A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' — Kant — John Shaqi
A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'
Kant · en
The general thesis, that the universal and necessary elements in
experience constitute its form, Kant specifies in the following
determinate manner. The form is fixed for all experience, that is to
say, it is one and the same in each and every experience, however simple
or however complex. It is to be detected in consciousness of duration no
less than in consciousness of objects or in consciousness of self. For,
as Kant argues, consciousness of duration involves the capacity to
distinguish between subjective and objective succession, and likewise
involves recognition[22] with its necessary component
self-consciousness. Or to state the same point of view in another way,
human experience is a temporal process and yet is always a consciousness
of meaning. As temporal, its states are ordered successively, that is,
externally to one another; but the consciousness which they constitute
is at each and every moment the awareness of some single unitary meaning
by reference to which the contents of the successive experiences are
organised. The problem of knowledge may therefore be described as being
the analysis of the consciousness of duration, of objectivity, and of
self-consciousness, or alternatively as the analysis of our awareness of
meaning. Kant arrives at the conclusion that the conditions of all four
are one and the same.[23]
Kant thus teaches that experience in all its embodiments and in each of
its momentary states can be analysed into an endlessly variable material
and a fixed set of relational elements. And as no one of the relational
factors can be absent without at once nullifying all the others, they
together constitute what must be regarded as the determining form and
structure of every mental process that is cognitive in character.
Awareness, that is to say, is identical with the act of judgment, and
therefore involves everything that a judgment, in its distinction from
any mere association of ideas, demands for its possibility.