Abstract

I argue that there is a great similarity between the Critique of Judgment and the later Heidegger and that, pace Heidegger, he owes a great debt to Kant's aesthetics. To show this, I focus on the processes of world disclosure: those practices which allow the world to show itself one way rather than another, and thus constrain how the world can exist for us. ;I distinguish between two forms of world disclosure: epistemic and aesthetic. The former begins with general concepts and ends with particulars, and tends to claim both spatial and temporal universality. The latter begins with particulars and only then seeks to generate or discover general concepts which can, retrospectively, account for the particulars; its claims tend to be closely linked to the here and now and move only problematically towards the universal. ;The first Critique's elucidation of determinative judgment provides a paradigm case of epistemic world disclosure. Determinative judgment makes possible an objective world whose very objectivity is guaranteed by the universality of the form of reason itself. The third Critique, I argue, gives an analysis of aesthetic world disclosure under the name reflective judgment. Reflective judgment begins with experiences unshaped by pre-existent categories. It is accompanied by a double desire: to bring these experiences to language and to consider them universally binding. Both are problematic because they presuppose the sorts of general concepts upon which reflective judgment cannot draw. ;The later Heidegger offers no positive account of epistemic world disclosure. Rather, historically grounded structures of epistemic world disclosure are to be unveiled as such, showing them lacking in trans-historical claims to universality. I suggest that aesthetic world disclosure, through its emphasis on particularity offers a positive alternative. ;While Kant is at pains to contain reflective judgment--and the world it discloses--and emphasizes that reflective judgments are not objective, Heidegger is explicitly interested in establishing the possibility of a non-objectified world. I conclude that he valorizes the aesthetic more than had Kant and sees it as a positive alternative to modern epistemic world disclosure