Time and Corporeality

Kant's theory of Time is open to two interpretations. First, the definition of it as the 'form of inner sense' can be construed as referring to the successiveness of the flow discovered by self-intuition. Second, a reading to which Kant seems to give greater prominence in the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is that successiveness is a structure of the act of self-intuition itself, because in self-intuition, the intuiting self and the intuiting self do not coincide, but the latter is necessarily subsequent to the former, thereby establishing a relation of necessary successiveness between them. Now, while Bergson's theory of Durational flux aligns itself with the first of the two interpretations, his too casual treatment of Intuition as virtually, but not exactly, coinciding with its object, opens him to the criticism that his analysis of the successiveness of Consciousness is superficial, and, so misses the active role of the subject in producing it. On the other hand, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, better appreciate that Temporality is a product of the circuit of Selfhood. However, since they each seem to present the object of self-intuition as a previous act of Consciousness, they join with Bergson in proposing a theory of Time that is independent of corporeality. In contrast, on the construction that has been developed here, the intuited self is an appearing self, and the process of appearing is irreducibly physiological. It thus diverges from those various post-Kantian incorporealizations of Temporality.