Kant is very different. He supposes nothing. An experience such as ours
is very different from experience in the abstract. Imagine just simply
experience, succession of states, of consciousness! Why, there would be
no connecting any two together, there would be no personal identity,
no memory. It is out of a general experience such as this, which, in
respect to anything we call real, is less than a dream, that Kant shows
the genesis of an experience such as ours.
Kant takes up the problem of the explanation of space, time, order, and
so quite logically does not presuppose them.
But how, when every act of thought is of things in space, and time,
and ordered, shall we represent to ourselves that perfectly indefinite
somewhat which is Kant’s necessary hypothesis—that which is not in
space or time and is not ordered. That is our problem, to represent
that which Kant assumes not subject to any of our forms of thought, and
then show some function which working on that makes it into a “nature”
subject to law and order, in space and time. Such a function Kant
calls the “Unity of Apperception”; _i.e._, that which makes our state
of consciousness capable of being woven into a system with a self, an
outer world, memory, law, cause, and order.
The difficulty that meets us in discussing Kant’s hypothesis is that
everything we think of is in space and time—how then shall we represent
in space an existence not in space, and in time an existence not in
time? This difficulty is still more evident when we come to construct
a poiograph, for a poiograph is essentially a space structure. But
because more evident the difficulty is nearer a solution. If we always
think in space, _i.e._ using space concepts, the first condition
requisite for adapting them to the representation of non-spatial
existence, is to be aware of the limitation of our thought, and so be
able to take the proper steps to overcome it. The problem before us,
then, is to represent in space an existence not in space.
The solution is an easy one. It is provided by the conception of
alternativity.
To get our ideas clear let us go right back behind the distinctions of
an inner and an outer world. Both of these, Kant says, are products.
Let us take merely states of consciousness, and not ask the question
whether they are produced or superinduced—to ask such a question is to
have got too far on, to have assumed something of which we have not
traced the origin. Of these states let us simply say that they occur.
Let us now use the word a “posit” for a phase of consciousness reduced
to its last possible stage of evanescence; let a posit be that phase of
consciousness of which all that can be said is that it occurs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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