temporal “I think,” also supposed to affect itself and thereby bring forth time? But on the other hand, for Kant it is equally impossible to reduce the “I think” to time. So within the self as such, there remains this aporia of the connection (or lack thereof) between the a-temporal spontaneity of the “I think” and the spontaneity of self-affection, which is time itself.

The difficulty is resolved with one blow once we take seriously time as making-present. The “I think” is not in time (Kant is completely right to reject that) but is time itself, or more exactly, one mode of time—that of pure making-present. As pure making-present, human existence itself is the “for-which” of whatever it might happen to encounter; and making-present is human existence’s way of letting-something-encounter-it. In making-present (taken in its proper sense), human existence lets whatever it encounters come toward human existence in such a way that neither the I becomes an object [Objekt] nor does time (i.e., presenting, taken as an existential) become an object [Gegenstand]. Here again Kant is entirely in the right, phenomenally speaking, when he underlines the non-objectivity [Nichtobjektivität und Nichtgegenständlichkeit] of the “I think” and of time. When turned into a positive statement, this is understandable only if time itself is pure making-present, pure letting-something-encounter. In making-present, human existence places itself, as it were, purely into presence-unto-whatever, and it is purely and totally absorbed by the presence-of [Anwesenheit] and its presenting-of [Gegenwart]. [406] So much is this the case, that time goes unseen in existence’s absorption in time and in presenting. Rather, existence simply “sets free” whatever can encounter it in an act of presenting and become intelligible as something present [Anwesendes] in the presenting.

The “I think” as the “for which” of the letting-encounter is time itself qua pure presenting. Certainly this interpretation essentially goes beyond Kant (indeed, back behind him), but not so radically as to abandon the path of the phenomenal contexts that Kant himself had in mind. This claim is documented by a characterization that Kant, in one passage, gives of the I: “For this constant and enduring I (of pure apperception) constitutes the correlate of all our presentations” (A 123). But this determination of the I is almost a word-for-word definition of time, which, according to Kant, absolutely stands and persists and is the correlate of all appearances in general. When Kant really tries to investigate the phenomena, he brings time and the “I think” as close together as possible, so much so that the definitions of both phenomena are, as it were, co-extensive. Nonetheless, on the basis of a dogma that guides him, he wrenches time and the “I think” apart and keeps them absolutely separate from each other, so much so that he is a priori certain that they simply cannot be brought together at all.