Kant’s analysis of the pure schema “number” is quite rough, and gives occasion for such misunderstanding. But he never had in mind anything as trivial as that counting takes place over time. What he wanted to do was clarify number itself in its own proper constitution. And the decisive thing is that he discovered (to put it roughly) that time is embedded in number itself, quite apart from whether counting occurs over time or not, and regardless of whether numbers themselves are in time or not. Precisely because numbers are not in time, they have, as their very being, a constitutive relation to time itself. To be sure, this relation remains obscure in Kant, but I have tried to bring it out in my interpretation so as to determine the specific content of what Kant was after.
Insofar as Kant brings number and time together in the way we explained above, that bringing-together does not mean that “counting elapses over time.” But at the same time it does mean that, in bringing them together, Kant has to have understood time as different from the kind of time that we mean in saying that something elapses in time. This latter is the time that Kant understands primarily as world-time and the time of nature. But in this transcendental determination of time, time shows up in a very different and much more original way. It appears in this way for Kant as well, even though, as our analysis has already shown, he had to hold on to the idea of time as now-time. So now we will have to ask:
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Our analyses of the schematism of number have prepared us for the answer to the above questions. [385] In answering them, we will have to draw out [herausholen] of those analyses something that Kant may have surmised, even though it remained inaccessible to him. In fact, to the degree that Kant did surmise this issue, he expressed it (and had to express it) in inadequate concepts and characterizations.
In the synthesis speciosa temporis, what happens is a looking-away from the now—in and through the now—and simply a synthesizing of
133. [Here (Moser, p. 770) Heidegger ends his lecture of 22 February 1926, to be followed by that of Tuesday, 23 February, which opened with a 430-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]