence requires
a "self-intuition which has at bottom a form, given a priori, i.e.,
time" (B157n). Nevertheless, neither in this nor in any other regard
does Kant equate time and self-affection, or even treat them as
equivalents, as Heidegger would have us suppose.
Furthermore, what Heidegger fails to address is the explanation

Kant himself gives of self-affection.74 The discussion occurs in ?24
("On the application of the categories to the objects of the senses

in general") where Kant is concerned showing with how the under
standing is able a priori to determine the inner sense (the receptacle
of all that is sensed) in accordance with the synthetic unity of ap
perception and, by implication, with the categories. This deter
mining of the inner sense by the understanding is tantamount, in
Kant's own words, to being affected by oneself. More paradoxically
expressed, "The I, the T think,' is distinguished from the I that
intuits itself. . . and still is one with this latter as the same subject"
(B155).
To appreciate what self-affection means here and why Kant
insists that it presents no serious difficulty, it is necessary to dis
tinguish between the sense inwhich I am a passive (intuitable) sub

ject and the sense inwhich I am an active (thinking) subject. I can
be both, even at the same time, though, to be sure, not in the same
respect. The inner sense is the passive subject (that I indeed am

in this respect), containing of itself no specific intuition, but only
74
Instead, Heidegger calls the explanation at B152-156 "a different
concept of self-affection"; see Logik, 341.
the form of intuition, namely, the pure manifold of time. A specific

intuition of myself emerges only in that, as the thinking subject, I
act on my inner sense. Just as I cannot think of a circle without
(at least mentally) circumscribing one, so I have no intuition of
myself (as I appear) without affecting myself. What I thereby affect
is my inner sense, synthesizing its manifold. As Kant notes, this
self-affection is part of every act of attention, whereby the tumult
of sensations and images in the inner sense is, as it were, interrupted
and brought to a standstill. Otherwise indeterminate representa
tions are sorted out and joined in the unity of a thought, that is to
say, brought into the unity of apperception (B154-155).
Kant's account of self-affection is thus
diametrically opposed
to the interpretation given it by Heidegger. Kant states unequivo
cally that "what determines the inner sense is the understanding
and its original capacity to synthesize the manifold of intuition"
(B153). The understanding, then, not time as pure intuition, "af

fects" the form of inner sense and thereby does not "find" but rather
"brings forth" a synthesis of the manifold. Time, in this context,

is affected, the understanding is what affects it, and the entire air
of paradox dissolves with the differentiation between the activity
of understanding and the passive (albeit a priori) character of sen
sibility (the form of inner sense).

Heidegger reads the account of self-affection in the Transcen
dental Aesthetic together with the opening paragraph of the De
duction (?15). Having distinguished synthesis and unity, Kant in
sists that the unity to the synthesis cannot arise from the synthesis
itself, "but rather the entertainment of the unity makes the concept
of synthesis first possible" (B131). Heidegger argues that the
unity?a priori, yet given, co-implied by the original self-conscious
ness, and lying at the basis of categorial (logical) unity?can be
nothing else but time, that is to say, time in its original, ecstatic
sense. In regard to this second thesis Heidegger does not assert
that Kant is explicitly thinking about time as the unity supposed
by the synthesis. Heidegger's interpretation in this regard is plainly
a case of identifying what Kant "wanted" or "should have wanted
to say."75
On Heidegger's account, moreover, it is precisely as self-affec
tion that time is the fundamental unity presupposed by the pure
75
PIK, 338.
synthesis of the supreme principle of understanding, namely, ap

perception. Time as self-affection is the unity which is presupposed
by or, better, in the original-synthesis of apperception. "As pure
self-affection it [time] originally forms the finite selfness, such that
the self can be something like self-consciousness."76
Kant does indeed claim that every synthesis presupposes a unity,
but there can be no doubt that he attributes the supreme unity to
self-consciousness itself and, indeed, self-consciousness in its syn
thetic activity, identified with the spontaneity of understanding
(B133n). Since time is a form of sensibility, not understanding,
Kant's identification of the unity of apperception with the faculty
of understanding demonstrates unmistakably how radically Hei
degger's interpretation departs from Kant's text. Whether or not
one agrees with Heidegger that Kant should have taken (ecstatic)
time in the sense of self-affection as the basis for apperception,
there can be little doubt that this claim is not one that Kant would
have "wanted" to endorse.
This is not to say that Kant's characterization of the synthetic
unity of apperception is unobjectionable, even on its own terms.

After he distinguished synthesis and unity and even asserted the
priority of the latter over the former, Kant's reference to a synthetic
unity is, at the very least, perplexing. Matters are not made any
clearer by his insistence that the analytic unity of self-consciousness
(the identity of self-consciousness in several representations) is "only
possible under the synthetic unity of apperception" (B133). How,

one wonders, can I know that I am synthesizing a manifold of given
representations into one consciousness without, if not first, at least
also knowing that it is my one and the same consciousness? Cer
tainly it seems reasonable to amend Kant's stated view in this regard
and maintain the equivalence of the analytic and synthetic unities
of self-consciousness. That is to say, there is an analytic unity of
self-consciousness if and only if there is a synthetic unity of (the
same) self-consciousness. In other words, I can be conscious of my
76
KPM, 184. Cf. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le ph?nom?ne (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 92: "L'auto-affection n'est pas une
modalit? d'exp?rience caract?risant un ?tant qui serait d?j? lui m?me (au
tos). Elle produit le m?me comme rapport ? soi dans la diff?rence d'avec
soi, le m?me comme le non-identique."
identity in entertaining different things if and only if I can combine

(synthesize) a manifold of representations in a single consciousness.77
By contrast, Heidegger identifies time as the unity supposed in

the synthetic unity of apperception. "Time does not appear 'next
to' the pure apperception 'in the mind,' but rather already lies as
[the] basis of the possibility of Selfness in the pure apperception."78

What Heidegger understands by time as self-affection is the kind
of unified differentiating of (inauthentic) temporality in Sein und
Zeit: a presencing intimately and elastically affected by the way of
having been and the way of looking out for what is to come (gew?r
tigend-behaltendes Gegenw?rtigen).19 The unity to this self-affection
is, to speak in Kant's terms, though not in his spirit, located in a
pure sensibility as a condition, not only for the encounter with any
thing other than onself, but also for the constitution of oneself.
In Kant's own version of self-affection, as we have seen, the
inner sense is determined, not by time, but by "the spontaneity of
my thinking," that is to say, by "intelligence" (Intelligenz). Quite
apart from determinations of time, moreover, this spontaneity of
apperception can yield a purely intellectual synthesis. Pure apper
ception, Kant notes, is itself an act of spontaneity, meaning "it can

not be regarded asbelonging to
sensibility."80 In other
words,
spontaneity is for Kant characteristic, solely and fundamentally, of
self-consciousness and its unity. Moreover, in Kant's view at least,
77
As Klaus D?sing has pointed out, this basic line of reasoning, both
the objection and the amendment to Kant's theory of apperception, is sug
gested by Hegel. In addition, the recognition of the need for this alteration
does not require buying into any absolutistic metaphysics. As D?sing
effectively argues, however, it does require a development of a theory of
subjectivity that, if it is to follow Kant, must not look beyond the under
standing for the constitutive unity of self-consciousness. See Klaus D?s
ing, Dos Problem der Subjektivit?t in Hegels Logik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976),
238-43, esp. p. 240; Klaus D?sing, Hegel und die Geschichte der Philosophie
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 225; Klaus D?sing,
"Constitution and Structure of Self-Identity," Midwest Studies in Philos
8 (1983): 414-15, 427.
ophy 78
"Damit ist aber mit einem Schlage offenbar, da? die Zeit als reine
Selbstaffektion nicht 'neben' der reinen Apperzeption 'im Gem?t' vor
kommt, sondern da? sie als Grund der M?glichkeit der Selbstheit in der
reinen Apperzeption schon liegt und so das Gem?t erst zum Gem?t macht";
KPM, 185. See also KPM, 184.
79SZ,406ff.
80
B132; see also B157n, B150-151, B428-430.
this spontaneity, operative in the understanding, is quite capable of
being realized and recognized in abstraction from the form as well

as the content of sensibility.
Only by discounting Kant's conception of the spontaneity of

self-consciousness is Heidegger able to construe time as self-affection
and radically revise the status Kant assigns to self-consciousness
and time in relation to one another. What, on the one hand, is
doubtlessly true for Kant is that apperception and time are irre
ducible and complementary in the constitution of a priori knowledge
of nature. What, on the other hand, is not true for Kant is this
complementarity in regard to all a priori knowledge, for example,

in pure self-consciousness or in logic. In fact, Heidegger's claim
that the predicates of time and apperception coincide in the KrV is
directly denied by Kant.

The consciousness of my self in the representation "I" is no intuition
at all, but rather a mere intellectual representation of the activity of
the self of a thinking subject. Thus this I has not the slightest predi
cate of intuition which, as enduring [beharrlich], could serve as a cor
relate to the time-determination in the inner sense. [B278]
In Kant's own
terms, the Kritik der reinen Vernunft is, among
other things, an attempt to explain the possibility of experience and
to do so on the basis of transcendental knowledge?a synthesis or
determination of the pure intuition of time merely by the under
standing. What links this project of Kant's transcendental philoso
phy to Heidegger's fundamental ontology is the fact that for both
of them time, taken in a distinctive sense, plays a prominent role
among the original conditions of human knowing, a role that explains
both how knowing is possible and why it is finite. As finite, this
knowing, or, as Heidegger would put it, this original transcending,
is in no way some fundamental power (Grundkraft) of the soul, either
in the Wolffian sense explicitly rejected by Kant or in the German
idealist sense of an absolute self-consciousness (knowing or spirit).81
81 to link up
Logik, 270; PIK, 392. Thus, Dieter Henrich's attempt
Heidegger's interpretation with that of German idealists is, in my view,
unconvincing. See his "Die Einheit der Subjektivit?t," Philosophische
Rundschau 3 (1955): 28-69.
For Kant, however, the distinction between what is given to and

what is constituted by the knower remains fundamental. What is
original is a categorical synthesis of the sheer manifold of time (its
before-and-after-ness: das Nacheinander) presupposed in any pos
sible experience and effected by the intellect on the basis of its high
est principle: the (pure and spontaneous) synthetic unity of apper
ception.
For Heidegger, on the other hand, what is original is ecstatic
horizontal temporality, rendering transcendence itself and thus
being-in-the-world possible at all. Perhaps what is most radical
about Heidegger's interpretation is the way in which he thus at
tempts to desubjectify the notions of time and self-affection as they

are presented by Kant. While it is true that there is nothing ar
bitrary time
about for Kant, and that the mind's structuring of time
is spontaneous, the soundness of the claim that time for him is, in
the sense of ecstatic temporality, both presubjective and preobjective
can be sustained, not on the basis of what Kant does say, but only
on the basis of what he ought to have wanted to say.
The Catholic University of America
Appendix: Heidegger on the KrV
In the chart on the following pages, the divisions are less precise
than the page numbers might suggest. This should be
expected,
since the discussions often overlap, especially when Heidegger dis
cusses the prefaces and introductions. Nevertheless, the chart il
lustrates the extent of Heidegger's preoccupation with Kant's critical
philosophy during this decade. The far left column indicates the
pages from the Kr V explicitly addressed by Heidegger in lectures
and publications between 1925 and 1936. The accompanying six
columns refer sequentially to the corresponding pages in the five
published lectures and in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik

where that commentary can be found.
Heidegger's Commentary on the Kritik der reinen Vernunft
between 1925 and 1936
Critique of Logik GP PIK KPM WmF FD
Pure Reason 1925/6 1927 1927/8 1929 1930 1935/6
Prefaces, Introduction 40-76 5-18 152-3
Transcendental
Aesthetic 227 77-112 19-52 137-9

B33-36 (?1) 122-31
B37-40; 46-48 (?2, 4) 113-22
B40-41; 48-49 (?3, 5) 139-41
B42-46; 50-73 (?3, 6-8) 305 145-63 136-40 200-4
Transcendental Logic
B74-77 165-76 62-65 147-73
B77-82 176-88 178-83
B82-88 188-97
B87-90 198-217
1. Analytic of Concepts
1) Clue {Leitfaden)
B90-93 217-40 48-50
B93-101 (?9) 241-62 50-4
B102-105 (?10) 263-92 55-62
B105-113 (?10, 11) 292-302 62-?
B116-129 (?13, 14) 303-26 65-8
81-4
2) Deduction
A95-130 326-91 68-81
403-24 170-82
B129-169 (?15-27) 155-65 255-7
(?24, 25) 305-47 391-402 182-89

B162n 294-7 132-9 56-8
140n
2. Analytic of
Principles
B169-75
1) Schematism
B176-187 357-400 429-31 85-109 159 214-16
B176-187 145-6 224
2) Principles
B189-193 110 174-8
B193-197 115 183-7
243-5
B197-202 187-97
Axioms
B202-207 197-208
250-2
Critique of Logik GP PIK KPM WmF FD
Pure Reason 1925/6 1927 1927/8 1929 1930 1935/6
Anticipations
B207-218 209-26
Analogies
B218-224 424-8 148-63
169-71 227-38
1) Substance
B224-232 347-57 163-74 234-7
2) Causality
B232-256 174-200 237
3) Community
B256-265 238
Postulates
B266-287 61-7
Idealism
B274-279 292-3
355-7
Phenomena and
Noumena
B294-315 115-20
Doctrine of Ideas
B390-395 203-9
Paralogism
B399-432 201-9
Antinomies
B432-448 211 209-16

Third Antinomy
B472-480 216-23
Section 3
B490-504 223-8
Section 7
B525-535 228-36
Solution
B560-587 236-59
Ontological Proof of
God's Existence
35-107
B620-630
445-52
Architectonic
B860-879 61-76

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Heidegger's Kantian Turn: Notes to His Commentary on the "Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft"

Author(s): Daniel Dahlstrom

An the spring of 1928, approximately one year after the publication

With the publication of several of Heidegger's lectures at Marburg

Review of Metaphysics 45 (December 1991): 329-361. Copyright ? 1991 by the Review of

Marburg. The final portion of Heidegger's lectures in the winter

being and subjectivity in the KrV.

Freiburg to take up the chair vacated by Husserl. Not long after

degger devotes the entire winter semester (1935-36) to the "Doctrine

philosophy is projected as the first installment of the second, un

part of Sein und Zeit, the commentary can be expected to

provide clues to the unfinished business of that project.4 Second,

importantly it outlines a central part of the argument for his basic

temporality, conceived as an original, yet finite, transcending.

"thoughtful dialogues" seem

logues. Heidegger himself acknowledges that his interpretations

trying to say or should have been trying to say.6

Yet for a generation of German philosophers in the Wilhelmzeit,

Though potentially as arbitrary as it is fruitful, the criterion

pretation, by his own standards, depends upon the extent to which

perspectives can critically

commentary. Its success, even where he acknowledges its "violence"

With some notable exceptions,14 the bulk of Heidegger's studies

provocatively calls "Kant's ontology," namely the Transcendental

(Kant's critique of rational psychology or the doctrine of the soul).

too, is the brevity of Heidegger's treatment of the Paralogisms.

subject.19 Nevertheless, there can be no doubt about the consid

The significance of Heidegger's commentary can be gathered

afforded by construing the temporality of transcendental imagi

commentary on the KrV is the part it plays in the unfinished?or

(Destruktion, Abbau) of the history of ontology with a view towards

ontological horizons and conceptions. This positive appropriation

said, on theone hand, to continue the tradition of ancient

assimilating what 'to be' means to the temporal structure of the

$>Gegenw?rtigens<^ von etwas). On the other hand, Kant is also

subject to encounter or relate to a particular being (Seiendes) at all.25

object at all. Reality and existence are distinct categories, but

jective, psychological or physical conceptions of time, clock time, or

Thirdly, according to Heidegger, Kant regards the unity of that

beyond itself to an object; but it does explain how human existence

Heidegger drafts this parallel in terms of three theses con

cerning self-affection: (1) the original (ecstatic) sense of time is

distinguishing of the Self in the sense that it becomes an object for

ject is an object to itself, but, correlatively, or rather more basically,

jective and preobjective. In self-affection, in other words, time is

innermost essence of transcendence" and provides "the transcen

subjectivity as an anticipation of the fundamental ontology of "hu

self-affection, Heidegger us, tells is the sheerturning toward itself

(reines Sich-zuwenden-zu) in the sense of letting itself stand opposite

precisely in this sense that time makes possible Self-consciousness,

precisely inasmuch as time is a persistent projecting onto a horizon

(comes back to or recovers) and maintains (presents) itself.34

apperception is "the highest point, to which one must affix every

porality underlies, in Kant's own words, "every use of the under

standing, even the whole [of] logic."35

philosophy from the understanding to sentience. That is to say, he

insisting that for Kant knowing is basically an intuiting, Heidegger

analysis, in terms of the structure and character of such judgments.36

Despite the considerable difference between what Kant means

analyses of knowing helps put in focus one meaning of his remark

analysis of truth, the problem of transcendence is for Heidegger not

it specifically means in the case of intentionality (the being of the

logical prejudice?one that construes the intuited identity of a filled