Idealistic Studies

Volume 39, Issue 1/3, Spring/Summer/Fall 2009

A Continuity Between the A and B Deductions of the Critique
Revisiting Heidegger’s Reading of Kant

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics controversially claims that the A deduction is superior to the B deduction because the imagination, as the “common root” of understanding and sensibility, opens the first Critique to metaphysical ground. Drawing on Dieter Henrich, this paper reinterprets Heidegger’s reading by moving beyond the Analytic and taking the Dialectic into account. This suggests a continuity between the A and B deductions, namely that the imagination, as more than an ontic faculty, remains a basic power that keeps open a metaphysics of being in Kant—a metaphysics whose site is a radicalized unity of transcendental apperception. Revisiting Heidegger in this way shows how Kant is both linked to and differentiated from German Idealism’s debate about the imagination, a position suggested in both Heidegger and recent scholarly discussion.