A simple look at Kant on Time
For Kant,
experience cannot tell us with absolute certainty that time exists in the world
of things as they appear to us. We can observe objects changing, but we cannot
say that we fully understand time through these sensory experiences -
this is because those sensory experience cannot provide us with the succession
of time in an absolute way. This is because Kant does not posit that sensory
experience on its own is sufficient to provide us with any absolute
truth; we can watch a thousand apples decay on a thousand different occasions,
but this can never tell us that an apple will always decay. Nor does it tell us
of the (metaphorical!) foundations required for us to experience an apple
decaying at all. Yes! Let us plunge deeper into reality.
We must,
therefore, consider time prior to our experiences. Time is an inner
sense; a pure intuition of ourselves; part of our pure sense of self. Time
does not belong to shape, or location - it determines the relation of things we
see inside our inner state. Time is not an object that exists in and of itself.
Time is not contained in things themselves, as a property of those things.
Events do not take place inside of time. Effectively, time is only
absolute in our subjective, human reality. If we removed our experiencing the
succession of events in the world, time would become nothing. Time needs
experience of it in action to prove it exists, and so it cannot be an absolute
reality. However, just because time needs our senses to understand it, it does not
mean that the senses alone would be sufficient; we need our inner sense. Nor
can time be discovered purely by thinking about it (for Kant, pure analysis is
worthless without physical evidence). Time is not an idea imposed upon reality
by the mind, but is the result of our inner sense experiencing the succession
of things outside of us; our minds give form to the chaotic mass of sense data
beyond us and allow us to make sense of it all.
Human experience
can only discover things occurring within time, thus it has what Kant would
call 'empirical reality' (or 'evidence discovered through the use of our
senses').
Every sensory
experience we have of anything, must represent time; we cannot remove time from
appearances. We need time to make sense of the ever shifting flux of matter,
i.e. things in motion. This means that time is a condition that must be
fulfilled for us to be able to see things changing; time must come before
appearances. And so time requires more than just this 'empirical reality', it
needs also our inner sense, in order to make our understanding of time
complete.
By Selim 'Selim' Talat
