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CHAPTER 4 The Differend in Being-for-Consciousness “Finite spirit is that which is not active otherwise than in suffering.”140 —Kant Kant, it is said, supposedly recoiled before an abyss into which he glimpsed, and then denied. It is as if he shied away from his own discovery of the temporality of being. His retreat may be seen particularly in the revisions to which he submitted the deduction of the categories in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.141 However, by examining what he says in all of his statements regarding the question of being itself—and not only regarding the role of the imagination—we find that from the first to the second edition, he takes, quite to the contrary, a step forward, and a giant step at that, toward an abyss traversing being itself. At many decisive points in this second edition, Kant inserts remarks about being —about “existence”—which do not square with the doctrine of modalities. Those remarks occur in a note to the new Preface, in the Refutation of Idealism, in the new Deduction, and finally, apropos of the Paralogisms. In those revisions, he conjoins with existence as the second category of modality a notion of being that points elsewhere than toward the understanding. Kant forthrightly affirms the character of this other being, irreducible to the predicative functions: “the existence here is not a category” (B 423n). In this context, it is a question of consciousness, the ultimate condition of all spontaneous acting. There, Kant considers self-consciousness as a given—not, however, as an empirical-psychic given, because then it would fall directly under the categories, nor, any longer, as a noumenal-intelligible given, for then it would be pure spirit. Consciousness is given in every use that we make of our faculties. Kant is exceedingly clear in making the distinction that the existence of the given is not a category. Quite to the contrary, where the text presents numerous circumlocutions —much ambo agere, the pursuit of two paths—it is in regard to other distinctions , namely that an existence that is given is neither noumenon nor phenomenon. Those two paths are the very ones by which, in regard to freedom, we have seen Kant skirt around the transcendental terrain. We see the same thing here. Kant formulates the theorem about existence that “[t]he mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside of me” (B 275). Here we have the existence of consciousness (and thus of precategorial being ) being determined like that of an object of experience. Its Institution (Kant with Luther) 483 Henceforth, the reflex of evasion is common in Kant. With full clarity, he sees a certain originary break through which the critical turn puts us, in the final instance, in a double bind. He then evades the pathetic condition he perceived and escapes to the terrains adjacent to the transcendental, at times the terrain of the thing-in-itself, at others the terrain of appearance. It will be necessary to ask oneself if, here again, Kant has not recognized, and then denied, an originary pathein, a suffering which affects transcendental being. There is no lack of suggestive readings which recuperate, set aside, glean from, and blow out of proportion, or even seek to integrate and smooth over, the passages on precategorial being. The most suggestive of these sees the “discovery of a concrete subject which does not have a tenable place within the system.”142 Before thus banishing precategorial being from the system, let us give the “system” a chance. Let us see if the other being—other than categorial—does not rather belong here, and essentially so at that. The point of departure in Kant allows us to maintain that being thus understood occupies the central place in the system, the place toward which the first lines of the Aesthetic point (the intuited given is “that to which all thought as a means is directed . . .” (A 19). In precategorial being it is a matter, right from the beginning, of givenness as such. It is said that the systematic point of departure for the critique, which is never questioned, is experience. In a word, for Kant, it goes without saying that we have sensory experiences. Now, if precategorial being signifies givenness, then it responds directly to the attempt to render problematic that in view of which thought is made into a means, which is...

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