less automataor, to put it in todays terms, into thinking machines.The implicationof this passage is much more radical and paradoxical than it may appear. If weignore its inconsistency (how could fear and lifeless gesticulation coexist?), theinescapable conclusion is that, at the level of phenomena as well as at the noumenallevel,wehumansare mere mechanisms with no autonomy and no freedom: asphenomena, we are not free, we are part of nature, mere mechanisms, totally submittedto causal links, part of the nexus of causes and effects; as noumena,we are againnot free, but reduced to mere mechanisms. (Is what Kant describes as a person whohas direct knowledge of the noumenal domain not strictly analogous to the utilitariansubject whose acts are fully determined by the calculus of pleasures and pains?)Our freedom persists only in a space in between the phenomenal and the noumenal. It is therefore notthat Kant simply limited causality to the phenomenal domain in order to be able to assertthat, at the noumenal level, we are free autonomous agents: we are free only insofaras our horizon is that of the phenomenal, insofar as the noumenal domainremains inaccessible to us.Is the way out of this predicament to assert that we are free insofar as we are noumenallyautonomous, but our cognitive perspective remains restricted to the phenomenallevel? In this case,we are really free at the noumenal level, but our freedomwould be meaningless if we were also to have cognitive insight into the noumenal domain,since that insight would always determine our choiceswho would chooseevil, confronted with the fact that the price of doing evil will be divine punishment?However, does this imagined case not provide us with the only logical answer to thequestion what would a truly free act be, a free act for a noumenal entity, an act of truenoumenal freedom? It would be to know all the inexorable horrible consequences ofchoosing evil, and nonetheless to choose it. This would be a truly nonpathological act, anact of acting with no regard for ones pathological interests. . . . Kants own formulationsare misleading here, since he often identifies the transcendental subject with thenoumenal I whose phenomenal appearance is the empirical person, thus drawingback from his radical insight into how the transcendental subject is a pure formalstructuralfunction beyond the opposition of the noumenal and the phenomenal.The philosophical consequences of this Kantian parallax are fully explored in thenotion of ontological difference, the focus of Heideggers entire thought, which canbe properly grasped only against the background of the theme of finitude.There is adouble doxa on Heideggers ontological difference: it is a difference between the Whatness,the essence of beings, and the mere That-ness of their beingit liberates beingsfrom subordination to any ground/arche/goal; furthermore, it is a difference notmerely between (different levels of) beings, of reality, but between the All of realityand something else which, with regard to reality, cannot but appear as Nothing.. . .This doxa is deeply misleading.With regard to the notion of ontological difference as the difference between whatthings are and the fact that they are, the doxa says that the mistake of metaphysics is tosubordinate being to some presupposed essence (sense, goal, arche . . .) embodied