Freedom for Losing Oneself: Lessons in Spontaneity and Temporality in Kant and Heidegger

I illustrate a formal similarity between the autonomy-heteronomy relation in Kant and the authenticity-inauthenticity relation in Heidegger, which then serves as an introduction to the affinity as well as the differences between Kant’s philosophy of self-consciousness and Heidegger’s investigation of the meaning of being. I sketch this in a two-fold manner: (1) for Kant and Heidegger, freedom is a form of energeia—a self-sustaining and (in some sense) complete or perfected activity. For each it may also be seen as constitutive of our lived experience of time (or temporality, Zeitlichkeit) as the limit within which our everyday being occurs, allowing for fallenness or un-ownedness to manifest inside time; and (2) for both, the possibility of un-ownedness is to be understood through a form of self-deception. We will see that these two basic points are inextricably linked: freedom or spontaneity as a self-sustaining activity underlying philosophy as a whole, and which constitutes the possibility of activity in time, is the condition of the possibility and actuality of the phenomenon of losing one’s self-ownership to oneself within time. The inextricable link can be seen in the way that all activity which is properly described as taking place inside time always already presupposes a relation to the energeia constituting the whole of time. This distinction between being in time and being constitutive of time is registered in what I call the temporal difference. However, the striking disagreement between Kant and Heidegger may also be understood from this same vantage point. I suggest that this difference lies in the way that Kant conceives of the temporal difference, specifically by emphasizing the independence of self-consciousness from time.