Kant's Way of Asking about the Thing

CHAPTER 1

The Historical Basis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

How, then, are we supposed to arrive on the path of the authentic "living" history of our question, if only in a provisional way? We choose a middle stretch along this path, and indeed one in which the inception and a decisive era come creatively together in a new manner. This is the philosophical determination of the thingness of thing brought about by Kant. The essential delimitation of the thing is no accidental by-product of Kant's philosophy; the determination of the thingness of the thing is its metaphysical center. We bring ourselves onto the path of the intrinsically historical question concerning the thing by way of an interpretation of Kant's work.

Kant's philosophy places the whole of modern thought and Dasein into the clarity and transparency of a foundation. This determines every subsequent scientific stance, along with the boundaries and assessments of the sciences from the nineteenth century to the present. In this respect, Kant towers so far above all his predecessors and successors that even those who reject him or go beyond him remain altogether dependent upon him.

Moreover, despite all the differences and the extent of the historical distance, Kant has something in common with the great Greek inception, which distinguishes him at once from all previous and subsequent German [56] thinkers, namely, the incorruptible clarity of his thinking and speaking, which in no way excludes the question-worthy and the unstable and will not feign clarity where darkness reigns.

We turn our question "What is a thing?" into Kant's and, in turn, Kant's question into ours. The further task of the lecture course thereby becomes very simple. We do not need to report "about" Kant's philosophy in sweeping overviews and generalizing turns of phrase. We place ourselves within Kant's thought itself. In future only Kant himself shall speak. What we [will] do from time to time is meant only to provide an indication of the sense and the direction, so that, along the way, we do not deviate from the path of the question. The lecture is then a sort of signpost [Wegweiser]. Signposts are matters of indifference in comparison with that which itself travels along the path. They show up here and there along the side of the road [Weg] in order to point something out, only to disappear as one passes by.

The path of our question "What is a thing?" leads to Kant's chief work, which bears the title Critique of Pure Reason. The lecture course is not up to the task of getting through this work as a whole. We must once again limit ourselves to a stretch along our path. But we are attempting to reach the middle of this stretch and hence the middle of Kant's chief work itself, in order to grasp it in accordance with its chief inner directions. If this succeeds, we will not have become better acquainted with a book written by a professor in the eighteenth century; instead we will have taken some steps into a basic historical and spiritual stance, which supports and determines us today.

§14. The Reception of Kant's Work during His Lifetime; Neo-Kantianism

Kant once said in conversation in his last years of life: "I have come a century too early with my writings; one will first understand me rightly after a hundred years [57] and then accept my books and newly study them" (Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebücher I, 46).

Do we hear a vain self-importance in these words or, indeed, the annoyed hopelessness of being pushed aside? Neither, for both are foreign to Kant's character. What expresses itself here is Kant's deep knowledge of the mode and manner in which philosophy actualizes itself and takes effect. Philosophy belongs to the most primordial of human endeavors. Of these, Kant once remarked: "Human endeavors turn in a constant circle and return to a point where they have already once been; thus, materials that now lie in the dust can perhaps be employed in the building of a glorious structure" (Kant's Answer to Garve, Prolegomena, ed. Vorländer, p. 194). Here speaks the superior calm of a creator, someone who knows that the standards of the "contemporary" are dust and that greatness has its own law of movement.

Kant was fifty-seven years old when he allowed the Critique of Pure Reason to appear in the year 1781. Until the time of this work's appearance, Kant had been silent for more than ten years. During the decade of this silence, 1770–1781, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Beethoven spent their youth. Six years after the initial appearance of the work, in the year 1787, the second edition appeared. Several doctrinal passages were revised and many modes of proof sharpened. But the total character of the work remained unaltered.

Kant's contemporaries stood helpless before the work. It went beyond everything familiar in the elevation of its problematic, the rigor of its concept-formation, the far-reaching organization of its questioning, the novelty of its language, and its decisive aim. Kant knew this; he saw clearly that the work in its entire tendency and manner went against the taste of the times. Kant himself once characterized the prevailing taste of [58] his age as the effort to present the difficult in philosophical things as easy (Prolegomena, p. 193). Although it was not understood in its essential intentions, but always only taken up in its contingent exterior, the work was provocative. An eager tug-of-war emerged in writings, pros and cons. Until the year of Kant's death (1804), the number of such writings had reached 2,000. Schiller's well-known verse "Kant and His Interpreters" relates to this state of affairs in the confrontation with Kant:

How many beggars just one rich
Man alone feeds!

When kings build, the workers
Bring forth deeds.

The same Schiller also first helped Goethe...