Abstract
Tolley argues, first, for a sharper distinction between three kinds of representation of the space of outer appearances: (i) the original intuition of space, (ii) the metaphysical representation of this space via the a priori concept “expounded” in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and (iii) the representation of this space in geometry, via the construction of concepts of spaces in intuition. He then shows how more careful attention to this threefold distinction allows for a conservative, consistently nonconceptualist and non-intellectualist interpretation of the handful of suggestive remarks Kant makes in the Transcendental Deduction about the dependence of various representations of space on the understanding—against recent interpretations which argue that the Deduction’s remarks require that Kant revise the impression given in the Aesthetic (and elsewhere) that intuition in general, and the original intuition of space in particular, enjoys a priority to, and independence from, all acts and representations of the understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Mathematical categories and principles are distinguished precisely as applying directly and “constitutively” to “objects of intuition (pure as well as empirical)” (B110), i.e. to appearance space as well as to the relations of sensations (appearances) within this space, whereas dynamical categories and principles “do not concern appearances” (B220; emphasis added) but rather “the existence” that is related to appearances (B110; emphasis added; cf. A160/B199, A178/B221)—i.e. the really existent substances which are responsible for bringing about appearances—and the relations (of causality, community) among these existents.
- 3.
I explore these distinctions, and their role in Kant’s idealism, at length in Tolley (MS a), and more briefly in Tolley (MS c).
- 4.
Here and throughout, unless otherwise noted, I use the term “object” in the very broad sense of a subject of true predication in judgement, such that even e.g. that which is non-existent, or non-substantial—i.e. that which is (in some sense) nothing—counts as an object, since it can be the subject of true predications. At the end of the Amphiboly, Kant himself uses the term “object in general” (Gegenstand überhaupt) to range over both that which is “something” (Etwas) and that which is “nothing” (Nichts) (B346), and explicitly to comprise both noumena and also pure space as the form of intuition (which are also, incidentally, both classified as forms of ens rather than nihil).
- 5.
For the stronger “conceptualist” interpretation of intuition, according to which the original intuition of space requires the involvement of concepts (categories), see McDowell (2009). For the weaker, merely “intellectualist” interpretation, according to which only an act of understanding is necessary for the original intuition of space, though no concept or specifically conceptual synthesis (instead: something “pre-discursive”), see Friedman (2012, 2015), Longuenesse (1998b), Messina (2014) and Grüne, Chap. 4, in this volume. (I am borrowing the “conceptualist”/“intellectualist” contrast from McLear 2015.)
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
For other references to the concept of space at issue in TAe in terms of its purity and apriority, compare B118–21, B195 and B207 (see also the discussion below in Section 11.4).
- 10.
In fact, it should follow from the Metaphysical Exposition that this “original” intuition, if it is truly original, cannot itself “flow from” any concept, or any other representation.
- 11.
I provide a brief sketch of the account of the difference between these mental acts (intuiting, perceiving, experiencing) in Tolley (2013), and more fully in Tolley (MS a). I also argue there that keeping track of these distinctions is of utmost importance for understanding Kant’s account of “cognition” (Erkenntnis). In Tolley (MS c), I take up the further and difficult question of how the space of the objects of outer intuition (outer appearances) relates to the space of the objects of outer experience (corporeal substances), drawing on Sellars’s (1968) analysis of counterpart-relations.
- 12.
For more background context-setting about the occasion for writing, see Friedman (2000) and Onof and Schulting (2014). I have also consulted the recent translation of these remarks by Onof and Schulting (in Kant 2014) in the course of providing translations for the quotations below. However, I have departed from their renderings without comment where it seemed appropriate.
- 13.
For interpretations which can seem to slide from noting distinctions among representations of space into talking as if there were distinctions in kinds of space (“metaphysical space” over against “geometrical space”, with geometrical space seemingly identified only with a “subset” of metaphysical space), see Friedman (2000, 2012, 2015) and Patton (2011).
- 14.
Here I mean to emphasise the fact that the original intuition of infinite space is itself not only presupposed by, but actually contained in, every act of construction (description, delimitation), such that every geometrical representation of space not only depends (abstractly) on the presence of the original intuition of space but actually takes place “in” this intuition, as its infinite backdrop. A space delimited “in” space is always finite relative to the space in which it is delimited—i.e. the infinite space of original intuition—and so it is right to say that there is something finite “given” in each construction. At the same time, however, there is also an infinity “given” in each construction as well—and also (for that matter) an infinity given in each empirical intuition (as its form). The co-givenness of infinite space in geometrical construction and empirical intuition is obscured in Friedman’s insistence, for example, on the finitude of every visual or perceptual field (cf. Friedman 2000), to try to help account for the difference he recognises Kant is marking between metaphysical and geometrical representations of space.
- 15.
Compare: “That representation that can be given prior to all thinking is called intuition” (B132).
- 16.
This in no way implies that Kant means to deny that the space given in original intuition is an object, or that it can be represented under the concept of an object, or that it has properties which can be represented conceptually. As we have seen, Kant is quite clear throughout that the space of original intuition is the object of the metaphysically expounded concept of space, and that this space is already infinite, unitary, a magnitude and given in intuition.
- 17.
Compare Allais (2009) for further discussion of the importance of the contrast between space simply being given (in mere intuition) and space being given “as” something (even: as an object).
- 18.
Although this distinction is not front and centre in TAe, it does contain several terminological markers that suggest a parallel understanding of the subjective/objective contrast. Kant there claims that the originary “outer intuition” must “inhabit [beiwohnen] the mind” in a way that “precedes the objects themselves”, and therefore “has its seat merely in the subject [im Subjecte], as its formal constitution for being affected by objects and thereby acquiring immediate representation, i.e., intuition, of them” (B41; emphasis added). This kind of “subjective” givenness is also touched upon in the Prolegomena, §9: “There is therefore only one way possible for my intuition to precede the actuality of the object and occur as an a priori cognition, namely if it contains [enthält] nothing else except the form of sensibility, which in me as subject precedes all actual impressions through which I am affected by objects” (Prol, 4:282; my underlining). To be sure, here Kant’s concern is primarily to emphasise that space is given prior to external affection—that is, prior to further objects being given to the mind through the sensations they produce, and in fact given prior to even the sensations themselves being given—rather than its priority to thinking (whether conceptualisation or construction). In TAe, however, this point about space already being given and present “in the subject” is made precisely at the end of the Transcendental Exposition that aims to show a priori (as we can now emphasise), not just that certain representations “flow from” the concept of space, but rather that certain cognitions (Erkenntnisse)—i.e. certain representations “with consciousness” of objects (A320/B376–7)—can “flow from” this concept (combined with the original intuition). And the cognitions of objects that are shown to “flow from” the concept (plus intuition) in this way are none other than geometrical cognitions. In any case, this also should allay any concern that Kant’s differentiation here between subjective and objective forms of givenness could require a corresponding differentiation in whatever objects are given in these manners. This would be so only if one and the same thing were not able to be first given in one manner and then in the other. But not only is this not in any way conceptually prohibited, it is exactly what Kant seems to have in mind in this particular case. Space is first given “in” the subject in pure intuition, and then given “objectively” in consciousness to thought, as the correlate of a concept.
- 19.
In the Dialectic, Kant notes a further difference even in relation to the progressus that has otherwise been the focus of the foregoing remarks on the mathematical representation of infinity: whereas mathematicians are happy to speak of this progressus going in infinitum, philosophers restrict themselves to speaking of a progressus in indefinitum (A510–11/B538–9)—which is in further accord with the general distinction above, between the metaphysical though indeterminate representation of space as infinite and given, and the geometrical “determination” of space as to its parts “to infinity”.
- 20.
See note 5 for references to conceptualist and intellectualist interpreters.
- 21.
For an overview of the variety of interpretations of this footnote, see Onof and Schulting (2015). For a survey of some of the key passages in TD and elsewhere for the broader debate about the nonconceptuality of the content of intuitions, see Allais (2015), Schulting (2015b) and Tolley (2013). See also Allais, Chap. 1, in this volume.
- 22.
Indeed, as Kant says just a bit later in the Analytic: “That representation that can be given prior to [vor] all thinking is called intuition” (B132; emphasis added). For more discussion of these and similar passages, see Allais (2009).
- 23.
Cf. Grüne, Chap. 4, in this volume.
- 24.
For a very instructive analysis of the more general role of reflection in Kant’s conception of understanding and concepts, compare Longuenesse (1998a), although she at times seems to wish to downplay the “subjective” standing that Kant accords to the initial targets of reflection in perception (sensations, “my state”; Prol, 4:300) and too quickly wishes to identify these items with the ultimate “objective” objects of judgements of experience.
- 25.
For a careful and much more thorough analysis of this footnote that is broadly in line with the nonconceptualist reading I am defending here, see Onof and Schulting (2015).
- 26.
Friedman rejects the idea that Kant is here discussing explicitly geometrical representations (representations constructed in the science of geometry), because he thinks Kant must be talking about a more primitive representation presupposed by all geometrical representation (cf. Friedman 2015). This may be so, since Kant does say here that it “precedes all concepts”—presumably, all concepts of spaces (cf. Longuenesse 1998b). Yet as we have seen above in the discussion of the Kästner remarks, there are still further representations of space intermediate (as it were) between the original intuition and its geometrical representation, all of which are still “derivative” of the “originary” intuition—most notably, the a priori concept of space which is “expounded” in transcendental philosophy. Furthermore, Friedman has not made the case that the metaphysically “given” concept of space itself will need to incorporate the specifically “kinematic” activity (or kinematic unification of perspectives thanks to apperception) into its content that Friedman’s reading of the representation at issue in B160n. presupposes (cf. Friedman 2012 and 2015). This itself leaves open the possibility that both the original intuition of space and the metaphysical concept of space lack consciousness of the kinematic perspective-structure that Friedman sees as a condition for the possibility of the geometrical representation of space, and that this content is only represented distinctly subsequent to geometry itself, rather than in the original intuition or metaphysical concept of space.
- 27.
At the outset of the Schematism, for example, Kant writes that “no one would say that the category, e.g., causality, could also be intuited through the senses and is contained in the appearance” (A137–8/B176–7; emphasis added). And again, at the beginning of the Dialectic, Kant claims that “a representation of sense ... contains no judgment at all” (A294/B350; emphasis added). And in the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena, Kant describes the situation that obtains “if I take all thinking (through categories) away from an empirical cognition” as leaving in place “mere [bloße] intuition” (A253/B309; emphasis added).
- 28.
I would like to thank Lucy Allais, Karl Ameriks, Rosalind Chaplin, Dennis Schulting, the UCSD German Philosophy Research Group, an anonymous referee and especially Eric Watkins for helpful discussion and feedback on earlier drafts of this material.
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Tolley, C. (2016). The Difference Between Original, Metaphysical and Geometrical Representations of Space. In: Schulting, D. (eds) Kantian Nonconceptualism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53517-7_11
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