angelova - revisiting heidegger's reading of kant.pdf

© 2009. Idealistic Studies, Volume 39, Issues 1–3. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 53–69

A CoNtINuIty BetweeN the A ANd B deduCtIoNS of the CrItIque: reVISItINg heIdegger’S reAdINg of KANt

emilia Angelova

Abstract: heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics controversially claims that the A deduction is superior to the B deduction because the imagination, as the “common root” of understanding and sensibility, opens the first Critique to meta-physical ground. drawing on dieter henrich, this paper reinterprets heidegger’s reading by moving beyond the Analytic and taking the dialectic into account. this suggests a continuity between the A and B deductions, namely that the imagination, as more than an ontic faculty, remains a basic power that keeps open a metaphysics of being in Kant—a metaphysics whose site is a radicalized unity of transcendental apperception. revisiting heidegger in this way shows how Kant is both linked to and differentiated from german Idealism’s debate about the imagination, a posi-tion suggested in both heidegger and recent scholarly discussion.

heidegger’s interpretation of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics1 is known for its controversial claim that the A deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding2 is superior to the B deduction, because of the role that imagination plays in it. heidegger finds an opening to metaphysical ground in the imagination, and he finds it in the A deduction. Consequently, scholars have taken the view that this opening is peculiar to the Aesthetic and Analytic in the A edition, and, because the opening is not to be found in B deduction, or because it is only, in any case, thought to be pertinent to issues of the deduction, it is thought to have no bearing on the rest of the Critique, beyond the analytic and the aesthetic. this predominant view assumes that the Kantbuch does not at all take into account the developments of dialectic. If, however, the dialectic is crucial to heidegger’s metaphysi-cal reading, as some scholars, notably dieter henrich, have claimed, then heidegger’s interpretation of the A deduction might in fact suggest a continuity between the A and B deductions. I pursue this continuity by drawing on henrich and arguing that heidegger associates the imagination with the metaphysics of being in Kant in a way that demands attention to the dialectic. the continuity radicalizes the Kantian project from within and shows that more is going on in the dialectic and the A and B deductions than is usually acknowledged. revisiting heidegger’s reading of Kant in this way shows how Kant is both linked to and differentiated from german Idealism’s debate about the imagination—a position about Kant well supported in recent scholarly discussion.

IdeAlIStIC StudIeS54

1. Heidegger’s View of the Imagination in the A DeductionKant’s text varies from the first edition (1781) of the Critique to the second (1787), and the motives of the revisions are not always easy to explain. In the second edition, Kant makes major revisions to the role of imagination in the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of understanding. In this section, I focus on the importance of the imagina-tion to the A deduction and Critique as a whole, to prepare for the study of the shift in the B deduction, which is the focus of the next section.

Kant’s attention to imagination and heidegger’s subsequent focus on it stem from a crucial issue in Kant: that a circular relation of dependency between intuition and under-standing is prerequisite to the conditions of possibility for determinate knowledge. Kant posits that pure intuition requires determination through the understanding, if it is to yield knowledge. yet, he also posits that the understanding in turn depends upon intuition, “for we can understand only that which brings with it, in intuition, something corresponding to our words” (A277/B333). Kant’s view of this circular relationship and its role in cognition undergoes a shift as his inquiry into this circle deepens, with the A and the B deductions representing two different runs of the circle.

the imagination has an important role in both runs because, unlike perception, which always holds onto an object as given to sensibility, imagination spontaneously gives an image. As spontaneous, it makes present the being of something absent (A100–102). But the two deductions harness this spontaneity to two quite different ends. In the A deduction, imagination serves the ideal task of bringing the thing-in-itself into thought. Imagination thus has a kind of autonomy over and above the imperatives of understand-ing, subordinating understanding and sensibility to the ideal task. this is key to Kant’s argument that there are in fact three sources of knowledge (A94, A115, A124, cf. K 93): sensibility, understanding and the imagination, with imagination as what Kant calls their “common root” (a point discussed below). But in the B deduction, imagination is bound by the necessities of supplying objective cognition. this couples with Kant’s argument that there are only two sources (Grundquellen) or conditions of possibility of experience, sensibility and understanding. As heidegger sees it, this is because the B deduction al-lows for the “subsumption” of the manifold of sensibility “under” the unity of concepts and this subsumption first constitutes the object a priori of our cognition. this is a shift toward a ‘cognitivism’ that leaves behind the radicalism of the A deduction, where Kant does not reduce sensibility to understanding and does not subsume intuition to concepts of understanding: in the A deduction Kant had happened upon a notion of the “power of transcendental imagination,” a “pure synthesis” prior to the discovery of concepts (cf. A77–79/B103–105; A101) that precisely disallows subsumption or reduction to concepts and to understanding. heidegger’s defence of the superiority of the A deduction involves several points, which I review below.

heidegger’s interpretation of the A deduction focuses on the notion of pure synthesis. this notion leads Kant to a recovery of what heidegger calls the “preparatory exposition of the problem of a grounding of metaphysics.” Pure synthesis “is only possible on the grounds of a priori knowledge, free of experience, of the constitution of the Being of beings” (K 36), for it concerns the necessary way in which sensibility and understanding belong together. heidegger bases his interpretation on Kant:

55reVISItINg heIdegger’S reAdINg of KANt

[Pure synthesis] presupposes that appearances are themselves actually subject to such a rule [a law of reproduction], and that in the manifold of these representations a co-existence or sequence takes place in conformity with certain rules. otherwise our empirical imagination would never find opportunity for exercise appropriate to its powers, and so would remain concealed within the mind as a dead and to us unknown faculty. (A100, emphases mine)

for heidegger, Kant posits “an order of precedence in the structural grounding of thinking in intuition,” such that “pure transcendental synthesis of imagination” precedes thinking; in this order of precedence, the pure imagination “exists as initial representing” (K 33, emphasis mine). the pure synthesis of imagination is “form giving,” a “power of forming” (K 123), it is the foremost condition of possibility that supplies the synthetic representation a priori of the object of our cognitions. this is in agreement with Kant, who states that “this synthesis of imagination is . . . grounded, antecedently to all experience, upon a priori principles” (A101). According to heidegger, pure synthesis is in the first place openness, an “affection” by the “non-sensible” being of the sensible, which then appears “as” the forms of sensibility—the pure intuitions of space and time themselves. there is a non-sensible, non-empirical and, therefore, transcendental affection, which brings-forth and sets-free sensibility into a transcendental appearance (prior to giving an object a priori of our cognitions). Pure synthesis is “experience-free,”3 a pure representing, for which knowledge of what is “present at hand” is not the aim. that is, non-sensible affection must “give itself something capable of being represented” and pure intuition “must, in a certain sense be ‘creative.’” It is because it involves the “creativity” of pure intuition that the image is sensible. And because pure intuition is creative (of a sensible image), thus pure synthesis is affective—a susceptibility to affectivity that does not have its source in something really and only at hand (K 123).

heidegger’s deeper point is that pure synthesis is a pure (transcendental) reproduction, a representing of unity “in advance,” a paradoxical repetition (Wiederholung) of being “without the presence of the object,” a representing “of that which has never before and nowhere been experienced” (K 125). Pure synthesis attests, then, to sensibility as a meta-physical receptivity to an outside that is taken in spontaneously. however, spontaneity is a ‘resistance’—an excess of form over matter that is neither empirical nor sensuous, but purely transcendental and that cannot itself be given in or subsumed under concepts of un-derstanding. In heidegger’s view, via imagination as transcendental spontaneity as well as receptivity, Kant here encounters a metaphysics of ground in the Critique, the “occurrence” of the metaphysics of the Being of beings. As Kant writes: “there must then be something which, as the a priori ground of a necessary synthetic unity of appearances, makes their [pure] reproduction possible. what that something is we soon discover, when we reflect that appearances are not things in themselves, but are the mere play of our representations, and in the end reduce to determinations of inner sense” (A101, emphasis mine).

heidegger singles out time and the “I” in Kant’s A deduction as having special standing in enabling this occurrence of metaphysics. Kant’s notion that time is a pure intuition a priori and is universal points us to a pure synthetic universality, one rooted in pure synthesis. time as universal intuition a priori temporalizes appearance—it is the “making-sensible” or “possible” of the concept. yet it never lets the purely synthetic essence of appearance


(which is beyond concept) be subsumed under it, be levelled down to the concept. As universal intuition a priori, time is the condition of possibility of all appearances, it is the unthematic horizon upon which things appear. Appearing, however, is not a mere horizon, but a horizon that always “plays” (as Spielraum and Zeitraum, K 136–138; cf. A101) with a “representing unity” that makes time as unique object appear “from time to time” (K 175). Because of its role as synthetic universality, pure synthesis underlies the Supreme Principle of the transcendental Analytic, which is concerned with the givenness of transcendental appearance. So at A158/B197 Kant holds that “[t]he conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time [sind zugleich] conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience” (K 114). the condition and the object “appear” as simultaneous (zugleich) since the pure power of imagination which gives pure syn-thesis sets forth both the “I” and sensibility (the intuition of time) “in time.” Appearance (“experience”) is “possible” insofar as the power of transcendental imagination a priori holds the condition (the “I”) and the object (sensibility) as being-together at the same time. yet this power of imagination and the simultaneity it produces are concealed, they do not appear in what appears, even though they condition what appears. what makes appearance possible is concealment. Pure synthesis of imagination is this form of being that secures “in advance” what is “wholly other” (K 111; cf. A154/B193–194). It is thereby in concealment that the condition of objects a priori can appear at all. But concealment makes unknown to us the “how” of this pure synthesis. As heidegger stresses, it is the finite essence of transcendence that pure synthesis sets forth as an “inner possibility” that does the concealment.

heidegger traces this concealment back to Kant’s “metaphysical deduction” of the intuitions of sensibility, part of the Aesthetic. Kant distinguishes intuitus derivativus (de-rivative intuition) as human and finite from intuitus originarius, an intellectual intuition that is divine and infinite (B67–72. Cf. K 136–137). As Kant puts it, divine knowing is: “[I]ntuition (for all its knowledge must be intuition and not thinking, which always shows itself to have limits)” (K 24; cf. B71). that is, insofar as thinking always shows itself to have limits (cf. A19/B34), it follows that the pure form of intuition, in the A edition, depends on imagination. this point leads heidegger to conclude that in his notion of the power of transcendental imagination Kant stumbled into the ways in which, for the transcendental subject, for pure reason, even the nihil absolutum of an empty concept that is also empty of intuition cannot appear as it is (“nothing”), but always would appear as a “something.”4 It will appear, because the excess of imagination fills it, via a pure synthesis. heidegger sees that there is a connectedness between the condition of possibility of knowledge and the object of knowledge in their being-together “at the same time.” this connectedness, though, is a receptivity or openness, in a pure synthesis, to the being “that it is not and that shows itself from itself” (K 28).

even though it produces this crucial connectedness, the pure synthesis, the pure power of imagination “itself” (if such a thing exists) withdraws in concealment, disconnected from the being that it draws near and makes visible in appearance. this withdrawal is concealment’s source. heidegger concludes that the same disconnectedness, a detachment from the being that it brings inside (intuits “in time”) in turn “also” “throws out” (K 145) both the condition, the “I,” and the object, sensibility—it throws them outside of time. this


is why pure sensibility as species of intuitus derivativus is ultimately non-spontaneous. the pure synthesis of imagination does not produce being in the act in which it intuits it—the being that does the “forming” remains outside of time.

the pure power of imagination as pure synthesis is itself “thrown.” the important point is that the same connectedness that brings in time, and via the schema-image produces a transcendental determination of time, refers to a “forming” ground, a pure synthesis that lies outside of time. It is this double (receptive and spontaneous) reflexivity of the taking in and throwing out that the pure synthesis of the power of transcendental imagination ‘is’ or enables. this bringing in of time by transcendental imagination is the opening to metaphysical ground. But Kant seems to have cut transcendental imagination—and thence this opening—out of the Critique in the B deduction.

2. Altering the View in the B DeductionI now turn to assess the controversy surrounding heidegger’s claim that the A deduction is superior to the B deduction. My goal in what follows is not to give a thorough explanation of the controversy but to show that careful attention to heidegger’s point reveals a con-tinuity between the A and the B deductions, in light of a continuity between imagination in the A deduction and theoretical reason in the dialectic. I should say from the start that the textual evidence from the B edition, on which heidegger relies, leads him to say that Kant is “eliminating” the pure power of the imagination and leaving imagination in the B edition “in its name only” (K 158). here is heidegger’s verdict on Kant:

this original, essential constitution of humankind, “rooted” in the transcendental power of imagination, is the “unknown” into which Kant must have looked if he spoke of the “root unknown to us,” for the unknown is not that of which we simply know nothing. rather, it is what pushes against us as something disquieting in what is known. And yet, Kant did not carry through with the more original interpreta-tion of the transcendental power of imagination. . . . Kant shrank back from this unknown root. (K 155)

the key passage from Kant referred to by heidegger is as follows:

only this much appears to be necessary by way of introduction and anticipation, namely, that there are two stems of human knowledge, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring forth from a common, but to us unknown, root. through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter they are thought. (A15/B29)

for heidegger, the imagination is this “unknown root.” And this passage in Kant gives “a remarkable characterization of the two basic sources,” for it “goes beyond” the “mere enumeration” of sensibility and understanding, to imagination as their primordial “originality”—a supposition that no calculative rationality could justify (K 34). heidegger envisages the imagination not as one cognitive faculty amidst others:

But just as the transcendental power of imagination itself is far from being merely something imaginary [Eingebildetes] because as a root it “forms [bildet],” likewise it is not something that could be thought of as a “basic power” in the soul. Nothing lies further from this going-back into the essential origin of transcendence than the


monistic-empirical explanation of the remaining faculties of the soul based on the power of imagination. (K 138)

At the very least, for heidegger, in the B deduction Kant “shrinks back” before the “nothing”: at once fleeing and epistemologizing, that is, positivizing this nothing (namely the thought that X, the thing itself), as “object in general.” But heidegger grants Kant that the X that is referred to by the object a priori is not an “apprehending of beings”: it is no “universal, indeterminate being which stands-against,” and therefore gives no knowledge of positivity (K 119). the a priori source of the object can only be “ontologi-cal knowledge,” and the constriction on this type of knowledge is that it always precedes itself—it precedes a positivist knowledge of ontic beings for it first lays out the ground for a metaphysics of the ontic.5

dieter henrich, who provides one of the earliest systematic assessments and defences of heidegger’s controversial interpretation of Kant, urges that it must be assessed in its true context: heidegger’s revisiting of Kant and post-Kantian idealism in relation to the Neo-Kantians of his time. heidegger exaggerates his claims about the changes to the B deduction in reaction to the positivism of his contemporaries. to henrich, heidegger’s genuine insight into Kant reveals more of a continuity between the A and B deductions than heidegger lets on.6

In his now classic essay of 1955, “the unity of Subjectivity,”7 henrich notes with some concern that heidegger has been a major influence on Kant interpretations, although “that influence has not occurred in the light of conscious methodical discipline.” for henrich, the controversy of heidegger’s interpretation almost exclusively concerns the passage from Kant cited above, about the “common, but to us unknown, root” (A15/B29), in which sensibility and understanding “perhaps” originate.8 while heidegger stresses the “unknown,” this is not something irrational (as the neo-Kantians tended to think), it is rather a matter of the limits of knowledge where knowledge itself no longer fits the inscription of philosophy (as opposed to science). henrich writes:

heidegger insists that the true dynamic of the Critique has to be seen in the force of Kant’s glance into that “unknown”—given that the unknown is not that of which we know nothing, but that which comes up to us as the disquieting in what is known. . . . thus anyone attempting to enter into a dialogue with heidegger concerning this underlying assumption is referred to the interpretation of that passage in Kant.9

for henrich, the “unknown” is “spoken from the certainty of the insight that the task of revealing the common root reaches beyond the limits of human knowledge; and that the ‘perhaps’ merely concedes the possibility that there might be such a first principle, though there would be no reason to assume that it had to exist.”10 heidegger’s interpretation there-fore does not “point forward” to a deeper understanding to be gained from the unfolding of Kant’s Critique, as if the Critique would reveal something behind this unknown, something within the limits of reason. Kant’s unknown could not be something fully present, as the positivists would say. Kant’s concept of the unknown root in fact emerges out of his criti-cism of wolff, Crusius and leibniz, namely, his criticism of their views on soul as a basic power, which soul is assumed and conceived as substance. to be sure, in the critique of


the four varieties of the psychological paralogism Kant rules out the substantialist basis for the soul: the unknown root cannot be a substance beyond reason.

But henrich adds original support for heidegger’s point that the root must be pure imagining by approaching the issue through the problematic of transcendental illusion as requiring an ontological interpretation, that is, more than an ontic explanation. here we must agree with henrich that the peculiarity of heidegger’s take on Kant’s two deduc-tions is reflective of heidegger’s interest in what he would call the “phenomenological” interpretation of the logic of transcendental illusion. this interpretation involves a phe-nomenology or short-circuiting of time, a more basic, or more originary interpretation of “experience” (Erfahrung vs. Erlebnis) that has more than merely ontic predicates. that is, when reason’s employment must fail to reach being, fail to constitute the being of its object, the transcendental object = X, Kant ventures that reason as faculty of pure thinking is driven by “pure imagining.” As Kant develops the thesis in the dialectic, not all of reason’s objects can have a constitutive role. the deepest, most radical of reason’s objects, authentic ideals, can only be regulative—mere projections.11

what does the Kantian unknown—a “perhaps” unknown—refer to? the idea, while within the limit of reason, is yet unknown to reason: reason itself can have only a purely regulative employment, if the idea that it entertains is of the sort that ‘must not’ reach being. for henrich, the idea that reason ‘can have’ but ‘must not have’ constitutive em-ployment is well identified by Kant under the heading of transcendental illusion and the focus imaginarius (A644–645/B672–673): “employment . . . directing the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection. this point is indeed a mere idea, a focus imaginarius, from which, since it lies quite outside the bounds of possible experience, the concepts of the understanding do not in reality proceed.”

to draw out henrich’s thesis a bit, the point concerns the basic issues of the phe-nomenology of transcendental illusion—a question that heidegger tackles in two further lecture-courses on Kant, both in 1927, of which henrich makes good use.12 Kant’s logic of the transcendental power of illusion receives its highest orientation out of a focal point, an end, the Ziel, Ding an sich, an “object in the idea,” the point splitting reason’s own use into regulative and constitutive uses, since creating a more originary field of appearing or “play” which itself prevents the collapsing of the two and their application into another. while both planes of perception, one directed at ends that are visible appearing in the plane of the mirror, and another imaginary and beyond the mirror, are bound to one another, one within the other, each is also anterior to the other.

to fully appreciate heidegger and henrich’s discussions of the power of imagination as a more primordial origin, or ‘root,’ active within the limit of reason yet ‘perhaps’ ‘unknown to us’ we need to review the objections to B deduction first. heidegger’s attention to the A deduction and imagination is part of his overall rethinking of the change, introduced with Kant’s critical philosophy, to the role of concepts (of understanding) and categories (of reason). Against his contemporaries, the neo-Kantians, he is eager to stress that con-cerns about the “objective reality” (Washeit, Sachheit) of the categories do not reduce to concerns about their “objective validity” (Gültigkeit, Geltung). heidegger quickly finds in Kant of the B deduction an ally to neo-Kantianism, even though he stresses how Kant’s


elaborate distinctions concerning the notion of deduction (questio juris and questio facti, cf.A84/B117) prevent issues of truth (and the thing in itself) from being reduced within the limits of reason. what Kant deduces in the A deduction, as heidegger points out, is not the “objective validity” of concepts, not their epistemological validity, but an objective reality that would yet appear within the limit.13 But this would involve regulative ideas.

In other words, when we put heidegger’s controversial claim in context and understand how it points us to the rule of regulative ideas and a way of interpreting Kant against cognitivism, we soon realize that heidegger’s interpretation is most productive when understood as giving a map of the Critique and a comprehensive strategy for interpreting it. we should recall that in his own words, heidegger “glimpsed” a connection between “the problem of the Categories . . . and the phenomenon of time,” Kant’s A deduction and the schematism, and made this connection into the guiding thread of his interpreta-tion (K xiv). that is, as heidegger reads it, the A deduction, via its “connection” with the schematism, is part of the very same question that guides Kant’s study of the “objective reality” of the categories, which is pursued in Kant’s study of the schemata which are the “making-sensible of the concept.”14 on the strength of the schematism chapter (which is not our interest here), which remains unaltered in the B edition, heidegger is saying that reason is first subject to imagination’s “work.” what the attentive reader needs to find out is how this work gives to reason ideas whose use is restricted to regulative employment, yet without which use reason cannot ever begin to compare the concept to the object.

to begin, that reason is susceptible to a turning toward ontology so as to contem-plate either being or non-being (on a continuum) underscores two important points in heidegger’s account. first, Kant ponders a susceptibility in reason for a submission to the given as given, an attunement to what becomes decisive in how the categories make appearance appear (the very point of Kant’s deductions as needing to show how pure concepts bear on reality not just validity), i.e., how they decide between “something and nothing” of what appears. In this the categories would be swayed under the influence of reason as power of ideas but in its aspect of descendence from knowledge (of appearance) to idea’s dialectic use/ abuse, endowing the idea with an object, which in a priori fashion yields a connection with being. And second, Kant understands as related to the problem of transcendental grounding that reason is thereby (through susceptibility to orientation by the mere object in the idea) first of all capable of turning away from the oppression of the “nothing” and toward that, which could appear, “something.” the deep point is that reason is thereby proved subordinate to a more originary order of appearing, what Kant calls “discursive” understanding, engaged with non-sensible intuition at a level other than the regime of appearance.

3. The Continuity Between the A and B Deductions and Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kantian Intellectual Intuition

In this section I continue to be guided by henrich, who draws a parallel between Kant and the aesthetic root of intellectual intuition in german Idealism—a view in which heidegger is himself interested in the Kantbuch—to show that heidegger’s claim in fact allows for a continuity between the two deductions. As in the preceding section, it is important to put heidegger’s verdict in context and this is what I do first.


heidegger seeks to recover the metaphysical interpretation of Kant’s B deduction since he rightly sees that the topic of the B deduction is, in fact, the philosophical problem of intellectual intuition. the german idealists had understood the power of transcendental imagination in the A deduction as Kant’s solution to the problem of intellectual intuition, namely, to the problem that we have finite intellects in which intuitions are given recep-tively and require concepts, that we do not have intellectual intuition, as might a divine intellect, which has a completely spontaneous power of intuition and to which concepts do not need to be added to supply the universal.15 Kant’s presentation, of course, complicates this classical problem, given that for him being and thought are divided, and given that reason only makes claims about divine intellect by way of regulative ideas that would say nothing about the existence of this intellect.16 heidegger suggests that in setting out to revise the Critique, Kant in effect responds to his earliest reception by turning, in heidegger’s words, away from imagination and to epistemology, that is, away from the metaphysics of ground that he had pursued in the A edition.17 this turn to epistemology, would, for Kant, smooth the relation between ideas and existence. But for heidegger this is a misguided response, and leads to a misguided appropriation of Kant.18

heidegger spends only a few pages discussing the B deduction and his remarks do not have the systematic quality of the discussion of the A deduction. Several sporadic remarks are of central importance for putting heidegger’s claim about the B deduction in context. the direct accusation (K 155–165) suggests that Kant disposes of the imagination as a third basic power and reduces the sources of our knowledge to two, sensibility and understand-ing, and furthermore endows understanding with the role played by imagination in the A deduction, to the degree of eliminating imagination as power of pure synthesis. the core of the controversy, however, does not lie in mere details about whether there are three or two sources of knowledge, or whether understanding could fully take over imagination. the controversy has more important ramifications since with the second edition of the Critique (which revises more than just the A deduction) terms such as “self-affection” and “objective side,” vs. “subjective side” of the deduction enter into the text. these terms are needed to compensate for the ‘loss’ of imagination and the turn to epistemology, and they signal, more than the first edition, that the real topic of both deductions is intellectual intuition—that the deductions are solutions to the problem of intellectual intuition. the rise of german idealism is unthinkable without Kant’s work on the deductions. But what german idealism takes from the deductions is a reductive understanding of Kant’s notion of transcendental deduction. As henrich writes about heidegger’s position:

If, however, the transcendental power of imagination is deleted as a particular grounding faculty . . . then the possibility of grasping pure sensibility and pure thinking with regard to their unity in a finite, human reason diminishes . . . all re-interpretation of the pure power of imagination as a function of pure thinking—a re-interpretation which german Idealism even accentuated subsequent to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason—misunderstands its specific essence.19

on henrich’s view, heidegger’s claim is that this “deletion” of imagination by german idealism is wrong; german idealism wrongly collapses imagination and the “thing in itself” (K 166) by reducing both to self-consciousness, to the Kantian unity of transcendental


apperception. even if henrich is imprecise on heidegger’s view of german idealism and in his claim that german idealists ‘delete’ imagination,20 he is right in diagnosing the problem that heidegger would find in a position that deletes the imagination. Such a deletion is wrong because, according to heidegger, imagination in the A deduction involves a metaphysical ground beyond reason’s limit and the reduction eliminates this ground. But heidegger controversially claims that Kant is to blame for this reduction, when in the B deduction Kant “shrank back” before the “unknown” of the imagination and of metaphysics, to epistemology. As henrich shows, heidegger is interested in pursuing the structural role of Kant’s very notion of “transcendental deduction,” and not simply its “products,” such as self-consciousness as the self-explicating single principle of the activity of the individual, etc.

to begin, in section 18 in the B deduction Kant introduces a novel notion, that of the “objective side” of the deduction. the objective side is the side of the understanding, since the act of spontaneity of understanding gives objective unity to the concepts. the differ-ence from the A deduction is that there it is the pure synthesis of imagination that gives and justifies this unity. the B deduction thus leaves to the faculty of imagination only a subjective significance while the objectivity of knowledge is accorded by understanding. heidegger is concerned with the excision of imagination as openness to metaphysical ground from the Kantian text since “the original unity of apperception must lead beyond itself” (K 131; cf. A94). But he also seeks to comprehend just what gap or absence is be-ing filled by understanding in the revised deduction: “the problematic of a pure reason amplified in this way [that it is not able to tolerate in proximity to itself that which recalls the specific constitution of a determinate kind of realization of a finite rational creature in general] must push aside the power of imagination, and with that it really first conceals its transcendental essence” (K 163).

heidegger is saying that the “unmistakable problem” that “thrusts itself to the fore” in the B deduction is that of the “distinction between a finite, rational creature in general and the separate realization of such a creature, which is the human being.” Kant himself had stressed on the “first page” of the second edition of the Critique (B33), that the con-cern is with finite knowledge, with the finite intuition as given “at least to us humans,” that the taking in of things must “necessarily be mediated through the sense organs” (K 163). heidegger argues that “the elimination of transcendental imagination” points in fact to an open, “undecided,” “incomplete” question, concerning “a perspective which was broken open [in the first edition], so to speak, only for an instant,” a glancing into the “strangeness” of imagination’s power and “the sheer power of pure reason” (K 163); and therefore points to an open question concerning “the more original interpretation of the transcendental power of imagination” (K 165).

that is, heidegger is right that what Kant had glanced into was the subjectivity of the transcending subject as more than ontic: “will not the Critique of Pure Reason have deprived itself of its own theme if pure reason reverts to the transcendental power of imagination? does not [Kant’s] ground-laying lead us to an abyss?” (K 161–162). heideg-ger goes back to the Preface of the first edition of the Critique to discern Kant’s original intention for his critical project and discovers that the distinction between the “objective


side” and the “subjective side,” made explicit in the B deduction, figured in the initial plan of the Critique. Kant writes:

this enquiry, which is somewhat deeply grounded, has two sides. the one refers to the objects of pure understanding, and is intended to expound on and render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts. It is therefore essential to my purposes. the other seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself, its pos-sibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests; and so it deals with it in its subjective aspect. (Axvi–xvii)

heidegger acknowledges that despite what Kant says in this passage, both the A and B deductions only pursue the proof of the objective side (of the objectivity of objects and of the pure concepts of understanding). yet for Kant, it is the Objekt (thing in itself) in the Gegenstand (object) that confers objectivity on the object in the B deduction. But what the B deduction really elaborates upon concerns the “objective” (objektive), the thing in itself “which turns-toward,” takes place “in the pure subject as such,” in the faculties, under-standing and reason. the B deduction therefore is, says heidegger, “in itself necessarily objective-subjective,” a continuation of Kant’s elaboration on the imagination (on what would have been the subjective side of the deduction). “[t]he faculty of thinking itself” is essentially concerned with “this turning-toward [the Objekt] and with its possibility” (K 159). So even in the B deduction the issue is still a metaphysical ground.

heidegger links this metaphysical ground to self-affection, a topic referred to only twice in the Critique, and only in the B edition, a remnant of the imagination and the topic of important commentaries by heidegger. Kant refers to self-affection, “the mind . . . affected through itself,” in the Aesthetic:

Now that which, as representation, can be antecedent to every act of thinking any-thing, is intuition; and if it contains nothing but relations, it is the form of intuition. Since this form represents nothing except insofar as something is posited in the mind, it can be nothing other than the way the mind, through its own activity (namely, this positing of its representation), consequently comes to be affected through itself, i.e., according to an inner sense of its form. (K 184; cf. B67)

Kant’s other reference to “self-affection” is in the Analytic:

[the paradox of the form of inner sense is]: namely, this sense represents to con-sciousness 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. It is to avoid this contradiction that in systems of psychology inner sense, which we have carefully distinguished from the faculty of apperception, is commonly regarded as being identical with it. (B152–153)

According to heidegger, nothing less is at stake in the “new” doctrine of self-affection in the second edition than the connection between the thing in itself and apperception. Imagination has disappeared but a new problem arises in the same place, the problem of inner sense (the form of time) as a problem of the “originality” of time, of apperception, namely the “I.” where imagination in the A deduction opened metaphysical ground, time does so in the B deduction. thus heidegger comments: “[t]he inner affection must come


forth from out of the pure self. . . . It must constitute the self in the first place” (K 185). heidegger devotes sections 32–34 to (pure) self-affection, time and the “I.” for him, Kant stumbles upon self-affection as the core theme of the three syntheses of imagination (ap-prehension, reproduction and recognition in a concept) in the A deduction. So heidegger insists that the doctrine of self-affection which appears under its proper name in the B deduction, is in fact a doctrine fully developed in the A deduction. In section 34, heidegger concludes thus: “the idea of pure self-affection, which as we have now seen determines the innermost essence of transcendence, was thus not introduced by Kant for the first time in the second edition. In that edition it was simply formulated more explicitly, and indeed it appears characteristically [at the beginning] in the transcendental Aesthetic [B67f.]” (K 184). More importantly still, heidegger directs his criticism against the (fichtean) “I” that “practices self-positing,” by objecting that “time as pure self-affection is not found ‘in the mind’ ‘along with’ apperception. rather, as the ground for the possibility of self-hood, time already lies within pure apperception, and so it first makes the mind into a mind” (K 185).

the criticism that heidegger directs against german idealism is a criticism of the “struggle against ‘the thing in itself,’” a struggle that started with “the growing forget-ting of what Kant struggled for . . . the more original working-out . . . of the problem of finitude” (K 237). heidegger insists that had Kant carried out the Subjective deduction (as promised in Axvi ff.), he would have been “strong enough to permit the subjectivity of the subject [a more original ground-laying of the transcendental power of imagination] as a whole to be seen in a new light.” “Because Kant does not carry out the Subjective deduction, the subjectivity of the subject for him continues to be guided by the constitu-tion and the characterization offered to him through Anthropology and Psychology” (K 161). the target of heidegger is clearly the psychologization and empiricization of the transcendental unity of apperception in the B deduction. But remaining at this surface level of analysis does not give enough basis to understanding why Kant would introduce, for example, self-affection.

4. The Pluralism of Faculties Thesis in Kant’s Recovery of Transcendental Apperception as Radical Faculty

It has often been said, as heidegger notes, that what motivates Kant’s revisions to the A deduction (shown by textual references at B153) is Kant’s effort to depart from empiricist psychology (locke) and the substantialization of soul (wolff, Spinoza). But heidegger seems to argue, much more plausibly, that the revision in fact has to do with Kant’s re-thinking of the apperceptive “I.” In following heidegger, henrich’s essay “the unity of Subjectivity” makes a good case for this, namely, that in both A and B deductions Kant is concerned with a view of the unity of apperception, in which the “unity of subjectivity” is that of a plurality of faculties rather than that of a mind constituted by the mind itself, the unity of a self-explicating single rational principle. Below by way of concluding I turn to henrich to back up this point as well as to point in the direction in which it highlights a new view of the Kantian faculties—as exceeding ontic determination.

for henrich, heidegger’s own method of distinguishing between the A and the B de-ductions in fact provides the methodological tools for accessing the notion of intellectual


intuition in Kant, where Kant’s successors had failed to observe it. Kantian apperception, in both A and B deductions, is the “radical faculty” (A114), the determining structure of finite self-consciousness—it determines the content of the structure formed by the faculties. It is apperception, in both A and B deductions, that the german idealists take over when they read intellectual intuition back into Kant. But as heidegger shows—and it takes henrich’s systematic assessment to reveal this—it is Kantian imagination that is actually the condition of possibility of the unitary structure of subjectivity as such. hen-rich writes: “one can thus see why Kant can be amazed at the unity of the subject. for if apperception requires for its actualization other faculties which it cannot presuppose [that is, imagination], then the fact that there is consciousness requires further investigation.”21 Specifically, heidegger’s interpretation of the A deduction attributes to the imagination the recovery of an originary (ursprünglich) ground.

upon this ground Kant, then, overlays several predicables—faculty, power, sponta-neity, freedom and so on. yet as predicables, in both A and B deductions, they can only bring about knowledge insofar as they are applicable to something “pre-given”—“they originate [in the principle of apperception] as merely logical forms through which it is possible to think something.”22 we must see, however, that on heidegger’s view in both A and B deductions the imagination is not “a really existing structural element, to which, as to something primary and identically underlying, the multitude of the phenomena of subjectivity is to be reduced.”23 In the A deduction, Kant is working out of a conception of the plurality of faculties, in which imagination is a genuine cognitive faculty, but in the B deduction Kant shows that we cannot reduce imagination or the plurality of the faculties to a mediating function between sensibility and understanding; there must be a plurality of faculties, they cannot be reduced to each other.24 Kant’s B deduction preserves the plurality of moments even in the unity that is ultimately reached, that of the condi-tion of understanding’s pregiven concepts, as well as in its spontaneous “act,” the act of becoming conscious of sensibility’s representations.

that is, even though sensibility’s representations are temporalized (time is intuitive discursivity), and even though spatial representations are also temporalized, because of something crucial about time, “their very givenness” remains unconscious, non-sponta-neous, their givenness is a “receptivity as a possibility” (cf. K 25; 36; 40 as openness to a being that it itself is not; 86–88). the spontaneity of understanding determines the given precisely “in accordance with the forms of sensibility” (B160–165). Similarly, under-standing’s own pre-given concepts are “empty,” without intuitions, they too depend upon a condition of sensibility that is something other than a conceptual, rational discursivity.

I have argued that heidegger inquires into Kant to recover the meaning of the predicable “is.” this is what is targeted in henrich’s use of “the unity of subjectivity”—Kant’s concern as to the meaning of the faculties in their open constitution or “being.” for heidegger, such radicalized unity projects “toward the same unitary totality that is presupposed in the idea of Being itself.”25 true, Kant’s B deduction supports the claim that understanding and sensibility are the two sources of objective contents of knowledge, while transcendental imagination has merely subjective significance. But subjective significance, as is known to Kant scholars, gains new meaning in the B deduction. Sensibility and understanding as two sources of objective knowledge “contribute to every instance of knowledge of a


specific content,” while “imagination has to be presupposed only for the coming about of knowledge.” that is, imagination is a mediating “act,” it does not contribute to the material of knowledge, what an empirical proposition contains is “never anything stemming from imagination”—yet “imagination alone renders intuitions ready for conceptualization.”26 furthermore these conditions, as heidegger contends, are “not exhausted by appercep-tion.”27 they must be referred to imagination as independent cognitive power. these results of Kant’s B deduction are also consistent with Kant’s critique of the paralogisms.

In sum, for heidegger, fichte, Schelling, and hegel absolutize the Kantian “I,” whereas for Kant the “I” as the object of inner sense depends upon the schematizing activity of imagination, a condition that is itself irreducible to a thought that thinks something. Ac-cording to heidegger, this is because of the role of time in inner sense. Indeed, the doctrine of inner sense points further to the arguments in the analogies of experience. As henrich suggests, Kant sees that the categories are applied not to the matter of experience but only “analogically.” So self-consciousness both employs categories to grasp the very concept of the unity of the cognitive faculties, and at the same time “it knows” that it employs the categories only analogically—it cannot substantialize the unity of the faculties. the very “idea of the common root merely indicates an ‘empty space,’” self-consciousness is “empty.” In the B deduction, as henrich shows, Kant rejects only the dogmatic notion of a basic unifying or synthesizing power, but he must nevertheless assume the problematic idea of it (hence the “perhaps” at A15/B29): “such an idea is the inaccessible correlate of the (for us) contingent plurality of subjective attainments.”28 Just as heidegger claims, the predicables used in the B deduction, “act,” “spontaneity,” do not actually apply to apper-ception (i.e., self-consciousness). the origin that they apply to is instead the imagination (via the doctrine of inner sense in the A deduction), thus pointing to the unconditioned origin of knowledge—“without, however, being able to ascertain an original foundation for it.”29 Kant’s notion of intellectual intuition (act, spontaneity, freedom, radical faculty) corresponds with imagination, not with apperceptive self-consciousness, and this notion carries on from the A into the B deduction without changing its essence. Apperception “is the principle from which the necessity of the logical functions can be derived, and it therefore belongs to logic.”30 however, as heidegger also saw, precisely since the “I” is the supreme principle of all thought and knowledge, of all experience, what “being the ‘I’ has, insofar as it is such that it says ‘I’ to itself, cannot even be expressed in its logical structure.”31 thus in henrich’s rendition, what unifies both A and B deductions is Kant’s very notion of intellectual intuition to be retrieved out of his notion of “transcendental deduction”:

the “deduction” is hence wholly different from a deductive, logical developing of the previously mentioned relations of the understanding to pure synthesis and to pure intuitions. rather, from the outset the deduction already has the whole of pure, finite knowledge in view. while holding fast to what is caught sight of in this way, the explicit taking-up of the structural references that join the whole together proceeds from one element to the other.32

By way of concluding, in offering an interpretation of Kant that ambitiously positions Kant in continuity with fichte, Schelling and hegel on issues of imagination and reason,


heidegger opens up a new perspective on Kant. If the focus of one’s Kant interpretation is on intellectual intuition, on the sort of identity that hegel sought, then problems about the limits of reason, of dialectical illusion, and critical judgment’s denunciation of intellectual intuition fall by the wayside, for they become problems to be solved within the scope of subjectivity, and there can be no limits to reason if the hegelian identity and subjectivity is achieved. heidegger’s question, the one addressed above, about the metaphysics of ground, opens quite a different perspective on Kant’s system. the question is no longer what would reconcile the gaps of Kant’s system, but what is the metaphysical ground that underlies these gaps, what is it that grounds the limits of reason and that provokes dialectical illusion? It is because heidegger asks this novel question that he can and does provide a framework for the investigations that follow.

Trent University

Notes

1. Martin heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Vierte, erweiterte Auflage ed. (frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973); Martin heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. richard taft, 4th ed., Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1990). All citations in the paper of the type (K 104) refer to this text, indicating pagination in the german original.

2. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. wilhelm weischedel, Band iii und iv der theorie- werkausgabe Immanuel Kant, werke in 12 Bänden, frankfurt 1968 ed., 2 vols. (frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (london: Macmillan education, 1929). All citations in the paper of the type A15/B29 refer to this text, the letter A indicating the edition of 1781 and the letter B the edition of 1787, respectively. Kemp Smith’s translation remains the main reference text for the translators of the Kantbuch, Kant also appears in heidegger’s own translation.

3. See K 123, “So liegt zunächst in der Einbildungskraft eine eigentümliche Nichtgebundenheit an das Seiende. Sie ist freizügig.” Pure synthesis is a peculiar nonconnectedness to the being, it is free of experience. As condition of experience it is akin to metaphysics as what belongs to human nature, a hidden formative power that makes appear independently of what is required for percep-tion (for which the object, Objekt, must be represented as present): the power of imagination ‘can’ intuit, it “‘can’ take the look of something in stride, without showing the intuited which is referred to, itself, as being, and without getting the look from itself alone.” for comprehensive work on K, see henri declève, Heidegger et Kant (la haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970); Martin weatherston, Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination and Temporality (houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

4. the issue broached here is addressed by Kant in the division of the concept of “nothing,” at the end of the Amphiboly of Concepts of reflection.

5. Behind heidegger’s critique of the positivist interpretation of Kant is his disagreement with the Neo-Kantians of the 1920s. See especially the debate with Cassirer at davos. for more on


heidegger and neo-Kantianism, see Heidegger, German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, ed. tom rockmore (Amherst, N.y.: humanity Books, 2000).

6. the argument for the continuity remains debatable. In Charles M. Sherover, Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1971), pp. 170–181. for a further discus-sion, see herman-J. de Vleeschauwer, The Development of Kantian Thought: The History of the Doctrine, trans. A. r. C. duncan (london: thomas Nelson and Sons ltd., 1962), pp. 90–107; also see Norman Kemp Smith, Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (Atlantic highlands, N.J.: humanities Press International, 1992), pp. 234–270. for a different but related reading, see Pierre Kerszberg, “Being as an Idea of reason: heidegger’s ontological reading of Kant,” in Heidegger, German Idealism, and neo-Kantianism, ed. tom rockmore (Amherst, N.y.: humanity Books, 2000), pp. 35–63; Pierre Kerszberg, Critique and Totality (Albany: SuNy, 1997). See also frank Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: State university of New york Press, 1992).

7. dieter henrich, “on the unity of Subjectivity,” in The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. richard Velkley (Cambridge, Mass.: harvard university Press, 1994; reprint, Philosophische rundschau, 3 [1955]: 28–69), pp. 17–55. henceforth cited as ouS.

8. Cf. Sherover’s discussion of the “common root” in Heidegger, Kant and Time, pp. 136–142. See also Kemp Smith, Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” pp. 77, 337. Also see Michael friedman, A Parting of Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: open Court, 2000).

9. ouS, p. 19.

10. Ibid., pp. 19–20.

11. Ibid., p. 26. “the idea of a basic power is thus a regulative one.” Cf. A644/B672; A649/B677, A835/B863. on the early development of this idea, see Immanuel Kant, Kant on Sweden-borg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings, trans. gregory r. Johnson, and glenn Alexander magee (west Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg foundation Publishers, 2002). for more on this use, see Avery goldman, “Critique and the Mind: towards a defense of Kant’s transcendental Method,” Kant-Studien, vol. 98, no. 4 (2007): pp. 403–417.

12. Martin heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. emad Parvis and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1997); Martin heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1982). See also Kerszberg, “Being as an Idea of reason”; also see françois raffoul, Heidegger and the Subject, trans. david Pettigrew and gregory recco (Atlantic highlands, N.J.: humanities Press International, 1998).

13. See K 9–11; 58. even as Kant does not complete the subjective side of the deduction (in A deduction), in the B deduction attention to the “objective side” is far from mere reductionism. on these complications, see robert hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Also see Andrew Cutrofello, Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (New york: routledge, 2005).

14. See K 86.

15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 406.

16. for the classical formulation, see ibid., pp. 76–77. hegel takes up this problem in g. w. f. hegel, Faith & Knowledge, trans. h. S. harris (Albany: State university of New york Press, 1977). for a discussion, see Béatrice longuenesse, “Point of View of Man or Knowledge of god: Kant


and hegel on Concept, Judgment and reason,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2000), pp. 253–283, here pp. 258–259. Also see Karl Ameriks, “Introduction: Interpreting german Ideal-ism,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2000), pp. 1–18.

17. See dieter henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford university Press, 1992), pp. 3–29.

18. Kant was seen as being the german Berkeley and the Prussian hume. this reception is dis-cussed in de Vleeschauwer, The Development of Kantian Thought: The History of the Doctrine, pp. 90, 92, 98; 107–109. See h. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysics of Experience: A Commentary on the First Half of the “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” (london: george Allen&unwin, 1961), vol. 1, p. 147.

19. ouS, p. 50. Cf. K 191 and 132, footnote 196.

20. heidegger writes of “a re-interpretation which ‘german Idealism’ [deutsche Idealismus] even accentuated . . . [and] misunderstands,”distinguishing between german idealism as movement and german idealists, such as hegel in their own right. Cf. hegel, Faith & Knowledge [329], p. 72: “the whole transcendental deduction . . . cannot be understood without distinguishing what Kant calls the faculty of the original synthetic unity of apperception from the ego which does the representing and is the subject—the ego which, as Kant says, merely accompanies all representa-tions. And the imagination is nothing but reason itself.” for a challenge to henrich’s claim, see daniel dahlstrom, “heidegger’s Kantian turn: Notes to his Commentary on the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 45, no. 2 (1991): pp. 351–374.

21. ouS, p. 31.

22. Ibid., p. 35. See also robert Bernasconi, “the double Concept of Philosophy and the Place of ethics in Being and time,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 18 (1988): pp. 41–57.

23. ouS, pp. 49–50.

24. Cf. K 13. “through the Copernican revolution, the ‘old’ concept of truth in the sense of the ‘correspondence’ (adequatio) of knowledge to the being is . . . ground[ed] for the first time.”

25. ouS, p. 51.

26. Ibid., p. 39. for support of this point, see Béatrice longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles t. wolfe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton university Press, 1998). Also see Paul guyer, “hegel, leibniz, and the Contradiction in the finite,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 40 (1979): pp. 75–98; Paul guyer, “the transcendental deduction of the Categories,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1992), pp. 123–61.

27. ouS, p. 36.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., p. 37. this thesis is supported in longuenesse, “Point of View of Man.”

30. ouS, p. 37.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., p. 50. Cf. K 52–57.

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