hand in everything that is given empirically? What is already thought beforehand in everything that is understood as given-and-thought? The latter question asks what makes possible the “determinedness” (the thought-ness) of the given. Now, to determine and to think mean to combine a manifold that has been given. Hence the question: What makes possible the combining of the given? That question is not simply identical with: “What makes possible the unification of understanding and sensibility?” Rather, the first question (“What makes possible the combining of the given?”) prepares for the second one; or more exactly, it shows that the second question cannot be posed in that fashion.

The relevant question in the investigation is about what must a priori underlie the combinability of a given manifold. Combining is an act of the understanding. Therefore, what gets combined is what is given to the understanding. But the understanding is cogitatio. Therefore, for Kant (given his Cartesian orientation) the only thing that can be given to and combined with the understanding (“internally,” he says) is what itself has the character of a cogitatio. Which means: presentations are what get combined. However, the presentations that are to be combined are given as a manifold of inner sense. And the manifold of this manifold of inner sense has the character of next-to-eachother and one-after-another—in other words, the character of time. Therefore, the presentations that are combinable by the understanding are in fact combinable [only] by way of a pre-view of time. So now we understand the question in more precise terms: What makes possible the combinability of the pure manifold, i.e., the combinability of time? To combine is always to determine. And so: What makes possible the determinability of time?

This is the central question that Kant did not ask but that nonetheless [309] underlies the question he does ask about the general determination of time as such. The question about the general determination of time as such is the question toward which the Transcendental Logic’s positive investigation of the Analytic of Principles and finally the Analogies [of Experience] flows. To go to the heart of the matter: This question is the principle guiding question toward which everything else converges. But this question about a general determination of time contains the more radical question about the conditions of the possibility of the determinability of time as such.

What is to be determined is time as a pure manifold. Or to put it more precisely: What is to be determined is the manifold that has the character of time thanks to a pre-view of this manifoldness, “time.” Thus, determining this manifold requires a pre-viewed unity on the basis of which a particular “combined” is a specific unified something.⁷⁰

70. [Cf. Moser transcript, p. 627.30–32.]