[can] be nothing else than the way the mind is affected by its own activ-ity—viz., by this positing of its presentation [ihrer Vorstellung]—and hence affected by itself, which means that as regards its form, it is an inner sense. (B 67–68)

The original printing of the B edition has the text as above: [the mind is affected by] “this positing of ihrer Vorstellung,” where Vorstellung [“presentation”] means Vorstellen [the mind’s act of presenting]. [340] But later editions emended the text to read “the positing of seiner Vorstellung,” a change that is completely unnecessary and robs the sentence of its rich meaning.¹⁰² We have to say (1) that the spontaneity of the self consists in the modes of its act of presenting;¹⁰³ (2) that the pre-viewing that we have characterized—namely, time—belongs fundamentally to that spontaneity; and (3) consequently that, just as fundamentally, spontaneity qua self-affection is receptivity.

Time, understood as this most fundamental self-affection, is “antecedently letting a pre-viewed basis-on-which be given.” This “antecedent letting” is the condition of the possibility of the mind being occupied with presentations as manifolds antecedently given for combination and determination by the understanding. In self-affection, time posits for itself the very self as the one who, on the grounds of this self-concern, can be encountered by something. (“Time gives what can be determined” [B 158, note]; this giving is, as such, the actus of my activity.) This positing comes about not through being- affected. Rather, self-affection—time—is the condition of the possibility of any and all ability to be affected. In phenomenological terms: it is the condition of the possibility of being unto an other that we may encounter.

For Kant, it is the subject and its presentations that are given first of all; and by passing through them, as it were, we then apprehend and

102. [In his edition, Kritik der reinen Vernuft. Text der Ausgabe 1781 mit Beifügung sämmtlicher Abweichungen der Ausgabe 1787 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1878), Karl Kehrbach (1846–1905) replaced ihrer with seiner. All current German editions of the first Critique use ihrer.

Heidegger clarifies this passage in a footnote to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 133 n. 266: “The proposed change of ‘their presentation’ to ‘its presentation’ (des ‘ihrer Vorstellung’ in ‘seiner’) removes from the text precisely what is essential. The ‘their’ is not supposed to express that the presentation is a presentation by the mind, but rather that the presenting that is posited by the mind presents the ‘pure relations’ of the succession of the now-sequence as such and allows them to come toward receptivity” (translation slightly revised).]

103. [More literally: “. . . the spontaneity of the self is what it is in the modes of its act of presenting.”]