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Part II

Here time is used for a fundamental statement about the presence of the world and of the empirical I—or more precisely, for a statement about the necessary co-presence of the one with the other. Stated as a principle: Time co-functions in the clarification of how something present is able to be determined. It is the “constant correlate of all existence {i.e., presence} of appearances.” Thanks to time’s a priori relation to the unity of apperception, Kant now arrives at these fundamental principles: the analogies [357] that he says have a regulative character. This means that they a priori regulate the various ways of determining—the various syntheses of the relations of—whatever exists in time.

The understanding is the faculty that brings about comprehension. The fact that we comprehend anything at all is due to the understanding as a combining. But the determinateness of everything determinable is the determinateness of the a priori form of everything determinable—i.e., of everything given—and that a priori form is time. Therefore, time co-functions in constituting the understanding of anything at all; that is, it co-functions in the constitution of meaning. Time co-functions in and for constituting the possibility of pure concepts of the understanding relating to the given objects and, in this relating, intending some meaningful content, intending some thing—that is, the possibility of the pure concepts having present a meaning, a sense.

From the fact that time co-functions to constitute understanding in general, in connection with the determining of the determinable, we come to what seems to be a new structural connection between time and the “I think,” but which in fact is the same connection we already discovered in the First Analogy. How time is connected with and functions in the formation of an understanding in general is what Kant discusses under the rubric, “The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.”

§31. The schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding


In the Critique of Pure Reason, the section of the investigation that bears the title “On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” is the one in which the function of time and its connection with the “I think” are thematized in a properly concrete way, but in the same way that we have already pointed out: by making use of some kind of connection while leaving it entirely undetermined.

This chapter [358] on the schematism is the real center of the Critique of Pure Reason. The whole structure of the book stands or falls with the doctrine of the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding and with the sustainability of this doctrine. However, current Kant


Martin Heidegger (GA 21) Logic : the question of truth

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