The Question Concerning the Thing

On Kant's Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles

Martin Heidegger, James D. Reid, Benjamin D. Crowe

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781783484652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The Question Concerning the Thing presents a full English translation of a lecture course first delivered by Heidegger at Freiburg University during the Winter Semester of 1935-36 (originally published in German as volume 41 of the Gesamtausgabe ). The text presents with particular clarity Heidegger’s distinctive approach to issues of general philosophical interest. Heidegger shows how a litany of classical metaphysical problems flow from the basic question ‘what is a thing?’, revealing the historicity of these problems and, thus, the ways in which they implicate further issues of cultural significance. He examines issues regarding the history and philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and logic that are still debated today. Moreover, the lecture course as a whole is framed by questions regarding the nature of philosophy itself. Along the way, Heidegger provides sensitive and often provocative discussions of historically significant figures, in particular Kant.

MAIN PART

Kant’s Way of Asking about the Thing

CHAPTER 1

The Historical Basis of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason

How, then, are we supposed to arrive on the path of the authentic “living” history of our question, if only in a provisional way? We choose a middle stretch along this path, and indeed one in which the inception and a decisive era come creatively together in a new manner. This is the philosophical determination of the thingness of thing brought about by Kant. The essential delimitation of the thing is no accidental by-product of Kant’s philosophy; the determination of the thingness of the thing is its metaphysical center. We bring ourselves onto the path of the intrinsically historical question concerning the thing by way of an interpretation of Kant’s work.

Kant’s philosophy places the whole of modern thought and Dasein into the clarity and transparency of a foundation. This determines every subsequent scientific stance, along with the boundaries and assessments of the sciences from the nineteenth century to the present. In this respect, Kant towers so far above all his predecessors and successors that even those who reject him or go beyond him remain altogether dependent upon him.

Moreover, despite all the differences and the extent of the historical distance, Kant has something in common with the great Greek inception, which distinguishes him at once from all previous and subsequent German [56] thinkers, namely, the incorruptible clarity of his thinking and speaking, which in no way excludes the question-worthy and the unstable and will not feign clarity where darkness reigns.

We turn our question “What is a thing?” into Kant’s and, in turn, Kant’s question into ours. The further task of the lecture course thereby becomes very simple. We do not need to report “about” Kant’s philosophy in sweeping overviews and generalizing turns of phrase. We place ourselves within Kant’s thought itself. In future only Kant himself shall speak. What we [will] do from time to time is meant only to provide an indication of the sense and the direction, so that, along the way, we do not deviate from the path of the question. The lecture is then a sort of signpost [Wegweiser]. Signposts are matters of indifference in comparison with that which itself travels along the path. They show up here and there along the side of the road [Weg] in order to point something out, only to disappear as one passes by.

The path of our question “What is a thing?” leads to Kant’s chief work, which bears the title Critique of Pure Reason. The lecture course is not up to the task of getting through this work as a whole. We must once again limit ourselves to a stretch along our path. But we are attempting to reach the middle of this stretch and hence the middle of Kant’s chief work itself, in order to grasp it in accordance with its chief inner directions. If this succeeds, we will not have become better acquainted with a book written by a professor in the eighteenth century; instead we will have taken some steps into a basic historical and spiritual stance, which supports and determines us today.

§14. The Reception of Kant’s Work during His Lifetime; Neo-Kantianism

Kant once said in conversation in his last years of life: “I have come a century too early with my writings; one will first understand me rightly after a hundred years [57] and then accept my books and newly study them” (Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebücher I, 46).

Do we hear a vain self-importance in these words or, indeed, the annoyed hopelessness of being pushed aside? Neither, for both are foreign to Kant’s character. What expresses itself here is Kant’s deep knowledge of the mode and manner in which philosophy actualizes itself and takes effect. Philosophy belongs to the most primordial of human endeavors. Of these, Kant once remarked: “Human endeavors turn in a constant circle and return to a point where they have already once been; thus, materials that now lie in the dust can perhaps be employed in the building of a glorious structure” (Kant’s Answer to Garve, Prolegomena, ed. Vorländer, p. 194). Here speaks the superior calm of a creator, someone who knows that the standards of the “contemporary” are dust and that greatness has its own law of movement.

Kant was fifty-seven years old when he allowed the Critique of Pure Reason to appear in the year 1781. Until the time of this work’s appearance, Kant had been silent for more than ten years. During the decade of this silence, 1770–1781, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Beethoven spent their youth. Six years after the initial appearance of the work, in the year 1787, the second edition appeared. Several doctrinal passages were revised and many modes of proof sharpened. But the total character of the work remained unaltered.

Kant’s contemporaries stood helpless before the work. It went beyond everything familiar in the elevation of its problematic, the rigor of its concept-formation, the far-reaching organization of its questioning, the novelty of its language, and its decisive aim. Kant knew this; he saw clearly that the work in its entire tendency and manner went against the taste of the times. Kant himself once characterized the prevailing taste of [58] his age as the effort to present the difficult in philosophical things as easy (Prolegomena, p. 193). Although it was not understood in its essential intentions, but always only taken up in its contingent exterior, the work was provocative. An eager tugof-war emerged in writings, pros and cons. Until the year of Kant’s death (1804), the number of such writings had reached 2,000. Schiller’s well-known verse “Kant and His Interpreters” relates to this state of affairs in the confrontation with Kant:

How many beggars just one rich
Man alone feeds!

When kings build, the workers
Bring forth deeds.

The same Schiller also first helped Goethe form a concept of Kant’s philosophy and of philosophy as such. Goethe later once said that when he read one page in Kant, it affected him “like entering a brightly lit room.”

In the last decade of Kant’s life, during the years from 1794 to 1804, the interpretation of his work and the corresponding effect of his philosophy achieved a definite direction. This occurred through the work of younger thinkers, of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Their philosophy took shape on the basis of Kant’s philosophy—or, better, with the help of its impetus—into what is well known in popular historical presentations as “German Idealism.” Kant was respectfully leapt over in this philosophy but not overcome. This could not succeed, if only because Kant’s authentic basic position was not attacked but only abandoned; it was not even abandoned, because it was never adopted—it was only skirted. Kant’s work remained like an unvanquished fortress standing behind a new front [59], one which, despite its impetuosity, or precisely because of it, was already plunged into emptiness a generation later, i.e., it was not able to allow a truly creative opposition to emerge. With German Idealism, it seemed as if philosophy as such had reached an end and finally entrusted the administration of knowledge exclusively to the sciences. But around the middle of the nineteenth century the call “Back to Kant” arose. This return to Kant emerged out of a new historical, spiritual situation; at the same time, the return to Kant was determined by the turn away from German Idealism. One of the essential characteristics of the spiritual situation around the middle of the nineteenth century is the distinctive predominance of a particular formation of the sciences; one designates it with the catchword “positivism.” This is a [form of] knowing, the claim to truth of which has as its first and last measure what one calls “facts.” About facts—one believes—there can be no quarrelling; they are the highest court of appeal for decisions concerning truth and untruth. What is demonstrated in the natural sciences by way of experiments, and what is verified in the historical human sciences by way of manuscripts and texts, is true. And, this is to say: it is the only scientifically demonstrable truth.

The return to Kant was guided by the intention to find in Kant the philosophical foundation and justification of the positivistic interpretation of science. At the same time, however, it was a scientific turn away from German Idealism, a turn away that understood itself as a turn away from metaphysics. This new turn toward Kant, therefore, took his philosophy as the shattering of metaphysics. One called this movement back to Kant “Neo-Kantianism,” in contrast to the followers of Kant in his own lifetime, the earlier Kantians. When we survey this movement back to Kant from our own present position, it must become questionable right away whether it could win back, or even find, Kant’s basic position, which German Idealism had also merely skirted and overleaped. [60] In fact, that did not happen. Nonetheless, this philosophical movement of neo-Kantianism has its undeniable merits within the spiritual history of the second half of the nineteenth century. There are above all three:

1.Although one-sided, the renewal of Kant’s philosophy saved positivism from a complete slide into the deification of facts.

2.Kant’s philosophy itself was made familiar in its entire scope through careful interpretation and elaboration of his writings.

3.The universal exploration of the history of philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, was conducted on a higher plane of questioning under the guidance of Kant’s philosophy.

All these are admittedly little enough, when we take the authentic task of philosophy as our measure, which (again) does not at first mean much, as long as it remains a counterclaim, instead of being a counter-accomplishment.

Since then, we have come to see Kant’s philosophy in a wider field of vision than neo-Kantianism. Kant’s historical position within Western metaphysics has become clearer. But this means, initially, only a better [case of] historical taking-cognizance [Kenntnisnahme] in the usual sense, not the confrontation with the basic position conquered for the first time with Kant. What he predicted must be made to come true: “One will accept my books and newly study them.” When we have come so far, there is no more Kantianism; for every mere “-ism” is a misunderstanding and the death of history. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason belongs to those works of philosophy which, as long as there is still philosophy on this earth, become inexhaustibly new each day. It is one of those works that has already passed its judgment on every future attempt to “overcome” it by merely moving on. [61]

§15. The Title of Kant’s Chief Work

We are here attempting to put our question “What is a thing?” to Kant’s work, and indeed as learners.

At first it is certainly completely obscure what a work with the title Critique of Pure Reason could have to do with our question “What is a thing?” We will only truthfull...