Transcendental Aesthetic

  Kant Pt II Space and Time and The Cognitive Model of Experience

“Bill: Yeah dude, it’s like, I just think it’s kinda messed up that like, because space and time are the forms of pure sensible intuition they can’t like... be...
Ted: Intuited?
Bill: Yeah! And because of that, even though they’re the framework in which all experiences happen, we can never...
Ted: experience Space and Time because...
Bill: they themselves the conditions under which they are experienced…
Both: Whoaa”
-Excerpt from rejected Bill and Ted script

The framework of intuitions which are the means that all objects are presented to us, or given to us, or affect us, is Space and Time. Space is the sense of outer objects, time is the sense of inner change. That is all you really need to know about that. You cannot have one without the other, at least when communicating with another person. The people that have no sense of either in their communication were historically deemed schizophrenic. There’s actual metaphysical justification in the Critique, but it’s not particularly interesting and this idea seems reasonable enough we can move on to a cooler section.

Kant’s Cognitive Model in The Transcendental Aesthetic

Kant’s project is largely one of bringing the Rationalism of Leibniz and the Empiricism of Hume into cooperation with one another. I am glossing over a-priori-synthetic judgements for now because Kant just alludes to them in this section.

Rationalism vs Empiricism

"Every time I speak of Rationalists and Empiricists I do so with great love and affection. They cannot

help that they were born fucked up!" - Preface to the second Critique

    I am very sketchy on my Hume and my Leibniz at the moment, and I don’t plan on reading either of them ever again. Here’s a summation of what I know in the shortest amount of time that I can explain it; and why I ultimately found them to be not good, as something to be discarded, something to be thrown in the dustbin of history and for their disciples to be spat upon and then put to death, then for the children of those disciples to be sterilized and put to work on oil rigs as concubines for the halfwits we assign such careers; concubines whose short, horrific and tragic half lived lives are also to be forgotten, by us, long before those images and anxieties of monstrous oil stained violation are shuttered from their minds for good.

Rationalism is a view where all knowledge can be derived logically in the mind itself - this corresponds roughly to how we commonly think about mathematics today, although there is a particular wrinkle having to do with “synthetic a priori” truths I will skip over for now. Arithmetical functions, addition and subtraction, sort of imply one another, as do multiplication and division, and as Leibniz later discovered, integration and derivation of functions. Unlike Newton, Leibniz did not discover Calculus in order to predict things about the physical world, but thought of it more as the framework of the mind itself, and therefore the framework of reality. It is also a normative theory, meaning to tell us how we should take the world to be. The ultimate goal is a moral system similar to the Judeo-Christianity, which the baseline structure of rationalism means to articulate and provide a secular basis for. Obviously, that is a project that is worthwhile and has never gone wrong for anyone, and I cannot cite a single historical catastrophe that this type of thinking could possibly lead to, nor can I think of any possible ethical critiques of such an airtight morally perfect system and argumentative technique.

Empiricism is a view that, at its most radical, believes all knowledge is always and only arising out of sense-experience. These sensings, repeated over and over at different frequencies and intensities, are what allow our mind to make associations and eventually be able to predict things about its environment, but these predictions have no absolute grounding. Think of the Scientific Framework, and how in experiment design one must always allow for falsification, or how a Scientific Law like Gravity is more or less only true so far. It’s fundamental drawback is that it presents the mind as a sort of passive receptacle of sense data. It is a descriptivist theory, in that it aims to present the world to us as the world actually is. It fails miserably, both according to Kant and according to the modern sciences. Let’s take some key lessons an empirical science, Developmental Biology: there are clearly pre-determined physical structures and paths of growth those structures take in all developing organisms, and key behavioral moments consistently identified in the development of humans, as babies age into toddlers, as toddler age into children, etc. This indicates at least some sort of consistent, embedded framework of cognition - one that is indicated empirically. The cognitive or conceptual framework might be malleable, affected by the environment, and be easily shaped in different ways, but it is still empirically indicated as being there.

Kant noticed a similarity between these two Philosophical outlooks, mainly that they assume there is but one source of knowledge. Kant’s big move is to say that there are two faculties, working in cooperation and feeding back into one another. 

These two levels are Intuitions, in which sensations are given to us, and the Understanding, which is the faculty that brings sensations and appearances presented in Intuitions under concepts as objects. By bringing presentations of intuition under concepts, presentations can be re-presented to us in a framework of other re-presentations without the sensation or presentation of the object in intuition being present-at-hand. To understand something is to understand not only a thing, but that thing’s relations to other things in the realm of representations. The appearances of the objects in intuitions are called the matter, while the representations of them relationally in the understanding are called the form.

This is a lot of vocab, and this was three pages. There was more but I skipped over it. I’ll just do two quick phenomenological stories about this model. The first one stresses sense-experience dealing with material reality, the second deals with sense-experience in more sophisticated social, historical, cultural reality. Now these are empirical examples, because I am dealing with Kant’s cognitive model of experience. 

Mark is a 4 year old child sitting on the kitchen counter. His mother leaves the room, but the stovetop is on boiling water for coffee. Mark crawls over and puts his hand on the kettle, and after a brief moment, begins screaming. His mother rushes in, removes his hand, bandages it and he makes a full recovery. 

One week later, Mark’s mother sits him on the inert stovetop in order to tie his shoes before taking him to Daycare. The stovetop isn’t on, it’s completely cold, but Mark begins screaming in distress nonetheless.

Later that month, Mark’s parents take him camping. They are all sitting around a campfire. Mark approaches the fire, feels its increasing warmth, and steps back slightly when it gets too hot. Mark’s parents teach him to roast marshmallows and they make smores. He sees the flames char the marshmallow, light them on fire, and he blows out the little flame when his father shows him how. He then eats the warm cracker sandwich.

When they get back, Mark’s mom cooks him oatmeal for breakfast. She turns the burner on the stove and Mark watches. The warm bowl is set at the table and he blows on spoonfuls of it cool it off. The next time she sets him on the stove, he experiences no anxiety.

This is how I would trace out the Kantian cognitive model here: when Mark first touched the hot stovetop, he paused for a second, unable to make out what the sensation he was sensing actually was (as he was encountering it for the first time), because he also had no conception of it. He sensed the pain, screamed in distressed, and was rescued. He associated the stovetop itself with the pain rather than the heat because he had not yet encountered that acute of a sensation of heat yet.

He associates the experience with the stovetop, he is intuiting this because he was on the stovetop the last time he had that experience. At this stage, he has the experience itself in the understanding, but not in its entirety.

After visiting the campsite, and being around the fire, Mark sees the radiant effect of fire’s heat at the sense level, by stepping a little too close and then back, he senses an increase and a decrease in the sensation the fire provides: of heat. He also notices it again when blowing out the marshmallow, and when eating the smore.

So we see Mark

1: Experience a sensation of pain at the level of intuition before he has the concept of heat.

2: Bring that experience under primitive concepts of his Understanding (“That painful sensation happened because of the stove top”).

3: Integrating the experience of heat, fire, and (maybe) cooking in his Understanding and bringing the original, painful experience of the stove under a new set of relations of concepts and acting accordingly.

The second account is about Mark’s Mother.

Dr. Josie Blackwood is a retired specialist in internal medicine who teaches science courses part time at a local Community College. Her son, Mark, is now fully 23 years old and pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting. 

The prestigious school which Mark attends specializes in a style of painting called “Globlularaizm.” Mark’s galleries and exhibitions are highly popular, and he will likely go on to have a great deal of success, and Josie, though excited, cannot pinpoint what it is about Mark’s paintings that make them cause such a stir, no matter how much of the exhibition material she reads beforehand or after. 

She is polite, nice to his friends, tells Mark how proud she is, and usually forgets what any piece actually looked like.

She eventually finds a book in Mark’s old room from when he was in high school, a small volume on painting where on the first page of each chapter is full page a high quality replica of a particular painting or study, while the rest of the chapter expounds a little bit on the symbolism, historical viewpoint, color theory prevalent at the time, etc. and ends with a short biography of that painter. She reads through the book over the next month, spending time looking at each image, trying to connect the author’s commentary to the accompanying image.

The next gallery she attends, Josie remembers what each painting looks like, and what the accompanying materials say, and even forms an opinion on how successful Mark had been in achieving his aesthetic goals, withholding judgement when she encounters one of his newer experimental pieces, but piecing together where she might find out more through lively conversation with Mark and his colleagues.

This story largely mimics the first with one large caveat: the sensations, intuitions, understandings, etc. spoken about were not brute physical or material ones of primitive data, but experiences of a pre-established complex sociohistorical world inhabited by a sophisticated protagonist.

1. The sensings were still primitive, but were understood to be primitive: they were ones of viewing artwork and being unable to cognize it.

2. The incorporation of new concepts and ideas into the mind of the protagonist at a level beyond that of simple physical sense-datum, she studies and reads about, and thinks about something to understand it.

3. How those new concepts and ideas, added to her previous ones, made the web of relations in her understanding able to re-present concretely the previous sensations under new concepts, and place them in a broader framework of ideas, categorize them, and make a partially endorsed judgement of them. She places Mark's artwork in "a logical of reasons" (Wilfrid Sellars), and by doing that, knows where she can navigate fluently and how to find out more about the areas she cannot yet.

The model has coherency both for experiences of the developing mind experiencing and understanding brute sense datum, and for experiences of a person inhabiting a complex sociohistorical reality. This is the shortest section of the Critique. To reiterate, Kant's Goal was to bring Rationalism and Empiricism into a sort of mutual cooperation to launch a sophisticated critique of the entire project of philosophy itself. This is the shortest section because Kant thought he pretty much nailed it, and most other philosophers think he did too with his cognitive model.