Some Clarifying Measures

Going back to our second day discussing Kant and pertaining to Mr. Wiley’s consternation over Kant’s reasoning concerning knowledge and experience, I thought it might be helpful to note how Kant gives weight and representation to his claims in his sections concerning Time and Space.

Let us first recall that famous line with which we are dealing: “But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience” (41). Now I know we wrestled with the predicament of this paradoxical assertion in class last Wednesday, but even so, I feel as if we never quite came to a decisive answer as to 1) what the difference, according to Kant, between beginning with and coming out of experience actually is and 2) if there is such a distinction, how Kant represents the difference between the two. And while we may not have, at the time, been quite far enough into The Critique of Pure Reason to stand witness to Kant’s illustrations, we now have before us, after reading “The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,” some further groundwork on which to build.

Accordingly, in section B54, Kant makes the claim that “time is something real” (79). Moreover, he goes on to call time “the real form of inner intuition,” that which “is therefore to be regarded as real, not indeed as object but as the mode of representation of [him]self as object” (79). Kant, therefore, presents time as the primary representation of his assertions concerning the relation of knowledge and experience. He notes time as an empirical and subjective reality and, in turn, professes it “the condition of all our experiences” (79). Herein, Kant unfolds his paradox. He points out how since time is, first and foremost, merely the condition for the possibility of experience, we humans know time apart from experience and, thus, express a knowledge that does not arise out of experience. Meanwhile, because time is something real, taking on the form of our pure intuition, which is itself the origin of our sensibilities and ability to recognize objects, we must first experience objects in space and time in order to know what time is and how it functions empirically. This knowledge of time, thus, begins with but does not derive out of experience.

Taking these ideas concerning time into consideration, it becomes easier, however slightly, to see how Kant can so readily make the claim that knowledge both begins with and does not always arise out of the realm of human experience. Moreover, it gives whole new weight to the transcendental claim, borrowed from Dr. Davis, that if we are thinking, then there is, by necessity, time.