Abstract

The publication of Heidegger's important study of Kant not only made available in English a remarkably clear example of Heidegger's thinking but also created a need for an English commentary on the relation of Heidegger to Kant. Charles M. Sherover's attempt to meet that need fails to present Heidegger adequately. Sherover starts out with both Kant and Heidegger seeking the foundation of metaphysics "in a conception of the nature of human reasoning, in a conception of the nature of man." With the exception of the last chapter, where Sherover claims to go beyond Heidegger, the book never takes us far beyond this formulation. But one of Heidegger's repeated warnings--a warning which Sherover passes over in his commentary--is that the science required is not an anthropology, not even a philosophical anthropology, since we cannot suppose we know what we mean by the question "What is man?" In a phrase which carries to an extreme a tendency to over-use the hyphen, Sherover seems to give us a glimpse of the self that lies beyond anthropology: "... the self is not a thing or an entity but a kind-of [!] reflexive event...." But this reflexive-event self is immediately brought down to the level of "our particular individual selves," the selves that on the basis of "concerns" decide which aspects of anything are important. Is the self of Heidegger's "pure self-affection" an individual? Then, since it is time, how do we all happen to live in the same time? Sherover's last chapter answers that question: It is because of what Heidegger supposedly meant by "world-time." Sherover reasons from "our success in dealing with the world" that human temporality must reflect with some accuracy "world-time." Now there is a third "time" on which the self as primordial temporality depends just as the latter is that on which time as ordinarily conceived of depends. What makes this third "time" any more satisfactory than the first? Why couldn't we do without the third and make the second again dependent on the first? Far from going beyond Heidegger, we are in danger of coming down from Kant--a surprising turn for a book that presents almost ad nauseam the "Copernican Revolution" and Heidegger's Kantianism. A work on Heidegger's Kantianism, on what Heidegger does with the Kantian turn to the subject, would be welcome, especially if written from the perspective of current analytic critiques of the notion of the self. Such a perspective would be able to throw its light on Heidegger's own critique of the self in its everyday meaning. It would also not be so attached to Kant as to speak of Heidegger's Kantianism without realizing that Heidegger's Kant is the Kant whom Heidegger understands "better than [Kant] understood himself."--J. H.