Kant's Transcendental Object and Heidegger's Nichts

Kant's Transcendental Object and Heidegger's Nichts CHARLES M. SHEROVER BURIED rs Tim rmJa~T of the "Preliminary Remark," which Kant had hoped would aid the reader to comprehend the "Deduction of the Categories" (A edition), is the obscure doetdr/e of the 'transcendental object'. It is brought up again in the chapter "Phenomena and Noumena" where we are told, "This transcendental object cannot be separated from the sense data, for nothing is then left through which it might be thought." x Left without any truly clariticatory elucidation, it has been subjected to divergent interpretations trying to make some sense of it; one prime and sympathetic commentator, after making a valiant attempt, confessed with admirable candor, "I do not know what this means .... I do not think this is very intelligible in itself.... ,, 2 At several stages in Martin Heidegger's interpretive study of Kant's Critique, s he offers an interpretation of this most obscure Kantian doctrine which seems to make sense, to be in accord with the developed doctrine of the first Critique and to suggest that Kant was groping for a way in which to express some profound insights into the nature of human thought. Heidegger's treatment of this subject starts from what might be called the radical empiricism at the heart of the Critique. Kant had suggested 4 that empty concepts can at best have only a negative value in possibly guarding against error, that the sole positive value of concepts and the sole mode of their meaningful employment is to render our perceptions intelligible. In order to be meaningful, a concept must refer to a kind of thing, to an object 'reported' by sense-lntuition-2 Immanuel Kant, Critique o/ Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1950), A250-251, p. 268; hereinafter referred to as CPR. (N.B.: The term 'transcendental object' is used elsewhere in CPR and, in most cases, was not deleted from the B edition.) s H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience: A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (2 vols; London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., and New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961), II, 433-443. 8 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), hereinafter referred to as KPM. Martin Heideggcr, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (2nd ed.; Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1951), hereinafter referred to as KPM/G. 4 See CPR, A795 = B823, p. 629. [413] 414 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY lor "intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us." 5 A meaningful concept is ostensive; it has a denotation. The bare requirement for meaningfulness is that the concept have an 'object' to which it refers as a relevant instance of what it 'says'. This point is readily clear with regard to empirical concepts. But this referential criterion for meaningfulness was not to be confined merely to empirical concepts; Kant made it applicable to all concepts as such. But then what are the 'objects-of-reference' of the categories--which are pure, logically pre-experiential, concepts? In discussing the conceptual element in the triune cognitive synthesis, Kant had insisted that the representation of things, the 'reports' of intuition, are "not to be taken as objects capable of existing outside of our power of representation. What then," he asked, "is to be understood when we speak of an object corresponding to, and consequently also distinct from, our knowledge?" 6 This question arises just because "outside our knowledge we have nothing, which we could set over against this knowledge as corresponding to iL" 7 What then is this thing-that-is which is represented in our representation of a general or pure concept? This object to which a transcendental pure concept refers is not empirical and therefore cznnot be perceived as an object which our sensibility can report. Empirically, then, the referent of a transcendental concept as such, is not a 'thing' which can appear in our experience. But what is this unknown kind of object? Kant suggested that it can only be thought as "something in general = X," a a general kind...