Introduction to Heidegger’s understanding of transcendental imagination

Abstract

The attempt to express transcendental imagination as a critical point in Kant’s theory of knowledge is as old as the Critique of Pure Reason. It is implicitly present within Kant’s philosophical system – in the differences and uncertainties encountered when comparing the content of the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason – and in the large number of subsequent interpretations of the spirit and letter of Kant’s philosophy. Ambivalences related to expressing the clear nature and role of transcendental imagination in the process of acquiring knowledge and/or grounding ontology are inseparable from questions related to the nature of the relationship between transcendental imagination and transcendental apperception, but also significantly related to questions related to the nature of the schematic “relationship” of pure forms of sensibility and pure forms of reason. In this paper, we will attempt to point to the specificities of Heidegger’s temporal approach to the problem of transcendental imagination. Namely, we will ask whether sensibility and reason are a kind of integral mode of transcendental imagination – specific ways of its manifestation – or whether transcendental imagination is their external, artificial, intermediary. Is it, as Heidegger suggests, transcendental imagination the common root of sensibility and reason, or does that root remain, as Kant claims – inscrutable and hidden?