Kant’s three objects
March 14th, 2010
First there is the specter which is the representation of the object in the envisagement/look, e.g., that my finger now represent 1. Here the imagination plays a role in fabricating objects in the specter, but still the sighting of the object in a look is a distinct consciousness, for it is an immediate, intuitive sighting, like seeing the lamp to your left (even though there is no “left” in the specter at all). We see a singularity which consists of a multiplicity or diversity, such as the Big Dipper. We see it as a given thing in the heavens above us. That is how we see it. We see that multiplicity as a single thing, like spying a face in the cloud.
That’s the way we look at things, we see them as singularity of a diversity. We actually see the face in the cloud as a single thing. It peers out of the cloud as just that.
So this then is the object of the looking. The material is sensation and the form is space and time. We see these singularities of a multiplicity and they are real before our eyes. This is the material provided by the spectral object.
The next object is the object of experience. And this arises in a subtle way, and we don’t notice it at the time. Something prompts us in the object in the looking to imagine something which should be unimaginable. We add something to the maze of the specters. For some reason (not yet totally clear to me) we dream up a something which is not given in any exposure, and that is the notion of there is a real something such that what I see and sense is not a real thing, but only how that real thing affects me or appears to me in my lookings.
It is of course only by virtue of such a conception that it could eve have occurred to anyone, least of all Hume, that things did not get smaller at a distance, for without a “real thing on its own” (independent of perceiver) there is no way that we can reduce the objects of our looking to just that, namely the way we are affected by these real things. So this thing on its own had to be conceived a priori in order for us ever to think to investigate how it is that what we experience in the brainarium is of representations of real things, and not real things on their own.
It has to do, I think, with the unification or calibration of the various senses, e.g., vision versus touch. I’m not sure all animals connect them as the human does, as opposed to merely long validated expectations, and without even noticing it.
So we introduce the thing on its own to the fray and by means of that are able to conceive of the object of experience (thing that’s really there, in common and scientific parlance) and which looks like this (and here science fills in the blanks). And its what we mean when we distinguish the rainbow as a specter (a sheer sighting which cannot be located in space) from the rain drops and the sun.
But we forget that all we have done is to add to the concept of the transcendental object = x = the thing on its own, and have come up with the object of experience. But the thing on its own is understood as independent of all human looking, such that the object of experience represents this thing on its own to a being whose capacity for impression is limited to sensations.
So the thing on its own is a concept necessary to science but still which is undefined by science (limited as it is to the sighting of this things, but which is always encased as a human looking), and thus remaining open to other predicates which we might dream up even and which could be applied to that thing on its own and which we are free to do at whim, and so then certainly if a moral need should arise for such a story.
In brief then. The spectral object (the appearance of a singularity) lies in the looking as a fact, but no more enduring than a rainbow or face in the cloud. The object of experience is conceived of as an element in a great single nature which is represented by the singularities sighted in the looking/Anschauung, and which brings natural necessity to the sightings of objects in the looking and binds them as representations of this single nature. And then the transcendental object, or thing on its own, is thought of either as an object of experience, or as a thing on its own independently of the way it appears to the human, i.e., not conceived of as the object of experience.
We have the singularity in the looking but no necessity. The necessity is provided via the conception of the thing on its own, a something existing independently of us which appears to us spectrally and thus what the specter represents and whereby we see that the shrinking of the table is a trick of the eye. The utilization of that conception for that purpose is obviously valid, but does not deplete the concept of the thing its own (which can only be thought in negatives, e.g., not in time, not in color, etc.). Thus we can say more about the thing on its own, but not know more except morally, i.e., as it works to facilitate the moral imperative of practical reason.
Entry Filed under: Kant
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