Phenomenological Critique Of Critical Philosophy

To interpret Kant's philosophy was an established task of Heidegger when he was trying to deconstruct the history of ontology. According to Heidegger, the question of Being will not become concrete and subtle unless the history of ontology is deconstructed. It will be manifest that to make a detailed inquiry of the meaning of Being is unavoidable in the process of deconstruction, and the significance of bringing up the issue of Being again will emerge at the same time. Finally, it can be said that the meaning of Being dominates Heidegger throughout his elucidation of Kant's philosophy. Reading the theme of first Critique as the founding of metaphysics, Heidegger considers the concerns of Kant as unfolding the possibility of ontological knowledge, which is also the matter of'how a synthetic judgment a prior is possible'. Precisely speaking, what the latter is cares about is, how intuition and concept (category), as heterogeneous elements of knowledge, can be synthesized ontologically through a structural conjunction. Heidegger has found the transcendental power of imagination as a third basic faculty of knowledge in the transcendental deduction of the first version of first Critique. In terms of his explanation, as a intermediate power, the transcendental imagination which is both receptive and spontaneous, combines the sensibility and the understanding. That is to say, being the foundational condition on which objects are given to us, the transcendental power of imagination regulates'structurally'. Furthermore, Heidegger thinks highly of the synthetic function of the transcendental imagination, and he points out that the synthetic activity of transcendental imagination runs through the entire process of our knowing, while the triple syntheses are just three modes of its transcendental synthetic activity. It is because of having a penetrating insight into the precedence of the synthetic activity of the transcendental imagination over the apperception and the capacity of imagination's power to construct the horizon of objectivity in general, Heidegger develops the bearing that the transcendental imagination have on ontological knowledge, namely, it is temporality,which is the shared radix of sensibility and understanding. In this way, the transcendental imagination (now it can be called original time) replaces the apperception and becomes the subjectivity of the subject, so the genuine origin of category is time (which is highlighted in the chapter on theory of scheme). Time in its essential unity of imagination has a central metaphysical function in the Critique of Pure Reason. To sum up, in order to set up a metaphysics of Dasein, Heidegger attempts to bring metaphysics back to its ground by reinterpreting the Kantian themes as funding of metaphysics. But we must note that, the metaphysics of Dasein must be justified within the time. This also explains why he has the greatest esteem for Kantian imagination. All what he aims to show is very clear:it is time that is the basic determination of ontological knowledge and the foundational question of metaphysics.