The consciousness of life, says Kant, is based on sensation (cf. Kant, Anth, AA 07, 134 f., n. and 230 ff.) and the universal form of sensation is time alone. If the latter, as it is widely declared, is nothing but the formal condition of any order that is to say, if it is succession, then the elementary consciousness of life is history. But in contrast to cognition sensation is located within the field of sensibility faraway from reason bringing along order and succession (for the relation between reason, succession and order see Kant, KrV A 199 f./B244 f.). Sensation is the consciousness of appearance, a time-bounded manifold (cf. Kant, KrV B3) mediating the real content of every representation (cf. esp. Kant, KrV B207) and for that reason real time can never be known a priori in particular. According to this, any self-conscious living being is formally merely bound to time and gets to know itself in time as a form of a manifold without any order and all its egoism will always be a degenerated form of some elementary pluralism (see thereto Kant, Anth, AA 07, 130). It is this metaphysical conception of time, whose importance at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics has not been noticed, despite Kant's distinction between the metaphysical and the transcendental exposition of time in the »Critique of Pure Reason«, and whose fundamental role for sensations such as sorrow and solitude this paper will prove.
