MANEJO DEL PRESUPUESTO

Cristina Lafont

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understanding being in general, then we shall arrive at the philosophically fun-damental problematic of Being and Time.”²Thus, Being and Time’s radicaliza-tion of transcendental philosophy has as its target the scope of the problem of ontological knowledge rather than the Kantian model for understanding it. As I will try to show in what follows, Heidegger sees indeed his own project as Kantian to the extent that it incorporates the core of Kant’s Copernican revolution into the most important categorical distinction of his philosophy, namely, the ontological difference. On the other hand, though, as a consequence of his interpretation of the ontological difference Kant’s transcendental ideal-ism is transformed into a hermeneutic idealideal-ism. Accordingly, Heidegger’s radicalization of transcendental philosophy aims to show, among other things, that what Kant erroneously thought were the invariant features of any human experience whatsoever (i.e., the pure forms of intuition and the cate-gories) are just a special case of what is in fact a much broader phenomenon, namely, the necessarily circular (i.e., temporal) structure of all human under-standing.³In this sense, Heidegger welcomes Kant’s discovery of the syn-thetic a priori that is at the core of his Copernican revolution, but he thinks that the special function and status of the synthetic a priori is not an issue that concerns some specific judgments (at the basis of the positive sciences) but one that concerns understanding being in general. Seen in this light, an analysis of Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation of the synthetic a priori seems crucial to determining the precise nature of Heidegger’s Kantianism.⁴ Earlier in the above-mentioned lectures Heidegger explains the connec-tion between Kant’s discovery of the synthetic a priori and the so-called Copernican revolution. His explanation is very helpful in this context, for it shows the exact way in which Kant’s transcendental idealism gets trans-formed into Heidegger’s hermeneutic idealism via the ontological difference.

Commenting on the problem of the synthetic a priori Heidegger remarks:

Briefly the problem is the following: How can understanding open up real princi-ples about the possibility of things, i.e., how can the subject have in advance an un-derstanding of the ontological constitution of the being of a being? Kant sees this correlation, one which we formulate in a more basic and radical manner by saying:

Beings are in no way accessible without an antecedent understanding of being. This is to say that beings, which encounter us, must already be understood in advance in their on-tological constitution. This understanding of the being of beings, this synthetic knowledge a priori, is crucial for every experience of beings. This is the only possible meaning of Kant’s thesis, which is frequently misunderstood and which is called his Copernican revolution.⁵

Heidegger’s claim that there can be no access to entities without a prior understanding of their being is thus the core of his hermeneutic transfor-mation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Paraphrasing Kant’s highest prin-ciple of synthetic judgments,⁶Heidegger’s claim would read as follows: the Heidegger and the Synthetic A Priori 105

conditions of possibility of understanding the being of entities are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the being of those entities. Hei-degger makes this idealist view explicit right at the beginning of Being and Time, when he equates what we could call the “hermeneutic” with the “re-alist” meanings of “being.” According to his explanation of the meaning of

“being,” “that which determines entities as entities” is “that on the basis of which entities are always already understood.”⁷Whereas from a realist per-spective it is assumed that what determines entities as entities is something that belongs to those entities themselves, that is, some ontic structure or properties that those entities have and others do not, the idealist perspective that Heidegger favors assumes that “there is being only in an understanding of being,” and thus that “being can never be explained by entities but is al-ready that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity.”⁸In Heidegger’s view this idealism follows from recognizing the ontological difference itself, that is, the fact that “the being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity.”⁹

As Heidegger explains in his discussion of realism and idealism in section 43 of Being and Time, recognition of the ontological difference involves at least two separate claims. On the one hand, realizing that being cannot be re-duced to entities implies realizing (against any naïve realism) that what deter-mines entities as entities is our understanding of being, and not something ontically present in those entities and thus independent of our understand-ing of them. This is the idealist content of Heidegger’s interpretation of the ontological difference that he expresses with the claim that the being of enti-ties must be projected in order for these entienti-ties to be accessible to us. On the other hand, realizing that entities cannot be reduced to being implies realizing (against any absolute idealism) that entities cannot be reduced to our under-standing of them. Parallel with Kant’s attempt to reconcile a transcendental idealism with an empirical realism, one could say that Heidegger aims to be an ontic realist and an ontological idealist. On the one hand, this view is opposed to what Kant called “transcendental realism” and these days is usu-ally called “metaphysical realism”: the world is not made out of self-identi-fying entities; we are the ones who divide the world into different entities according to our interpretation of their being. On the other hand, this view is not supposed to lead to anything like what Kant called “empirical ideal-ism” à la Berkeley, that is, it does not question the existence of entities in-dependent of us. As Heidegger would put it, that there are entities has noth-ing to do with us, but what they are depends on our prior projection of their being.¹⁰Regardless of whether Heidegger’s attempt to combine real-ism and idealreal-ism is in the end defensible or not,¹¹what matters in our con-text are the implications of his hermeneutic idealism for an understanding of our experience (that is, of the conditions of possibility of our access to entities).¹²

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According to this view, our understanding of the being of entities is syn-thetic a priori in the specifically Kantian sense that it is, as Heidegger puts it,

“prior to all ontic experience, but precisely for it.”¹³That is, our understand-ing of the beunderstand-ing of entities is not taken from experience (1), but at the same time it determines all experience (of those entities) (2). However, this cannot be so for Kantian reasons. According to Kant, the apriority of this special kind of knowledge is due to the (alleged) fact that no human experience would be possible without said knowledge and thus is due to its universal va-lidity. But according to Heidegger a factual Dasein’s understanding of being is itself “essentially factical” and changes historically by virtue of our contin-gent projections. Thus, we need to know what other sorts of reasons Hei-degger has to offer to justify the a priori status of our understanding of the being of entities.

The answer to this question lies at the core of Heidegger’s transforma-tion of the Kantian notransforma-tion of apriority into the hermeneutic notransforma-tion of the perfect tense a priori (i.e., the “always already”). This notion is supposed to both preserve and transform the Kantian notion of apriority in the follow-ing way. On the one hand, as Heidegger is keen to insist, the priority im-plicit in this notion does not merely have the temporal sense of indicating something ontically past but, as its name suggests, it also has the normative sense of conferring to that which is in each case prior the status of an ab-solute authority over us that a priori knowledge is supposed to have.¹⁴On the other hand, though, the fact that it includes the temporal sense expressed by the “in each case” is what is specifically incompatible with the traditional, Kantian notion of apriority, for it eliminates the implication of universal validity from the absolute authority of the a priori. In light of its historical alterability, that something is “a priori” no longer means that it is “univer-sally valid,” but at most that it is “unquestionable from within” (i.e., by those who share it). From this point of view, the crucial challenge to transcenden-tal philosophy in Being and Time is to be found in Heidegger’s claim that Dasein’s “disclosedness is essentially factical.”¹⁵

In light of this claim, though, one may well wonder whether Heidegger’s aim is really to transform the notion of apriority or rather to simply reject it altogether. For the claim that our disclosedness is essentially factical seems to imply precisely that nothing in it has the kind of normative status that a pri-ori knowledge is supposed to have. However, that this is not the intended in-terpretation becomes entirely clear when Heidegger claims that Dasein’s dis-closedness is “truth in the most primordial sense.”¹⁶Thus, the crucial issue be-hind Heidegger’s hermeneutic notion of apriority seems to lie in whether it can succeed in making these two characterizations of our disclosedness (as

“essentially factical, but true”) compatible. This brings us back to our former question. Given that our disclosedness is merely the result of a historical, Heidegger and the Synthetic A Priori 107

contingent process of cultural interpretation, we need to know what reasons Heidegger can offer to ascribe to our understanding of the being of entities the Kantian features of synthetic a priori knowledge.

The first part of the claim—namely, that the understanding of being is not taken from experience—is just the expression of Heidegger’s idealism, as al-ready discussed. Being must be projected in advance in order for entities to be accessible as such entities.¹⁷This is such a basic presupposition within Heidegger’s philosophy that he seems never to have felt the need to offer an elaborated justification for it. There is indeed a hermeneutic reason that Heidegger alludes to repeatedly, although he never discusses it in detail. Per-haps the best way to express it would be with the help of Quine’s maxim

“no entity without identity.”¹⁸In our context, the idea behind it could be made explicit through the following argumentative lines: given that entities are not self-identifying, one has to identify which entities one is talking about in order to be able to distinguish them from others. And one cannot do so unless one has an understanding of what distinguishes these entities from others, that is, an understanding that provides the resources to identify entities as what they are, that is, in their being. Heidegger suggests such a line of argument in multiple places. For example, at the beginning of his lec-tures of the winter semester of 1931–32, entitled The Essence of Truth (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit), he explains:

We wish to consider the essence of truth. “Truth”: what is that? The answer to the question “what is that?” brings us to the “essence” of a thing. “Table”: what is that?

“Mountain,”“ocean,”“plant”; in each case the question “what is that?” asks about the

“essence” of these things. We ask—and yet we already know them! Indeed, must we not already know them, in order afterward to ask, and even to give an answer, about what they are? . . . Clearly, we must necessarily already know the essence. For how oth-erwise could we know what we should provide when we are requested to name truths? . . . We must already know what and how the thing is about which we speak.¹⁹ Thus, that an understanding of the being of entities must be prior to any experience of those entities is just a consequence of a hermeneutic con-straint, namely, that the way in which entities are understood must deter-mine in advance which entities we are referring to or, in general terms, that meaning must determine reference. This hermeneutic constraint explains why understanding is necessarily projective. It also provides a more or less trivial justification for the second part of the claim, namely, that the understanding of the being of entities determines all experience of those entities. Given that the prior understanding of the being of entities is what makes our experi-ence an experiexperi-ence of some specific entities (rather than others), it deter-mines what these entities are (for us),²⁰that is, it determines what they are accessible to us as.²¹Thus, that our experience is determined by a priori 108 Cristina Lafont

structures is not a consequence of its being constituted by some invariant set of conditions to be discovered once and for all, as Kant thought. It is actually a consequence of the circle of understanding, that is, of the fact that “every interpretation . . . must already have understood what is to be interpreted.”²²It is for this hermeneutic reason that entities can only be discovered by the prior projection of their being.²³As Heidegger explains in Basic Problems of Phenom-enology:“An entity can be uncovered, whether by way of perception or some other mode of access, only if the being of this entity is already disclosed—

only if I already understand it. Only then can I ask whether it is real or not and embark on some procedure to establish the reality of the entity.”²⁴

Although the priority of an understanding of being over and above any experience of entities is, according to Heidegger, a general feature of all hu-man understanding, the paradigm example that Heidegger favors in order to show the plausibility of this hermeneutic idealism is scientific knowledge.

For scientific theories, as opposed to most ordinary understanding, are ex-plicit and highly articulated kinds of interpretation, which for this reason al-low for closer scrutiny as to their origin, structure, relationship to experi-ence, and so on. Still, as a kind of interpretation they are subject to the same circular (and thus projective) conditions of understanding. In his lectures of the winter semester of 1928–29, entitled Introduction to Philosophy (Einleitung in die Philosophie) Heidegger explains:

A determinate scientific investigation moves within a determinate problem, a deter-minate question posed to that which is its theme. Thematization presupposes the givenness of an object. But an object can only be given to me in the act of objecti-vation. I can only objectify something if this something is already manifest to me in advance. A manifest entity as entity can only be manifest, if this entity in its being is already understood in advance with regard to its being, that is, if it is projected.

Thus, we see a completely determinate sequence within the structure of science.

The central phenomenon is this projection of the constitution of being.²⁵

In What Is a Thing? (Die Frage nach den Ding?) Heidegger offers a very detailed explanation of the structure and characteristics of such a projection with the help of an analysis of the transformation of science from the an-cient conception of nature into modern natural science. He interprets this transformation as a change of “metaphysical projection” or, as it is called these days, a paradigm shift. Heidegger makes clear that the core of this par-adigm shift does not consist in the emphasis on observation or experimen-tation, but on the projection of an entirely different understanding of the being of entities, a new world-disclosure brought about through the estab-lishment and definition of new basic concepts by modern scientists such as Galileo and Newton.²⁶According to Heidegger, to the extent that these new concepts organize all possible experience in advance, the grounding Heidegger and the Synthetic A Priori 109

postulates or axioms of these modern theories through which these con-cepts are defined have the status of synthetic a priori knowledge.²⁷For only on the basis of such postulates and axioms is something like empirical knowledge possible at all. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik) Heidegger explains this view as the correct in-sight behind Kant’s Copernican revolution. Commenting on Kant’s claim that “reason has insight only into that which it produces according to its own projections,” he adds:

The “previously projected plan” of a nature in general determines in advance the constitution of the being of entities, to which all questions that are investigated should be capable of being related. This prior plan of the being of entities is in-scribed within the basic concepts and principles of the science of nature to which we already referred. Hence, what makes the comportment toward entities (ontic knowledge) possible is the prior understanding of the constitution of being, onto-logical knowledge. . . . This known quiddity of the entity is brought forward a priori in ontological knowledge prior to all ontic experience, although precisely for it.

Knowledge that brings forth the quiddity [Wasgehalt] of the entity, i.e. knowledge which unveils the entity itself, Kant calls “synthetic.”Thus the question concerning the possibility of ontological knowledge becomes the problem of the essence of a priori synthetic judgments. The instance capable of establishing the legitimacy of these material judgments concerning the being of the entity cannot be found in ex-perience, for experience of the entity is itself always already guided by the ontolog-ical understanding of the entity, which in some specific respect must become acces-sible through experience.²⁸

In spite of Heidegger’s brilliant effort to have Kant speak in the language of Being and Time, the de-transcendentalization of synthetic a priori knowledge implicit in Heidegger’s interpretation of the Copernican revolution be-comes clear just by comparing the way in which the term projection is em-ployed by both authors. For when Kant speaks of projections in his discus-sion of the structure of the empirical sciences, this term refers expressly to those projections to which pure reason itself gives rise, whereas for Heidegger these projections are merely a working-out of the basic concepts of the guiding understanding of being,²⁹that is, they are just (historically alterable) cultural productions. But in this way, the properties of these projections in the two conceptions are radically different. For Kant, the appeal to the property of apriority implies ascribing to such projections (as products of pure rea-son) a strict transcendental status to which they would owe their necessity and universal validity, whereas the prior character of Heidegger’s projections stems merely from the fore-structure of understanding.

However, once the transcendental status of the a priori is questioned, it is no longer clear that the features associated with this status can be pre-served in the new conception. In particular, the claim that synthetic a priori

However, once the transcendental status of the a priori is questioned, it is no longer clear that the features associated with this status can be pre-served in the new conception. In particular, the claim that synthetic a priori