Kant and the Brick Wall of Experience

Kant begins the B Deduction with the observation that sensibility offers us a manifold of representations, but the understanding combines these representations. This combination cannot be given in sensibility, for only intellectual intuition (which we do not have) could directly intuit the combination of objects. Thus we must have a spontaneous faculty, the understanding, which takes the manifold of sensibility and combines it into one coherent whole of experience.

I wonder about this. Is it really the case that, at the deepest level of understanding, intuitions are manifold and diverse? This is Kant’s picture, which I will call the “brick wall” picture of experience. Experience is a diverse manifold of plural experiences, each of which is a tiny brick. For Kant, the understanding is the bricklayer that builds these bricks into a coherent whole. My use of the brick metaphor is not meant to imply that Kant says experiences are capable of being broken into individual, irreducible atoms of experience (sense-data). As far as I can tell, space and time are continuous, not discrete, and thus such a picture would not work. Instead, I mean to bring attention to the fact that experience arises when smaller parts are worked up into a whole.

Is it fair to question the way Kant has set up the problem? What if, instead of a brick wall, we said that experience was a fundamentally whole lump of clay? Rather than building up a whole experience from parts, the understanding, then, is a sculptor that breaks apart the clay into different figures, that divides the given unity into different individuals. As the last sentence shows, I think many of Kant’s basic insights about the understanding would still hold. If the unity were given, the fact we can represent it as manifold would require a spontaneous act of the understanding, but one that posits differences, breaks apart, and individiuates rather than one that joins together. So something would look different, and I wonder what it would be.