A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

Now quite obviously this argument is invalid if the distinction between representations and their objects is a real and genuine one. For if so, it does not at all follow that because our representations of objects are in time that the objects themselves are in time. In other words, the argument is valid only from the standpoint of extreme subjectivism, according to which objects are, in Kant’s own phraseology, blosse Vorstellungen. But the argument is employed to establish a realist conclusion, that outer objects, as objects, stand in time-relations to one another. In contradiction of the previous paragraph he is now maintaining that time is a determination of outer appearances, and that it reveals itself in the motion of bodies as well as in the flux of our inner states.

The distinction between representations and their objects also makes it possible for Kant both to assert and to deny that simultaneity is a mode of time. “No two years can be coexistent. Time has only one dimension. But existence (das Dasein), measured through time, has two dimensions, succession and simultaneity.” There are, for Kant, two orders of time, subjective and objective. Recognition of the latter (emphasised and developed in the Analytic)[538] is, however, irreconcilable with his contention that time is merely the form of inner sense.

We have here one of the many objections to which Kant’s doctrine of time lies open. It is the most vulnerable tenet in his whole system. A mere list of the points which Kant leaves unsettled suffices to show how greatly he was troubled in his own mind by the problems to which it gives rise. (1) The nature of the a priori knowledge which time yields. Kant ascribes to this source sometimes only the two axioms in regard to time, sometimes pure mechanics, and sometimes also arithmetic. (2) Whether time only allows of, or whether it demands, representation through space. Sometimes Kant makes the one assertion, sometimes the other. (3) Whether it is possible to apprehend the coexistent without successive synthesis of its parts. This possibility is asserted in the Aesthetic and Dialectic, denied in the Analytic. (4) Whether simultaneity is a mode of time. (5) Whether, and in what manner, appearances of outer sense are in time. Kant’s answer to 4 and to 5 varies according as he identifies or distinguishes representations and empirical objects.

The manifold difficulties to which a theory of time thus lies open are probably the reason why Kant, in the Critique, reverses the order in which he had treated time and space in the Dissertation.[539] But the placing of space before time is none the less unfortunate. It greatly tends to conceal from the reader the central position which Kant has assigned to time in the Analytic. Consciousness of time is the fundamental fact, taken as bare fact, by reference to which Kant gains his transcendental proof of the categories and principles of understanding.[540] In the Analytic space, by comparison, falls very much into the background. A further reason for the reversal may have been Kant’s Newtonian view of geometry as the mathematical science par excellence.[541] In view of his formulation of the Critical problem as that of accounting for synthetic a priori judgments, he would then naturally be led to throw more emphasis on space.

To sum up our main conclusions. Kant’s view of time as a form merely of inner sense, and as having only one dimension, connects with his subjectivism. His view of it as inhering in objects, and as having duration and simultaneity as two of its modes, is bound up with his phenomenalism. Further discussion of these difficulties must therefore be deferred until we are in a position to raise the more fundamental problem as to the nature of the distinction between a representation and its object.[542] Motion is not an inner state. Yet it involves time as directly as does the flow of our feelings and ideas. Kant’s assertion that “time can no more be intuited externally than space can be intuited as something in us,”[543] if taken quite literally, would involve both the subjectivist assertion that motion of bodies is non-existent, and also the phenomenalist contention that an extended object is altogether distinct from a representation.

The fourth and fifth paragraphs call for no detailed analysis.[544] Time is empirically real, transcendentally ideal—these terms having exactly the same meaning and scope as in reference to space.[545] The fourth sentence in the fifth paragraph is curiously inaccurate. As it stands, it would imply that time is given through the senses. In the concluding sentences Kant briefly summarises and applies the points raised in these fourth and fifth paragraphs.

ELUCIDATION

First and Second Paragraphs.—Kant here replies to a criticism which, as he tells us in his letter of 1772 to Herz, was first made by Pastor Schulze and by Lambert.[546] In that letter the objection and Kant’s reply are stated as follows.

“In accordance with the testimony of inner sense, changes are something real. But they are only possible on the assumption of time. Time is, therefore, something real which belongs to the determinations of things in themselves. Why, said I to myself, do we not argue in a parallel manner: ‘Bodies are real, in accordance with the outer senses. But bodies are possible only under the condition of space. Space is, therefore, something objective and real which inheres in the things themselves.’ The cause [of this differential treatment of space and of time] is the observation that in respect to outer things we cannot infer from the reality of representations the reality of their objects, whereas in inner sense the thought or the existing of the thought and of myself are one and the same. Herein lies the key to the difficulty. Undoubtedly I must think my own state under the form of time, and the form of the inner sensibility consequently gives me the appearance of changes. Now I do not deny that changes are something real any more than I deny that bodies are something real, but I thereby mean only that something real corresponds to the appearance. I may not even say the inner appearance undergoes change (verändere sich), for how could I observe this change unless it appeared to my inner sense? To the objection that this leads to the conclusion that all things in the world objectively and in themselves are unchangeable, I would reply that they are neither changeable nor unchangeable. As Baumgarten states in § 18 of his Metaphysica, the absolutely impossible is hypothetically neither possible nor impossible, since it cannot be mentally entertained under any condition whatsoever; so in similar manner the things of the world are objectively or in themselves neither in one and the same state nor in different states at different times, for thus understood [viz. as things in themselves] they are not represented in time at all.”[547]

Thus Kant’s contention, both in this letter and in the passage before us, is that even our inner states would not reveal change if they could be apprehended by us or by some other being apart from the subjective form of our inner sense. We may not say that our inner states undergo change, or that they succeed one another, but only that to us they necessarily appear as so doing.[548] Time is no more than subjectively real.[549] As Körner writes to Schiller: “Without time man would indeed exist but not appear. Not his reality but only his appearance is dependent upon the condition of time.” “Man is not, but only appears, when he undergoes change.”[550] The objects of inner sense stand in exactly the same position as those of outer sense. Both are appearances, and neither can be identified with the absolutely real. As Kant argues later in the Critique,[551] inner processes are not known with any greater certainty or immediacy than are outer objects; the reality of time as subjective proves its unreality in relation to things in themselves. The statement that the constitution of things in themselves is “problematic” is an exceptional mode of expression for Kant. Usually—as indeed throughout the whole context of this passage[552]—he asserts that though things in themselves are unknowable, we can with absolute certainty maintain that they are neither in space nor in time. Upon this point we have already dwelt in discussing Trendelenburg’s controversy with Fischer.[553]