The Role of Receptivity in Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation
Authors: Lambeth Morganna ,   Heidegger Circle
Published: July 2021

Commentators on Heidegger’s late-1920s interpretation of Kant often argue that Heidegger reveals himself in this work to be a philosopher of receptivity: Heidegger gives pride of place to the passive aspects of human cognition, our “openness to the world,” over against activity, spontaneity, and understanding (Gordon, 2010, p.7). On this view, Heidegger’s contribution to the transcendental tradition is offering an “affective transcendentalism” (Engelland, 2017, p.223): in response to the central question of transcendental philosophy – What are the prior conditions that enable and structure our experience? – Heidegger emphasizes the prior affectivity that preconditions our experience. While Heidegger’s position, so construed, may appear an exciting strain of transcendental philosophy, it likewise seems to be a considerable departure from Kant. After all, Kant insisted that both spontaneity and receptivity are required for human cognition; this is often referred to as Kant’s “discursivity thesis”. In Kant’s well-known formulation connecting our passively receiving intuitions and actively organizing concepts, “thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75). Therefore, the idea that Heidegger defends a philosophy of receptivity in his interpretive works on Kant contributes to the common view that Heidegger is a bad interpreter of Kant. I challenge the claim that Heidegger defends a philosophy of receptivity in his interpretive works on Kant. This claim derives its plausibility from Heidegger’s opening discussion of intuition, where Heidegger does insist that “thinking is in the service of intuition.” While this discussion grants a kind of primacy to sensibility – in particular, our faculty of sensibility explains why human cognition is finite – I suggest that it does not compromise Kant’s discursivity thesis. Heidegger affirms, with Kant, that understanding and sensibility, two distinct capacities or faculties, are required for cognition. Further, I argue that Heidegger’s claim that sensibility plays a “leading role” in cognition is merely the beginning of Heidegger’s argument; it is not his main intervention. For Heidegger is concerned not with cognition, but with the source of cognition: the very constitution of the human being. And this source, Heidegger insists, is both receptive and spontaneous. Heidegger’s central thesis – that we must consider the imagination to be the fundamental cognitive faculty in Kant – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Under the consensus reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, Heidegger is supposed to be a perfect foil to the Neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant: where the Neo-Kantians privilege spontaneity, Heidegger privileges receptivity. While Heidegger is certainly critical of the Neo-Kantian prioritization of spontaneity, I argue that we must rethink Heidegger’s relationship to the Neo-Kantian view. Heidegger’s main thesis in the Kant interpretation – that the imagination, a faculty that is both spontaneous or receptive, is the “common root” of sensibility and understanding – answers a question that Heidegger takes up from the Marburg Neo-Kantians: what is the origin that unifies the faculties of sensibility and understanding? While the Neo-Kantians insist on an origin in the spontaneous faculty of understanding, Heidegger suggests instead that the origin is the receptive and spontaneous faculty of imagination. Where the Neo-Kantians overemphasize spontaneity, Heidegger restores balance. Ultimately, Heidegger does not prioritize receptivity in his reading of Kant; rather, Heidegger offers a transcendental philosophy that inquires more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.