224
Part II

and (2) in keeping with the inner freedom of his own way of philosophizing, which admits that there are still difficulties for human philosophizing and that at every moment philosophy faces the possibility of being up-ended. For Hegel, on the other hand, everything is clear, and he himself is in possession of absolute truth.47


* * *


§22. A preliminary look at the meaning of time in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason


We have already alluded to Kant’s philosophical position on time when we first characterized the problematic of ur-temporality. That is because in a certain sense Kant is the one who made the most progress in this problematic despite all the limits within which the time-problematic remains even in him. Even for Kant time is the time of nature, taking “nature” in the broad sense that includes both physical and mental nature. But we should consider the following. When we say that mental nature—the mental succession of ideas in the broadest sense—is determined by time, an essential exception must be made, one that determines Kant’s entire problematic, namely that the proper determination of subjectivity in fact falls outside time, subjectivity as the “I think” that must be able to accompany all my ideas if the mental is to be at all a unitary context. [The exception is] that the “I think” or the transcendental apperception—the very unity of consciousness—falls outside time. From the beginning and throughout, we must keep in mind that the concept of time is oriented to nature [270] in the broadest sense. It is oriented to nature also in the sense that in his doctrine of the antinomies Kant explains the problem of the possible origination of the world, the question of the creation of the world, in connection with the problem of time.

It is typical of Kant that whenever he reaches a crucial problem-set in his Critique of Pure Reason, he is forced to go back to the issue of time. Time occupies a privileged place right from the start. Kant does not think, as Hegel did, that there is just space, and also time. Rather, time has a principled priority in the problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason.

To make the point in a merely extrinsic way: Time is treated for the first time in the Transcendental Aesthetic. But it is treated yet again in the Transcendental Logic—in fact, in both parts of the Transcendental


47.[Here (Moser, p. 558) Heidegger ends his lecture of Thursday, 28 January 1926, to be followed by that of Friday, 29 January, which opened with a brief 100-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]


Martin Heidegger (GA 21) Logic : the question of truth

Page generated by LogicSteller.EXE