did not pursue (much less see) the relevant presuppositions that Kant had left undeveloped. Instead, it continued to pursue the question in the Kantian (more exactly, [311] in the Cartesian) fashion, by putting the emphasis from the beginning on the “I think,” on the I, so as to understand knowledge from the I as starting point and from a still more original determination of the activity of the I as the pure-fact-ofactivity, a Tathandlung. In Hegel, the problem appears to be directed entirely toward the objective; but he holds fast to the same problem, and in fact his whole philosophy cannot be understood at all unless we keep it within the horizon of this question. The only thing is that the question gets displaced in Hegel and becomes more obscure due to fact that his solution to the problem is extremely Kantian, but at the same time he has recourse to Greek ontology in its objective orientation. He thus gives the false impression of actually solving the problem, whereas in fact all he does is completely obfuscate it. What I mean is that, in trying to solve Kant’s problem, Hegel utilized every possible means generated by the history of philosophy theretofore. The intrinsic need to do so comes from Hegel’s impulse toward dialectics, and the intrinsic consequence was that he understood his philosophical position as the absolute completion of all philosophy up until then.

And so, as we ask about the possibility of the being of a connection between time as such and the “I think” as such, we must pose the question more radically, and that means not orienting ourselves toward any determinate theses. It is not a matter of championing a new standpoint, as the Romantic Idealists did, but rather of getting in our sights the unresolved issues in Kant’s position. And philosophers must have patience, regardless of whether they do or do not find the truth. Kant works with and within this connection of time and the “I think”—with and within, yes; but without ever asking about the connection itself. But as Kant works within his concrete investigation into this connection—an investigation that is the most exciting that can be found in scientific philosophical literature—he reaches the limits of what can possibly be asserted about time. And these are limits that were posed to him by his whole approach to the question. [312]

What we want to understand now is (1) the meaning behind Kant’s way of treating time in this context, and (2) what positive features of time emerge from that treatment—so that, beginning from a “negative example” (so to speak), we might understand the problem of ur-temporality. To do that, we need at least a rough understanding of Kant’s problematic, but one that is concrete enough to prevent us from reducing Kant’s problem to an empty formula; but, by rearticulating that problematic, to promote our effort to get to the issues and phenomena. So first of all we need an adequate understanding of Kant’s