horizon described above for the interpretation of beings with regard to their essentia and existentia can be carried out only by making intelligible from the most distinctive constitution of the Dasein's being why the Dasein primarily and for the most part has to understand the being of beings in the horizon of productive-intuitive comportment. We must ask, What function does the action of producing and using in the broadest sense have within the Dasein itself? The answer is possible only if the constitution of the Dasein' s being is first brought to light in its general basic features, that is, if the ontology of the Dasein is made secure. Then it can be asked whether from the Dasein's mode of being, from its way of existing, it can be made intelligible why ontology is oriented at first naively in conformity with this productive or perceptual-intuitive comportment. However, we are not yet prepared for the more penetrating analysis of the Dasein's mode of being. What we have to see for the present is only that ancient ontology interprets a being in its being by way either of production or perception and that, since Kant also interprets actuality with reference to perception, there is manifest here an undeviating continuity of tradition.
b) The inner connection between ancient (medieval) and Kantian ontology
Thus the attempt to get to the roots of the problem fixed in the second thesis leads us anew to the same task as did the original interpretation of the Kantian thesis. The Kantian interpretation of actuality by recourse to perception and intuition generally lies in the same direction as the Greek interpretation of being by reference to noein and theorein. But with Kant, and already long before him, the stock of ontological categories handed down from antiquity had become routine, deracinated and deprived of its native soil, its origin no longer understood.
If an inner connection exists in this way between ancient and Kantian ontology then—on the basis of the interpretation of ancient ontology, hence of productive comportment and its understanding of being—we must also be able to make clear to ourselves what Kant's interpretation of actuality as absolute position really means. Obviously, absolute positing does not mean for Kant that the subject posits the actual from within itself outside itself in the sense that it freely and arbitrarily first deposits something of the kind there and subjectively assumes something to be actual, for some reason or other judges that something is actual. Rather, absolute positing understood properly—even if Kant does not interpret it explicitly—means positing as the letting something stand of its own self and indeed absolutely, as detached, set free as "an und vor sich selbst," in and for its own self, as Kant says. If phenomenological interpretation is pushed far