Immanuel Kant

General Observations on Transcedental Aesthetic

[quote]:

To avoid all misapprehension, it is necessary to explai, as clearly as possible, what our view is regarding the fundamental constitution of sensible knowledge in general. 

What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so consituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that  if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole consitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them - a mode which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly, by every human being. With this alone have we any concern. Space and time are its pure forms, and sensation in general its matter. The former alone can we know a priori, that is, prior to all actual perception; and such knowledge is therefore called pure intuition. The latter is that in our knowledge which leads to its being called a posteriori knowledge, that is, empirical intuition. The former inhere in our sensibility with absolute necessity, no matter of what kind our sensations may be; the latter can exist in varying modes. Even if we could bring our intuition to the highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby come any nearer to the consitution of objects in themselves. We should still know only our mode of intuition, that is, our sensibility. We should, indeed, know it completely, but always under the conditions of space and time - conditions which are originally inherent in the subject. What the objects may be in themselves would never become known to us even though the most enlightened knowledge of that which is alone given to us, namely, their appearance.

The concept of sensibility and of appearance would be falsified, and our whole teaching in regard to them would be rendered empty and useless, if we were to accept the view that our entire sensibility is nothing but a confused representation of things, containing only what belongs to them in themselves, but in doing so under an aggregation of characters and partial representations that we do not consciously distinguish. For the difference between a confused and a clear representation is merely logical, and does not concern the content. No doubt the concept of 'right', in its common-sense usage, contains all that the subtlest speculation can develop out of it, though in its ordinary and practical  use we are not conscious of the manifold representations comprised in this thought. But we cannot say that the common concept is therefore sensible, containing a mere appearance. For 'right' can never be an appearance; it is a concept in the understanding, and represents a property (the moral property) of actions, which belongs to them in themselves. The representation of a body in intuition, on the other hand, contains nothing that can belong to an object in itself, but merely the appearance of something, and the mode in which we are affected by that something; and this receptivity of our faculty of knowledge is termed sensibility. Even if that appearance could become completely transparent to us, such knowledge would remain toto coelo different from knowledge of the object in itself.

 ---

The self transcends the isolation of its own subjectivity, in the clarity of thought presented to us by Kant. The "I" exists limited to its own interpretive "sensibilities", only viewing the phenomenal appearance from its own subjectivity, not knowing "the other" in itself, except through its own interpretive lense. Yet connections are made in the aesthetics of thought, as thinker comes to know its own existence in a lucid and precise manner: "transcendence". The apprehension of the world of phenomena hangs by a thin thread - one's own conciousness of the world of appearance. But the moment of clarity described by Kant, gives the reader a sense of unity-of-the-us, of thought. The process of coming to know "the other" as a thou-of-life becomes the focal point in the life-living of the self, as a being in openness. Is this not the 'right' action in its common sense usage, a sensibitliy to come to understand the soul of the other in the space through the continuum of time?