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Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [127-128]

ground of its possibility Ontological knowledge "forms" transcendence, i.e., the holding-open of the horizon which is discernable in advance through the pure schemata. These "spring forth" as the "transcendental product"180 of the transcendental power of imagination. As original, pure synthesis, it forms the essential unity of pure intuition (time) and pure thinking (apperception).

The transcendental power of imagination, however, did not first become the central theme in the Doctrine of the Transcendental Schematism. Rather, it already [had that status] in the preceding stage of the ground-laying, the Transcendental Deduction. Because it is to undertake the original unification, it must already have been mentioned in the second stage, with the first characterization of the essential unity of ontological knowledge. The transcendental power of imagination is hence the ground upon which the inner possibility of ontological knowledge, and with it that of Metaphysica Generalis, is built.

Kant introduces the pure power of imagination as an "indispensable function of the soul."181 To clear the already-laid ground for metaphysics in an explicit way, therefore, means: to determine more precisely a faculty of the human soul. That the laying of the ground for metaphysics finally arrives at such a task is "self-evident," if indeed metaphysics, in Kant's own words, belongs to "human nature." As a consequence, the "Anthropology" which Kant dealt with over the years in his lectures must provide us with information concerning the already-laid ground for metaphysics."182

"The power of imagination (facultas imaginandi) [is] a faculty of intuition, even without the presence of the object."183 Hence, the power of imagination belongs to the faculty of intuition. According to the definition cited above, by intuition we understand first and foremost the empirical intuition of beings. As "sensible faculty," the power of imagination belongs among the faculties of knowledge, which have been divided into sensibility and understanding, and of these the first is presented as the "lower" faculty of knowledge. The power of imagination is a way of sensible intuiting "even without the presence of the object." The intuited being itself does not need to be presenting [anwesend], and furthermore, the imagination does not intuit what it has taken in stride as intuition, as something really and only at hand, as is the case with perception for which the Object "must be represented as present. "184 The power of



180. A 142, B 181.

181. A 78, B 103.

182. In his Marburg dissertation, Die Einbildungskraft bei Kant (1928), H. Marchen undertook the task of [preparing] a monographic presentation and interpretation of Kants teachings concerning the power of imagination in his Anthropology, in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Critique of Judgment, and in the other writings and lectures. The work will appear in volume Xl of the Jahrbuch fur Philosophic und phänomenologische Forschung. The present exposition is limited to what is most necessary for an exclusive orientation to the guiding problem of the laying of the ground for metaphysics.

183. Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Werke, vol. VIII, §28, p. 54.

184. Reicke, Lose Blätter aus Kants Nachlaß (1889), p. lO2.


Martin Heidegger (GA 3) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics