ABSTRACT
The basic problem in Kant with which both Husserl and Heidegger are fundamentally concerned is the issue of an adequate articulation of the relationship between the transcendentally ideal and empirically real aspects of knowledge. In Husserl it is his extension of the concept of intuition in the Logical Investigations to include what he calls ‘categorial intuition’ that marks the decisive break with the letter of Kant’s philosophy. This move that lies at the heart of Husserl’s breakthrough to phenomenology appears to render otiose the basic function of what Kant calls the ‘transcendental imagination’ in bridging the divide between the conceptually ideal and the sensibly real. Having ‘deduced’ the a priori validity of the pure concepts of the understanding or categories (cf. KRV, A95 ff./B129 ff.), Kant is faced in the Critique of Pure Reason with the task of showing how such concepts are ‘realized’ in actual experience. In order to account for such ‘realization’ Kant posits a mental operation that he calls the ‘schematism’ of the transcendental imagination (op. cit., A137 ff./B176 ff.). However, this putative operation of productive imagination bears a troubling resemblance to Plato’s notion of methexis, that is, the ‘participation’ or inherence of intellectual forms within individual empirical objects.1
