Thinking on the Anschauung
December 24, 2009
I just suddenly remember the envisagement of the triangle, where we can draw a triangle on a computer screen and let any side serve as base and see the other two sides as the specter of two parallel lines, namely their appearance in the brainarium, where the necessarily join in a empirical vanishing point.
This then is an example of the envisagement a/k/a intuition or Anschauung. We know that what we see is a product of the imagination, but it is no imagination that we see the two lines as parallel but rather an envisagement which an abiding character (such as the faces sighted in clouds). I think Kant may mean to say that it is by means of the imagination that we are able to distinguish the envisagement in general, the “take†that we have on things, for the envisagement has a force of its own which is never present with the imagination.
I think it is something like this. We can recognize the inner sense, including the imaginative contents, only by first having acknowledged the permanence of the external specter, i.e., through an actual recognition of the real in space. It is then in contrast to this given, this reality in space, that some of the specters of the inner sense arise and are recognized, e.g., dreams and imagining. Only in that way can the inner experience be possible, always presupposing the external experience. If the dream corresponds exactly to experience then it will not be discerned. This is the case where there is no recognition of dreams. In lieu of the external experience, everything will fit together because nothing whatsoever is together, i.e., its simply this and that and this and that, i.e., different and instantaneous perceptions.
Envisagement then is the way that objects are given to us, and they are a product of ourselves for the envisagement is the way we take things, the way we see them, e.g., a face in a cloud, its our own individual take on things of our senses. The envisagement is in the specter only by the work of the perceiving subject.
Filed under: Kant