a robust phenomenological interpretation, Kant in these passages has already penetrated deep into the structures of space, structures that later became, for Hegel above all, the bases for his interpretation of the “punctuality” of space in terms of the “now.”68
To a certain degree we have now delineated the object of the preview, i.e., the form of intuition, as regards its content. As an infinite given magnitude, time is the condition of the possibility of experiencing and determining a specific delimited one-after-another. If we want to say that time is taken “quantitatively” here, we need to understand that in a philosophical, categorial way. It does not mean that time is “quantified.” It means, rather, that time is understood as the object of a pre-view concerned with order, and as such it is what makes it possible to order a quantity of one-after-another.
On the basis of his conception—his double conception—of space and time as (1) forms of intuition and (2) infinite given manifolds, Kant is now able to determine them directly as “sources of knowledge” (B 55). That is, in every act of experiential ordering and determining, space and time are the sources from which we can and must draw. Time is a source of knowledge—that is the fundamental interpretation of time, and it underlies and supports everything else that Kant has to say about time.
Even if this interpretation is not unambiguous, nonetheless, by following this guiding thread, Kant manages to provide a series of fresh conclusions about the function of time, even though it is still undecided whether they can be sustained in the form in which they are presented. Up to this point we have gained the following determinations about time:
1. Time is the form of inner intuition.
2. Time is an intuition.
3. Time is an infinite given magnitude.
4. Time is a source of knowledge.
(In this hardly clear list, we are immediately struck by the difference in character between the first, second, and fourth determinations [305] and the third one.) Using these determinations we have to make two things clear: how it was possible for Kant to assign time a preeminent role (even higher than space) in the interpretation and knowledge of nature; and how Kant, in clarifying this fundamental role of time, entered the arena of the problematic which we designate as urtemporality and which we are trying to approach, indirectly, by taking
68. [Heidegger later refers to this same issue in Being and Time, §82(a), with reference to Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Sciences, §257 (Addendum) and §254 (Addendum).]