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Transcendental Inquiry
Avery Goldman
DePaul University
Abstract: While in Being and Time Heidegger criticizes Kant for presupposing the
very objects that he then goes on to examine, in his 1935–1936 lecture course What
Is a Thing? he argues that the differentiation of subject and object with which Kant
begins enables him to point to the temporal nature of thought. In following Kant’s
own description of his project, Heidegger deems the presupposition of the objects of
experience not detrimental to the inquiry, but determinative of its circular method.
In this paper I investigate whether such circularity offers an entrance to Heidegger’s
own hermeneutic circle.
© 2010. Epoché, Volume 15, Issue 1 (Fall 2010). ISSN 1085-1968. 107–120
108 Avery Goldman
Kantian project and is not an addition to the B edition. In the above quoted passage
from the end of the Analytic of Principles, Kant goes on to argue that the temporal
determinations that the categories afford depend upon spatial determinations.
Kant explains this dependence of temporality on spatiality in terms of the three
categories of relation, so echoing the claims of the earlier Analogies of Experience.
The first of these Analogies, that related to the category of substance, is exemplary.
The persistence in time that the category of substance promises depends upon a
spatial determination in time; for time itself flows, and so the persistence needed
for substantiality is born of “something persistent [etwas Beharrliches]” in it.12
What this means is that the temporal rule born of the schematized category is
in need of spatial givenness to determine something according to the category.
While Kant concisely explains the dependence of the temporal nature of cogni-
tion on spatial determination in the B edition, the priority of space that is there
described is clearly visible already in the A edition; in the sections that precede this
note, those that follow the Schematism chapter and which belong to the System
of all Principles (Grundsätze) of Pure Understanding in both editions of the first
Critique, Kant elucidates how experience can be conceived as determined by the
temporally schematized categories. These detailed discussions, particularly in
both the Analogies of Experience and the Postulates of Empirical Thought, argue
that the temporal rule of the schematized category remains empty without the
spatial givenness in which the rule can be determined.
In neither his Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (course from 1927–1928), nor his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
(published in 1929), does Heidegger address these lengthy sections, choosing
to end his detailed investigations of the first Critique with his discussion of the
Schematism. Such an emphasis avoids all discussion of the objects of experience
that permit Kant the designation of the role of temporality. And yet, in a later
lecture course (1935–1936), published as What Is a Thing? (Die Frage nach dem
Ding),13 Heidegger addresses Kant’s Analytic of Principles (Grundsätze), arguing
that in its analysis of the conception of objects with which Kant begins we catch
a glimpse of the circularity that is fundamental to the Kantian project; and it is
through Heidegger’s description of the circularity of the Kantian approach that
we will be able to offer an interpretation of the “new insight” that Heidegger de-
scribes Kant as offering in the B edition of the first Critique when he emphasizes
the priority of space over time in the elucidation of experience. Notwithstanding
Heidegger’s varied criticisms of Kant’s account of objects, and thus of the starting
point of critique, such an interpretation will help to bring out the affinity between
Heidegger and Kant, as Heidegger also embraces a conception of philosophy as
a circular undertaking.
Kant explains that the Analytic of Principles, which follows the transcendental
deduction of the categories, is a canon for the “power of judgment [Urteilskraft]”
110 Avery Goldman
thus determining the outline of the relation of the conceptually determined object
to the cognitive faculties, and in so doing, as Heidegger writes, Kant has “at the
same time delimited being to the being of the object of experience.”17
This is not to say that the Postulates merely graft a completed conception of
objects onto the cognitive faculties of the perceiving subject; rather, the principles
that precede the modal ones, the Axioms, Anticipations, and Analogies, already
depend upon the conception of this relation, and thus of being, that is only brought
out in the Postulates.18 The preceding principles are already limited to the realm
of possible experience in their examination of empirical objects.
The postulate of possibility begins Kant’s account of the modal principles.
An object is deemed possible if it conforms to the conditions of experience, but
merely in a formal and not in an empirical manner; if a thing can not only be
conceptually determined but lies “under those conditions on which all objects of
experience rest,” which is to say that such a thing could be spatially given, then it is
deemed a possible object; for “space is a formal a priori condition of outer experi-
ences” without which objects cannot be empirically given.19 Outer experience, as
a formal condition, is necessary for an object to be deemed possible. If this formal
condition is not met, if a thing that is thought cannot be spatially given, then its
concept is empty, and thus even if the concept is not internally contradictory, it
does not distinguish an object of possible experience. It is a necessary but not suf-
ficient condition of the possibility of a thing that its concept not be contradictory.
Thus, a thing can be judged an object of possible cognition when its conceptual
determination corresponds with the a priori condition of space, when, that is to
say, it can be empirically given.
An actual object not only meets such a formal criterion of experience, but is
directly perceived as a spatial object, which is to say that the formal possibility is
actualized by sensible intuition.20 This direct perception is the sensible givenness
of the material corresponding to the conceptual determination. The actual object
thus differs from the possible object only in so far as in the former the object
is sensibly given. The actuality of an object marks something more than mere
possibility, but this something more does not denote a furthering of conceptual
determination beyond what the possible offers. 21 What must be remembered is
that the modal categories do not add anything to the conceptual determination
of the object. They affirm only the relation of the object to the cognitive activity
of the perceiving subject. The realm of the actual does not exceed the realm of
possible objects. This is because the actual differs from the possible only in so
far as the formal conditions of experience that the possible exhibits are, in the
actual, sensibly given.
The categories of modality thus explain the presuppositions of the other
principles (Grundsätze). To examine the conditions of the possibility of objects
of experience is to limit the investigation of cognition to what can be spatially
112 Avery Goldman
In What Is a Thing? Heidegger goes further, giving Kant credit not only for
pointing beyond the objective, but so too for initiating the circular project of
critique which permits the subversion of epistemological concerns called for by
Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Heidegger argues that Kantian experience
(Erfahrung) is not to be understood as a thing “present-at-hand (vorhanden),” it
is not the object stripped of our engagement with it and so reduced to its quantifi-
able elements; it is, rather, a circular happening that exposes the gap that is to be
found in the attempt to examine cognition, a gap “between” subject and object
that directs beyond such a cognitive dualism.
Such an emphasis on Kant’s designation of the region of experience does not
mean that Heidegger viewed the Kantian dualism of subject and object, which
is to say, the separation of objects from the subjects who perceive them, in any
more generous a light. And yet, it does point to a growing concern on Heidegger’s
part for the methodological structure that allows Kant to point to that which is
most originary. This is evident not only in Heidegger’s What Is a Thing? but also
in some of his late works, particularly his essay “Kant’s Thesis About Being,”35 in
which he investigates Kant’s conception of transcendental reflection, the act that
orders the representational field prior to critical inquiry, as well as his “Time and
Being,” his 1962 lecture, in which he explicitly challenges his earlier attempt in
Being and Time to designate the temporal prior to the spatial.36 But even more
than three decades earlier, in his What Is a Thing? Heidegger can be seen to have
introduced a discussion of Kant’s method, of the structure that permits Kant the
analysis of cognition, through his introduction of the circularity that is at the core
of transcendental philosophy; and in so doing Heidegger must surely be seen to
be drawing some sort of a parallel between the circularity (Kreisgang) of Kantian
critique and the description that he offers of his own project as examining the
hermeneutic circle (Zirkel) of understanding (Verstehen).37
While explaining the hermeneutic circle in Being and Time, Heidegger writes
that “what is decisive is not to get out of the circle [Zirkel], but to get in it in the
right way.”38 What Heidegger means by this circle is that human experience is
always characterized by a prior commitment that designates what can become
meaningful. What is articulated, or understood, depends upon this prior structure,
what Heidegger calls “this existential fore-structure [Vor-Struktur]” of Dasein.39
We cannot claim the independence of our interpretations as they are tied to the
self-understanding from out of which they follow. This means that there is no way
to avoid the “circle of understanding,” one is always, already in it, and what is im-
portant, Heidegger argues, is how we undertake such an involvement. This means
that one should not accept “popular conceptions [Volksbegriffe]” concerning this
“fore-structure,” one should instead, Heidegger explains, be rigorously scientific in
its analysis, and so develop, or rather uncover, this pre-articulation in a way that
lives up “to the things themselves (aus den Sachen selbst).”40 Heidegger is not in
Kant, Heidegger, and the Circularity of Transcendental Inquiry 115
this way claiming the Kantian noumenal realm of the “Ding an sich,” but rather
the phenomenological things, the Sachen, to which Husserl called us.41 To rigor-
ously investigate the “things” of our experience is not for Heidegger to conceive of
them as the three-dimensional objects that form the basis of the Kantian analysis;
rather, it is to pursue such things prior to their reduction to Kantian objects of
experience, and in this way such an investigation is able to help elucidate the “fore-
structure” that they exemplify. This hermeneutic “circle [Zirkel]” offers no external
justification, no point from which its claims can be corroborated; its authority,
or scientific rigor, comes from the analysis of the totality of this “fore-structure.”
Only if such a totality has been unraveled, can an interpretation from out of this
hermeneutic circle raise the possibility of “the ‘authentic’ existence of Dasein.”42
In Being and Time, after criticizing Kant for having presupposed the conception
of objects that he then analyzes,43 Heidegger goes on to distinguish his concep-
tion of the hermeneutic circle (Zirkel) of understanding from the circularity of
traditional epistemological systems, from systems like Kant’s that presuppose a
reductive, epistemological conception of objects. Heidegger writes: “This circle
[Zirkel] of understanding [Verstehen] is not a circle [Kreis] in which any random
[beliebige] kind of knowledge operates, but it is rather the expression of the ex-
istential fore-structure of Dasein itself.”44 The hermeneutic circle (Zirkel) avoids
an arbitrary conception of objects, expressing, rather, what Heidegger implies is
a fundamental account of the experience of objects. And Kant is surely amongst
those Heidegger is here addressing when he criticizes a knowledge of objects that
replaces “the existential fore-structure of Dasein.”
But even in Being and Time we can see a certain ambivalence on Heidegger’s
part towards the Kantian analysis of objects that allows him to point to the
fundamental temporal origins of thought; later in Being and Time, rather than
criticizing such epistemological methods, Heidegger appears to argue that such
methods offer us access to the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger explains that we
must aim at leaping into this “circle [Kreis]” primordially and completely, so
that even at the beginning of our analysis of Dasein we make sure that we have
a complete view of the circular [zirkelhafte] being of Dasein.45
Here Heidegger uses both terms, Kreis and Zirkel; the method into which one
must leap is a Kreis (the term he uses to describe Kant’s undertaking), while what
this shows is the zirkelhafte nature of Dasein itself. We must enter the analysis of
Dasein with a view to the whole, to the “circular [zirkelhafte] being of Dasein”;
and yet, with such a view in mind we must still find an entry point, a means of
beginning our analysis, and such an entrance Heidegger describes in precisely the
language that he will come to use for Kantian inquiry: the “circularity [Kreisgang]”
of the Kantian analysis of objects permits access to the more fundamental “circle
[Zirkel]” of the understanding itself.46
116 Avery Goldman
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
1995), 100–3; Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Ver-
nunft, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), Bd. 25,
145–50.
Kant, Heidegger, and the Circularity of Transcendental Inquiry 117
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A98–9; Kritik der reinen Vernunft
(Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), 3 and
4. Following accepted practice, references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will give
the “A” and “B” pagination of the first and second editions. This passage is quoted by
Heidegger in his Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
102–3; Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
149.
3. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 111;
Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 162.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B67.
7. Ibid., B291.
8. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 136; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1951), 181.
9. Ibid., 110; 147.
10. Ibid., 98; 131.
11. Ibid., 110; 147.
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B227/A184; translation altered.
13. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (South Bend,
Ind.: Regenry/Gateway, 1967); Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 1987).
14. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B171/A132.
15. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 237–8; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 184–5.
16. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B266/A219.
17. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 240; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 186.
18. Ibid., 241; 187.
19. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B271/A224.
20. The category is that of existence (Dasein), while the principle (Grundsatz) that follows
from it is that of actuality (Wirklichkeit).
21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A234–5/B287.
22. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 241; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 187.
23. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A737/B765; Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242; Die Frage
nach dem Ding, 187.
24. On this passage see Pierre Kerszberg, Critique and Totality (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997), 87.
25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B404/A346.
26. Ibid., B404/A346. Kant capitalizes the terms “Er” and “Es.” Dieter Sturma explains:
“Because the ‘I think’ is included in all of my experienced states [Weil das ‘Ich denke’
in allen meinen Erfahrungszuständen enthalten ist],” I cannot have any concept of it.
118 Avery Goldman
See Dieter Sturma,“Die Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft in der zweiten Auflage,” in
Kritik de reinen Vernunft, ed. Georg Mohr und Marcus Willaschek (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1998), 402; see also Sturma, Kant über Selbstbewußtsein (Hildesheim: Georg
Olms Verlag, 1985), 41.
27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B404/A346; translation altered.
28. Ibid., B404/A346; translation altered. Kant also uses the term Zirkel negatively, distin-
guishing his own method from that of “a vicious circle [ein fehlerhafter Zirkel]”; the
circularity of the inquiry would be “vicious” if what is initially presupposed is accepted
not hypothetically, or regulatively, but as actually existing (Kant, KrV, A693/B721).
Kant also uses the term “Zirkel” with such a negative connotation in the Grounding
of the Metaphysics of Morals where he explains that in the inference from freedom to
autonomy and then on to the moral law he has not introduced “a hidden circle [ein
geheimer Zirkel]” in his reasoning. See Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals,
trans. Mary Gregor, in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 99; Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Gesammelte Schriften (Preußischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–), 4, 453.
29. Patricia Kitcher, in her “Kant’s Real Self,” explicitly denies this in claiming that “Kant
is simply confusing the order of proof with what we might call the order of conceiv-
ability.” See Patricia Kitcher,“Kant’s Real Self,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy,
ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 126. Kitcher recognizes
that the unity of apperception must be presupposed in order to prove, or deduce, the
categories, but she claims that this order of proof does not imply that the self cannot
be thought by means of the categories, for what it proves is that “the only way that
we can think at all is through the categories” (ibid.). Henry Allison describes Kitcher
as having in this way reduced “the subject of thought to a system of ‘contentually
dependent cognitive states’”; Kant is turned into Hume, the “ineliminable” nature
of apperception is lost. See Allison, “On Naturalizing Kant’s Transcendental Psychol-
ogy,” in Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66.
30. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 188.
31. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 102–7;
Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 72–6.A phenomenological inves-
tigation, if it is to avoid the legacy of Cartesian dualism, must begin its investigations
with what is “ready-to-hand,” with entities that offer themselves as meaningful, useful
for our purposes, and as offering a developed extension of our bodily involvements
in the world. They are, Heidegger writes, our “equipment.” Beginning with entities so
conceived, which is to say prior to the radical division of our subjectivity from objects
of experience, avoids viewing the entities that surround us as artifacts cut off from
our personal involvements or, rather, avoids viewing them at precisely that moment
in which they do not serve their purpose but are broken and force us to look at them
as merely physical things that offer themselves equally for analysis to all beings of
our cognitive functioning. Such a reduced meaning, attributed to the entities that
form the web of meanings within which we live, Heidegger calls “presence-at-hand
[Vorhandenheit].” For Heidegger’s criticism in Being and Time of Kant’s conception of
Kant, Heidegger, and the Circularity of Transcendental Inquiry 119
objects in his “What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (Was heißt: sich im
Denken orientieren?) see Heidegger, Being and Time, 144; Sein und Zeit, 109–10.
32. Being and Time was published in 1927; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was first
published in 1929.
33. “Kant ist vor dieser unbekannten Wurzel zurückgewichen” (Heidegger, Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, 110; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 147).
34. John Sallis writes that the accomplishments of Kant’s first Critique, the dualism of
faculties, etc.,“effectively block the route that reason would take back to the common
root.” See Sallis, Spacings of Reason and Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 71–2. Thus, for Sallis, the critical accomplishment implicitly covers up
its own opening, it is “stabilized only at the cost of having its voice torn away from
it” (72).
35. In this 1961 essay Heidegger raises such methodological questions by directing us
to the Appendix that follows the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, the
oft overlooked Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection (Von der Amphibolie der
Reflexionsbegriffe). See Martin Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” trans. Ted E.
Klein Jr. and William E. Pohl, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998), 337–63; “Kants These über das Sein,” in Wegmarken
(Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 273–307.
36. In this late lecture, first published in 1969 in Zur Sache des Denkens, Heidegger
criticizes his own earlier Being and Time for its attempt “to derive human spatial-
ity from temporality [Zeitlichkeit].” See Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 23; “Zeit und Sein,” in Zur Sache des
Denken (Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 29.
37. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153; while Heidegger uses the term
Kreis to both broadly criticize epistemological systems, and later to describe the ac-
complishments of one such system, the Kantian, he refers to his own circle with the
Latinate Zirkel. It is precisely such a Zirkel that Kant claims for his own method.
38. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books,
2000), I, 45; Logische Untersuchungen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968), I,
10.
42. Heidegger, Being and Time, 288; Sein und Zeit, 312.
43. Heidegger, Being and Time, 144; Sein und Zeit, 109–10.
44. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153.
45. “Die Bemühung muß vielmehr darauf zielen, ursprünglich und ganz in diesen ‘Kreis’
zu springen, um sich schon im Ansatz der Daseinsanalyse den vollen Blick auf das
zirkelhafte Sein des Daseins zu sichern” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 291; Sein und
Zeit, 315).
46. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger describes the connection between “work
[Werk]” and “art” as that of a “circle [Zirkel],” describing it as offering “the feast of
120 Avery Goldman
thought [das Fest des Denkens].” Heidegger goes on to say that every step between
work and art “circles in this circle [kreist in diesem Kreise].” Obviously, such a circle
would demand further analysis that cannot here be undertaken, including that of
connecting it to Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle of understanding. It should, however,
be noted that in this passage Heidegger refers to the circle at issue as both Zirkel and
Kreis. See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in
Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 18; “Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957), 8.
47. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B291.
48. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 242; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 188.
49. Heidegger, Being and Time, 143; Sein und Zeit, 153.
50. As quoted above, Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 143; Sein und Zeit, 153. To conclude
in this way is to argue against Paul Ricoeur’s assertion in his “Existence and Herme-
neutics” that Heidegger rejects all such methodological questions, offering instead “to
ground hermeneutics in phenomenology” by means merely of the ontological ques-
tion. See Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” trans. Kathleen McLaughlin,
in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 6; “Existence et Herméneutique,” in Le
Conflit des interpretations: Essais d’herméneutique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969),
10. Ricouer describes Heidegger’s approach as the “short route [voie courte]” (ibid.,
7; 11) to hermeneutics, contrasting it with his own “long route [voie longue]” (ibid.,
10; 14) which takes into account semantics. Ricoueur explains that for Heidegger
“[o]ne must deliberately move outside the enchanted circle [cercle enchanté] of the
problematic of subject and object and question oneself about being” (ibid., 7; 11).
What has here been argued is that while this might have been the case in his Be-
ing and Time, in Heidegger’s later lectures and writings on Kant he recognizes the
methodological importance of remaining, at least for the start, within the “enchanted
circle” of Kantian inquiry.