whereby anything can be encountered at all. So here time is the condition that makes it possible for anything given to be given in the articulated form of one-after-another. The object of the pre-view, then, is a purely given whole of one-after-another-ness.

By antecedently seeing that object, the mind or self, of itself, provides itself with the fundamental possibility of being encountered by [339] anything out there. This pre-viewing, this antecedent, if unthematic, act of having the basis-on-which [something can be received], is the a priori act of letting something encounter the self. This is the fundamental way the self is. It is the self’s basic kind of being, whereby the self, in and of itself, lets itself be encountered by, concerned by, or in Kant’s terms be affectively modified (sich affizieren) by another, viz., the basis-on-which.

This unthematic pre-viewing is the mind’s originary act of affecting itself—its self-affection. In it the mind relates itself to an infinite given magnitude: time. Time is the way in which the mind lets itself be given anything at all. It is the most original, universal form of how-something-can-be-given; it is the mind’s original, universal self-affection. As the self’s way of letting itself be concerned about anything, it is the ontological condition of the possibility of meeting up with anything.

But since this being-affected [Affektion] does not rest on sensation, i.e., is not a character of any empirical intuition, it must be designated “pure” self-affection. Intuition as pure intuition (time) is certainly not an intuitus originarius [originating intuition] in the sense of the intellectus archetypus [the intellect that is the archetype of things], because the subject does not first create time.¹⁰¹ It is an intuitus derivativus—that is, an intuitus originarius that befits a created entity. In this case the existing subject, as created, has the possibility, arising from itself, to affect itself with itself and in an entirely original sense. That is why I say: according to Kant, time is original, universal, pure self-affection. Up until now, Kant-scholarship has completely overlooked this proper sense of time—although in one passage Kant does expressly comprehend the phenomenon of time in this way.

The upshot of this phenomenological analysis is that time is original pure self-affection. And that is no different from what Kant says. What we have been calling “the act of pre-viewing the basis-on-which” is what, Kant writes,

101.[Kant defines God’s intuitus originarius as an intuition “through which the existence of the object [Objekt] of intuition is itself given” (CPR, B 72; cf. B 135, 138–139). Kant contrasts the divine intellectus archetypus and the human intellectus ectypus in Critique of Judgment, §77 (Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 5, p. 408). See Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Geyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 277.34.]