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Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [87-89]

such be taken as a question of validity Instead, the quaestio juris is only the formula for the task of an analytic of transcendence, i.e., of a pure phenomenology of the subjectivity of the subject, namely, as a finite subject.

However, if the fundamental problem presented by the traditional Metaphysica Specialis has been solved by means of the Transcendental Deduction, then has not the ground-laying already achieved its goal in general terms with the stage we just discussed? And at the same time, regarding the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, does not what has been said attest to the right of previous usage to consider the Transcendental Deduction as the central discussion within the positive part of the Doctrine of the Elements? What need is there, then, for yet another stage to the laying of the ground for ontological knowledge? What is it that demands a still more original going-back to the ground of the essential unity of ontological knowledge?

THE FOURTH STAGE OF THE GROUND-LAYING: THE GROUND FOR THE INNER POSSIBILITY OF ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

The inner possibility of ontological knowledge is exhibited from the specific totality of the constitution of transcendence. The medium holding it together is the pure power of imagination. Kant not only finds this result of the groundlaying to be "strange," but he also repeatedly stresses the obscurity into which all discussions of the Transcendental Deduction must move. At the same time, the laying of the ground for ontological knowledge certainly strives—over and above a mere characterization of transcendence—to elucidate it in such a way that it can come to be developed as the systematic totality of a presentation of transcendence (transcendental philosophy=ontology).

Now the Transcendental Deduction has indeed made precisely the totality of ontological knowledge in its unity into a problem. For all that, with the central meaning of finitude and the dominance of the logical (rational) way of posing the question in metaphysics, it is the understanding—or rather its relation to the unity-forming medium, to the pure power of imagination—which comes to the foreground.

However, if all knowledge is primarily intuition and if finite intuition has the character of taking things in stride, then for a fully valid illumination of transcendence the reference of both the transcendental power of imagination and the pure understanding to pure intuition must be explicitly discussed. Such a task, however, leads the transcendental power of imagination and the self-forming of transcendence and its horizons to demonstrate their unifying


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