Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003.08.

04

Weatherston, Martin, Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant:

Categories, Imagination, and Temporality, Palgrave Macmillan,
2002, 209pp, $62.00 (hbk), ISBN 0333994000.
Reviewed by:

Robert Hanna
University of Colorado
Boulder

In Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant, Martin Weatherston closely and critically examines

Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason--recently
translated from vol. 25 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe--in order to correct the somewhat one-
sided impression we may get from Heidegger’s notoriously tendentious reading of Kant in Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics (also known as “the Kantbuch”). Weatherston’s interesting study
is in effect a prolegomenon to the deeper and more difficult project of comparing, contrasting,
and evaluating Kant’s transcendental idealism in the first Critique and Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology in Being and Time.

It is well known that in the Kantbuch, Heidegger strongly emphasizes Kant’s theory of the
imagination and makes the controversial claim that for Kant the cognitive capacity of
imagination is the “common root” of the capacity of understanding (the faculty of concepts) and
the capacity of sensibility (the faculty of intuitions). In fact Heidegger even more controversially
claims that the representational spontaneity of productive imagination is at bottom identical to
the volitional spontaneity of practical freedom. And most controversially of all, Heidegger also
claims that Kant’s transcendental theory of the imagination anticipates but still falls short of his
own existential-phenomenological theory of “temporality” (roughly, human intentional agency)
and “freedom” (roughly, decisive personal commitment with a view to achieving “authenticity,”
or psychological coherence and personal integrity over an entire finite human life). These bold
interpretive assertions have frequently drawn the accusation that Heidegger unfairly distorts
and even does “violence” to both the letter and the spirit of the Kantian texts.

Weatherston quite rightly does not try to deny that Heidegger’s reading of Kant is tendentious:
it is tendentious. What he does instead, by getting deeply into the Phenomenological
Interpretation-- the text of a lecture course from 1927-28--is painstakingly to reconstruct the
philosophical rationale behind Heidegger’s reading of Kant by showing how it prefigures and
rehearses the central themes of Being and Time, which was published in 1929. To understand all
is to forgive all. In fact, Heidegger was only doing what every first-rate post-Kantian Austro-
German philosopher in the early 20th century had to do or else become a mere Kant scholar or a
neo-Kantian: somehow claw his way out of Kant’s system and find his own philosophical place
in the sun. Frege did this in the 1870s and 80s by writing the Foundations of Arithmetic, the
Begriffsschrift, and Basic Laws of Arithmetic and by undertaking to reduce arithmetic to pure
logic, thus refuting part of Kant’s thesis that mathematics is non-logically necessary because it
presupposes the pure intuitions of space and time. Wittgenstein did it in 1919 in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus by latching onto the elementary and non-paradoxical part of Frege-Russell
logic and by substituting that for Kant’s theory of intuition. Carnap did it in 1934 in the
Logische Syntax der Sprache by latching onto Tarski's brilliant semantic and meta-linguistic
triage for Gödel incompleteness and the Liar Paradox, together with what was left of Frege-
Russell logic, and by substituting higher-order function theory (the theory of types) for Kant’s
theory of intuition. And Heidegger did it in 1927-28 in the Phenomenological Interpretation by
engaging in a direct “dialogue” with Kant in which Heidegger got to do all the talking, by
substituting a radically realist, externalist, noncognitive, and pragmatic version of the Brentano-
Husserl concept of intentionality (which Heidegger generally labels “care”) for Kant’s theory of
intuition, and by adding the existential-phenomenological theory of temporality and freedom. If
this is philosophical “violence,” then thank god for philosophical violence, and to the devil with
good Kant scholarship! It is however instructively ironic and grist for the sociology of
philosophy that if anyone less brilliant than the Heidegger of Being and Time had written
Phenomenological Interpretation or for that matter the Kantbuch, those two books probably
would never have been published.

According to Weatherston, Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Kant has two basic

themes--(i) Kant’s logic (both formal and transcendental), and (ii) Kant’s doctrine of the
imagination (especially the productive imagination)--both of which Weatherston then traces
through Heidegger’s analysis of central topics of the first half of the first Critique: the nature of
metaphysics as a science (ch. 1), the Transcendental Aesthetic and the unity of the faculties of
understanding and sensibility (ch. 2), transcendental logic and the nature of judgment (ch. 3),
the metaphysical deduction and the relation between categories and synthesis (ch. 4), the
Transcendental Deduction of the categories (ch. 5), and finally apperception, objectivity, and
temporality (ch. 6). Weatherston spells out the basic themes clearly and in much detail; his
interpretations of Kant and Heidegger are on the whole accurate, illuminating, and convincing;
and his point-by-point critique of Heidegger’s reading of Kant is similarly cogent.

Nevertheless there are still a few isolated knotty cases in which, I think, neither Heidegger’s
interpretation of Kant’s texts, nor Weatherston’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, nor
Weatherston’s criticism of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, is correct. For example,
Heidegger says that for Kant “formal intuition” (i.e., formale Anschauung, not to be confused
with “form of intuition” or Form der Anschauung--see Critique of Pure Reason B160-161 n.)
should be understood as essentially imaginational and nonconceptual, which I think is incorrect;
then Weatherston says that there is no sense in which sensibility is spontaneous, which I think is
also incorrect; and then Weatherston criticizes Heidegger for failing to see that there is no sense
in which sensibility is spontaneous, which I think is yet again incorrect. For Kant, formal
intuition is the joint result of what in the B edition he calls (1) the “pure intellectual synthesis of
the understanding” and (2) the “pure figurative synthesis of the imagination” or “synthesis
speciosa,” so it is necessarily both conceptual and nonconceptual. Moreover the sensibility has its
own “lower-level” or nondiscursive type of spontaneity, which thus complements the “higher-
level” or discursive spontaneity of the understanding, to the extent that the forms of intuition
are generated by what Kant in the A edition calls the “synopsis” of the manifold in sensible
intuition, which I would identify with the “pure synthesis of apprehension” in the A edition, and
also in turn identify with the pure figurative synthesis of the imagination or synthesis speciosa in
the B edition.

Of course all of this heavy Kantian transcendental machinery is an attempt to answer the
$64,000 question: how can the logical functions of the understanding (and in particular,
categories, judgments, and empirical concepts) apply to the objects given in sensibility? Here I
think that the correct answer is that sensibility is directly nonconceptually acquainted with those
given objects--which are “appearances” or “undetermined objects of empirical intuition”--by
means of empirical intuition in inner or outer sense, and that the special cognitive role of the
understanding is then to “determine” those objects, that is, correctly characterize them by
means of concepts and judgments. In other words, for Kant empirical cognition or the objective
representation of the natural world is the joint product of “bottom up” lower-level
nonconceptual processing by sensibility and “top down” higher-level conceptual processing by
the understanding. Each faculty directly contributes its own distinctive sort of representational
form and content to the outputs of the other faculty, for the overall purpose of cognizing a
determinate object: so they operate interdependently. Empirical cognition is thus a global
achievement of the several interdependent faculties of a single unified self-conscious rational
animal in dynamic interaction with its surrounding world. The trick is to avoid the dual mistake
of holding that sensibility is purely passive and that the understanding does all the cognitive
work, although this is the interpretation that Weatherston favors (see, for example, pp. 17, 96-
98, 104, 116-120, 160, and 174).

Also I wish that Weatherston had tried to get more deeply into the dialectical interplay between
Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views. In his Conclusion he says tantalizingly that both Kant and
Heidegger recognized the importance of the finitude of human cognition and that they traced
the source of this finitude to human intuitional cognition (p. 176). I agree completely. But that is
all he says. So his discussion raises at least two important questions: (I) Are Kant’s views and
Heidegger’s views in fact fundamentally different from one another? and (II) How should we
evaluate the truth of their views?

As to the first question, it seems to me that in fact there are at least four ways in which Kant’s
views and Heidegger’s views are deeply similar. (1) Weatherston himself notes the obvious
parallel between Kant’s empirical vs. transcendental distinction, and Heidegger’s ontic vs.
ontological (or beings vs. Being) distinction (p.165). But there is also (2) Kant’s theory of
nonconceptual (i.e., intuitional) content in inner sense and outer sense, feeling or affect,
imagination, perception, judgment, desire, and volitional intention, which Heidegger develops at
length in Being and Time under the rubric of “care”; (3) Kant’s thesis (implicit in the first
Critique but explicit in the Critique of Practical Reason) of the primacy of practical reason over
theoretical reason, which Heidegger treats via his doctrines of temporality, freedom, and
authenticity; and also (4) Kant’s observation in the Jäsche Logic that the fundamental question
of philosophy is “what is a human being?,” which Heidegger attempts to answer via the
existential analytic of Dasein. Furthermore it is arguable that (1*) Kant’s transcendental vs.
empirical distinction is just the distinction between humanly essential fundamental cognitive
capacities (i.e., understanding and sensibility) and their actual application to the world; (2*) that
Kant’s theory of nonconceptual or intuitional content is the key to understanding his theory of
cognition in the first half of the first Critique; (3*) that the primacy of the practical is the key to
the understanding Kant’s theory of reason in the second half of the first Critique and in the
second Critique; and finally (4*) that anthropocentrism is the key to understanding Kant’s
transcendental idealism in all three Critiques. Now all four of these ideas are basically shared by
Heidegger. So in this light it seems to me accurate to say that the Heidegger of Being and Time
has “existentialized,” “externalized,” “noncognitivized,” “pragmatized,” and more generally
flattened out Kant’s transcendental idealism, but still has not really deviated in any deep way
from the Kantian framework.

As to the second question, it seems to me that while there are good reasons to prefer some of
Heidegger’s views over some of Kant’s, nevertheless there are even better reasons strongly to
prefer Kant’s views to Heidegger’s, all things considered.

To the extent that Heidegger tries to show how logic, judgment, and conceptualization all
presuppose practice, affect or emotion, and engaged intentional agency, or in other words to the
extent that Heidegger tries to show how cognitive intentionality presupposes “care,” I think that
Heidegger is both correct and also has gone philosophically somewhat beyond Kant. Moreover I
think that Heidegger is correct that logic, judgment, truth, conceptual representation, science,
and theoretical reason are shot through with normativity. Kant of course recognizes the
intrinsic normativity of theoretical reason too--he holds that formal logic is the science of how
we ought to think, for example, and there are deep connections between Kant’s views on truth
(as formal correspondence with the actual facts) and his views on truthfulness (as sincerity and
the concern for accuracy)--but not as explicitly or as fully as Heidegger.

Nevertheless Heidegger--like Nietzsche, Dewey, and the later Wittgenstein--is engaged in a

radically deflationary philosophical project. As Rorty has pointed out, this project is
eliminativist without being reductive. But many things, properties, and facts that really and truly
matter to creatures like us are trashed along the way. What happens in Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology is that logic, judgment, conceptual thinking, truth-as-correspondence, science,
and theoretical reason all lose their ontological, semantic, and epistemic integrity in the face of
their corresponding existential-phenomenological foundations. In effect, the logos sinks without
a trace into the Lebensphilosophie. In this respect, I think, Kant’s general notion of a
“transcendental deduction” (i.e., a proof that some a priori representation R has “objective
validity,” or empirical cognitive significance, by means of showing how R is presupposed by
some other representation R* that has objective validity by assumption) is superior to
Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological analytic, precisely because--whatever we might think
about Kant’s idealism--a transcendental deduction at the very least fully preserves the
ontological, semantic, and epistemic status of what it purports to explain.

Furthermore and perhaps even more importantly, Kant’s basic concern throughout the Critical
philosophy with rationality, consistency, truthfulness, strict obligation, and universal moral
principles is a fundamental corrective to and an appropriate constraint on Heidegger’s highly
subjective or first-person-centered and in effect emotivist and anti-rationalist existential ethics.
The sad and sometimes tragic fact is that living freely and authentically (and even more so,
attempting to live freely and authentically) in the existential sense will not guarantee that you do
the right thing. This is because it is quite possible to be authentic in the existential sense and
deeply evil: witness Nietzsche’s imaginary Übermensch, and (50 years later, catastrophically in
real life) the wannabe-authentic Nazi thug.

This is not however to say that the Heideggerian ethics of authenticity should be rejected out of
hand. Indeed, Kant’s notion of an (imperfect) duty to develop one’s talents can be deepened if
one reads it as the obligation for all rational human animals to seek authenticity in the face of
their own inevitable deaths. More generally, the Kantian notion of autonomy as moral self-
legislation, or willing in accordance with the Categorical Imperative, can also be deepened by
the Heideggerian notion of authentic freedom. Kant is surely correct that the highest good for
creatures like us is to will in accordance with the Categorical Imperative: but it also seems
plausible to me that the complete good for creatures like us is to have a good will, plus happiness,
plus authenticity.

Therefore at the end of the day I would want to say that Kant is the much greater philosopher of
the two--and correspondingly, that the Critique of Pure Reason is a much greater book than
Being and Time--precisely because Kant’s Critical philosophy or general theory of human
cognition, human volition, and the limits and scope of human theoretical and practical reason,
comes much closer to the truth about the nature of creatures like us than Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s tendentious interpretations of Kant do open up some
otherwise latent and previously unexplored aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy--and this has
paid dividends in recent “continentally” inspired scholarly work on Kant by, for example,
Béatrice Longuenesse and Wayne Waxman. It also remains true that some of Heidegger’s
existential-phenomenological insights into the human condition significantly enrich Kant’s
theories of cognition, volition, and reason. So by all means read Kant, read Heidegger, read
Heidegger on Kant (and here you may also want to consult Weatherston’s useful book), then
read Kant again. Then throw away your Heidegger and teach Kant to your students.
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