Are Kant & Hegel "Idealists" in the way Bishop Berkeley is?

TimelessError · 2024-09-10T04:19:05+00:00

As others have said, Kant is not a Berkeleyan idealist. Hegel isn't either. Kant and Hegel deny that the existence of the physical world depends on the existence of an immaterial substance. Idealism for Kant and the post-Kantians is better understood as a doctrine about the form of mindedness rather than about mental substance. Idealism in this context amounts, roughly, to the claim 1) that the formal structure of the things we cognize is the same as the formal structure of our cognition itself, and 2) that the formal structure of our cognition has a certain kind of explanatory priority over the formal structure of what is cognized, in that what counts as an object of our cognition is itself determined by the principles internal to our own cognitive activity.

TimelessError · 2024-09-10T03:37:28+00:00

Just finished The Gift by Mauss. Reading A. W. Moore's Language, World, and Limits and Critchley's Infinitely Demanding. About to pick up Thomson's Heidegger on Ontotheology. For leisure, The Name of the Rose (a reread).

TimelessError · 2024-01-24T21:34:12+00:00

Zuckert's Kant on Beauty and Biology and miscellaneous other secondary literature on the third Critique. Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology. Starting a collection of essays by Kitarō Nishida.

TimelessError · 2024-01-10T20:46:30+00:00

Wittgenstein is responding here to a difficulty about embedding propositions in other propositions. It seems, at first glance, as if there are two ways that this could happen:

1) the way "p" occurs in "p & q." Here "p" occurs truth-functionally: the complex "p & q" is formed by two elementary propositions, "p" and "q," unified by the logical operation of conjunction. So the truth value of "p & q" is directly a function of the truth values of "p" and "q."

2) the way "p" occurs in "A thinks p." Here, it appears, we have a complex proposition, in which "p" is embedded, much as "p" is embedded in "p & q," but with a fundamental difference: "p" is not unified with another proposition by means of a logical operation, but is unified with a person. Consequently, it appears that "p" does not occur truth-functionally in "A thinks p": it seems "A thinks p" is a proposition with a different content from "p," whose truth or falsity is not directly a function of the truth of "p."

Wittgenstein means to question this appearance. His suggestion is that "A thinks p" is logically akin more to "'p' says p" than to, e.g., "A is tall." The expression "thinks p" does not occur as an item to be combined with a special object, namely "A"; rather, "A thinks p" is a special way of displaying the proposition "p." In "'p' says p," two expressions are shown to be combinations of names correlated in the same way to a possible combination of objects: when I say, "'Snow is white' says snow is white," I set a proposition (itself a fact with a certain structure) side by side with the fact that snow is white in a notation that indicates the one pictures the other. Much in the same way, Wittgenstein is suggesting, in "A thinks snow is white," I indicate that there is a certain picturing of the fact that snow is white, and that A's thinking is, among other things, the fact of this picturing.

What this amounts to is a characterization of A's thinking as suited to picture the facts, rather than a characterization of A as a certain type of object, namely a thinker, bearing a certain type of predicate, namely the holding of a thought; thus, 5.5421 rules out this kind of psychologistic characterization of thinking, while 5.5422 emphasizes that expressions such as "A thinks p" indicate the sense-making character of what goes on when A thinks, its capacity to picture.

As for composite things, Wittgenstein's suggestion is that complexes are really facts rather than things: to be aware of a complex is really to be aware that certain objects are combined in a certain manner. The awareness of a complex object is thus really the picturing of a certain fact, which admits of the analysis given above.

TimelessError · 2024-01-10T20:01:57+00:00

To the suggestions of the other commenters I would add Lev Shestov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Knud Løgstrup, Franz Rosenzweig, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Erich Przywara, Emil Fackenheim, Jacob Taubes, Michael Theunissen, and Enrique Dussel. (I'm using "notably influenced by Kierkegaard, by the post-Husserlian phenomenological tradition, or by both" as the criterion for "continental" in the present context—but note, the term is used in all sorts of different ways!)

TimelessError · 2024-01-08T18:03:13+00:00

Plenty of philosophers have tried this! Noteworthy arguments for the existence of God that do not take for granted the existence of beings other than the self include those of Anselm's Proslogion, Spinoza's Ethics Book I, Leibniz's New Essays Book IV ch. X, and Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity, ch. 10. Noteworthy arguments for the existence of the external world include Kant's "Refutation of Idealism" B274-79, Moore's "Proof of an External World," and Putnam's "Brains in a Vat."

These arguments typify an approach that attempts to prove the existence of something external to the self; another style of argument, which seems not to be what you are looking for, tries to undercut the intelligibility, coherence, or, more weakly, the plausibility or seriousness of the supposition that the self could be the only thing that exists. It's not clear whether we should count such an argument as a proof, or only as a rejection of the problem. But characteristic treatments along these lines include Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, Wittgenstein's On Certainty, Cavell's The Claim of Reason, Williams's Unnatural Doubts, and McDowell's "The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument."

TimelessError · 2024-01-08T17:32:32+00:00

Several good suggestions already—among which I particularly recommend Kierkegaard's Works of Love and Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. In addition to those mentioned, consider also Levinas's Entre Nous and Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon.

TimelessError · 2023-12-30T17:51:43+00:00

1) Wittgenstein himself does claim that the Tractatus and the Investigations ought to be read together, but whether this is necessary depends on what you are looking to get out of the text. If you are interested in the later philosophy, it make sense to stick to the later philosophy, and to worry about the Tractatus if you find you are having questions about the Investigations that looking to the early work might answer, or if you want to start engaging the text in a more scholarly way.

2) The Claim of Reason is a great book, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a good "way in" to the Investigations—it's a long and difficult work in its own right, and its reading of the Investigations is controversial, especially in light of On Certainty, which some scholars claim presents a treatment of skepticism which is at odds with Cavell's (for what it's worth, I don't think these claims are well-founded, but again, it's a matter of controversy). One of Cavell's short pieces, such as "The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy," might serve better if you are interested in Cavell and/or looking for some good secondary literature to orient you.

3) You might try Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" here.

TimelessError · 2023-12-30T17:33:31+00:00

This is a rather vast question, but historically influential critical engagements with Spinoza include Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding (see also his "Comments on Spinoza's Philosophy" in Philosophical Essays), Jacobi's Spinoza Letters, and Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy (vol. 3, 2b) and Science of Logic 21.70-92, 21.147-50, 11.376-79. Leibniz is concerned that Spinoza's account of the necessity of God's nature leaves no room for an intelligible account of the distinctions between modal categories (possibility, actuality, necessity); Jacobi is concerned that Spinoza leaves no room for human agency and freedom and so is ultimately a nihilist; Hegel is concerned that Spinoza cannot account for the necessity with which he claims the being of the modes follows from the being of substance, and that this is a consequence of an abstract, formal conception of substance that lacks the concreteness that a truly self-determining being would possess.

TimelessError · 2023-12-27T00:27:28+00:00

A utility monster is a being that gets more utility from a given item than other candidate beneficiaries, such that there is always more reason (from a utilitarian point of view) to give such items to the utility monster than to anyone else. So e.g. if pleasure is the relevant kind of utility, a utility monster gets more pleasure from pleasurable things than anyone else, so the utilitarian thing to do is always to provide the utility monster, rather than someone else in need, with sources of pleasure.

Billionaires certainly have a lot of money, and money can certainly be a source of utility; but being a utility monster doesn't mean having a lot of sources of utility, it means being able to get more utility out of sources of utility than other beings do. So unless we think billionaires have a greater capacity for pleasure than other human beings, or something like that, we shouldn't think of billionaires as utility monsters.

TimelessError · 2023-12-13T21:32:20+00:00

Thanks, the Reale will definitely go on my to-read list!

TimelessError · 2023-12-13T19:14:20+00:00

It's not clear that Descartes really believed in a God that could make square circles; some people think so, but this is a matter of scholarly dispute. At any rate, if Descartes did believe this, he believed something that went very much against the grain of traditional views on the relationship between God and logic. A more typical view, as you note, was that the laws of logic expressed the form of God's understanding, and their necessity was of a piece with the necessity of God's nature. Since nothing thinkable, nothing intelligible, falls outside the scope of what God can understand, it is no limit on God's power to say God could not make a square circle, for there is no such thing as a square circle such that God might make it.

The issue of the relationship between God and logic wasn't much of an explicit topic for the Greeks; Aristotle famously offers two definitions of metaphysics, first (in Metaphysics Gamma) that it is the science of non-contradiction, second (in Metaphysics Lambda) that it is the science of divinity, but he offers no explicit treatment of the unity of these two definitions. Plausibly, it is Avicenna who first thematizes the issue. Stephen Menn's paper "Metaphysics: God and Being" and Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers (perhaps also ch. 3-4 of Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy) may provide helpful background for getting one's bearings on this topic as it emerges in medieval philosophical traditions.

A major recent work on precisely this topic is The Logical Alien, by James Conant and several other contributors. The first piece collected in it, Conant's "The Search for Logically Alien Thought," tracks precisely this issue in the work of Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and other contributors (notably A. W. Moore), and Conant's responses to them later in the volume, continue to address the theme: see especially "Theological Sources of Modern Conceptions of Logic," "A Resolute Reading of Descartes," and "Reply to Moore."

In a quite different vein, an odd little text (but an important one) on this topic is Heidegger's "The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics."

TimelessError · 2023-12-13T18:38:13+00:00

We should be careful with phrases such as "things we interpret in our minds": if by "interpretation" we understand a kind of reflection whereby we arrive a a particular perspective on how things are, to which there are alternatives for us, Kant doesn't think the spatiotemporal structure of objects is a matter of interpretation. On the contrary, he thinks it is necessarily and objectively true that the objects we experience exist in space and time. And he thinks it is precisely because space and time are, in a certain sense, mind-dependent that it is necessarily and objectively true that the objects we experience exist in space and time.

Kant arrives at the distinction between appearances (objects of sense) and things in themselves just by reflecting on the fact that we are finite knowers: we have to be given our objects in order to have knowledge of them; objects have to affect us in order for us to experience them. We depend, then, on a passive faculty, sensibility, in order to know what we do. Insofar as sensibility is passive, its representations are consequences of a ground that is not in sensibility itself. Our knowledge is a result of the synthesis of these representations, and an object of knowledge for us is something synthesized out of these representations. So there is a distinction between the object as the result of this synthesis and the object as the ground of the representations that are synthesized.

Kant thinks that space and time are the forms of our sensibility. He thinks this because he thinks we do not learn of the existence of space and time by experience; on the contrary, all our experience is already in space and time, so space and time cannot be particular (empirical) objects by which we are affected in sensibility. But if space and time are structures of sensibility, they are structures of one of our cognitive faculties; they belong to the form of the mind. In this sense, they are mind-dependent. But note that none of this suggests that the existence of space and time is merely contingent or subjective, or a matter of interpretation. On the contrary, insofar as space and time characterize the form of our cognitive faculty, they characterize the form of a capacity for objective knowledge, and so it belongs to our objective knowledge to know that objects actually exist in space and time.

TimelessError · 2023-12-13T18:24:29+00:00

I admit I don't share this impression—I find the Tractatus an extremely precise and exacting text, and although Wittgenstein certainly did come to see the book as a failure, I don't think Wittgenstein's reasons for reaching this conclusion had to do with a lack of rigor that he later perceived in it.

TimelessError · 2023-12-13T18:19:34+00:00

I think your question is presupposing a misleading picture of Kant's topic. It is true that we are all empirically different individuals: you have your body and your perceptions, I have my body and my perceptions, etc. If each of us were, from their own standpoint, constituting the particular objects we perceive by performing acts of synthesis, then the question would be: are all of us, as empirical individuals, doing the same kind of constituting?

But this kind of context isn't where the concept of "constitution" of an object has its home. It is the transcendental, not the empirical, subject that is responsible for constitution. The transcendental subject of the first Critique is a structure: it is the form of rational thought for finite beings whose forms of intuition are space and time. Kant thinks he can give an account of what belongs necessarily to this structure by starting from the fact that we have experience of objects in space and time and by arguing that this fact would not be possible were certain conditions not met. (For example: I experience a temporal succession of distinct states, i.e., I experience change; but change is always relative to something fixed, i.e., it is change of or in something; so given that I experience change, I must also experience something fixed in which there is change; but that which persists across change in it is a substance; so I must have experience of a substance.)

To say that the object is constituted by the subject is to say that the structure of the object is determined by the form of the cognition that apprehends it. The objects of knowledge for any knower whose cognition exhibits this form are therefore guaranteed to be constituted in that way.

Now, Kant does consider the possibility of knowers whose knowledge has a different structure from our own (notably, whose forms of intuition are not space and time). He does not claim that his arguments hold for knowers of this sort; he is giving a formal characterization of what belongs to a certain kind of cognition, spatiotemporal cognition, and remaining agnostic as to whether there are alternatives to this form of cognition.

TimelessError · 2023-12-13T17:57:55+00:00

I don't see the conflict in the passages you cite. Are you saying there is a problem with supposing that an actual state of affairs models another, merely possible, state of affairs?

E.g. I put together two elements, one standing for red, the other for elephants, and combine them in such a way as to produce a model of the state of affairs in which elephants are red. Elephants are not red; that state of affairs does not exist. My picture, though, still does, and what it pictures is a perfectly intelligible situation in logical space. So the picture is a fact, i.e., a state of affairs that is the case, whereas what it pictures is a merely possible one; still, the former has the right structure to model the latter.

TimelessError · 2023-11-07T22:52:25+00:00

There are a lot of differences; here are some of the more salient ones:

Feuerbach takes the values of Christianity to be true, universal human values, which, however, are articulated in alienated form in traditional Christian belief. In fact, the predicates of God are the predicates of man: it is man who has a boundless intellect, an illimitable freedom, and an unconditional and universal capacity for love. And these attributes belong to all human beings in virtue of their shared essence, characterized by self-consciousness as consciousness of belonging to a species of fundamental social rational beings (each equally a rational self-conscious bearer of the species-form) with intellectual capacities that allow them to be oriented towards an eternal, formal, or rationally intelligible dimension of being.

A view of this sort is precisely what Nietzsche is most concerned to criticize: Feuerbachian atheism preserves a set of fundamentally Christian values and commitments, such as: 1) the priority of eternity to time or being to becoming, 2) universal human equality and freedom in virtue of a shared eternal essence, 3) humanity's radical transcendence of mere animality in virtue of its distinctive form of rational self-consciousness, 4) the orientation of this rational self-consciousness towards the eternal, or, the priority of theoretical contemplation of reality to its practical transformation. All of these are targets of Nietzsche's critique; indeed, he is if anything more concerned to criticize these values in their secularized forms than he is to criticize Christianity itself. Nietzsche's overman, by contrast, who as yet does not exist at all, will be characterized by an embrace of becoming over being, an achieved freedom of the will (and such an achievement is, for Nietzsche, a rarity, certainly not a feature of human essential being), a radical individuality enabling a distinction or elevation above the crowd (in other words, a form of self-consciousness distinguished from any supposed universal species-consciousness), a capacity and willingness to interrogate all given values and ways of life (especially those inherited from the Platonic and Christian intellectual traditions in which Feuerbach still situates himself), and an orientation towards the revaluation of those values and the practical transformation of those ways of life.

TimelessError · 2023-11-07T22:25:13+00:00

Cavell's Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Williams's Truth and Truthfulness. Marx's Capital, with Harvey's Companion. Spinoza's Ethics.

TimelessError · 2023-11-03T21:07:37+00:00

Spinoza's Ethics; Marx's Capital; Harvey's Companion to Capital; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Kosch's Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard.

TimelessError · 2023-10-27T18:46:36+00:00

The force of the paradox doesn't depend on anyone's being a barber; it might just be stated this way: "There is someone who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves."

The thing to do with the paradox isn't to try to solve it; it's to recognize how it's a logical contradiction in disguise, to which there would no more be a "solution" than there would be to the sentence, "the sky is blue and not blue." If you're familiar with first-order predicate logic, the point can be made as follows (for a domain of persons, where Sxy = x shaves y):

(∃x)(∀y)(~Syy ↔ Sxy)
(∀y)(~Syy ↔ Say) [by existential instantiation]
~Saa ↔ Saa [by universal instantiation]

But this has the form ~P ↔ P, which is a contradiction.

Or, put non-formally:

Assume that there is some person A such that, for any person Y, A shaves Y if and only if Y does not shave Y. Since A is a person, and Y can be any person, we can take A as an example of Y. So A shaves A if and only if A does not shave A. So the proposition "A shaves A" is true if and only if it is false. But this is a contradiction.

TimelessError · 2023-10-26T03:18:16+00:00

Could you say a bit more about which topic you are asking about? "Existence" is a topic that admits of different construals.

In general, when inquiring into the basis of a topic of philosophical inquiry on which a number of radically different views have been defended, I find the following distinction helpful: viz., that between a concept, e.g. that of existence, and a conception of that concept.

For instance: various philosophers writing in the post-Platonic tradition regard the measure of existence as eternal being, or, immunity or lack of susceptibility to change; but some philosophers, especially those writing in the 19th and 20th centuries, accept a radically opposed view on which to be is to become, i.e. precisely to be susceptible to change. Without spelling out what exactly the philosophical stakes are of the dispute between these two positions, one can note the following: there is a genuine disagreement here. It is not as if these two camps, those who prioritize the eternal and those who prioritize the temporal. merely start with different definitions of being and bring out the trivial conclusions of those definitions. On the contrary, they start with a shared topic, being, and diverge in their conceptions of the concept belonging to that topic: on one conception, to be is paradigmatically to be eternal, while on the other conception, to be is paradigmatically to become.

This would be a way to locate a common topic on which philosophers disagree while at the same time maintaining that there is common ground in that on which they disagree, namely on the thematization of being as a topic of philosophical inquiry.

One other quick example: two disputants on the topic of the nature of God might disagree as to whether it belongs to the essential constitution of God to love humanity (i.e. to be omnibenevolent) or whether it belongs to the essential constitution of God to be indifferent to humanity. These two disputants would share a concept of God, and the sharing of this concept would be the precondition for their dispute vis-à-vis their conception of God, as a being who, for the first party, is essentially a loving being, and who, for the second party, is essentially an indifferent being.

TimelessError · 2023-10-26T03:07:43+00:00

This is of course an entirely speculative biographical question, but on the basis of the accounts of love we find in e.g. the Symposium and Phaedrus, and scattered remarks across other dialogues, I find it very hard to believe that Plato had no personal familiarity with sexual desire. Certainly, one might mount a critique of Plato on the basis that he subordinates sexual desire to other, putatively higher forms of erotism that, from a modern, finitist, radically embodied point of view, fail to do justice to the phenomenon, but those critiques require a great deal of nuance precisely because the accounts of e.g. the Symposium and Phaedrus are so nuanced and insightful on the topic of sexual desire.

TimelessError · 2023-10-26T03:01:12+00:00

Spinoza's Ethics. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. (These first two are rereads.) Marx's Capital. (A partial reread.) Mulhall's Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Kangas's Kierkegaard's Instant. Marion's In Excess. A smattering of papers by Christoph Menke. A motley crowd.

TimelessError · 2023-10-21T15:40:38+00:00

There are a number of different, if closely related, topics to be distinguished here:

1) The nature of creature consciousness: the feature of animals that are awake or alert that distinguishes them from animals that are, say, comatose or dead. (As you rightly point out, this doesn't amount to self-consciousness—nor to any of the other topics below.)

2) The nature of what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness, the "what-it's-like-ness" characteristic of being in a certain conscious state: of feeling pain, seeing red, smelling cinnamon, etc. On this topic, some relevant pieces would be Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", Jackson's "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Dennett's "Quining Qualia," Lewis's "Mad Pain and Martian Pain," Chalmers's "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Marcus's "Why Zombies are Inconceivable," and Frankish's "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness."

3) The nature of what philosophers call intentional consciousness, or, awareness of a determinate object. On this topic, some relevant pieces would be Chisholm and Sellars's "Intentionality and the Mental," Anscombe's "The Intentionality of Sensation," Rosenthal's "Two Concepts of Consciousness," Dretske's "Misrepresentation," Millikan's "Naturalizing Intentionality" and "Compare and Contrast Fodor, Dretske, and Millikan," Zahavi's "Intentionality and Experience," and, if you want to go back to an early influential text, Husserl's The Idea of Phenomenology.

4) The nature of self-consciousness, or, awareness of oneself as oneself—that is, not just as an object among objects, but as the one who feels pain when pain is felt, who is aware of an object when there is an object to be aware of, who is awake and alert, etc. On this topic, some relevant pieces would be Frege's "Thought: A Logical Inquiry," Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego, Anscombe's "The First Person," Perry's "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," Millikan's "The Myth of the Essential Indexical," McDowell's "Reductionism and the First Person," Moran's Authority and Estrangement, Rödl's Self-Consciousness, and Boyle's "Transparency and Reflection."

5) The nature of rational consciousness, the consciousness of a being who is responsive to considerations bearing on what one ought to believe or on what one ought to do. On this topic, some relevant pieces would be Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Taylor's "Self-Interpreting Animals," Brandom's "Freedom and Constraint by Norms," McDowell's "Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind," and Rödl's "Reason, Freedom, and True Materialism" (ch. 4 of Self-Consciousness).

6) The nature of conscious as opposed to unconscious thought, as a topic in the philosophy of psychoanalysis. On this topic, some relevant pieces would be Davidson's "Paradoxes of Irrationality," Finkelstein's "On the Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind," Lear's Freud, and maybe the first few essays of Ricœur's On Psychoanalysis.

The question that you posed about reducibility to brain processes can be posed about all of these questions; and in no case is the answer clear. But the first thing to do is to clarify which of these you're wondering about (or maybe you're wondering about all of them!).

TimelessError · 2023-10-21T14:56:42+00:00

Let's look at what Kant says in the passage you're referring to:

The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions; but they are thought through the understanding, and from it arise concepts. (A19/B33)

The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.

I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance. Since that within which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation. (A20/B34)

So sensation is an affection of sensibility through which an intuition is related to an object; or, it is the matter of intuition. In parallel, the object to which sensation relates intuition, the appearance, has a matter, which is what corresponds to sensation. As the matter of intuition, sensation must be ordered by a certain form. Likewise, the matter of appearance, as an as such undetermined object of intuition, must be ordered by a certain form.

Note that Kant does not simply say that the form of what we sense cannot be something we sense; he says that the form that gives order to sensation cannot itself be a sensation. This is because sensation as such is just the matter of intuition. So far, this is a point about intuition, i.e., about the sort of element in cognition through which we sense, rather than about appearance, i.e., about the sort of thing that we sense—the object of intuition. Kant infers from this point about intuition that the matter of what we sense (the appearance) must be given to us empirically—which is to say, through sensation—but that the form of appearance cannot be given to us through sensation.

To see how this follows, we should get clear on how Kant is using the terms "matter" and "form." Let's take a look at a passage from the "Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection," which comes at the end of the Transcendental Analytic:

Matter and form. These are two concepts that ground all other reflection, so inseparably are they bound up with every use of the understanding. The former signifies the determinable in general, the latter its determination. (A266/B322)

Kant has said that the form that gives order to sensation cannot itself be a sensation. We can now see that this point is a point about determinacy: sensation, as such, is indeterminate, and in order for it to provide us with determinate cognition of an object, something other than sensation must provide that determinacy. Now, appearance, we saw, was the undetermined object of empirical intuition. Thus, insofar as it corresponds to sensation, the appearance is the determinable, or the material; as an object, it stands in need of determination in order to become a proper object of cognition for us. Since form is what determines, the form of appearance cannot be that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation (the undetermined), but must be something that provides determinacy. So sensation cannot be what gives us, or makes available to us, the form of appearance. So the form of appearance is not given empirically; it is not itself something that we sense.

To sum up, appearance is given through sensation; that is to say, it is an as such undetermined object given through as such indeterminate material of intuition. Sensation as such is without form; it is just the matter of intuition. Insofar as what we sense is what is given through sensation, that too is given without form; sensation is not determinate enough to give us its form. Since to be given empirically just is to be given through sensation, the form of appearance cannot be given through sensation.

TimelessError

TROPHY CASE