This intellectual tendency constituted, according to Cassirer, the main manifestation of an essential component of the human condition which he, following Kant, called "spontaneity".
In the first edition of the Critique, in 1781, Kant had even defined imagination as a "third faculty" of the human mind, placed between sensitivity and intellect, which, being "heterogeneous", needed a temporal synthesis or transcendental schematism.
For Cassirer, however, the Heideggerian attempt had to be completely rejected, as in Kant works there was sufficient material and of the utmost clarity.
But for Heidegger "this was merely a confirmation of his view of how to read a philosophical tradition that deliberately veils its own truth: 'In order to wring from what the words say, what it is they want to say, every interpretation must necessarily use violence.
Rudolf Carnap,[6] Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Emmanuel Levinas (who later recalled that: "Young student could have had the impression that he was witness to the creation and the end of the world"),[3] were also in the audience at Davos.