ABSTRACT
The principal task of this third chapter will be to set out and evaluate Husserl’s thought with respect to the essential relations between the imagination and time. Coming as it does in the midst of the present examination of Husserl’s concept of imagination, from this point onwards a more direct attempt to follow the sense or direction of Husserlian phenomenology towards its transformation in Heidegger will be made. As noted at the end of Chapter 2, Husserl too readily criticizes Kant for a putative restriction of his archaeology of human knowledge to purely cognitive sources. From the breakthrough in LU to the mature account of phenomenological philosophy in Ideas I Husserl fails to grant any positive significance to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic and the pivotal doctrine of the schematism.1 As a result, precisely those sections of the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant articulates the dynamic relations between sensibility and cognition are left out of the Husserlian account. Considerations in the current section, however, will make clear that the phenomenological critique of knowledge is much closer to the Kantian perspective than Husserl was initially willing to acknowledge. According to the basic thesis advanced here, it is the theme of the imagination that makes this affinity of Husserl and Kant most readily apparent. Thus, precisely that mediating power which Kant recognized as binding together concept and intuition is by no means-as might at first seem to follow from Husserl’s postulation of non-sensible categorial intuition-made redundant in phenomenology. As will emerge, rather than dispensing with the need for the imagination, Husserl inherits the very problem of identifying its ‘proper place’ within the economy of conscious life that persisted throughout Kant’s critical period of thought. Indeed, the central thesis of the present enquiry is that the ‘homelessness’ of the imagination (as Heidegger would go on to speak of it) indicates nothing other than a radical fissure in the phenomenological edifice, a split in mental life that will be taken up by those who follow in Husserl’s footsteps and ‘repeat’ his phenomenological moves in one form or another.
