The basis-on-which (say, “color” or “material quality”) is certainly “in view,” but it is not thematically comprehended. That is, I am not thematically focused on, e.g., the content of color as such. If I were, I could never get around to ordering what’s in front of me. The specific structure of all this is that the pre-viewed basis-on-which is constitutive for the ordering; but the pre-viewing itself is unthematic. Naturally it can be rendered thematic at any given moment. But when I do that, I step out of the specific conduct of ordering something, and I now take the pre-viewed basis-on-which as the primary given.

This is the analysis of the structure when we track it down in a concrete, natural process of ordering. However, the dimension of the problematic that I analyzed in a simple and direct fashion in the last lecture is something quite different. Say we prescind from the specific, material, and factual orderedness of things given within a region of experience. Say we direct our view to the given as such, regardless of its content, regardless of the specific sense-field it belongs to. If we do so, we see (and Kant put his finger on this phenomenon right from the beginning) that whatever is given is a manifold, regardless of any ordering that might be relevant. Thus, to be “manifold” is a phenomenal determination of the given, regardless of whether the given is ordered or not ordered according to whatever concretely relevant viewpoint. Take any field of sight—say, a manifold that is a wild whirlwind of colors without a trace of order to it. Even in this spread of the given—this buzzing bustle of sensation, as it is often and unclearly put,⁵⁵ [287] although one is unsure whether it is a given or just a bustling confusion that runs its course in the mind—even this whirlwind of indeterminate given objects has the character of being “manifold,” and thus does have a determination and articulation that in the broadest sense (and even precisely in Kant’s sense) has to be understood as an order. Kant’s determinations here are so general and crude that he gives no further attention to the proper structures of the phenomena.

This primary and phenomenally first order that is given—“a manifold”—underlies every case of order or lack of order. But that articulation of the given, that primary “apartness” [Auseinander] of the data,⁵⁶ is a mark of some arrangement, and to that degree it entails the

55. [Given Heidegger’s early allusions to William James in his 1919–1920 lecture-course, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (GA 58, p. 10.29–30) and in his 1925 course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (GA 20, p. 28.14 / HCT 23.12), it is possible that the text here is an allusion to James’s phrase—in writing of a newborn baby’s impression of the world—“one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” See William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1980), p. 462.]

56. [Heidegger’s das Auseinander (very roughly, “the outside-one-another”) is a nod to the traditional definition of extension as partes extra partes—parts of a whole