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

by Norman Kemp Smith

IV. B 71.—Kant continues the argument of A 39.[617] If space and time condition all existence, they will condition even divine existence, and so must render God’s omniscience, which as such must be intuitive, not discursive, difficult of conception. Upon this point Kant is more explicit in the Dissertation.[618]

“Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime, is a spurious axiom.... By this spurious principle all beings, even though they be known intellectually, are restricted in their existence by conditions of space and time. Philosophers therefore discuss every form of idle question regarding the locations in the corporeal universe of substances that are immaterial—and of which for that very reason there can be no sensuous intuition nor any possible spatial representation—or regarding the seat of the soul, and the like. And since the sensuous mixes with the intellectual about as badly as square with round, it frequently happens that the one disputant appears as holding a sieve into which the other milks the he-goat. The presence of immaterial things in the corporeal world is virtual, not local, although it may conveniently be spoken of as local. Space contains the conditions of possible interaction only when it is between material bodies. What, however, in immaterial substances constitutes the external relations of force between them or between them and bodies, obviously eludes the human intellect.... But when men reach the conception of a highest and extra-mundane Being, words cannot describe the extent to which they are deluded by these shades that flit before the mind. They picture God as present in a place: they entangle Him in the world where He is supposed to fill all space at once. They hope to make up for the [spatial] limitation they thus impose by thinking of God’s place per eminentiam, i.e. as infinite. But to be present in different places at the same time is absolutely impossible, since different places are mutually external to one another, and consequently what is in several places is outside itself, and is therefore present to itself outside itself—which is a contradiction in terms. As to time, men have got into an inextricable maze by releasing it from the laws that govern sense knowledge, and what is more, transporting it beyond the confines of the world to the Being that dwells there, as a condition of His very existence. They thus torment their souls with absurd questions, for instance, why God did not fashion the world many centuries earlier. They persuade themselves that it is easily possible to conceive how God may discern present things, i.e. what is actual in the time in which He is. But they consider that it is difficult to comprehend how He should foresee the things about to be, i.e. the actual in the time in which He is not yet. They proceed as if the existence of the Necessary Being descended successively through all the moments of a supposed time, and having already exhausted part of His duration, foresaw the eternal life that still lies before Him together with the events which [will] occur simultaneously [with that future life of His]. All these speculations vanish like smoke when the notion of time has been rightly discerned.”

The references in B 71-2 to the intuitive understanding are among the many signs of Kant’s increased preoccupation, during the preparation of the second edition, with the problems which it raises. Such understanding is not sensuous, but intellectual; it is not derivative, but original; the object itself is created in the act of intuition. Or, as Kant’s position may perhaps be more adequately expressed, all of God’s activities are creative, and are inseparable from the non-sensuous intuition whereby both they and their products are apprehended by Him. Kant’s reason for again raising this point may be Mendelssohn’s theological defence of the reality of space in his Morgenstunden.[619] Mendelssohn has there argued that just as knowledge of independent reality is confirmed by the agreement of different senses, and is rendered the more certain in proportion to the number of senses which support the belief, so the validity of our spatial perceptions is confirmed in proportion as men are found to agree in this type of experience with one another, with the animals, and with angelic beings. Such inductive inference will culminate in the proof that even the Supreme Being apprehends things in this same spatial manner.[620] Kant’s reply is that however general the intuition of space may be among finite beings, it is sensuous and derivative, and therefore must not be predicated of a Divine Being. For obvious reasons Kant has not felt called upon to point out the inadequacy of this inductive method to the solution of Critical problems. In A 42 Kant, arguing that our forms of intuition are subjective, claims that they do not necessarily belong to all beings, though they must belong to all men.[621] He is quite consistent in now maintaining[622] that their characteristics, as sensuous and derivative, do not necessarily preclude their being the common possession of all finite beings.

THE PARADOX OF INCONGRUOUS COUNTERPARTS

The purpose, as already noted, of the above sections II. to IV., as added in the second edition, is to afford ‘confirmation’ of the ideality of space and time. That being so, it is noticeable that Kant has omitted all reference to an argument embodied, for this same purpose, in § 13 of the Prolegomena. The matter is of sufficient importance to call for detailed consideration.[623]

As the argument of the Prolegomena is somewhat complicated, it is advisable to approach it in the light of its history in Kant’s earlier writings. It was to his teacher Martin Knutzen that Kant owed his first introduction to Newton’s cosmology; and from Knutzen he inherited the problem of reconciling Newton’s mechanical view of nature and absolute view of space with the orthodox Leibnizian tenets. In his first published work[624] Kant seeks to prove that the very existence of space is due to gravitational force, and that its three-dimensional character is a consequence of the specific manner in which gravity acts. Substances, he teaches, are unextended. Space results from the connection and order established between them by the balancing of their attractive and repulsive forces. And as the law of gravity is merely contingent, other modes of interaction, and therefore other forms of space, with more than three dimensions, must be recognised as possible.

“A science of all these possible kinds of space would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry.”[625]

In the long interval between 1747 and 1768 Kant continued to hold to some such compromise, retaining Leibniz’s view that space is derivative and relative, and rejecting Newton’s view that it is prior to, and pre-conditions, all the bodies that exist in it. But in that latter year he published a pamphlet[626] in which, following in the steps of the mathematician, Euler,[627] he drew attention to certain facts which would seem quite conclusively to favour the Newtonian as against the Leibnizian interpretation of space. The three dimensions of space are primarily distinguishable by us only through the relation in which they stand to our body. By relation to the plane that is at right angles to our body we distinguish ‘above’ and ‘below’; and similarly through the other two planes we determine what is ‘right’ and ‘left,’ ‘in front’ and ‘behind.’ Through these distinctions we are enabled to define differences which cannot be expressed in any other manner. All species of hops—so Kant maintains—wind themselves around their supports from left to right, whereas all species of beans take the opposite direction. All snail shells, with some three exceptions, turn, in descending from their apex downwards, from left to right. This determinate direction of movement, natural to each species, like the difference in spatial configuration between a right and a left hand, or between a right hand and its reflection in a mirror, involves in all cases a reference of the given object to the wider space within which it falls, and ultimately to space as a whole. Only so can its determinate character be distinguished from its opposite counterpart. For as Kant points out, though the right and the left hand are counterparts, that is to say, objects which have a common definition so long as the arrangement of the parts of each is determined in respect to its central line of reference, they are none the less inwardly incongruent, since the one can never be made to occupy the space of the other. As he adds in the Prolegomena, the glove of one hand cannot be used for the other hand. This inner incongruence compels us to distinguish them as different, and this difference is only determinable by location of each in a single absolute space that constrains everything within it to conform to the conditions which it prescribes. In three-dimensional space everything must have a right and a left side, and must therefore exhibit such inner differences as those just noted. Spatial determinations are not, as Leibniz teaches, subsequent to, and dependent upon, the relations of bodies to one another; it is the former that determine the latter.

“The reason why that which in the shape of a body exclusively concerns its relation to pure space can be apprehended by us only through its relation to other bodies, is that absolute space is not an object of any outer sensation, but a fundamental conception which makes all such differences possible.”[628]

Kant enforces his point by arguing that if the first portion of creation were a human hand, it would have to be either a right or a left hand. Also, a different act of creation would be demanded according as it was the one or the other. But if the hand alone existed, and there were no pre-existing space, there would be no inward difference in the relations of its parts, and nothing outside it to differentiate it. It would therefore be entirely indeterminate in nature, i.e. would suit either side of the body, which is impossible.