Chapter II

Prolegomena to Any Future Noumenology

David C. Braun

© 2006 David C. Braun

Chapter II

[A.  Consideration of the Transcendental Aesthetic:]

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                [i.  The general question of intuition; response to Kant’s view:]

Because the Kantian Transcendental Aesthetic contains an anticipation of his position restricting knowledge with the categories of the understanding (indeed all knowledge) to phenomenal experience alone, I turn first to consideration of what I deem to be crucial portions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, especially in relation to the category of cause.

Kant calls an intuition (i.e., the direct source of the mind’s ideas of an object, forming the ultimate material of thought) pure when there is in it (i.e., in the representation) nothing belonging to sensation (i.e., that effect produced by an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as I am affected by it, whereby empirical intuitions may be had).  The pure form of all sensuous intuitions, the form in which the manifold elements of the phenomena (i.e., undefined objects of the empirical intuition) are seen in a certain order, must be found in the mind a priori.  This pure form of sensibility he calls pure intuition.[1]

But only apprehension of events as if in order is an apprehension of the rational in the events’ relations, the sole ground for asserting the apprehension’s being in the mind a priori.  This is nothing other than the idea that the percepta of the world are within an internal system.  To the extent that reasoning begins with internals, it can apply only thereto.  But the nature of order, also apprehended by the mind (which by mastery of the laws of logical order can begin a priori) is, at least with regard to that system, harmonic.  Thus thought can treat all harmonic definitions and know wherein the internal system cannot produce certain independent, thus external harmonies.  Yet logic applies all the same thereto because such external is of harmony, the guarantee being that harmony does not harmonize with disharmony or nullity (e.g., as to origin).  The harmonic intuition is the sole “nonsensuous” intuition (if I allow myself an incautious expression) that can be granted; from it, my notions of definitional order come by discursive development and by perception (as in the case of time, infra).  The rule is that all things are known by conclusions from the definitional premises.

                [ii.  Anticipation of the independent harmony and its meaning:]

What was set forth above on the intellect’s ability to know independent harmony will be treated elsewhere.  At this juncture, the ultimate nature of the task can be seen for what it is.  One might suggest, as below, and as accomodation to Kant’s position, that time is simply consciousness’ harmonization of the percepta as within a general system of perceptual definitions.  Even be this so, time could be nothing more than the definitional form, as perceived, of a harmony imposed within the system, a harmony within the rule of ground and consequent.  So harmony conveyed within the system and generated therein, as imposed or in turn imposing, must be anticipated according to the harmony by a ground within the system.  If there be perceived a harmony not in accordance with any such principle but unanticipated, it is not of the system of consciousness’ harmonization, even though, by the definitions’ being constantly defined (so as to avoid the uncertainty problem of the undetermined in, e.g., quantum mechanics), consciousness has such power, then the harmony is independent of the system, yet is, as harmony, of a harmonic origin aside from consciousness.  Only by such a method can I know anything outside my “perceptual system,” and then only to the extent allowed by its internal harmony.  Yet that will allow me to speak of origin, as harmonic, by the rule of principle and conclusion, of ground and consequent; thence I may speak of causes, etc.

Lest it be argued that the harmony of my world be the product of the agent of consciousness, only if the harmony be grounded in the conscious could it be said that the harmony was not independent.  Otherwise my conclusion that there is an independent harmony grounded in the harmony of being, with all that is entailed, even causation in being independent of experience, might be granted in the objection.  The harmony perceived internally may be said to be caused by the harmony of internal consciousness through the act of perception, but perception can be imposition only if the harmony is anticipated according to the harmonic rule in definition.  (The experience in question is such as to be in the direct reach and control of the consciousness.  The harmony is unanticipated, not only as thing, but as harmony.)  The harmony that is unanticipated but yet a harmony can be rooted only in a harmony independent of consciousness, which is in being.  For it is perceived as pure harmony, which is yet not rooted in the consciousness’ harmony because not within the anticipation rule.  (For disharmony can be perceived.)  The causes of a harmonic perception must be harmonic, or not disharmonic, including the material cause, which must be in ease.  (Further, one would have harmony only in the actual system if there be no independent harmony.  The argument on definition without con tent applies equally to any column of argument involving the body where one is apprised of the harmony before knowing its “vehicle.”)  If the thing perceived is independent, as fact of definition, of the consciousness because unanticipated, it is also by the same token independent of the agent.  A definition without content is not a definition but nothing at all; and the only content of the harmony perceived is its harmony.  The harmony that is the state in the consciousness yet newly come must be of that which is harmonic, as the perceiving faculty receives disharmony only as it is; so I experience it, and so also of the thing accomplished by that which is its independent cause, as it certainly is not, even by my experience, ex nihilo.  Therefore the cause, which is independent, is independent harmony.  Hence I may know that there is a being, and that causation exists in reality, not merely in the percepta,[2]

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[A.  (cont’d.):]

                [iii.  Kant’s exposition of time; and response:]

Kant, by stating that time is not an empirical concept deduced from experience because neither coexistence nor succession would enter perception were representation of time not given a priori,[3] desires to banish altogether the empirical element (or any scintilla thereof) from time.  But whence come ideas if not from experience, whether of externals or of internals, but from reasoning in regard to other experiential givens?  With time, it must be one or the other.

On time as necessary representation whereon all intuitions allegedly depend, Kant states one cannot take away time from phenomena, but one can take phenomena out of time.  Is this an apparent contradiction in the same sentence?  Is this to say merely one may consider phenomenal import out of its place in time but one may not experience phenomena without time?  If so, is there some empirical sense of time, in itself or as part of my underlying psyche’s life, underlying my sense of phenomena yet not emanating purely therefrom as an imposition on phenomena?  (Or is he stating that one may well imagine a passage of time without phenomena in it?[4])  From this he states that time is thus given a priori, that in it alone can a phenomenon be real; therefore, though phenomena all vanish, time as the general condition of their possibility cannot be eliminated.[5]   First, if all phenomena vanish, then even those composing the idea of my self may vanish.  If so, time (as I know it) must also vanish.  Second, were I to be given the privilege of knowing all the states of a thing in an undifferentiated present (which, according to theology, I would know in knowing God in Heaven by infused knowledge), I should hardly have a sense of time at all, though one should retort that under such a state of affairs what I know would no longer be a phenomenon per Se.  Why I should have no sense of time in knowing all the states of a thing as of one knowing will appear from the fact that there would be nothing unknown to me as there is in moments of future not within my grasp.  Past and present events can be unknown, but if the unknown be learned, it is learned in the future.  (Kant stated time cannot be perceived, nor does change affect time but only temporal phenomena.[6]  One need not assume the truth of these points, merely disarming from within, though the main content disarms from without.)

Kant then states that on the a priori necessity of time depends the possibility of apodictic (i.e., certain) principles of the relation of time (e.g., time has only one direction, different times are successive, different spaces being simultaneous).  Were these empirical, they could not be with certainty applied to all possible experience as mandatory but only to common experience so far had.[7]  But exactly how are these rules derived?  The first is that time has only one direction, from that which is before to that which is after, not vice-versa.  For if it went both ways, one could proceed from the latter back to the former state of an object to obliterate it.  Thus would one destroy a thing in its past when it must have a future continuous with its past (as existent) and without break, and a disharmony is evidenced.  What is this but a way of seeing that if the premise is false, the conclusion that alone can follow therefrom is impossible as such because groundless?  Time is but the order of events as perceived by the limited perceiver and as known by the limited intellect.  The premises in the order must, by the harmony, precede a conclusion following only from it; e.g., were one’s left hand plunged into Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace and slowly withdrawn, and the right vice-versa, the fire being constant, the temporal order could easily be discerned.  The left as rapidly related must be at that time the premise, as the right is not yet hot until in contact with the fire.

Kant then states time is not a “discursive” concept but pure form of sensuous intuition.  Different times (as measured parts) are parts only of one and the same time (the general continuum).  Representation produced by a single object only he calls intuition.  He states that the proposition that different times cannot be at the same time cannot be deduced from any general concept but is synthetical.  Nor can it be deduced from concepts only; it is thus contained in the intuition and representation of time.[8]  How, again, do I know that different times cannot be at the same time (e.g., two different hours cannot be at the same hour)?  I have times as different to the extent necessary to preserve the level of ground as anterior to that of ground and consequent, to preserve the stages of change, so that contradicting determinations do not exist in a thing so as to be disharmonic (e.g., hot steam, in being such, cannot thereby be cold ice).  This is an ordinal, not a perceptual, rule based on the harmony of the thing and the logical sequence; precisely because of this do I affirm my rule on time.

Kant adds that to say time is infinite means no more than that its every definite quality is possible only by limitations of one time, which forms the foundation of all times.  The original representation of time must therefore be given as unlimited.  But, he adds, when the parts and every quantity of an object can be represented as determined by limitation only, the whole representation cannot be given by concepts (for, in such a case, the partial representations come first) but must be founded in immediate intuition.[9]  But here he illegitimately confuses the infinite with the syncategorematically indefinite.  The latter is based on the notion of extending the parts of a progressive (or retrogressive, past) sequence without definite end, an extending consisting of a kind of addition of moments.  It must begin with partial representations.  (As St. Paul put it, we know in part.[10])  The notion of an underlying whole of time is the synthetic notion of time beyond recalled experience.  That latter is most certainly finite and divisible by the stages as evidenced in the several determinations of things; from those building blocks of finite divisions I synthesize the syncategorematically indefinite time beyond experience.  Because the blocks of which any such time is built are finite, they can in no way be compounded so as ever to form a true eternity.  (The latter, as is evident from what was stated above in the remarks on knowledge of all states, is not of the nature of time but is sempiternity, in which all are as of one present.)

Kant states the concept of change (and thus of motion) was possible only through and in the representation of time, and that, were that representation not intuitive (internally) a priori, no concept could make us understand the possibility of a change, i.e., of a connection of contradictorily opposed predicates (e.g., the being and non-being of one and the same thing in one and the same place in one and the same object).  It is, for Kant, only in time that both contradictorily opposed determinations can be met in the object, one after another.  (The concept of time exhibits, therefore, the possibility of as many synthetical cognitions a priori as are found in the general doctrine of motion, which is very rich in them.)[11]  Granted that the notion of change as the connection of opposed determinations is required (by the harmony on the part of the thing) and requires some ordinal progressive arrangement (of the determinations in the one object) which is perceived as time by the finite observer; it is only in view of that harmony that the idea of time as usually sensed or known has any validity.  What is sensed internally as the mind’s time (which Kant calls an intuition, or the form of the internal sense) is a succession in harmony of such states.  But that succession can be known as a logical succession of ground and consequent, of premise and conclusion, constructible in the abstract in terms of definitional givens, for which no intuitions are needed save that of harmony in the realm of perception.  What has so far been said about time as harmonic order can be confirmed in my own activity involving the ordering of events in my endeavors according to time calculated mathematically, so that it is not as if I merely impose such an order onto events, unless I impose it onto definitions in general.

Kant holds time does not exist in itself, so that it would be real without being a real object.  He holds further that time is not inherent in things as an objective determination of them that might remain were the subjective conditions of the intuition abstracted.  This he held because he believed that, if time were an order inherent in things themselves, it could not be antecedent to things as their condition and be known and perceived by means of synthetic propositions a priori.  This would be possible if time is but a subjective condition under which alone intuitions occur.  Then this form of internal intuition can be represented prior to the objects themselves, i.e., a priori.[12]  I have already noted that time has two elements:  a logical succession of ground and consequent, of premise and conclusion, and a limited perceiver who cannot (as so constituted, and left to own devices) take in all stages of things except by the parts of that succession in its order.  That perceiver experiences even in thought such a succession, which can be described as intertwined with those of the material or visible realm, at least at some stage or other in the successions that are interconnected.  Hence all the successions are experienced as in the same fundamental order of ground and consequent, as indeed they must be.  This allows for an interior sense of time in the perceiver, but the perceived objects as such must have a succession subject to being so perceived, as in unbroken succession or continuity, and to being apprehensible as fitting into an order.  This they must have in the harmony of definitions, lest a succession emanate from the inner sense alone (which would be any intuition interior to me), unless the harmony come also from within.  So Kant was partly right yet, in greater part, wrong; the harmony of definition gives rise to that which I perceive in time and is the condition of things in their definition.  What is discontinuous I do not perceive temporally, as I know from sleep between waking and dreaming or waking and waking, or within other states of unconsciousness.  What is not in logical succession cannot be posterior in any harmonic order as, e.g., time.

According to Kant, time is only the form of the internal sense, i.e., of my intuition of myself, my inner state.  He says that time cannot be a determination peculiar to external phenomena. It refers neither to their shape, nor their position, etc., but determines only the relation of representations in the internal state.  As the internal intuition of time supplies no shape, I try to remedy the “deficiency” by means of analogies, e.g., by representation of the succession of time by a line progressing without limit (as I say, in substitution for Kant’s idea of progression to infinity), in which the manifold constitutes a series of one only dimension.  Kant says one concludes from the properties of the line as to all properties of time, with the exception that the parts of a line are simultaneous, whereas those of time are successive.  Therefrom he concludes that clearly the representation of time is an intuition.[13]  True, time cannot be peculiar to external phenomena, in the two senses that internal phenomena are also subject to time and the perceiving and knowing mind, as limited, perceives all phenomena in successive times according to their succession as ordinal or logical.  His statement that time determines the relation of representations in the internal state is revealing.  Although it is the definition as ordered (according to its harmony) that gives rise to time (in interior perception), the relations of definitions are relations within (and because of) order.  Time belongs to order, which is seen or read into relations.  (If the definitions are altered, so is the order, as is time, e.g., in the case of high-velocity travel.)  While time may be represented in linear fashion, the building of the spatial line from finite parts is an act that occurs in time.  The true difference is that the parts of a completed time remain, while the things from completed time (e.g., a premise that has given rise to a completed conclusion having a life of its own) may be free to depart, as do the “former things” in regard to change.  Kant’s conclusion does not seem of strict necessity to follow from his reasoning.  His representation of them in terms of the external intuition refers to his notion of space as that intuition’s form; but if the nature of space is similar to that of time, the argument’s force is lost.  I can express pure mathematical statements wholly in terms either of space, time or both without rendering mathematics intuitive.  Time as extended by order takes part therein.

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[B.  The tension between “now” and the continuum:]

The past is no-longer; the future, not-yet.  The future becomes the present, which becomes the past.  “Is” becomes “is-not.”  The present has no dimension, either; all the “presents” added together make no measurable period, and there is no duration.  The present “is-not,” either; it has no dimension.  For every instant, no sooner than precisely pinpointed, passes into the past and is followed by a subsequent instant, which likewise dissipates.  There can accordingly be no dimension to any instant.  The alternative is that the “now” be somehow a dimensional atomon (a contradiction, as any measurable is in principle divisible into half-measures, etc.).

All my consciousness occurs in time, i.e., in “the present.”  Time as a flow of “instants” is without duration, without measurable dimension; it is accordingly not time at all.  Time is self-contradictory.  Yet because my consciousness occurs in time, which is an essential structure of it,[14] I am forced to admit a contradictory element to a consciousness not itself disharmonic.  Thus I must deny either that time is a continuum of nondimensional points each denominated as “now” or that time is an essential experiential structure.  This latter view makes time but a curiosity and, to be quite blunt, epistemological dross.  The problem therewith, the mathematician or physicist can retort, is that time is of interest to those special sciences.  Yet it is precisely time which poses a Zenonian problem of the “many” that is seemingly insoluble.[15]

A solution to the foregoing might begin with the proposition that the foregoing arguments have force only if time is reified as a result of a category-mistake.  There is no “existence” (taken either absolutely or in the sense of experiential nonvoids) involved in the dissipation of temporal moments.  Rather, the “existence” belongs purely to entities perduring given periods of time.  Time, moreover, is not a thing real in itself but a form of ordering sense-data, a form determined according to such laws as causation (rather than determining such laws), a form which, when not necessary, is discarded.

Time is yet an apparent contradiction invoked, as it were, to prevent acknowledgment of what might otherwise seem the contradiction one would say inheres in change, i.e., a thing’s being yet in some way not-being something.  Even if I say that the “time as inherent contradiction” argument involves a category mistake, must I concede that any attempt to measure time is in principle an exercise in falsehood?  Or is time a duality necessarily involving both continuum and discontinuous points denominated “now,” properly not belonging to the continuum, both of which nevertheless intersect within experience?  And this, insofar as time does not involve entity, is there no real contradiction ever risked in so treating time?

Is time’s paradoxical nature yet another reason for assigning it a place akin to that assigned above?  I.e., part of it is purely phenomenal but part involves an ordering for which consciousness alone cannot take full credit?  Will that assignment alone cure the paradox?  Suppose the “now” were the element of consciousness; the continuum, the transcendently[16] founded element.  The “now” will dissipate, leading to each next moment of an otherwise measurable continuum.  The relation of the now to the continuum, as long as it is one of the latter’s dependence in some way on the former as outgrowth of it, still generates the paradox.  Only by declaring a dependence relation of the continuum on the “now” an illusion can I solve that one difficulty.  But that solution in turn generates yet another problem:  Is not the argument for my accepting causation at the level of phenomena founded upon an apparent continuation of the object in some moment of experience according to the harmony, i.e., in a continuum issuing from the moment “now?”

Does the above allow “now” and “continuum” to be two different aspects of time, both necessary to it yet neither of itself a sufficient aspect of it?  Does this allow for the generation of a continuum from a moment “now,” as appears to occur in experience?  “Now” may not even be “sayable,” let alone “thinkable.”  Were I to grant that, would that obliterate the paradox?  panta rei:  That is the evidence of experience.  A moment “now” is something artificially abstracted from it, almost a transcendent treatment of that which is not transcendent.  A definite “now” I should jettison, then, as dangerous to the possibility of immanent knowledge of the appropriateness of causation, inter alia.

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[C.  The Kantian categories and harmony:]

                [i.  Harmony as basis for their application; independence of harmony allowing transcendent use:]

The above on harmony not according to the inner system, independent of it as thing and harmony (stripped, newly sensed by one knowing disharmony), generates a reply to Kant’s doctrine on the use of the categories.  He argued that the categories (unity, plurality, totality; reality, negation, limitation; substance, cause, community; possibility, existence, necessity[17]) apply only to percepta, because the thought (or category) without an object is empty and the only schematism for their application involves time, the inner form of perception.[18]  But the categories apply to percepta because both are harmonic, adhering to the law of noncontradiction.  Through independent harmony I have access to the harmonic in itself, which has none other than harmonic being for an origin.  A congruence between the harmonies allows application of the categories to reality through this independent harmony.

The “stripped” pure harmony is not merely a threshold to determining that a thing could be independent as to its harmony; it is the harmony between the thing perceived and the system of self-definition.  That harmony alone cannot be the independent as thing yet not independent as harmony, especially where it is newly perceived by one who can perceive disharmony.

                [ii.  Objection to independent harmony:  a.  nontransmission:]

Lest it be argued that the absence of internally sensed harmony[19] may represent the mere failure of transmission of harmonization to the area to be affected “normally,” whether because of nonattainment of a critical threshold or otherwise, I note that where, e.g., within one part exist two problems, one only (more difficult) of which is resolved, transmission would be to both and is thus not failing.  Similarly, e.g., were one to find a case where one or more such had been aided in general and harmonized, though the absence of internal euharmony still obtained, one would find the problem was not of nontransmission thereof.

                [ii.  (Cont’d.):  b.  Use of noncontradiction:]

Objection may arise to use of general argument from noncontradiction to show that the law of causation applies to transcendent being or things in themselves, on the ground that one can apply that argument only to (and to the extent of) any phenomenon, and no farther.  I reply that one may apply such a method in relation to the harmony perceived, which, in relation to the harmonic system, must have a ground, according to its harmony.  As I cannot assign any cause within the system at all, within myself, yet as I have been given before me that harmony as such, the harmony would be overthrown unless I were to proceed by noncontradiction to show that the harmony in question had a harmony, real and transcendent, as ground.

                [ii.  (Cont’d.):  c.  The verifiability criterion of meaning:]

External to the system, objection may arise that one cannot obtain knowledge of reality or of God, because such concepts transcend known percepta and formal rules of logic (which tell nothing new, according to the objection, because they involve mere definitional tautologies).  Such ideas, not fitting either division, are devoid of meaning insofar as they refer to nothing that would verify or falsify them, according to the objection.  The objection misconstrues the operation of reason, which does not merely perform tautologies but finds in particular things (e.g., a given living person) hidden aspects (e.g., mortality) visible or knowable in the harmonization towards the universal (e.g. all members of Homo sapiens are mortal, the living fitting the same form as those who have died), even though it is done by combinations of definitions.  Even in identity, an element is added in synthesis to the simple fact of the thing identified, which is the harmonic constancy in discursive moments.  Identity is not the sole law, for there is also the well known law of noncontradiction allowing one to distinguish the harmonic from the disharmonic in discourse, as well as void in experience from nonvoid (e.g., dreamless sleep).  Thence one may draw an apophatic concept of reality, which, in the level of givenness, refers to the nonvoid experience of harmony, for example (which, in turn, is, in part, nondiscord).  By showing the unanticipated harmony one may show an independent power that for its underpinning (conceived analogously with that, e.g., of ideas, which are their perceptual referents) must have that which is harmonic and thus nonvoid, and, in an apophatic sense, “real.”  Only in this way can one know the “real.”  And through the law of causation, known to apply to transcendent reality through the independent harmony, one can know whether the entity supporting consciousness (for example) is self-sufficient or radically dependent on a Creator.

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[1] Critique of Pure Reason, Elements of Transcendentalism, Transcendental Aesthetic, §1.

[2] See this work, §13, infra.

[3] Kant , op. cit., §4, I.

[4] Id. at A: 23, B: 38; but see below for an answer.

[5] Id. at §4, II.

[6] Id., Transcendental Analytic, A: 183-86, B: 226-29.

[7] Id., Transcendental Aesthetic,  §4, III.

[8] Id., §4, IV.

[9] Id., §4, V.

[10] I Cor. XIII: 9.

[11] Kant, op. cit., §5.

[12] Id., Conclusions from the Foregoing Concepts, a.

[13] Id., Conclusions from the Foregoing Concepts, b.

[14] See generally Kant, op. cit., Transcendental Aesthetic, passim.

[15] One should be reminded of the argument outlines in, e.g., F. Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, vol. I, part 1 (Garden City, N.Y. 1962), p. 72, and quoted in G. de Santillana, The Origins of Scientific Thought  (Chicago 1961), pp. 102f.

[16] I deem it appropriate to adopt “transcendent” and “transcendently” to refer to that which is beyond any possible experience, and to restrict use of “transcendental” and “transcendentally” to refer to that which conditions any possible cognition, including any possible experience, a usage I would be reluctant to adopt except for its being consonant with Kant’s usage.  Where the “transcendental” as condition of any possible cognition appears to be a being beyond possible experience, I call it “transcendent[al].”  The terminological problem regarding “transcendent” and “transcendental” comes to a head on considering what to make of the “transcendental ego” taken to refer not only to the necessary condition of experience and knowledge but also to an absolute ego, the sine qua non of consciousness yet never itself within possible experience, or, according to the formula ego-cogito-cogitatum, the nonpsychological ego taken as subject (taken so logically, perhaps, whereof causative activity [cogitare] is posited) standing outside experience, tends towards the status of a transcendent ego.  Accordingly, I propose the term “transcendent[al] ego,” which exploits not only the intention of the term’s prior use but also a criticism which should be manifest below.

[17] Kant, op. cit., Transcendental Analytic, bk. I, ch. I, section III, § 10.

[18] Id., ch. II, section II, § 22 (B: 146), see also Transcendental Logic, Introduction, I: Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind (B: 75/A: 51); bk. II, ch. I, sect. 3, 3B (B: 183f/A: 144f).

[19] See this text §13, infra.