Heidegger's Shadow by Engelland Chad;

Author:Engelland, Chad;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

Since synthetic judgments involve a fresh encounter with the object, they do not merely elucidate the content of our knowledge but in fact enlarge it. For example, the judgment, “The board is black,” cannot be based on the concept of board alone, which, as Heidegger reminds us, could be gray, white, or red; only recourse to the object itself grounds this relation of subject and predicate. The difference between analytic and synthetic judgments, then, trades on the new definition of judgment, which seeks to identify the ground of the relation of subject and object. If that ground is the concept of the object alone, the judgment is analytic. If that ground is the object and its givenness, then the judgment is synthetic.

The new formulation of judgment and its new distinction into analytic and synthetic entails at the same time a transformation of thinking itself. No longer is it, with the rationalists, a merely conceptual procedure; rather thinking is now subordinate to the truth of the object itself. Heidegger writes, “This distinction is only visible and able to be established, when thinking is grasped in its object-relation and thinking is no longer understood as reckoning with concepts, but rather as essential action of object-determination and, that is, as standing in the service of truth.”107 Kant therefore overcomes rationalism not by means of a flight into irrationalism but instead by means of a determination of thinking as thoroughly oriented toward truth.108

Judgment is no longer simply the combination of concepts, and therefore the understanding can no longer be grasped exclusively along these lines. Heidegger says the understanding is instead the unification of presentations “which grasps and constitutes this reference to an object as such.”109 Kant consequently calls the understanding the faculty of rules since it specifies the conditions for unification. He writes, “This distinguishing mark is more fruitful, and approximates more closely to its essential nature.”110 Kant also says that the understanding, as the source of rules, is the source of all truth. The rules allow an object to come to constancy in the appearances and so make the truth of correspondence possible. Heidegger suggests that the understanding’s principles respond to the need to bring to constancy the appearances in which we are suspended.111 Because Kant understands understanding on the basis of such metaphysical necessity, he thinks he “has understood the understanding in a way no thinker has before.”112

We need only connect, with Heidegger, the new essence of judgment and its distinction into analytic and synthetic with the distinction between a priori and a posteriori. The a priori concerns the essence of something; it has priority in the order of nature but not the order of knowing, because it “enables the thing to be what it is.”113 How the priority of the a priori is determined follows from how the thingness of the thing and the being of the entity is conceived. In modern philosophy, the I-principle has priority. Consequently, assertions regarding it are all a priori: “The a priori is what belongs to the subjectivity of the subject.

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