ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have charted the development of Heidegger’s thought in the 1920s and demonstrated the pivotal significance of the idea of imagination within that development. Whereas the initial consideration of Husserl produced no fixed conception of the imagination within the immanent horizon of his general idea of phenomenology, Heidegger has been shown to consistently grasp imaginative activity in terms of the opening up or ‘constitution’ of the temporal horizon basic to human experience and understanding. On the other hand, just as Husserl ultimately fails to resolve a fundamental ambiguity in his notion of the imagination as either an essentially intuitive or signitive act of consciousness, Heidegger appropriates the Kantian transcendental imagination in the context of an unresolved opposition between projection and thrownness. On Heidegger’s own account this conceptual pairing central to the analysis of human existence offered in BT does not have the sense of an opposition, but instead indicates coeval or ‘equiprimordial’ (gleichursprünglich) aspects of a basic existential constitution ultimately unified in the ‘three-fold ecstatic unity’ of temporality. However, it emerged in following the attempts made by Heidegger to complete the projected whole of fundamental ontology that the effort to refer temporality itself back to human freedom merely deepens the unresolved aporia of ‘spontaneous passivity’ inherented from Kant’s idea of productive imagination. Accordingly, though Heidegger in this period basically emphasizes the spontaneous aspect of human existence, in key passages he insists that the sense of existence is one of being delivered over to a condition of being that can only be taken up as one’s own after it has been granted. Such passages suggest that thrownness is grasped as ‘older’ than any projective, and so for Heidegger properly imaginative, activity on the part of Dasein.
