Correlated with that is the heavy-handed, unsophisticated way people usually speak of time and of timelessness versus temporality, as if these were the simplest things in the world. As I indicated earlier, the only one who started to grope around in this darkness, but without managing to see the fundamental significance of his attempt, was Kant. However, within the very narrow chronological field that he worked in, Kant already saw [201] the obscurity of the phenomena that he met there.
One piece of evidence for that is a statement Kant makes in the Critique of Pure Reason in connection with his explanation of the schematism, and it serves as the rubric for the particular way the problematic of time emerges for Kant within the Critique of Pure Reason.
This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty. (B 180–181)
Now, we do not want to naïvely maintain that the project Kant doubted could be carried out has in fact been carried out and surpassed. But what he called obscure and almost inaccessible, we take up as an authentic philosophical challenge—to shed light on this night and get a grip on what is there so we can understand it. In this way we will take seriously the philosopher’s job of “dismembering the secret judgments of common sense.” In fact, perhaps the phenomena that circle around ur-temporality and time are these secret “judgments” of human reason.
As in every field where Kant’s investigations really latch onto issues, here too, in this field of the problem of time, Kant keeps the horizons open. The way he carries out his investigations shows that he is struck by the phenomena, maintains his characteristic reserve in front of them, and shows his reflective caution about hastily assaulting a phenomenon. When he reaches his limits, he leaves the problems there—which is more helpful for later research than forcefully arranging some half-baked ideas into an imposing system.
Kant’s understanding of time as expressed in the doctrine of schematism remains isolated and was completely misunderstood by the Idealism that followed. An extreme example of that is Hegel, who expressed himself on the schematism in his Lectures on the History [202] of Philosophy. The point of the schematism is to show in what way the understanding, the spontaneity of reason, can be qualified to determine the forms of intuition as forms of receptivity. Or more exactly, the point was to show to what extent the categories as a priori determinations of the unity of reason can relate to what stands over against it [Gegenstände] as objects [Objekte]. The question of the connection between understanding