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Adventures of the Double Negation:on Richard Bernstein's Call for Anti-Anti-Humanism

Adventures of the Double Negation:on Richard Bernstein's Call for Anti-Anti-Humanism

by Reiner Schrmann

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1985, pages: 283-291, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/


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Praxis International 283

ADVENTURES OF THE DOUBLE NEGATION: ONRICHARD BERNSTEINS CALL FOR ANTI-ANTI-

HUMANISM*

Reiner Schrmann

Double negations are adventurous strategies to engage in. To be sure,anti-anti-humanism has a strong rhetorical appeal. Who is not

wholeheartedly in favour of the many warm feelings and luminous phantasmsassociated with the term humanism: concern for man, for his values andnoble achievements; devotion to the humanities, hence to progress in learningand education; the ideal of Renaissance man and of the Enlightenment; thefurtherance of the well-being of the greatest number . . . all the ingredients ofthe positive mood Richard Bernstein so eloquently advocates. In sum,anti-anti-humanism stands for life against death. The double negation evokesanti-anti-life, which is to say, anti-deathaway with deathwhich is to say,long live life.

Before responding to him on praxisand Heidegger, I wish to address thisgeneral thrust of his argument and examine whether by it he is not, like Ulysses,much thrust about (polytropos)himself.

Redemptive or compulsive repetition?

Again, double negations are adventurousas adventurous perhaps as anOedipal crisis. The Oedipal conflict is indeed the arch-model of a doublenegation in which life and death are at stake. Richard Bernstein expects fromanti-anti-humanism the constitution of higher forms of life. This expectation

places him in good company. Oedipal struggles contain indeed the possibility ofredemption. In Richard Bernsteins paraphrase of Hegel, they contain thepossibility of a beginning that at once presupposes what has been, breaks withit, and fulfills and redeems it. More specifically, the family relation producesits contradictionthe desire to kill my fatherwhich destroys its originalcontent; but this contradiction can in turn be negated as I go and found a familymyself. Redemption from parricidal impulses is granted through fatherhood.With it, civil societythe higher formappears. It makes life vanquish deathas the social process dissolves stable entities, makes the static dynamic and theparticular, universal. Likewise, anti-anti-humanism could be a strategy that

breaks with man as an entity and redeems him as dynamic and universal.

* This is a commentary, delivered at the 1984 convention of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential

Philosophy in Atlanta, on R. Bernsteins paper, initially entitled Anti-Anti-Humanism, and published as

Heidegger on Humanism in Praxis International5, No. 2: 1-20.


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Praxis International284

But instead of redemptive, the outcome of the double negation may turncompulsive. Whether its strategy heads one way or the other depends on whatyou do or say after the second negation. Kill my father?: first negation.No!: second negation. All is wellat least for the nineteenth-centuryphilosophers whose up-beat mood Richard Bernstein finds so inspiringif yougo on to say: Rather found a family and raise children. Things go less well ifyou say: [Kill my father?] No, no, no! (brackets enclose the simple negation).This sequence merely iterates the second negation, it denatures the redemptionand turns it into compulsion. The qualitative transformation is aborted as thenegation turns obsessive, and it no longer matters whether it is double, triple orquintuple. [Kill my father?] No! is equivalent to: [Kill my father?] No no nono no! Things do not go so well here since repetition-compulsion is held to beenacted by the death instinct rather than the life instinct. The higher form of lifeis done for, and Oedipus miscarries in his duty to generate civil society. Ifanti-[anti-humanism] is equivalent to anti-anti-anti-anti-[anti-humanism],then much more than the up-beat mood that Richard Bernstein so rightfullypraises may be lost. Earlier it seemed that anti-anti-humanism stood for lifeagainst death. But if the reduplication fails in its dialectical task and lapses intocompulsion, the double negation actually stands for death against life. Such atleast is Freuds explanation inBeyond the Pleasure Principle.1What is it that theinstincts seek in compulsive repetition? To return to an earlier stage ofevolution, he says, and approximate the inorganic.

To adjudicate whether the conceptual strategy in Richard Bernsteins doublenegation is redemptive or compulsive, whether it is the work of dialectics or ofThanatos, it is necessary to look briefly at the origin of this entire debate.Unfortunately he offers us no background information on it whatsoever.

Critical humanism and its negation

The expression anti-humanism was coined originally, if I am not mistaken,by Louis Althusser in the early 1970s. It was meant to negate a position, criticalhumanism, which has therefore to be recalled first. Humanism will turn out

to designate those conceptual strategies in the soft sciences that refer allpossible topics to man. One may call those strategies therefore referential.Anti-humanism, on the other hand, will designate systemic strategies. Theirdistinction should produce something akin to the Edison effect in this debate: aconversion of heat into light.

(a) The concept of humanism from which this odyssey of negations set out isone that appeared in France after the Second World War. As opposed to theclassical humanism, Sartre wrote, the critical will, first and foremost,never consider man as an end because he is always in the making. In theclassical viewfrom the Greeks to Kant and beyondman was treated as a

given, an entity, something unchanging, whereas in the critical view he appearsas a perpetually unfulfilled task: not an end, but open-ended. Second, as aconsequence, critical humanism does not render a cult to mankind sincethat would imply that we ascribe a value to man on the basis of the highestdeeds of certain men. This humanism is absurd. Critical humanism is

aCEEOL NL Germany


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prospective rather than retrospective. Third, if man has as yet to becomehuman, this does not imply any absolute goal lying ahead of him. Sartreancritique is a doctrine of action, of mans circumstantial efforts in seekingoutside of himself a goal which is just this liberation, just that particularfulfillment.2 The goal sought after can only be a contingent, never a necessaryone. As open-ended, prospective, and contingent, critical humanism requires,in Sartres terms, a revolution to establish more human relations among allmen. Revolutionary thinking is at the same time a humanist thinking. Theassertion, we, too, are humans lies at the very heart of every revolution.3 Thisimplies an etiology of class conflicts: they arise, not from some anonymous oreven automatic development of capital, but from past and present contingentchoices. It is not things which are ruthless, it is men.4

Thus the class struggle translates into two types of humanism: bourgeois,which, as the offspring of the classical ideals, is the counterpart of racism: it isa practice of exclusion, and proletarian, which is true and positivehumanism.5 Klaus Hartmann considers Sartres humanization of Marxismhis paramount undertaking.6 One may add that it was prompted and madepossible by the publication of Marxs manuscripts of 1844, a decade and a halfearlier. But Sartre, as it were, de-metaphysicizes the young Marx, relegatingamong versions of pre-critical humanism even speculations about mansspecies-being and about its full re-appropriation.

There is an undeniable kinship between Richard Bernsteins Ithaca and this

de-metaphysicized human essence. One thinks one is reading the Critique of Dialectical Reasonwhen one hears him praise the American pragmatists forintimating how we can foster a sense of solidarity and community amonghuman beings, and when he calls for a critical community without anyabsolute beginning points or finalities. But then polytrepein, Homerictumbling-about, sets in. After this salute to the doctrine of essential manquethe doctrine that archaiand teleare never givenone can only be perplexed byhis description of what he likes and wants: a humanism capable of putting usback in touch with ourselves. This is what every metaphysics of full presencephantasized about, from the Platonic dialogue of the soul with itself to the

young Marxs conception of generic being (Gattungswesen). It may take a bitof speculative doing to bring the self in touch with itself while at the same timeholding fast to the absence of absolute beginnings and ends. How can one claimat the same time and from the same point of view (and on the same page) boththe full presence of mans essence and its insurmountable lack? RichardBernsteins very option for man, the position he wishes to redeem throughdouble negation, is already a split vote: for pre-critical, but also criticalhumanism; for metaphysics, but also phenomenology; for essence in Feuer-bachs, but also Sartres sense; for mans presence to himself, but also hisabsence. His referential strategythe method in the soft sciences of referring

all issues back to the standard manfollows two mutually exclusiveprograms, that of the subject appropriating its essential attributes throughpractice, and that of a radical critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity.Even the most cheerful mood will fail to amalgamate into one positionen-telechic with a-teleocratic humanism. For an initial stand to be sublated by


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double negation, this is one platform too many.(b) Althusser coined the term anti-humanism in a discussion of Marx. It is,

however, aimed against the metaphysics of subjectivity in general and its latestversion, critical humanism, in particular. In 1845, Marx broke radically withevery theory that based history and politics on the essence of man.7 Whethergiven as a fact, donne, or as a task, ordonnewhether classical or criticalhuman essence is a standard that obfuscates Marxs chief theoretical discovery.The negation of humanism sets up an alternate theoretical field. Althusser alsospeaks of an alternate continent or problematic. The type of intelligibilityMarxism is capable of providing, he claims, does not encounter the problematicthat refers attributes to a subject, whether these are held to make up theindividual (attributes such as reason, consciousness, or emotions) or toconstitute society (attributes such as labor, historicality,

praxis, or

phronesis).

The conceptual strategies in this alternate theoretical field are not referential,but systemic. The concepts put to work stand in relation, not to one ultimaterepresentation, but to each other.

Much needless lament about entropy and decline would fall off if the critics ofanti-humanism took note of what the phrase designates, namely, the shift inmethods of inquiry which got under way in several sciences in the nineteenthcentury and which has also been described as the structuralist turn. Theoriginal pattern scientists then turned away from was that of attributingaccidents to a substance. The pattern they turned toward was that of a set of

elements defined by its wholeness, its law of transformation, and its self-regulation. In Althusser, these elements are the productive forces, the relationsto production, the infra- and the superstructure, ideologies, etc. In Lvi-Strauss, they are the constituents of symbolic codes. In the early Foucault, theyare, in one instance, labor, life, and language. In each case the inquiry intostructure has yielded insights that the methodic focus on man as the guidingconcept would have precluded.

To seek a type of intelligibility different from the referential-attributive-predicative strategies is no cause for alarm. It may seem extremely danger-ous, as it does to Richard Bernstein, only if one holds that philosophy today

has to be either a theory of communicative action or else will remain, in hiswords, totally inadequate. Such either-ors have been the jaws of alldogmatisms. To understand that systemic inquiries do not encounter, because ofthe kind of questions they raise, the noblest task of the citizendecisionmaking according to ones responsibility (Hans-Georg Gadamer) does notamount to giving up on the humanitas ofhomo humanus. It amounts tolocating each issue in its proper domain. Kant had discovered a comparablecontinental rift between problematics when he established that causality inaccordance with the laws of nature pertains to a philosophical discourse thatdoes not encounter the problem of another causality, that of freedom.8 As it

raises different questions and follows different conceptual strategies, a systemicinquiry does not encountereither to affirm or denyissues such as freedomand responsibility,praxisandphronesis.

This much may suffice as background information on the concept ofanti-humanism.


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Being is said in many ways

Richard Bernstein asks: How are we to account for Heideggers virtualsilence about praxisand phronesis in his later writings? The account is easilygiven. The disjunction that I have traced between two conceptual strategies,attributive versus systemic, indicates the direction. What did Heidegger turntoward in the reversal (Kehre) his thinking underwent around 1930? As RichardBernstein points out, it, too, is expressly directed (at least in the Letter onHumanism) against Sartre. In referential or attributive investigations the termto which qualities such as freedom are attributed sets the standard for thinking.For humanism, man is the first law of thinking. In his anti-humanist strategy,now, Heidegger calls something else the first law of thinking, namely, thatthinking fit the destiny of truth.9 He speaks, not of problematics orcontinents, but of sites. What he turns toward in the Kehreare the synchronicconstellations in the history of the West as well as the traits of their diachronictransformations. He calls the synchronic regularities for instance fundamentalpositions,10 epochal stamps or stampings,11 jointures,12 or simplyconstellations.13 As the phrase destiny of truth suggests, these are all wordswith which to address the mode of unconcealedness (altheia) that predomi-nates in a given age or era. The diachronic transformations are described notonly as destiny (Geschick) and its unfolding,14 but also as a freesequence,15 or as sudden epochs.16 All of these terms pertain to a strategy in

which man does not play the role of a theoretical standard. In its new sitethinking has, from its starting point, given up the pre-eminence of conscious-ness and its consequence, the pre-eminence of man.17 The later Heideggerdevotes much of his effort to laying bare the traits of something all-pervading which pervades beings destiny from its beginning to itscompletion.18 His deduction of the rules for diachronic transformationwhich this is not the place even to outlinedisplaces the categorial. He seeksenduring features, no longer upon man, but in history. What this ishowever theplace to indicate is the guiding issue which Heideggers anti-humanist, that is,systemic inquiry is meant to elucidate.

Richard Bernstein has indeed given a paper on anti-anti-humanism andHeidegger in which he says not only little about humanism and nothing aboutanti-humanism, but equally little about Heideggers one persistent question,the being question, and nothing about the one answer he obstinately tries tobring to bear on it, time. The titles of both Heideggers best known and his lastpublicationBeing and Time and On Time and Beingindicate this abidingpreoccupation. In the late 1930s he even stated that the question of being andtime was a matter of thinking being as time. This, he added, is the mostdifficult thought of philosophy.19 Of that most difficult thought, let alone ofthe reasons why it can only be approached through a systemic, not a referential

inquiry, Richard Bernstein tells us nothing. The necessity of raising thequestion of being otherwise than in reference to man lies, however, at the coreof his topic.

The reason why referential thinking is incapable of tackling that mostdifficult issue is that, by definition, this kind of philosophy identifies being with


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one entity or another. Heidegger lists some such entities historically repre-sented as ultimate: the suprasensory World, the Ideas, God, the moral Law,the authority of Reason, the Happiness of the greatest number, Culture,Civilization.20 It is immediately obvious that these representations from whichmetaphysicians have taken their cue are one and all related to man. That is thereason why Heidegger can claim not only that metaphysics is humanisticthrough and through, but also that it is nihilistic. Inasmuch as the question,What is being? has consistently been answered by pointing toward one entityheld to be most intensely present, being qua being has been worth nothing forthe tradition. One can only agree with Richard Bernsteins equation philoso-phy = metaphysics = humanism = nihilism (enframing, however, does notpertain to this series of terms since it designates one stage in that history, not thevery lineage of stages), although one may feel distressed at his failure to provideany reason for that equation in terms of the temporality of being.

The most difficult thought, that of the temporality of being itself, was stillunattainable in Being and Time since fundamental ontology was assigned thetask of tracing the originary rootedness21 of all phenomena in Dasein. Theproject ofBeing and Time, then, ran into a dead end because of its starting point,Dasein, which entailed the impossibility of stepping from mans Zeitlichkeit tobeings Temporalitt.22 The most difficult question cannot be thematized inrelation to the root or referent man since the very quest for one ultimatephenomenal root defines the thematic continent from which Heidegger, with

the reversal in his thinking, turns away. No, the concept root makes itimpossible to articulate mans rapport to being.23

Why and in what way, then, does the systemic, not the referential,pre-understanding allow one to think beingastime? It does so by opening upthe ontological difference as a two-fold step back from phenomena, that is, as athree-tiered difference. Being is spoken of in many ways: nominatively (a beingor entity), adverbially (epochal ways of being), and infinitively (to be).

Metaphysicians have not exactly forgotten the ontological difference, butthey have inquired about being only for the sake of entities and not for beingsown sake. They have stepped back from entities to their way of being that

makes them entities: from la onta to ousia, or from entia to entitasinHeideggers terms, from das Seiende to die Seiendheit, beingness. Interestedexclusively in grounding entities, they have omitted to inquire into being, dasSein (literally the to-be), independently of such groundedness. The decisivelayer in this triad is the middle one, beingness, which is conditioned by beingbut conditions the entities. What this means concretely appears, however, onlywhen the triad is phrased in temporal terms. There the middle layer is made upof what I described earlier as the fundamental positions, epochal stamps,jointures or constellations of unconcealedness in history. Thus the stars areentities that enter into successive systems of presence. They have one way of

being present when Aristotle treats them as divinities endowed with reason,soul and causal efficacythe only intelligibles we can also see. They haveanother mode of presence when, to a medieval person, they are creatures eachpropelled by its angel, and another mode still in the early modern designs ofcelestial mechanics. As descriptive, Heideggers phenomenology of the history


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of being steps back from entities to these epochal modes of presence; astranscendental, it steps back from these modes to being itself, now understoodas the event of presencing. One may call temporal difference the triad:present entitymode of presenceevent of presencing (das Anwesende, dieAnwesenheit, das Anwesen). This three-tiered temporal difference is Heideg-gers last word in his systemic, non-humanist, inquiry into being as time.

The politics of mortals

Phenomenologists have the reputation of proving under-equipped when itcomes to politics. If they claim for their discourse the status of meredescription, they can do a phenomenology of any regime; if they claim acritical-transcendental status, they make it their profession to step back fromthe struggle of regimes to the acts of consciousness that make them at allpossible. In either case, intervention in the public sphere is not the phenomeno-logists forte.

This state of the profession is true of all phenomenologies that trace politicalformations to acts or possible acts, latencies, in the subject. The state ofphenomenological research looks different as one thematizes the historicalnetworks into which any entity must enter to become a phenomenonthat is,as phenomenality is constituted, not by consciousness, but by the economy ofinterconnections within which a phenomenon occurs. Then it appears that the

epochal economies in the West have been dominated since the Greeks by oneultimate representation. To systematize, here again: in the Greek context, thatrepresentation would be nature; in the Latin, God; and in the modern, thesubject. The step back from modes of presence to being as presencing isdescribed by Heidegger as the entry into the event.24 This is to say that thoseepochal modes of presence need not be dominated by one arch-present entity;that the forgottenness of being is nothing other than that domination, and theretrieval or recollection of the being-question, nothing other than an end to thatdomination. The entry into the event requires a laboring through metaphysicsand an eventual exit from underneath its sway. It requires the active struggle

against those representations the tradition has held supreme and which havealready lost their credibility. The enumeration of referents quoted earliertheIdeas, God, Reason, Culture, etc.concludes indeed; today these representa-tions suffer the loss of their constructive force and become void.25 This is tobe understood not only in regard to any single referent, e.g., reason, but to allepochal economies stamped by a supreme referent of whatever kind it may be.The self-emptying of ultimate referents has to be understood as the end ofanthropocentrism, since, as I have shown, these various figures are butvariations upon the epochal rule of man. The task of removing remaininginstances of an organizing First, when read together with the task of an open

resistance against humanism26against man as the standardappearsthen as the practical corollary to the task of living differently with our death.The rational living beings must as yet becomemortals.27 As animal rationale,man rules supreme over his world; as mortal, he is one variable in the systemicplay of the world. Mortal is mans most thoughtful name in Heideggers


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anti-humanist strategy. Mortals have renounced all ultimate holds. Only asmortals can we enter into the event. Rational animal is an attributive-predicative-referential concept while mortal is a systemic one. This isobvious from the context in Heidegger in which it appears, the discussion of thefour-fold.

Is anti-anti-humanism a politics of mortals? Hardly so since sublation andredemption are nothing if not devices against mortality. One might havebelieved that the redemptive paradigm in politics had found its end atWaterloo, when the world-spirit on horseback (Hegel on Napoleon), thegreat redeemer of family and civil society, was forced to dismount. Isanti-anti-humanism then a theoretical tool for reconciliation among groups insociety? Hardly, since, as I have shown, its theoretical starting point amounts toa double bind: the conceptual support system of position and determinatenegation is unquestioningly presupposed and equally unquestioningly rejectedas a metaphysics of subjectivity. As a consequence, the dialectical reconcilia-tion Richard Bernstein suggests is more miraculous than marvelous. Is itperhaps a usable critical tool, comparable precisely to Nietzsches philosophyof the hammer? With a hammer one locates hollow spots in a construct, breaksoff what is rotten, and frees dormant forms. Due to the split option at theoutset, anti-anti-humanism proves, however, to be what all Heidegger readersare familiar with, a broken hammer. When its unusability is discovered,equipment becomes conspicuous.28 What does become conspicuous in this

piece of slashed equipment is, I am afraid, the syndrome of repetition-compulsion. It can and should, for the sake of clarity, be put in terms of theEnlightenment tradition. That legacy is merely beingclaimed and claimed againby Richard Bernstein. The question is whether one is willing to think of praxisotherwise than in terms of determinations affecting an actor, otherwise thanreferentially. Concerning activities such as myth-telling and laboring, thatwillingness seems to have quelled most resistances. The repetition syndrome isat its deadliest in the axiom of all orthodoxies: Non nova, sed nove, no newteachings, only the old ones stated anew. This, not the step from referential tosystemic analysesfrom humanism to anti-humanismis the true col-

lapse of the enlightenment project.Kant defined enlightenment as mans release from his self-incurred

tutelage.29 What is it that men have incurred as their oldest and mostcomforting tutelage? The representational dominance of ultimate referents.Their doubtful comfort will not be broken by reiterating no-no beforeanother thinking, called for by the possibility of another beginning (the sense ofnovelty that, ironically, Richard Bernstein praises about the nineteenthcentury!), and requiring another praxis: the politics of mortals. Inasmuch asthis other praxis consists in bringing down those referents already void, itthepolitics of mortals, not anti-anti-humanismtruly releases men from their

self-incurred tutelage.


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NOTES

1 Sigmund Freud,Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ch. 3-5, trans. James Strachey (New York:

Liveright, 1961), pp. 12-37.2 Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. B. Frechtman (New York:

Philosophical Library, 1957), pp. 49-51.3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Materialism and Revolution, in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans.

A. Michelson (New York: Criterion, 1955), p. 56.4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London:

Humanities, 1976), p. 748.5 Ibid, pp. 752 and 800.6 Klaus Hartmann, Sartres Sozialphilosophie: Eine Untersuchung zur Critique de la raison

dialectique (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), p. 193.7 Louis Althusser,For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 227.8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 472.9 Martin Heidegger,Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper, 1977), p. 241.

10 Grundstellung, e.g., What is A Thing? trans. W.B. Barton and V. Deutsch (Chicago:Regnery, 1967), pp. 96 and 183.

11 Prgung, e.g.. Identity and Difference, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1969),p. 62; Geprge, ibid., p. 58.

12 Gefge, e.g., The Question of Being, trans. J.T. Wilde and W. Kluback (New Haven:Twayne, 1958), p. 105.

13 Konstellation, e.g., The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt (New York:Harper, 1977), p. 49.

14 entfalten, e.g., The Question of Being, op. cit., p. 87, or Austrag, e.g., What is a Thing?,op. cit., p. 183.15 freie Folge, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 52.16 jhe Epochen, The Question Concerning Technology, op. cit., p.54.17 Vier Seminare(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), p. 125.18 Identity and Difference, op. cit., pp. 51 and 67.19 Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art, vol. 1, trans. David F. Krell (New York: Harper,

1979), p. 20 (emphasis added).20 The Question Concerning Technology, op. cit., p. 65.21 Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 377.

The German text has ursprngliche Verwurzelung.

22 See ibid., p. 63 (the translators render the first term as temporality and the second asTemporality).

23 Vier Seminare, op. cit., p. 127.24 On Time and Being, op. cit., p. 41 (the translator renders Ereignishere as Appropriation).25 See above, note 20.26 Basic Writings, op. cit., p. 225.27 Pojetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), p. 179.28 Being and Time, op. cit., p. 102.29 Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (A481), trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck,

Kant: On History(Idianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1963), p. 3.

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