180747 VO-L Selfaffection (2011S)

The first seven meetings of this lecture will deal with the problem of self-affection in Kant. Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics will thereby serve as a main reference to interpret this crucial notion in Kant’s late philosophy. It is a text in which Heidegger, in addition to his reading of Kant, tries to formulate his own idea of the “Kehre” for the first time as the basis of a philosophy that is still yet to come. His idea of a distinctive turning point in the history of thinking culminates in this period in the notion of time as a mode of self-affection. And it is this notion of time as an event that will finally lead both thinkers, Kant and Heidegger, to a reconsideration of the notions of space, physics and corporeality in their later philosophies.
In the second half of the semester I would like to show how these later philosophies of space, bodies, self-affection and physics correspond with Indian philosophies. Some works of Paul Deussen, one of the leading Indologists of his time and a close friend of Nietzsche, will serve as a main reference to interpret Indian Vedanta philosophies, especially those of Sankara and their evaluation of self-affection, space, bodies and the relation of thinking and corporeality.