scholarship is of the opposite opinion. It has simply passed over this chapter on schematism as baroque and obscure, thinking that one can get on with an interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason without this truly central item. Even [Erick] Adickes, a scholar who has earned great esteem for his scholarly interpretation, remarks in his edition of the Critique: “In my view, we should not attribute any scientific value to the section on schematism, since it was inserted quite late in the ‘brief outline’ for systematic reasons” (1889, p. 171 n.).¹¹³ But even if one emphasizes the fundamental significance that the schematism has for the Critique of Pure Reason, nothing is gained by such a blind, dogmatic insistence on the importance of the schematism. Instead, we must gain an understanding of the phenomena that Kant hit upon under this rubric but that he in no way mastered.

By clarifying what Kant means by this schematism we will get, retrospectively, a clearer understanding of the context that he presupposed in the analogies. The “I think” of the original synthesis antecedently thinks “unity.” Every possible a priori unity of combinability in accordance with the pure forms of combining, qua unity, is what guides the determinability of a manifold of the given, and therefore is necessarily related to time as the form of the given as such. Accordingly, time is that wherein the a priori actions of the understanding can be a priori rendered sensible—or as Kant once put it: can be given a “sense,” i.e., be related to objects and thereby be determined to a certain content.

The question is: How can a pure concept of the understanding, which in and of itself merely expresses the pure condition of an act [359] of the understanding as such, be related to appearances—i.e., to something that, on its side, is given from out of itself to the understanding? How can it be related to appearances in such a way that it asserts something about the appearance—i.e., something regarding its content, something that belongs to its content not just occasionally but necessarily? The issue is not about how it happens that, now and again, given the right occasion, I apply the correct category and form to some stuff that is given. That is, it is not about how, when confronted with a manifold of sensations, I am able to choose the fitting and right category with which to clothe the given stuff. Kant quite correctly never posed such a question. Instead, what he asks about is something that is fundamental to his Cartesian position: How is it at all possible for pure understanding, from out of itself, to determine something that must necessarily be given to it? In demonstrating this a priori possibility, one proves a priori the possibility that the pure concepts

113. [Guyer and Wood provide historical and textual clarification of this point (CPR, p. 728 n. 51).]