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We are considering Kant’s idea of time. At all the decisive points of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant returns to time; it is the phenomenon that gives his investigation its material continuity. This in itself already gives a rough idea of the significance that time has within the Kantian problematic. The way Kant treats time at each of those various points is also instructive, especially when we consider the peculiar way he weaves together for a good while a procedure that is phenomenological but then goes back to entirely dogmatic and constructivist arguments. Sometimes what he has seen phenomenologically is able to determine the broader context of his questioning, but at other times the weight of a dogmatic position simply smothers the effects of his phenomenological insights. Therefore, a scientific study of Kant (which I separate from a set of lectures merely aimed at a general education and the preparation for exams) requires a positive and productive control of the phenomenological problematic as well as a philosophical mastery of the central problem of past philosophy since the Greeks.

Kant did not explicitly see the phenomenological problematic. Instead, he moved within it, as does every authentic philosophical investigation. That is, phenomenology is not something unique or unusual, it is not a certain direction in philosophy, nor a system of philosophy. Rather, it is something quite obvious although at times difficult to comprehend, namely that in philosophy one should not blather on and on but should speak of and from the things themselves. That is easy to demand, but hard to live up to.

Even today, when phenomenological research proceeds with sureness within certain limits, there are still dogmas, second-hand issues, obscurities, missed opportunities. There is no such thing as pure phenomenology. In fact by its very essence it is, like all human undertakings, burdened with presuppositions. Philosophically, the point is not to eliminate these presuppositions at all costs [280] with arguments, but rather to admit them and to orient the research positively and materially in terms of those presuppositions. Admittedly, alongside presuppositions like these there are others that no philosophical investigation can ever get to. Behind the back of every philosophical problematic there lies something that philosophy itself, despite its superior degree of lucidity, does not see; in fact philosophy possesses such lucidity precisely because it is completely ignorant of that presupposition. And it is naïve and unphilosophical for philosophy to think it has found the truth for all eternity instead of realizing that philosophy exists only to open up new areas of focused rather than random progress [toward truth]. Kant’s “weaving together” that I just mentioned is, on the one hand, due to his ignorance of the phenomenological problematic as well as in his way of approaching history; but on the other hand it is an essential