ULTIMA ACTA PARCIAL

Ernst Cassirer was the first to raise public protest to Heidegger’s reading of Kant at the Davos lectures of 1929. As outlined above, the substance of Heidegger’s public lecture was the unity of Kant’s system. In contrast to the neo-Kantian suppression of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Heidegger awarded both the Transcendental Aesthetic and Logic necessary roles in the Kantian project and then demonstrated the unity of these elements through the transcendental power of the imagination: the third basic source of the mind.⁶⁹ The third element is not to be thought as a ‘mediating’ faculty between the two primary elements, ‘but rather it is their root’. By way of Heidegger’s systematic inquiry into the Kantian problem, he situates the imagination as the synthetic faculty that makes possible both the logical and the sensible. The creative power of the imagination assumes the role of primary condition as regards the Transcendental Aesthetic and Logic. Therefore, Heidegger trusts that ‘The point of departure in reason has thus been broken asunder’.⁷⁰ Heidegger, however, explains that Kant had to ‘shrink back’ from the implications of this

discovery.⁷¹ The ‘imaginative’ grounding of consciousness in the faculty of pure synthesis, as fashioned in the First Edition, implies the destruction of the rational basis of Western thinking. For this reason, according to Heidegger, Kant repositioned the ground of the transcendental method in the (conceptual) unity of apperception in the Second Edition.

Cassirer criticizes Heidegger for misunderstanding the holistic essence of neo-Kantianism, at least as practised by Cassirer. He points out that, although the synthesis of the imagination is central to the Kantian system and informs the rendering of the formal problematic, Kant’s system aims at explaining the role of human freedom and the ethical in distinction to the mechanism of nature. It is in the ethical sphere that human finitude breaks through to something beyond itself (transcends) to the realm of the Absolute. According to Cassirer, Heidegger, by placing his analysis in historical human finitude, relativizes all acts of human knowledge and hence truth: ‘[T]ruths are relative to Dasein’. Cassirer then restates Kant’s original question: ‘Without prejudice to the finitude which Kant himself exhibited, how, nevertheless, can there be necessary and universal truths?’ He continues, ‘It is therefore because of this problem that Kant exemplifies mathematics’. If something of this magnitude is not isolated, it becomes difficult to account for things that are not bound to finitude. And finally,

Does Heidegger want to renounce this entire Objectivity, this form of absoluteness which Kant advocated in the ethical and the theoretical, as well as in the Critique of Judgement? Does he want to withdraw completely to the finite creature or, if not, where for him is the breakthrough to this sphere?⁷² To all intents and purposes, the core of Heidegger’s critique of the logical ground of metaphysics comes to the fore in Cassirer’s questions. The dispute surrounds the basic orientation of philosophy and the relationship finite human being has to knowledge, truth and the determination of human freedom in history. What acts as ‘ground’ and what is ‘determinate’ for action?

Heidegger’s reply focuses on finitude. He consents that the finite creature is capable of breaking out from immediacy to a higher or prior law; however, the transcendence in question is still in the realm of ‘creatureliness’ [Geschöpflichkeit].

The question that must first be addressed is the finitude or infinitude of Dasein.

For Heidegger, the finite creature only has infinitude in the understanding of being, but human beings are not infinite nor can they create the infinite out of themselves. Heidegger’s transcendence is a ‘finite transcendence’ that stands in an open relation to the world of beings based on an understanding of being and time.⁷³ For Heidegger, this describes the structure of ‘being-in-truth’.

Therefore, when Heidegger says that ‘truth is relative to Dasein’, he is saying that truth occurs only in the transcendent structure of Dasein’s temporal openness towards the world. Lastly, Heidegger explains that human freedom as the ground of ethics relates to anxiety, which sets free the human being:

‘The sole, adequate relation to freedom in man is the self-freeing of freedom in man.’⁷⁴ Heidegger concludes with asking Cassirer to detail his understanding of the pathway to infinity and the status of the infinite itself.

The positions of the two men become starkly defined when Cassirer describes his point of departure as a finitude that transcends through ‘filling-out the finitude itself’ towards an ‘immanent infinitude’. Man ‘can and must have, however, the metabasis which leads him from the immediacy of his existence into the region of pure form. And he possesses infinity solely in this form’. The region of pure form constitutes man’s spiritual realm which is essentially,

‘created from himself’. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, and his own account of Dasein as being-in-a-world which it does not create but is rather thrown into, opposes Cassirer’s description of finitude/infinitude. Heidegger concentrates on the finite nature of Dasein that is ‘codetermined’ by an original unity and the ‘immanent structure of the relatedness of a human being’. ‘I did not give freedom to myself, although it is through Being-free that I can first be myself.’⁷⁵ Heidegger is detailing his concept of ‘thrownness’ as a self-interpreting being that is always already in the situation of being in existence.⁷⁶

While the exact position of each participant in the disputation is difficult to determine, what is apparent is that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant has led into the problem of transition and the nature of human being. Is human being as a creature of finitude informed by its original unity (being) in correlation with its worldly orientation, or does that finitude form its own ‘spirit’ through self-describing itself in objective, universal truths? What is striking about the stances of Heidegger and Cassirer is the similarity of their intent and yet the divergence of direction and means. Both are concerned with finitude, transcendence and a new manner of describing dynamic relations as opposed to static concepts;

however, the definitions and expectations for these terms are shaped by differ-ent philosophies. Neither thinker describes finitude or transcendence in a theological sense; both are explained by way of immanence. Cassirer’s position appears to transcend towards an objective sphere; nevertheless that sphere does not function as a creative origin or a law-giving faculty in itself but is rather a self-created mirror or measure of human being’s progress. Heidegger’s posi-tion, while stressing the finitude and thrownness of Dasein, opens a horizon towards beings informed by an original understanding of being. Heidegger allows for a transcendent rather than an immanent relationship with an origi-nal realm which ‘orders’ or ‘schematizes’ existence in correlation with Dasein’s struggle for self-understanding. However, Dasein’s relationship with itself is described as ‘accidental’ with regard to the thrownness of its project, and leads Dasein back to the ‘nothingness’ of its existence.⁷⁷ It is in confronting the noth-ingness that Heidegger defines the task of philosophy: to throw Dasein back onto the ‘hardness of its fate’. While Heidegger uses certain theological refer-ences, his project at this point aims at the destruction of traditional metaphysi-cal unities, and hence ‘infinity’. Heidegger’s unity has the characteristics of an

‘origin’ in contrast to Cassirer’s ‘teleological’ unity of self-creating objectivity.

‘Unity’, and related terms such as ‘synthesis’ and ‘transcendence’, describe different projects. A unity that aims at exposing the accidental (zufällig) nature of existence includes a form of determinism as a document of being. As Dasein is not in control of its original unity with being and is thrown to a world of beings, it is limited: ‘determined’. Except, if philosophy reveals that the hard-ness of fate comprises of a relation with ‘nothinghard-ness’, then that determinism is

‘accidental’ or ‘arbitrary’. The arbitrary nature of the relationship with infini-tude (as the understanding of being) undoubtedly breaks the formal necessity that metaphysical systems have relied on to describe the passage from the infinite to the finite and vice-versa. Accordingly, when the necessary relation is broken, the passage between the finite and the infinite appears as free. It is free in that it is unnecessary and, in a formal sense, uncaused, and yet, simultane-ously, it is determined. This construction highlights the phenomenological givenness of Heidegger’s situated Dasein: one cannot say why one comes into being, there appears no necessity for it; conversely, being is necessary for existence. This is a hard fact to absorb. If ‘who’ or ‘what’ I am is ‘accidental’, and yet I am ‘thrown’ to my existence as a consequence of ‘fate’, then I am determined by arbitrariness.I am, therefore, free to be myself insofar as I am deter-minate of the arbitrary nature of thrownness. According to Heidegger, this situation is not an occasion for pessimism but a call for resoluteness and authen-ticity.⁷⁸ Dasein is immanent to its fate; however, this immanence is Dasein’s

‘world’; it is life-giving.

Cassirer, in his 1931 review of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, is scathing of Heidegger’s position.⁷⁹ Cassirer reports that the Kantian project, which aims at the objectification of knowledge and the transcendence of the human spirit, is lost in the ‘abyss [Ab-grund] of Dasein’. Although Cassirer shares with Heidegger an appreciation for the centrality of the power of the imagination, Cassirer explains that Heidegger does not escape from this point of departure and is always led back to originary being.

The original link with intuition can never be broken, the dependence upon it which it brings with it can never be set aside. It is not possible to break the chain of finitude. All thinking as such, indeed any ‘purely logical’ employment of the understanding, already bears the imprint of finitude.⁸⁰

Pierre Aubenque explains that Heidegger’s comprehension of the ‘finitude of thought’ is that it is empty if it is not ‘filled with intuition’; finite thought is thus derivative and dependent upon intuition for its form.⁸¹ For Cassirer, who retains a metaphysical aspect to his understanding of transcendence, the subject is required to surpass this immanence and breakthrough to objectivity. Inasmuch as the breakthrough is provided by the exhibitio originaria in creative imagination, the subject is capable of generating its own surpassing. ‘Spontaneity’ is linked to creativity as a form of autonomy and liberty. However, Cassirer does not in Heidegger’s opinion have a ground or foundation to launch the original

spontaneity of the self. Heidegger as such always insists on the return to the ground for the enabling of the act of transcendence, which is therefore immanent to its own understanding and departure.

We have registered some of the problems in Heidegger’s methodology, which Richardson aptly expresses as Dasein’s problem of being ‘faithful both to its transcendence and to its finitude’. For Richardson, Heidegger seeks a ‘unified totality of finite transcendence’ that accounts for both fundamental elements of Heidegger’s synthesis.⁸²

As for the centre of transcendence (the pure imagination), it is certainly a self, but, because (ontologically) prior to the subject-object relationship, it is a non-subjective, pre-subjective self, whose unity derives from transcendence, whose ultimate meaning is time.⁸³

However, Richardson raises a question that we have already provoked,

‘[H]ow are we to discern this controlling idea that gives it warrant, so that we may be sure we are submitting to a discipline and are not prey to mere arbitrariness?’⁸⁴