Gary,

Here is how I am seeing Heidegger on Kant, in a kind of progressive contrast with Benjamin and Adorno. I would really appreciate being corrected wherever I go wrong. I don’t care about being right or wrong in a debating sense. I want to get it right so that no one can say ‘but that’s not what Heidegger said’.

Heidegger tells a story about the development of metaphysics, which does not exactly culminate in Kant but he is a most significant point along the road. He talks about ontology and I’m taking this to mean the theory of ‘Being’. A big ‘B’ is used with this word for the same reason a big ‘G’ is used with ‘God’ – Being with a capital ‘B’. The object of ontology has not been properly recognised because it has until now always been treated from the perspective of metaphysics, that is any perspective that aims to look beyond what is ultimately ‘empirical experience’. These are my words. In the Foreword to the Kant book, Langan describes it ambiguously as seeking ‘beyond the sum total of things of our experience’, although he means empirical and/or scientific experience, in that he excludes Plato’s ideas and all that is amenable to abstract truth, which is precisely the approach of metaphysics.

Metaphysics means something more than this for Heidegger – it is a theory of timeless truths in which a distinction between the intellect and that which is beyond the intellect also holds. Another way of saying this is that the development of the metaphysical theory of ontology is tied to a conformity theory of truth, the correspondence theory being a classical example – a relation between the things beyond experience and the intellect, a relation of domination by the former over the latter.

According to Langan, ‘Descartes takes the decisive step toward converting the object into the subject’s “representation”’. Kant’s work represents a further advance in this project of explaining ontology because he examines the rules of relating to representation. ‘With this inquiry the whole historical destiny of metaphysics is fulfilled’, a destiny that began from the notion that Being existed before we started cognising about it, to end with the realisation that this Being could not be other than representation. So, after Kant, the metaphysical problem is to explain how representation could ever have meaning or significance.

Given this view of the progressive metaphysical appropriation of ontology as a wrong turn, Heidegger has no choice but go back to the start and take another fork in the road. Hence, we get a theory of being-in-the-world, of anxiety, of forfeiture, of existence, et cetera, with the ultimate idea of Being as self-realisation instead of appropriation.

I chose to call this a story precisely because it is not history. It is a myth – a very popular myth among analysts too, as it turns out – that western philosophy is a kind of seamless development of ideas, a sui generis process, evolving from within itself as the expression of an idea. Heidegger doesn’t even differ from the empiricists and positivists in thinking that it was the wrong idea. There is no argument on that score. Their view, however, is that there is no point pursuing ontology at all, and so they and Heidegger part ways.

For Benjamin and Adorno, Kant is a much more ambiguous figure than he is for Heidegger. Where Fichte in particular was happy to absorb the object into the subject, Kant preferred inconsistency to such a move. Like Kracauer, neither Benjamin nor Adorno regard Kant as an idealist in the way that Heidegger sees him. According to Adorno, Kracauer saw Kant’s philosophy as ‘not simply a system of transcendental idealism… the objective-ontological and subjective-idealist moments warred within it…. From a certain point of view, the fissures and flaws in a philosophy are more essential to it than the continuity of its meaning, which most philosophies emphasize of their own accord.’ Where Heidegger sees Kant as part of the seamless weave of metaphysical development, these other three see a dialectical struggle taking place.

Where Heidegger sees philosophy wandering along happily from Thales to Bertrand Russell, Benjamin et al see the discontinuities of history and metaphysics not as some sort of continuous development in ideas but as something tied to its time, a windowless monad in fact, the epitome of its time. Adorno says of Kant’s work, ‘the enormous impact of the Critique Of Pure Reason has its source in the circumstance that it was in effect the first work to give expression to the element of bourgeois resignation, to that refusal to make any significant statement on the crucial issues.’ And, ‘The crucial feature of the Kantian work … is that it is guided by the conviction that reason is deprived of the right to stray into the realm of the Absolute.’ And, ‘codified in the Critique Of Pure Reason is a theodicy of bourgeois life which is conscious of its own practical activity while despairing of the fulfilment of its own utopia.’ For Benjamin et al, the Kantian development is not some inevitable evolution of a wrong idea but a response to a certain specific way of life, a text the direction of which was tied to historical circumstances.

Where Heidegger wants to overcome or replace metaphysics, Benjamin et al want to restore it after its dissolution since Descartes. Heidegger replaces theology with a Clayton’s theology, the theology you have when you’re not having theology, the idea of Being instead of the idea or God, or the good life, or whatever. Nonetheless, if this theory is not metaphysics, it is something very like it. For a start, like metaphysics Heidegger looks beyond the sum total of empirical experience or any kind of experience of that which is out there and detectable. In Kant’s words, it must be ‘given prior to the synthesis of understanding and independently of it’. It does not draw on ordinary life or day-to-day experience, despite all claims to the contrary, but ‘returns’ to origins, back to Thales and Anaximander and Parmenides.

Getting back to Kant, Heidegger subdivides metaphysics into special metaphysics and general metaphysics. The former is made up of theories about what essentially exists – some translators use the word ‘essent’ to mean roughly ‘what essentially exists’, i.e. God, world and man, as in say The Star Of Redemption. The latter kind of metaphysics is the study of these ‘essents’ in general. James Churchill, who translated Heidegger’s Kant book, describes general metaphysics as ‘ontology – or in Kant’s terminology, “transcendental philosophy”’. Once again in Kant’s own words, transcendental philosophy enquires into the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. Judgments about God, world and man, about Being, about causality, about subject and object, about space and time, are synthetic a priori judgments. Ontology is an enquiry into their possibility. Heidegger is primarily concerned with ontology in this sense, and existential philosophy is one proposal for a transcendent philosophy.

I’ll return to the point that this transcendent alternative is not derived from existence, in either the mundane or authentic sense. The idea of Being in existential philosophy depends on the notion that because we are less than being we seek completion – put crudely, that we are nothings seeking completion. With exactly the same existential basis, Bataille is able to argue that we are plenitudes – that is, we are not nothings – but we are unhappy plenitudes, and so we seek oblivion. Gombrowicz was at one with Bataille on this, writing:

‘I have been unable to take root in any contemporary existentialism. Existentialism tries to re-establish value, while for me the “undervalue”, the “insufficiency”, the “underdevelopment” are closer to man than any value. I believe the formula “Man wants to be God” expresses very well the nostalgia of existentialism, while I set up another immeasurable formula against it: “Man wants to be young”.

We do not want completion. We want incompletion.

What does this indicate? To me it indicates that the philosophy of existentialism does not flow with by necessity from ordinary day-to-day existence and nor is it the spontaneous metaphysics of ordinary people, because the opposite view is equally implied by this life and the experience of ordinary people. In fact, for me it is more compelling. At least, I cannot see how eroticism can be explained from the perspective of existentialism, other than as some kind of forfeiture. But this sounds moralistic, as if we know the conditions of Being before we experience them.

I’d like to say more but I am running out of puff. I hope I’ll get around to following it up later.

Comments

Posted by: Baaden Baaden | May 6, 2004 3:35 PM