(BCDU)
We have examined what Kant’s immediate successors said about the question of the transcendental imagination. In a sense, however, nothing was said, at least according to an important note in Heidegger’s book on Kant ( Kantbuch GA3, §27 ):
The explicit characterization of the power of imagination as a basic faculty [Grundvermögen] must have driven home the meaning of this faculty to Kant’s contemporaries. Thus Fichte and Schelling, and in his own way, Jacobi as well, attributed an essential role to the power of imagination. Whether in this way the power of imagination as seen by Kant was recognized, adhered to, and even interpreted in a more original way, cannot be discussed here. The following interpretation of the transcendental power of imagination grows out of another way of questioning and moves, so to speak, in the opposite direction from that of German Idealism.
Such a declaration shows us first of all that the “stone thrown into the pond” of Marburg Neo-Kantianism represented by Heidegger’s Kantbuch is nonetheless engaging, secretly but no less “athletically” in a debate with all the interpretations of Kant since 1781, and notably the one that the history of ideas has retained under the name of “German idealism” ( Hölderlin being quickly excepted ), to the point of characterizing Kant’s work as “an unconquered fortress behind the new battlefront.” Thus it remains to ask in what way “the essence of Einbildungskraft as Kant understood it” could have been so misunderstood and disfigured by his immediate posterity that this question has to be examined all over again from the opposite direction.
We will limit ourselves here to emphasizing that Heidegger’s reading of Kant, like his reading of Hölderlin, accentuates the idea of an essential finitude of the human being, who is a “king of finitude” ( Hölderlin, hymn “To Freedom” ), whereas German idealism emphasized the unconditional nature of the ego of transcendental apperception as Selbstbewusstsein, or “self-consciousness.” The Bild itself thus became the stake in conflicting interpretations that sometimes inscribed it within a spontaneity Kant reserved for the understanding, and sometimes sought to maintain the equal balance of spontaneity and receptivity, of logic and aesthetics. Instead of stressing the thetic character of the Kantian synthesis ( Fichte and Schelling ), Heidegger underlines the essential part played, in every knowing, by sensibility understood not as passivity but as receptivity.
Referring to Kant’s comment cited earlier, Heidegger remarks that
The term Bild is to be taken here truly at the source, as when we say, looking on a landscape, “What a beautiful view!” [Bild] ( Anblick ), or again, in the presence of a gloomy group, “What a sad sight!” [Bild] ( Anblick ). Kantbuch GA3, §19