think of how he crossed out the word zugleich—“at the same time”—in his interpretation of the principle of contradiction. Or are the acts of spontaneity exempted from the being-in-time of cogitationes? Are there, therefore, some cogitationes that are outside of time and some that are in time? And further, some whose presented content is also in time, and some whose presented content is not? [337]
Kant never demonstrates that or why this state of affairs is this way; he simply presupposes it as a fact. But the basis for his argumentation is the Cartesian presupposition that what is given first and above all is the act of presenting, and that the only way, the necessary way, to get to what-is-presented begins with and passes through this act of presenting. This presupposition also hinders Kant from seeing (1) that the world, the lived world, is given just as immediately as—no, even more immediately than—what is given in inner sense, and (2) that we have an equally immediate experience of the one-after-another and the at-the-same-time in our experience of the lived world. We first experience the one-after-another in the change of day into night, in the movement of the sun, in the way things around us change place, and so on. We use the sun to determine time, and so, the sun is time. Time is the sun, the heavens. These statements are not poetic fabrications; they express what one sees first of all—as Plato says: Time is the heavens. From this you can clearly see that we encounter time first of all precisely in the things given to our outer senses and that it requires a very artificial attitude in order to see time the way Kant wants to: as something that is found, from the beginning, purely and exclusively in the one-after-another of presentations. This position—that time can be experienced even when it is dark, i.e., when I see nothing in the world but am referred purely to myself and to the course of my thinking—this was underlined for the first time by Aristotle in his treatise on time: time as experienced in the κίνησις of the soul’s νοεῖν [“in the movement of the soul’s apprehending”].98
Kant’s proof of the universality of time cannot be sustained in its motivation, its presuppositions, or its procedure—but nonetheless its outcome is incontestable. However, the fact that Kant in the first place requires and makes use of this proof uncovers the presuppositions behind his position. We must understand and remember how and as what Kant determines time in the light of this presupposition.
We now understand that time is characterized in two ways. (1) Time is pure intuition, where the act of intuiting is a determination carried out by the mind.
Time is simply a subjective condition of our (human) intuition . . . [338] and outside the subject it is nothing. (B 51)
98. [On sensing time in the dark, see Physics Δ, 11, 219a4–6.]