A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' — Kant — John Shaqi
A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'
Kant · en
=Second Paragraph (Conclusion b).=--This latter statement is repeated at
the opening of the second _Conclusion_. The emphasis is no longer,
however, upon the term “form” but upon the term “inner”; and Kant
proceeds to make assertions which by no means follow from the five
arguments, and which must be counted amongst the most difficult and
controversial tenets of the whole _Critique_. (_a_) Time is not a
determination of outer appearances. For it belongs neither to their
shape nor to their position--and prudently at this point the property of
motion is smuggled out of view under cover of an etc. _Time does not
determine the relation of appearances to one another, but only_ the
relation of representations _in our inner state_.[529] It is the form
only of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state.[530]
Obviously these are assertions which Kant cannot possibly hold to in
this unqualified form. In the very next paragraph they are modified and
restated. (_b_) As this inner intuition supplies no shape (_Gestalt_),
we seek to make good this deficiency by means of analogies. We represent
the time-sequence through a line progressing to infinity in which the
manifold constitutes a series of only one dimension. From the properties
of this line, with the one exception that its parts are simultaneous
whereas those of time are always successive, we conclude to all the
properties of time.
The wording of the passage seems to imply that such symbolisation of
time through space is helpful but not indispensably necessary for its
apprehension. That it is indispensably necessary is, however, the view
to which Kant finally settled down.[531] But he has not yet come to
clearness on this point. The passage has all the signs of having been
written prior to the _Analytic_. Though Kant seems to have held
consistently to the view that time has, in or by itself, only one
dimension,[532] the difficulties involved drove him to recognise that
this is true only of time as the order of our representations. It is not
true of the objective time apprehended in and through our
representations. When later Kant came to hold that consciousness of time
is conditioned by consciousness of space, he apparently also adopted the
view that, by reference to space, time indirectly acquires simultaneity
as an additional mode. The objective spatial world is in time, but in a
time which shows simultaneity as well as succession. In the
_Dissertation_[533] Kant had criticised Leibniz and his followers for
neglecting simultaneity, “the most important consequence of time.”