Kant grasps the phenomenal content of the 'I' correctly in the expression 'I think', or—if one also pays heed to including the 'practical person' when one speaks of 'intelligence'—in the expression 'I take action'. In Kant's sense we must take saying "I" as saying "I think". Kant tries to establish the phenomenal content of the "I" as res cogitans. If in doing so he calls this "I" a 'logical subject', that does not mean that the "I" in general is a concept obtained merely by way of logic. The "I" is rather the subject of logical behaviour, of binding together. 'I think' means 'I bind together'. All binding together is an 'I bind together'. In any taking-together or relating, the "I" always underlies—the ὑποκείμενον. The subjectum is therefore 'consciousness in itself', not a representation but rather the 'form' of representation. That is to say, the "I think" is not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented. When we speak of the "form" of representation, we have in view neither a framework nor a universal concept, but that which, as εἶδος, makes every representing and everything represented be what it is. If the "I" is understood as the form of representation, this amounts to saying that it is the 'logical subject'.

Kant's analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the "I" to a substance; for another [320] thing, he holds fast to the "I" as 'I think'. Nevertheless, he takes this "I" as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject characterizes not the Self- hood of the "!" qua Self, but the selfsameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand. To define the "I" ontologically as "subject" means to regard it as something always present-at-hand. The· Being of the "I" is understood as the Reality of the res cogitans.^xix

But how does it come about that while the 'I think' gives Kant a genuine phenomenal starting-point, he cannot exploit it ontologically, and has to fall back on the 'subject'—that is to say, something substantial? The [321] "I" is not just an ' I think', but an ' I think something'. And does not Kant himself keep on stressing that the "I" remains related to its representations, and would be nothing without them?

For Kant, however, these representations are the 'empirical', which is 'accompanied' by the "I"—the appearances to which the "I" 'clings'. Kant nowhere shows the kind of Being of this 'clinging' and 'accompanying'. At bottom, however, their kind ofBeing is understood as the constant Being-present-at-hand of the "I" along with its representations. Kant has indeed avoided cutting the "I" adrift from thinking ; but he has done so without starting with the 'I think' itself in its full essential content as an