GOBIERNO LOCAL

If the preceding is the general form of scientific letting-be, and if the that-being of scientifically discovered entities is Gegenständlichkeit—that-being-an-object or objectivity—then the relevant sense of letting be is again the enabling sense.

For the upshot of subsumption under laws is to enable entities to stand up against observations and measurements—that is, to defy and repudiate them.

Letting Be 101

And the crucial prerequisite for this defiant repudiation is, as we have seen, the law-mandated impossibility of certain combinations of observed characteris-tics or measured magnitudes.

More particularly, we now see how, through Newton and his laws, the entities of Newtonian physics became accessible as the entities they already were and would continue to be. What remains utterly opaque, however, is what could be meant by saying that, through Newton, his laws became true—not to mention the inevitable follow-up question of whether they became neither-true-nor-false again through Einstein. What’s worse, with this opacity, the force of the seemingly clear “as they already were and would continue to be” becomes pretty murky after all. What could Heideg-ger have been thinking?

I think Being and Time will support an extrapolation in terms of which this question might be answerable. (Whether the answer could ever be ac-ceptable is another issue.)

Remember first that there are different sorts of time in Being and Time, in-cluding originary time, world time, and vulgar time. Originary time is not sequential at all. Simplifying ruthlessly, I understand it as the temporal char-acter of a commitment to an understanding of being. When Heidegger says that, through Newton, his laws became true, he is referring to the undertak-ing of such a commitment. Thus, it is ultimately that undertakundertak-ing which lets the Newtonian entities be. These entities are, of course, in time—and also in space. But this time does not at all have the character of a commitment (nor even the significance and datability of Dasein’s everyday world). Rather, it has only the mathematical character of so-called Newtonian space-time. And it is in this time that those entities show themselves as precisely the entities that already were previously, and, moreover, will continue to be.

Now, when Einstein comes along, he has a different commitment to a different understanding of physical being, which, in turn, likewise lets enti-ties be. These entienti-ties also show up as ones that already were previously and will continue to be—though, of course, in relativistic space-time. It is a diffi-cult and vexing problem to say just what the relationship is between the re-spective sets of entities, but simple identity seems ruled out.

The easiest (and therefore most tempting) line is to say that, really, only one set of laws has ever been true, and only one set of entities—the entities that those laws let be—is actual, in some timeless sense of “is actual.” Thus, what Einstein showed us is that, contrary to what we thought, Newton’s laws were never true and the Newtonian universe of entities was never actual.

Rather, it has always only ever been Einsteinian.

One problem with this interpretation is that it’s incompatible with what Heidegger explicitly says. Another problem is that it’s unlikely to be a stable position. For, by the same reasoning, we would have to say, even now, that it’s 102 John Haugeland

really always only ever been an X-ian universe, where X is Einstein’s succes-sor—or, rather, the ultimate end of the line in that successorship, assuming there “is” such an end and science lasts long enough to get there.

Why would that idea ever strike anyone as the easiest and most tempting thing to say? I suspect that it is more of the legacy of scholasticism. The original and final science—the only one that’s ever really been right—is God’s science: the scientia of omniscience. This scientia is supposed to be ab-solutely and eternally correct, literally by fiat—the effecting sense of “letting be.” No one who has ever tried to think about it could imagine that “get-ting over” this legacy is or will be easy. It will require at least a profound reconception of reality as such—which is to say a new and deeper under-standing of being.

What I have tried to show is that the idea of letting be, taken not as effec-tive and divine but as enabling and human, is an integral part of that larger endeavor.

Letting Be 103

in his book The Genesis of Being and Time, Theodor Kisiel introduces his analysis of what he calls “the Kantian draft of Being and Time” with the fol-lowing remark:“When was Heidegger not a Kantian? It is almost like asking,

‘When was Heidegger not a German?’”¹There are many senses in which Kisiel’s observation is indisputably correct and which ensure the fruitfulness of an in-depth investigation of the relationship between Heidegger and tran-scendental philosophy. From a historical point of view, perhaps the fact that best supports Kisiel’s remark is the one he points to immediately thereafter, namely, the neo-Kantianism that pervaded the air of the German university in Heidegger’s formative years and, in particular, Heidegger’s allegiance to the “Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism” as a student of Rickert.

However, in what follows I would like to focus on the relationship between Heidegger and transcendental philosophy more from a systematic than from a historical-genealogical point of view.

Needless to say, any attempt to explain the sense in which Heidegger was a Kantian necessarily involves explaining the sense in which he was not. For it is surely beyond question that he was not an orthodox Kantian. Heidegger makes explicit his own view of the tension between his thought and Kant’s in his lectures of the winter semester of 1927–28, entitled Phenomenological Interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft). There he characterizes the importance of Kant’s philosophy for the very enterprise of Being and Time in the following terms:“If we radicalize the Kantian problem of ontological knowledge in the sense that we do not limit this problem to the ontological foundation of the positive sciences and if we do not take this problem as a problem of judgment but as the radical and fundamental question concerning the possibility of

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