Kant calls this unity “qualitative,” in contrast to (cf. B 131) the category of unity as the category of quantity. Here “quantity” means “particularity” and “singularity” which, in the mode of particularity, pertains to the forms of pure intuition insofar as there is but a single space and a single time. Kant determines qualitative unity in connection with an interpretation of the unum transcendens [the “transcendental one” of Scholastic thought], according to which we say that omne ens est unum [“whatever is, is one”]. Such a “unity of the comprehension of the manifold of knowledge” is [simply a] “logical requisite and criterion of the knowledge of things” (B 114).⁷⁸ This requirement of unity is a “logical rule of the agreement of knowledge with itself” (B 116).⁷⁹ Kant says “logical”—and that means: it resides in the very structure of understanding as a cogito me cogitare.

Of its very essence, the understanding is a combining, but not only or primarily any specific act of combining. Rather, the understanding is always an “I combine.” In other words, the combining of a specific manifold of presentations is possible only as based upon an underlying “always already having combined the to-be-combined manifold of presentations with me qua I-combine.”⁸⁰ And this “already-have- combined-whatever-will-be-given” (whether the given-in-general or the given in a specific act of combining) is what constitutes the “for[me-ness]” that belongs to the very being of the “I.” The original synthesis that carries out, and posits itself as carrying out, any particular synthesis—that is a unity, a μόνας, a monad.

The basic question that concerns us is about the connection between time and the “I think,” and the possibility of that connection. Our critical discussion with Kant, from which we hope to gain a positive

78. [Kant asserts that, “These supposedly transcendental predicates of things [the unum, verum, bonum of medieval philosophy] are nothing other than logical requisites and criteria of all knowledge of things in general. . . . In all knowledge of an object [Objekt] there is, namely, unity of the concept, which we may call qualitative unity insofar as, by means of it, we think only the unity of our comprehension of the manifold of our knowledge.” Heidegger, because he is referring to only one of the scholastic transcendentals, changes Kant’s two plurals (“Erfordernisse und Kriterien”) to singulars (“Erfordernis und Kriterium”).]

79. [Here again, Heidegger changes a plural (Regeln) to a singular (Regel).]

80. [“Always already having (done this or that)” is Heidegger’s way of speaking of what Aristotle calls τὸ τί ᾖν εἶναι, the essence of a thing, understood as “what that thing is a priori” or “what that thing always already is, insofar as it is.” Both in Aristotle’s Greek and in Heidegger’s German, that notion is (not unproblematically) expressed as “what the thing already has been insofar as it is,” not in a chronological but in an ontological sense. Here Heidegger is saying that any specific act of combining is grounded in the essence of the understanding (in what the understanding always already is—“has been”—insofar as it is). That essence is to combine the to-be-combined with the self as a priori combining.]