Why Wasn't Kant a Phenomenologist?

One book that somebody should write, and I would read it with great interest and curiosity, would be "Why Wasn't Kant a Phenomenologist?"  We almost got something like that in Heidegger's book, "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics," but I need someone to go further than Heidegger, to explain much that Heidegger leaves unexplained.  Because I, for one, when I read Kant, cannot help but feel that he is tending towards phenomenology - and, of course, after Kant, phenomenologists sprouted up like mushrooms.  To oversimplify matters entirely, the problem is essentially this: Kant seems to have recognized something like the antinomial character of metaphysics - therefore, he "should" have renounced metaphysics altogether and insisted on focusing simply on the phenomena themselves, refusing to allow any of the phenomena to acquire any metaphysical residue, so to speak.  It almost seems inevitable that a philosopher, having confronted the Kantian antinomies, would thereby have a conversion experience, and accept the phenomenologist faith.  (I'm kidding, of course.)

But Kant did not do that.  That's what's so interesting about him.  What's more, as I read Kant, it seems to me that this is no accident on Kant's part.  I cannot lapse into the patronizing stance of the type of person who would say, "Ah, what a shame - Kant just wasn't quite smart enough to think his thoughts all the way through.  If he had put a little more effort into it, he would have become a phenomenologist" or something like that.  What's so arrestingly bizarre and fascinating about Kant is that he seems to have renounced any hope for direct access to the transcendent - and, at the same time, also renounced phenomenology.  You might ask, what's left?  Well, what indeed?

Heidegger's account is brilliant, of course.  But perhaps what dissatisfies me about it - the reason I want someone else to write another, better book on the subject - is that, for me, Heidegger is too biased in favor of phenomenology.  I want to read an account of this topic from the perspective of a non-phenomenologist. To be clear, I'm not looking for, say, the perspective of an analytic philosopher, a naive realist, a "new atheist," or anything along those lines - I'm looking for someone well-trained in the Continental tradition, who fully understands the phenomenologist project, really gets the phenomenological aspiration, knows what Husserl and Heidegger and the rest of them were up to, what they were trying to accomplish, and yet at the same time, says something along the lines of, "Okay, phenomenologists, go ahead, do your thing, keep doing phenomenology, have fun - but Kant is over here, doing something else, engaged in a different project, and we're going to talk about that, and why he chose to do this instead."  I think that could be the basis for something really fruitful - to see what arises in an alternative to phenomenology, which I think Kant only vaguely gestured at and which further thinkers could develop into a new branch of the philosophical family tree.

I should stop talking there, but I can't help adding my two cents in and say that the starting point for such an investigation might be that, for someone like Kant, these two things - on the one hand, the very notion of a pure, bare phenomenon, bereft of all metaphysics, and on the other hand, the transcendent - are more similar than they may at first appear, and may in fact be two sides of the same coin.  I, for one, come again and again to the frustrating conclusion that while the problems of metaphysics remain unsolved, nonetheless there is no way to avoid metaphysics.