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

functions as ground to a universal system of philosophy is now presented in its
particularity as well.
Based on his earlier critical work, the Kantian subject is known in the last
instance, at least from a theoretical point of view, as nothing more than a set of functions
that in their different relations constitute the possibilities for cognition as well as aesthetic
and teleological judgment. However, for these functions to be actually exhibited as the
nature or principle of the latter, it is necessary that mental powers [Kräfte] corresponding
to these functions be animated. The instigation or arousal of these mental forces occurs,
moreover, in their encounter with the given. The positing required for this encounter to
take place points to an unlocalizable space and is in this way a dislocated event of sorts.
On the one hand, this unlocalizable space is where the subject posits itself a priori as the
bearer of the conditions for the possibility for its experience; and on the other hand,
where the subject is subjected to something over which it has no control. This locus of
the occurrence of the self-positing of the subject in the Selbstsetzungslehre is sensibility,
which considered in isolation from the imagination (qua faculty of sensibility, not of
understanding) is the seat of the virtuality of the ―I.‖ In this sense, sensibility is the
critical sphere of the deployment of the powers of the mind; it is the ―blinded‖ and
―disorienting‖ temporal, spatial, and dynamical relations, where in the different repetitive
acts of reason, understanding, judgment, and imagination, the subject individuates itself
temporally, spatially and materially in and from a whole that precedes its parts. In
sensibility the ―I‖ sustains its conscious existence as Verbum in the cognition of itself, of
objects, and other subjects, indeed, even in the feeling of pleasure and pain.
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