Stern, David G.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein on the Subject of Kantian Philosophy

1997

"The transcendental subject is not an entity to be found or recognized within experience, but neither is it transcendent, altogether independent of experience; rather, it is like the vanishing point of a perspectival painting--a construction implied by the structure of what is pictured, but not present in it."

In the next sentence, he [Kant] restates this point, stressing the common role of the mind's activity in both cases: The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, is produced the logical form of a judgement, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general. (A79/B104-5)The structure of the self is also the structure of the not-self: both are constituted by the rule-governed activity of the transcendental subject. The transcendental subject is not an entity to be found or recognized within experience, but neither is it transcendent, altogether independent of experience; rather, it is like the vanishing point of a perspectival painting--a construction implied by the structure of what is pictured, but not present in it. But unlike such a focal point, or any other part of a painting, for that matter, its activity structures and constitutes the field of experience as a whole. As a result, the subject matter of philosophy becomes the uncovering of the structure of this philosophical conception of the subject of philosophy: as rule-governed transcendental activity.
(p. 247)

Visual Arts::Painting

Reading

Stern, D. G. "Heidegger and Wittgenstein on the Subject of Kantian Philosophy." Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy. Ed. David E. Klemm and Günter Zöller. Suny Series in Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 245-259.

10/16/2003

01/19/2009