they are given as not nothing, but as a manifold. So, being a “manifold” is already a certain characteristic of the given; in fact we have to say that it is already an absolutely primary order—which may be an absolute lack of order with respect to scientific determination.

The essential point of the phenomenological analysis of the last lecture was to show the following: If the sense-manifold [282] stands in an essential relationship to possible ordering, then the very essence of ordering necessarily requires that the manifold that encounters the senses has to encounter them on the basis of an antecedent view of something that makes it possible for a manifold (i.e., whatever is given as a manifold) to encounter the senses. The very idea of ordering constitutively entails pre-viewing a basis-on-which, and whatever is given as order-able gets articulated on that basis. Whenever a sense-manifold is given as susceptible of order (whether it is actually ordered or not), the very giving of that manifold entails a pre-view of [manifoldness as such] whereby that manifold is a manifold at all.

From the start Kant takes it as an established fact that a sensemanifold has an essential relation to being ordered (i.e., to being determined via the understanding). Knowledge has two stems: sensibility and understanding. Neither can substitute for the other, neither can be dissolved into the other. Right here at the beginning, the Marburg School’s interpretation of Kant collapses. In positing, quite dogmatically, these two stems, Kant is backed up to a degree by a long and venerable tradition of philosophy. From early on, thinkers had distinguished (and Aristotle was the first to clarify) αἴσθησις (letting-something-be-given) and νόησις (determining something in thought). And thus the first part of Kant’s interpretation of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason is called the “Aesthetic.” It deals with αἴσθησις or perception. And the second part, which deals with νόησις, is really a “Noetics,” or as Kant calls it, a “Logic.” Only the togetherness of both, sensibility and understanding, constitutes knowledge.

As I say, Kant begins with this fact of the two stems. He does not show in any preliminary and more radical investigation how intuition and thinking, or being-given and being-thought, are, by their very nature, [283] referred to each other; nor does he show what more original ontological nexus of human existence itself might perhaps demand this togetherness and make it possible in the first place. Instead, he bases himself on tradition as if it were a certain and natural understanding that realizes as an unproblematic fact that sensibility and understanding belong to knowledge. But such a vague and general reason cannot be the basis for a profound and fundamental interpretation. Kant presupposes the two stems and then explains the ways they are related. But this whole approach is precisely the source of some essentially detrimental factors. For example, because he divides them at the outset