If we understand the “I think” as a mode of pure making-present, and if we understand making-present as the very way-of-being of human existence qua being-in-the-world, then Kant’s point of departure is fundamentally modified—in other words, the dogmatic starting-point of the Cartesian position is avoided from the very start. It is not the case that an “I think” is first given as the purest a priori, and then some “time” is added as the mediating point for the [I think] to come out to a world. Rather, the very being of the subject qua human existence is being-in-the-world, and human existence’s being-in-theworld is possible only because the basic structure of its being is time itself, specifically here in the mode of making-present. [407]

Further: The “I think” (i.e., the pure formal combining of the pure understanding) is, for its part, simply a free and emptied-out mode of making-something-present—but not that the “I think” is the primary element that must first relate itself to time, and in this relating constitute a being unto the world.

The pure, unconstrained making-present—the “I combine”—is the autonomous but derivative [abkünftige] mode of an original makingpresent on the part of factical existence itself. As pure and free making-present, it is accordingly a mode of time—or more precisely, a mode of human existence’s temporality—wherein time empties itself into the pure, free making-present of whatever-there-is. But insofar as presenting is still a mode of time, it is time in the full sense. The genesis of pure and unconstrained making-present from out of everyday being unto the world is what we have characterized as absorption in the world. It is nothing but the structure of the modification of the being of human existence in which human existence forms within itself the ontological mode of free, theoretical observation which, for its part, can be formalized into a mere “intending-something” in an “I-relate-to.” The ontological transition from the pre-theoretical relation to the world, to a pure [theoretical] making-present, is itself a mode of temporality—and it would be absolutely impossible if human existence were not itself time.

By contrast, Kant attempts to go from the empty “I combine” to what we comprehend, as follows: As being-in-the-world, we have opened up the world and are with entities that encounter us in the environment and that we know as nature. This “we know nature” is the phenomenal starting point of the problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason, and Kant’s problem is the possibility of this “we know nature” (even though he precisely overlooks the problem of the inter-subjectivity of the “we know nature”). The highest point from which Kant will seek to understand this possibility is the “I think”; but this highest point is questionable in the highest degree. It becomes possible as