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L E V I N A S , KA N T
A N D T H E P R O B L E M AT I C
O F T E M P O R A L I TY
A D O N I S F R A N G E S KO U
Levinas, Kant and the Problematic
of Temporality
 Adonis Frangeskou

Levinas, Kant
and the Problematic
of Temporality
Adonis Frangeskou
Alexander College
Larnaca, Cyprus

ISBN 978-1-137-59794-6 ISBN 978-1-137-59795-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59795-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945818

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FOR HARVEY
 Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Douglas Burnham, William Large, and David
Webb, who have aided me considerably by their philosophical expertise
and by their understanding of the problematic of Temporality. I would
also like to express my gratitude to my mother Maria Frangeskou, and
to Ann McGoun, for their continued guidance and support. Finally, I
wish to tell Lee Michael Badger how much his faithful friendship and
his example of intellectual integrity have sustained me in this difficult
enterprise called philosophy.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism 17

3 The Ground-Laying of Metaphysica Generalis

as Temporality of Dasein 47

4 Time, Temporality and the Opening up of Presence 77

5 From Presence to Absolute Presence: The Supreme

Diachronism 109

6 The Ground-Laying of Metaphysica Specialis

as Temporality of Being-for-the-Other 135

Bibliography 207

Index 211

ix
 Abbreviations

The list below provides the abbreviations of all primary texts cited in the
main body and endnotes of this book. The pages of the original language
versions will be referenced along with their corresponding English trans-
lations where this is possible. Those English translations that have occa-
sionally been modified and interpolated will be marked ‘mod.’ Successive
citations of the same text will exclude its abbreviation.

Texts by Heidegger
The original language texts are those numbered volumes of Heidegger’s
Gesamtausgabe [G] published in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio
Klostermann. An exception is made for Sein und Zeit [SZ], which is
cited following the seventh edition published in Tübingen by Max
Niemeyer Verlag.

G3 1991. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik./Richard Taft, trans.

1990. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.

xi
xii   Abbreviations

G5 1977. Holzwege./Julian Young & Kenneth Haynes, eds. 2002. Off

the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
G9 1976. Wegmarken./William McNeill, ed. 1998. Pathmarks.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
G14 2007. Zur Sache des Denkens./Joan Stambaugh, trans. 1972. On
Time and Being. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press.
G15 1986. Seminare./Andrew Mitchell & Francois Raffoul, trans. 2003.
Four Seminars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
G21 1976. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit./Thomas Sheehan, trans.
2010. Logic: The Question of Truth. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
G24 1975. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie./Albert Hofstadter,
trans. 1982. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
G25 1977. Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der
reinen Vernunft./Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly, trans. 1997.
Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
G26 1978. Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von
Leibniz./Michael Heim, trans. 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
G31 1982. Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die
Philosophie./Ted Sadler, trans. 2002. The Essence of Human Freedom:
An Introduction to Philosophy. London: Continuum.
G32 1980. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes./Parvis Emad & Kenneth
Maly, trans. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
G41 1984. Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von der transcen-
dentalen Grundsätzen./W.B. Barton, Jr. & Vera Deutsch, trans. 1967.
What is a Thing? Chicago: Henry Regency Company.
G42 1988. Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit./Joan
Stambaugh, trans. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom. Athens: Ohio University Press.
G64 2004. Der Begriff der Zeit./William McNeill, trans. 1992. The
Concept of Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
SZ 1967. Sein und Zeit./John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, trans.
1962. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
 Abbreviations   xiii

Texts by Levinas
The original language texts marked with an asterix* refer to Le Livre de
Poche versions of those texts.

AEAE 1978. Autrement qu’être ou au-delá de l’essence. The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff Publishers*./Alphonso Lingis, trans. 1991. Otherwise
than Being or Beyond Essence. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
AT 1995. Altérité et Transcendance. Saint Clement: Fata Morgana*./
Michael B. Smith, trans. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. London:
The Athlone Press Ltd.
BI 1983. ‘Beyond Intentionality.’ Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin
in Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiori. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 100-15. Reproduced in 2002. The
Phenomenology Reader. Edited by Dermot Moran & Timothy
Mooney. London: Routledge, 529–39.
BPW 1996. Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak,
Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
CPP 1998. Collected Philosophical Papers. Alphonso Lingis, trans.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
DEL 1984. ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.’ Translated by Richard
Kearney in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The
Phenomenological Heritage, edited by Richard Kearney. Manchester:
Manchester University Press. Reproduced in 1986. Face to Face with
Levinas. Edited by Richard Cohen. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 13–33.
DMT 1993. Dieu, la mort et le temps. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle*./
Bettina Bergo, trans. 2000. God, Death, and Time. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
DVI 1982. De Dieu qui vient á l’idée. Paris: Librairie Philosophique
J. VRIN./Bettina Bergo, trans, 1998. Of God Who Comes to Mind.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
EE 1998. De l’existence a l’existant. Paris: Librairie Philosophique
J. VRIN./Alphonso Lingis, trans. 2001. Existence and Existents.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
xiv   Abbreviations

EI 1981. Éthique et Infini. Librairie Arthème Fayard et Radio-France*./

Richard A. Cohen, trans. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
EN 1991. Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-á-l’autre, Paris: Grasset &
Fasquelle*./Michael B. Smith & Barbara Harshav, trans. 1998. Entre
Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, London: The Athlone Press Ltd.
HAH 1972. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana./
Nidra Poller, trans. 2003. Humanism of the Other. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
HS 1987. Hors Sujet. Saint Clement: Fata Morgana*./Michael B. Smith,
trans. 1993. Outside the Subject. London: The Athlone Press Ltd.
IRB 2001. Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas.
Edited by Jill Robbins. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
ITN 2007. In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith.
London: Continuum.
ON 1982. ‘The Old and the New.’ Translated by Richard A. Cohen for
the English publication of Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
PPR 1994. ‘The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason.’ Translated by Blake
Billings in Man and World, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1994), 445–53.
TA 1979. Le temps et l’autre. Montpellier: Fata Morgana./Richard
A. Cohen, trans. 1987. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press.
TI 1961. Totalité et Infini. Essais sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff Publishers*./Alphonso Lingis, trans. 1969. Totality and
Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press.

Texts by Kant
Citations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will be listed convention-
ally according to the pagination of both A and B editions, as pre-
sented in Immanuel Kant: Werke, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Vols. 3 &
 Abbreviations   xv

4. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft./Werner S. Pluhar,

trans. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company Inc.
References to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will
Be Able to Come Forward as Science will be cited according to the vol-
ume and page number of Immanuel Kant: Werke, Prolegomena zu einer
jeden kunftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können,
Vol. 5. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft [KW5], followed
by the English pagination in Gary Hatfield, trans. 2004. Prolegomena to
Any Future Metaphysics. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 1
Introduction

The following book aims to introduce Levinas’s notion of ‘the Other’

into the very heart of the Kantian doctrine of the schematism, and
therefore of the Heideggerian problematic of Temporality. In this sense,
it will render possible an ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure
Reason which departs substantially from Heidegger’s own ontologi-
cal interpretation of that text in his Kantbook (Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics) of 1929. More specifically, the book intends to establish
the historical connection between the retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality in the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas on the one
hand, and the laying of the ground for metaphysics in the schematism
of Kant’s critical philosophy on the other. It intends to show that this
connection is not simply to be established in the way that Heidegger,
who destroyed the doctrine of the schematism on the grounds of the
existential temporality of Dasein, establishes it. His destruction of
the doctrine of the schematism remains overly committed to a reso-
lute ontological interpretation of the Kantian ground-laying. Drawing
on Levinas’s ethical critique of the Heideggerian retrieval of the prob-
lematic of Temporality together with his destructive proposal to carry
out the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in a manner

© The Author(s) 2017 1

A. Frangeskou, Levinas, Kant and the Problematic of Temporality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59795-3_1
2   A. Frangeskou

consistent with Rosenzweig’s philosophy, I will argue that the connec-

tion should be established at the point where Kant determines the ethi-
cal status of the schematism according to the regulative schemas of the
ideas of pure reason (God, man and world), and not, as in Heidegger’s
ontological destruction, at the point of his determination of the sensible
schemas of the pure concepts of understanding (the categories). For it
can almost certainly be argued that the destruction of the schematism
accomplished by Heidegger in 1929 remains extraordinarily limited
in its application, and for two reasons: first, because it limits the sche-
matism to the sensible schemas of the pure concepts of understanding
alone, so as to effectively restrict the Kantian doctrine of the schema-
tism as such; and then, above all, because it thereby retrieves the exis-
tential ground of Dasein’s temporality. Does not Heidegger’s historical
exhibition of Dasein’s existential temporality reveal to us the extreme
limitation that he imposes, and necessarily must impose, on the retrieval
of the problematic of Temporality from out of Kant’s 1st Critique? Does
not Heidegger’s historical clarification of the existential temporality
of Dasein allow us to call into question the projected task of his own
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality—that of destroying Kant’s
doctrine of the schematism? For it is by no means a foregone conclu-
sion that the Kantian doctrine of the schematism can be limited to the
sensible schemas of the pure concepts of understanding, and therefore
that it be destroyed only on the grounds of the existential temporality of
Dasein.
It will therefore be shown, with the aid of Levinas’s ethical
philosophy, that the retrieval of the problematic of Temporality
can no longer be limited to its previous task of destroying the doc-
trine of the schematism on the grounds of the existential temporality
of Dasein. The question raised by this book can thus be posed as fol-
lows: Does the task of destroying the doctrine of the schematism
retrieve the existential grounds of temporality or does it retrieve the
diachronic grounds of temporality? In other words, does the destruc-
tion of the doctrine of the schematism operate according to its retrieval
of the existential temporality of Dasein or according to its retrieval of
the diachronic temporality of ‘Being-for-the-Other’? [IRB 114]. It is
not only a matter here of renewing the retrieval of the problematic of
 1 Introduction    
3

Temporality, but much more originally of establishing whether and to

what extent the diachronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other oper-
ates another destruction of the Kantian schematism as such. For Levinas
doubtless did not accomplish what he nevertheless rendered possible
for destroying the doctrine of the schematism on the grounds of the
diachronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other. There are at least three
reasons that explain why this is the case: first, because Levinas’s under-
standing of the 1st Critique, and of the Kantian schematism in particu-
lar, is too often guided by a Heideggerian pre-understanding; second,
because the diachronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other, even in
the traditional form of the regulative schemas of the ideas of pure rea-
son, never even comes close to unveiling itself; and finally, because the
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality required for this unveil-
ing, never gets beyond either its preparatory status or its contradictory
formulation. But if, in spite of all this, the diachronic temporality of
Being-for-the-Other can indeed be shown to be fully operative within
the 1st Critique, then Heidegger’s ontological retrieval of the prob-
lematic of Temporality would have to concede—somewhat contradic-
torily—that its task of destroying the doctrine of the schematism can
no longer be limited to retrieving the existential temporality of Dasein.
There is every indication that Levinas has at least opened up the pos-
sibility of pursuing this alternative retrieval: the destruction of the
schematism—and therefore, of the regulative schemas of the ideas of
pure reason—rests solely on an ethical retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality, beyond both the sensible schemas of the pure concepts
of understanding and the existential temporality of Dasein.
In this book, then, I will endeavour to accomplish the ethical
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality in the 1st Critique, and
thus to carry out the task of destroying the doctrine of the schematism
by releasing this task from its fundamental ontological commitments.
If in Levinas’s claim that ethics is first philosophy, which is to say, in
his claim to oppose the project of fundamental ontology, the retrieval
of the problematic of Temporality can be shown to surpass the exis-
tential temporality of Dasein, then it becomes necessary to drive this
ethical retrieval forward to the point of exceeding the ontological
destruction of the schematism previously carried out by Heidegger. But
4   A. Frangeskou

in doing so, one is equally compelled to renew the Heideggerian task of

destruction by carrying it out ethically, equally bound to that uniquely
ethical task of destruction which exceeds the limits of fundamental
ontology. It is in conceiving of this ethical destruction of the schema-
tism that this book justifies its claim to offer an ethical interpretation of
the Critique of Pure Reason.
It is therefore an essential argument of this book that in claiming
ethics to be first philosophy, Levinas not only maintains the philo-
sophical priority of ethics over that of fundamental ontology, but also
renews its related task of destruction and of destroying the history of
ontology. To claim, as Levinas does, that ethics is first philosophy, is
not only to maintain that within philosophy ethics ‘signifies a certain
priority […] that ethics is,’ philosophically speaking, ‘before ontology’
[DVI 143/90].1 It is also to maintain the priority of ethics within the
history of ontology itself. In other words, it maintains a certain prior-
ity of ethics within the philosophical task of destroying the history of
ontology (to play on a title of Heidegger’s). Thus, to claim that ethics is
first philosophy is to maintain the historical priority of ethics in addi-
tion to its philosophical priority.2 For ‘it is at this level’ of priority—
the level of what Derrida, whom I have already begun to cite here, calls
‘the worldwide historico-philosophical situation’—‘that the thought of
Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble. At the heart of the desert, in
the growing wasteland, this thought, which fundamentally no longer
seeks to be a thought of Being […] makes us dream of an inconceiv-
able process of dismantling and dispossession.’3 Derrida then qualifies
this oneiric process of dismantling the thought of Being by describing
it as ‘a necessity’ that will ‘finally impose itself upon Levinas,’ namely,
‘the necessity of lodging oneself in traditional conceptuality in order
to destroy it.’4 It is therefore Levinas himself who, when necessarily
lodged in this way, will enable me to establish the historical connection
between the laying of the ground for metaphysics in the schematism of
Kant’s 1st Critique on the one hand, and the retrieval of the problem-
atic of Temporality in his ethical thought on the other. It is he alone
who, when imposed upon by this necessity, will enable me to argue that
the destruction of the doctrine of the schematism leads to an ethical
retrieval of the problematic of Temporality, and thus renders possible an
 1 Introduction    
5

ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. For it is by virtue of

its own historico-philosophical situation that Levinas’s ethical thought
is compelled to lead—through an almost inconceivable and necessary
process of its destruction—the doctrine of the schematism toward an
alternative retrieval of its temporal problematic, that of the diachronic
temporality of Being-for-the-Other.5 A more expansive ‘phenomenon
of a ‘transcendental determination of time’ in its own structure’ unveils
itself within this ethical retrieval than within Heidegger’s own ontologi-
cal retrieval of the existential temporality of Dasein [SZ 24/45]. This
more expansive phenomenon is no longer limited to a transcendental
determination of time which Heidegger destroyed on the grounds of
the existential temporality of Dasein, and which he therefore grounded
in the existential structures of temporality. I will show that Levinas’s
ethical thought renders possible an interpretation of the 1st Critique
which relieves the task of destruction from grounding the phenomenon
of a transcendental determination of time in the existential structures
of temporality alone. This ethical interpretation of the 1st Critique
destroys the phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time by
grounding it ultimately in the more expansive diachronic structures of
temporality. Destroyed on the grounds of the diachronic temporality of
Being-for-the-Other, the phenomenon of a transcendental determina-
tion of time therefore becomes conceivable in such a way as to free up a
strictly ethical interpretation of the 1st Critique.
The account of Levinas’s relation to Kant proposed here is natu-
rally very different from the more traditional accounts of this relation.
Given that Levinas prioritises ethics over ontology, and given that, as
Heidegger has shown, Kant’s 1st Critique originally unfolds as a project
of fundamental ontology, it is far from obvious how his ethical thought
could be utilised effectively in an interpretation—or indeed reinterpre-
tation—of the 1st Critique. Here it would be germane to recall a recent
argument made by Richard Cohen that: ‘While Heidegger’s “funda-
mental ontology” effects an ontological revision of Kant’s epistemologi-
cal account of the imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s
intersubjective ethics effects a revision and unification of Kant’s account
of the ethical subject in the Critique of Practical Reason and the role of
religion in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.’6 Those traditional
6   A. Frangeskou

accounts which, in line with Cohen’s argument, simply neglect the

importance of Levinas’s ethical thought for interpreting the 1st Critique
usually insist on its relation to Kant’s 2nd Critique alone. Such insist-
ence is clearly evident in an earlier essay written by Paul Davies. In
attempting to clarify ‘the relation to Kant and Kantianism staged in
and by Levinas’s phenomenological project,’ Davies finds textual evi-
dence in the lecture courses God, Death, and Time and elsewhere to
support the general claim that Levinas affirms the necessity of such a
relation.7 He then suggests that ‘the Levinasian call for ‘ethics as first
philosophy’ [cannot] fail to bring to mind that earlier insistence on
the primacy of practical reason which crucially centred around the
description of reason’s being affected by the moral law, laid low by its
own imperative.’8 In other words, Levinas’s phenomenological project
stages the relation to Kant in and through the relation to the primacy
of practical reason, i.e., in and through the description of the moral
imperative. Consequently, on Davies’s account, the relation to Kant that
Levinas affirms in God, Death, and Time invites ‘us to begin to find in
Kant’s practical philosophy and in the announcement that the critical
philosophy is not limited to the conditions of theoretical knowledge,
something of a genuine ‘outside,’’ i.e., it invites us to begin to find in
Kant’s 2nd Critique something of that ‘sense of the subject ‘outside’
ontology’ and ‘the knowledge […] of any being whatsoever.’9
Catherine Chalier provides what is perhaps the most impressive
instance of this type of account. She understands Levinas’s relation
to Kant primarily in terms of ‘a shared admiration for practical rea-
son’s aptitude to exceed the bounds of speculative reason.’10 With this
in mind, she contends that ‘Levinas recognizes his proximity to that
[i.e., Kant’s practical] philosophy, since, “beside the theoretical access
to the being of the phenomenon,” Kant’s reflections examine how the
implications of moral action can be explained by the existence of a
reasonable subject “without becoming the object of any knowledge of
being.” That view corroborates his preoccupation with an ethics that
is not based on an ontology.’11 This ethical proximity to Kant, Chalier
argues, therefore makes it necessary for us to compare ‘these two phi-
losophies of the moral subject’ so as ‘to examine their common inter-
est in conceiving of a moral obligation beyond any possible theoretical
 1 Introduction    
7

knowledge [of being],’ and thus, beyond any possible ontology of the
subject.12 There are many interpreters who follow Chalier’s understand-
ing of what Levinas’s relation to Kant amounts to—i.e., their shared
admiration for the primacy of practical reason over theoretical rea-
son—and who also agree that Levinas maintains such a relation. Diane
Perpich, for instance, points out that: ‘In Kant’s insistence on the pri-
macy of pure practical reason, Levinas finds a parallel to his own philo-
sophical project, which he often sums up in the claim that ethics is “first
philosophy.”’13 This point is more fully developed by Peter Atterton,
who states that: ‘In his only essay dedicated entirely to Kant, pub-
lished in 1971 under the title “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,”
Levinas applauded the “great novelty” of Kant’s practical philosophy.’14
For Atterton, there can be no doubt that ‘the practical philosophy of
Kant stands closest to his [i.e., Levinas’s] own thinking in ethics,’ since
‘Levinas finds in Kant’s practical philosophy “un sens” (meaning, sense,
direction) that is irreducible to ontology.’15 Indeed: ‘By subordinat-
ing the interests of theoretical reason to those of practical reason […]
Kant’s doctrine of primacy signifies for Levinas a reversal of philosophy’s
traditional vocation to ground thought and action in knowledge and
truth. The ontological problematic […] is in this instance subordinated
to ethics as an independent and preliminary praxis.’16
John Llewelyn, however, has managed to situate Levinas’s relation to
Kant in a quite different context. For just as it cannot be doubted that
Levinas’s own ethical thinking stands closest to Kant’s practical philoso-
phy, and thus to the 2nd Critique, so too one can hardly avoid seeing
that it also stands equally close to Kant’s theoretical philosophy, and
in particular, to ‘those few pages of the Critique of Pure Reason where
he writes of imagination as schematization.’17 The main argument that
Llewelyn hazards here no doubt comes from his attempt to interpret
‘the ethicality of face-to-face saying’ as precisely ‘that moment of imag-
ination when it is surprised by its own radical exteriority,’ a uniquely
ethical moment of imagination which Llewelyn goes on to describe as
‘a moment where the synchronizable and recuperable time of memory
and the Critical imagination that synthesizes what it analyses is crossed
by the unsychronizable time of being hypoCritically addressed […] by
the other.’18 It therefore becomes necessary to argue, as Llewelyn does,
8   A. Frangeskou

that ‘the Kantian account of the imagination must be reinterpreted

phenomenologically […] by going back through Kant, through a
Critical doctrine of the imagination catastrophized by the hypoCriti-
cal ethicality of what Levinas calls the face-to-face.’19 As for the ethical
moment of schematization, it is always a matter of ‘what Levinas calls
[…] the face,’ such as it is developed not only by taking the ‘French
word ‘figure’ […] to mean ‘face’,’ but also by ‘taking it back to the fig-
ura that are the diagrams that Kant calls the schemata of the imagina-
tion in the Critique of Pure Reason.’20 Without confusing the “figure” or
face of the other with the “figura” or schemata of the imagination, it is
nevertheless a matter of undertaking ‘a programme by which the hypo-
Critical responsibility that is Levinas’s great thought may welcome as its
recipients everything in space and time, including things that, on his
account of my welcoming the other into my home, get what ethical rel-
evance they have only by being donanda, that is to say […] as things to
be given to my guest.’21 According to this remarkable undertaking, not
only does Llewelyn accept the face of the other as perhaps the ultimate
figure or schema of space and time in the 1st Critique, but above all
even the recourse to responsibility, that is, to the great idea of Levinas’s
ethical thought, does not pass beyond that schema, but reinforces it by
“welcoming” those things received in space and time as things to be
given to the other.
In a certain respect, this book undertakes a similar programme by
which to situate Levinas’s ethical thought. It will assert that an ethical
reinterpretation of imagination as schematization is utterly indispensa-
ble to clarifying his relation to Kant. In opposition to those traditional
accounts which claim that Levinas’s ethical thought stands closest to
the 2nd Critique, my own account of this thought will argue in favour
of its equally close proximity to the 1st Critique. My own account of
Levinas will show that these traditional accounts neglect an idea of cru-
cial importance in his ethical thought, one that arises primarily from
out of his temporal explication of Rosenzweig. I am speaking of the
proposal announced in the final remarks to the interview ‘The Other,
Utopia, and Justice’, to carry out the deformalization of the notion of
time in the 1st Critique so as to unveil concretely those privileged situ-
ations or circumstances of ecstatic-horizonal temporality in which this
 1 Introduction    
9

notion of time is constituted. The historical development of this idea

in Levinas’s ethical thought strongly indicates a unique philosophi-
cal equivalence between the destruction of the Kantian schematism
in Heidegger’s retrieval of the problematic of Temporality on the one
hand, and the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in his tem-
poral explication of Rosenzweig on the other. This equivalence will lead
me to advance a new notion (much more expansive than the ontologi-
cal notion) of the Kantian schematism—understood no longer as the
phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time by the catego-
ries of ontology, but as the phenomenon of a transcendental determina-
tion of time by the ideas of God, man and world. This ethical expansion
of the phenomenon of transcendental time-determination (from the
categories to the ideas) is precisely what motivates the present book to
work out and unveil an ideal notion of the schematism in Levinas’s tem-
poral explication of Rosenzweig. It then becomes necessary to reinter-
pret the notion of the Kantian schematism: Can it be unveiled as an
order of time according to a schema of ideas, and thus no longer as an
order of time according to a schema of categories? Confronted with
this ideal notion of the schematism, shouldn’t we distinguish essentially
between the phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time by
the ideas of God, man and world, and the phenomenon of a transcen-
dental determination of time by the categories of ontology? Here, an
essential question is posed about the possibility of unveiling the ideal
schemas of time concretely within Rosenzweig’s ecstatic-horizonal tem-
porality of the religious human being, and thus, within an ecstatic-hori-
zonal temporality that remains strictly irreducible to that of Heidegger’s
Dasein. Now, it is precisely in this first advance that the development of
an ethical destruction of the Kantian schematism also becomes equally
necessary: Is it still legitimate to carry out the task of destroying the
Kantian schematism by unveiling the schemas of time concretely in the
privileged circumstances of the human Dasein’s ecstatic-horizonal tem-
porality (from the perspective of the categories of ontology)? Could it
not be carried out instead by unveiling the schemas of time concretely
in the privileged circumstances of the ecstatic-horizonal temporality of
the religious human being (from the perspective of the ideas of God,
man and world)? I will therefore demonstrate that the development of
10   A. Frangeskou

an ethical destruction of the Kantian schematism in Levinas’s temporal

explication of Rosenzweig permits one to work out a phenomenon of tran-
scendental time-determination that clearly moves beyond that which was
worked out or unveiled by Heidegger’s ontological destruction, because
it unveils it concretely in the purely biblical—and thus, radically non-
ontological—circumstances of ecstatic-horizonal temporality. Moreover, a
destruction of the schematism that can be understood ethically is one
that succeeds in the task of unveiling concretely another phenomenon
of transcendental time-determination than that to which Heidegger,
and to a certain extent Rosenzweig, limited themselves: one that
becomes unveiled concretely in the privileged ethical circumstances
of the ecstatic-horizonal temporality of Being-for-the-Other. Finally,
the concrete unveiling of the phenomenon of transcendental time-
determination, if indeed it does exceed both the privileged ontological
and biblical circumstances of ecstatic-horizonal temporality, nonethe-
less always remains faithful to the ideal—and hence, non-ontological—
trajectory of Rosenzweig’s biblical conception of temporality. What
ideal notion of the schematism comes to be unveiled concretely after
Levinas’s temporal explication of Rosenzweig? Levinas refers to it
implicitly in his reading of the regulative use of the ideas in Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, an ideal notion of the Kantian schematism that
can actually be destroyed or deformalized, and thus, unveiled concretely
within the ethical temporality of Being-for-the-Other.
In short, Levinas’s proposed deformalization of the notion of time
in the 1st Critique is shown to be equivalent to the destruction of an
ideal notion of the Kantian schematism, and for this reason is absolutely
essential to clarifying Levinas’s relation to Kant.22 I shall therefore argue
that the relation to Kant and Kantianism in Levinas’s ethical thought
is not only staged in and through the description of the moral impera-
tive, as per the traditional accounts, but is also staged in and through
the doctrine of the schematism.23 In Levinas’s thought, everything tran-
spires as if there were indeed an ethical retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality that necessitated its own unique destruction of the doc-
trine of the schematism. Such an ethical retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality therefore invites those traditional interpreters who neglect
the importance of Levinas’s thought for interpreting the 1st Critique,
 1 Introduction    
11

to at least consider the possibility of interpreting that text from the

point of view of this thought, i.e., from the point of view of ethics as
first philosophy.
This ethical interpretation of Kant’s 1st Critique will be unfolded in
five chapters (Chaps. 2–6).
Chapters 2 and 3 endeavour to provide a detailed account of
Heidegger’s interpretation of the 1st Critique in his Kantbook of 1929.
Chapter 2 begins with Heidegger’s preparatory statement that: ‘The
following investigation is devoted to the task of interpreting Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason as a laying of the ground for metaphysics and
thus of placing the problem of metaphysics before us as a funda-
mental ontology’ [G3 1/1]. It then proceeds with an account of this
strictly ontological interpretation of the Kantian ground-laying itself
in terms of the schematism of the categories of Metaphysica Generalis.
Supplementing Heidegger’s Kantbook with relevant material taken from
his own 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, I then
outline in Chap. 3 a distinctively existential account of this text, thus
showing how Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of the 1st Critique
is already complicit with a certain retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality. Accordingly, I detail precisely how that which Heidegger
considers to be essential to the Kantian ground-laying of Metaphysica
Generalis, namely, the pure synthesis of imagination, can itself be
unveiled originally as the existential temporality of Dasein.
Chapters 4 and 5 seek to develop Levinas’s ethical thought on tem-
porality such as he presents this thought in his later texts. Both these
chapters are geared towards establishing the temporal grounds for an
ethical—as opposed to a strictly ontological—interpretation of the 1st
Critique. The later texts are historically and philosophically situated
within Heidegger’s own conception of time in the terms of temporal-
ity, and thus, within a conception of the opening up of time as such.
Chapter 4 intends to explore the ontological conception of temporality
as unveiled by Heidegger and then the ethical displacement of this tem-
porality as initiated by Levinas. The entire exploration in this chapter is
therefore unfolded as a successive commentary on the existential tem-
porality of Dasein which opens up the time of presence, and the dia-
chronic temporality of Being-for-the-Other which, in its displacement
12   A. Frangeskou

of the first opening, opens up the time of non-presence or absolute

presence. Chapter 5 then develops this commentary further in order
to explore how Levinas’s ethical thought alters the ecstatic-horizonal
constitution of temporality. As that which opens up the time of non-
presence and absolute presence, the diachronic temporality of Being-
for-the-Other already requires an ecstatic-horizonal constitution—since
the ecstatic-horizonal constitution of temporality bears above all on the
opening up of time itself. Henceforth, the ecstatic-horizonal constitu-
tion of temporality can no longer be conceived according to an opening
up of time in the existential temporality of Dasein, but far more origi-
nally, according to an opening up of time in the diachronic temporality
of Being-for-the-Other.
Chapter 6 aims to establish the historical connection between the
laying of the ground for metaphysics in the schematism of Kant’s
1st Critique on the one hand, and the retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality in Levinas’s ethical thought on the other. Having devel-
oped Levinas’s historical and philosophical situation within Heidegger’s
conception of temporality in the previous two chapters, Chap. 6
raises a question which Levinas himself did not ask, but which he
nevertheless anticipated to some extent in his destructive proposal to
carry out the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in a man-
ner consistent with Rosenzweig’s philosophy. That question is the fol-
lowing: On the grounds of which problematic of Temporality can
the Kantian ground-laying of metaphysics in terms of the schema-
tism itself be originally unveiled? Can the problematic of Temporality
only be unveiled in the ontological terms of a schematism of the
categories of Metaphysica Generalis, or can it move beyond the limits
of this first unveiling so as to be unveiled more originally in the ethi-
cal terms of a schematism of the ideas of Metaphysica Specialis? Having
explored Levinas’s alteration of the ecstatic-horizonal constitution of
temporality as an opening up of time in Chap. 5, I show in Chap. 6
how this altered constitution accomplishes an ethical—as opposed to
Heidegger’s strictly ontological—interpretation of the 1st Critique.
Consequently, the interpretative task of unveiling the Kantian ground-
laying of metaphysics according to the problematic of Temporality no
longer consists in unveiling the pure synthesis of imagination as the
 1 Introduction    
13

existential temporality of Dasein, but rather, in unveiling it according

to its own essential negation by the differentiation of reason, and thus,
in unveiling it more originally as the diachronic temporality of Being-
for-the-Other. In this way, the question which Levinas himself antici-
pated is answered successfully, and the retrieval of the problematic of
Temporality is deployed ethically so as to unveil the Kantian ground-
laying of Metaphysica Specialis according to the diachronic temporality
of Being-for-the-Other. I conclude the book at the close of this final
chapter by reasserting that Levinas’s ethical retrieval of the problem-
atic of Temporality does indeed accomplish an ethical destruction of
the doctrine of the schematism, one that moves beyond the ontologi-
cal limits of Heidegger’s own destruction. I then end my conclusion
with a brief reflection on the significance of this destructive retrieval for
unveiling the diachronic ground of infinite time.

Notes
1. For an excellent discussion of the philosophical priority of eth-
ics over ontology, see Jean Griesch, ‘Ethics and Ontology: some
Hypocritical Reflections’, Irish Philosophical Journal, Vol. 4, Nos. 1−2
(1987), 64−75.
2. That ethics could have, in the last analysis, a historical priority equal
to that of its philosophical priority, that is, a priority within the his-
tory of ontology, is what Jacques Derrida does not fail to consider—
I shall come to this in a moment. What he does not fail to consider
is ‘whether history itself does not begin with this relationship to the
other which Levinas places beyond history.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence
and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ in
Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1978),
116.
3. Ibid., 101.
4. Ibid., 139. Interestingly enough, it was during the course of a discus-
sion held with Salomon Malka on the subject of Levinas’s antagonism
towards Heidegger, that Paul Ricoeur also highlighted the endur-
ing necessity of destruction in Levinas’s ethical thought. ‘Did you
notice,’ he asks, ‘that the last published series of lectures is the one on
14   A. Frangeskou

death [Ricoeur has in mind here of course the lectures entitled God,
Death, and Time], where Levinas is still confronting Heidegger? He
never stopped explaining himself in terms of Heidegger.’ He contin-
ues: ‘Because he was the closest stranger. This was an ontology with-
out ethics. And the problem, for Levinas, was to exit ontology and to
make ethics the first philosophy. To do that, it was always necessary,
as I have said, to continually deconstruct the hegemonic pretences of
Heideggerian ontology.’ Paul Ricoeur in Salomon Malka, Emmanuel
Levinas: His Life and Legacy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2006), 198.
5. Jill Robbins alludes to the possibility of this ethical destruction when,
in her introduction to the English publication of a series of interviews
with Levinas, she states that: ‘Although nowhere do we find in Levinas
a systematic destruction in the Heideggerian style of the history of phi-
losophy from the vantage point of the forgetting of the ethical, we can
perhaps begin to envision—especially with regard to […] Kant—what
a “Levinasian” critical retrieval would look like’ [IRB 9].
6. Richard A. Cohen, Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and
Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 29.
7. Paul Davies, ‘Sincerity and the end of theodicy: three remarks on
Levinas and Kant’ in Simon Critchley & Robert Bernasconi (eds.), The
Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 162.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 168 & 165 respectively.
10. Catherine Chalier, What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas,
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 4–5.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. Ibid., The quotations in Chalier’s text are taken from DMT 75/64.
13. Diane Perpich, ‘Freedom Called into Question: Levinas’s Defence of
Heteronomy’ in Melvyn New with Robert Bernasconi & Richard A.
Cohen (eds.), In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the 18th Century,
(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2001), 303.
14. Peter Atterton, ‘From Transcendental Freedom to the Other: Levinas
and Kant’ in In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the 18th Century,
327. The essay referred to here is PPR. The quoted phrase is taken from
p. 451.
15. Ibid., 328 & 347 respectively.
 1 Introduction    
15

16. Ibid., 347.

17. John Llewelyn, The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas
(London: Routledge, 2000), 3.
18. Ibid., 7 & 200 respectively.
19. Ibid., 219.
20. Ibid., 218. Llewelyn is referring here implicitly to Heidegger’s own
interpretive account of the term ‘figura’ in his 1927–28 lecture course
on Kant’s 1st Critique. Thus, as Heidegger writes: ‘In the Critique,
Kant specifies the function of the power of imagination as follows:
“…imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form
of an image.” Thus pure power of imagination must bring the pure
manifold of time into the form of a pure image. Productive synthesis
forms into “an image”; it offers productively a figura. Hence Kant also
calls productive synthesis “figurative synthesis”’ [G25 414–15/281].
See also A120 & B151-2.
21. Ibid., 218–19.
22. In the final chapter to his comprehensive examination of Levinas’s
ethical thinking of time, Eric Severson discusses various hitherto unex-
plored possibilities for its advancement. For Severson, two such pos-
sibilities would include exploring his proposed ‘deformalization of
time, which Levinas saw underway in Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger,
and Rosenzweig,’ as well as his increased ‘engagements of philosophi-
cal history’ in various later texts, thus ‘aligning Levinas’s diachrony
with understandings of time in Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and
many others.’ The question, raised in the present book, is whether or
not the deformalization of time is already equivalent to a destructive
engagement of philosophical history, that is, to a destruction of Kant’s
purely formalized notion of time in the schematism, as stated previ-
ously in reference to the philosophical equivalence between Heidegger’s
retrieval of the temporal problematic of the schematism and Levinas’s
renewal of this temporal problematic in his explication of Rosenzweig.
The attempt, proposed here, to show such an equivalence would then
suggest one possible avenue of exploration into ‘what it means to fur-
ther deformalize time’ in Levinas’s ethical thought. See Eric Severson,
Levinas’s Philosophy of Time: Gift, Responsibility, Diachrony, Hope
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2013), 267, 268, 337 n4 &
247 respectively.
16   A. Frangeskou

23. This argument is also characteristic of an essay written by Jere Paul

Surber. The difference, however, between his own destructive staging
of this relation to the Kantian schematism and the one I am propos-
ing here—to say this in the very briefest of terms—is that for Surber,
Levinas’s ethical thought of the Other is staged in and through the
categorial schemas of its otherness (and more specifically, according
to Kant’s categorial schematization of the nothing in ‘The Amphiboly
of the Concepts of Reflection’), whereas for me, the ethical thought of
the Other can only be staged in and through the ideal schemas of its
otherness (according to Kant’s ideal expansion of this schematization
contained within ‘The Regulative Use of the Ideas of Pure Reason’).
See Jere Paul Surber, ‘Kant, Levinas, and the Thought of the “Other”’,
Philosophy Today, Vol. 38, No. 3 (1994), 294–316.
 2
The Ontological Destruction
of the Schematism

Two Readings of the 1st Critique

‘The following investigation is devoted to the task of interpreting Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason as a laying of the ground for metaphysics and
thus of placing the problem of metaphysics before us as a fundamental
ontology’ [G3 1/1]. This is the opening statement to Heidegger’s 1929
interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, one that clearly announces
its utter devotion to the task of destroying this text. In 1927 Heidegger
published Being and Time, and if he interprets the 1st Critique in its
fundamental metaphysical significance, he nevertheless does so from the
vantage point of the newly disclosed ‘ontological analytic of Dasein,’
the metaphysical ground of the 1st Critique forever ruined in the wake
of this disclosure [1/1]. By 1929 Kant’s own laying of the ground for
metaphysics had already been destroyed by that which it rendered pos-
sible. Hence ‘the violence’ that does not cease to dominate Heidegger’s
interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason [xvii/xx]: the Kantian
ground-laying of metaphysics is placed before us as merely a harbin-
ger for his already accomplished fundamental ontology of Dasein.1
This violent appropriation of Kant can only be understood in the last

© The Author(s) 2017 17

A. Frangeskou, Levinas, Kant and the Problematic of Temporality,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59795-3_2
18   A. Frangeskou

instance as a historical confrontation—in the form of a destruction of

the history of ontology—with what the ground-laying of 1781 failed
to open up.2 However, this should not detract from the importance
of having to work out exactly what the stakes of the Kantian ground-
laying of metaphysics signified for the fundamental ontological move-
ment of Heidegger’s own thinking. ‘Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”’ in
the 1st Critique can receive its ‘true […] metaphysical sense’ only from
an engagement that is itself sensitive to the essential problematic of the
entire enterprise therein [12/8]. With regard to Levinas’s confrontation
with Heidegger two interpretations of this problematic become appar-
ent and reveal the stakes of the metaphysical ground-laying in question.
In light of this confrontation it would appear that Heidegger’s ontologi-
cal destruction radicalises the metaphysical sense of Kant’s revolution-
ary text to the point of obscuring what is truly at issue. How? In his
concerted effort to prioritise the Transcendental Analytic Heidegger
diminishes the potential of the Transcendental Dialectic to chart an
interpretive direction in the Kantian ground-laying that takes us beyond
the problem of Being, one that Kant himself had foreseen, but a direc-
tion which Heidegger’s own interpretation conceals from us. In this
way Heidegger reaches in his Kant lecture courses, and especially in the
1929 Kantbook, the schematism of the pure concepts of understand-
ing.3 He therefore removes himself, and Kant along with him, from the
supra-temporal excesses of traditional metaphysics which characterise
‘the discipline of Metaphysica Specialis’ [9/6] in order to open himself
to an interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a historical out-
let for the ‘further clarification’ of fundamental ontology presented in
Being and Time [xvi/xix]. As Heidegger comments in the ‘Preface to the
Fourth Edition’ of the Kantbook, it was ‘the chapter on Schematism’
that led him ‘to interpret the Critique of Pure Reason from within the
horizon of […] Being and Time,’ because it was this chapter of the 1st
Critique which first uncovered the ‘connection between the problem of
Categories, that is, the problem of Being in traditional Metaphysics and
the phenomenon of time,’ a schematic connection of Being and time
that until then had remained buried within the metaphysical tradition
[xiv/xvii–xviii]. Through the schematism chapter of the 1st Critique,
Kant lays the ground for the discipline of ‘Metaphysica Generalis
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
19

(Ontology)’ and anticipates the temporal problematic of fundamen-

tal ontology in Being and Time [9/6]. In his ‘projection of the inner
possibility of metaphysics,’ in his ‘setting-free of the essential ground’
of Metaphysica Generalis [2/2], Kant came across the problematic of
Temporality as such, and he did so by leading this projection back
beyond the timelessness of the ideas of pure reason toward the schema-
tism of the pure concepts of understanding because he allowed himself
to be drawn there ‘by the coercion of the phenomena themselves’ [SZ
23/45].4 To be sure, Kant ultimately fails to uncover the temporal prob-
lem of Being radically enough. However, in spite of this, once accom-
plished, the ground-laying does allow one to project the problem of
Being, of the inner possibility of traditional metaphysics, more directly
upon the phenomenon of time. Hence the historical connection which
Heidegger explicitly recounts in Being and Time and which he cease-
lessly suggests in 1929 between, on the one hand, the Critique of Pure
Reason, which in the Transcendental Analytic leads to the ground-laying
of metaphysics ‘in its originality’ such as to free it from the timeless play
of concepts alone—that is, from the purely rational ideas of Metaphysica
Specialis—and, on the other hand, the task of a fundamental ontology
of Dasein which interprets this ground-laying of Metaphysica Generalis
‘in a retrieval’ of the problematic of Temporality [G3 3/2]. The origi-
nality of the ground-laying of 1781 anticipates both the destruction of
traditional metaphysics as well as the need to establish a temporal ontol-
ogy of Being without having to resort to an ontic knowledge of supra-
temporal beings: Kant’s ground-laying leads away from the timelessness
of traditional metaphysics by allowing for the development of a funda-
mental ontology of Dasein’s temporality.
The alternative approach—which belongs to Levinas in princi-
ple, even though he failed to outline it in fact—completely overturns
Heidegger’s ontological directive for reading the 1st Critique. The
ground-laying of metaphysics certainly does consist in freeing up the
categories in their connection to the phenomenon of time. But far from
advancing his reading toward the dialectical expansion of these connec-
tions in the hands of the ideas, Heidegger would have unreservedly led
Kant’s metaphysics back to the schematism of the pure concepts alone,
thereby imprisoning the problematic of Temporality within the problem
20   A. Frangeskou

of Being. Thus, Heidegger’s reading of the 1st Critique would perpetu-

ate, even against the author’s original intention to re-establish the meta-
physical value of the ideas of pure reason, the primacy of fundamental
ontology at the expense of ethics as first philosophy. In short, the adher-
ence of Heidegger’s Kant-interpretation to the categories of traditional
ontology would betray, by recourse to the unquestioned primacy
accorded to the schematism of the pure concepts of understanding,
those concepts that ‘break’ with—or ‘break up’—the ontological phe-
nomenon of time. To overcome Heidegger’s directive for the ground-
laying of metaphysics would require that one overcome fundamental
ontology, by revealing against its appropriation of Kant’s theoretical
philosophy, a possibility that had been passed over as early as 1927—
of playing the ideas of God, man and world, those concepts foreign
to all ontology, against the ontological concepts traditionally endowed
with the title of categories and which connect to a phenomenon of
time appropriate to Metaphysica Generalis. Within this topic, accord-
ing to the development of a schematism of the ideas that will eventu-
ally lead it to the temporality of Being-for-the-Other, the 1st Critique
of 1781 attempts to restore the ethical primacy of Metaphysica Specialis
by expanding the phenomenon of time beyond the ontological primacy
of the Transcendental Analytic. Kant’s ground-laying therefore does not
lead away from the timelessness of traditional metaphysics but leads
back into it by compelling the Transcendental Dialectic to reveal the
ethical expansion of time by the supra-temporal ideas of pure reason.
The conflict of these two interpretations situates the Critique of
Pure Reason in two opposing directions: Either, reading it on the basis
of the Transcendental Analytic, one can retrieve the temporal status of
the traditional ontological concepts of metaphysics (the categories),
and it then becomes possible to move on to fundamental ontology
by carrying out the ground-laying of Metaphysica Generalis accord-
ing to the temporality of Dasein. Or else, reading it on the basis of the
Transcendental Dialectic, one reveals the conceptual primacy of the
ideas of pure reason, which becomes all the more clear insofar as they
expand the phenomenon of time in its connection to the categories of
the understanding; it then becomes necessary to move on to ethics as
first philosophy, in order to work out the ground-laying of Metaphysica
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
21

Specialis according to the temporality of Being-for-the-Other. This con-

flict, which for the purposes of this study becomes unavoidable, gives
rise to a host of difficult questions. According to Heidegger’s Kantbook,
and thus in strict accordance with the newly disclosed ontological ana-
lytic of Being and Time, in what did the ground-laying of metaphysics
consist exactly? Does Kant’s motive for the ground-laying really concern
the temporality of Dasein as newly disclosed by the project of funda-
mental ontology? Heidegger retrieves the temporal status of the catego-
ries; Levinas, in allowing us to begin stigmatising this approach, permits
us to reveal the ethical expansion of the temporal by the ideas of God,
man and world. Supposing that this distinction is supported by Kant’s
text, would it not offer a definitive range of material sufficient for us to
present the conflict between the two readings in a more elaborate way?
In other words, if it is a matter of situating the 1st Critique ontologi-
cally on the temporal ground of the schematism in the Transcendental
Analytic, then is there not already, in support of the Levinasian read-
ing of the 1st Critique we are proposing, an ethical expansion of this
ground in the Transcendental Dialectic? An examination of these ques-
tions will not be easy, yet must be conducted if we are ever to reveal the
conflicting motivations—both ontological and ethical—for the ground-
laying of metaphysics in the 1st Critique.

Destroying the Doctrine of the Schematism

If ‘the obscurity of his doctrine of the schematism’ effectively ‘closed off’
the problematic of Temporality to Kant in 1781, Heidegger immedi-
ately recognises the ultimate reason for this in 1927: ‘Kant could never
achieve an insight into the problematic of Temporality […] [because]
his analysis of it remained oriented towards the traditional way in which
time had been ordinarily understood; in the long run this kept him
from working out the phenomenon of a ‘transcendental determina-
tion of time’ in its own structure and function’ [SZ 23-4/45mod]. Such
blockages by the tradition necessitate that one not take the Kantian
ground-laying of metaphysics as completely genuine, but instead bring
to light those ‘primordial ‘sources’’ that remain concealed beneath it,
22   A. Frangeskou

and from out of which it is ‘in part quite genuinely drawn’ [21/43]. The
doctrine of the schematism is not to be taken traditionally as something
self-evident, but rather, is that which Kant himself is unable to render
problematic and which therefore requires a certain task of ‘destruction’
[23/44]5; namely, the task of retrieving the original possibilities of the
Kantian ground-laying, those “primordial sources” which elude Kant,
but at the same time, enable him to return to the tradition of ontol-
ogy in a positive manner and make it productive for working out the
problematic of Temporality.6 Like Kant, who in a characteristic destruc-
tion of his own, led the categories—which are perhaps in themselves
employed only timelessly—back to the phenomenon of their tran-
scendental determination of time, one must lead the schematism itself
and as a whole back toward its sources in the structure and function
of Dasein’s ‘temporality [Zeitlichkeit ]’ [17/38]. Indeed, ‘those very phe-
nomena which will be exhibited under the heading of ‘Temporality’ in
our analysis, are precisely those most covert judgements of the ‘common
reason’ for which Kant says it is the ‘business of philosophers’ to provide
an analytic’ [23/45]. The destruction of the doctrine of the schema-
tism already implies the identification of that obscure doctrine with the
failure to exhibit the phenomena of Temporality, and in return: ‘Only
when we have established the problematic of Temporality [Problematik
der Temporalität ], can we succeed in casting light on the obscurity of his
[i.e., Kant’s] doctrine of the schematism. But this will also show us why
this area is one which had to remain closed off to him in its real dimen-
sions and its central ontological function’ [23/45mod].
That the problematic of Temporality should have remained closed
off to Kant is due to the fact that the phenomenon of a transcenden-
tal determination of time is governed principally by his own deductive
use of the categories, those concepts of traditional ontology which for
Heidegger are primarily responsible for the concealment of the dimen-
sions of temporality. The retrieval of the problematic of Temporality
therefore requires the task of destruction to reveal the extent to which
‘the chapter on the schematism and the Kantian doctrine of time’ oper-
ates with the concepts that the ontological tradition had laid out for
it, so as to then be able to reveal the newly established temporality of
Dasein that this chapter invariably conceals from us by its employment
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
23

of these concepts [24/45]. It then becomes incumbent upon the task of

destruction to ‘stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition, and
this always means keeping it within its limits; these in turn are given fac-
tically in the way the question is formulated at the time, and in the way
the possible field of investigation is bounded off’ [22/44]. The destruc-
tion of the doctrine of the schematism in terms of its retrieval of the
problematic of Temporality has force only if it is a matter of bringing
to light what, given the factical limitations imposed upon the Kantian
doctrine of time, precisely conceals itself from view; a concealment that
arises from out of its unquestioning appropriation of the traditional cat-
egories and concepts of ontology.
As these early passages of Being and Time confirm, Heidegger can
retrieve the temporal problematic inherent in the Kantian ground-lay-
ing of metaphysics only by carrying out this task of destruction. For
only: ‘The destruction of the history of ontology [can] […] raise the
question whether and to what extent the interpretation of Being and
the phenomenon of time have been brought together in the course of
the history of ontology, and whether the problematic of Temporality
required for this has ever been worked out in principle or ever could
have been’ [23/44-5mod]. One must carry out a destruction of the
doctrine of the schematism because one must lead Kant’s metaphysical
enterprise in the 1st Critique back to the interpretive task of destroy-
ing its own historical limitations, which have hitherto prevented him,
and us, from working out the principle ontological requirements of
the problematic of Temporality. Only then can what remains essential
to Kant’s own investigation of this temporal problematic come to light.
Even the later Kantbook does not deviate from the importance of this
initial intention, offering itself ‘as a “historical” introduction of sorts
to clarify the problematic treated in the first half of Being and Time ’
[G3 xvi/xix], one that Heidegger insists must be taken in the strictest
sense as a ‘“confrontation” [“Auseinandersetzung ”]’ with the 1st Critique
which aims ultimately at its destruction [249/175mod].7 We therefore
conclude with Heidegger: the fundamental significance of the Kantian
ground-laying of metaphysics in the 1st Critique has to do with the
elevation of time as determined transcendentally by the categories, to
the level of a complete ontological destruction of the phenomenon that
24   A. Frangeskou

was initially worked out in the doctrine of the schematism, that is, to
the absolutely decisive role the problematic of Temporality plays with
respect to the phenomenon of a transcendental determination of time.
The initial projection and the final completion of the ground-laying of
metaphysics come into an immediate historical connection: Kant’s met-
aphysical—and indeed, ontological—enterprise is identified as such by
leading everything that the schematism claims to be worked out as a
phenomenon of transcendental time-determination back to the funda-
mental ontology of Dasein’s temporality. This conclusion gives rise to
two arguments, which Heidegger delivers in 1929.
First, Heidegger argues that the constitutive ‘problem of the essence
of a priori synthetic judgements’ formulated in the Critique of Pure
Reason orients Kant’s metaphysical enterprise in no other direction
than toward ‘the question concerning the possibility of ontological
knowledge,’ and thus in no way contradicts the Copernican injunction
to establish the genuine limits of pure reason [14/9]. In fact, Part 1 of
Heidegger’s interpretation does not hesitate to recognise that the 1st
Critique, insofar as it admits of being a theory of knowledge ‘adjusts
itself to the ontological,’ that is, to the determination of ‘the essence
of “transcendental truth, which precedes all empirical truth and makes
it possible”’ [17/11].8 This revolutionary moment is carried out and
acknowledged as such when one realises that for Kant ‘the unveiling
of […] ontological knowledge’ turns on ‘an elucidation’ of the a priori
synthesis which, as common to all synthetic a priori judgements, first
makes this unveiling possible [14/9]. In short, Kant’s laying of the
ground for metaphysics consists in a ‘bringing-forth of the determi-
nation of the Being of the being [as] a preliminary self-relating to the
being. This pure “relation-to…” (synthesis) forms first and foremost the
that-upon-which [das Worauf ] and the horizon within which the being
in itself becomes experienceable […]. It is now a question of elucidat-
ing the possibility of this a priori synthesis’ [15/10mod]. This a priori
sense of the Copernican revolution augments the ontological direc-
tion of the 1st Critique all the more insofar as Kant himself explicitly
includes it: ‘Kant calls an investigation concerning the essence of this
synthesis a transcendental investigation. “I entitle all knowledge tran-
scendental that is occupied in general not so much with objects as with
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
25

the kind of knowledge we have of objects, insofar as this is possible a

priori.” Hence, transcendental knowledge does not investigate the being
itself, but rather the possibility of the preliminary understanding of
Being, i.e., at one and the same time: the constitution of the Being of
the being. It concerns the stepping-over (transcendence) of pure reason
to the being, so that it can first and foremost be adequate to its possible
object’ [15-16/10].9
For Heidegger at least, the Kantian problem of a transcendental
elucidation of all synthetic a priori judgements belonging to the dis-
cipline of metaphysics does not deviate from the question concern-
ing the possibility of ontological knowledge, but rather constitutes its
accomplishment and truth: ‘To make the possibility of ontology into
a problem means: to inquire as to the possibility, i.e., as to the essence
of this transcendence which characterizes the understanding of Being,
to philosophize transcendentally. This is why Kant uses the designa-
tion “Transcendental Philosophy” for Metaphysica Generalis (Ontologia)
in order to make the problematic of traditional ontology discerna-
ble’ [16/10-11]. An interpretation of the 1st Critique must take as its
starting point Kant’s reduction of the understanding of Being to the
problem of transcendence, i.e., to the question concerning the inner
possibility or grounding of ontological truth, which in the first instance
characterises the synthesis inherent in all ‘a priori synthetic knowledge’
[17/11]. Only then can we understand how ‘with this revolution Kant
forces the problem of ontology to centre stage,’ and on that basis, begin
to inscribe the Critique of Pure Reason into the ontological problematic
passed down to us by the tradition [17/11]. Indeed, when one consid-
ers, as Heidegger does, that the whole of the 1st Critique was under-
taken for the sake of developing this problem of a priori synthesis,10
then by implication, any interpretation of Kant’s transcendental philos-
ophy as a laying of the ground for Metaphysica Generalis ‘must pursue
the a priori synthesis exclusively in itself, pursue it to the seed [Keim ]
which provides its ground and which allows that synthesis to develop
into what it is (allows it to be possible in essence). […] Thus, the task
then arises of showing how this development of the possibility of ontol-
ogy from its seeds is to be carried out’ [17-18/12].
26   A. Frangeskou

With this task, we embark upon the second of Heidegger’s argu-

ments. It begins with a clear statement of destruction that opens the
second part of the book: ‘In order to project the inner possibility of
ontological knowledge, we must first have opened up a view into the
dimension of going back [Dimension des Rückgangs ] to the ground
which supports the possibility of what we are seeking in its essential
constitution’ [19/13]. What is most certain for Heidegger, what the
Kantbook names the ground of a priori synthesis, and which alone ren-
ders possible Kant’s projection of the inner possibility of metaphysics
in the 1st Critique, has to do with this: the inner possibility of onto-
logical knowledge, such as it becomes reduced to the constitutive prob-
lem of grounding all synthetic a priori judgements, is supported by an
essential constitution, one whose primacy must be secured in advance
and which guides Kant’s own ontological insights from the ground up.
Any interpretation that refuses to go back to the ground of Kant’s meta-
physical projection in the 1st Critique, cannot hope to secure what is
most proper or essential to this constitution since any such interpreta-
tion excludes itself from ‘an explicit, systematic uprooting and mark-
ing of the field’ upon which an adequate interpretation of the Kantian
ground-laying of metaphysics becomes possible [19/13]. Consequently,
if Kant’s projection of the ground in his ground-laying of metaphys-
ics is ignored, if the knowledge of the origin of pure reason which the
1st Critique requires remains undetermined, then the ‘original directive
force of the projecting,’ that is, the essential constitution of the a priori
synthesis which plays such a pivotal role in the ground-laying of meta-
physics as Kant projects it, will remain concealed [19/13].
Two requirements then become necessary to the success of return-
ing to the ground in question: The first of these is a preliminary ‘char-
acterization of the field of origin’ of this a priori synthesis, one which
concentrates ‘on the clarification of the essence of the finitude of human
knowledge’ [21/15]. It demands that one ensure the return to ‘the essen-
tial structure of knowledge itself ’ by means of a thorough appraisal of
intuition [21/15]: ‘In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason
this point must be hammered in, so to speak: Knowing is primarily intu-
iting. From this it at once becomes clear that […] thinking is merely in
the service of intuition’ [21-2/15], and that ‘both intuition and thinking
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
27

must have a certain inherent relationship that allows their unification,’

a unification or synthesis that moreover opens itself up as the ground
of ‘Representation in general (repraesentatio )’ [22/16]. It is the ground-
ing of the two sources of knowledge that, above all else, characterises
the development of the a priori synthesis that Heidegger is seeking to
return to, a ‘characterization of the finitude of human knowledge’ which
at the same time provides ‘a clearer indication of the direction which the
[process of ] going back to the source of the inner possibility of ontology
has to take’ [35/24].11 Now, this “‘springing-forth” [Entspringen ] of our
knowledge’ into two basic sources cannot itself be a ‘mere juxtaposition’
of elements, since it is not ‘a subsequent result of the collision of these
elements,’ but is, in terms of the synthesis that unites them, what allows
these ‘elements in their belonging-together and their oneness [to] spring
forth’ [36/25mod]. Such oneness of the basic sources of pure knowledge
combines what each of them represents of the Being of the being; as the
unknown root of sensibility (which represents the Being of the being in
accordance with pure intuition) and understanding (which represents
the Being of the being represented in pure intuition by representing it
in pure concepts) this pure ‘veritative synthesis’ precedes them in their
capacity for ontological knowledge [29/20], perhaps in the sense that
here, according to Heidegger, ‘something essential arises for the general
character of the Kantian laying of the ground for metaphysics’ [37/26].
It remains the case that in order to take on the projective function of
the ground-laying, the pure veritative synthesis must be irreducible
to either of ‘the pure elements of pure knowledge’ which spring forth
from it [39/27], and thus ‘goes into and points consciously toward the
unknown […] ground for Philosophy’ [37/26].
The second requirement is concerned with the manner of unveiling
this unknown ground of the pure veritative synthesis, as well as an indi-
cation of the method for confronting what becomes unveiled there.12
Both are geared toward rescuing pure synthesis from an ‘ambiguous
indeterminacy’ [29/20] by requiring us to return to ‘the inner pos-
sibility of the essential unity of a pure veritative synthesis,’ one that
‘pushes us even further back to the clarification of the original ground
for the inner possibility of this synthesis’ [39/27]. The clarification of
28   A. Frangeskou

this original ground of the pure veritative synthesis, or quite simply, of

‘ontological synthesis,’ becomes the principal recourse for every elabo-
ration Heidegger ever makes regarding Kant’s distinctive contribution
to the ground-laying of metaphysics in the 1st Critique by being the
first and last thing to undergo the fundamental ontological retrieval, in
this case by becoming unveiled as ‘pure synthesis’ in the deepest sense
that Kant gives to this term [39/27]. Hence, the ontological destruc-
tion of the Kantian notion of pure synthesis, merely proposed in Being
and Time as a destruction of the doctrine of the schematism, is now
attempted by the investigation of 1929; as early as §8, it announces that
the ‘provisional characterization of the essential structure [Wesensbaues ]
of finite knowledge has already revealed a wealth of structures
[Strukturen ] which belong inherently to synthesis’ [40/28]. And yet, the
Kantbook will hold back from fulfilling the destructive promise of Being
and Time until near the end of the third part. Part Two, which ‘runs
through [the] five stages’ of the Kantian ground-laying of metaphys-
ics, does not enter into the ultimate confrontation—namely with the
Kantian ground-laying in its originality—but sets about unveiling the
ground upon which the ultimate possibility of destruction must play
itself out [39/27mod]. Heidegger himself will confirm as much in the
opening paragraph to Part Three when he states that ‘what the ground
itself is, as already established in the ground-laying, must be clearly
delimited’ [126/89].13 In fact one will have to wait until §33, explic-
itly dedicated to ‘the working-out of the inner temporal character of the
three modes of synthesis’ [178/124], for Heidegger’s complete unveil-
ing of this synthesis, and thus for its retrieval as the ‘original time’ of
Dasein’s temporality [177/124].
If one recognises the guiding thread of pure synthesis throughout
each of its stages of development, then the immediate historical con-
nection between the Critique of Pure Reason and the ontological ana-
lytic of Dasein becomes clear. But what of the method for unveiling this
ground? Heidegger posits as ‘a general indication of the fundamental
character of the procedure for this laying of the ground for metaphys-
ics’ the ‘type of investigation [which] can be understood as “analytic”
in the broadest sense. It concerns finite pure reason with a view to
how, on the grounds of its essence, it makes something like ontological
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
29

synthesis possible’ [41/29mod]. In short, Kant’s Transcendental Analytic

in the 1st Critique is, in contradistinction to “‘Psychology” and “Logic”’
[41/28], a ‘revealing of the essence of human Dasein’ [41/29]. A seman-
tic reading of the term ‘analytic’ immediately follows: Analytic means
‘a freeing which loosens the seeds [Keime ] of ontology. It unveils those
conditions from which an ontology as a whole is allowed to sprout
[aufkeimen ] according to its inner possibility’ [41-2/29].14 We should
especially not lose sight here of the root meaning of this ‘freeing’ as the
‘making fluid [Flüssigmachen ]’ or ‘bringing into flux [Fluß-bringen ]’
of the ‘Origin,’ since it coincides with a certain wholly irremovable
determination that defines the entire procedure of the Transcendental
Analytic [41/29]: the very same inner temporal character of ontological
synthesis which lies at the origin of the two sources of pure knowledge
and which ‘at the same time determines [its] construction’ [42/29mod].
The inner temporal character of this construction ‘thus becomes a
letting-be-seen [Sehenlassen ] of the genesis of the essence of finite pure
reason from its proper ground. In such an analytic, therefore, lies the
projecting anticipation of the entire inner essence of finite pure reason.
Only in the thorough development of this essence does the essential
structure of ontology become visible’ [42/29]. Now that is a remark-
able equation: the analytic unveiling of the pure synthesis supporting
the essential unity of pure knowledge contains within itself an inner
temporal character. Temporality not only ‘brings metaphysics to the
ground and soil [Grund und Boden ] in which it is rooted as a “haunt-
ing” of human nature,’ i.e., as the essence of human Dasein, but also
more importantly, characterises its fundamental mode of procedure as
an anticipatory projection of that ground [42/29].
We can therefore give an initial response to the first of our earlier
questions: the ground-laying of metaphysics in the 1st Critique consists
in leading the pure concepts of understanding and the pure intuition
of sensibility back to the hidden ground of their pure veritative syn-
thesis as defined in the doctrine of the schematism, and thus in radi-
cally deepening the ontological sense of this synthesis itself. The inner
temporal construction of ontological synthesis implies that the Kantian
doctrine of the schematism lets out far more to be seen, at least more to
be seen than an unveiling that limits itself to a traditional ontological
30   A. Frangeskou

understanding of the schematism alone. In other words, because the

schematism occupies the central place of what Kant understands uni-
versally by the term ‘pure synthesis,’ there is more to be seen than what
has traditionally been seen in the ground-laying of metaphysics; namely,
exactly as much as the schematism allows to be seen in a fundamental
ontological unveiling.

The Kantian Ground-Laying of

Metaphysics—Five Stages
But what does the schematism allow to be seen with respect to the
inner temporal construction of ontological synthesis? This remains to be
answered, but a quick response to this consequence of the first question
will allow us to conceive exactly how far the Kantian notion of ‘pure syn-
thesis,’ and therefore also the laying of the ground for metaphysics, pro-
ceeds according to the five stages that Heidegger outlines in 1929.15 In
the opening paragraph to his analysis of these stages, Heidegger reiterates
what he considers to be the primary aspect of the ground-laying; namely
the ‘problem of the possibility of Ontology’ according to the ‘problem of
the transcendental, i.e., of the synthesis’ which essentially grounds—or
‘constitutes’—‘the transcendence of the preliminary understanding of
Being’ [42-3/30]. In fact, in 1929, it is a matter of understanding how
‘finite human Dasein’ [42/30] or ‘the finite being that we call “human
being” [must] be according to its innermost essence so that in general it
can be open to a being that it itself is not and that therefore must be able
to show itself from itself ’ [43/30mod]. In order to attain the ontologi-
cal orientation that is demanded by Kant’s transcendental philosophy,
it is obligatory to review those key stages of the 1st Critique individu-
ally and to ‘follow the inner movement of the Kantian ground-laying’ on
that basis [43/30]. Here it is first necessary ‘to assess the appropriateness,
the validity, and the limits of the external architectonic of the Critique
of Pure Reason based on the most original understanding of the inner
course of the ground-laying’ [43/30]; and it is necessary to note above
all that the Kantian ground-laying leads beyond the limits of its own
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
31

enterprise in order to reach the temporality of Dasein. Moreover, in an

earlier lecture course conducted in 1927, and which we offer in support
of what he is now saying here in 1929, Heidegger states the following:
‘In Kant, the […] decisive thing remains obscure, namely that in assert-
ing existence […] some being is always intended, but the […] under-
standing in the assertion of being looks toward something else which,
however, is already understood precisely in commerce with beings and
in access to them. Expressed in Temporal language, the enpresenting
of something has, as such, a reference to beings; but this means that as
ecstasis it lets that for which it is open be encountered in the light of
its own—the enpresenting’s—horizon’ [G24 451/317].16 It is therefore
necessary to understand that to begin with, Kant’s external architectonic
of the ground-laying works in favour of an unveiling of the ecstatic-hori-
zonal temporality of Dasein concealed within it.
The ontological analytic of Dasein is opposed to the schematism
alone according to which the time of pure intuition is determined tran-
scendentally by the categories of pure thought. It is therefore a matter of
submitting the highest synthetic principles of reason to a fundamental
ontological destruction. It is a matter of discovering that the synthesis
governing this pure transcendental determination of time allows for a
deeper clarification, and therefore that this pure synthesis is unveiled
according to a temporal figure of unity that far exceeds the schema-
image of a category, that is, that far exceeds the pure sensible limits
imposed by Kant himself upon the traditional concepts of ontology.
The unfolding of the Kantian limitation is accomplished in five stages;
each of these stages progressively unveil the pure synthesis of the sche-
matism in such a way as to retrieve its fundamental ontological signifi-
cance, and with the result that the Kantian schema-image is revealed by
Heidegger to be the product of an ecstatic-horizonal construction.
1. In his Introduction to the Transcendental Logic, Kant famously
states that intuition would remain utterly blind if there were no con-
cepts of thought to unify it, and that these same conceptual unities
of thought would remain completely empty if there was no intuition
to fulfil them. Heidegger uses this statement as a reason to posit that
the ‘finitude of knowledge directly demonstrates a peculiar inner
dependency of thinking upon intuition, or conversely: a need for the
32   A. Frangeskou

determination of the latter by the former’ [G3 58/41]. This pecu-

liar attraction ‘of the elements toward one another indicates that their
unity […] must have applied to them “earlier” and must have laid the
ground for them’ [58/41]. Hence, the pure form of intuition—namely
time—would not have any validity unless it had already been unified
conceptually by the categories of pure thinking; the function of pure
intuition is a requirement on its part to ‘be gone through in a certain
way, taken up, and bound together in order to produce knowledge’ [61-
2/43]. Conversely, pure thinking must be ‘viewed with regard to its own
essence, i.e., its pure relatedness to intuition’ [57/40], which character-
ises the unveiling of ‘the origin of the categories’ in their capacity to
take up time and bind it together ontologically [56/40]. In this way,
Kant sets about unveiling ‘the essence and the idea of the category in
general’ [56/40].
The unity that is presupposed by each of these elements, and which
is earlier in a metaphysical sense, is none other than the unity that Kant
himself announces ‘by naming it “synthesis”’ [60/42]. They can presup-
pose it only if ‘the essential unity of ontological knowledge […] revolves
around the pure Veritative Synthesis’ [60/42]. The fundamental task of
the 1st Critique is to ask about ‘the original union of pure, universal intu-
ition (time) and pure thinking (the notions)’ [60/42], such that the ‘prob-
lem of the pure veritative or ontological synthesis must hence be brought
to the question’ of how ‘the original (veritative) “synthesis”’ can appear in
its capacity to unify such things as time and the categories [60-1/43]: that
is, to the question of unveiling the inner possibility of ontological truth
which lays the ground for the discipline of Metaphysica Generalis.
2. This ontological synthesis is itself unveiled in the veritative mode
of what Heidegger provisionally calls a ‘reciprocal preparing-themselves-
for-each-other’ of the elements of pure knowledge, ‘the pure manifold
of time’ and ‘pure thinking’ [62/44], for ‘it must share the basic charac-
ter of the two elements, i.e., it must be a representing’ [62-3/44]. Now,
‘“Synthesis in general,”’ as Kant himself tells us, ‘“is the mere result of
the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul
without which we would have no knowledge whatever, but of which
we are seldom conscious even once”’ [63/44].17 This means that the 1st
Critique delivers two parts that whilst being irreducible to one another,
 2 The Ontological Destruction of the Schematism    
33

are seen to belong to a ‘joining-into-one’ which is exhibited for Kant

in ‘the sticking-together [Syn-haften ] of intuition and the understand-
ing’ [64/45]. From here it becomes ‘evident that there are three parts
belonging to the full essence of pure knowledge’ [63/45], and that ‘the
pure synthesis of the power of imagination holds the central position’
[64/45].
But how does this pure synthesis of imagination appear at the out-
set? Upon what ground must the destruction of the Kantian ground-
laying of metaphysics deploy itself? Provisionally we can say that the
pure synthesis of imagination appears in two ways simultaneously: On
the one hand, it appears as ‘the pure Synopsis’ ‘in intuition’ [60/43]
which ‘“demands”’ that the pure manifold of time be ‘gathered from
dispersion’ by already being made ‘to fit [fugt ] with thinking itself, i.e.,
fit with it as a conceptual determining’ [62/44]. On the other hand, it
appears as ‘the pure reflecting (predicative) synthesis’ of pure thinking
[61/43], which requires that the demand for gathering the pure mani-
fold of time in pure synopsis be guided in advance by being ‘brought
to the concept which itself gives it unity. Thus pure synthesis [of imagi-
nation] acts purely synoptically in pure intuition and at the same time
purely reflectively in pure thinking’ [62/45mod]. We shall elaborate fur-
ther on these important points in a moment, but already from his out-
line of the two ways of its appearance it is clear that Heidegger assesses
the pure synthesis of imagination ‘as one having a truly superior charac-
ter’ due to its power ‘to unite such things which in themselves already
demonstrate synthetic structure’ [61/43].18 The power of imagination
therefore appears in its ontological superiority as the pure synthesis of
intuition and understanding, anticipating the doctrine of the schema-
tism, and it does so, above all, ‘in such a way that it shows how it is able
to unify time and notion’ [69/49].
It is therefore necessary to understand that in the 1st Critique, the
two parts of ontological knowledge give way to ‘the exhibition’ of the
power of the imagination to unify the categories and time, an exhi-
bition that the imagination itself carries out in ‘what Kant calls the
“Transcendental Deduction of the Categories”’ [69/49]. Thus, for
Heidegger, the ‘basic intention of the “Deduction”’ is to provide an
imaginative exhibition of the category of pure thinking in its unity with
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structures, but their business has grown so that they have had to be
pushed up to six stories or more. Winnipeg is one of the chief
markets of western North America. If you had a pair of long-distance
glasses that would enable you to look from here to the Pacific you
could find no city in western Canada that can approach it, and your
eyes would travel as far as Toronto before any city of its size could
be seen.
“If it were now summer,” the Winnipegger continues, “your
telescope would show you that you are at the eastern end of the
greatest grain-growing region on earth. To the west of us are six
million acres of land that will grow wheat and other foodstuffs with
little more labour than scratching the ground. Western Canada
raised in one year almost a half billion bushels of wheat and almost
as much oats, to say nothing of millions of bushels of barley, rye, and
flax seed.”
“Don’t you think it is a bit cold here on the roof?” I rather timidly
manage to ask.
“Well, perhaps so,” is the reply, “but when I talk about Winnipeg I
grow so warm that I could stand stark naked on the North Pole and
not feel uncomfortable.”
Leaving the Union Bank Building, we go for a motor ride through
the city. Main Street, the chief business thoroughfare, was one of the
old Indian trails that followed the course of the Red River past the old
Hudson’s Bay Company fort. And it still contains some of the city’s
best commercial properties. Along it real estate has been rapidly
rising in price and is said to be now fully as high as in Minneapolis or
Toronto. Portage Avenue, which we saw from the roof, cuts Main
Street almost at right angles. It also is part of an old Indian trail that
extended from here a thousand miles westward to Edmonton, a city
now reached by three great railroad lines.
Notice the banks! Winnipeg is one of the financial centres of
Canada, with branches of the chief banks of the Dominion. Now we
are going toward the river, past the Hudson’s Bay Company stores.
Turning to the right, we pass the Manitoba Club, the University of
Manitoba, and the parliament buildings. Like Washington, Winnipeg
is a city of magnificent distances. The main streets are one hundred
and thirty-two feet wide, and they stretch on and on out into the
country. In the residential districts they wind this way and that along
the Assiniboine River. Boulevards have been laid out on both sides
of the stream in such a way that every residence has a back yard
running down to the water, and nearly all have gardens and trees.
There are miles of fine houses in this part of Winnipeg. The chief
building materials are white brick and a cream-coloured stone found
near by. This is, in fact, a white city, and it looks as neat as a pin
under the bright sunshine. The boosting Winnipeggers say the sun
shines here for thirteen months or more every year. It is true that of
the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, three hundred and
thirty are usually cloudless.
 Winnipeg grew within fifty years from a Hudson’s
Bay post of two hundred people to the third largest
city in the Dominion. It is the greatest grain market in
Canada, all eastward-bound wheat being inspected
and graded here.
 Corn is cut by machinery in southern Manitoba.
The land is worked in such large tracts that it pays to
use the most modern labour-saving devices.
 Wheat growers on a large scale usually have their
own threshing machines, but the small farmer must
stack his grain and wait for the arrival of one of the
threshing outfits that travel from farm to farm through
the wheat belt.
Leaving the boulevards, we ride through street after street of
cottages, the homes of the well-to-do and of the poorer classes. We
see but few signs of “To Let” or “For Sale.” Winnipeg has almost no
tenement buildings. Even the dwellings of the labourers stand in
yards. Notice the double windows used to keep out the intense cold.
Winnipeg lies on a plain about midway between the Atlantic and
the Pacific and sixty miles from the United States boundary. The city
is built on the banks of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the
North, which here come together. The confluence of the two rivers
was the site of numerous Indian camps and trading posts, and the
scene of many of the early struggles between the rival fur
companies. Fort Garry was finally established here in 1820 by the
Hudson’s Bay Company, and a settlement that sprang up a half mile
away was called Winnipeg, after the lake of the same name about
fifty miles to the north. The word is a contraction of the Cree Indian
“Ouinipigon,” meaning “muddy waters.”
 In 1870, at the time of the Red River Rebellion against the
creation of Manitoba as a province of the Dominion and its
occupation by the Dominion government, Winnipeg, including Fort
Garry, had two hundred and forty inhabitants. Ten years later its
population was seven thousand, and in another ten years, following
the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway, it had about thirty
thousand people. Since then it has grown steadily, until it is now the
third city in Canada, outranked only by Montreal and Toronto. It is an
important industrial centre, manufacturing more than one hundred
million dollars worth of goods in one year.
Situated at the gateway of Western Canada, and the vast
wheatfields of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Winnipeg is
the largest grain market not only of the Dominion but of the whole
British Empire. It is the neck of the bottle, as it were, for practically
the entire crop of the prairie provinces. Every carload of wheat
bound eastward for Fort William or Port Arthur is opened here and
sampled to determine its grade, a report on which is sent on to the
elevator as soon as the car is reclosed and sealed. Hence, when the
carload of wheat arrives at the elevator it can be binned in its proper
place without any delay.
Winnipeg is the distributing point for western Canada for
immigrants and settlers. There are people here of almost every
nationality in Christendom, and I am told that the Bible is circulated
through a local society in fifty different languages and dialects.
Across the Red River from the city is the town of St. Boniface, where
live several thousand French Canadians whose fathers came here
years ago. For a long time the settlement was typically and wholly
French, but many new people have come in, and not long since, for
the first time in its history, an English-speaking mayor was elected.
Some distance from the city, on the south shore of Lake
Winnipeg, is a colony of Icelanders. These people were among the
first of the immigrants to western Canada. They were brought in by
commissioners of the Dominion government when it was thought
that none but those accustomed to the cold of the arctic region could
withstand the climate. A colony of several thousand was settled
along the shores of the lake. For a time they made their living by
fishing, much of their catch in the winter being taken through holes in
the ice. The Icelanders intermarried with the Canadians, and they
are now well scattered over the province. Some of them are lawyers,
others are teachers, and many of the girls have gone into domestic
service. The largest Icelandic church in the world is in Winnipeg, and
periodicals are published here in the Icelandic language.
Winnipeg has many Mennonites and Russians. I saw a Russian
church in my drive about the city. The Catholic population is large,
the French Canadians belonging to that denomination. Outside the
city are a Trappist monastery and a Trappist nunnery. Almost every
denomination of Protestants has its meeting house, and the Jews
have a synagogue.
I like the Winnipeggers. They are strenuous, enthusiastic, and
happy. They are “boosters,” claiming that their city has the best
climate on earth, and that they would not exchange the biting winter
winds of the prairie for the gentle zephyrs of Florida or California.
Just now every one who can afford it wears a fur overcoat, many of
which are made of coon skins. The fur of the coon is long and thick
and the coat almost doubles the size of the wearer. It makes him
look at least a foot broader. Some of the fur caps add six inches in
height. Indeed, the town seems peopled with furry giants, who just
now are breathing out steam, for the frost congeals the air from their
nostrils so that it rises like the vapour of an incipient volcano.
The women here also dress in furs. Their cheeks are red from
Jack Frost’s nipping cold, and the ozone in the air paints their eyes
bright. When they begin to talk one knows at once that they are the
wives and the daughters of the giants beside them, for they sing the
praises of Winnipeg as loud as the men.
Until 1912 Manitoba contained only half as much land as it does
to-day. It was almost a perfect square and was known as the
“Postage Stamp” province. Then a section of the Northwest
Territories was added to it, and now it is as large as North Dakota,
South Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana combined. From the Lake of the
Woods and the Ontario boundary it extends westward to
Saskatchewan, while from the boundary of North Dakota and
Minnesota it stretches northward for a distance almost as long as
from New York to Chicago.
Although known as a prairie province, as a matter of fact, only
five per cent. of Manitoba is rightly included under this designation.
This is in the southern part, where the fertile Red River Valley grows
some of the finest wheat of all Canada. Three fourths of the province
is covered with forest, mostly second growth, which has sprung up
since the great forest fires in the past swept over the country. In the
north are also vast regions of barren land and muskeg, whose only
value is in their game and fish. Near The Pas, four hundred and
eighty-three miles north of Winnipeg, is a region of minerals, where
deposits of copper, gold, and silver are known to exist, but where the
developments as yet are of no great importance.
About five hundred miles north of Winnipeg is a belt of clay land
similar to that I have described in Ontario. This belt is level and well
adapted to mixed farming. The Winnipeggers tell me that the railway
built toward Hudson Bay has done much to open that part of
Manitoba to settlement. The climate is said to be warmer than that of
Winnipeg, owing to the absence of windswept plains and the
proximity of the waters of Hudson Bay, which have a temperature
higher than those of Lake Superior. Hardy grains and vegetables can
be grown, and strawberries have been raised at The Pas.
The first charter to build a railway to Hudson Bay was granted as
far back as 1880, and the project has been under discussion more or
less ever since. The various Canadian trunk lines at different times
have made plans for extensions to the Bay, and I am told that James
J. Hill once owned a concession to build such a line. The railway
from Winnipeg to The Pas on the Saskatchewan River was
completed about 1906, and from there it was planned to extend it on
to Hudson Bay. Actual work was held up a long time because of a
controversy as to whether the northern terminus should be at Port
Nelson or farther north at Fort Churchill. Port Nelson was finally
decided upon in 1912 and work was resumed.
As there were no settlements along the route, and as the
builders had to carry with them all their supplies and food, the line
was pushed northward a short distance at a time, and progress was
slow. The plans included a harbour at Port Nelson and the erection
there of two four-million bushel wheat elevators. However, the ships
loaded with supplies for the new port met with disaster, and later it
was learned that the entire appropriation for the railway had been
spent leaving the line far from completion. The project was finally
abandoned in 1917, when three hundred and thirty-two of the four
hundred and twenty-four miles from The Pas to Port Nelson had
been built. An irregular service has been since maintained to Mile
214, mostly for the accommodation of miners and hunters.
The Hudson Bay route would bring the wheat of the Northwest a
thousand miles nearer the ocean. Port Nelson is as near Liverpool
as is Montreal, and a carload of wheat from Regina in Saskatchewan
could be at the Hudson Bay port in the same time it would take to
reach Fort William. The distance from Winnipeg to Liverpool via
Hudson Bay is three thousand miles, whereas by Montreal it is 4228
miles. Passengers to England from St. Paul and Minneapolis by
using this route would shorten their railroad journey by at least five or
six hundred miles. The chief objection to the completion of the
Hudson Bay railway is the difficulty of navigating, not the Bay itself,
but Hudson Strait, which leads into it. The strait opens out into the
Atlantic a little below Greenland. It is between four and five hundred
miles long, and from fifty to two hundred miles wide. From the middle
of October until June it is sure to be full of ice from the Arctic Ocean,
and some parts of it are usually blocked for a month longer.
Moreover, it is not safe to rely upon it being open later than the first
week in October.
 CHAPTER XXI
THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAYS

Can you imagine all the railroads of the United States divided
into two systems, paralleling each other from our Atlantic coast to the
Pacific? Think of them as north of a line drawn from Baltimore
westward through St. Louis to San Francisco. Let the distance
between terminals be nearly four thousand miles, and the total
length of track ten times as great. Finally, suppose that the larger of
the two systems is owned and operated by Uncle Sam, and the other
by such a corporation as the New York Central. If you can do that
you will have the background of the railroad situation in Canada to-
day.
With a mile of track for every twenty-three people, Canada has
more railroads in proportion to her population than any other country
on earth. Only the United States and Russia have a greater total
mileage. Geographically, British America extends from our northern
border to the Arctic Ocean, but the active life of the Dominion is
mostly confined to a strip of territory averaging less than five
hundred miles wide from north to south and more than three
thousand miles long.
Our railroad development began in the East and extended
westward, but we have no system that reaches from coast to coast.
Canada, on the other hand, has two such systems. Neither have we
any such transportation service as the Canadian Pacific, which can
take a passenger on board ship at Liverpool, Hamburg, Cherbourg,
land him in Canada, carry him across the continent and across the
Pacific, and set him down in Japan or China, putting him up at its
own hotels whenever he wants to stop over.
 Before the World War, the Canadian Pacific, with some fourteen
thousand miles of its own rails, and five thousand more under its
operation, was the world’s largest land and water transportation
system under one management. To go over all its lines would take
nearly three weeks of continuous travel behind a fast engine. Now it
has been eclipsed on land by the Canadian National lines, with
twenty-two thousand miles of track, owned and operated by the
Dominion government.
I have ridden for thousands of miles over both of the present
systems, and have made trips in Canada when some of the lines
were in the process of building. I have talked with the pioneers of
railroad development in the Dominion and the officials of the great
railway organizations of to-day. I have watched the wheat trains pull
out of Winnipeg, one every half hour, all day and all night. Both the
Canadian National and the Canadian Pacific are doing their jobs
well, and both furnish excellent equipment and service on their main
lines. As a rule, the trains run at slower speed than the best
expresses of the United States, and, excepting the Trans-Canada
Limited, they stop at places so small that they would get only a
shriek of the whistle from our fast railway flyers. Most of the lines
have only a single track, but this is generally sufficient to handle the
traffic. Both systems operate almost exclusively their own sleeping
and dining cars. Each has also its own express service, and
combined they have more than one hundred thousand miles of
telegraph lines open to the use of the public. The food I have eaten
on the dining cars here has averaged in quality above that served on
eastern trains in the United States. The prices are about the same,
though the portions, as a rule, are more generous.
 With a population of less than two and one half
persons per square mile, strung out across a
continent nearly three thousand miles wide, Canada
has had to make enormous investments in railroads
to bind the country together.
 “Selling the scenery” has become a great source
of revenue to Canada’s railroads, which are experts in
exploiting the natural beauties of the Dominion.
Americans furnish the bulk of the patronage over the
scenic routes.
 The managements of both of these systems make strenuous
endeavours to cultivate the highest morale in their employees, and to
win their coöperation in the struggle for efficiency. Every man in the
Canadian railroad service understands that the Dominion needs
more and more people, and from managing vice presidents to
dining-car stewards, each seems to have constituted himself an
entertainment committee of one. I have never received anywhere
more courteous treatment from train men, and I notice that neither
the brakemen nor the sleeper conductors consider themselves
above helping me with my numerous pieces of baggage.
The Canadian Pacific has a chain of thirteen hotels
supplemented by eleven bungalow camps extending from St.
Andrews, New Brunswick, to Victoria in British Columbia. The
Canadian National lines operate half as many between Ottawa and
the Rockies. Both organizations are most enterprising in selling not
merely transportation, but all the attractions, business opportunities,
and resources of Canada. Either one will cheerfully locate a newly
arrived immigrant on the land, take an American sportsman on a
hunting trip, find a factory site or lumber tract for a group of
capitalists, or help a bridegroom plan his honeymoon journey. Both
are tremendous forces for advertising Canada.
Canada’s railroads have made the country. They have always
been, and still are, ahead of the population and the traffic.
Settlement in Canada has followed, instead of preceding, railroad
construction, and the roads themselves have had to colonize the
territories served by new lines. Uneconomic railroad building has
been a part of the price the Dominion has had to pay, not only for
settlers, but also for political unity. Both the Maritime Provinces and
British Columbia refused to become parts of the Dominion except on
condition that the Ottawa government build railways connecting them
with central Canada. From that day to this, political pressure has
been the force behind much of the railroad building in the Dominion.
The Canada that we know to-day may be said to have had its
beginning when the Canadian Pacific Railway was put through to the
west coast. In 1880 the job was turned over to a syndicate that soon
became world famous. Its contract called for completion of the line in
ten years, but it was finished within half that time. This saved British
Columbia to the Dominion, and gave the British Empire another link
in its world communications, including a direct route through its own
possessions to the Far East and Australia. Within two years after it
reached the western ocean, the Canadian Pacific began its
steamship service to Japan and China, and tapped the Orient for
cargoes to furnish traffic on its land line. Sixteen years later it
bridged the Atlantic. It now has on both oceans a fleet of more than
thirty vessels, including some of the finest passenger steamers
afloat. In its lake, river, and coastwise services it operates fifty
additional ships. It offers now a favoured route between London and
the Far East. The distance from Canton, China, to Liverpool, via
Canada, is fifteen hundred miles shorter than by way of San
Francisco and New York, and the journey takes much less time than
that by the Suez or Panama all-water routes.
Much of the main line between Montreal and Vancouver is being
double tracked; the mountain grades are constantly being reduced;
tunnels are taking the place of construction exposed to the snows;
branches and connections have been extended northward into new
country, and southward to connect with United States lines. To pay
its nearly seventy-five thousand employees takes almost eight
million dollars a month. Its car shops at Angus, near Montreal, are
one of the largest works of the kind on the continent, and they
employ more than six thousand men. Its freight yard at Winnipeg is
among the biggest in the world. Though the company is not fifty
years old, its total assets were recently valued at a figure in excess
of one billion dollars. It is, next to the government, the most powerful
single organization within the Dominion, and its influence is felt in
Europe and Asia.
The success of the Canadian Pacific, and the development that
followed, started in Canada the fever for railroad construction that
burned itself out only a few years ago. The provincial and the
Dominion governments and even municipalities eagerly backed
almost any railroad project that promised to open up new territory.
Not only were charters granted freely, but the obligations of the
constructing companies were guaranteed, and cash subsidies
advanced to the promoters of new lines. The actual transportation
needs of large areas were discounted decades in advance, and
competing lines were built parallel to one another in districts
producing hardly enough traffic for a single railroad.
In 1903 the Grand Trunk, the oldest railroad system in Canada,
contracted with the government for the construction of a new
transcontinental line from Quebec to Winnipeg and from Winnipeg to
Prince Rupert, a new terminus on the Pacific Coast, a total of 3559
miles. In the meantime, another road, the Canadian Northern,
starting in Manitoba, spread itself through the prairie provinces,
crossed the Rockies, and entered into competition with the Canadian
Pacific at Vancouver. By 1914 it had bought and built a total of 9400
miles of railway. The Grand Trunk also had grown, and it then had
7500 miles of tracks, a chain of hotels, steamship lines on the Pacific
coast, and grain elevators and terminals in the Dominion and the
United States. Both roads crossed the Rockies at the same point,
giving Canada two transcontinental lines over the northern route
where one would have been plenty.
It was in 1914 that these railroad chickens came home to Ottawa
to roost, and the end of the World War found the government up to
its neck in the transportation business. This did not come about by
anybody’s choosing, but through the working of forces set in motion
years ago. The Dominion government was first led into running
railroads by its bargain with the Maritime Provinces. Out of this came
government operation of the Intercolonial Railways serving the
eastern provinces and joining them to the St. Lawrence basin. This
system never earned any profits. The government built the National
Transcontinental from Quebec to Winnipeg on the understanding
that the Grand Trunk would lease it for fifty years. When it was
finished, the corporation begged off, and the government was
compelled to operate the line. In 1914, the owners of the Canadian
Northern announced that unless they received sixty million dollars at
once they would have to suspend. They got the money. Two years
later it was the Grand Trunk Pacific that appealed to Ottawa for
financial aid. Sustaining these railroads was such a drain on the
public treasury that finally the government assumed responsibility for
all their obligations and absolute control of the properties. It then
began to weld them into the single system now known as the
Canadian National Railways.
For years the Canadian Pacific Railway has paid dividends
regularly. The lines making up the Canadian National have, for the
most part, never paid anything, and they were unloaded upon the
government because they were regarded more as liabilities than as
assets. As the largest taxpayer in Canada, the Canadian Pacific
Railway Company must contribute indirectly to the support of its
competitor, unless the government lines are able to earn their own
way.
After the war, one year’s deficit on the government lines was
sixty-seven million dollars. In railroad subsidies, Canada has paid
out nearly three hundred million dollars. Bonds and other railroad
obligations to the total of four hundred and fifty-five millions have
been guaranteed, while four hundred and seventy millions of public
moneys were spent in building roads for the government. One
student of Canada’s railroad policy tells me that the national treasury
would now be four hundred millions to the good if the government
had given the National Transcontinental, the Canadian Northern, and
the Grand Trunk Pacific to some corporation, and had thrown in a
cash bonus of two hundred millions besides.
The government railroads now furnish a complete service to
virtually all parts of Canada, including the chief ports, from Halifax on
the east coast to Vancouver and Prince Rupert on the west. The
Canadian National Railways operate the Grand Trunk hotels and
west coast steamers, and also the sixty-five ships of the Canadian
Government Merchant Marine, which sail the seven seas. The
curious situation exists of railroads owned by the government of
Canada using two thousand miles of track in the United States.
Nothing was thought of the Grand Trunk having terminals at
Portland, Maine and New London, Connecticut, and Chicago, but the
government ownership of these properties raises the possibility of
conflict between the two countries in railroad matters.
 The government is fortunate in having in charge of the Canadian
National lines Sir Henry Thornton, one of the great railroad men of
the time. To him all Canada is looking to find the way out of the
wilderness into which circumstances have brought the Dominion.
Under his administration duplicated services are being eliminated,
and the deficits have been greatly reduced. He is confident the lines
can be made self-supporting. He said the other day:
“The world expects the Canadian National Railways to fail. It
does not believe that we can make them succeed. I do. I believe that
if the army of workers lines up behind us, we shall achieve the
greatest success the annals of transportation have ever recorded.”
Though he is to-day a British subject, Sir Henry was born an
American. His boyhood home was in Lafayette, Indiana. From St.
Paul’s School in New Hampshire and the University of Pennsylvania,
he went to the Pennsylvania Railroad. He rose to be manager of the
Long Island Railroad, where he had much to do with the construction
and operation of the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York City.
England sent for him in 1914 to manage the Great Eastern Railway,
which has the largest passenger traffic of any railroad in the world,
and during the war he was in charge of all British army transportation
in Europe.
Sir Henry is not the first railroad genius America has furnished to
Canada. Lord Shaughnessy, for many years the president and then
the chairman of the Canadian Pacific, was born in Milwaukee. When
he was a boy of fifteen he went to work for the Chicago, Milwaukee
and St. Paul Railroad. I once spent a morning with him in his office at
Montreal, where he told me of his early career and his vision of the
future of Canada and the great transportation system that he had
raised up from infancy. His successor, E. W. Beatty, is the first
Canadian-born president the Canadian Pacific has ever had.
Thomas Shaughnessy came to Canada at the invitation of
William Van Home, another American. Van Home became the
manager of the project after the government had given up hope of
building a road across western Canada. It was he who carried it
through the early period of desperate struggle with the wilderness
and the equally desperate fight for money with which to meet the
payroll. Years ago he established the present policy of courtesy to
passengers, and placarded the system with a demand for “Parisian
politeness on the C. P. R.” During their régime, both men had
associated with them many other Americans whom they called to
Canada to lend a hand in one of the greatest transportation jobs the
world has ever known.
 CHAPTER XXII
THE LAND OF FURS

For four hundred years furs from Canada have been warming
the flesh and enhancing the charms of feminine beauty. It is to-day
the chief breeding place of animals valued for their skins, and it is
likely to remain so for centuries to come.
When the settlement of North America was at its beginning, the
French adventurers making fortunes in furs did their best to
discourage the incoming colonists, for they knew that this meant the
death of the wilderness. If they could have had their way, all that is
now Canada would have been left to the Indian trappers and the
white traders who relieved them of their annual catches. As it is,
improved methods of transportation, trapping, and hunting are
reducing the available supply, and the demand is such that the
furriers have had to popularize skins formerly despised as too
common, and many Canadians have gone into the business of
breeding fur-bearing animals.