insight into ur-temporality, concerns time, [327] the “I think,” and their connection. To get on the right footing for explaining the “I think” (and to avoid wrestling a ghost) it is important to get clearer on the meaning of this original act of spontaneity.
If our goal were a detailed interpretation of Kant, we would have to discuss how the Neo-Kantians interpret apperception. We can leave that aside here. But just to give you an overview, I might underline the fact that regarding all the adumbrations of a so-called epistemological or logical subject (and of consciousness in general), Neo-Kantianism says that it is a matter of something logical, a mere concept. Of late they have tried to carry out this epistemological interpretation (which is pure construction) by connecting it with Scheler’s doctrine of the person. But putting the two together only increases the confusion and makes it less possible to understand the simple meaning of transcendental apperception. We should note above all that Kant never dreamed of determining this I of transcendental apperception, this consciousness in general, as a mere concept.
Kant distinguishes between an empirical and a transcendental apperception (self-apprehension). Empirical apperception is the intuiting, via inner sense, of the manifoldness of presentations as one- after-another. In empirical intuition qua empirical there are given appearances and objects (although as scientifically undetermined) as something mental that is articulated one way or another: as sensation, as striving, as a pleasing or displeasing impression—that is, a comprehension of an objective something-or-other that can be determined as regards the whatness of its content. But on the other hand, transcendental apperception is, as the name suggests, a self-apprehending, understood with an eye to the possibility of an a priori knowledge. In other words, transcendental apperception is itself the most original a priori of knowledge.
The “I think” is the expressed content of a “merely intellectual presentation of the self-activity of a thinking subject” (B 278). It is the expression of a direct comprehension of my self: sum cogitans, I am thinking. [328]
“I think, therefore I am” is no inference. (Opus postumum, Akademie vol. 22, p. 79).81
81. [Editor’s note: Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 22, p. 79.] [Translator‘s note: The edition Heidegger cited was Kants Opus postumum, ed. Erich Adickes (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1920). GA 21 cites Opus postumum according to the AkademieAusgabe, vols. 21–22, which was published only in 1936. For an English edition see Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 187.]