Bound Existence: Part 1 — Transcendental Aesthetic [TA]
Where and when am I?
We will first lay the groundwork of the project with a summary of Kant and the idea of an existence bound in Space and Time.
As the name indicates, Part 1 of this series is to do with Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic”, which is one of the opening pillars of his monumental work Critique of Pure Reason. This part will be at most an introduction and preface to our later investigations (Part 2, 3, 4), where we will be pushing these notions of Space and Time to their conceptual limits.
In Simple Words
Kant starts from the beginning, the most basic thing — experience. I am experiencing. He explores how things appear to us, and what makes it possible to have experience: this is the aim of the Transcendental Aesthetic.
Kant claims that you need two key forms of perception to have the experience that you have now. Space and Time. Simple right?
SPACE
We experience things in Space. We cannot have an experience without Space.
Most classical empiricists like John Locke claimed that space is an empirical conception, a concept that you derive from sensory experience. You can see multiple objects, these objects are distinguished (a couch is next to the chair), and finally there is a distance between these objects. So we derive space from the concept of seeing a distance between two objects, like a couch and a chair.
But wait a minute Locke, Kant says, “distance” is a spatial term! Space is presupposed in the concept of distance. Kant discovers that space is not a conception derived from outward experience. In order to have an external experience you must presuppose space. Busted.
We cannot have an experience without Space.
Can you think away Space?
Honestly try it yourself. Now immediately one likely thinks of nothing: an objectless thought, black, blank. Yet there is still the underlying form of space in order to negate objects: the objectless thought is nonetheless a thought within a spatial plane, with nothing present. You cannot take away space itself, you can de-populate your experience of the chair, but not of Space itself. So Space constitutes the very fabric of our perception of existence.
There is one Space!
There are many parts of this underlying form of space that we all have, there exists multiple objects in space, but experience is bound by space. So space is essentially one, and multiplicity (multiple distinct objects) exists in Space.
Space is not just one — it is also infinite.
Try it yourself! Can you think of the limits of Space?
Objects are finite, we can think of the limits of a water bottle, but conceiving of the limits of space seems to be impossible. It is part of our existence to experience spatially; all things are beside each other in space. So space is not an actual object, but it is essential to our experience!
So in order to have a — human experience — empirical experience — sensory experience — you need a Spatial framework (the form), the very lens that we perceive this world.
TIME
We experience things in Time. We cannot have an experience without Time.
Back to the classical empiricists like Locke and the gang; they claim that you derive Time from sensory experience. Locke says it like this: imagine you see an apple falling from the tree, what you see is a succession of an apple from the tip of the branch of the tree, succeeded by the next moment of the apple slowly letting go of its branch, succeeded by the apple free falling to the ground, and then the apple hitting the ground. Locke says, we abstract the notion of time from the experience of a succession.
But wait a minute Locke, Kant says, “succession” is a time-related concept (temporal notion)! When you talk about a succession here, you are talking about a temporal succession, you are already presupposing the notion of Time for the apple to be falling. Busted.
We cannot have an experience without Time.
Can you think away Time?
Sounds pretty easy right? I just imagine pausing the play button of life. Are you now imagining a world frozen, or paused like a video?
If you are, you are still existing in time when imagining everything frozen, the thought is not “timeless” as any thought has a beginning and end, there is still duration of the thought — you won’t be thinking about frozen Time forever. Your thought is still Bound by time.
So Time lies at the foundation of our experience, just like Space does.
Time only has one dimension. We experience Time as successive, different Times do not exist at the same Time.
We will explore this notion of time and how it can be perceived more in our next story: Two-Way Time [TWT]. See Part 2.
There is one Time!
Just as there is one Space, there is one Time. There are different moments of Time, in our experience of Time. Name any date and that is a moment in time — but see, it is a moment in Time, a part of it but not the whole.
The whole of Time is conceived as infinite, just as is Space. Like we said we are only ever experiencing a part of Time in the immediate present, a part of a whole that is incomprehensible for us to see the edge.
Basic Summary — For All Readers:
We proved that Space and Time are always present and needed for us to even have an experience! We are truly Bound in Space and Time.
Technical Summary — For Those Interested:
Kant abstracts all the content away from sensuous data, to discover the underlying forms that are necessary for experience. Discovering that Space and Time are the apriori forms of our intuition, rather than posteriori empirical conceptions. The philosophical consequences is known as his Transcendental Idealism, that Space and Time and other objects exist objectively in experience, but are denied Absolute Reality — that is we do not know if they exist as objects in themselves (further discussions on absolute reality in Part 3). Kant’s project here provides no new knowledge of the noumena, only an amplification of our understanding of phenomena.
Onto Part 2 — Where we take a deeper dive into the nature of Time, comparing third dimensional to (hypothetical) fourth dimensional beings to delve deeper into our exploration of the nature of our bound existence.
| Originally Published (22/06/22) |
