The Temporal Difference and Timelessness in Kant and Heidegger

2.1 From the Temporal Difference to Timelessness

Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s account of the “threefold synthesis” as an account of the three modes of temporal syntheses provides us a starting point for seeing how Kant rejects the temporality of the “I.” While the synthesis of apprehension first “runs through” and “takes together” a manifold of intuitions, the synthesis of reproduction brings them together by associating one with another which follows or accompanies it, thereby distinguishing one representation from its antecedent. This already marks a difference between merely encountering a manifold of temporal difference (e.g., one representation, then another, etc.) and the representation of one as following another. It is then the synthesis of reproduction which first represents a sequence as such. However, Kant argues that without representing a sequence as following a rule of necessary connection, no such synthesis could take place at all. To reproduce one representation in accordance with another requires that the sequence be more than mere difference (“If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy … then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red” (A101)). Still, something further grounds the necessity of such a rule:

Without consciousness that that which we think is the very same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be in vain. For it would be a new representation in our current state, which would not belong at all to the act through which it had been gradually generated, and its manifold would never constitute a whole, since it would lack the unity that only consciousness can obtain for it. (A103)

There must be a unity of consciousness under which any application of a rule of synthesis is brought; otherwise, no relation between representations would be a consciousness of how the represented manifold belongs to a single act of representing; the relation that is “gradually generated” would never constitute a unity of consciousness and hence there would be no cognition at all. While even the name “synthesis of reproduction” hints that it concerns consciousness of the past, Heidegger insightfully points out that this mode of temporalizing in relation to the past presupposes a future-oriented consciousness. When Kant tells us that the ground of necessity for all synthesis is a certain unity of consciousness, Heidegger interprets this as meaning that the ground of the necessity for any synthesis is a consciousness of myself as a “being-able-to-hold-something-before-us [Vorhaltbarkeit]”.^[56] As a consciousness of what can be brought to cognition in general, the synthesis of recognition belonging to the “I” seems to be nothing other than cognition’s open anticipation of what can possibly be cognized in accordance with the other two modes of synthesis. As such, this “anticipatory” (futural) mode of synthesis prefigures and unifies the other two. As Heidegger says later regarding his own account of temporality, “the primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future”.^[57]

The shift from apprehension to recognition is here conceived as a temporal transition from mere difference of “nows” to the representation of a sequence within a single consciousness of what is cognizable. This latter form of consciousness, conceived as future-directed or anticipatory synthesis, determines the character of the whole of time.^[58] The latter is perhaps most apparent in the Analogies of Experience, where Kant argues that experience is possible only by determining a temporal sequence of events with regard to time as a whole:

Understanding belongs to all experience and its possibility, and the first thing that it does for this is not to make the representation of the objects distinct, but rather to make the representation of an object possible at all. Now this happens through its conferring temporal order on the appearances and their existence by assigning to each of these, as a consequence, a place in time determined a priori in regard to the preceding appearances, without which it would not agree with time itself, which determines the position of all its parts a priori. (A199-200/B244-245)

As empirical cognition,^[59] all experience involves acts of the faculty of cognition, the understanding. Among these acts is that of determining the necessary temporal order of experience. Now, for there to be cognition of a necessary temporal ordering, there must be cognition that this ordering is fixed in relation to others. To perceive that the ship must first be upstream before it is downstream is to cognize it from a rule of temporal succession.^[60] In order for this succession to have a systematic connection to the other elements of my cognition, the necessity in the relation presupposes a systematic nexus of relations of temporal necessity. The understanding confers “temporal order on the appearances and their existence by assigning to each of these, as a consequence, a place in time determined a priori in regard to the preceding appearances, without which it would not agree with time itself, which determines the position of all its parts a priori” (A199-200/B245). To assign and confer temporal order on appearances, then, requires that I conceive of the order of this particular temporal manifold as fixed in relation to all others, and then as in agreement with the representation of time as a whole. This requires an a priori cognition of the whole of time (a cognition with universality and necessity) because I could never gain cognition of its wholeness or unity through the empirical cognition of any number of discrete temporal parts. As Heidegger would say, the understanding “always already” has a grasp on time as a whole, prior to empirical intuition.^[61]

Hence, determinate temporal sequences do not aggregate to form the representation of time. Any distinction between temporal parts is instead drawn within a prior whole. This is precisely what leads Kant to characterize time as pure, not empirical, intuition. An empirical intuition cannot take place except against the background of an immediate and singular conscious representation of the whole within which distinct spaces and times are first delimited. But it is also no concept. A concept is a general representation (a “universal”) common to and contained in many. By contrast, intuition is a singular representation containing a manifold, or at least containing the possibility of infinite division. Space and time are therefore original unities containing an infinite possible manifold of spatial and temporal parts, or what Kant calls “infinite given magnitudes” (A25/B39, A32/B47). We can now see why Heidegger recognizes Kant as the first and only one who began to traverse the path toward an understanding of temporality. For Heidegger, “temporality” designates not the ordinary philosophical concept of time, but a grasp of time’s fundamental mode of being. Kant started us on the path to understanding temporality by distinguishing between empirical times and the pure, non-elapsing representation of time.

The temporal difference prepares us for one sense of “timelessness.” For Kant, the pure intuition of time lacks temporal determinations, because it is that through which temporal determinacy becomes possible. As we saw, time is a “nothing,” an ens imaginarium or the “empty intuition without an object”:

The mere form of intuition, without substance, is in itself not an object, but the merely formal condition of one (as appearance), like pure space and pure time, which are to be sure something, as the forms for intuiting, but are not in themselves objects that are intuited (ens imaginarium). (A291/B347)

In a much-neglected passage, Heidegger acknowledges this, saying that the ens imaginarium “is not a being in the sense of what is at hand. Pure space and pure time are “Something,” but certainly not “objects” “[…] Space is nothing actual, i.e., it is not a being accessible in perception”.^[62] Moreover, since pure time is itself nothing actual, but instead the pure self-affection which produces the actual, it is like the darkness out of which the light of being emerges. In a Reflexion from 1776 to 1778, Kant writes that “reality is the first logice, and from this, it is inferred that it is also metaphysice and objective the first and the gloom out of which the light of experience elaborates shapes. Thus, appearances are originally manifold, and unity arises if one abstracts from the manifold”.^[63] While reality logically precedes negation (since negating requires something to first be given), “nothing” ontologically precedes “something” (since from the point of view of sensibility, all light of being first emerges out of the originally indeterminate and the manifold).^[64] The darkness of this pure self-affecting activity (also conceived by Heidegger as the dark “root” of both stems of cognition^[65]) is darkness because it is prior to any particular temporal content, and hence prior to cognition of an object.^[66] Even though Kant officially recognizes the “darkness” of pure time, he allegedly does not appreciate this darkness as the groundless “abyss” from which all intelligibility first emerges.^[67]

2.2 From Timelessness to Atemporality

So far, the timelessness of the “I” has been understood straightforwardly as the lack of within-time-ness. But Kant goes further than this in holding that the “I” is genuinely a-temporal, being neither inside of time nor identical to inner sense, and therefore outside of time. In the discussion about the relation between understanding and sensibility in the “B” Deduction, he not only brings to our attention the puzzle of identifying the transcendental with the empirical “I,” but he elaborates on how the faculty of sensibility is first given determination by the faculty of understanding. It is as part of this discussion that a famous footnote emerges in which Kant clarifies that the “formal intuitions” of space and time are first given only thanks to an effect of the understanding:

Space, represented as object (as is really required in geometry), contains more than the mere form of intuition, namely the comprehension of the manifold given in accordance with the form of sensibility in an intuitive representation, so that the form of intuition merely gives the manifold, but the formal intuition gives unity of the representation. In the Aesthetic I ascribed this unity merely to sensibility, only in order to note that it precedes all concepts, though to be sure it presupposes a synthesis, which does not belong to the senses but through which all concepts of space and time first become possible. For since through it (as the understanding determines the sensibility) space or time are first given as intuitions, the unity of this a priori intuition belongs to space and time, and not to the concept of the understanding. (B160-161n)

For space to be cognizable, as opposed to merely being a way in which intuitions are given to the senses, it must exhibit the unity of an act of synthesis that does not belong to the senses (and hence belongs to the spontaneity of understanding). Indeed, for Kant, all combination is an act of the understanding, and as such there is no synthesis in sensibility alone.^[68] This does not mean that synthesis in general presupposes particular conceptual determinations. As Kant says in this passage, in the Transcendental Aesthetic he ascribed the unity of intuition to sensibility in order to indicate that it precedes all concepts. Nevertheless, this unity presupposes a synthesis of understanding. Hence, there is a general synthesis of the pure manifold of intuition even prior to the application of a particular concept.^[69] Far from reducing the pure intuition of time to a concept, then, Kant says that it is this act of understanding upon sensibility which first lets time be given as an intuition. Inner sense, on its own, “contains the mere form of intuition, but without the combination of the manifold in it, and thus it does not yet contain any determinate intuition at all” (B154). When inner sense is determined by the synthetic act of the “I,” not only is its intuition made determinate, but “we also always perceive this in ourselves” (ibid.). Kant’s examples here are geometrical: we cannot think of a line without drawing it, or a circle without describing it. But this inner perception of the line and the circle are determinate appearances (phenomena) corresponding to the determining act of thinking (the spontaneity of the understanding). Indeed, “we cannot even represent time without, in drawing a straight line …, attending merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold through which we successively determine the inner sense” (ibid.). This act of synthesis through which a manifold is made determinate is, therefore, not part of the determinate series. The act of the subject – what Kant calls “motion” of the subject – “first produces the concept of succession at all” (B155). So, “motion” [Bewegung] here is sharply distinguished from motion of an object in space, since the latter is cognized through experience, while the former is “pure act” (B155n.).^[70]

Because in this act we cognize this pure intuition as time (as a whole sphere), we are capable of recognizing objects in the flow of time as having their place within its whole sphere (just as with space, with respect to which geometry is possible only because it can cognize necessary spatial relationships within the whole of space). For Heidegger, likewise, the Bewegung of Dasein “is not the motion of something objectively present. It is determined from the stretching along [Erstrecktheit] of Dasein,” the constitution of the human being which is prior to any objectively present “stretch of life” or determinate temporal moments (Being and Time, 374–5). The pure act here is a “stretching along,” but it is Dasein’s temporal extension of itself. In this way, it is not static and fixed, but ek-static or going outside itself in order to generate the conditions under which determinate temporal moments can be grasped.

But if this pure act is not only the origin of determinate temporal stretches but also the horizon against which all intelligibility first emerges, we must ask how this act serves as an ultimate condition or limit of human experience. The realm of appearances that always accompanies the determining act of the “I” is the realm of successive occurrence. Attending merely to the successive character of appearances, it is easy to see that our appearing and disappearing representations occur against the background of a kind of temporal horizon. Within time, what appears is always disappearing in expectation of what comes next, and carries with it some consciousness of what came before. I can follow this series continually, anticipating ever further temporal conditions. But I will never, from this perspective, have cognition of the whole time within which the series is constituted as a series. The horizon of temporal possibility surrounds me, but only as a limit which when approached recedes further into the distance.

Heidegger does conceive of the limits of all intelligibility as “horizonal.” He does not conceive of this horizon as the horizon that we merely glimpse within time, because he recognizes that our horizon is always glimpsed from Dasein’s perspective of being the source of its “self-stretching.” Nevertheless, original temporality is a unity of the three factical horizons of time (Being and Time, 310). As he puts it later, there is a strangeness in the very fact of intelligibility, which is fundamentally inexplicable in further rational terms.^[71] In a very deep sense, Kant and Heidegger agree that temporality itself (considered apart from an act of reason or understanding) is horizonal in just this way: temporality is, from within, intelligible only up to the point of its limits.

Consider a pair of remarks from the Critique’s Doctrine of Method:

If I represent the surface of the earth (in accordance with sensible appearance) as a plate, I cannot know how far it extends. But experience teaches me this: that wherever I go, I always see a space around me in which I could proceed farther; thus I cognize the limits of my actual knowledge of the earth at any time, but not the boundaries of all possible description of the earth. But if I have gotten as far as knowing that the earth is a sphere and its surface the surface of a sphere, then from a small part of the latter, e.g., from the magnitude of one degree, I can cognize its diameter and, by means of this, the complete boundary […] (A759/B787)

Our reason is not like an indeterminably extended plane, the limits of which one can cognize only in general, but must rather be compared with a sphere, the radius of which can be found out from the curvature of an arc on its surface (from the nature of synthetic a priori propositions), from which its content and its boundary can also be ascertained with certainty. (A762/B790)

If I take the appearance of the earth merely from the way my senses are instructed, then I would represent it as an indefinite plane that appears to extend at least as far as its horizon. Approaching this limit, it seems that I can always proceed further, with nothing indicating a determinate endpoint. I therefore have a “general” idea of this limit, though because it is one which necessarily evades my grasp by providing the frame within which anything is graspable, it is not something I cognize determinately. Now Kant tells us that, contra sensibility, reason knows its determinate bounds. The “critical” position seems to eliminate the possibility that reason has its limits “horizonally.”

A horizon for reason would be an ultimate “factical” or brute condition of reason’s principles, determinacy, and hence of the cognizability of anything through it.^[72] It is commonly thought that Kant’s critical system rests on such grounds, for example, because Kant admits that there are no further reasons to be given as to why the table of the forms of judgment is composed as it is, or why our forms of sensibility are space and time. But, in the above Kant appears to deny rational facticity. If reason cognizes its own boundaries then it thereby cognizes its own form completely. The formal “limits” of reason could not be limits that recede into the distance as they are approached – i.e., limits which are known “only in general,” framing an indefinitely traversable space. Limits of this sort could only be noticed, like a mere negation or absence, but not known like the boundary that encloses a whole sphere. Kant illustrates this difference in the Prolegomena by defining limits (Schranken) as mere negations that affect us and indicate the impossibility of completeness, while boundaries (Grenzen) presuppose “a space that is found outside a certain fixed location”.^[73] To cognize a boundary is to determine that there is “space” on the other side of it. This does not necessitate cognition, but at least thought, of what is beyond the boundary. In thinking beyond it, the “I” is not contained by it. Insofar as the self-consciousness of reason is a determining activity, it is impossible for it to recognize itself as contained within limits of any kind, for all recognition requires not merely noticing an inability (a mere negation, which can be felt by any creature with consciousness) but getting into view or grasping the limit as something given to my consciousness. In the latter case, if we could cognize this with determinacy, we would face the strange result of having purportedly objective cognition of limits which cannot themselves be criticized. The “I” of reason is a consciousness that cannot be contained, lest we sacrifice cognition’s objectivity.^[74]

Kant confirms this again by criticizing Hume for merely limiting, but not drawing determinate boundaries to, our understanding (A767/B795). By acknowledging mere limits on knowledge, Hume “brings about a general distrust but no determinate knowledge of the ignorance that is unavoidable for us” (ibid.). Kant’s striking claim here is that critical philosophy rests not on absolute knowledge, but rather on knowledge of our absolute ignorance (of certain matters). Despite Hume’s admirable capacity to doubt the dogmatic conclusions of the rationalists, he could never become conscious of the true ignorance that accompanies finite rational knowers, for this ignorance consists in knowing what can never be known. And absent this, if the understanding “cannot distinguish whether certain questions lie within its horizon or not, then it is never sure of its claims and its possession […]” (A238/B297).

Now we see that not only does Kant’s explanation of the unity of self-consciousness lack the character of within-time-ness, but it is also the source of all determination, hence the source of objective cognition. And this requires that the “I” be responsible for the determination of time’s character as a whole. If so, then the timelessness of the “I” consists in being conscious of its exemption from the restriction of any temporal condition. This is not just to say that the “I” lacks a within-time determination, but also that the limits of the “I” cannot be the limits of time.^[75]

At the same time, the “I” would be nothing at all if not for the sensible conditions under which it could act.^[76] Does this not mean that time conditions the “I”? Here we must see that Kant is flexible enough to recognize different types of conditions. For him, sensible conditions are those under which the understanding can first be exercised. But the mere enabling of the understanding’s exercise is not the determining of its act.^[77] On both textual and general philosophical grounds, such an idea would be untenable. First, Kant is quite clear that the limits of sensibility are given by an act of understanding.^[78] For sensibility, abstracted from its conditioning by understanding, these limits are brute, and our relation to them would be as the explorer of the indefinitely flat earth relates to the horizon. In this way, sensibility has the pretension of extending itself to include everything that is. But, as we just saw, this pretension must be curbed for objective knowledge to be possible, and that takes place through an act of understanding. This act of understanding first enables sensibility to deliver us not mere affections, but cognizable intuitions.^[79]

Kant also explains that “[s]elf-consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity, and yet is itself unconditioned” (A401). This statement occurs in the Paralogisms, where Kant is concerned to show that apperception’s merely logical or formal representation of itself as a simple and numerically identical substance does not yield material self-knowledge. Still, because pure self-consciousness is, as Stephen Engstrom formulates it, “identical with that of which it is a consciousness,”^[80] its understanding of itself as (merely) formally unconditional would yield self-cognition of its formal unconditionality. To be sure, no object of experience is unconditioned,^[81] but the pure “I” is neither an experience nor does it take itself to be any kind of material cognition.^[82]

What I have called the temporal difference now seems possible only thanks to the a-temporality of the “I,” since the temporal difference is no mere difference, but a determinate distinction drawn between within-time-ness and the unity of time itself. This requires a judgment of the whole of time as that within which necessary temporal order can be determined. Having now a concept of the pure intuition of time involves a consciousness that exceeds the boundaries of time, and this is in virtue of the distinction between concepts and intuitions. Being a representation contained in an indefinite manifold, a concept contains in it the consciousness of the possibility of identifying marks in an indefinite number of instances and hence involves a general consciousness or consciousness of universality. The consciousness of such a possibility must be unrestricted, since otherwise, it could not be conscious of its indefinite applicability. This consciousness of unrestricted universality is, for Kant, the universal “I” or self-consciousness in general, since the role of the “I” in all cognition is to be not a concept but rather “the vehicle of all concepts whatever […]” (A341/B399). Concepts inherit their generality from the absolute and unrestricted universality of the “I.” Even empirical concepts, which are borrowed from experience, can function as such only on the grounds of reflecting the categories and forms of judging which are themselves empty and unrestricted (A181/B224; B166n). It is only in this way that experience can include synthetic a priori judgments, i.e., synthetic judgments also containing unrestricted necessity and universality.^[83]

We see that Kant has carefully considered the reasons not only for asserting that the “I” is beyond time, but more specifically for rejecting the idea that the limits of the “I” are horizonal. This places him directly at odds with Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s limits, not because Kant shrinks back from temporality as the root of all cognition, but because he determinately opposes the thought that cognition is ultimately conditioned by a horizonal limit.

Before concluding, it may be worth noting that it is not only in Kant’s theoretical philosophy that we can see this point. In “The End of All Things,” Kant also directly thematizes the idea of thinking beyond time. Here, in discussing the ultimate ends of practical reason, he writes that from a moral point of view, we must represent ourselves (in death) as going “out of time into eternity” (AA 8:327). This is necessary as a means of representing to ourselves a “judgment day” – a final day upon which a determination of our basic moral character [Gesinnung] may be rendered.^[84] Apart from the fact that our moral vocation requires the perfection of virtue which cannot take place in time, this timeless self-conception is necessary for representing practical reason’s own temporal difference. Just as theoretical reason must represent the difference between what occurs in the temporal sequence of cognition and the time of which this sequence partakes, practical reason must represent the difference between the “daily” struggle between our predisposition to the good and our propensity to evil (Religion, AA 6:42) and the new beginning of virtue at every moment: “Virtue is always in progress and yet always starts from the beginning”.^[85] And, as we have seen, to represent the temporal difference is to be conscious not only of the difference between “within-time-ness” and the form of time as such, but also of the wholeness of the latter. Especially in the practical register, this is unavoidable if we know that we are bound by a moral law. The moral law is not only temporally unconditioned – like the principle of contradiction – but its adoption reflects a choice which determines the moral character of a whole life.^[86]