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

thus fields capable of determination by thought, or its agent of synthesis, the imagination.
From the perspective of this particular function, the concept brings out the fact that a
―determination‖ of any kind, however, is external to the source of the data of thought.
Unlike god, space and time are not self-determining.
In this way, the KrV opened up a new theoretical space where the concept of
Setzen became operative; it indicated a function of the mind that affected itself.
Nonetheless, its use in this context was still ambiguous. As a concept it was neither
thematized nor recurrent enough in the KrV, making it hard to establish whether or not its
use outside the discussion of absolute position was significant at all. Ultimately, what
was clear is that what was meant by ―absolute‖ was now in the KrV empirical only.
Looking back from the perspective of the analysis of the Selbstsetzungslehre,
however, one is able to identify a recurrent set of conceptual relations and functions.
First and foremost, the necessity of the possibility that data be capable of being given to
thinking in order to establish inner or real possibility appears in all three periods. The
turn to a transcendental idealism in the KrV positions space and time as the formal
conditions under which sensibility is capable of providing the intellectual ―I‖ content that
can be synthesized in thought. This is the reason why what is revolutionary in Kant‘s
thought – his kind of idealism – rests on precisely the introduction of the concept of a
―pure form of intuition.‖ While the establishment of the necessary synthetic possibility
for cognition is the aim of his critical thought, the critical character of his thought lies in
the move from the function of god to that of space and time. The question of the origin
of the given, of course, was no longer of metaphysical interest, since the answer could
only be speculative.
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