determine the outer world. The sense of this problematic entails that this manifold of presentations must itself be given—i.e., we must be able to be given something. What we said earlier about time as self-affection must be understood within these limits (“limits” in a Kantian sense). Because Kant unjustifiably restricts time, as a form of intuition, to the inner sense; and because his analysis fails to probe the structural connections between the prior view, the in-view-of, and the issue of letting oneself be encountered by a manifold; for these reasons, even the structural connection that we have laid out—time as original, universal, pure self-affection—could not come out in the straightforward, decisive way that its fundamental significance deserves. [341]

In this way the double determination of time becomes intelligible: first of all, as pure intuition and then as an infinite whole of the manifoldness of the one-after-another. The prior letting-oneself-be-given is, in an unthematic way, time. Likewise what that prior letting lets itself be given is time—which is to say that the subject affects itself with itself. Here alone, in this interpretation of time as original and pure self-affection, can we get to the authentic whole of the phenomenon of time. The first determinations of time in the Transcendental Aesthetic (which people usually just rattle off without understanding the context) are only partial determinations of the whole (viz., time as self-affection). Time is what lets the pure intuitable be given—and thereby is the very thing that gets intuited. Thus it is not some object that is present.

Kant penetrated no further into this dimension of the phenomenon of time. But de facto he makes the most of this sense of time when he studies the connection of time and the “I think.” And we must stress that this fundamental determination of time recedes completely into the background even while it materially underlies his explanations, most notably in the major chapters of his treatment of time in the analogies and the schematism—which is the reason why the commentators can’t help misunderstanding them. Instead, a different concept of self-affection emerges in Kant: the understanding as the determining of the given, and as the very spontaneity of the synthesis. The imagination

exercises an action on the passive subject, whose faculty it {the understand-ing itself} is. Therefore we rightly say that the inner sense is affected thereby. (B 153–154)¹⁰⁴

104. [Heidegger may misread this passage slightly. (1) The subject of the sentence is not the imagination but the understanding (der Verstand, B 153). (2) The synthesis that the understanding performs is the unity of the action (die Einheit der Handlung) that the understanding itself performs through the imagination’s