Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: The Violence and the Charity advances a sharply delimited wager: the notorious boldness of Heidegger’s Kant-book becomes explanatorily disciplined once the guiding procedure of reading—its economy of “violence” and “charity”—is reconstructed with care. Morganna Lambeth’s contribution is to make that procedure explicit and to show, textually and argumentatively, how it yields both a determinate through-line in the Critique of Pure Reason and a clarified picture of Heidegger’s own philosophical commitments. She argues that Heidegger works with a reconstructive hermeneutics attuned to internal tensions, distinguishing competing lines where Kant’s exposition wavers and ranking them by phenomenological and systematic force. The interpreter’s “violence” is the rigor with which less compelling lines are set aside; the “charity” is the consistent preference for the most illuminating path where the text itself divides. On this basis Lambeth tracks how a two-line method isolates the imaginative unification of receptivity and spontaneity, locates the Schematism and both Deductions as pivot points, and makes legible a deepened temporal idealism. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in showing that this is neither ventriloquism nor free construction, but a disciplined response to a text that repeatedly struggles to say what it is trying to say.
Lambeth begins from the charge that Heidegger reads himself into Kant and, turning that charge into a research problem, reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretive stance as a worked-out alternative to the familiar ideal of deference to the letter of the text. The interpreter for whom truth in the subject-matter serves as the regulative aim must risk disagreement with the surface continuity of an author’s prose; but such risk is managed by a method that seeks difference inside the text before supplying difference from without. Hence the emphasis on “two strands”—a phrase Lambeth anchors in Heidegger’s own descriptions—by which Kant’s argument is read as intermittently dividing into a line that privileges the understanding and one that privileges the imagination. What distinguishes Heidegger’s reconstructive “dialogue” from ventriloquism, she shows, is the attribution and explanation of error alongside the defense of insight: the inferior line is neither discarded nor harmonized away; it is accounted for as a philosophically intelligible retreat toward inherited securities when the stakes of a novel position become too high. The upshot is a model of charitable reconstruction that is fully compatible with principled disagreement about parts of the text, and that insists on treating the whole by explaining the presence of its less plausible moments.
The outer frame is exact in its orientation: Heidegger’s reading is an experiment in fundamental ontology as a way of receiving Kant. Lambeth shows him recasting the Critique not as psychology or empirical anthropology but as an inquiry into the basic constitution that makes synthetic a priori cognition possible; in his idiom, an ontology of the finite knower that grounds any possible ontology of objects. This alignment, which she secures by close attention to Heidegger’s vocabulary and to his presentation of the Kantbuch as a “laying of the ground,” fixes the horizon within which the interpretive decisions that follow make sense. The “dialogue” proceeds, on Lambeth’s reconstruction, by taking over Kant’s question—how does discursive finite cognition, requiring both receptivity and spontaneity, achieve its necessary unity?—and by using Kant’s own resources (forms of intuition, categories, the faculty inventory) to propose a better-supported answer than the tradition tends to hear.
The decisive methodological move is the articulation of a two-strand reading that refuses to conflate all of Kant into a single coherent line. Lambeth retrieves Heidegger’s insistence that tension in a great text is evidence rather than defect: where arguments pull apart, the task is to disentangle, rank, and defend. She locates the first major line in the privilege Kant often accords to the understanding—an inheritance of the “traditional privileged position of logic”—and the second in scattered but potent claims and hints that the imaginative formation of time is the locus of unification. For Lambeth, Heidegger’s “violence” is simply the fortitude to let the second line speak where it offers a more compelling answer to the Critique’s leading question; his “charity” is the sustained discipline of arguing for that preference from within Kant’s own devices.
From this methodological fulcrum the reconstructive narrative tightens around the central problem of finite discursivity. Lambeth treats Heidegger’s fidelity to discursivity—two qualitatively distinct powers must cooperate in finite knowing—as a constant, and she shows how the primacy of intuition functions diagnostically, not eliminatively: to say that cognizing is primarily intuiting is to force the question of what can possibly join intuition to the rule-bearing power without recourse to an atemporal legislator. The answer is the imagination understood not as a handmaiden of thought but as a heterogeneous common root: a unity formed by three interlaced temporal capacities that are at once receptive and spontaneous. Because it is both, the imagination can both produce rules and receive them as binding—a feature Lambeth singles out as decisive for the very possibility of synthetic a priori judgment.
The “root” talk is not a metaphysical hypostasis. Lambeth emphasizes Heidegger’s refusal of the old game in which a single deeper power causally generates the others. The root is heterogeneous: a structured unity of qualitatively distinct capacities—retentive holding-on, present articulation, anticipatory projection—that reciprocally refer to one another. In this sense imagination is root because it is the locus in which sensibility and understanding are already operating together as one temporalizing complex. Thus the familiar contrast—space and time over here, categories over there—becomes an internal difference of roles within a single process in which time is formed into a succession and the categories are fixed as stable rules in and through that very formation. Lambeth’s textual warrant is precise: neither “pure intuiting of time” nor “pure thinking of the categories” exists outside this process; receptivity fixes rule-boundedness and spontaneity articulates time as a sequence of nows.
The recurrent charge that such a root would simply repeat German Idealist reductions is pre-empted by Lambeth’s careful account of how Heidegger avoids both the homogeneous-originary-power model and illicit causal stories about supersensible faculties. Since Kant’s own critical restrictions bar the extension of categories like causality to the faculties, any “common root” must be construed non-causally. Heidegger’s unification is structural, not generative: it displays the togetherness already implicit in the lawful functioning of sensibility and understanding. In Lambeth’s rendering, this is why the root can unify without erasing difference and can underwrite bindingness without collapsing into sheer production.
Once the root is conceptually prepared, Lambeth re-stages the Analytic as a sequence of anticipations and groundings that make the two-line method vivid. The Metaphysical Deduction, she shows, is a paradigmatic site where the dominant line falters. The attempt to derive categories from the logical forms of judgment inherits its table, presumes what it must show, and remains phenomenologically thin with respect to how categories get their empirical purchase. These defects are not waved away; they open space for a different line to surface in the very places where Kant strains against his own set-up—moments where the imagination is tacitly invoked as what first “prepares and renders accessible” the manifold in a way a purely logical mapping cannot. On Lambeth’s account, the anticipatory force of the Deduction is exactly this surfacing of a submerged line; the work of the Schematism then provides the ground.
The Schematism, in Lambeth’s exposition, is the core of the whole enterprise. If one asks how categories first become categories as rules that can ever bind experience, the answer is: by being schematized—by being formed as time-rules through the imagination’s working with pure temporal relations. That is why those eleven pages are, for Heidegger, the central core of the Critique: here the categories are formed first of all as categories and not merely enumerated or mapped; here the understanding’s generalities are fixed as temporally articulable identities and connections. This is also the point at which the heterogeneous root ceases to be a conjecture and becomes a structured process with empirical consequences: the same imaginative act that stabilizes the rules articulates time as unidirectional sequence, allowing nature to show up as what can be identified and connected according to stable expectations.
The Transcendental Deduction, accordingly, is not a separate island but the hinge on which the whole turns. Lambeth reconstructs Heidegger’s reading of the three syntheses so that their empirical description is inseparable from their transcendental rooting: apprehension articulates a now in a way already shot through with retention and anticipation; reproduction’s reach into the no-longer is immediately available as offering; recognition’s rule-governed projection is a doing that is itself receptive to what can reappear. This is the point at which the standard identification of recognition with an atemporal understanding is displaced: recognition belongs to time because the “I can” that binds a rule does so as a temporal power. The unity of the three syntheses is thus nothing other than the unity of imagination as the finite knower’s way of being temporal. Lambeth’s claim that the Deduction clarifies the temporal dimension of apperception—and thereby reorients the relation between Aesthetic and Analytic—follows directly from her prior analyses of anticipation and ground.
What, then, of “violence” and “charity”? The pair names, in Lambeth’s treatment, a methodological economy rather than a mood. Violence is the exacting refusal to let the prestige of logic or the comfort of a received scheme dictate the answer to Kant’s own question; charity is the consistent willingness to give the text’s best line full voice, even when it unsettles the distribution of functions that the Critique itself sometimes authorizes. Crucially, Lambeth insists that Heidegger does not merely prefer the imaginative line; he explains the persistence and power of the other line by developing a theory of error. Here she turns to Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety: when a thinker confronts an underdetermined origin—a structure that cannot be safely grounded in a single faculty without remainder—there is a standing temptation to withdraw to stability. Kant’s occasional retrenchments (including the B-revision’s reassignment of imagination’s status) are thus made philosophically intelligible without being excused. The method treats the whole text by refusing to discard what it rejects; it explains why the less compelling line had the authority it had.
Lambeth keeps Heidegger’s neighbors in view only insofar as doing so clarifies what is at stake. The Neo-Kantians radicalize the understanding’s privilege by dissolving sensibility into conceptual function; the German Idealists hunt for a homogeneous original power from which the faculties can be generated. Heidegger’s wager, as she renders it, is that one can accept the Neo-Kantian call for unification without paying the price of erased discursivity, and one can pursue the Idealist lure of a common root without importing illicit causality or homogeneous origin. The imagination’s polyvalence—its being at once receptive and spontaneous—secures the bindingness and stability that a purely spontaneous origin could not; its heterogeneity secures unity without reduction. The triadic basic structure (sensibility–imagination–understanding) thus answers the duality-of-stems framing by making imagination neither a third wheel nor a mere function, but the place where the other two are one.
A particular strength of Lambeth’s study is her attention to composition and displacement: how one portion of Heidegger’s reconstruction prepares another and is then re-situated by it. The failure-patterns in the Metaphysical Deduction anticipate the need for a temporal origin of rules; the Schematism then grounds the Deduction by exhibiting the imaginative formation that makes categorial binding possible at all; the Deduction, properly temporalized, reorients the Aesthetic by showing that the form of time at stake in intuition already bears the mark of imaginative self-formation. The net effect is that early motifs (time, finitude, unity of faculties) are re-entered from later vantage points (temporal rules, temporal syntheses), and what initially appeared as the Analytic’s internal sequence shows up as an ellipse whose passes are mutually determining. Lambeth’s repeated use of “anticipation” and “ground” is not decorative; it is the architecture of the reading.
From here Lambeth turns to the explicit question of time’s form and its genesis. If the imaginative root is temporal, and if the categories are formed as rules only through time-work, what is the status of the linear, homogeneous time in which natural objects are encountered and measured? Her answer is that Heidegger uncovers in the Critique a structure of self-affection: the imagination’s own temporalizing—its interplay of retaining, presenting, anticipating—affects itself so as to yield the sequence of nows, a priori and as a pure intuition. The “ideality of time,” in Kant’s sense, is preserved and deepened: time is relative to the standpoint of a finite knower; but the process by which that standpoint articulates time as linear succession is made explicit and is shown to be internally motivated by the structure of finite subjectivity. Lambeth’s textual anchor here is unambiguous: pure time “must come from the self,” is “derived” from the primal activities of the three syntheses, and “springs” from the ecstases that determine selfhood.
This deepening has two large consequences that Lambeth brings into clear focus. First, it enables a reconciliation with the realist moment at the outset of the Kantbuch: once linear time is understood as the ontological framework in which beings can appear as already at hand, the claim that we are not “ontically creative” but “ontologically creative” becomes coherent. We contribute the horizon in virtue of which independent beings can be encountered as what they are for a finite knower. Second, it allows for a genuinely historical register: because the formation of linear time is an interpretive achievement of our temporal constitution rather than a necessary emanation, other articulations are in principle available. The history of Being, anticipated here, is the history of such articulations. Lambeth emphasizes that the argument for this idealism in the Kant project is more sophisticated than in Being and Time: it no longer merely traces back features of world-time to temporality; it explains the process whereby temporality temporalizes itself into linear succession.
By the time Lambeth gathers her results, the earlier charges against Heidegger’s reading have lost much of their force. The interpretation is neither a monologue nor a mere overlay; it is a disciplined disentangling of lines internal to the Critique, arguing for one as the best response to Kant’s own question while explaining, rather than silencing, the other. The consequences she inventories—on metaphysics, discursivity, conceptualism, idealism, historicism—follow from that procedure rather than preceding it. Metaphysics, for instance, is grounded in the a priori constitution of finite knowers, which means that its “foundation” is the structured openness of imaginative temporality rather than a ledger of eternal contents; discursivity is secured because unity without reduction is the very meaning of a heterogeneous root; conceptualism is transformed because the category as rule is nothing apart from its time-rule; idealism is deepened because the form of time is shown as the outcome of self-affection; and historicism becomes available as a live consequence because other self-affective articulations of time are possible. Each of these theses is legible in the evidence Lambeth amasses from Heidegger’s own texts, including the insistence that the Schematism is the “central core” where categories are first formed as categories.
One may object, of course, at local junctures—at how the three syntheses are distributed, or whether recognition can be pried from the understanding without remainder—but Lambeth’s achievement is to have shown how such objections should be framed. They are disputes over the ranking of internal lines, not denials of method. And because the method itself incorporates a theory of error, even Heidegger’s later reservations about the “violence” of the Kantbuch can be weighed without capitulation: read as a description of the danger of dialogue rather than a retraction of principle, they do not invalidate the practice Lambeth reconstructs.
The compositional rhythm of Lambeth’s own study mirrors the procedure it defends. She begins by fixing the horizon (fundamental ontology, finitude, receptivity, time), turns to the method and its worked-out theory of error, then re-enters Kant’s Analytic at three strategically chosen joints—Metaphysical Deduction, Schematism, Deduction—so that anticipation and ground can be seen operating, and finally harvests the systematic consequences, including the explicit account of self-affection that clarifies the dependence of linear time on originary temporality. At each step earlier claims are displaced by later gains without erasure: the book not only argues for a two-strand method; it performs one.
Clarifying, then: Lambeth does not rehabilitate Heidegger’s Kant by smoothing away its hard edges; she clarifies how the edges cut. The “violence” is the severity required to hold Kant to his own best resources when the familiar securities of logical privilege and faculty-dualism press for compliance; the “charity” is the care with which the text’s strongest line is allowed to unfold, even when it requires reading canonical sections against their most travelled paths. The result is an interpretation in which the Critique solves its own central problem by way of imagination’s temporal syntheses, and in which Heidegger’s Kant emerges not as a mirror of Heidegger, nor as a casualty of method, but as a rigorously defended hypothesis about how the text itself gets to where it is going. In that sense the work makes good on its title: it shows how a hermeneutics that draws blood can still be a form of fidelity, and how violence and charity congeal into method when the point is to let a difficult book make plain the insight it intermittently conceals.
Simon Gros 
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