Morganna Lambeth

In this paper, I appeal to Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to clarify why Heidegger centered his interpretation of Nietzsche on his unpublished fragments, and to answer objections to Heidegger’s choice of source material. Anglophone Nietzsche scholars argue that the fragments were composed for inclusion in a project that Nietzsche decided not to publish, and therefore do not represent his considered views. Further, scholars argue that these fragments lack context, enabling interpreters to read what they want into Nietzsche’s words. I argue that Heidegger focuses on Nietzsche’s unpublished works, because, like the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, these fragments develop competing answers to a philosophical question: one can find Nietzsche developing his own insight into the phenomena under consideration, and see where he departs from traditional views. What these fragments lack in polish, development and coherence – context, writ large – they gain in insight. Further, Heidegger offers an alternate account of Nietzsche’s intentions as an author: what Nietzsche meant to say is not determined by his publication decisions, but rather by the question he was trying to answer. On this account, we should interpret works that provide an insightful answer to the author’s questions, whether published or not.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heidegger on Being Self-Concealing by Katherine WithyMorganna LambethKatherine Withy. Heidegger on Being Self-Concealing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 192. Hardback, $80.00.Heidegger’s claim that Being conceals itself is significant for several reasons. It tells us something about Heidegger’s main area of inquiry, Being—that is, our standards for what makes a being count as a being, our “sense of what kinds of entities there can be” (8). Further, it explains why Heidegger’s inquiry is challenging: he inquires into something that conceals itself. This claim also elucidates other Heideggerian claims, explaining why we tend to overlook Being in our everyday lives, and why philosophers have failed to investigate Being. Because making sense of this claim is important for making sense of Heidegger, Katherine Withy’s book is a welcome addition to the literature.The claim that Being conceals itself is difficult to interpret, since, as Withy underscores, Heidegger discusses multiple types of concealment throughout his corpus. In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the withdrawal of tools when we use them: we attend not to the tool at hand but to what we produce with it (47). In the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger claims that earth, the materiality from which artworks are made, “denies... penetration” (34). He claims, variously, that language “cover[s] things up” (72), that we are concealed from ourselves (95), and that the world of equipment “recedes” into “the background” (48). Which of these, if any, counts as the self-concealing of Being?Withy’s book pinpoints what counts as the self-concealing of Being, and what does not. She develops this account with rigor and clarity, owing not least to the innovative structure of her investigation—organized into sections, which are grouped according to four “planks of unconcealment,” which she borrows from Mark Wrathall (Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]). “Unconcealment” is Heidegger’s rendering of the Greek word alētheia (usually: truth), which highlights that truth (propositional, ontological, etc.) reveals something previously “forgotten or concealed” (10). On Withy’s construal, these planks differentiate progressively deeper levels of unconcealment. At the most superficial level, language unconceals some entity; this is made possible by the second plank, where entities are unconcealed, or discovered; the third plank is the unconcealment, or disclosure, of Being, which makes discovery possible; finally, the fourth plank is the unconcealment of the clearing, which makes the disclosure of Being possible.Although Withy eventually rejects Wrathall’s fourth plank, adopting this plank structure nevertheless allows her to organize the forms of concealment that correspond to the first three planks of unconcealment. While taxonomizing multiple kinds of concealment—such as lēthē (in classical Greek, “forgetfulness”), the initial concealment that unconcealment “overcome[s]” (10)—Withy pays special attention to the self-concealing of unconcealment itself, which she calls kruptesthai (in classical Greek, “to hide, to conceal oneself”). The kruptesthai that occurs at the third plank (where Being is disclosed) is the self-concealing of Being. Withy also draws attention, at each plank, to the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophy combats kruptesthai, so unconcealment becomes apparent to us.Withy begins with the second plank, where we discover some entity. The withdrawal of tools and the hiddenness of earth are concealings that belong to this level (accompanying, respectively, the unconcealing of tools and artwork). However, these are not forms of self-concealing. Here, unconcealing conceals something else (the tool, the earth), rather than itself. Withy calls this kind of concealing kruptein (in classical Greek, “to hide, to conceal”). By contrast, kruptesthai occurs when discovery conceals itself—when we overlook that we are uncovering something (ourselves doing, making, contributing to an experience) when we encounter an entity. Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses, however, bring into view our unconcealing of entities.Withy then proceeds to consider the first plank, where language unconceals some entity. Heidegger suggests that we also fail to appreciate that language unconceals—linguistic unconcealing conceals itself. An utterance draws our attention to the phenomenon that it describes rather than to what language is doing to unconceal that phenomenon. However, [End Page 673] Heidegger’s analyses of...

Is Heidegger a temporal idealist or a temporal realist? That is, does he believe that time is supplied by the human standpoint, or that we derive it from the structure of the world around us? Blattner makes a compelling case that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, but a failed one. Rousse, however, argues that Heidegger’s position is more promising when he is interpreted not as an unsuccessful idealist, but as an underdeveloped realist. In contrast, we offer arguments grounded in German Idealist treatments of time that Heidegger is a successful idealist who can derive sequential time from nonsequential human temporality.

Against the consensus that Heidegger reads his own philosophical views into Kant, I argue that Heidegger takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant's best answer to it. Heidegger's method resembles those of Gadamer and Davidson. But by reading the first Critique as offering two conflicting strands of argument, he abandons their aim of maximizing truth, and his theory of error explains why Kant offers the less-promising strand. Heidegger thus provides a distinctive model of charitable, reconstructive interpretation that avoids hermeneutic ventriloquism—a failure to recognize differences of view between interpreter and text.

Heidegger has a reputation for reading himself into the philosophers he interprets, and his interpretation of Kant has therefore had little uptake in anglophone Kant scholarship. In this book, Morganna Lambeth provides a new account of Heidegger's method of interpreting Kant, arguing that it is more promising than is typically recognized. On her account, Heidegger thinks that Kant's greatest insights are located in moments of tension, where Kant struggles to articulate something new about his subject-matter. The role of the interpreter, then, is to disentangle competing strands of argument, and to determine which strand is most compelling. Lambeth traces Heidegger's interpretive method across his reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and situates Heidegger's reconstruction of Kant's best line of argument against other post-Kantian readings. She finally shows how Heidegger's deep engagement with Kant sheds light on Heidegger's own philosophical views.

Traditionally, theorists suggested that imaginative resistance is limited to morally repugnant claims. More recently, theorists have argued that the phenomenon of imaginative resistance is wider in scope, extending to descriptive claims. On both sides, though, theorists have focused on cases where imaginative resistance goes right, tracking something that is wrong with the story—that it is morally repugnant, or conceptually contradictory. I use a rarely cited discussion from Kant to argue that imaginative resistance can also occur when something goes wrong with the reader—namely, when a reader imports their own biases into the story, and resists a descriptive claim as a result. In identifying this new class of claims that can meet imaginative resistance, Kant presses the question: when should we cultivate imaginative resistance and when should we fight it?

While the human body is not a point of focus in Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology, I argue that considering our contempo-rary relationship to our own bodies provides crucial support to Heidegger’s account. Heidegger suggests that, in our contemporary age of technology, humans are taken to be “human resources”: like natural resources and technological devices, humans should be available for efficient and flexible incorporation into any number of projects. I argue that the contemporary attitude toward the human body provides evidence confirming this suggestion. Moreover, I identify the body as a unique site of resistance to the age of tech-nology, an anomaly to the technological paradigm, as the body con-stantly resists our attempts to transform it into a resource.

In the Second Analogy of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), Kant attempts to address Hume’s causal skepticism. Kant argues that the concept of cause must be employed in order to identify objective changes in the world, and that, therefore, all events are caused. In this paper, I will challenge Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy, arguing that we can identify objective changes without using the concept of cause, but by using the concept of logical condition instead. Rather than objectively ordering our perceptions through the idea that one thing that was perceived is the cause of the next thing that was perceived, the first necessitating the second, we can objectively order our perceptions through the idea that the first thing perceived is the logical condition of the second. In terms of Kant’s debate with Hume, I find that, though my objection undermines some of Hume’s own conclusions, it does allow Hume to avoid Kant’s argument against his causal skepticism.

In this paper, we discuss Martin Heidegger's position on the so-called godlessness of our current age. Rather than holding that we must either await the advent of god or enthusiastically embrace our godlessness, Heidegger holds that a third option is available to us: we could fundamentally change the way we experience the world by leaving behind all remnants of metaphysical thinking. In Section II, we show that, despite the absence of god, our current historical moment shares a metaphysical structure with the god-oriented epochs that preceded it. A metaphysical epoch involves a single, all-encompassing understanding of the entities in the world and how they ought to be arranged, usually established by a God who serves as a paradigm for those entities. In Section III, we discuss how the metaphysical age arose in the first place; the polytheistic world of the ancient Greeks was tumultuous and unpredictable, such that its inhabitants began to desire a stable, planned-out world that could be established by a single God. In the final section, we examine Heidegger's obscure discussion of the last god, who is to lead us out of metaphysics by a fundamental shift of the sort that led us into metaphysics. We discuss the basic features that will define a post-metaphysical age, and the last god's role in bringing this age about. We argue that this age resembles the pre-metaphysical age of the ancient Greeks, but rather than being polytheistic, it will be “polydivinistic”.