Transgressing limits

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Chapter three focuses on the paralogism of pure reason, specifically the paralogism of substantiality. It studies original time as pure self-affection, to show that the transcendental subject is not reducible to a unity of self-consciousness, but is open to ecstatic temporality.Kant's Critique of Pure Reason presents a novel notion of the limit of reason by grounding this limit in transcendental subjectivity. This grounding, however, points to freedom as transcendence, and as original temporality.Chapter two studies the constitution of the transcendental object in the Analytic and the consequences of the horizontal temporality of this objectivity for the antinomy of freedom. But freedom as transcendence is an open ground, what Heidegger calls a groundless ground, an opening that Heidegger does not himself discuss in relation to dialectic. This opening is centred on the Kantian thing in itself.Chapter one takes up Heidegger's controversial view that Kant "shrank back" from his implicit discovery, in the A Deduction, that imagination is the common root of the faculties of sensibility and thought. Heidegger's claims about theoretical reason and the transcendental imagination, however, show that there is a continuity between the A and B Deductions.Heidegger's interpretation of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is used to secure these results. Scholars often confine Heidegger's interpretation to its consequences for the doctrine of the categories in the Deduction. But careful study shows that Heidegger's position also leads to reinterpretation of the Dialectic and of the limits of reason.In conclusion, there is a kinship between imagination and reason that pervades the Critique, including the Dialectic. This kinship is suggested by Heidegger in his study of the A deduction, but is not taken any further. This kinship radically transforms Kant's project, for it means that transcendental illusion is intrinsic to reason as a free transcendence and that transcendental subjectivity is open to original temporality. Most of all it means that the Dialectic essentially depends upon Kant's discovery that sensibility as our faculty of receptivity has an element of spontaneity, and pure thought as our faculty of spontaneity has an element of receptivity.

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