Abstract
In this paper, I discuss, in a Heideggerian context, the possibility of de-subjectivizing the notion of the transcendental time-horizon and reinterpreting it as a formally indicated ‘whereto’ of releasement. The structures of the time-horizon depict the way beings unfold in the fullness of time in their alterity, and they orient the subject’s activity of ‘projection.’ What results is a field-oriented (as opposed to self-oriented) transcendental philosophy which would survive Heidegger’s critique of his own transcendental project, and which would avoid mystification. I take three steps. First, I point out that the problematization of ‘transcendental Heidegger’ is based on the subjectivist interpretation of the time-horizon. I problematize a recent account in the subjectivist vein, arguing that it is neither indispensable, nor very plausible, nor the most illuminative of Heidegger’s work. Second, with the help of Dahlstrom, Golob, Engelland, Sheehan, and Vasterling, I gradually dissociate the notion of the horizon from subjectivism, the visual metaphor, and the assumption of an absolute ground. I suggest instead that the horizonality of the horizon be understood temporally, i.e., as an interplay of presencing and absencing where what matter most are the structures, themselves affected by time, which the transcendental field displays when beings unfold themselves within it. Third, I identify three of those structures when performing a de-subjectivizing reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of the threefold synthesis in Kant’s A-Deduction. These structures capture the way every being manifests itself, without themselves being necessarily grounded in the subject’s activity. This gives an example of how transcendental philosophy can clarify what the time-horizon is like while bracketing the question of its provenance.
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Notes
References to the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe in this paper are abbreviated as ‘GA,’ followed by the volume number.
Whenever I cite a source translated from a language other than English, I give the page number in the original text and the page number in the English translation, separated by a slash (/). If I include a publication year in the citation, it refers to that of the English translation.
The reason for picking the phrase ‘de-subjectivization’ (instead of ‘de-subjectification’) is that the attempt is not to eliminate the subject altogether but to problematize subjectivism, the philosophical method which takes the notion of the subject for granted and builds reasoning upon it.
The re-interpretation of Kant’s synthesis of recognition as the synthesis of identification and ultimately as that of precognition was from Heidegger himself. (GA25: 359–68/243–9) See the ‘The Horizon-of-What-Is-to-Come in the Synthesis of Recognition’ section of this paper. Shockey (2021: 142) recognizes the move and understands precognition as grounded in the self.
Käufer (2002: 169) gives an even more radical account of Heidegger’s project in comparing it to those of the Marburg neo-Kantians: all these ‘philosophical systems’ exhibit ‘panlogicism,’ ‘principle monism,’ and ‘an implicit completeness-claim.’ However, given what Heidegger himself said in GA42 (38–59/22–33), one would have reservations against seeing Heidegger simply as a builder of philosophical systems. Accordingly, one need not follow Käufer in thinking that temporality must be abandoned along with the system of which it served as the ‘origin.’
For a critique of this model, see Zuckert (2007: 220–2).
A piece of indirect evidence is that Fichte, in his 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, presented an account of metaphysics which is largely isomorphic with the one I present here of the later Heidegger, while still calling this inquiry transcendental. See Fichte (2005).
For a critique of seeing the horizon as simply extant [vorhanden], see Dahlstrom (1995: 108).
In a pragmaticist vein, Okrent (2007) identifies the aim of this transcendental inquiry with the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ [Worumwillen] in Division One of SZ.
According to Carr (2007: 30–2), Heidegger attributed the object-directed sense of transcendence to Kant and saw Kant’s own motive for transcendental philosophy in a refutation of skepticism.
Engelland cites Vallega-Neu (2001: 68), who puts the issue in a concise way: ‘the leap into the horizon overcomes the very notion of horizon.’
One may recall Zimmerman (1981: 243–54)’s observation that ‘resoluteness’ [Ent-schlossenheit] was reinterpreted in the later Heidegger as releasement [Gelassenheit].
In the ‘The Horizon-of-Having-Been in the Synthesis of Reproduction’ section, I identify the releasement into the elsewhere specifically as the structure (topology) of the horizon-of-having-been. Here, I am contending instead that this structure is essential to every time-horizon as such, for it is about the latter’s horizonality.
This problem with the ‘absolute-time constituting consciousness’ is what Kelly (2016: 106) diagnosed of Heidegger’s Kantbuch and, by extension, of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. The current paper shows that Heidegger, at least in his Kant-interpretation, does not fall prey to this criticism.
Here, I won’t dispute Carr’s critique of Heidegger in this vein; nor will I discuss his adherence to transcendental subjectivity.
The notion of ‘operative’ [fungierende] intentionality was found initially in Husserl (1969: 140/157). Here, I build on Merleau-Ponty (2012: 480/441)’s distinction between act-intentionality and operative intentionality: ‘beneath “act intentionality” — which is the thetic consciousness of an object that, in intellectual memory, for example, converts the ‘this-thing’ into an idea — we must acknowledge an “operative” intentionality, which makes the former one possible and is what Heidegger calls “transcendence.”’ Operative intentionality does not exhibit the distinction between the intentional act and the intentional object/content; it is rather the ambiguity which makes the distinction possible in the first place.
Kant (1998). References to the Critique of Pure Reason begin with A or B; the title of the work will not be included in the references below.
Heidegger says that the characteristic of the ‘now’ is that it is usually grasped unthematically, so that ‘the now points away from itself.’ (GA21: 399/330).
Here, I borrow from de Warren (2009: 201)’s image in his interpretation of Husserl’s time-consciousness.
Here, Heidegger borrowed from Husserl (1991: 35/37)’s distinction between primary and secondary memory, i.e., between retention and thematic recollection.
Weatherston (2002: 121) notes correctly that ‘the synthesis of reproduction reaches back and retains the past, but not so that the past is merely present, but is presented as past.’ However, he seems to attribute this retaining to both empirical and pure syntheses concerning reproduction, and for him the pure synthesis denotes only the case where no empirical intuitions are involved. Were that the case, the pure synthesis would no longer be a necessary condition underlying the empirical synthesis, and accordingly the horizonal character of retention would be trivialized.
Sherover (1971: 187), on the other hand, clearly distinguishes between the empirical synthesis and the pure synthesis, but his construal of the latter still invokes the expression ‘bringing it [the past] into the present,’ which again connotes a re-present-ation [Repräsentation]. But Sherover probably meant instead that the horizon-of-having-been necessarily accompanies, unthematically, the now-horizon.
Heidegger focused on the latter circumstance, though the former is more basic. The unity of all extant beings, i.e., nature, was inherited from Kant’s problematic; and Kant took for granted the unity of a being because he believed that our apprehension of one being could be instantaneous. Strictly speaking, even the unity of one concrete being must be grasped in a temporal synthesis oriented by the time-horizon. Accordingly, identification is always at work, even when it comes to the piecemeal manifestation of a singular being.
In SZ (183–8/143–8), Heidegger calls what can be, ‘potentiality-for-being’ [Seinkönnen]. Sherover (1971: 190) defines the horizon which the synthesis of recognition constitutes as ‘what can be in my experience, the range of future possibility from which an actual present now can emerge.’ This is a correct claim, though it suggests that the future in question is restricted to ‘my experience,’ while on the other hand the neutral expression ‘future possibility’ has an impersonal connotation. My formulation of the horizon-of-what-is-to-come avoids this conceptual ambiguity.
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Liu, R. On the Autonomy of the Transcendental Time-Horizon: an Essay in De-Subjectivizing Heidegger’s Kant-Interpretation. SOPHIA (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00952-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00952-5