SPACE AND TIME.

Sense and sensibility.

1. The transcendental Aesthetic.
Kant first of all isolates sensibility, that is to say, he excludes from consideration everything
contributed to our knowledge of objects by thought or understanding. Secondly, he isolates the a
priori element contributed by sensibility. He does so by excluding everything that belongs to
empirical sensation.
An intuition is a singular idea (representation singularis); a concept is a general idea (repraesentatio
per notas communes) an idea of what is common to different objects.
As has often been pointed out, there is a certain ambiguity in words like “intuit”. My “intuition” my
intuiting, or “what I intuit”
The indeterminate object of an empirical intuition, where intuition would appear to mean intuiting.
On the other hand, he speaks of space and time as intuitions and not concepts. Here he must mean
that they are individual things intuited and not merely common characters conceived.
Their whole being depends on our intuiting, and calling them intuitions or ideas serves to bring out
this view.
Intuitions in human beings are sensuous. That is to say, they come to us by means of passive
sensibility. They are not created by us by means of passive sensibility. They are not created by us
but simply received. We are able to intuit only so far as it affects our minds and produces a
sensation.
The ambiguity of the word object. The simplest interpretation is to suppose that Kant is speaking on
the common-sense level. The object may be taken to be a body, such as a chair. It is given to us so
far as it affects our minds through the sense-organs and produces, for example, a sensation of color.
If we suppose this analysis to be already made, Kant´s statement (that an object affects our minds
and produces a sensation) applies both to the thing-in-itself and to the phenomenal object.
The thing or object which is given to us is, however, given to us only as it appears, not as it is in
itself. It is in short given as a phenomenal object. If we speak strictly, even the phenomenal object is
given only as regards its matter.
This is what Kant means when he says that intuitions without the concepts are blind. Hence without
thought there is no determinate object, no phenomenal object in the strict sense. What is given,
namely the mere sensum, may be called the indeterminate object, the object as a mere appearance,
the sense apart from thought.
In any case the phenomenal object, must both be given to sense and be thought by understanding.
Intuition itself may be analyzed into form and matter. The matter is the sensation or sensum, which
may also be called an impression. This is the effect of the object which affects our minds. The form
is the space and time in which our sensations are arranged and is due, as Kant hopes to prove, not to
the thing affecting us, but the nature of our minds.
SENSE AND UNDERSTANDING.
There is therefore an abstraction involved in dealing with sensibility by itself, and the Aesthetic is a
provisional and incomplete account of our knowledge of space and time.
OUTER AND INNER SENSE.
Sense for Kant covers both outer and inner sense. By outer sense (which includes sight, hearing,
etc.) we are aware of objects in space. By inner sense we are aware of our own states of mind in
time. Both inner and outer sense give us only phenomena, and not things-in-themselves.
For Kant an immediate cognitive relation to an individual object is possible only through intuition,
and intuition is given only by means of sensibility.
It is more remarkable that just as space is the form of outer sense, so time is the form of inner sense.
This means that time cannot be intuited outwardly, any more than space can be intuited as
something in us.
The use of the words “inside” and outside in regard to the mind always leads to confusion. Space,
for example, is certainty “in us”, if to be “in us “means to be an object of knowledge. It is also “in
us” as well as outside of us, if to be “in us” means to be in our bodies.
Kant´s view implies that we are immediately aware only of our own mental evolution as in time,
and that we have not this immediate awareness of the changes in the physical world.
THE FORM OF INTUITION.
At first sight Kant seems to use expressions like “form of appearances”, “form of sensibility”, and
“pure intuition”, almost as if they were interchangeable.
Everything that appears to sense must be capable of being ordered in spatial and temporal relations.
Space and time are the conditions of such ordering, and so are the conditions of the possibility of
appearances. As such, space and time are forms of appearances.
They are forms under which alone we can sense appearances, and are necessarily imposed on
appearances by the nature of our sensibility. This doctrine is expressed in the statement that space
and time are forms of sensibility.
On this view space and time are potentially present in our sensibility even before experience begins.
I do not think Kant believes that space and time are actually present to our minds before experience
begins. But the expression form of sensibility has certain ambiguity.
There is clear distinction between “form of appearance” and “form of sensibility”, the latter alone
implying the subjectivity of space and time.
Form of intuition may be taken as equivalent to form of appearance, so far as intuition is equivalent
to appearance.
Form is essentially the form of matter, and when we speak of space and time as “forms”, it is
convenient to think of them as the relations in which our sense is given.
PURE INTUITION.
When we separate the form from the matter, that is to say, when we abstract the spatial and
temporal relations from the objects which stand in these relations, we have pure intuition.
The form of intuition is or contains the relations (or system of relations) in which appearances
stand. The content of pure intuition is these same relations, abstracted from sensible appearances,
and taken together as forming one individual whole. Space and time are at one the forms of
appearances and the content of pure intuition.
Kant makes his doctrine more difficult by saying, not that space and time are the contents of pure
intuitions, but that they are pure intuitions. This phrase serves, like the phrase form of sensibility, to
indicate that space and time are mind-dependent.
Pure intuition is intuition (and not conception), because it involves an immediate cognitive relation
to an individual object- there is only one space and one time.