One can maybe make a case for time being an illusion that is imposed by us. But how can space be something that is imposed by our mind on sensory input and not something that actually exists out there?
I mean objects in "things in themselves" still have to spread out in some kind of space right?
matter is just energy
the three-dimensional representation is a product of our mind
But that energy itself occupies space that is "out there". I don't get how we can think of those " Things" without space. Reality might as well collapse to a point then
short answer: kant underestimated the noumena and made it into a mysterious blob to be subsumed by the subject, in an echo of indo-european grammar, where the event and the subject are always clearly separated. Kant extrapolated this grammar into a system where the interaction between noumena and the subject can't be anything else than one-directional subsumption, ignoring completely the possibility of noumena influencing the categories used to "subsume" it.
what is an example of noumena influencing the categories
well, in op for example: if there was actually space before mind perception, that would influence that mind's perception when it found itself dwelling in space.
It would influence the mind's perception in as far as it will cause representations (in accordance with the categories), but how about influencing the categories themselves (i.e. being able to change them)?
>but how about influencing the categories themselves (i.e. being able to change them)?
I mean, it would be the reason that such a category was invented in the first place, which would challenge the idea that man subsumes the world into categories like space, time(necessarily) and introduces a possibility of man'smental makeup being subsumed by outer world. The end result is the same, but I would say that how you theorize can be philosophically significant.
categories are supposed to be a priori though. if they existed independently of the human mind, wouldn't that make their status as simply a priori as opposed to a posteriori a bit doubtful?
The category is not invented but inbuilt so its formation would be the subject of evolutionary biology and not of metaphysics.
Which came first, noumea or the category has high relevance though. If noumena came first, we don't actually subsume reality into categories, but reality imposes categories on us. Say what you will, Kant would never write a sentence like
>noumenon subsumes our minds inside its categorial framework
Noumena are deduced, not immediately experienced, therefore they couldn't possibly come first.
>but reality imposes categories on us
First, noumena are not reality. Second, through what mechanism do you think they could "impose categories"?
But really, this is metaphysics. You are mixing it up with other things, methinks.
>First, noumena are not reality.
i think the meaning i was getting at is pretty clear, independent of human perception like kant would say. if you don't want to use the word real for that then that's your prerogative.
>Noumena are deduced, not immediately experienced, therefore they couldn't possibly come first.
Yet they are posited as something independent of human perception, so there is a possibility they did come first and continually subsume the human brain. Again, it may seem irrelevant, but Kant would never write sentences describing this.
>First, noumena are not reality. Second, through what mechanism do you think they could "impose categories"?
How could we know, as the noumena subsume us? We can only know it through in terms of its own structure, rather than correlate its workings to another structure outside it, looking at it from a third person view.
brainlet here, any literature to back up this view?
>in an echo of indo-european grammar, where the event and the subject are always clearly separated.
You mean literally every grammar in existence.
You can’t THINK of them as not out there, that’s the point. Whether or not they are actually in “space” is unknowable, and if they aren’t then it’s incomprehensible how but that doesn’t mean it isn’t just a construction of our brains. Mathematically, space can be described as nothing but ordered pairs of numbers without included our intuitive notion of space at all, and we can’t be sure that even that is accurate. Our most accurate model of space, general relativity, is not even a full picture of reality, and it already doesn’t conform to our intuitive notions of space and time.
>matter is just energy
energy can only be defined in a limited space or in relation to something else. it makes no sense to say "everything is energy"
>the three-dimensional representation is a product of our mind
how could you know that. and how do you know mind would be a separate entity from matter/energy
What do you mean by "space"?
Space doesn't necessarily have to exist, since all things can be defined in relation to each other. You can't really say some object is in space location X without referencing other objects. So space is not really need because of there's no object there's also no space?
>pace doesn't necessarily have to exist, since all things can be defined in relation to each other.
What does that even mean? How does reality make sense without some conception of space
I can get behind the idea that there is a space but our perception of it is distorted
I mean that if there is space then there can technically be a "lack of space" I'm not talking about a vacuum but a literal un-existence.
You're expressing relationalism about space, which is not Kant's view. Kant denies both Newton's/Clarke's view that space is a thing in itself and Leibniz's view that space is a mere relation of things in themselves.
Neither time nor space are illusions, they exist in real, material space. Kant simply asserts that our experience of time and space exists within the framework of our minds, meaning that time and space exists in the world of representations, concepts and ideas, that is to say the world that we actually experience through our senses and that is being interpreted by the brain. Sensory input is simply the transformation between the material world and the representation world that we actually experience. Both worlds do exist at the same time without contradiction and it is the relationship between the two that reality is based upon. I think that is what he was meaning to say, please correct me if I'm wrong
idk i mean a lot of people interpret it like that but Kant uses the words "subsume" alot (or the translator does) with regards to categories, that they subsume the noumena. This is how the process goes according to Kant. But equally well, we might, at first, learn the existence of the noumena without thinking of transcendental categories and later extrapolate them from the noumenon. I think this distinction is meaningful and its erasure somewhat of a whitewashing.
I think that a most of the confusion stems from the fact that usually the representation of the thing and the thing in itself are thought of as equivalent for ease but they are in fact two different things.
But we cannot think of the thing itself as anything else but a "thing" (i.e. the concept is fully exhausted with the mere statement that it is indeed a thing), and anything we think of as a content of the thing is in fact the representation of the thing.
I.e. "space" as a thing in itself is not really space as we think of it but merely a "thing".
>Neither time nor space are illusions, they exist in real, material space.
Not really; any physics below the level of basic Newtonian cases ends up throwing Euclidean space and absolute frames of reference out the window
In fact they aren't even really separate things, time and space are just the emergent properties of one more fundamental "thing"
In Christian and Platonic theology and metaphysics, because God is necessarily not dependent on any category or form of being, because he must be the CAUSE of all categories and forms of being, it logically follows that there is a form of being, i.e. God's, which is above and beyond and prior to even the most basic ones we can imagine (like space, time, and various versions of essence). It's a commonplace in Christian and Platonic theologies that even our concepts of God's most essential attributes, like that his essence itself implies existence, are themselves not true knowledge of God's essence in the SAME WAY that a perfect being (God) would have knowledge of that same essence.
So by Kant's time it was an old tradition in European philosophy to conceive of the quasi-paradoxical possibility of forms of conception beyond all finite, human conception. This tradition was well and alive in Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy, which regarded spatial extension/displacement and finite temporality as functions of imperfect minds trying to grasp perfect essences - basically, when God looks at the essence of something he sees its entire possible past and future and everything about it that could ever possibly be, because all that is contained in its essence (which is also why Leibnizianism tends toward an unpleasant determinism), but when we look at it, we see it sort of "blurring" into multiple things. Presumably this means that when we see particular matter spread out across particular space, we are actually seeing one essential thing (whatever that is, the root-essence of all material being, or of beings of that kind, etc.), but because our minds can't penetrate and comprehend the full essential nature of the thing, we see "instances" of it in multiple "places."
Not strictly speaking satisfactory, but these are all old traditions, so Kant had plenty of room to play around. Compare the debates over the nature of space and extension in comparably abstruse figures like Henry More (see Koyre's famous book, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe), or the Cartesians' extreme resistance to the idea of empty space (void), or the Clarke-Leibniz debate.
I think when people read Kant today they forget that he's writing in this larger tradition, a tradition that had Philo at one end and Nicholas of Cusa and the Cloud of Unknowing at the other, both insisting on the radical "otherness" of God, beyond all conceptuality.
There is a certain sleight of hand in claiming this is a final answer though, and I think you are right to question it: obviously something "like space" must exist, in the specific sense that if differentia exist WITHIN the absolute, or within the ultimate ground of being (whatever that is), they must be "somewhere," there must be a ground of differentiation. It's slightly disingenuous to say "yes, but they aren't SPATIALLY somewhere, the ground of differentiation is not spatial," because implicitly what is really being asked is:
>What does it then MEAN to have differentia, but for them not to be anywhere spatially? What are non-spatial differentia, then?
But thinking about this makes you realise just how innate and instinctive it is to think of things in material, spatial terms, which goes back to Kant's point. Even when someone explicitly tells you that you are dealing with a form of being, and thus a form of knowing, that is totally non-material, non-physical, non-spatial, non-geometrical, your mind still TRIES to picture some kind of sphere or geometrical solid and divide it up into spatial, geometrical regions in which differentia can "be." Right at that limit of your cognition, when your mind is essentially saying "If anything is to be anything, it has to 'be' in a spatial WAY! If anything is to have differentia, it is to be differentiated in a geometrical, spatial way!," Kant is saying "how do you know?" Your very certainty that your categories are universally valid is itself a contingent category of your cognition.
This is the line where the reason and the understanding part ways, because you are now at the boundary of what your understanding (and its friend, intuition) can cognise, but you are still manifestly thinking what is beyond that boundary. You know there's "something" out there, but you can't say anything about its form of being prior to its being naturalised to your mind's eye (intuition) and mental idiom (the understanding).
The feeling of frustration and limitation you feel in trying to think something beyond your categories of thought, to THINK something you can't think ABOUT, is just what Kant is indicating by the word "noumenon," i.e. literally "the thing that is thought," just not understood. There are some paradoxes involved in Kant's formulation here, because he says that the noumenon or thing-in-itself (Ding an sich, really thing unto itself or even thing for itself, i.e. NOT for us - again related to theological conceptions of something being "known or knowable in/to itself, secundum se," but not by any FINITE knower) has a quasi-causal relation to finite knowers: the something-out-there seems to continually "present" us with the "material" which we form into objects of the understanding and intuition, but causality is one of the relations of the understanding, so this is illogical within Kant's scheme. But this is of secondary importance to what is really going on in Kant: directing you to that boundary-line between ALL YOUR CATEGORIES OF INTUITION AND UNDERSTANDING, and the THING to which you are seeking to apply them, and revealing vividly that your categories have no guarantee of adequacy with the thing (guarantees which used to be sought in fore-knowledge of God's goodness and thus lack of interest in deceiving us).
Again this formerly would have been clear to minds raised on medieval mysticism and neoplatonic epistemology. It's supposed to be paradoxical. Ironically this is how Kant's philosophy can actually be used as a propaedeutic for mysticism and what he calls intellectual intuition, in the same way things like Nicholas of Cusa and the Cloud of Unknowing were more explicitly and self-consciously useful for that purpose.
>One can maybe make a case for time being an illusion that is imposed by us.
This is not what kant is saying. Time is an illusion but space is also "real" in the world of noumenon besides also being a category in our minds.
>Be David Hume eating lots of food
>Can't know anything a priori...except colors which you can guess
>Be Kant drinking coffee and looking like dwarf
>Nah, not just colors bro. Picture space in your imagination, infinite space just going on and on.
See, space is in your head!
This is correct, and Schopenhauer rightly chides him for this. Can't talk about noumena.
It can’t be.
How does this add help us to sell more philosophy?
Not necessarily. Think of how the illusion of three-dimensional space is created in videogames.
>I mean objects in "things in themselves" still have to spread out in some kind of space right?
not if our minds are interpreting one singular divine object of which everything is apart of, and space is just our minds way of breaking it down and making sense of it
>is apart of
This means the opposite of what you intended.
yes *a part
>something that is imposed by our mind on sensory input and not something that actually exists out there?
You failed to understand Kant's statement here. Try again.
Do you mean to say that sensory input by virtue of being input is already structured by the aesthetic? Schopenhauer redefined Verstand to mean the active part of our mind in structuring concrete representations, where Kant thought that sensibility was structured prior to any intelligent thought (whether conscious or unconscious - Schopenhauer argued Verstand was unconscious and implicit). Schopenhauer's explanation generally seems more correct when contrasted with Kant's.
Both questions are answered to the full extent in the first chapter of the phenomenology of spirit.
what about emotion
No one in this thread has ever read a single page of Kant.
>How can space be a category in our heads?
Kant does not propose space as a category. He thinks that space is the form of our outer sense, while time is that of inner sense. The content provided by our sensibility (both inner and outer) is subsumed under the pure concepts of the understanding in order to make experience possible. Those pure concepts of the understanding, which are derived from the logical form of our judgements, are called categories.
>But how can space be something that is imposed by our mind on sensory input and not something that actually exists out there?
Space is indeed something that actually exists, namely as the form of your outer sense.
>I mean objects in "things in themselves" still have to spread out in some kind of space right?
We don't know stuff like that. We don't talk about stuff like that.
>I mean objects in "things in themselves" still have to spread out in some kind of space right?
No, time and space is how we represent the thing-in-itself.