to the object?” (Akademische Ausgabe, vol. 10, p. 124).92 “Representing” in Kant means, as he himself says, “having an object.” And in this context, Kant goes on: This representing—having-an-object—is understandable,
if what in us is called representation were active with respect to the object, that is, if the object itself were produced by the representation, in the same way as we imagine divine knowledge as the prototype of things, the con-formity of the representation to its object would be intelligible.93
Thus the intellectus divinus, the divine act of knowing, is the highest kind of representing, of having-an-object. However, God’s intellect is not first of all brought face-to-face with objects as bodily out there. Rather, it brings the object face-to-face with it in a way that first brings the entity into being. It goes out ahead of it in such a way that it produces it in the first place. That is why Kant calls this intellectus the intellectus archetypus (ibid.) or the intuitus originarius (Critique of Pure Reason, B 72). We might compare this with Husserl’s “originary intuition,” except that Kant now understands the intuitus originarius in a much more extreme way. It is called “originary” because it originally gives being to what is intuited in the intuition. Therefore, divine intellect is the origin (ἀρχή) whereby things come into being. It makes the intuited be immediately there insofar as this intuitus originarius, this intellect, originally thinks the possibilities of things as such and, in and with these possibilities, gives things the basis on which they can be actual. This intellect does not come after the entity and then seek it out. Rather, as intellect it really produces it, makes it possible, in the first place. The divine intellect renders it a possibility because only if things are possible can they become actual.94 Kant emphasizes the relation between the representation in us and the object. God is the substantia infinita. The intellectus divinus is the intellect of an [116] infinite being, whereas a cognitive entity such as the human subject, because it is created, is finite.95
92. [Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 10, pp. 123–130; translated as Immanuel Kant, Selected Pre-Critical Writings and Correspondence with Beck, ed. and trans. G. B. Kerferd and D. W. Walford (Manchester: Manchester University Press / New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), pp. 111–118, here p. 112. The German Vorstellung can be translated either as “presentation” or as “representation”; in both cases, as Heidegger points out, it means the mental having-of-an-object.
93. Conformity. Thomas [Aquinas] always characterizes truth as conformitas, in fact in the very same context as Kant does here, namely, God’s knowledge.
94. [Cf. Moser, p. 241.8–242.1.]
95. In the Neo-Kantians, the subject is neither human beings nor God. No one knows who it is. And if we ask, “What is this consciousness in which the world is constituted?” Rickert answers: “A concept.”