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

continuous reiteration of the most fundamental question of Kant‘s theoretical work (how
are synthetic a priori judgments possible?); second, an ongoing consideration of the
different conditions and levels known to be necessary for theoretical cognition in
experience (as in the above quoted passage) and; third, an imperative to know oneself,
leads us to orient the present analysis within Kant‘s theoretical philosophy and the
implications of the latter for understanding any conception of the moral or
anthropological human being. Indeed, it could be said that with the doctrine of self-
positing we find ourselves back in the domain of the KrV.
Back in the domain of the KrV, there are nonetheless differences, one of which is
its methodological approach. As mentioned above, Kant's starting place in the later text
reverses the order of the elements (i.e., aesthetic and analytic sections) as presented in the
KrV. Without yet going into the exact nature and repercussions of this issue for Kant's
philosophical position as a whole with respect to the Selbstsetzungslehre, there is a
disclaimer that must be made as to the approach of our current analysis here. There are
two ways to go about analyzing the doctrine itself, one is to start with it by addressing
space and time and their status as forms of intuition, only then proceeding with the topic
of self-consciousness. The other approach is to start with self-consciousness and follow
Kant's enumeration of the subsequent layers of it, as seen in the above passage. The
possibility of choosing either path reflects a certain consistency found in fascicle vii (in
so far as the nature of the text allows the reader to discern these patterns, in the midst of
many other considerations). The pattern consists in the fact that the passages that
thematically address the issues that concern the Selbstsetzungslehre do sometimes have a
separate ―paragraph‖ or ―section‖ where Kant asks what space and time are as well as
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