The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy by Anthony Morgan

Author:Anthony Morgan [Morgan, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Bigg Books
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

8: The Task of a Finite Thinking

A Conversation with Marie-Eve Morin

In this conversation, Marie-Eve Morin situates Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking within the frameworks of finitude offered by Kant and Heidegger, noting his indebtedness to Heidegger’s idea of finitude as existence at the limit rather than limited existence in relation to a hypothetical infinite being (as in Kant). She then goes on to clarify some of Nancy’s paradoxical formulations, such as the ‘infinitely finite’ or ‘in-finitude’, in which there seems to be a blurring of boundaries at play, a constant straining at the limits of finitude.

Marie-Eve Morin is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta, specializing in 20th-century continental philosophy. She is author of Jean-Luc Nancy in Polity’s ‘Key Contemporary Thinkers’ series, co-editor of The Nancy Dictionary, and editor of the recently published Continental Realism and its Discontents.

---

Jean-Luc Nancy has been referred to by Bruno Bosteels as “without a doubt the clearest exponent of the doctrine of finitude.” I am interested in situating him within this ‘doctrine of finitude’, especially in relation to 1) Kant and 2) Heidegger, both of them thinkers of finitude but in very different ways.

The relation of Nancy to Kant, and especially Heidegger, is very complex. But schematically, we could say that Kant insists on the finitude of the human being’s cognitive capacities. Human beings are deprived of intellectual intuition. We can only cognize what can be given to us, and the forms of intuition condition what can be given to us. But, while Kant insists on the limits of our ability to know, and unearth the conditions of possibility of experience (and hence of knowledge), his thinking of finitude is still profiled against a thinking of the infinite. In short: human intuition is contrasted with intellectual intuition (how we would intuit if we were God), and the phenomenon is contrasted with the noumenon (the world as it is, or as it would be experienced by an infinite intellect). This is why Kant, despite his insistence on finitude and the limits of the power of knowing, could so easily give rise to the German idealists, who reasserted intellectual intuition and our power to access the Absolute.

Now with Heidegger, we see an attempt to think finitude on its own terms. In this sense, Nancy is closer to Heidegger than to Kant. The finitude of Dasein, for Heidegger, is not a flaw or a limitation. Rather, finitude is possibilizing. It allows for disclosure, or for what Heidegger calls ‘the clearing of Being’, which is the reason things appear, or make sense to us. Very schematically again: To exist for Dasein means to be exposed to limits that cannot be reappropriated. We cannot get back ‘under’ or ‘beyond’ the limits that are our thrownness (birth) and our death and integrate them in our being. At the same time, we are exposed to these limits; they are part of our existence as limits. Because they are not ours, or rather because they are essentially the other in us, we have to relate to them, to own up to them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.