Abstract
In this chapter I argue that there is a form of existentialism in Heidegger that is closely linked to his reading of Kant. More precisely, I argue that “Heidegger’s existentialism,” like existentialism in general, is a specific variety of idealism and, in Heidegger’s case at least, with decidedly but unacknowledged tendencies towards subjectivism or constructivism. This assessment which I share with other exegetes is particularly well supported by Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, both in relation to Heidegger’s early thesis on the temporality of subjectivity and in relation to the later thesis on objectivity as a possible but contingent figuration of the history of being.
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Notes
- 1.
For concise reconstruction of “Heidegger’s existentialism” see Blattner 2012.
- 2.
For a more precise reconstruction of the first phase, see Römer 2018, pp. 333–347.
- 3.
As Adrian Moore points out, just as in Derrida’s “deconstructive project” that follows Heidegger on this point, “for Heidegger the repudiation of traditional metaphysics involved appropriating traditional metaphysical concepts and traditional metaphysical methods. It was not, in other words, a simple matter of turning one’s back on the tradition. It was a matter of using the tradition’s own resources to subvert it from within” (Moore 2012, pp. 528–529).
- 4.
- 5.
Cf. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: “Thus the moral law has no cognitive faculty other than the understanding (not the imagination)” (Kant 1996, p. 169 (5: 69)).
- 6.
I discuss this in a forthcoming text, cf. Espinet 2020.
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Espinet, D. (2020). Heidegger and Kant, or Heidegger’s Poetic Idealism of Imagination. In: Stewart, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_15
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