Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 18 页

The Theses obviously disrupt the philosophy of time in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For Kant, time is the a priori condition of all appearances in general (all objects of the senses), a necessary representation which immediately grounds inner sensible intuition (the domain of the soul) and mediately grounds outer sensible intuition (the appearance of things as a priori determined by relations of space).²¹ Time is thus the pure form of sensible intuition; synthetic a priori judgements and the understanding cannot be realised without it. The basic lesson of the transcendental aesthetic is that time is only empirically real because it is transcendentally ideal: there is no objectivity to time from the standpoint of what Kant calls the ‘thing in itself’: ‘time is…merely a subjective condition of our intuition…and in itself, outside the subject, is nothing.’²² Kant develops this position further in the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding (the categories). In the analytic of principles, schematism is the procedural field of time that mediates the subsumption of all appearances and all objects under the categories, that regulates the application of the categories to the manifold. This ‘third thing’, which Kant designates as a ‘transcendental time-determination’, is a pure mediating representation which stands ‘in homogeneity with’ – which harmonises – the relationship between the sensible and intellectual dimensions of the Gemüt.²³ In the ‘A’ (or 1781) deduction of the categories, Kant emphasises schemata as the product of the imagination and synthesising faculty of the Gemüt, a priori determinations of time that realise the understanding by restricting it. In other words, the concepts of the pure understanding are capable of relation and have significance because they temporalise, and they temporalise because their application is necessarily limited to finite appearances of time and space. Thus when Heidegger reads schematism as the ‘sensibilisation of concepts’²⁴, he simultaneously understands it to be temporalisation by concepts.

²⁰ However, one could claim that the priority of existence over essence is actually already explicit in Feuerbach, which complicates matters, historico-philosophically. This would involve a larger appraisal of Marx’s (in some respects misleading) critique of Feuerbach in the Theses.

²¹ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787] (hereafter CPR), trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), A34/B51, 163-64.

²³ Ibid. A139/B178, 272.

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