7 Nietzsche’s point here invites comparison with Kant’s conception, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of transcendental subjectivity as consisting, in each case, in a subject’s consciousness of herself as a ‘self-active’ being synthesizing representations. Qua transcendental subject ‘I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination’ (B 158). The nature of this ‘consciousness’ is notoriously unclear in Kant. He says that ‘I do not have another self-intuition which gives the determining in me (I am conscious only of the spontaneity of it)’. Hence ‘I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being; all that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought’. Kant’s formulation here is ambiguous: is the ‘representation’ of my synthesizing spontaneity only a thought—essentially an inference from the unified contents of consciousness, as B 134–5 suggests—or is it experientially (‘intuitively’) presented? In which case Kant’s denial of self-intuition as an ‘active being’ would refer not to the spontaneity itself, but only to the intrinsic character of that which exercises the spontaneity, revealing Kant’s commitment to a metaphysics of substances with intrinsic properties at the noumenal level (see esp. B 478).