From Transcendental Subjectivity to Relational Temporality: Kant, Heidegger, and the Ground of Ethics

This article reconsiders the relation between Kant and Heidegger in order to clarify what it might mean to rethink ethics after transcendental philosophy. While Kant grounds moral obligation in the autonomy of a rational, self-legislating subject, Heidegger can be read as transforming transcendental inquiry by relocating the conditions of ethical responsiveness within the temporal, historical, and relational structures of existence. Through a reading of Being and Time in dialogue with later concepts such as Gelassenheit and Lichtung, the article argues that responsibility emerges not primarily from universal norms or sovereign willing, but from Dasein’s situated responsiveness within a shared world. Rather than offering a normative ethics, Heidegger discloses the existential conditions under which ethical meaning becomes possible: finitude, historicity, and being-with others. By tracing a continuity between transcendental inquiry and the existential conditions of ethical responsiveness, the article challenges interpretations that regard Heidegger’s ontology as ethically silent or sharply divided between early and later phases.