References
- See the essays: “The completion of metaphysics”, published in Vortraege und Aufsaetze (1954), and “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking” in Zur Sache des Denkens (1964).
- In the lectures on Nietzsche from 1935, published in the first Nietzsche volume as “Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst”, Heidegger himself offers a six stage history of aesthetics under the title “Sechs Grundtatsachen aus der Geschichte der Aesthetik”, Nietzsche vol. 1, pp. 91–109. The complexities of this development of Heidegger's thinking on art in the context of his reading of Nietzsche defy summary here.
- There are also the lectures from 1927/28 on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, to which no further reference will be made. In his essay “Das Ding”, published in Vortraege und Aufsaetze (1954) Heidegger summarises his objections to Kant and indeed makes use of the critique of aesthetics to be outlined here in designating Kant as reducing what it is to be a thing to being an object (Gegenstand) of a subject's attention. In this later essay, Heidegger makes connections from this theoretical move within philosophy and epistemology to a lack of concern shown by human beings for the independent existence of things, indicated by the willingness to develop and make use of atomic power for destructive purposes. It is presumably a continuing preoccupation with these issues which explains why Heidegger chose these lectures on the question of the thing from 1935/36 for publication in 1962.
- It is this refusal of inverting the Platonic prejudice that grounds Heidegger's claim to be genuinely transgressing the strictures of metaphysics, rather than as he supposes Nietzsche to be doing still operating within them. This dispute between Nietzsche and Heidegger can be no more than gestured towards in this paper.
- See Peter Strawson: The Bounds of Sense London 1966 and Ralph Walker: Kant, Routledge 1976.
- See Gilles Deleuze: Kant's Critical Philosophy: the Doctrine of the Faculties (1969), Athlone 1984.
- In parallel to Hegel's rewritings of Kant, Deleuze in his later joint effort with Guattari in Anti Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Editions de Minuit Paris 1972 seeks to transform Kant's conception of paralogism and reconstrue Kantian critique, in order to reveal dogmatisms in the theories of Marx and Freud.
- The problem relation between theoretical enquiry and politics in this tradition is particularly clear in the critique levelled by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's painstaking but unfocused critique of Foucault, Lacan and Derrida: French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism 1985. University of Amherst, Mass., Press 1990. They attempt to retain a stance of immanent critique of the texts published, revealing contradictions within them; but are continually misled into making a contrast between the logic of their subjects’ enquiries and the political beliefs to which some of them some of the time give utterance, even though those beliefs are discordant with the results of their own work. This gap between what can be demonstrably argued for and what an individual affirms on other grounds can also be found in Kant. It is not in itself a mark of intellectual charlatanism. Indeed the ability to recognise a gap between the two when it occurs is perhaps rather a mark of integrity. Foucault, Lacan and Derrida are thus accused not of being political, but of not being political enough: of not subordinating their theoretical results to their practical political comments.
- The synthesis of apprehension in an intuition; the synthesis of reproduction in imagination; the synthesis of recognition in a concept: see Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction (A): Kemp Smith pp. 129–150.
- See the astonishing remark in the 1939 essay on phusis: “in modem metaphysics, in the outstanding form of for example Kant, nature is conceived of as a system of techniques, so that these techniques which make up natural entities can provide the metaphysical basis for the possibility indeed the necessity of encompassing and mastering nature through machinery.” Wegmarken p.287.
- See footnote 2.
- See his critiques of Hegel in both Being and Time section 69; and in the much later Identity and Differenz (1957).
- For Heidegger's discussion of historical studies see the World Picture essay, Holzwege p. 76.
- Heidegger introduces this term “Zeitigung” in his first book on Kant in order to capture what it is he supposes the transcendental imagination to contribute to temporality. It also features in the last pages of the lectures from 1925, The History of the Concept of Time, published in 1985. The thought that the three dimensions of time, past, present and future, are co-ordinated in different ways in different epochs is made available in Being and Time (1927).
- For the development of this shift from Husserlian bracketing and a conception of world to Heideggerian epochs and temporality, see Heidegger's insistence throughout Being and Time that the horizon for enquiry is not yet properly stabilised until the rewriting of world as temporality has occurred.
- The epistemological reading leads under the guidance of a certain reading of Wittgenstein to a disruption of the absoluteness of the distinction between the cognitive status of epistemological claims and the non-cognitive status of aesthetic and ethical claims. The insistence that what is in question is not a subsection of human experience but a whole way of life rests in a series of challenges to the Kantian distinctions between analytical and synthetic forms of language use and forms of judgement. See John McDowell: “Mind and World” John Locke lectures Oxford 1991. These follow in a line of development from Goodman and Quine. See Nelson Goodman: The Structure of Appearance, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass. 1951 and Ways of Worldmaking and W.O. Quine: Ontological Relativity and other essays, Columbia UP, NY 1969.
- See Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Blackwell, Oxford, 1980 and to a lesser extent Hans Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method 1960.
- See his Letter on Humanism, in which he responds warily to the request from Jean Beaufret for an explanation of the relation between fundamental ontology and ethics. Throughout Being and Time he is very cautious in his references to both ethics and metaphysics.
- See the discussion of this distinction in chapter two of his The Principles of Art, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1938.
- See Derrida on dead metaphors in “White Mythologies: metaphor in the text of philosophy”, in Margins of Philosophy, (1972), in which there is also a response to Heidegger's claims about time and temporality.
- Again there is a connection to the short history of aesthetics, offered in the Nietzsche volumes, which cannot be adequately explored here. The fourth item refers to the “completion of aesthetics” in Hegel's lectures, and subsequent transformation of the status of art: “The completion of aesthetics has in this its greatness that it recognises and expresses this end of great art.” Nietzsche vol. 1, p.100.