any manifold becomes intelligible, need not be comprehended thematically. The point is this: One-after-another-ness is the pure oneafter-another. It is the basis for my understanding a one-after-another thing in its one-after-another-ness. However, it need not be thematically intuited and comprehended in the process.⁵²

The essential thing in all this is that, prescinding from orderedness or unorderedness, order necessarily presupposes a pre-view of something that gives sense to an order qua order. The difficulty in understanding all this comes from the brevity with which Kant lays these things out, and above all in the ambiguity in his use of the notion of order. In German the word Ordnung [“order”] really means the same as Ordnen [“putting in order, ordering”]. When we say, “So-and-so is concerned with the Ordnung of his papers,” it can mean that he is engaged in ordering them: he is actually putting them in order. But the sentence can also mean that he is preoccupied with the order of his papers. In that case he is looking for a principle, the basis-on-which that he must pre-view if he is to put the papers in a specific order. This pre-viewed basis-on-which is constitutive of any “order” as such. As regards any manifold that encounters the senses, it is one-after-another as such, pure succession—that is to say: time.

What, then, does Kant mean when he says that time is a “form of intuition”? Nothing other than: time is [276] the unthematically and antecedently (i.e., pure) presented basis on which a manifold is able to meet the senses. This is the phenomenological content of all talk about form in contrast to matter. Those terms mean nothing as long as they are used loosely, vaguely, and without a focus on the real issues they refer to—or rather, they mean “everything” insofar as every single thing can be differentiated in terms of matter and form.

Kant designates time, like space, as not just a form of intuition but as pure intuition. As with my earlier explanation of the notion of intuition, here too we see that this pure intuition is not an intuition of the same type as the intellectus archetypus. This intuitus is not originarius but derivativus, because it does not have the intuited so immediately as to create the intuited in the very act of intuiting it. Instead, it must first let the intuited be given to it (only in that way does it have its intuited), but given purely—i.e., prior to and independent of the understanding receiving any determination. When we say “prior to” such determinations, we mean that pure intuition is not founded on, not composed of

52. [More literally: “The characteristic is precisely that, in letting a manifold one-after-another encounter the senses, one-after-another as such—i.e., the pure one-after-another on the basis of which I understand at all a one-after-anotherentity in the one-after-another—this pure one-after-another need not itself be comprehended and thematically intuited in the process.”]