From the Aesthetic into the Analytic
February 22nd, 2010
What do we have from the Aesthetic such that the understanding in the Logic has something to work with. The understanding is a connection. When we make a connection we nod and say we understand. So what is it that the senses give us that we can seek to make connections?
What we have is very simple. It is a projection within the confines of the brain (in the brainarium) of various sensations. And some of these sensations we notice as grouped, as making up a single thing, though composed of parts. These things appearing within the brainarium are not things on their own, but rather the representation of things, i.e., how real things would look as a projection, i.e., the specter/appearance/Erscheinung of things. The rainbow is a specter in the sky in that while it, like the rain, can be sighted in space, only the latter can be located in space. The rainbow is the picture of the way a giant bow would look if it were standing in the rain and painted in certain colors. But there is no bow there in rain; it is entirely within the brainarium (where even the picture of things must also appear in a projection). We see it as a configuration in space (and in time) and thus call it a specter as we might the Big Dipper in the sky. We can see it as a single thing, the rainbow, and composed of a multiplicity of colors. Hence it is a specter.
Originally we did not know that what we saw about us was a specter. We took these specters in the brainarium as though they were real things. But then we figured out something, e.g., that things did not really get smaller at a distance for the same reason that it would violate one of the main connective devices of understanding, i.e., the continuity of matter in a universe through time. So we knew something was wrong and we undertook to figure out how this diminishing could be, i.e., what it could mean. Now nothing in any exposure to the specters could even hint that things don’t get smaller at a distance. So we bring this to the specter ourselves and it is we who provide the connection that makes any experience, namely we, like Hume, know that the table cannot be getting smaller and so therefore there must be a cause, and that leads to the investigation of such things as the split finger touching our nose.
So Hume knew that the table did not get smaller and so was not suffering any illusion, and he knew that only he could have known this, for it was not available in experience, but that was the source of all the knowledge in his system, and so that would mean that his system was flawed, and it wasn’t. It was perfect, but then how could he have discovered that the table did not change it’s size.
Hume’s great error, Kant tells us, is that he did not realize that mathematics was itself based upon an object which is provided by us in a construction in space and time. The only way we can know that a triangle is such a connection of straight lines that any two will always be found to be together greater than the third, is by taking a look, and indeed in advance of any physical triangle a “look in advance of experience” through the construction of one in the imagination and seeing it in space, as a spatial object. Three straight lines, the end point of each being an endpoint of two. That’s what’s necessary to assemble a triangle. Nothing more is needed. We construct a triangle and see that necessarily and off course any two sides must be greater than a third, because otherwise you couldn’t have a triangle. You have to look at it to see it. It’s hard to explain. Perhaps: for otherwise, if they were the same length, you would only have a single straight line divided into two segments, and you could not have three lines.
So if Hume had realized that the certitude of mathematics was synthetic through our own provision of an object which is constructed in time and space in advance of experience and to which, for the reason that space and time are pure envisagements/intuitions/Anschauungen and thus are added to the sensations through our way of sensing, means that it also holds and is valid for all that can ever appear in this time and space, and so are authoritative in advance of the specters actually appearing in space and time.
Entry Filed under: Kant
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