Cassirer: As for the first: In no way other than through the medium of form. This is the function of form, that while man changes the form of his Dasein, i.e., while he now must transpose everything in him which is lived experience into some objective shape in which he is objectified in such a way, to be sure, that he does not thereby become radically free from the finitude of the point of departure (for this is still connected to his particular finitude). Rather, while it arises from finitude, it leads finitude out into something new. And that is immanent infinitude. Man cannot make the leap from his own proper finitude into a realistic infinitude. He can and must have, however, the metabasis which leads him from the immediacy of his existence into the region of pure form. And he possesses his infinity solely in this form. “From out of the chalice of this spiritual realm, infinity flows to him.” The spiritual realm is not a metaphysical spiritual realm; the true spiritual realm is just the spiritual world created from himself. That he could create it is the seal of his infinitude.

As to the second. It is not just a privative determination, but is instead a stranger sphere, although it is not one obtained in a purely negative way in addition to the finite. In infinitude, it is not just an opposition to finitude which is constituted but, in a certain sense, it is just the totality, the fulfillment of finitude itself. But this fulfillment of finitude exactly constitutes infinitude. Goethe: “If you want to step into infinitude, just go in all directions into the finite.” As finitude is fulfilled, i.e., as it goes in all directions, it steps out into infinitude. This is the opposite of privation, it is the perfect filling-out of finitude itself.

As to the third. That is quite a radical question, to which one can answer only with a kind of confession. Philosophy had to allow man to become sufficiently free, to the extent that man can just become free. While it does that, I believe, it frees man — to be sure, in a certain radical sense — from anxiety as mere disposition. I believe, even according to Heidegger’s explanations earlier today, that freedom can properly be found only along the path of progressive freeing, which indeed is also an infinite process for him. I believe that he can agree with this interpretation. Granted, I see that the most difficult problem is found here. I would like the sense, the goal, in fact the freeing, to be taken in this sense: “Anxiety throws the earthly from you.” That is the position of idealism with which I have always been acquainted.

Pos<7>Pos is apparently the Dutch scholar H. J. Pos, one of the participants in the Davos course. I am indebted to Prof. O. Pöggeler for his help with this identification.: Philological remark: Both men speak a completely different language. For us, it is a matter of extracting something common from these two languages. An attempt at translation was already made by Cassirer in his “Space for Action” [“Aktionsraum“]. We must hear the acknowledgment of this translation from Heidegger. The translational possibility extends to the point at which something emerges which does not allow translation. Those are the terms which demarcate what is characteristic of one of a group of languages. In both of these languages, I have attempted to gather several of these terms which I doubt would allow for translation into the other language. I nominate Heidegger’s expressions: Dasein, Being, the ontic. On the other hand, I nominate Cassirer’s expressions: the functional in spirit and the transformation of original space into another one.<8>The German terms of Heidegger are: das Dasein, das Sein, das Ontische. The German terms of Cassirer are: das Funktionale im Geist, die Umwandlung des ursprünglichen Raumes in einen anderen. Should it be found that there is no translation for these terms from both sides, then these would be the terms with which to differentiate the spirit of Cassirer’s philosophy from Heidegger’s.

Heidegger: In the first lecture, Cassirer used the expressions terminus a quo and terminus ad quem. One could say that for Cassirer the terminus ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness. For Cassirer, the terminus a quo is utterly problematical. My position is the reverse: The terminus a quo is my central problematic, the one I develop. The question is: Is the terminus ad quem as clear for me? For me, this occurs not in the whole of a Philosophy of Culture, but rather in the question: τί τὸ ŏv, or rather: what in general is called Being? For me, it was from this question that the problematic of a Metaphysics of Dasein arose in order to win a foundation for the basic problem of metaphysics. Or, in order to come once more to the core of the interpretation of Kant: My intention was not to bring up something new in contrast to an epistemological interpretation and to bring honor to the power of imagination. Rather, it should be clear that the inner problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e., the question concerning the possibility of Ontology, is relegated to a radical bursting-open of the concept in the traditional sense, which was the end result for Kant. In attempting to lay the ground for Metaphysics, Kant was pressed in a way that makes the proper foundation into an abyss [Abgrund].<9>The words “relegated to a radical . . . Kant was pressed” were added by the editor in the GA edition. If Kant says: The three basic questions are allowed to lead back to the fourth: What is man?, then this question in its character as question has become questionable. I attempted to show that it is not at all self-evident to start from a concept of logos, but instead that the question of the possibility of metaphysics demands a metaphysics of Dasein itself as possibility of the fundament of a question of metaphysics. In this way, the question of what man is must be answered not so much in the sense of an anthropological system, but instead it must first be properly clarified with regard to the perspective from within which it wants to be posed.

And here I come back to the concepts terminus a quo and terminus ad quem. Is this just a heuristic questioning, or does it lie in the essence of Philosophy itself that it has a terminus a quo which must be made into a problem and that it has a terminus ad quem which correlates to the terminus a quo? This problematic does not yet appear to me to have been coined clearly in Cassirer’s philosophy up to now. Cassirer’s point is to emphasize the various forms of the shaping in order, with a view to these shapings, subsequently to point out a certain dimension of the shaping powers themselves. Now, one could say: this dimension, then, is fundamentally the same as that which I call Dasein. But that would be erroneous. The difference is clearest in the concept of Freedom. I spoke of a freeing in the sense that the freeing of the inner transcendence of Dasein is the fundamental character of philosophizing itself. In so doing, the authentic sense of this freeing is not to be found in becoming free to a certain extent for the forming images of consciousness and for the realm of form. Rather, it is to be found in becoming free for the finitude of Dasein. Just to come into the thrownness of Dasein is to come into the conflict which lies within the essence of freedom. I did not give freedom to myself, although it is through Being-free that I can first be I myself. But now, not I myself in the sense of an indifferent ground for explanation, but rather: Dasein is the authentic basic occurrence in which the existing of man, and with it every problematic of existence itself, becomes essential.

Based on this, I believe we can answer the question by Pos concerning translation. I believe that what I describe by Dasein does not allow translation into a concept of Cassirer’s. Should one say consciousness, that is precisely what I rejected. What I call Dasein is essentially codetermined — not just through what we describe as spirit, and not just through what we call living. Rather, what it depends on is the original unity and the immanent structure of the relatedness of a human being which to a certain extent has been fettered in a body and which, in the fetteredness in the body, stands in a particular condition of being bound up with beings. In the midst of this it finds itself, not in the sense of a spirit which looks down on it, but rather in the sense that Dasein, thrown into the midst of beings, as free, carries out an incursion into the being which is always spiritual and, in the ultimate sense, accidental. [It is] so accidental that the highest form of the existence of Dasein is only allowed to lead back to very few and rare glimpses of Dasein’s duration between living and death. [It is] so accidental that man exists only in very few glimpses of the pinnacle of his own possibility, but otherwise moves in the midst of his beings.

The question concerning the type of Being of what is set into his Philosophy of Symbolic Form, the central question concerning the inner constitution of Being, is what the Metaphysics of Dasein determines — and it does not determine it with the intention of a previously given systematic of the cultural jurisdiction and of the philosophical disciplines. In the entirety of my philosophical efforts, I left completely undecided the traditional shape and division of the philosophical disciplines, because I believe that the orientation to these is the greatest misfortune in the sense that we no longer come back to the inner problematic of philosophy. To an equal degree, neither Plato nor Aristotle could have known of such a division of philosophy. A division of this sort was the concern of the schools, i.e., of a philosophy that has lost the inner problematic of its questioning; and it requires exertion to break through these disciplines. What is more, that is why if we pass through the disciplines of aesthetics, etc., we again come back to the specific metaphysical mode of Being of the region concerned. Art is not just a form of consciousness which shapes itself; rather, art itself has a metaphysical sense within the basic occurrence of Dasein itself.

I have intentionally singled out these differences. It is not suitable to the task at hand if we come up against a process of leveling. Rather, because it is only in and through the rigor of what has been brought forth that the problem gains clarity, I would like once more to place our entire discussion in terms of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and to fix once more the question of what man is as the central question. At the same time, however, [I would like to fix it] as the question which we pose not in some isolated ethical sense, but instead so that both positions become clear on the basis of the problematic, so that the question of man is only essential for the philosophers in the way in which the philosopher simply disregards himself, so that the question may not be posed anthropocentrically. On the contrary, it must be shown that: because man is the creature who is transcendent, i.e., who is open to beings in totality and to himself, that through this eccentric character man at the same time also stands within the totality of beings in general — and that only in this way do the question and the idea of a Philosophical Anthropology make sense. The question concerning the essence of human beings is not to be understood in the sense that we study human beings empirically as given objects, nor is it to be understood in such a way that I project an anthropology of man. Rather, the question concerning the essence of human beings only makes sense and is only justifiable insofar as it derives its motivation from philosophy’s central problematic itself, which leads man back beyond himself and into the totality of beings in order to make manifest to him there, with all his freedom, the nothingness of his Dasein. This nothingness is not the occasion for pessimism and melancholy. Instead, it is the occasion for understanding that authentic activity takes place only where there is opposition and that philosophy has the task of throwing man back, so to speak, into the hardness of his fate from the shallow aspect of a man who merely uses the work of the spirit.

Cassirer: I, too, am opposed to leveling. What we both want to, and must, strive for, and also what we can achieve, is that anyone, for all that he remains with his own position, would see not only himself but the other as well. That this must be possible appears to me to lie in the idea of philosophical knowledge in general, in an idea which Heidegger too will appreciate. I do not want to make the attempt to break Heidegger from his position, to force him into another direction of seeing. Instead, I want only to make his position understandable to me.

I believe that where the disagreement lies has already become clearer. It is not fruitful, however, to highlight this disagreement again and again. We maintain a position where little is to be accomplished through arguments which are merely logical. Nobody can be compelled to take up this position, and no such purely logical compulsion can force someone to begin with the position which appears to me to be the essential one. Hence we have been condemned here to a relativity. “What one chooses for a philosophy depends upon what sort of human being one is.” But we may not persevere in this relativity, which would be central for empirical men. And what Heidegger finally said was very important.

Like mine, his position cannot be anthropocentric, and if it does not want to be such, then I ask where the common core of our disagreement lies. That it cannot be in the empirical is clear. We must search again for the common center, precisely in the disagreement. And I say, we do not need to search. For we have this center and, what is more, this is so because there is a common, objective human world in which the differences between individuals have in no way now been superseded, but with the stipulation that the bridge here from individual to individual has now been knocked down. This occurs repeatedly for me in the primal phenomenon of language. Each of us speaks his own language, and it is unthinkable that the language of one of us is carried over into the language of the other. And yet, we understand ourselves through the medium of language. Hence, there is something like the language. And hence there is something like a unity which is higher than the infinitude of the various ways of speaking. Therein lies what is for me the decisive point. And it is for that reason that I start from the Objectivity of the symbolic form, because here the inconceivable has been done. Language is the clearest example. We assert here that we tread on a common ground. We assert this first of all as a postulate. And in spite of all deceptions, we will not become confused about this claim. This is what I would like to call the world of the objective [objektiven] spirit. From Dasein is spun the thread which, through the medium of such an objective spirit, again ties us together with another Dasein. And I believe that there is no other way from Dasein to Dasein than through this world of forms. There is this factum. Should this not be so, then I would not know how there could be something like a self-understanding. Knowing is also just a basic instance of this assertion: that an objective statement can be formulated about a matter and that it has the character of necessity which no longer takes notice of the subjectivity of the individual.

Heidegger rightly said that the basic question of his metaphysics is the same one which Plato and Aristotle defined: what is the being?<10>Was ist das Seiende? And he further said that Kant had again referred to this question which is basic to all metaphysics. This I concede without further ado. But here an essential difference appears to me to exist, namely, with respect to what Kant called the Copernican Turn.<11>die kopernikanische Wendung. At B xxii, Kant actually uses somewhat stronger terms when he refers to “eine gänzliche Revolution” (a complete revolution), after the examples of the geometricians and natural scientists. Indeed, the question of Being appears to me in no way to have been done away with by this turn. That would be a completely false interpretation. But as a result of this turn, the question of Being now comes to have an extremely complicated shape, as it had had in antiquity. Wherein does the turn occur? “Previously it was accepted that knowledge must conform to the object . . . But for once, we now attempt the reverse question. How would it be if it were not our knowledge that must conform to the object, but if instead it were the object that must conform to knowledge?” That means that this question regarding the determinacy of the object is preceded by a question concerning the constitution of the Being of objectivity in general. And what is applicable to this objectivity in general now must also apply to every object within this structure of Being. What is new in this [Copernican] turn appears to me to lie in the fact that now there is no longer one single such structure of Being, but that instead we have completely different ones. Every new structure of Being has its new a priori presuppositions. Kant shows that he was bound to the conditions for the possibility of experience. Kant shows how every kind of new form now also refers to a new world of the objective, how the aesthetic object is not bound to the empirical object, how it has its own a priori categories, how art also builds up a world, but also how these laws are different from the laws of the physical. For this reason, a completely new multiplicity enters into the problem of the object in general. And for this reason, the new Kantian metaphysics comes into being precisely from out of ancient, dogmatic metaphysics. Being in ancient metaphysics was substance, what forms a ground.<12>eine Zugrundeliegende. Being in the new metaphysics is, in my language, no longer the Being of a substance, but rather the Being which starts from a variety of functional determinations and meanings. And the essential point which distinguishes my position from Heidegger’s appears to me to lie here.

I stand by the Kantian posing of the question of the transcendental as Cohen repeatedly formulated it. He saw what is essential to the Transcendental Method in that this method began with a factum, only<13>The fourth edition reads “and now” instead of “only.” it had this general definition: to begin with a factum in order to ask about the possibility of this factum, further narrowed down, while mathematical natural science again and again makes it out to be what is properly questionable. Kant does not stand within this reduction. But I ask about the possibility of the language of the factum. How does it come about, how is this, about which we are able to come to an understanding, thinkable from Dasein to Dasein in this medium? How is it possible that now and in general we can see a work of art as an objective determination, as an Objective being, as this Significant [thing] in its wholeness?

This question must be settled. Perhaps from here on, not all of the questions of Philosophy are to be settled. Perhaps from here on we cannot approach vast areas. But it is necessary that we pose this question in the first place. And I believe that if we have posed this question, we have made access to the question which Heidegger poses free for the first time.

Heidegger: Cassirer’s last question in Kant’s confrontation with the ancients gives me another opportunity to characterize the total work. I say that Plato’s question must be retrieved. This cannot mean that we retreat to the Greeks’ answer. It turns out that Being itself has been dispersed in a multiplicity and that a central problem exists therein, namely, to attain the foundation in order to understand the inner multiplicity of the ways of Being based on the idea of Being. For my part, I am anxious to establish this sense of Being in general as central. Accordingly, the only trouble for my investigations has been judged to be [the need] to attain the horizon for the question concerning Being, its structure and multiplicity.

Mere mediating will never amount to anything productive. It is the essence of philosophy as a finite concern of human beings that it has been confined within the finitude of human beings as something which is not a creative human achievement. Because philosophy opens out onto the totality and what is highest in man, finitude must appear in philosophy in a completely radical way.

What it comes down to is that you take one thing with you from our debate: do not orient yourselves to the variety of positions of philosophizing human beings, and do not occupy yourselves with Cassirer and Heidegger. Rather, the point is that you have come far enough to have felt that we are on the way toward once again getting down to business with the central question of metaphysics. And on top of that, I would like to point out to you that in small measure what you have seen here is the difference between philosophizing human beings in the unity of the problematic, which on a large scale expresses something completely different, and that it is precisely this freeing of itself from the difference of positions and standpoints which is essential in the debate with the history of philosophy, that it is the first step in the history of philosophy; [it is essential to see] precisely how the differentiation of standpoints is the root of the philosophical endeavor.<14>“that it is the first step . . . of philosophy” was added by the editor in the GA edition.

APPENDIX V

On Odebrecht’s and Cassirer’s Critiques of the Kantbook

Basic Question: The Essence and Grounding of the Finitude of Human Knowledge; the Problem of Finitude in General

1. The Finitude of Knowing
(Cassirer, Odebrecht)
(On Their Critiques of My Kant Interpretation)

1) What ought we to find, or do we want to find, from the comparison of our knowing with the absolute? Simply to explain what is meant by the finitude of our knowing, wherein its finitude can be seen.

Absolute knowing is merely a constructed idea (see p. 17), that is, it comes from our knowing, in which the specifically finite has been separated and its essence has been freed. The actual knowledge of the actual Being-at-hand of absolute knowledge — which is to say, the being of God himself — is not needed here. Moreover, we have proven its finitude in the first place precisely by only bringing it to the construction of the leading idea.

2) In absolutely no way is finite knowing “deduced” by me from absolute intuition, as Odebrecht claims (Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie, V, 1, 1931) when he says “the intuitional character of thinking [can be said to] follow necessarily from the broad concept of intuitus originarius.”

Furthermore: in absolutely no way does this follow from anywhere through deduction, but rather it manifests itself to us in the fundamental experience of the dependency upon what is given. Everything remains as it was for the ancients, even if we conceive of designating this as finite knowing (to be sure, the finite must then necessarily be explained differently, as “earthly” — the perspective and level of this interpretation). Thus it must have been composed and named together with and in reference to Kant’s design (see Phenomena and Noumena! Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 23f.!; see Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: finitude — elucidated, wherein it consists with reference to our knowing, with a view toward same).

Thrownness (Geworfenheit), the ground for the finitude of knowing (see Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 19), at first grasped as dependency upon beings other than ourselves. Finitude is primarily not that of knowing; rather, that is but an essential consequence of thrownness. And it is precisely therein that the necessity of thinking as in service to intuition is grounded, assuming that interpretation and determinacy is necessary to the experience of beings (if it was shown to be necessary for finite intuiting qua primary, finite knowledge, then at the same time the appointment [Dienststellung] and the serving [Dienen] are shown to be intrinsic to the understanding (see Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 19f.)).

“Thinking” is the index of finitude, i.e., dependency upon intuition, which itself is dependency upon what is given — thrownness springs forth. This springing-forth, or grounding, means essential relationships. Thinking is not reduced to intuiting (Odebrecht), but is maintained as representing, and to understand the representing from something in general, [is to understand] that for it finite intuition is necessarily required if it is to be knowledge.

“Knowing is primarily intuiting” (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 15, see notes there), i.e., the grounding character in knowing is intuiting. For finite knowing, however, this character as foundational in a primordial sense is indeed necessary, but — precisely because [the knowing] is finite — it is not sufficient.

The formal and apophantic-veritative essences of judgment, then, are shown from the subordinate character of thinking.

The understanding is essential for finite knowing, i.e., it itself surpasses intuition, namely in its character of finitude.