and the so-called “spirituality” of human being. Some say that in their real, true being, humans cannot be in space; otherwise they would not be immortal. That is, they prejudge the case from the beginning by claiming that human beings are or must be immortal. In other words, they ground a specific thesis about the ontological structure of human being on what they believe.

To me, however, it seems that for scientific philosophy the road should run in the opposite direction, and that the only possible road is first of all to look at the facts about human existence’s structure and to make this determination of being-in-space part of the original starting point, and in this way to begin with what we know, not with what we believe. None of this says that what we believe is impossible. But making a clean start at questioning clearly means tracking down all such dogmas that underlie these determinations of person, spirit, and the like—and getting rid of them. And so we see that underlying an apparently bland and uncontroversial problem like the being of space there are theses like the immortality and spirituality of human being; and that these theses implicitly or explicitly prevent us from seeing things the way they are. We begin with an ego that is not spatial and then use some kind of hocus-pocus to work our way into space.

Kant’s position goes back to Descartes as regards this peculiar conception of the a priori as an entity in the sense of a cogitatio. Kant never got beyond Descartes’s position, nor did he ever question its foundations. One might object that in a noteworthy section of his Critique of Pure Reason, which is titled [293] “Refutation of Idealism” (B 274–275), Kant did try to overcome the Cartesian position. But this objection is mistaken. In that section Kant tries to demonstrate the existence of things in space; i.e., he thinks it necessary that the being of the outer world (as we would put it) has to be proven, and he declares it an outright scandal that philosophy has no such proof. But insofar as Kant thinks the outer world must be proven he presupposes the Cartesian position, namely, that at the start I do not yet securely possess this curious outer world, but rather have to prove it in the strict philosophical sense of that word. This refutation of idealism is a refutation only of material idealism, as Kant puts it; and it is precisely a proof for the Cartesian position within the Kantian problematic. The reason I mention this peculiar refutation of idealism (which should be compared with the valuable remark in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique, see B xxxix), is that we will need to come back to these interpretations in another context—because they are in fact of momentous significance and, given his position, are the most radical thing Kant could say about the being of the world in relation to human existence or the subject. They are even more significant insofar as time is the guiding thread of the argument. And this is the place where Kant