watson 1988 - heidegger, rationality, and the critique of judgment

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Heidegger, Rationality, and the Critique of JudgmentAuthor(s): Stephen WatsonSource: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Mar., 1988), pp. 461-499Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20128627 .

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ARTICLES

HEIDEGGER, RATIONALITY,AND THE CRITIQUEOF JUDGMENT

STEPHEN WATSON

The priority of the question of judgment does not have its ground in

the fact that the essence of knowledge really is judgment, but in the

fact that the essence of judgment must be defined anew.1

I

J. he opening OF martin HEIDEGGER'S summer of 1928 Marburg

lectures on logic is, to use a word he himself invokes elsewhere

about these matters, "dismaying"?providing perhaps additional

evidence for the perennial charge that aspects of his work contain

tendencies toward irrationalism, mysticism, and forms of nostalgic

romanticism. In fact, the lectures show Heidegger calling for

nothing less than a "destruction (Destruktion) of logic,"2 a move not

only consistent with a similar destruction in Being and Time, pub

lished a year previously, but also consistent with a context which its

author describes as one in which "the inner rebellion against knowl

edge, the revolt against rationality (der Sklavenaufstand gegen die

Rationalit?t), and the struggle against intellectualism have become

fashionable."3 His ensuing condemnation of "the widespread ste

rility of academic courses" in this area and the call for "loosening

up (aufzulokern) traditionallogic,"4

would seem to leaddirectly

to

the proclamation which would issue from Heidegger's struggle with

Nietzsche in the decade thereafter, that "reason, glorified for cen

1Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and

Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967), 146.2Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans.

Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 57.3Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 5.4

MetaphysicalFoundations

of Logic,6.

Review of Metaphysics 41 (March 1988): 461-499. Copyright ? 1988 by the Review of

Metaphysics



462 STEPHEN WATSON

turies, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought."5 The ques

tion of Heidegger's account in this regard has continually troubled

(and provoked) those writing in its wake?not only in the continen

tal traditional, such as Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, Merleau

Ponty, or Derrida, but also those "beyond" it, such as Carnap, Ryle,

Rorty, or Putnam.6 And yet, such claims seem only to provide

added weight to the concern that the "retrieval of metaphysics"

thought to be essential to these issues based upon the Daseinanaly

tik of Being and Time would only lead the classical issues in philoso

phy associated with justification and decidability into a quagmire.

Its emphasis upon the conjunct in its title, being and time, could

only lead, on the one hand, to anthropological reductionism?since

it returned the interrogation of Being back to the commitments (the

Vor-Urteilen) of the being through whom the questioning arose?

and on the other hand, to a new version of historicism?since it

claimed that questions concerning "truth" were tied essentially to

time, and specifically, to the latter's appearance within the tem

poral (historical) horizon of the being to whom they appeared.

Moreover, that even those closest to Heidegger viewed the matter

similarly is clear, for example, in the criticisms his mentor, Edmund

Husserl voiced in the 1931 response, "Phenomenology and Anthro

pology." There the strategy Husserl used in arguing against

Dilthey's flirtation with relativism in a Logos essay of 1911 (an

essay Heidegger affirmed) was reinvoked against Heidegger him

5Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead'

"in The

Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt,

(New York: Harper Books, 1977), 112.6

See for example Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method trans.

Garrett Barden, John Cumming (New York: Crossroad, 1975); J?rgen Ha

bermas, "Martin Heidegger. On the Publication of Lectures From the

Year 1935," trans. Dale Ponikvar, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6

(1977); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Al

phonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Jacques

Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1982); Rudolph Carnap, "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical

Analysis of Language," trans. Arthur Pap in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J.

Ayer (New York: The Free Press, 1959); Gilbert Ryle, "Martin Heidegger's:Sein und Zeit" inHeidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and

theMirror ofNature (Princeton: Princeton University, 1979); Hillary Put

nam, "Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized," Synthese 52 (1982).



RATIONALITYAND THE CRITIQUEOF JUDGMENT 463

self.7 In this regard, far from contributing to a retrieval of classi

cal issues in philosophy, Heidegger would be simply guilty of ef

fecting their ultimate dissolution, a claim which, like that of irra

tionalism, has accompanied his works ever since.

Nonetheless, if the strength of these charges is perhaps justly

unavoidable, there is a sense inwhich, too, when all is said and done,

such charges never allow the confrontation of Heidegger's text, its

Auseinandersetzung, to take place. Not because, as Heideggereans

often enough point out, such charges may miss the complex seman

tics affiliated with such "markers" as Destruktion1, or 'Wiederho

hlung\ or even Dasein1 itself, but because they may miss the issue

at hand, that Heidegger's invocation of the need for "another logic"

(einer anderen Logik)* was precisely "calculated" both to acknowl

edge and remove the question of truth from the vagaries of those

threats which plagued reason at the turn of the century (and per

haps still does) under the guise of historicism, relativism, psycho

logism, and Lebensphilosophie. And, he intended to do so without

assuming the transcendentalist's pens?e en survol, simply denying

thechallenge involved,

orgenerating

a series of antinomies which

would enforce a certain decisionism upon rationality?to be either

for or against. In this regard the characteristic Heideggerean

claim that "the chains of proof in ontic argumentation do not pri

marily constitute the context of proof,"9 and that considerations

concerning this "constitution" demanded an ontological turn, may

be seen precisely as a response to the problems of contextuality,

historicity, and rationality?that the problem of context itself, that

is, had not been radically questioned, and that in this regard, as the

lectures on logic themselves attest, virtually all of Heidegger's in

vestigations into ontology, the path of the infamous Seinsfrage, and

perhaps as well the ensuing turn from the traditional language and

solutions of philosophy may be seen to grow out of (if not limited

7Edmund Husserl, "Phenomenology and Anthropology," trans. Rich

ard G. Schmitt in Husserl: Short Works, ed. P. McCormick, F. Elliston

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); and "Philosophy as

Rigorous Science" inPhenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Q.

Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Likewise see the HusserlDilthey correspondence edited by Walter Biemel and translated by Jeffner

Allen inHusserl: Shorter Works.8Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 5.9Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 218.



464 STEPHEN WATSON

by) his initial concerns for what had been traditionally at stake in

the question of judgment.10 Moreover, if these origins quickly and

perhaps inevitably ledHeidegger (in addition to logic) to forays into

a critique of metaphysics, cultural interpretation, aesthetics, and

ethics, then by attending closely to Heidegger's path here one can

not only "adjudicate" concerning the criticism of his texts from the

other figures of his time (e.g., Husserl, Dilthey, Scheler, Rickert,

Schlick), but also, by coming to grips with the context or horizon of

these texts, judge perhaps even the 'rationality' of their own re

sponse to this context.

II

The earliest of Heidegger's writings, dating from fifteen years

before Being and Time, already announced the necessity of rethinking

the problem of judgment. In a review of new investigations in logic

published in 1912, Heidegger asked, "What is the ground of logic?"

and concluded, "We are already before a problem whose solution remains reserved for the future."11 And, it was already clear that, as

his lectures on logic later affirmed, the solution to this problem could

not be simply of a formal or mathematical nature, but rather one

which returns these questions to their "condition of possibility."

The deeper meaning of the principles (of logic) remain in obscurityand logic ignores the problems posed by the theory of judgment.12

The deeper question of their origins thus became, he believed, for

feited and left at the limit. Heidegger would say little else in the

Marburg lectures:

10This thesis doubtless is paradoxical, granted traditional readings.

Even Jacques Derrida, for example, has noted that Sein und Zeit is a text

credited with having finished "the empire of judgment which was in sum

almost the whole of philosophy." And yet as will become evident, an

interpretation which would simply dissolve judgment on Heideggerean

grounds remains no less problematic, indicative rather of an issue still

unfinished in the interrogation of the Heideggerean oeuvre?as (inter alia,the collection of papers from which Derrida's statement is drawn attests.

See La Facult? de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985) ed. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard;and see Derrida's essay, "Pr?juger," in particular.11

Literarische Rundschau 10 (October 1912): 467.12

Literarische Rundschau 11, (November 1912): 520.




Contemporary logic shows a new distortion of the problem. Not onlyis metaphysics reduced to logic, but logic is itself reduced to mathe

matics. Contemporary logic is symbolic, mathematical logic, andthus a logic which follows the mathematical method.. . . Rather, it

is important to [show] concretely how logic is possible as a metaphysics of truth.13

From the outset, however, it must be realized that Heidegger's

charge here does not concern the "mathematical" character of logic

itself. If throughout his texts concerning logic, Heidegger, for

example, drew upon Kantian and post-Kantian sources in delimit

ing his arguments concerning what he called "modern"accounts

of

rationality, he never seriously questioned whether mathematics

should be excluded from logic. In fact, in the same introduction in

which he called for its "destruction," he was even willing?rightly

or wrongly?to affirm the view of Kant that "since its earliest times

logic had been placed upon a sure path" which was essentially

"correct."14 Heidegger's concern instead lay elsewhere, almost

tangential to what he refers to as "contemporary logic." Conse

quently, he would have perhaps little to say to the logician directly.

His concern, moreover, could not in the end even be confused?pace

his stipulations regarding the possibility of truth?with a tran

scendental logic in the classical sense. Instead, he would be forced

to confront what remains in the wake of the failure of such tran

scendental and foundational accounts. And, in so doing, it would

be necessary to reopen and extend the issues surrounding the cri

tique of judgment and the problem of interpretation, deriving an

account of the rational as both relational and "hermeneutic."15

Ill

The problem with judgment, as the history of philosophy at

tests often enough, is that when it is broached apart from what is

thought to be its essential connection with the formal structures of

logic, things become murky. Hence its disappearance from much

13Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 105.


15For further discussion of the characterization of the rational as

relational and hermeneutic, see Dominique Janicaud, La Puissance du

rationnel (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).



466 STEPHEN WATSON

of twentieth century philosophy under the pretence that it re

mained in any sense that could be ultimately decided, and was justunavailable. Consequently, the problem has too often been "re

duced" by a kind of transcendental illusion; either, on the one hand

to logicism and "Platonism," or to conventionalism and empiricism,

on the other?but in either case mystifying the origin of judgment

itself. And in either case, Heidegger claimed in 1912, "the question

has not been studied in the depth of its dimension." The solution

here can be "neither purely logical nor purely psychological."16

Rather, invoking a word that would soon occupy center stage, and

risking the introduction of matters which were "quasi-inductive,"

the question of the conditions of possibility is a question which is in

the end "historical."

In the Scotusbuch (1916),17 a treatise written on Thomas of

Erfurt's Modi-significandi, Heidegger began concretely to trace out

the protocols of this account of rationality, specifically in this work

detailing the status of signification. From Erfurt, Heidegger

claimed to retrieve an ancient metaphysical account of objectivity,

a logic, that is, not merely of "inference," as he called it, but of

truth. It is clear as well that, while it involves a metaphysical

"realism" which occurs in relation to a scholastic legacy, Heideg

ger's retrieval takes place under the protocols of Husserlian phe

nomenology, thus supplying an element which would be at work

throughout his concerns with "the essence of truth."

In the present epoch, it is Husserl who has returned the 'idea of a pure

grammar' to honor, and demonstrates that there are laws of a priori

signification which foresee the objective validity of signification.18

While the early Husserl without doubt shares similar commitments

as others standing in the wake of Bolzano concerning the apodictic

status of truths-in-themselves, what distinguishes his treatment is

precisely the claim that logic must be committed to an account

which demonstrates the origin of its evidence. Hence the necessity

of adding a phenomenology to the account of logistic and, thereby,

the necessity of confronting again the problem of judgment. It is

16Literarische Rundschau 11 (November 1912): 522.

17"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus" in Martin Heidegger, Fr?he

Schriften (Frankfurt Am Main: Klostermann, 1972).18

"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 269.




this recognition which is equally at work in Husserl's "turn" from

"pure logic"

to his

phenomenological investigations:

We must try to see what essential phenomenological or logical dis

tinctions apply a priori to expressions, and how we may in essence

describe, and may place in pure categories, the experiences?to deal

first with the phenomenological side of expressions?that have an a

priori fitness for the meaning function (Bedeutungs-funktion). We

must find out how the 'presenting' and 'judging' achieved in such

experiences stand to their corresponding 'intuition,' how they are

'illustrated', or perhaps 'confirmed' or 'fulfilled', in the latter, or

rendered 'evident' by it, etc. . . . So-called 'judgment theory' ne

glects this task: it is in the main, in respect of its essential problems, a

theory of presentation. We are naturally not interested in a psycho

logical theory, but in a phenomenology of presentation?and judg

ment-experiences as delimited by our epistemological interests.19

On Husserl's account, phenomenology would exhibit and descrip

tively demonstrate the intuitional and experiential sources of

knowledge, fulfilling logic with a theory of truth by delineating the

internal relation of judgment to its ideal contents.20 And if for

Heidegger, Husserl re-engages the accomplishments of the modis

tae, he goes beyond them precisely by further explicating the intentional relations which constitute the Bedeutungsfunktion.

In his Ideas, Husserl has given the domain of significations its placewithin the totality of tasks of phenomenology and by this itself

has placed the theoretical importance of a priori grammar in a

new light.21

IV

It is precisely this new light upon the issues, to be provided

through phenomenological investigation, this "Aufkl?rung" to use

19Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. J. N. Findlay

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 259. A similar extension add

ing a description of use would, of course, occur in the later Wittgenstein?one which he characterized occasionally in fact as "phenomenological."

See, for example, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von

Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper &

Row, 1972), p.9e: "And

everything descriptiveof a

language gameis

partof logic." In neither case, however, could this annexation of the descriptive into the logical be simply sufficient, or occur without risk.

20Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1,165. For further discussion

of this issue see my "On the Agon of the Phenomenological: Intentional

Idioms and Justification," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 17 (1987).21"Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 270.



468 STEPHEN WATSON

Husserl's term, which would complete the metaphysics of the scho

lastics. Whatis

specifically privilegedin the account is the

emphasis placed upon the status of the experience inwhich this objectivity

arises. That is, "if one wants to understand the category (of Being)

in a decisive manner, it is necessary to place it into essential rela

tion with the formation that edifies objectivity."22 It is not acci

dental, then, Heidegger claims, that both Aristotle and Kant linked

the problem of the categories with the event o?formulating a propo

sition, that is to say, with judgment.23 Both recognized, thereby,

the intrinsically constitutive function of judgment in relation to

"objectivity."

Still, the Scotusbuch holds that committing the problem of the

categories, the question of ontology, and, consequently, a logic of

truth to judgment, threatens neither reason nor objectivity. Quite

to the contrary, rather than reducing Being to subjective evalua

tion, it precisely enriches the finite, opening it up to the field of

transcendence. If Husserl completes the account of objective in

tentional reference in the scholastics, what the latter provide is an

account of transcendence within the finite. Drawing upon the

scholastic account of analogy, one which doubtless remains still too

hidden in the past of hermeneutics (and its ?berwindung of the

modern) Heidegger claims that the medieval lived the soul's rela

tion with God with "rare solidarity."

It is in virtue of this particular approach or withdrawal, in the quali

tatively intensive sense, that the multiplicity of vital relations be

tween God and the soul, between the Beyond and the within is

modified. The metaphysical connection traversing transcendence

is at the same time the source of multiple oppositions and is the

richest source of lived experience within the immanent life of each

individual.24

Moreover, it is this account of immanence within transcen

dence which both raises "the problem of ontic interpretation and

the logical conception of the object"?that is, the problem of "ap

plication," as he terms it?and overcomes it in the differentiation of

the "fullness" of lived possibility. Here knowledge is fulfilled

"through the transcendent" rather than in the sheer "fluid expan

22"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 345.

23Ibid.





sion of content."25 In fact, the medieval archive of the analogical

had already been treated in this regard as the fundamental charac

teristic (Grundmerkmal) of the genus metaphysicum, the pros hen

equivocal by which Being becomes ontically articulated.26 In his

concluding chapter Heidegger further draws upon its account of

how "homogeneity and heterogeneity are intermixed in a specific

manner"27 as that by which "alone ... it will be possible to provide

a satisfying response as to how the"

'irreal,' 'transcendent' mean

ing guarantees us true reality and objectivity."28

Nonetheless, if it has been thegoal

of the Scotusbuch to trace

out this archive, it ends precisely in handing the locus of this play

between immanence and transcendence over to another domain.

Heidegger turns from the solidarity of medieval transcendence to

the chaos of the nineteenth century discovery of the transcendence

of time, from theology, that is, to history, and from Scotus and

Augustine to Hegel:

The epistemological subject does not explain the metaphysically most

important meaning of spirit, and, even less, the entire content. Onlyin being assumed into this full content does the problem of the categories maintain its own depth dimension and enrichment. The living

spirit is, as such, an essentially historical spirit in the broader sense ofthe term. The true world-view is far removed from the merely pointalist existence of a theory set loose from life. Spirit is not conceiv

able if the entire fullness of its activities, i.e. its history, is transcen

dentally resolved in it;with precisely this fullness, always growing in

its philosophical conceptuality, there is given a constantly self-exceed

ing means of vitally conceiving the absolute spirit of God. Historyand its cultural-philosophical and teleological significance must

become a meaning-determining element for the problem of the

categories.2*

If the Scotusbuch remained in all this merely at its foyer, Heideg

25"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 349, 351.

26"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 200. In fact, Heidegger still

grants the problem of analogy a certain priority in Being and Time.

Within two pages of its opening, Heidegger proclaimed that with Aris

totle's "discovery" of the unity of Being as a "unity of analogy," the Seins

frage was in fact in principle placed "on a new basis," one which Descartes'

modernism and subjectivist refusal is credited later with having missed,"an evasion . . . tantamount to his failing to discuss the meaning of

Being." See Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1962), 3,126.



29"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 349-50.



470 STEPHEN WATSON

ger's commitments to the "qualitative intensity" of lived time and

the transcendence of history was in fact already clear, even if hewould ultimately judge that the medievals suffered from a certain

conceptual insufficiency here. In his paper, "The Concept of Time

in the Science of History," the problem of this other transcendence

is hard at work.

V

"Science," Heidegger declares, "is a context of theoretical

knowledge ordered and founded on principles."30 This "ordering,"

however, is claimed to be quite different in the physical and the

historical sciences, a difference that is "determined by the object of

the respective science and points of view assumed."31 In the natu

ral sciences the context is a homogeneous one which is quantita

tively constructed. "[T]he flow [of time] is frozen and becomes a

surface [and] only as a surface can it be measured. Time then

becomes a homogeneous ordered series of points, a scale, a parame

ter."32 The object of history, however, Heidegger claims, involves

"an original attitude of mind, irreducible to any other sciences."33

And the procedure then is quite different:

I would ask in physics whether the weight of the Atwood gravitymachine would reach a certain position on the scale, when?that is,after how many beats of the seconds pendulum. If I ask "when"

concerning an event in history, then I am asking about the position in

a qualitative, historical context, not how much.34

And, retrieving the commitments of the Scotusbuch, Heidegger re

turns once more to discuss the basis of this "qualitative" context in

terms of the domain of lived experience:

The points in time of physical time are distinguished only by their

position in the series. Historical times do in fact succeed one an

other?otherwise they would not in fact be times?yet each differs in

30Martin Heidegger, "The Concept of Time in the Science of History,"

trans. H. S. Taylor, H. W. Uffelmann, Journal of the British Society for

Phenomenology 9 (January 1978): 3.31

Ibid.32

"Concept of Time," 6.33

"Concept of Time," 10.34

Ibid.




its content and structure. The qualitative element of the historical

concept of time is nothing more than the concentration-crystallization

?of a given life objectification in history?5

Heidegger would have little further to say concerning the classical

distinction in hermeneutics between natural and human sciences.

But what he does have to say about it in his lectures during the

Marburg period demonstrates both the complexity of the issues

which surround the distinction and the need for fundamentally new

ways of approaching it?as well as other matters. The Summer of

1927Marburg lectures,

The Basic ProblemsofPhenomenology,

state

cursorily that the distinction remains problematic because the

status of cognition in general had not been made thematic.36 More

over, the lectures on logic cited above are perhaps more exacting in

this regard, perhaps even while remaining faithful to the 1916 text:

N.B. To be sure, the natural and human sciences are not two differ

ent groups of sciences which differ in their development of conceptsand methods of proof or differ in that one occupies itself with sul

phuric acid and the other with poems. Instead, they differ as basic

possibilitiesof the free encounter of the

metaphysicalessence of

Dasein with its world, which is, in itself, one and the same.37

The question of this difference remains, as Heidegger had said in

1916, a matter of "an original attitude of mind." But what differs

here is that the Heidegger of the Marburg lectures of the 1920s had

radicalized the question. Unlike Dilthey, who saw the issue as one

that was metaphysical (dualism) and methodological (interpretation versus explanation by subsumption under laws), or Husserl,

who saw theproblem

as one that wasepistemological

and tran

scendental, Heidegger himself, without simply affirming the ontic

difference between regions or the logical necessity of a transcen

dental condition, raises instead the question of the specific "contex

tual interconnectedness" of observation and theory, of "appear

ance" and "attitude."38 It is precisely in this sense that the her

meneutic of Dasein's historicality was to contain the conditions for

the possibility of "historiography" as well as the roots of enquiry in

all science.

35Ibid.

36Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans.

Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 29.37Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 215-16.

38Basic Problems, 207.




account, far from being the irrational event arising out of the causal

mechanism ofsensory receptors

andassociation,

belief would be

uncovered as the transcendental origin whose content rationally

motivates judgment, the event in which entities in general arise and

are disclosed. As a result, as Husserl put it in Ideen I, "Truth is

manifestly the correlate of the perfect rational characteristics per

taining to protodoxa, to certainty of belief," that is, to the bodily

presence of the perceived as such.41

Now the textual evidence that Heidegger never simply denies

this account tout court is readily available during this period. In

the Marburg lectures on the concept of time, further explicating the

phenomenology of the perceptual world, he states:

Perception, or what it gives, points out, de-monstrates. The empty

intention is demonstrated in the state of affairs given in intuition; the

originary perception gives the demonstration.. . . Inasmuch as in

tuition is bodily originary, it gives the entity itself.42

Being and Time itself remains committed to such a verificationist

account of truth. For Heidegger, then, the problem of the disclo

sure of the phenomenon remains essential (as a necessary condi

tion) of the account of truth?or Dasein's 'being-in' the truth, as

Heidegger puts it. "Confirmation (Bew?hrung) signifies the en

tity's showing itself in its self-sameness."**

VI

Nonetheless, if the "solution" of Being and Time acknowledged

the phenomenological enterprise as a necessary extension in the

recherche de la v?rit?, the latter could not be sufficient. If the

phenomenological principle of principles had in fact incontestably

raised the question of the Evidenz of what got "presented," it never

fundamentally questioned the nature of presence as such. Husserl

in this regard always risked conflating transcendental and onto

41Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to

a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1982), 334.42

Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kiesel

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 49.43

Being and Time, 261.



474 STEPHEN WATSON

logical conditions. And, if the phenomenological extension itself

again raised the question of the Being of the evidence in surpassingthe nominalism of modernism, it never in fact faced its challenge

directly. If phenomenological intuitionism disclosed an Evidenz,

that Evidenz itself was always based upon a presence taken-for

granted. Consequently, it never took seriously the question of

scepticism which underwrote philosophical modernism's commit

ment to strenge Wissenschaft, nor the radicality of its account of

justification.

The phenomenological extension perhaps rightly overcame the

limits of this account of strict demonstrability in its attempt to

return to the evidence of "the things themselves," but it did so

without acknowledging all that had been, thereby, distanced from

modern rationalism and placed at risk. If the phenomenological

extension surpassed the limits of rationalism in order to fulfill the

requirements of a "logic of truth," it did so without facing the risk

of the phenomena themselves, the problem of the difference be

tween the given and its appearance, the difference between Er

scheinung and its Schein. And consequently, it did not face the

problem of interpretation and the limitations of phe

nomen-ology, the question, as it were, of the event of phenomenali

zation.44 Thus, having fully affirmed the transcendentalism, the

"immanence" of Husserl's verificationism, Heidegger then radi

cally challenges it precisely on the ground of a certain "transcen

dence" upon which it depends:

For why can I let a pure thing of the world be encountered at all in

bodily presence? Only because the world is already there in thus

letting it be encountered, because letting-it-be encountered is but a

particular mode of my being-in-the world and because world means

nothing other than what is always already present for the entity in

it. I can see a natural thing in its bodily presence only on the basis of

this being-in-the-world.45

The pure "seeing" of phenomenology must be referred back to

its anterior ground. To make present is always to encounter pres

ence on the ground of an event already past and the specificity of an

already presupposed referential context. The "as" of the phenome

nological appeal to the evidence of the "meant as meant" then

44On the problem of transcendental illusion, the status of the simu

lacrum, and the phenomenalization of phenomen-ology see Marc Richir,

Recherche Ph?nom?nologiques, Recherche 2 (Bruxelles: Ousia, 1981).45

History of the Concept of Time, 196.




differs from Husserl to Heidegger, becoming inextricably contex

tual and hermeneutic in the recognition that truth isas

mucha

matter of producing (Herstellen) as it is of proving.46 The evidence

provided by the presence of transcendental representation must

inevitably be deferred within the play of its conditions, the specific

ity of its "appearing to" Dasein and "within" its specific "world"?

that is, its appearance within a specific "world horizon" and the

specificity of its prior condition, its specific "historical" emergence.

It is precisely in this regard that the "making-present" of pure

phenomenological intuition remains opened by means of a certain

transcendental illusion, the forgetfulness of the "interpretative

transcendence" which is the condition of, the letting-be-present of,

the evidence of presence itself?the passage from the conditions to

the conditioned, in Kantian language. And, it is doubtless neces

sary to appeal to this Kantian legacy to grasp this transformation.

Heidegger's appeal to history, to temporality, as that which both

makes possible and, as has become evident, "ruins" ultimate objec

tivity, doubtless has a certain Diltheyan precedent. But as be

comes evident, too, it is ultimately contested on the basis of a Kant

ian archive upon which both Heidegger and Husserl depended.

Still, without question this archive affects, first of all, the

issues which had been previously contested in the confrontation

between Husserl and Dilthey. To claim, after all, that the condi

tions of phenomenological presence arise only on the beside of a

certain "world entry," to use Heidegger's term, is to claim that

appearance is always the appearance of a particular "world-view."

In fact theproblem

of worldview,

as

Heidegger points out, has,at

least since Schelling, been associated not simply with the mere

apprehension of the given, but the Kantian problem of its "sche

matism," thereby forcing its immanence into question.47 And, it is

46Basic Problems, 108. Likewise see, p. 201: "The view that knowl

edge equals judgment, truth equal judgedness equals objectivity equalsvalid sense, became so dominant that even phenomenology was infected bythis untenable conception of knowledge, as appears in the further investi

gation of Husserl's works, above all in the Ideas toward a Pure Phenome

nology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913)."4See Basic Problems, 5; and Friederich Wilhelm Joseph von Schell

ing, Einleitung Zu Dem Entwurf Eines Systems Der Naturphilosophie,

Werke, ed. M. Schroter (Munich: Beck and Oldenburg, 1927), 271. For

further discussion of Schelling's role in the past of hermeneutics, see my

"Aesthetics and the Foundation of Interpretation," Journal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism, Winter 1986.



476 STEPHEN WATSON

incontrovertible in this regard that for Heidegger it ultimately

forcedus to

choose against Husserl?whichis not to

say that he hadhimself simply chosen for a Weltanschuungphilosophie. Nonethe

less, it was imperative to realize that Husserl's argument against

Dilthey in the 1911 Logos essay, "Philosophy as Strict Science,"

which attempted to dissolve appeals to the historical embeddedness

of reason as self-contradictory, simply did not allow the confronta

tion to take place. In this regard, as Heidegger states quite openly

in the Marburg lectures, the Logos essay "typifies Husserl's position

toward theproblem

ofhistory,

aposition

which must be described

as impossible, rightly invoking Dilthey's dismay."48

This does not mean that Heidegger's turn towards the histori

cal meant that he thereby simply affirmed Dilthey's "world-view"

philosophy. He declared, a "Weltanschauung philosophy is pre

cisely no philosophy at all." Still, this recognition cannot imply

that rationality can simply be removed from all ties to its condi

tions, all horizonality. Heidegger's 1927 lectures on the basic

problemsof

phenomenology

are decisive. In his introduction to the

Grundprobleme he declares that the task is to understand how the

distinction between "scientific philosophy" and "philosophy as

world-view" vanishes.49 Moreover, that the Kantian archive facili

tates this surpassing is immediately noted, ironically surpassing

the constraints of the first Critique's Analytic in explicating the

"scientific" by appealing elsewhere for its account in the Kantian

oeuvre:

This seems also to be the view of Kant who put the scientific character

of philosophy on a new basis. We need only recall the distinction he

drew in the introduction to the Logic between the academic and the

cosmic conceptions of philosophy.50

48History of the Concept of Time, 119.

49Basic Problems, 7. Some fifteen years previously, Max Scheler had

similarly rejected the dilemma separating Husserl and Dilthey, claiming

both that "Husserlwas

correct in rejecting all 'philosophy of Weltanschauung,

' "and that "every historical phase of a 'science' is always al

ready conditioned by a Weltanschauung and an ethos with regard to goals

and methods." See Formalism inEthics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

(1913-1916), trans. M. Frings, R. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern Univer

sity Press, 1973), 302.50

Basic Problems, 7.




VIII

In this regard, the issue perhaps turns on a Kantian hinge, the

issue of the nature and epistemics of worldhood, the nature of the

world, a "world-view," and hence, the status of a view, perspective,

or horizon?perhaps even the "fusion of horizons," to use a Gada

merian term. As such, the issue of the status of interpretive hori

zons and worldviews returns to what Kant called cosmolog?a ra

tionis?and, in the problem of its ultimate or transcendental foun

dations, the problem of "cosmo-the-ology."51 Gadamer himself, on

the other hand, initially attributed the notion of horizon (and ap

pealed for its explication) to Husserl.52 Moreover, it perhaps

always accompanied his reading of Heidegger, a view that returned

the hermeneutic and its difference to the homogeneity of the tran

scendental horizon of worldhood, the homogeneous ground which

delineated the appearance of any object in general. But precisely

thereby it perhaps almost missed the displacement operative in

Heidegger's account, that is, the difference (and the risk) which in

the Grundprobleme (and elsewhere) Heidegger had ascribed to the

extensions of the Kantian system and the effect it had even upon

51See H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 216-17. The question of

this horizon and its standpoint has troubled and accompanied hermeneu

tics since its modern inception, appearing for the first time in the work of

Chladenius. On the entrance of cosmolog?a rationis and cosmotheologywithin the Kantian text, see the Critique of Pure Reason, B392 and B660,

respectively. In this regard both the epistemological and cosmol?gica!issues concerning the pluralization of possible worlds and the threats they

posed for philosophical modernism have Copernican roots?as Kant

clearly recognized. And there is perhaps every reason to believe that it

participates thereby in the Copernican problem already at work in Nicho

las of Cusa's advice that, granted the interchangeability of standpoints in

cosmological observation?one in which "wherever anyone would be, he

would believe himself to be the center"?it is necessary "to aid oneself as

best you can by means of the imagination" in order to fuse (complices) each

of the varying poles into the other. See De docta ignorantia, II, 11.52

See Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a

Phenomenological Philosophy, ?55, and his assertion of the contradiction in

the notion of a world existing outside our own (108-09). Likewise com

pare Gadamer's correspondence with Leo Strauss shortly after the publication of Wahrheit und Methode: "I do not believe at all that we live

'between' two worlds. ... I remember, instead of this the one world

which I alone know, and which in all decay has lost far less of its evidence

and cohesion than it talks itself into." See "Correspondence Concerning

Wahrheit und Methode,"

The Independent Journal of Philosophy, 2 (1978):10.



478 STEPHEN WATSON

the retrieval of classical hermeneutics itself, one by which the

problem of judgment and rationality was to be reexamined. If, ashas been seen, Heidegger was still willing in this regard to claim

that logic from Aristotle and Plato to Kant was "essentially cor

rect," he was likewise willing to claim that, precisely because of his

challenge to, and step beyond, metaphysics, Kant took "the first

step forward in philosophical logic since Aristotle and Plato,"53 one

from which Heidegger drew the conclusion of radical transforma

tion concerning both the logic and the metaphysics of truth.

In the section on the regulative employment of the Ideas which

culminates the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure

Reason, Kant states:

Every concept may be regarded as a point which, as the station for an

observor, has its horizon (als einen Punkt ansehen, der, als der Stand

punkt eines Zuschauers).54

Further, every concept is to be represented as part of an ascending

or descending inferential chain, thus participating in the teleologi

cal ascent to the totality of the conditions and reason's systematic

completeness, the teleolog?a rationis humanae. Yet, if reason is

inevitably this call to systematic completeness, the ascent to the

absolute, it is equally unavoidably a failure at this task. There is in

the end a certain failure to the Copernican turn in philosophy. The

"transcendental problem" of reason, as Kant put it, is precisely that

appearances demand explanation by means of the totality or the

absolute whole, but all that may ever be given together in an abso

lute whole is not itself a perception.55 This totality is but an Idea,an Aussicht, a horizon within which the particulars might become

intelligible. By its means, therefore, reason is extended beyond the

given and yet only at the risk of loosing its surety.

The problem of reason is thus the problem of extensions.


54Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New

York: MacMillan, 1973), p. 542-47. As is the common practice, reference

will be made hereafter to the first (A) and second (B) editions (A 658/B686). Compare Heidegger's affirmation in The Essence of Reasons, trans.

Terence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 25: "The

manner in which ontological concepts apply to Being will always be lim

ited to and circumscribed by a definite point of view (Blickpunkt)."Hence: "Propositional truth is rooted in a more primordial truth." (p. 21).55

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 435 (A 483-84/B 511-12).




Indeed, recognizing the Aussicht of critique itself, Kant claims that

philosophy itself participates in the project of Erweiterungen56?albeit one whose result is wholly negative in the moment in which

its search for "origins" is aborted.57 It required, instead, a theoret

ical practice whose sole function is to witness the inevitability of

the lapsus judicii in the attempt to bridge the abyss between parts

and wholes inferentially. Critique arises, that is, precisely in the

wake of the recognition that there will be no ultimate or "common

horizon," as Kant puts it, "in reference to which, as from a common

center, they can all be surveyed," no standpoint which "compre

hends under itself all manifoldness?genera, species, and subspe

cies."58 Rather, in the wake of this failure, the problem of exten

sions is the recognition of philosophy's profound de-centering, the

recognition of the ultimate underdetermination of all Standpunk

ten, and the ensuing "dissemination" and heterogeneity of possible

worlds. Hence, our attempts to transcendentally institute objec

tivity, notwithstanding, the problem can then be succinctly stated

?in fact as Kant himself stated it in the Opus Postumum: "plura

litas mundorum sed unitas universi. "59

In the wake of the failure of ultimate determinability, the eidos

of metaphysical Ansehen, the object of theoretical or speculative

contemplation, becomes radically transformed from its Platonic

origin.60 Heidegger acknowledges, as an interpreter of Plato, Kant

"would have to get a straight T'." But again, that too may avoid

the issue at hand. In the same transformation, "Kant and only

Kant has creatively transformed Plato's doctrine of ideas."61

Moreover, on Heidegger's reading we can be specific about the na

ture of this transformation concerning the framework (Gestell) of

the rational. In recognizing that the ideas are not simply given but

are in fact precisely to the contrary, synthesized from a standpoint

56Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 179 (A 135/B 174).

57See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 96 (A 55/B 80).

58Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 542-43 (A 658-59/B 686-87).

59

Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, vol 21 [Opus Postumum](Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1936), 29.

60See Heidegger's correlation of eidos and Ansehen, for example, in

An Introduction toMetaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Dou

bleday, 1961), 88.61

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. F. Wieckand,

J. G. Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 77.



480 STEPHEN WATSON

?a focus imaginarius62?this transformation can be seen to go

hand in hand with the claim that in thus turning to the problem ofsynthesis, the "first advance into transcendental imagination was

the first moment in the history of philosophy inwhich metaphysics

endeavored to liberate itself from logic."63 Hence it was no acci

dent that the faculty of synthesis was the faculty of "ontological

synthesis" for Heidegger, the origin of transcendence and the in

stitution of "world entry"?if it would become increasingly difficult

to grasp the differentiation within this event of appropriation, this

Ereignis, as merely an "institution" or a "production."64

For Kant himself the pluralization of conceptual frameworks

opened up the possibility for the solution of the conflict between

theoretical and practical reason, the possibility that, the conflict

notwithstanding, there may be a compatibility of "the two stand

points."65 And, this pluralization of possible worlds would serve

Heidegger, too, in his account of Dasein 's transcendence. As he put

it in The Essence of Reasons, written two years after Being and

Time, "Kant's own answers to these questions, which he himself

does not pose in an explicit manner, completely transformed the

problem of the world."66 Still, because the problem of worldhood

remains itself still disparate in Kant's thought, Heidegger claims,

in addition to the quest for totalization in the Dialectic, he focuses

his discussion of the problem on the Logic and Anthropology.

In the Anthropology, for example, while recognizing the ulti

mately ungroundable character of the judgments which arise in

62Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 533 (A 644/B 672).


64See Heidegger's treatment of Ereignis, for example, in Identity and

Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

Heidegger's account would speak less and less of Dasein's founding of the

world and the question of "world entry" instead to make more explicit its

own participation in an event which transcends it, the event of the

"worlding" of the world, as he put it, one for which both talk of "grounds"and "causes" remains unsuitable. See for example "The Thing" inPoetry,

Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row,

1971),179-80.

65See Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 70ff. For

further discussion of this issue, see my "Kant on Autonomy, the Ends of

Humanity, and the Possibility of Morality," Kant-Studien 77, (1986).66

Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, 62.




this discipline (as in the Dialectic), he was equally quick to raise the

problemof the worldhood in

conjunctionwith it:

The most important object in the world to which he can ascribe

cultural progress is man, because man is his final end. So an under

standing of man in terms of his species, as an earthly being (Erdwe

sen) endowed with reason, especially deserves to be called knowledge

of the world.61

Such knowledge is not based upon a theoretical knowledge, but

remains knowledge based upon our participation in the world (Mit

pielen),

and

consequently,upon the play of transcendence itself.68

It is, Heidegger claims, an event in which "[h]uman Dasein, a being

situated in the midst of being and relating itself to being, exists in

such a way that the whole of being is always manifest and manifest

as a totality."69

Still, if in all this as Heidegger claims, "Kant prefigures the

more recent expression 'Weltanschauung'," he does so with a deci

sive difference, a difference by which Kant points to a path beyond

Dilthey's relativism.70 Kant's Weltspielen remains in fact the

Spielen of transcendence, the Spielen of an Aussicht, a horizon

which can never be made strictly determinate, objective, or decid

able. The range of the world, in this regard, as Heidegger states, is

variable (ver?nderlich).11 It is rather the institution of a transcen

dence whose totalization precisely escaped its ground, a transcen

dence which is ultimately, in fact, the default of all grounds. And,

it involved, thereby, an extension which became linked with the

problem of Erstreckung, the problem of concern, the horizon of care,

and the problem of enduring, expectation, and ultimately hope asinvested in the task of human transcendence and fulfillment?all in

fact consistent still with what he called "the rare solidarity" of the

medieval spirit, if no longer committed perhaps to its surety.

Even here, however, the requisite elements of the Heidegger

ean synthesis are hard at work. If the Spielen in question involved

a turn toward Dilthey, denying the transcendental unity of the

67Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View,

trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 3.68

Kant, Anthropology, 4.69

Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, 83.70

The Essence of Reasons, 80-81.71

The Essence of Reasons, 83.



482 STEPHEN WATSON

Husserlian totality for the sake of a transcendence which was

equally "abysmal,"if it could not

simply denythe threat of relativ

ism, it did so equally not without the grounds of the phenomenological account of reason which Husserl's doctrine of intentionality

opened up. The Spielen in question is still, after all, an"anticipa

tion of totality," a "surpassing of the world" and the task of the

interrogation of Being which our participation in being itself

opened up, a move which acknowledges the evidence in question, if

it were still an evidence whose complete determination was pre

cluded in principle and a totality always "relative to a disper

sion."72 In short, to Dilthey's reception of the Kantian Aussicht,

Heidegger is still quick to add the phenomenological account of

evidence.

Still the surpassing in question at the same time left the phe

nomenological Erf?llung equally at bay. Husserl's phenomenolog

ical "extension," which originated as early as his Logical Investiga

tion, could not access pure being at a stroke.73 The grafting of the

predicates of 'transcendence' and 'surpassing' that had accompa

nied Heidegger's reading of the medieval account of analogy could

only lead instead to the ruin of transcendental representation. The

appearance of phenomenology could not be removed from its hori

zon and all that exceeded it. It thus remained resigned to the

finite. IfHeidegger had grafted the Husserlian text in groundingthe Bedeutungsfunktion of the modistae, his commitments to all

that had been consigned to transcendence could only have porten

tous returns upon the limitations of its finite appearance. Hence

in the culminating chapter of division 1 of Being andTime,

which

confronts the problem of truth within the hermenutics of Dasein, he

states:

Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of

Dasein, all truth is relative toDasein's Being. Does this relativity

signify that all truth is 'subjective'? If one interprets 'subjective' as

'left to the subject's discretion,' then it certainly does not. For un

covering, in the sense which ismost its own, takes asserting out of the

province of 'subjective' discretion, and brings the uncovering Dasein

face to face with the entities themselves.74

72The Essence of Reasons, 85 and Metaphysical Foundations of Logic,

172.73

See E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, 246.74

Being and Time, 270.




It is only within the assertability accompanying Daseiris facticity

that truth becomes "wagered" for Heidegger, a risk which Husserl's

transcendental reduction, always already sure of its immanence,

could not admit.

A skeptic can no more be refuted than the Being of truth can be

'proved' (beweisen)... . Because Dasein, for its own part, cannot be

subjected to proof, the necessity of truth cannot be proved either. It

has no more been demonstrated than there ever has 'been' an 'actual'

skeptic (though this is what has at bottom been believed in the refu

tation of skepticism, in spite of what these undertake to do) than it

has been demonstrated that there are any 'eternal truths.'75

Such a position neither asserts nor denies the affirmation of eternal

and non-relative truths but rather commits them to the play of

"transcendence" itself, acknowledging thereby the infinite task of

their adequation. Hence, in accord with the more radical turn in

Husserl's own thought, it must admit that apodicticity and ade

quacy need not go hand in hand. And, thereby it occurs equally in

full recognition, as Heidegger said of other matters, that his "cri

tique today no longer applies in its full trenchancy" since Husserl

himself is "essentially making allowances for them."76 Full ade

quation, strict demonstrability, the paragon of modernist rational

ity, remains an infinite task whose completion lies only upon the

horizon. But in the same instant, then, it became incumbent to

recognize the underdetermination of its evidence and ultimately, its

relativity.

Formally, this returns the force of judgment to the realm of the

reflective in Kant and the contextual affirmation of reason and

nature which arises in the interplay between understanding and

imagination, extending the art of judgment beyond the schematics

of technical subsumption by pure a priori forms. The result would

be "strictly" objective only in a subjunctive sense which unites both

the judgments of aesthetics and the teleological judgments of the

"Transcendental Dialectic," ascribing a predicate "as if it were a

property of things."77 Nonetheless (in both cases) the claims which

result are thought to be the effects of our direct interplay with the

things themselves,not

simply subjective, and hence remain commu

75Being and Time, 271-72.

76History of the Concept of Time, 121.

77Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New

York: Hafner, 1968), 47.



484 STEPHEN WATSON

nicable, if still in the strict sense indemonstrable, underdetermined

and, again in the strict sense, neither objective nor disputable, i.e.,

decidable.78 In fact, it is this new criteria of rationality, this new

gloss on the objective and the "communicable," that Heidegger

invokes as peculiar to Kant's finding. But truth is communicable

in this instance precisely in driving a wedge between the communi

cable and the objective, that is, by opening up a domain of commu

nication within the sensus communis as "hermeneutic." The do

main of meaning is extended beyond the strict confines of Sinn und

Bedeutung, affirming in the same moment the problematic charac

ter of "the articulation of intelligibility."79 Hence the transforma

tion of communication beyond the realm of the propositional and its

"sharing" or "transference":

To say that one Dasein communicates by its utterances with anothermeans that by articulating something in display it shares with the

second Dasein the same understanding comportment toward the

being about which the assertion is being made. . . . Communica

tions are not a store of heaped up propositions but should be seen as

possibilities by which one Dasein enters with others into the same

fundamentalcomportment

toward theentity asserted about, which isunveiled in the same way.80

And yet if, formally, Heidegger's account of the articulation of

intelligibility was intended in all this to affirm the transcendence of

reflective judgment?which is doubtless essential to the archive of

78See the "Second Moment" of the "Analytic of the Beautiful," that

"according to quantity," in the Critique of Judgment, 47.79

See the account in Being and Time of the pre-predicative intelligi

bility which arises in the existential constitution of disclosedness: "The

intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there

is any appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the Articulation of

intelligibility. Therefore it underlies both interpretation and assertion.

That which can be Articulated in interpretation, and thus even more

primordially in discourse, is what we have called 'meaning'"

(203-04).Doubtless this account remains akin to, if indeed it does not stand behind,Charles Taylor's account in arguing against a merely formal account of

rationality: "But the concept of rationality is richer than this. Rational

ity involves more than avoiding inconsistency. What more is involved

comes out in the different judgments we make when we compare incom

mensurable cultures and activities. These judgments take us beyond

merely formal criteria of rationality, and point us toward the human

activities or articulation which give the value of rationality its sense"

("Rationality" inRationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis, S. Lukes [Cam

bridge: MIT Press, 1982], 105).80Basic Problems, 210.




rationality in contemporary hermeneutics?this is not to say that it

merely repeats it.

IX

If, as Heidegger puts it, assertion has been taken out of the

realm of subjective discretion and returned to the problem of Da

seiris transcendence and Mitspiel, a function of the ?berg?nge at

work in the difference between Being and beings, what then is the

nature of judgment? Heidegger claims that the classical view of

judgment which views it as a binding together of concepts?a view

formalized by Aristotle and made more rigorous still by Leibniz in

taking all judgments of truth as identities, as analytic?remains

too restricted, and, awaits again transformation in Kant's wake.81

And, this transformation is explicated precisely within Kant's

assertion of the synthetic moment underlying analytic claims. It is

the recognition that "all analysis presupposes synthesis," presup

posesthe

synthesisof the

imaginationin its extension

beyondthe

given, an extension again which occurs "through the object"?one

based, for Heidegger, ultimately upon Kant's extended account of

human participation with the world (Mitspielen), or, according to

Being and Time, Dasein's Being-in-the-World. In this regard Hei

degger is adamant about this addition and what he calls "Kant's

new definition of judgment" which would liberate it from the con

fines of simple analysis.82 But, it is in fact not simply a matter of

"a mere extension":

According to the way inwhich we have now contrasted the two defini

tions of judgment, i.e. the traditional one and Kant's, it looks as

though Kant only added something to the definition of judgmentwhich had been omitted up till then. But it is not a question of a

"mere extension," but of a more primordial grasp of the whole.83

Thus it involves, Heidegger claims, "something absolutely

81See Heidegger's discussion of Aristotle and Leibniz in this regard in

the introduction and first part of Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.

Again, inWhat is a Thing?, Heidegger claims?following Kant?that "the

logical conception of judgment is correct but insufficient" (p. 186).82

What is a Thing?, 159.83

Ibid.




Still, Heidegger's account here of what elsewhere he described simi

larly as "an exhibitive disparting"87 no doubt risks the grade he

gave Kant on his reading of Plato. Aristotle did not in fact think

affirmation and negation, nor even analysis and synthesis, to

gether?any more than did Kant. As in 1916, there remains here a

certain Hegelian turn in Heidegger's account. It is Hegel's dialec

tic and not Kant's which questions the distinct status of synthesis

and diaeresis, if only momentarily, to exchange its effect ultimately

for the proof of action, the vestige of practical reason, and the

Aufhebung der Realisierung.** Having acknowledged this event,

Hegel ultimately instead claimed that the problem of reason's ex

tension and the task by "which we must strive to bring the condi

tion of the actual world ever nearer" is in fact realized, that "every

thing actual is only in so far as it possesses the Idea and expresses

it."89

If Hegel had seen the interpretative indeterminacy which at

taches itself to the analytic, he could not allow it to have the last

word. If he recognized that the analytic moment, as he said of

reflection is "a positing and presupposingat

thesame

time,"90 and

consequently, a "relation to otherness within itself" (i.e., not simply

an explication of "internal difference"),91 he was unable to claim

that this difference, the difference between subject and predicate,

and ultimately the difference between the entity and Being?the

hermeneutic or ontological difference, as Heidegger put it?could

be anything but reduced: "[D]ifferentless identity really constitutes

the true relation of the subject to the predicate."92

On the contrary, this positing and presupposing at the same

time is the inextricable circularity of the hermeneutic circle, a pos

iting by which, as has been seen, not only was the difference ines

capable, but for Heidegger (since the Scotusbuch) remained the

condition for the possibility of truth, of what transcends within the

87Basic Problems, 209.

88Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities

Press, 1969), 787. Also, see p. 818. In fact, since 1912, Heidegger linked

the problem of Aufhebung to the problem of a scientific Logic?which is

not to say that his response was simply "Hegelian." See Literarische

Rundschau, 10 (Oktober 1912): 466.89

Hegel's Science of Logic, 756.90



Hegel's Science of Logic, 629.



488 STEPHEN WATSON

sphere of the finite.93 And yet, what also became ultimately clear

in a way that had not been (at least explicitly) clear in 1916, was

precisely the re-move, and consequently, the "ruin" this transcen

dence instituted vis a vis classical representationalism. What

Kant had himself called "the interpretations which logicians give of

judgment in general" the simple "representation of a relation be

tween two concepts" would need to be surpassed.94 Not only be

cause it misses the institution of truth in transcendence, but be

cause itfalsifies?again, confuses Being with mere representation,

necessary with sufficient conditions, transcendental with ontologi

cal conditions, as if synthesis and diaeresis were simply a function of

representation, rather than a question of the event (Ereignis) of

Dasein's participation in, belonging-to, and appropriation-of Being

itself in its withdrawal and transcendence.

In fact, it is precisely by means of this reduction and its "tran

scendental illusion" that reason would become for Heidegger the

"most stiff-necked adversary of thought." As a result, the en

counter with the difference which intervenes would be reduced to

representation, truth, and thereby, to certainty, and its "experience" to the boundaries of the disputable; to the decidable?dispu

tatio?exhibiting reasons, founding, and thus, legitimated dis

course.95 Judgment would thus be reduced to a matter of calcula

tion, that is, merely a weighing of arguments, a bringing into unity

before a judicial or representative tribunal by which once and for

all things could be brought to critique and decided, a move which

would again conflate representation and certitudo with truth. In

93Hence the famous statement in Being and Time concerning the

positive possibility of the hermeneutic circle?not one which is to be taken

to have solved the problem of rationality through its resources, but only to

have opened up the possibility for warranted judgment in its wake: "In a

scientific proof, we may not presuppose what it is our task to provide

grounds for. But if interpretation must in any case already operate in

that which is understood, and if itmust draw its nurture from this, how is

it to bring any scientific results to maturity without moving in a circle,

especially if, moreover, the understanding which is presupposed still

operates within our common information about man and the world? . ..

But if we see this circle as a vicious one and look out for ways of avoiding it,even if we just 'sense' it as an inevitable imperfection, then the act of

understanding has been misunderstood from the ground up" (p. 194).94

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 158 (B 140).95

See History of the Concept of Time, 265.




short, it forgets that certitudo, "the merely correct, is not yet

the true."96

It is "this critique of critique" that Heidegger institutes in his

questioning of philosophical modernism?questioning, that is,

whether what Kant himself had called "the dogmatic procedure" of

reason, which would "yield strict proof (strenge beweisend) from

sure principles a priori," did not itself suffer from the "dogma

tism" to which he opposed it.97 As Heidegger put it in

Der Satz vom Grund:

Representational thought, completely dominated by the principium

rationis, now becomes thoroughly rational, dominated by reason

(Vernunft). For from ancient times, ratio does not only signify in the

sense of what justifies, that is, founds, something else. Ratio also

signifies account in the sense of vindicating something, calculating it

as justified and correct and securing it by means of such calculation.

Understood in this broad sense, calculation is the manner in which

man conceives of (aufnimmt) something, undertakes (vornimmt)

something and engages in (annimmt) something, that is, generally

per-ceives (vernimmt) something. Ratio is the manner of perceiving

(Vernehmen), that is, reason (Vernunft). Reasonable, rational

thought obeys the principium rationis. The principle of ground is the

principle of rational thought in the sense of a calculation that certifies. We speak of rational arguments (Vernunftgrunden). Leibniz

formulated the short scarcely expressed principle?Nihil sine

rationed

Still, this principle which expresses "the most concealed char

acter of the age of Western history" which Heidegger calls "mod

ern," in marshalling a meta-narrative of Reason's "pre-domi

nance," could only prove illusory. Its reduction would exclude all

that could not bebrought

toconceptual adequacy,

todemonstration,

as "ir-rational." But equally, it avoided thereby the difference

which undercut all simple representational adequacy, the failure,

that is, of representation to adequately ground itself, to account for

its conditions, the interpretative synthesis of adequation, the ulti

mate "re-move" of judgment, and even, Heidegger proclaims, the

96"The Question Concerning Technology," 6.

97Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 32 (B xxxv).

98Martin Heidegger, "The Principle of Ground," trans. Keith Hoeller

Man and World, 7 (August, 1974): 212. What is Called Thinking?, explicitlyin Nietzsche's wake links this culmination to a specific power structure:

"Now that logistics is in some suitable way joining forces with modern

psychology and psychoanalysis, and with sociology, the power-structure of

future philosophy is reaching perfection" (p. 21).



490 STEPHEN WATSON

"errancy" of judgment and its truth.99 And itwas this claim that

led him ultimately to take the criticisms of Nietzsche seriously.

This dependence upon transcendence as the condition of truth

would inevitably enforce a certain rational agnosticism before the

failure of strict demonstration. Identity, identification within the

representational and demonstrative "theater"?the search for con

sensus and the demand for validity?always presupposes "a certain

unitary context of Being" which is the result of a synthetic matrix,

always makes use of something pre-given that it is engaged in

identifying; always already, that is, presupposes transcendence.100

The synthesis of recognition, the telos of all transcendental reflec

tion, in short, always already presupposes a synthesis of pre-recog

nition.101 Consequently, in Heidegger's lectures, Ph?nomenolo

gische Interpretation von Kants Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft

99See Heidegger's discussion of the problem of "errancy" in "On the

Essence of Truth," trans. John Sallis in Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1977).

100See Martin Heidegger, Ph?nomenologische Interpretation von

Kants Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt-Am-Main, 1977) 363-64.

For a more contemporary debate on this issue see Cornelius Castoriadis's

discussion of significative practices, "identitary logic," and set theory (le

gein) in The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blarney

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), and J?rgen Habermas's criticism of this

text in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederich

Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) 327-28. While Habermas is

doubtlessly right in characterizing the stress on the faculty of imagina

tion, the problem of underdeterminability, and the world-constitutive

character of discourse as Fichtean and Heideggerean?charging the latter

with omitting an account of legitimation and accountability?he remained

perhaps equally blind to the Fichtean metaphysics threatening both the

appeal to praxis of his earlier position and his more recent committments

to the "reciprocity of communicative interaction" as solutions to these

problems. If it is true in this regard that Heideggerean appeals to "tran

scendence" doubtlessly step beyond the analytics of the critical tribunal,the priority granted to those appeals occurs perhaps less through simpleomission than in the demand for retrieval of dialectics?both in the Aris

totelian sense, that concerning the prius of demonstration, and in the

Kantian sense, that concerning its completion, and consequently, its falli

bism. If Habermas is granted the importance of the question of legiti

mation, it will be necessary then to grant to those writing inHeidegger's

wake the necessity of recognizing the (transcendental) illusions threaten

ing it from within. In this regard, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, "judgment is

the risk of reason." See the latter's "Dies Irae" in La facult? d?juger, ed.

Lyotard.101

Ph?nomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik Der Reinen

Vernunft, 364.




(Winter, 1927-28), a certain culmination would occur in the asser

tion that the original conditions that make possible the juridical

dimension of transcendental reflection and rational discourse

precisely renders that juridical position in the strict sense im

possible.102

Hence the inevitable claim, made eight years later, that "the

transcendental is what concerns transcendence."103 It could, of

course have been a syntagm extracted some twenty years previously

from the Scotusbuch?were it not for the difference which inter

vened and the problem that accrued concerning the phenomenaliza

tion that marked the phenomenon of transcendence. This inevita

bility concerned the difference Heidegger discovered within Kant's

own transformation of Plato's Ideas, the "lie" with which Nietzsche

had charged the scientific view of truth in committing it to a per

spective, and the possibility which Dasein's mortality could not

outstrip inBeing and Time. It was a difference which forced the

apophantic to turn hermeneutic and the identity invested within

the copula of representation to turn interpretative, to institute the

phenomenologicalmeant as meant

only by committingit to its

essential contextual and historical facticity, to all that had com

bined necessity and contingency within the analysis of Dasein's

Being-in-the World.104

If the hermeneutic circle is to be understood positively as the

ground for the emergence of interpretative disclosure, it fostered

inevitably, then, another recognition the more that Heidegger con

fronted the Nietzschean challenge. If interpretation had been lib

102Ibid., 385.103

What is a Thing?, 176. Compare Being and Time, 62: "Every dis

closure of Being as the transcends is transcendental knowledge." Still,

granted that all that was at stake between the account of Being as "tran

scendence" and knowledge as "transcendental"?concerning the founda

tion of the rational, the nature of judgment, and the status of legitimationand authority?the position could not escape "ambiguity." Hence Jean

Paul Sartre's proclamation that "Heidegger's transcendence is a concept in

bad faith." See the latter's Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes

(New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 336. Sartre himself, without

simply denying the problem of finitude and the underdetermination at

stake, clearly argued for the priority of one over the other, retaining the

insurpassability of the cogito and asserting that "judgment is the tran

scendental act of a free being" (p. 358)?thus giving rise to the severity of

Heidegger's own response to this account. See the latter's "Letter on

Humanism," trans. F. Capuzzi and J. G. Gray, in Basic Writings.104

Compare HegeVs Science of Logic, 546ff.



492 STEPHEN WATSON

erated from the positivistic constraints underlying the critical tri

bunal and strenge Wissenschaft, it was necessary to recognize that

the return to origins remained equally stricken with another

risk?"that no interpretation could escape the necessity of taking a

stand [and] simply by its choice of starting point [becomes] an un

spoken rejection and refutation."105 And without question the re

sult placed adjudication itself in peril: "[N]o thinker can ever be

overcome by our refuting him and stacking up around him a litera

ture of refutation."106

X

Henri Birault has perhaps expressed the overdetermined effect

of this result in claiming that for Heidegger, "All judgment is

essentially transgressive."107 But, it is so in a twofold sense, a

synthesis which Heidegger himself described in claiming of judgment that it was "bifurcated."108 Not simply because, as Birault

himselfclaims, Heidegger surpassed judgment in returning it to

the realm of the prepredicative, further elaborating what in fact

Husserl did before him in founding epist?m? in protodoxa, but pre

cisely because this protodoxa is itself re-moved from the immanence

(the presence) of the given and committed to the Mitspielt of tran

scendence, the hermeneutics of world-entry. The abyss of Dasein's

transcendence undercut both the adequacy of simple juridical as

sertion as well as simple empirical or phenomenological descrip

tion, ultimately dissolving, thereby, the possibility of a philosophy

and a rationality of "strict science." The result for Heidegger

was clear: the idea of a scientific philosophy was a contradiction

in terms.

Which is not to say that philosophy as a result turns ir-ra

105What is Called Thinking, 54.

106Ibid.

107Henri Birault, Heidegger et l'exp?rience de la pens?e (Paris: Galli

mard, 1978), 470. In What is Called Thinking, Heidegger similarly statesthe paradox and its risk: "The idea of what is, judged from what is, is

always beyond what is" and hence, "the idea of what is, is in itself meta

physical" (p. 98).108

Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 101.



494 STEPHEN WATSON

sion of identity within difference.113 Moreover, the articulation of

intelligibility at stake could arise only through another archaic re

trieval, which remains glossed over within the Kantian text, that

"judgment is a talent. . .which can be practiced only"?one which

remained still at work in the "Transcendental Dialectic" as the inevi

table (transcendent) condition for schematic (determinate) sub

sumption or analytic identification.114 Here judgment is primor

dially the essential institution of difference and inextricable tran

scendence, the difference at play between the sensible and the

intelligible, by which, as Heidegger put it, "mortals dwell between

earth and sky,"115?or precisely the difference by which, as Kant put

it in the exposition of the concept of worldhood, humanity remains

"an earthly being endowed with reason,"116 a being whose judgment

must be understood in terms of this "between" and its "gathering,"

its "synthesis."

Such a recognition implies that judgment remains, in the strict

sense of the word, a di-judicare?an Ur-teil, as Hegel, too, put it in

113See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stam

baugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) and Deleuze's account of these

issues inDiff?rence et r?p?tition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1972). 'Explicatio' and 'complicatio9 are terms which doubtless must be

re-situated within the neo-Platonist, immanentist, and expressivist ar

chive from which they descend, an archive which both hermeneuticists

(e.g., Gadamer, who affirms it) and post-structuralists (e.g., Deleuze, who

contests it) have affirmed. See in this regard Hans-Georg Gadamer,Truth and Method, appendix 6; Gilles Deleuze's discussion of the neo-Pla

tonist archive in chapter 11 of Spinoza et leprobl?me de l'expression (Paris:

Minuit, 1968) as well as his criticism of analogy inDiff?rence et r?p?tition,

55 ff. Finally see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 543 (A 659/B 687).114Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A133/B 172. Likewise, see his first

introduction to the third Critique: "The reflective judgment thus works

with given appearances so as to bring them under empirical concepts of

determinate natural things not schematically, but technically, not just

mechanically, like a tool controlled by the understanding and the senses,but artistically" (Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of

Judgment, [1789-90] trans. James Haden [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,

1965], 18. In this respect imagination is not simply a "mediatory" facultyat the service of understanding, but becomes in a sense itself constitutive,a power to "invent" possible criteria; hence the importance of poiesis in the

later Heidegger.115See, for example, ". . .

Poetically Man Dwells . . ." in Martin Hei

degger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York

Harper & Row, 1971).116Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, 3.




an etymological appeal,117?one which never dissolves its "gather

ing" to "identity," never permits analysis in any simple sense, and

never permits the simple endorsement of the dogmas of empiri

cism. The articulation of intelligibility at stake in human rational

ity would remain ultimately irreducible to the adequacy, decidabi

lity, and completeness of the critical tribunal. The threat of rela

tivism and skepticism (nihilism, to use Nietzche's term) which

arises as the inevitable accompaniment of its hermeneutic "trans

gression" would thus remain unavoidable. And yet such a recogni

tion must occur while it allows another of Heidegger's fateful ety

mologies to "faintly shine through," one which is the opening of

both the evidence of interpretation and its task. In fact in the

same text in which Heidegger called for the destruction of reason,

in an exposition of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, he asserted:

"Ratio is connected with rear, 'to consider something as'."118 It

was, he claimed, a retrieval that remained essential, returning to an

account of judgment and truth before the result of judgment would

be confused in any simple sense with its origins, its simple re-pre

sentation?before, that is, the gathering of judgment would be the

subject of a certain Vergessenheit, a Vergessenheit, consequently,

which itself forces a certain destruction of Reason: "The Enlighten

ment obscures the essential origin of thinking. In general, it

117In the lesser Logic Hegel notes this "difference" which "erupts"

between subject and predicate in the etymological past of judgment (Ur

teil). "The etymological meaning of the Judgment (Urteil) in German

goes deeper, as itwere, declaring the unity of the notion to be primary andits distinction to be the original partition. And that iswhat the Judgment

really is." The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford Univer

sity Press), 297. H?lderlin had already made the point, as is evident froma fragment probably dating from 1795 on judgment and being, one writteninKant and Fichte's wake: "In the highest and strictest sense, judgment isthe original division between object and subject, which are most inti

mately united in intellectual intuition.... It is the original cutting into

parts (Ur-teil) or dividing. The concept of division already implies the

concept of interrelation of object and subject, and the necessary presup

position of a whole of which object and subject are parts" (H?lderlin,

"Judgment and Being," presented as appendicies D-F. inW. J. Schelling'sThe Unconditional in Human Knowledge, trans. F. Marti (Lewisburg:Bucknell University Press, 1980), 261-62).118

Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 110. Likewise, see What isCalled Thinking?, 210.



496 STEPHEN WATSON

blocks every access to the thinking of the Greeks."119 Heidegger's

nostalgia (not to speak of his fictions) for the origins in such narra

tives is perhaps notorious. But this retrieval, which would trace

the hermeneutic als and its difference within all judgment, likewise

perhaps knew the risk of its own interpretation before a retrieval

that was ancient: that it is of the essence of wisdom?if not of

"Reason"?to know when a demonstration is to be demanded and

when not.120 And yet the effect, too, was clear. As Heidegger

admitted, "there is no such thing as the one phenomenology."121

XI

Such a retrieval, undertaken within the default of strict rules

for judgment, could not, then, avoid committing rationality and its

adjudications to the risk of the difference that had been encoun

tered. And, unfortunately, Heidegger has too little to say con

cerning the process of rationalization itself to derive simple conclu

sions about the matter. Still, the necessity of confrontingthis

taskin the wake of the failure of strenge Wissenschaft became increas

ingly apparent. What is Called Thinking?, for example, confronts

this issue itself in Heidegger's own re-reading of Parmenides:

it would violate the meaning of interpretation generally if we cher

ished the view that there can be an interpretation which is non-rela

tive, that is absolutely valid. Absolutely valid can at the very most

be only the sphere of ideas within which we beforehand place the text

to be interpreted. And the validity of the presupposed sphere of

ideas can be absoluteonly

if the absoluteness rests on some uncondi

tional?on a faith.122

Moreover, in this text he explicitly details the status of what he

continues to call the "critical analysis" granted this result:

Every confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) of two different interpre

119What is Called Thinking?, 211. See in this regard Heidegger's

discussion oflegein?of

thegathering

of "what opens itself in its open

ness"?in contrast to Modernism's reduction of Being to representation,

viewpoint, and hence Weltanschauung, in "The Age of the World Picture"

in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 131-32.120

See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 75b.121

Basic Problems, 328.122

What is Called Thinking?, 177.




tations of a work, not only in philosophy, is in reality a mutual re

flection on the guiding presuppositions; it is the discussion of these

presuppositions?a task which, strangely, is always tolerated only

marginally and covered up with empty generalities.123

If it is clear in all this that Heidegger does not, as is too often

charged, simply give up on the reflective or critical moment, he

insists, nonetheless, upon committing it to the play of presupposi

tions and the inevitable relativity of the differences that it haunts.

And it forced the recognition that "tolerance" under these condi

tions would always be at best "marginal" and transgressive, the

effect, too, of reason's inevitable transcendence and Vor-Urteil. It

was a recognition, again, that perhaps escaped Gadamer, whose

blinking recognition of the importance of Nietzsche here remained

in the end too nearsighted.124

And yet as a result of all this, "critique" seems only to be

inevitably tossed between the blinders of epist?m? and protodoxa?

literally, in the end, between incommensurable presuppositions.

Moreover, if, as became evident in Heidegger's evaluation of the

conflict between Dilthey and Husserl, this is a dilemma that he hasrefused to endorse, it must equally be acknowledged as a dilemma

that he has adamantly refused to deny: "The unconditional charac

ter of faith and the problematic character of thinking are two

spheres separated by an abyss (Abgrund)."125

Nonetheless, ifHeidegger insisted upon committing judgment

to this difference and its "other," if, that is, he views ad-judication

precisely as an Aus-einandersetzung whose dispersion would never

bebrought

to final decision within the criticaltribunal,

it does not

mean that he denies either reason or judgment all "warrant." If

interpretation in the end is not a matter over which, strictly taken,

we can "dispute," to speak Kantian, this does not imply that her

123Ibid.

124Compare Gadamer, Truth and Method, 228: "The true predecessor

of Heidegger in raising the question of being and thus going contrary to

the whole direction of Western metaphysics could not, then, be either

Dilthey or Husserl, but rather Nietzsche. Heidegger may have realizedthis only later, but in retrospect it can be seen that the aims already

implicit in Being and Time were to raise Nietzsche's radical criticism of

'Platonism' to the level of the tradition criticised by him, to confront

Western metaphysics on its own level, and to recognize the transcendental

position as a consequence of modern subjectivism, and so overcome it."125

What is Called Thinking?, 177.



498 STEPHEN WATSON

meneutic rationality, in its default, simply involves a holistic deci

sion for or against a set or matrix of protocols, blinders whose

acceptance, rejection, or transformation inevitably comes about by

means other than the rational, or that by committing reason to

history, somehow time "decides."

Rather, from the outset, or at least since the "turn" of the

Scotusbuch towards the question of transcendence and the Seins

frage?and the remainder of a teleological appeal to "differentia

tion" and the task of articulation at work in its past?Heidegger

had attempted to delineate the extension of rationality precisely in

the wake of the failure of strenge Wissenschaft.126 And even if it

would necessitate (as a result of his struggle with Kant and

Nietzsche) giving up the naivete of the belief he voiced in the Sco

tusbuch' that by this turn we might overcome our "increasing inse

curity (Unsicherheit),"121 what without question connects the var

ious developments of Heidegger's Seinsfragen was precisely the re

trieval of a resource for rationality in the wake of the failures of the

Enlightenment and the history he described as "modern."

If, thereby, Heidegger unavoidably committed interpretationto an abyss,128 he likewise, through recourse to its potential for

consilience, delineated the space of an extension by means of its

possibility for disclosure. He relied, that is, upon this abyss pre

cisely as an opening (Offenbare) and thereby, a depth to be mined.

If he insisted upon committing reason to the play of imagination

and the problem of "ontological synthesis," it remained the case

that Heidegger denied the claim that the "encounter" with Being

wassimply

a matter of an ensimaginarium,129

slmove which he had

condemned as the false closure of nihilism. Instead, rather than

the simple Destruktion of the rational, interpretation itself became

126"j3ie Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 351.

127Ibid. See, in this regard, Heidegger's discussion of the categories

and the problem of schematizing undertaken both in relation to "Pla

tonic-Aristotelian thought" as well as Kant and Nietzsche inNietzsche,vol. 3, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capazzi (San

Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 71ff.128For further discussion of the archive of this issue, see my

"Abysses" in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman,Don Ihde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

129Compare Kant's discussion of the ens imaginarium in the wake of

the results of the Analytic in the Critique of Pure Reason, 294 (A 290f/B,

346).




the extension through which assertion was both committed to its

"difference" as well as

consignedto its task?thus

reinstatingthe

rational beyond hope of all ultimate security and foundations.

And, if Heidegger could neither affirm the classical accounts and

hopes concerning the nature of rationality, nor provide simple en

dorsement for the metaphysics of the animale rationale upon which

it relied, he had learned as well from Nietzsche?without simply

endorsing him?that the task of interpretation was both the "gam

bling game" and the "venture" in which "our nature is at stake."130

University ofNotre Dame

130What is Called Thinking?, 128.

watson 1988 - heidegger, rationality, and the critique of judgment

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