292

Disclosure of the Origin of Categories [430-431]

belongs to pure synthesis as such and how do its concrete variations look as regional principles of nature?

By contrast, Kant succumbs to the external schema of the division of logic and thus deprives himself of a clear and radical result. However, this claim cannot be readily sustained: The segment devoted to schematism, which stands between the analytic of concept and principles and which cannot have any correspondence to formal logic, is Kant's elementary self-defense against violation by the external architectonic of formal logic, i.e., concept, judgment, and conclusion.

In the schematism Kant attempts to grasp the synthesis a priori of the productive power of imagination in a unified and original manner. He makes this attempt in such a way that he no longer tries to work out more dearly the pure essence of categories, but rather [to work out] the basis of this essence, the inner possibility of categories, that is, the pure transcendental propositions of time. Now Kant tries to show that pure concepts of understanding as categories function only on the basis of a procedure of understanding according to which understanding obtains a pure image for its concepts in pure time. Understanding is closely tied into the original unity of the three time-related modes of synthesis, as we have basically worked it out already. Precisely as understanding it can function in no other way than as essentially related to time. For Kant schematism is understanding's character as necessarily an enactment by which understanding presents itself in time, that is, working with schemata, shapes, images or views, working with what is purely intuitable, that is, working with pure temporal relations. The schemata of pure concepts of understanding, the categories, are a priori time-determinations and as such they are a transcendental product of the pure power of imagination.29

In the way in which we set out to interpret the transcendental aesthetic and analytic, especially the transcendental deduction, we fundamentally dealt with the problem of the schematism. Viewed in terms of the arrangement of the Kantian presentation, the schematism grounds the transcendental deduction, although Kant does not understand schematism in this way. Viewed in terms of our interpretation, the schematism is a reference to the original sphere of the radical grounding of the possibility of ontological knowledge.

When some years ago I studied the Critique of Pure Reason anew and read ii, as it were, against the background of Husserl's phenomenology, it opened my eyes; and Kant became for me a crudal confirmation of the accuracy of the path which I took in my search. Certainly an authority as such is never a justification, and something is not true just

29. Ibid., B 185.