THE END OF PHILOSOPHY
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Kant is on the way to thinking the being of reflection in the transcendental, that is, in the ontological sense. This occurs in the form of a hardly noticeable side remark in the Critique of Pure Reason under the title "On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection." The section is a supplement, but it is filled with essential insight and critical dialogue with Leibniz, and thus with all previous metaphysics, as Kant himself sees it and as it is grounded in its ontological constitution in egoity.
XVIII
Regarded from the outside, it looks as if egoity were only the retroactive generalization and abstraction of what is egolike from the individual "egos" of man. Descartes above all obviously thinks of his own "ego" as the individual person (res cogitans as substantia finita). Kant, on the other hand, thinks "consciousness in general." But Descartes also already thinks his own individual ego in the light of egoity which, however, is not yet explicitly represented. This egoity already appears in the form of the certum, the certainty which is nothing other than the guaranteeing of what is represented for representational thinking. The hidden relation to egoity as the certainty of itself and of what is represented is already dominant. The individual ego can be experienced as such only in terms of this relation. The human ego as the individual self completing itself can only will itself in the light {GA 7: 85} of the relation of the will to will, as yet unknown, to this ego. No ego is there "in itself," but rather is "in itself" always only as appearing "within itself," that is, as egoity.
For this reason, egoity is also present where the individual ego by no means presses forward, where it rather retreats, and society and other communal forms rule. There, too, and precisely there, we find the pure dominance of "egoity" which must be thought metaphysically, and which has nothing to do with naively thought "solipsism."
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