But Kant was not a Kantian. The current, inchoate discovery of metaphysics in Kant can be a useful contribution to an objective inventory of what really is [to be found] in Kant as contrasted with the lopsidedness of the Kantians. But even with that, we still have not reached what is philosophically relevant in Kant. We now have two Kants, and depending on how they evaluate the metaphysics and the epistemology, philosophers will take him one way or the other and will treat the other side as an unpleasant appendage. But what will then be needed is not to create some external synthesis of these two “sides,” but rather to ask why there is this apparent doubling, and where the necessity, and thus the fundamental limits, of Kant’s philosophy lie.96
So solidly does intuition remain the sense and core of knowledge, that even thinking gets the meaning of its function from intuition. [118] Its function is to be simply a means for bringing our knowing face-to-face with the thing itself. Proof of this is the first sentence that opens the investigation proper of the Critique of Pure Reason: “In whatever manner and by whatever means knowledge may relate to objects, that by which it is immediately related to them, and to which all thinking as a means is directed, is intuition” (§1, B 33).97
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For Kant the one who most exactly and decisively formulated this concept of knowledge is Leibniz, and I mention Leibniz because he was of crucial significance both indirectly for Kant and directly for Husserl. Earlier I mentioned Leibniz when I was characterizing Husserl’s critique of psychologism, at the point where it was a matter of showing that Husserl, in his critique, maintained the validity of truthsin-themselves à la Bolzano, whose position relies directly on Leibniz. A characteristic treatise of Leibniz is his De cognitione, veritate, et ideis, “On Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas,” 1684 (in Gerhardt’s edition of Leibniz, vol. 4, pp. 422–426).98 He gives four determinations of knowledge:
96. In Critique of Pure Reason (B 51), Kant speaks of the “sensibility of our intuition” as “that kind of presentation that is peculiar to us.” It is not a productive intuition but a “sensible intuition” that is able to be given something, an intuition “that therefore is called sensible because it is not original. It is not an intuition through which the very existence of the object of intuition would be given (something which, as far as we can see, can belong only to the Original Being). Instead, our intuition is dependent on the existence of the object and therefore is possible only insofar as the presentational capacity of the subject is affected by that existence” (B 72).
97. [Here (Moser, p. 246) Heidegger ends his lecture of Monday, 30 November 1925, to be followed by that of Tuesday, 1 December, which opened with a 620word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]
98. [G. W. F. Leibniz, “Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis” (Novem