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7/28/2019 Watson 1988 - Heidegger, Rationality, And the Critique of Judgment
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 .
Accessed: 25/04/2011 21:25
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pes. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
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.
27"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 199.
28"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 348.
29"Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus," 349-50.
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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.
7/28/2019 Watson 1988 - Heidegger, Rationality, And the Critique of Judgment
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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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