Notes on <Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason> - The Sensible Conditions of Objects (The Aesthetic)
- Kant’s analysis of cognition
- The sensible form of experience: space and time
- Space and time as a priori intuitions: Kant’s arguments
- Space and time in the Analytic
The Transcendental Aesthetic is concerned with sensibility, and thus with objects in so far as they are sensed. Its focus, however, is principally on space and time, regarding which its first central claim is that space and time provide the sensible form of experience, and on that account play a fundamental role in making objects possible. The second central claim is that space and time are forms of sensibility and all the objects of our experience are mere appearances as opposed to things in themselves.
Kant’s analysis of cognition
| Intuitions | Concepts | |
|---|---|---|
| From | Sensibility | Understanding |
| function | by means of which objects are given to us | enables objects to be thought |
| Relates to objects | Immediately | Mediately |
| Passive/Active | Passives, Being affected | Active, Spontaneous |
Epistemological implications
Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind….Only through their union can knowledge arise.
Intellectual intuition
We can think of a subject whose cognition is not divided in the way that ours is. This would be a subject whose act of thinking, and being presented with an object, were one and the same event. Such a subject would possess what Kant calls intellectual intuition. For this subject there would be no room for sense experience and it would not be necessary to apply concepts; nor for such a subject would there be any distinction between the actual and the possible, since this distinction disappears if objects become actual merely by virtue of being thought of. The only subject to which we can meaningfully attach the notion of intellectual intuition, Kant suggests, is God.
The sensible form of experience: space and time
There are two other views about space and time, Newton’s absolutist view that space time as real existence and Leibniz’s rational(reductionist) view that they are only determinations or relations of things.
Kant’s own view of space and time he expresses by saying that they are a priori intuitions. To say that they are a priori is to say that they do not derive from experience. And to say that they are intuitions is to say that our awareness of them is immediate and non-conceptual, and that each of space and time is in some sense a ‘single object’. This differs from Leibniz’s view in that space and time is irreducible and differs from Newton’s view that they are not real in an absolute sense. The argument is in Metaphysical Expositions in CPR.
Pure intuition
Synthetic a priori judgment is possible if there is a priori intuition on which it may be grounded.
Experience must have form, because a subject can only be cognitively conscious of its experience as something if it is organized in some way. The form of appearance consists in a structure of relations, and according to Kant it must be supplied a priori by our power of intuition, because sensation cannot either bring with it or give rise to the form that it has in our apprehension of it. This form must also be intuitive rather than conceptual, since it concerns the shape that sensation has in so far as it provides a content for thought. The form of appearance is thus located between sensation and thought: like sensation, it is prior to the application of any concept, but like thought, it does not arise out of sensation.
It follows that we have a kind of intuition that is independent of sensation, which Kant calls “pure intuition”. Space and time are our two pure intuitions. Geometry may be regarded as knowledge derived from pure intuition of space. Pure intuition of time also gives rise to a body of knowledge like arithmetic.
Space and time as a priori intuitions: Kant’s arguments
There are 6 arguments for space as a priori intuitions. Four are in Metaphysical Expositions.
Space as a priori(#1 & #2)
- If the representation of space were not a priori, then it would be empirical; but if it were formed empirically, then it would be obtained from experience of outer objects. But this is impossible, since outer experience is impossible without the representation of space. So the representation of space must be
a priori. In sum, because the representation of space is invoked in the very act of representing a world of outer objects, it cannot be based on experience of outer objects. - The second argument says that although we can think space empty of objects, it is impossible to represent the absence of space. Space “must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent on them” From which it follows that space is a necessary and therefore again an a priori representation.
The point of the second argument is to rule out a possibility which the first leaves open, namely that although outer objects cannot be represented without space being represented, the reverse is also true. If the representations of space and an outer world were mutually necessary, then the representation of space would not be prior to the representation of an outer world, which would imply that space is after all an empirical representation.
Jointly the two arguments establish an asymmetrical relation of dependence between the representation of space and that of a world of outer objects: the former is presupposed for the latter, but the reverse is not the case. And Kant regards this as sufficient to show that our representation of space is a priori in the sense of not being derived from experience.
Space as an intuition (#3 & #4)
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We can represent to ourselves only one space, space is unitary, singular and unique. Since first to talk about “diverse spaces” is to talk about different “parts of one and the same unique space”; second, these parts “cannot precede the one all-embracing space” and “can be thought only as in it”. It follows that the representation of space is an intuition: it presents an individual object - Space, the whole which precedes its parts.
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Space is “represented as an infinite given magnitude”, and that this is to be explained by its being an intuition. Space is given to us, first as unbounded, and second as infinitely divisible. Carrying over from the third argument the conclusion that space is unitary, it follows that the possibility of an infinite number of parts of space is secondary to the infinity of Space itself. Space is not a concept because a concept that did resemble Space in containing an infinite number of parts, as distinct from having an infinite number of possible instances, would be one with an infinitely rich content, and could not be grasped by a finite mind.
Incongruent counterparts (#5)
- The argument occurs not in the Critique but in the Inaugural Dissertation and Prolegomena. The argument is that left and right gloves are counterparts. The difference of left and right glove are not relational, but “internal” to the gloves. The spatial properties of objects are therefore intrinsic, irreducible and underived. This is sufficient to refute Leibniz’s view that spatial relations are constructed conceptually from non- spatial relations between objects. So space is an intuition because the internal difference between the gloves, their incongruity, “cannot be described discursively or reduced to intellectual marks” and “cannot be made intelligible by any concept”.
The argument from geometry (Transcendental Exposition of Space in second edition) (#6)
- Only if space is a pure and therefore a priori intuition can the truth of geometry be explained. Geometrical judgements cannot be based on concepts, since they are not analytic, and they cannot be a posteriori, since they are necessary. So unless they are based on intuition, furthermore on intuition that is a priori, their synthetic a priori truth is unaccountable. The argument from geometry serves therefore the double function of showing that space is a priori and that it is an intuition.
Evaluating Kant’s arguments
Refuting a priority: it can be argued that space and objects are “contemporaneous”, that neither is prior to the other. and Kant may consequently be charged with sliding illicitly from one sense of a priori, “presupposed for experience”, to another, its earlier sense of “not arising out of experience”. But the “contemporaneous” view runs into the problem of reality because to suppose that spatial and outer representation are contemporaneous is to suppose that our capacity for representation is such that we are able to determine what mode of representation is appropriate to reality in the very act of representing it. No option remains, then, but Kant’s view of the representation of space as neither posterior to nor contemporaneous with outer representation, but prior to it.
Kant’s arguments about time are largely structural replicas of his arguments about space.
Space and time in the Analytic
The Aesthetic has described space and time as intuitions, and this is not sufficient to account for knowledge of space and time. In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant explains that when space and time are considered as objects of cognition rather than mere forms of sense experience - as ‘formal intuitions’ rather than ‘forms of intuition’ - the unity of space and time, which is merely assumed in the Aesthetic requires a ground which sensibility cannot itself supply, and which presupposes the complex conceptual machinery described in the Analytic.
Space and time do precede their parts and are irreducible to relations among appearances, but that the indeterminate spatiality and temporality of pure intuition is rendered determinate through being subjected to conceptual synthesis, which necessarily begins with the spatial and temporal positions of appearances.