The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

directed to the elements which are found in it, and of which it is
composed. 197
Like in the former passage, there are activities of the mind normally associated with
bodily functions—acts of vision or touch—that are here ―only an intuition of the mind.‖
Thus the feeling of seeing, touching, and walking is a form of thinking that instantiates
intuition. The use of the present participle in both of these passages indicates that what
one feels or of which one is intuitively conscious is simultaneous to the state of the mind.
This is different from it being for instance a recollection of a past event; in the latter, the
consciousness representation of an event that has already taken place is removed from a
case of undergoing a feeling of an event at a present moment. It appears also to be
immediate; it is one and the same with its experience and, as such, there is for instance no
need for the use of propositional form, which would be necessary if the understanding
were at play. In this way, feelings also appear to fulfill the two basic characteristics of
intuition.
After this elucidation of intuition in terms of both its methodological character
and an instantiation of what it may be like as an activity of the mind—feeling—it is
important to return to the question that initiated this discussion: ―What about one‘s
ability to recognize through all forms of mental awareness the constant presence of the
cogito (e.g., even in a state of radical doubt) allows one to posit that one exits?‖ Another
look at the first passage quoted in this section will introduce the resources necessary to
answer this question. In the first passage there are three overarching aspects or moments
to what Descartes is here describing as thinking. First, by thinking he understands ―all
197 Descartes, 155. Vol. 2
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