does not simply attribute time to the subject as the subject’s way of intuiting, but in addition makes this phenomenon—the act of making-present—the basis for Kant’s interpretation of knowledge. With regard to “making-present” as an existential, we can explain the positive and the detrimental aspects of Kant’s problematic, as well as its limits.
Let us not forget: The primary emphasis on presenting as a mode of time, still derives from a dependence on the notion of time as the time of nows. But what we need to show is that presenting is emphatically not the primary mode of time. There are two senses in which the traditional notion of time—i.e., understood in terms of the now—is not original:
Taking our orientation from time as presenting and from making-present as the very being of human existence qua being unto its world, we will now try to discuss briefly the question we formulated earlier about the relation between time as original pure self-affection and the “I think” as the spontaneity of apperception.
In formulating the question, we emphasized that time is letting-ourselves-be-encountered by something present. Time is the previewing that we characterized, and the pre-viewing is self-affection. The “I think” is letting something be co-present with the “I think,” i.e., with the I itself understood as the constant “for-which” that something present can be present unto. [405] Both of these—time and the “I think”—are unthematic, both are antecedent (a priori), both are modes of being of the subject. The question remains: Is time a mode of the “I think”? Or is the “I think” a mode of time? Or are both of them modes of a still more original connection?
The question is not advanced by postulating that the “I think” runs its course “within time,” because then we could ask: If the “I think” is itself “in time,” how is it supposed to “bring forth” time? (Cf. Über eine Entdeckung, vol. 8, p. 221.)149 How can something that is “in time” “bring forth” time? In addition to being within time, is the self, as this
149. [Über eine Entdeckung, nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll, in Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 8, p. 221. Heidegger is referring to Kant’s statement that our faculty of knowledge “bringt sie aus sich selbst a priori zu Stande,” where sie refers both to the form of things in space and time and to the synthetic unity of the manifold in concepts. The English translators render this as “it brings them out of itself a priori”; see “On a Discovery According to which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One,” in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, ed. and trans. Henry E. Allison (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 135.]