Would you say then that in this respect Heidegger did not fall into this transcendentalist trap? I haven't read Kant directly; but my understanding of Heidegger is that such an imposed structure amounts to metaphysics in lieu of ontology, which of course he is against. Would this then mean that Kant, although critiquing the naive metaphysics prevalent before him, nevertheless fell into a rationalist trap, which would explain Nietzsche's distaste of his categories? That Kant, although refusing the grounding of metaphysics prior to him, nevertheless grounded metaphysics in the a priori's of reason itself, which is the hallmark of all metaphysics: that is, to presume that such a neat, 'structural' grounding is possible? This calls to mind Heidegger's comments on Kant in Being and Time, that is (paraphrased according to my memory) that he was correct in wanting to examine the preconditions of any phenomena, but mistaken in his determining of such preconditions? That he did not peel the coconut enough to actually hit water, but merely satisfied himself with another layer, so to speak. Thanks for the amazing videos as always.
"almost always ignored by academics" Actually, wasn't this one of the main criticism aimed at Kant by Adorno & Horkheimer in their _Dialektik der Aufklärung_ ? p. 6: "Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself ” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature."
p. 19-20: "The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound. Kant combined the doctrine of thought’s restlessly toilsome progress toward infinity with insistence on its insufficiency and eternal limitation. The wisdom he imparted is oracular: There is no being in the world that knowledge can- not penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being. Philosophical judgment, according to Kant, aims at the new yet recognizes nothing new, since it always merely repeats what reason has placed into objects beforehand. However, this thought, protected within the departments of science from the dreams of a spirit-seer,* has to pay the price: world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject itself; nothing is left of it except that ever-unchanging “I think,” which must accompany all my conceptions. Both subject and object are nullified. The abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by nothing but abstract material, which has no other property than to be the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure. What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the subjection of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand. To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning-this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned. Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape."
Would you say then that in this respect Heidegger did not fall into this transcendentalist trap? I haven't read Kant directly; but my understanding of Heidegger is that such an imposed structure amounts to metaphysics in lieu of ontology, which of course he is against.
Would this then mean that Kant, although critiquing the naive metaphysics prevalent before him, nevertheless fell into a rationalist trap, which would explain Nietzsche's distaste of his categories? That Kant, although refusing the grounding of metaphysics prior to him, nevertheless grounded metaphysics in the a priori's of reason itself, which is the hallmark of all metaphysics: that is, to presume that such a neat, 'structural' grounding is possible? This calls to mind Heidegger's comments on Kant in Being and Time, that is (paraphrased according to my memory) that he was correct in wanting to examine the preconditions of any phenomena, but mistaken in his determining of such preconditions? That he did not peel the coconut enough to actually hit water, but merely satisfied himself with another layer, so to speak.
Thanks for the amazing videos as always.
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"almost always ignored by academics"
Actually, wasn't this one of the main criticism aimed at Kant by Adorno & Horkheimer in their _Dialektik der Aufklärung_ ?
p. 6: "Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself ” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature."
p. 19-20: "The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound. Kant combined the doctrine of thought’s restlessly toilsome progress toward infinity with insistence on its insufficiency and eternal limitation. The wisdom he imparted is oracular: There is no being in the world that knowledge can- not penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being. Philosophical judgment, according to Kant, aims at the new yet recognizes nothing new, since it always merely repeats what reason has placed into objects beforehand. However, this thought, protected within the departments of science from the dreams of a spirit-seer,* has to pay the price: world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject itself; nothing is left of it except that ever-unchanging “I think,” which must accompany all my conceptions. Both subject and object are nullified. The abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by nothing but abstract material, which has no other property than to be the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure. What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the subjection of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand. To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning-this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned. Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape."