empirical intuitions, of which it would be the generalization. Rather—and again, this is the essential issue; it is what Kant saw—pure intuition entails that a pure manifold as such is given immediately without need of a synthesis on the part of the understanding. On the shoals of these phenomenal facts, the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason that the Marburg School tried to carry out breaks apart and sinks.

Nonetheless, this characterization of space and time as pure intuitions has a very obscure element that cannot be clarified on Kantian grounds. To put it very broadly: Someone who is [philosophically] unsophisticated might say he cannot think anything using space and time as pure intuitions. And in fact you cannot think anything using those pure intuitions, you cannot even show something phenomenally. All one can do is show how Kant got to this notion by way of a specific dogma. For example, Kant designates time as ursprüngliche Vorstellung, an “original presentation” (B 48) [277]. He understands a presentation [Vorstellung] as an act of presenting, an act of having something. But in terms of the phenomenal facts of the matter, what he really means is that time is what is originally presented. In his use of the notion of presentation, Kant wavers between what he has seen (“phenomenologically,” as we would put it today) and what he is unable see because of a certain dogma. In Kant, Vorstellung—“presentation”—means Vorstellen, “the presenting of something.” But in his demonstration, Kant saw that the one-after-another is something that is always already co-presented prior to the presenting of something. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant himself speaks of space and time as that “within which” (B 34) sensations are ordered. But even in Kant this “within-which” remains undetermined. We showed it to be the pre-viewed basis-on-which. A pre-view [of that basis] is constitutive of every instance of ordering. This pre-viewed basis-on-which is not something that is further ordered. That would require having a pre-view of yet a further basis in terms of which the first pre-viewed basis would be ordered. In other words, time itself is not thought by way of a synthesis but is prior to every synthesis, i.e., prior to anything which, like a synthesis, is a determination of the intellect: a concept. Time is a simple manifold that is given immediately. Space and time are “original presentations,” where “presentation” refers to an intuiting, not a concept. Thus they are “original intuitions.”

What you read over and over again in the standard Kant-literature is that the notion of a “form of intuition” obviously and emphatically does not mean that time is intuited. But that is a complete misunderstanding of what Kant intends. The argument goes as follows:

1. Presenting is the presenting of something. And so in this case intuiting is the intuiting of something.