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Saturday, May 4, 2013

Being for Heidegger in the context of Kant's Transcendental Imagination

Reviewing Richardson on H's interpretation of Kant, Being is the functioning of the transcendental imagination so that duality arises as subject and object, observer and observed. The structuring arises as structuring of the Imagination. Being is the transcendentalising of an original unity of manifestation into an observer and observed. That is, the manifestation of the world is structured in its arising out of the Imagination into subject and object. The human Dasein then identifies with the subject ( apparently for H necessarily as part of the structuring), and is thereby rendered finite. Finite in the sense that the Dasein fails to apprehend the process of manifestation as origination in the Imagination, but rather takes the object as given to her. This given object is the phenomena. To apprehend the thing-in-itself, for H,  would be to "see" Imagination, as origin, manifest the object. For H, Dasein is structured (Being as functioning to hide, dissimulate) to not see manifestation at work, structuring the objects of a world. Because of this conditioning, Dasein is finite. According to Richardson, a sentience would be infinite if it was revealed to itself that it, as Imagination, manifested the world.

Taking a necessary human condition to be the condition of finitude (in the above sense) means that in all likelihood,  H was not enlightened in the Buddhist sense,  because enlightenment is precisely the apprehension, the "seeing" of seeing, by which seeing is "seen" to be the manifestation of objects from the Imagination as origin. This is the import of the pointing by the Awakened to "its all a dream". What is a dream, but the Imagination's self-manifestation of a world?

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