of the Critique of Pure Reason reveals, helped to prepare the turn away from an uncomprehended finitude toward a comforting infinitude. I cannot go into these matters in greater detail here but they are discussed in my book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where I have attempted to develop the necessity of the problem of finitude in relation to metaphysics. In that book I was not concerned with providing a better interpretation of Kant. What the neo-Kantians and the older Kantians like to think about Kant is a matter of complete indifference to me. The consequence I have pointed out is a necessary one, and, in the manner in which Hegel accomplished it, is worthy of our admiration. Yet this very consequence is already a sign of overconfidence in attempting to grasp the infinite. In-consequentiality belongs to finitude, not as a deficiency or an embarrassment but as an effective power. Finitude renders dialectic impossible and reveals its illusory character. For in-consequence, ground-lessness and fundamental concealment belong to finitude.
This question concerning the ego and consciousness (Dasein) therefore is not a question of epistemology. But neither is it a question of metaphysics as a particular discipline. Rather it is the question which reveals how all metaphysics is possible, i.e., is necessary.
§50. Having and not having world as the potentiality for granting transposedness and as necessarily being refused any going along with. Poverty (deprivation) as not having, yet being able to have.
What have we learned with regard to the problem of clarifying the essence of the animal's poverty in world from our discussion concerning the possibility of self-transposition in relation to the stone, the animal, and the human being? Being transposed into others belongs to the essence of human Dasein. As long as we keep this insight in view then we already possess an essential point of orientation with respect to the particular problem concerning the possibility of human self-transposition into the animal. But how does this really help us? Have we thereby dispelled the difficulty which besets us when we attempt to transpose ourselves into an animal in any given case? Initially we do not seem to have gained anything directly from our discussion at all. We have however gained something with respect to the other problem which we introduced, in noting that we quite self-evidently presuppose the possibility of somehow transposing ourselves into animals, and that this presupposition has a certain self-evident legitimacy. Does the fact that this presupposition is self-evident now mean in the last analysis that it is not only transposedness into other human beings which belongs to the essence of man but transposedness into animals as well, into living beings generally? For what else can it mean when