Kant’s First Analogy
November 15, 2009
In the First Analogy it looks like we are making judgments about the world in the most profound sense, e.g., describing objects as enduring through all time. Somehow the permanence of substance becomes a model for time. We wouldn’t have to think so, for there are other takes on the world. One is that things come into and go out of existence.
We need this principle of judgment in order ever to even comprehend the meaning of the word “dreamâ€. This ties in with the Refutation of Idealism.
So somehow the endurance of substance gives us an objective take on time itself and orders it objectively. This continuity of substance gives expressions to the continuity of time itself.
Suppose I had a take such that individual things were in their own individual time and would in that way come into or go out of existence on their own; then the tree before me yesterday and the same scene before me now, but without the standing tree and instead a downed tree (and they don’t look alike at first glance), would be two different things. I could think each of these two trees in its own respective time, but then I would have to dream up another time for these two times to order themselves.
It seems that I establish the tree is before me, having perhaps even touched it, and once I locate it in time and space, I simply assume that it always continues unchanged (in its quantity) and for that reason becomes a corollary or expression of time. We model the time by the position of the heavenly bodies in space and distinguish between a sunset and a midnight in terms of time (and not simply that they are different). Then when I come across an apparent contradiction of that continuity, namely the absence of the upright tree and the presence of the horizontal (downed) tree, judge that the two trees are actually one and the same tree, and the only difference is the positioning in the scene (and which calls for a subsequent judgment concerning causation, namely that there is a cause for this change in appearance).
According to Kant then this First Analogy gives us the expression of an objective continuation of time such that we can now consider changes in the specter/appearance/Erscheinung and consider them in terms of succession or simultaneity (the Second and Third Analogies). Now we are in position to recognize a dream, for now we can conceive of the dream as a fact of the inner sense and not the outer sense which pictures for us (per Analogy One) an objectively existing world order. And so it is only by means of the judgment of the First Analogy that we are able to recognize dreams as such, and not part of the objective tramp of time (which is expressed in the continuation of the quantity of matter).
Kant calls time substance the “substrata†of time.
Note: Schopenhauer, as I understand him, holds all this unnecessary. There are only two possible takes: in and out of existence or continuous existence. The cause of the former cannot be imagined and so we opt for the continuous. And so all we need is the analogy of causation.
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world there things went into and out of existence, i.e., out of sight out of mind, becomes: out of sight out of existence. I wonder if the animals might have that take on existence. It seems very intuitive. Things would work out OK overall and we would be fed on time, i.e., suddenly people are seen bringing food, and then food appears in the plate. I think we could get used to that and simply not put two and two together to realize that it is the same food that was being brought, and not just ignore such a consideration as odd. Two different perceptions equal, says Hume, two different things. As I try to think with Kant I need first to identity the food being brought and the food in the bowl as the same food, and only then wonder why they appear differently.
When I look at high speed interstate traffic from an overhead bridge I am taken not only by the reduction in size of the vehicles moving away from me but that they also have a sudden reduction at about 50 or 100 yards, where they are suddenly compressed (an optical effect). I think it be not unreasonable to assume that things came and went on their own. So perhaps what Kant is doing in the First Analogy is denying this possibility and moving then on to an examination of the causes of any given state of this enduring substance called matter. Accordingly then we don’t inquire as to any given state of something until we have established the something in order to have a state. Not (in the example of the trees): something has happened (per Schopenhauer) but rather something has happened to the tree (per Kant).
Filed under: Kant