and keeps them divided thereafter, he runs up against the problem of how to mediate these two stems and their functions, how to unify them, and what might be the underlying basis that supports the real, concrete unity of knowledge. As a result, Kant thinks he is forced in a way to dissolve one stem into the other—sensibility into understanding—or in any event to base sensibility on understanding. He likewise thinks that he is forced to introduce the phenomenon of the imagination to mediate them. Kant fails to clarify the imagination phenomenologically; above all he leaves obscure the imagination’s proper and basic relations to both sensibility and understanding. Naturally there are some sentences and interpretations that delineate the relations, but not in the sense of an actual exposition of these two structures.
Kant has neglected to plow up the field, phenomenologically and categorially, where these two stems—and especially what is supposed to mediate them—might grow in the first place. The Idealism that followed Kant was bound to neglect this task even more, because it could no longer muster the sober dispassion and solidity for the job as Kant had set it out. Husserl is the first one to see and elaborate the fundamental importance and universal significance of this task [284] in his Ideas. People characterize that text as Kantian, but in its foundations it is essentially more radical than Kant could ever be.
b) The constitutive moments of ordering
On the premise of the intrinsic relation of being-given to beingthought, and in keeping with Kant’s procedure, we now pursue the connection of the idea of order with the phenomenon of the form of intuition. We begin with a specific order within everyday experience (Kant’s “empirical intuition”), above all in order to show how previewing belongs to the act of ordering.
Suppose we have a bunch of spheres of different sizes and made of different kinds of material—and suppose they are be ordered. The bunch of spheres is unordered, and the task is to sort them out and group them. But how? The assignment—“The spheres are to be ordered”—is insufficiently defined because nothing has been said about what the job entails. We know the unordered is to be ordered, but the question is: Ordered in terms of what? The job of putting something in order is adequately defined only when the basis-on-which is specified. Yes, the assignment could be presented in such a way that the “how” is not stated. But that does not mean the “basis-on-which” is not part of the task of ordering or has been forgotten or is not there because it’s irrelevant. No, the “basis-on-which” has been thought through so well that it is obvious. The basis-on-which is not defined but it is still constitutive of the job of putting things in order. As always, ordering is by nature an ordering on the basis of something. So: