THESIS: Idealism has to be understood as a new name for metaphysics after Kant. Hegel is the one who in working out Kant's question of a priori synthetic judgments transformed metaphysics into idealism. For Hegel Kant was preparing a new unity between ontology and theology. For Heidegger this was a regression, not progression, in that it "christianized" philosophy. Texts: Hegel, "Faith and Knowledge" Heidegger, "Identity and Difference" 1. The possibility of a priori synthetic judgments is the leading question of metaphysics according to Kant. For Hegel this question turns into: How can we assimilate ontology and theology? (a priori synthesis assimilates into intuitive understanding of the divine) 2. Why does Heidegger disagree with this reading? For Heidegger we have to rid the new metaphysics of any theology. 3. Why is Kant's question interpreted as ontological? In a priori judgments the subject and predicate are identical. This unity is given before any other experience. Both Hegel and Heidegger stress the importance of transcendental imagination: ontology by Kant is understood first as image which gives an anticipatory view of the real. Kant's a priori synthesis is an economy of visibility, economy of the image, which is ontology itself and for Hegel it deserves a new name - idealism, since there is a close proximity between an image and an idea. 4. What is the difference between analytic and synthetic judgments? (basic Kantian conception in the CPR) 5. Kant never viewed his own project as ontological. All bodies are heavy is not a synthetic judgment. Worse, treating 7+5=12 as a synthetic judgment substitutes mathematical addition for authentic synthesis. Kant's project must according to Hegel be given its authentic philosophical dimension. In Kant's philosophy a priori judgments remain only analytical. 6. Hegel and Heidegger try to give imagination its true metaphysical value as pure image. What is a pure imagination (without content, without reference)? Hegel identifies the synthesis in Kant as revelation. Transcendental imagination reveals presence. Hegel and Heidegger don't have the same concept of this ontological opening. For Hegel this pure image is at the same time theological - God is the subject that is identical with its predicate. A priori synthesis is understood as the structure of divine understanding, it is what makes the world visible. For Heidegger this originary structure is time (finitude). Imagination has a temporal meaning. Pure images can only be the moments of time (past, present, future) - that is what allows us to look at the real. Transcendental imagination is primordial time. We see what we can see knowing that we cannot see the whole picture - that's finitude. For Heidegger the pure image is always invisible, it is a question - "What is this?" We have opening, but not revelation. For Hegel, the pure image is visible as the ideal, as Spirit. We both see the thing, and its ideal.
The term "Transcendental imagination," said to be conception and fantasy, knocks outs anyone's Transcendental Meditation claim, as other than self induction into fantasy based trance. Now keep in mind, the sort of divine represented at @29.00 by stating: "Identifying the structure of synthesis or transcendental imagination, with the idea of the divine understanding," is pure fantasy, unreal, thereon never related with the factual divine.
