The Philosophy of Immanuel KantLindsay, A. D. (Alexander Dunlop)
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
Lindsay, A. D. (Alexander Dunlop)
Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
An instance will help to make this point clear. Suppose that I am
sitting in a room, and look first at the door and then turn round and
look at the window. There are two successive acts of apprehending; the
content of the first is the door, of the second, the window, but the
succession, I say, is in my apprehending. The door and the window have
co-existed all the time. Suppose, again, that I look out of the window
and see a cab in front of the house opposite, come back into the room,
and then look out again and see the cab in front of a house further
down. Here, again, are two successive acts of apprehending, the content
of the first houses with cab in front of one house, of the second houses
with cab in front of another. This time I say the houses have gone on
co-existing, but the cab has moved. The difference in what I see this
time is due not to me, but to the cab. The succession is in the thing
apprehended. If we just think of the contents apprehended, we have
first A, then B, and say A and B co-exist in the first instance, and
have CD and CE, and say D and E have been successive in the other. Why
in the second case do we not say when we look out of the window the
second time: Here is another row of houses, which, though they look
exactly the same as the ones I saw last time, have got the cab in a
different place? That is the land of thing one does say in a dream.
Why would it be inadmissible in waking life?
Let us first ask how we ever come to make the distinction between change
in the content of our perception, which is due to change in us, and
change in the things we perceive. Look out of a window into a busy
street. As we look certain things remain the same, the houses opposite,
the lamp-posts, and so on, but other things change. The permanence of
part of the contents guarantees us that the change we perceive is not
due to us: if it were, these would change also. Therefore it must be in
certain of the things. Change is perceived against a background that is
permanent and does not change. But any such particular perception is,
of course, very limited. We do not see all the world at once, and we
only come to know a larger extent of reality by means of memory, which
enables us to put together what we see at one time with what we see at
another. We have got to try and understand how it is that we make this
distinction, which is clear to us in small isolated bits of experience,
hold of all experience. Now if reality did not change, and we were
conscious of our own movements, we could go from one point to another of
reality and back again, and could be aware that the changes in our
perception were all due, not to change in reality, but to us--were our
history. We should know that the different things we saw were
co-existing all the time, and we should, in describing them, try to
describe them, as in a map, as we should perceive them if we saw them
all at once. The succession would be subjective, the co-existence
objective.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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