Saturday, August 18, 2007

Hegel and Kant on time in Heidegger, corroborated...

Here is a short sentence in Being and Time that confirms what I was sketching out in the last post:

...Hegel has made an explicit attempt to set forth the way in which time as ordinarily understood is connected with spirit. In Kant, on the other hand, while time is indeed "subjective," it stands "beside" the "I think" and is not bound up with it.
-Being and Time, II.6 &82, 480.

In standing beside the "I think," time (as it is ordinarily understood, as a series of "nows") is not "bound up" with subjectivity but rather passes along with it. For Hegel, however, because he connects time (as it is ordinarily understood) with the development of the spirit, which is the development of the subjectivity or the "I think," time becomes even more of an expression of subjectivity than with Kant. That is, time in Hegel determines the Being of the subject less as time, because it becomes the vehicle for subjectivity. In Kant, however, because time passes along beside subjectivity and determines it while being outside it, time can determine the Being of subjectivity without emptying itself out into subjectivity, or losing its character as time. In Hegel, time becomes the mediating power of the negative that develops subjectivity and its Being. However, in Kant, time remains the determining factor that constitutes but does not remain the developing agent for subjectivity: it thus retains its power of determination over subjectivity without emptying itself out into a power of subjectivity itself. In short, then, it resists being something present-at-hand, even though Kant still holds that time is a series of "nows" that are present-at-hand, because it does not become something that is as graspable as the "I" in the "I think" of subjectivity (as it does in Hegel) while still remaining determining for subjectivity and its Being.

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