Abstract
Kant’s Copernican Revolution ushers in a modem view of being. The subjectivity of the subject becomes, in Kant’s words, the condition of the objectivity of the object. A consequence of this reversal is that the subjectivity of the transcendental imagination, as analysed in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is hailed as the common source of both our sensible and our intelligible knowledge of things. The ontological implications of this position are concisely stated in Kant’s bold maxim that “being is not a real predicate.” My opening chapter offers a critical reading of this Kantian thesis and explores its legacy in subsequent phenomenological interpretations by Brentano, Husserl, and, most especially, Heidegger.
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Notes
Edmund Husserl, Ideas,trans. W.R. Gibson (New York: Collier, 1962), §23.
“Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes”, Kants gesammelte Schriften II (Berlin, 1969), p. 77.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1,2, 1 ad 2.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics ( Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1964 ), p. 144.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations,Vol. 2, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), Investigation 6, Chap. 6, pp. 773–779.
Husserl, Ideas,§III. On the role of art and fiction see §70.
For insightful commentaries on this complex subject of Husserl’s phenomenology, see J. Taminiaux, “Heidegger and Husserl’s Logical Investigations” in Dialectic and Difference (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1985), pp. 91–114; R. Cobb-Stevens, “Categorical Intuition” in Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1990), pp. 148–152; E. Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 68–81; J.-L. Marion, “Question de l’être ou Différence Ontologique” in Réduction et Donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la Phénoménologie (Paris: PUF, 1974) pp. 163–210; Jean Beaufret, “Husserl et Heidegger; in Dialogue avec Heidegger (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974), pp. 126–130; and my Poétique du Possible ( Paris: Beauchesne, 1984 ), pp. 104–108.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), ch. 1, §7–9. This analysis is further developed in Heidegger, Kants These über das Sein ( Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1963 ).
The perceivedness of something extant,“ explains Heidegger, ”is not itself extant in this thing but belongs to the Dasein,which does not mean that it belongs to the subject and the subject’s immanent sphere. Perceivedness belongs to perceptual intentional comportment. And this makes it possible that the extant should be encountered in its own self… Perceiving takes from the extant its coveredness and releases it so that it can show itself in its own self.“ (Basic Problems of Phenomenology,p. 70)
Only with Husserl, and more explicitly with existential phenomenologists like Heidegger himself, would the equation of being-existence-position-perception be interpreted in terms of the dynamism of intentionality (directing oneself towards meaning) and transcendence (the “toward which” of the directedness). Or to put it in the terms of scholastic ontology, phenomenology discloses intentionality as the ratio cognoscendi of transcendence, and transcendence as the ratio essendi of intentionality. The modem temptation of subjectivism is thus countered.
Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology,p. 75. Being and Time was Heidegger’s own attempt — perhaps the most influential in this century — to respond to this task. Where the major thinkers of modern philosophy from Descartes and Kant to Husserl and Heidegger are in agreement, however, is that we can only understand the being of beings by reflecting on the being of our own existence. “For it is only on the basis of the exposition of the basic ontological constitution of the Dasein that we put ourselves in a position to understand adequately the phenomenon correlated with the idea of being, the understanding of being which lies at the basis of all comportment to beings and guides it. Only if we understand the basic ontological constitution of the Dasein can be make clear to ourselves how an understanding of being is possible in the Dasein” (Ibid.,p. 75).
On the controversy surrounding Heidegger’s reading of Kant on imagination, see C.O. Schrag, “Heidegger and Cassirer on Kant” in Kantstudien, Vol. 58, 1967, pp. 87–100, and E. Cassirer’s review of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in Kant Disputed Questions ( Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967 ), pp. 131–157.
See my section entitled “Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Kantian Imagination” in The Wake of Imagination,(London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 189–196.
See Sartre, L’Imaginaire, Eng. trans. The Psychology of Imagination ( New York: Philosophical Library, 1948 ).
See my discussion of Schelling’s theory of imagination in The Wake of Imagination,pp. 178–180.
See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,p. 166.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought ( New York: Harper and Row, 1959 ), p. 226.
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Kearney, R. (1995). Surplus Being: The Kantian Legacy. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Phaenomenologica, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_5
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