[Time] adheres not to the objects themselves but only to the subject that intuits . . . {the objects? or time?} (B 54)99
Space and time . . . are only in the senses and outside of them have no re-ality. (B 148)
These remarks, as well as the beginning of §6 of the Transcendental Aesthetic, make it clear how (as we have already shown) Kant transforms both Newton’s notion of time as a res, and Leibniz’s as an ordo rerum, into a cogito—a determination of the mind.
(2) We have also encountered a second delineation of time as the pre-viewed basis-on-which of a specific type of pre-viewing. In this case, time is given-and-presented as an infinite magnitude. In this second characterization, time is an infinite whole of the pure manifold of the one-after-another—or, as Kant puts it: time is a quantum.
Our task now is to gather up these new gains and push ahead to a radical interpretation that will clarify the connection between these two characterizations.
§28. Time as original pure self-affection
The pure act of intuiting—time100—was interpreted as an antecedent, unthematic viewing of the pure manifold as such “within which there is nothing but relations of one-after-another.” This antecedent viewing is a way the mind is. It has this pre-viewing from out of its own self, for the very essence of its kind of being is to have such a pre-view. But we showed that the object of the pre-view is the very condition
99. [In Kant’s German, the object of “intuits” is sie, which here can mean either “them” (the objects) or “it” (time). The Guyer and Wood translation (like the earlier Norman Kemp Smith translation) opts for the former; Heidegger, after the word sie, inserts in brackets: “die Gegenstände? Zeit?”]
100. [In this section, Heidegger’s own understanding of time (which he will soon spell out more clearly in Being and Time) begins to make its appearance. No longer a mere natural-cosmic measure of movement, Zeit is now designated as the self’s most fundamental a priori / ontological “act,” so fundamental that it is the very being of the self. This antecedent ontological “act” has the reflexive sense of the self’s “acting upon and affecting itself.” In Being and Time, time will be presented as the self’s self-generating (sich zeitigend) “temporality,” i.e., human existence’s finite (and indirectly self-referential) way of being. That being consists in (1) being open for any encounter (gegenwärtig) by (2) living into its own apriority (gewesende), which is (3) being the ontological basis on which the self can be encountered at all, a possibilizing basis-on-which that ever “recedes” (i.e., on principle can never be exhausted, only ended by death) while ever “arriving” (zukommende; Zu-kunft) precisely by making encounter possible.]