a discourse delivered by the tradition and precisely with its “unsaid” (he gave the example of the new perspectives he opened on the schematism and the “amphiboly” of the concepts of reflection in his Kantbuch). Marcel objected that this involved a certain kind of excessive and finally dangerous “generosity” toward the author. Heidegger replied with the example of the thought of place in Greek thought and its Galilean transformation into a conception of space: it is the play of presupposition that one should reveal in the interpretative dialogue. “Are we going to ask Braque what his criteria are?” Beaufret interjected, finally reminding everyone of the necessity to go back to specific texts. On August 30, the official program began with the explication of the beginning of Kant’s essay on The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God: “Vom Dasein überhaupt” (“Existence in General”).83 Heidegger led this seminar according to the very authoritarian method his former students (such as Biemel, himself present at Cerisy) knew well.84 The professor requested that the participants answer a series of apparently simple and academic questions: What’s the title? In what sense is the word Dasein used here? What about the word Gegenstand? The word objectum? And realitas formalis? The point was to understand why existence is not a predicate: but what is a predicate? Kant writes: “The concept of position or positing is totally simple and on the whole identical with the concept of being in general.”85 Paradoxically, the positive relation is to be understood from the relative position: what is posited is represented.
After this particularly austere session, Heidegger began August 31st with a clarification: he wanted to consider “a few difficulties” that had arisen; this was a euphemism to refer to the objections and resistances formulated in the very first session and then reinforced by his method, which was similar to that of an “elementary school teacher.” As a response to those who wished to study the theses of Heideggerian philosophy, he stated (a statement thereafter often quoted by Jean Beaufret): “There is no Heideggerian philosophy; and even if it existed, I would not be interested in that philosophy.” To the implicit criticisms he perceived, he replied that his method was not dictatorial, but represented an effort to answer the “dictate of being.” He then returned to Kant’s text and reasserted his interpretation: Kant conceived of existence as absolute position on the basis of the relative position consisting in the exercise of judgment. The following discussions remained quite “technical” and were not conducive to harmonizing the points of view: if he conceded to Jeanne Hersch that the pre-critical Kant of the 1763 essay had not yet made his “thesis about being”86 explicit, Heidegger resisted Ricoeur (who insisted that the thing in itself escapes the sphere of representation). As an object in general = x, it is not perceptible by the senses. What matters is to understand that, for Kant, the position of existence can be conceived only on the basis of the proposition formulated by judgment.