what role time plays in the fundamental task [345] of Kant’s transcendental investigation. The theme of Kant’s investigation is to clarify what is a priori known in our knowledge of nature, where “a priori” means: from out of the original actions of the subject. The mind’s actions and positings belong to the two stems of knowledge: sensibility and understanding. Understanding determines sensibility. Our question is: In what sense is the universal a priori of sensibility, namely time, the to-be-determined for the a priori of understanding, namely the synthetic unity of apperception? How does it look, this a priori, transcendental, general time-determination that supposedly makes possible the antecedent concrete scientific experience and study of nature in general? How do we understand “time” in this case? and what do we mean by a “determination of time”?
At the same time, we need to get a more precise view of such questions by seeing them within the horizon of the phenomena we brought out in our phenomenological interpretation of Kant’s problematic. Time is the condition of the possibility of encountering something at all. As such a condition, time has the character of an antecedent, unthematic pre-viewing of the infinite whole, the pure manifoldness of one-after-another. And this pre-viewing, in turn, has the structure of the subject’s being-affected-by-itself. Such pre-viewing is the basic form of [346] “letting something encounter oneself,” a “letting” that is generated by the pre-viewing itself. From the other side: The “I think” is the condition of the possibility of the “for whom” the encountered thing can encounter. As such a condition of possibility, the “I think” has the character of the most basic pre-viewing, the one that pre-views the constant presence of the self-identical I that something might encounter. As pre-viewing that constant presence, the pre-viewing is the most basic synthesis, and its structure is the very structure of the subject’s being. That being is: “from-out-of-itself-and-unto-itself letting-something-be-present-with itself, the subject, as the constant for-whom.”
Both of them, time and the I, are what is pre-viewed in a pre-viewing, and both are unthematic. Time is not perceivable as an empirical object, and the I is not an object that can be determined by way of predicates. Instead, both time and the I are the prior, unavoidable previewed of the unthematic pre-view that goes with any concrete act of knowledge. Both are originary modes of being of the subject. In this phenomenological characterization, time and the “I think” lose their