To & fro of a priori cognition and actual experience
Immanuel Kant here begins an exploration of the science of intuition
Immanuel Kant wrote:
If one is beyond the circle of experience, then one is sure not to be contradicted through experience. The charm in expanding one’s cognitions is so great that one can be stopped in one's progress only by bumping into a clear contradiction. This, however, one can avoid if one makes his inventions carefully, even though they are not thereby inventions any the less. Mathematics gives us a splendid example of how far we can go with a priori cognition independently of experience. Now it is occupied, to be sure, with objects and cognitions only so far as these can be exhibited in intuition. This circumstance, however, is easily overlooked, since the intuition in question can itself be given a priori, and thus can hardly be distinguished from a mere pure concept. Encouraged by such a proof of the power of reason, the drive for expansion sees no bounds. The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding. He did not notice that he made no headway by his efforts, for he had no resistance, no support, as it were, by which he could stiffen himself, and to which he could apply his powers in order to get his understanding off the ground. It is, however, a customary fate of human reason in speculation to finish its edifice as early as possible and only then to investigate whether the ground has been adequately prepared for it. But at that point all sorts of excuses will be sought to assure us of its sturdiness or to refuse such a late and dangerous examination. What keeps us free of all worry and suspicion during the construction, however, and flatters us with apparent thoroughness, is this. A great part, perhaps the greatest part of the business of our reason consists in analyses of the concepts that we already have of objects. This affords us a multitude of cognitions that, though they are nothing more than illuminations or clarifications of that which is already thought in our concepts (though still in a confused way), are, at least as far as their form is concerned, treasured as if they were new insights, though they do not extend the concepts that we have in either matter or content but only set them apart from each other.
Now since this procedure does yield a real a priori cognition, which makes secure and useful progress, reason, without itself noticing it, under these pretenses surreptitiously makes assertions of quite another sort, in which it adds something entirely alien to given concepts a priori, without one knowing how it was able to do this and without this question even being allowed to come to mind …
In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition. This, however, takes place only insofar as the object is given to us; but this in turn, is possible only if it affects the mind in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions; but they are thought through the understanding, and from it arise concepts. But all thought, whether straightaway (direct) or through a detour (indirect), must ultimately be related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us.
The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.
I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance. Since that within which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation.
I call all representations pure … in which nothing is to be encountered that belongs to sensation. Accordingly the pure form of sensible intuitions in general is to be encountered in the mind a priori, wherein all of the manifold of appearances is intuited in certain relations. This pure form of sensibility itself is also called pure intuition … [P]ure intuition … occurs a priori, even without an actual object of the senses or sensation, as a mere form of sensibility in the mind …
… [We] will therefore first isolate sensibility by separating off everything that the understanding thinks through its concepts, so that nothing but empirical intuition remains. Second, we will then detach from the latter everything that belongs to sensation, so that nothing remains except pure intuition and the mere form of appearances, which is the only thing that sensibility can make available a priori …
… Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is thus just as necessary to make the mind's concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts). Further, these two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything. Only from their unification can cognition arise. But on this account one must not mix up their roles, rather one has great cause to separate them carefully from each other and distinguish them. Hence we distinguish the science of the rules of sensibility in general, i.e., aesthetic, from the science of the rules of understanding in general, i.e., logic.
The Source:
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press I998 [pp. 129, 155-156, 193-194]
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