“disparate” character that they have at first glance and that they have had for Kant and the tradition both before and after him. Instead, the possibility of showing the phenomenological connection between the two grows more promising.
But how are we to understand the connection? Is time a mode of the “I think”? Or is the “I think” a mode of time? Or are both of them modes of an even more original connection? Our final position on Kant’s conception of time will necessarily lie in our answer to this question. We should not present our response as simply a counter-thesis to Kant’s conception of time. Instead we must show, on the basis of the interpretation we have carried out thus far, that the radical conception of the relevant connection of the phenomena that Kant treats requires the answer that we give.
Can we, using Kant’s work itself, get an understanding of how Kant determines this relation between transcendental apperception and time? He determines this relation—certainly not by [347] expressly asking about and searching for an answer, but nonetheless he does make use of it. And how does he make use of it? Once in his doctrine of the schematism of the pure concepts of understanding, and then again in his proof of the analogies of experience. From the way Kant makes use of the relation of time and transcendental apperception in these texts, we should be able to gather how he understands time. Only by pursuing these considerations and demonstrations with the intention of seeing how time is thereby understood, will we have the opportunity to complete our understanding of how Kant characterizes time. Only in this way, can we ask and answer the critical phenomenological question about the relation of time and the “I.” But that will mean nothing less than a concrete characterization of the problematic of ur-temporality in contradistinction to Kant’s interpretation of time. And it will be the interpretation of that same ur-temporality within the task of a clarification of the scientific knowledge of entities.
§30. Interpretation of the First Analogy of Experience in the light of our interpretation of time
We begin with a phenomenological treatment of the analogies of experience, and in fact we limit ourselves to the discussion of the First Analogy. Kant says in a general way: The analogies
exhibit the unity of nature in the combination of all appearances under certain exponents, which express nothing other than the relation of time (insofar as it comprehends all existence in itself) to the unity of apperception,