On the Plausibility of Heidegger's Scholastic Interpretation of Kant's Concept of Existence

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Catania

Congreso; 8th Multilateral Kant-Colloquium; 2018

Università degli Studi di Catania

It is well known that Being and Time, the magnum opus of Martin Heidegger, remained unfinished. In the general plan of the book (see Being and Time, § 8), Heidegger states that the treatise will have two Parts; the first Part will be dedicated to clarify the meaning of being, while the second will offer a critique of western ontology. Heidegger finally published only the first two Sections of the First Part of the book. Expressly referring to the unreleased Third Section of the First Part of Being and Time, Heidegger mentions in a marginal note of the Hüttenexemplar the lecture course that he gave in the summer semester of 1927 at the University of Marburg under the title Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie; the note makes clear that this lecture course corresponds to the Third Section of Being and Time. However, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie is not exactly what would have been that Third Section, but a more extensive text in which Heidegger adopts a historical standpoint to analyze different theories of being that western metaphysics developed through the centuries. In the First Part of Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (see especially §§ 7-12), Heidegger explicitly links Kant´s notion of ?existence? (Sein, Dasein, Existenz) and his correlative differentiation between ?existence? and ?reality? (Realität) with the scholastic notion of ?being? (esse, existentia) as distinct from ?essence? (essentia, quidditas). Scholastic metaphysics distinguished between the fact that something exists or does not exist from what ?or how? is that something that can exist or not exist. What exists is thus conceived by scholastic metaphysics as the result of a composition (compositio) between the determinations that define something as merely possible and the fact that that possible exists or, as the case may be, does not exist. On the basis of this fundamental approach, scholastic metaphysics developed three different ways of conceiving what is ?existence? and how it differs and ?according to the kind of its difference? how it relates to the determinations that define each thing, that is, how it differs from and relates to ?essence?. The different scholastic doctrines about the distinction ?and relation? between being and essence were to conceive it as a real distinction (Aquinas), as a modal distinction (Scotus) or as a merely mental distinction (Suárez). The ultimate background of this approach of Scholasticism to the constitution of things was non other than the religious dogma of the creatio ex nihilo, that is to say, the claim that no existing thing implies its own existence and that, for that very reason, everything what actually exists must have received its existence from a cause extrinsic to the universe. In this context Heidegger states that ?[t]he expression ?existence? as existentia is interpreted by Scholasticism as rei extra causas et nihilum sistentia, the thing´s being-put or placed outside the causes which actualize it and outside the nothing. We shall see later how this placedness in the sense of actualitas goes together with positedness in the sense of Kant´s absolute position.? Heidegger´s claim is thus that the way Kant conceives of existence, that is, as the absolute position of the determinate content of a concept (content that, according to Kant ?and it does not matter how determinate that content may be, ?even in its thoroughgoing determination? ? is as such always merely mental), is in its fundamental outline the same claim of scholastic metaphysics that being differs from a merely possible essence. In Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie Heidegger offers, further, a comprehensive analysis of the relation of Kant´s conception of existence to the different doctrines of scholastic metaphysics on the kind of distinction between being and essence. The objective of my talk is to examine in detail Heidegger´s claim that Kant´s notion of existence is intrinsically related to the scholastic notion of being, and to evaluate the conceptual and exegetical plausibility of that claim. In this context I will make explicit specific aspects of Kant´s theory of existence that supports Heidegger´s interpretation.