Kant and the object.
March 14th, 2010
Arithmetic as a synthesis in time. We use the 5 fingers to mark the succession. We start with 7 in mind and proceed up the chain of numbers until we come to 12. We have provided the object by means of a construction in the pure envisagement/look/Anschauung/intuition. In the same way we come to recognize that a triangle can only be constructed if each two of any three is together greater than the third.
So here we provide the object represented in the looking and do so in a pure envisagement, our own construction of the object and so where there is no doubt with regard to representation. Where, I guess, the representation and the object are one and the same. And so then where it is understandable that all things which can ever appear to the human in a look would be subject to the conditions of mathematics. Not all things on their own would be so subject, but certainly all things in a look-see which, for the human, can only be through the senses.
Now this will be different with regard to the understanding. For while it is impossible for anything to appear to us except under the conditions of space and time, there is no such link between our thinking an object and its actuality in what is given in space and time. We can dream up unicorns and describe them, but that doesn’t make unicorns.
We begin with the postulation of a something called a thing on its own and divorced from all relationships to the human, e.g., appearing so or so. We conceive of this thing as an element in an organized community called nature. Nature is the form of human understanding or categories as connective devises. This thing on its own, this transcendental object = x, becomes the object of experience, where object means a rule for the unification and necessitation of a given multiplicity (given in the empirical look, i.e., in a specter) which unifies the object with the remainder of the spectral world in this single nature of the transcendental (knowledge-enabling) object = x. In this way the specter is recognized as the representation of a certain object, e.g., a table or face.
Let’s see if we have that. The looking gives us spectral appearances/Erscheinungen which must conform to the conditions of time and space as the form of all human looking. The transcendental object = nature provides us with the glue which forces or necessitates the multiplicity of the spectral object as elements in a single object, called the world of nature. We get a contingent sighting of a single thing, an object, in our looking and we necessitate that thing as an object of the single experience of nature, and in that way we distinguish actuality from a dream. And so in one fell swoop we unify the multiplicity of the spectral object (of the looking) and then further unify that perceived object with all objects whereby a consistency is provided for all perceptions (and a recognition is just an objective perception). All perceptions make up together a single experience.
Until we provide the TO=X there is no distinction between dreaming and perceiving. There is no basis for the distinction, for there is nothing in the specter to suggest anything other than specter. There is nothing in the sight of Hume’s table to suggest that it were anything other than Hume’s table, always getting smaller at a distance. There would be no basis for even finding this remarkable, that the table always gets smaller at a distance. This is the way things would exist on their own if we didn’t know we were dealing with specters. And for that we need the TO=X in order to have something not appearing which then could be represented by the spectral object which does appear. Since it is not given in the specter, but only in the understanding, the provision of this object is validated by our ability to distinguish specter from the thing on its own, and so that thing on its own is a necessary provision of the understanding make up of the human being.
In my own recognition of my own dream, I stood staring at the placid back yard from an upstairs window and I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe that the loud and frightful battle waged there could vanish in the course of a few seconds along with all damage. And so I recognized that I had been dreaming.* I knew that things do not come into and go out of existence, and that what I had experienced was only a dream.
[* On a hot day and when I was about ten or eleven I took a nap on the back porch and dreamed that a battle was raging in the back yard and that I was witnessing it from the back porch and that in my fear I lay down on the couch. Awakening in terror from the couch I raced upstairs to find my daddy, who was calmly working with my brother. I looked out and saw that the back yard was its usual peaceful self.]
It was not “what caused all that to suddenly vanish?” (of Schopenhauer) but rather, “this cannot have suddenly vanished” (a disbelief) and then to the recognition of the dream as the cause, i.e., of a sighting which does not fit in with all perceptions of a single experience, experience with a single object called nature. And which had been an illusion (taking a dream for reality, like taking a specter for a real thing).
Now later we will find that pure reason also presumes to recognize objects, but falls into self deception because the conception of an object is not the recognition of an object, for which a look is needed. The deception is due to a confusion regarding the transcendental object = the thing on its own, where reason sometimes thinks of the unconditioned for the object of experience as recognized through the categories of pure understanding, and other times as entirely divorced from all this and as a something more general, about which nothing certain can be said, but only of its appearance in the human looking.
Entry Filed under: Kant
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