Kant's Intuitionism: A commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (review)

Goethe Yearbook 441 Lome Falkenstein, Kant's Intuitionism: A commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. In this book Falkenstein wants to repudiate the view of the Transcendental Aesthetic as "a rump of old views, incongruously patched onto the front of the book and supplanted by the more mature parts of the Critique" (12).The author also thinks that most commentaries dealing with the Aesthetic have ignored Kant's theory of space-time perception, his formal intuitionism, by concentrating too much on his Transcendental Idealism (283). He aims to redress the balance and rehabilitate Kant's formal intuitionism.This entails arguing against a constructivist interpretation of his view of space and time. Kant argues for the necessity of both intuition and understanding in knowledge. According to the author it is the failure to distinguish properly between intuition and understanding which leads to the denigration of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Falkenstein argues that intuition is the faculty of immediate cognition, which presents the matter of knowledge to be processed by the understanding . Also he argues that Kant's thesis that space and time are the forms of intuition should be understood as asserting that sensations are literally received in a spatial and temporal order. Intuitions are passively received in a spatio-temporal order. A constructivist would argue against both of these points, claiming that intuitions are not passively received in a spatio-temporal order but must be processed as such by the understanding. For example, according to Kitcher, the spatial and temporal form of intuition is the product of the cognitive processing of sensations by the understanding (110). The author rebuts passages in the Critique which suggest that space and time are generated by a synthesis of the understanding or imagination (78).This interpretation is rejected on the grounds that although synthesis is necessary for a conceptual representation of space and time, this does not rule out the possibility that a spatio-temporal order of representations is originally given in intuition . This intuitionist view has two problematic aspects, both of which the author handles in an interesting way. First, the author has to give a special account of the blindness thesis, the claim that intuitions without concepts are blind. Falkenstein is keenly aware of the problem, asserting that it is as if Kant had written the Aesthetic "without realizing that he was committed to the blindness thesis." 442 Book Reviews He insists that two faculties, intuition and understanding, do not have separable products which can be examined one by one; there can be no knowledge purely gained by intellectual concepts and no purely sensory knowledge. The two faculties must be distinguished not by their products, but by their operating processes. So far so good. However, the author still has to explain how unconceptualized, spatio-temporally ordered intuitions are possible, given the blindness thesis. In response, he says that unconceptual experiences may indeed be intuited, but such appearances are for us as good as nothing (55) and that prior to conceptualization, intuition is unintelligible (59). This is exactly the point at which we should press for greater clarity. Is an experience which consists of unsynthesized intuitions really possible? Falkenstein seems to answer "yes." He says space and time are given, together with the matter of the manifold,"in one and the same sensory experience" (89, my emphasis), -which Kant calls an empirical intuition. It seems then that intuitions are sensations , which are experiences. This implies that concepts are not a necessary condition of experience, after all. Apparently, intuitions without concepts are short-sighted rather than blind. At several points Falkenstein appeals to the analogy of a calculating machine. He says that the function of intuition is to present the raw data for processing by the understanding (59) and that intuition is the immediate reception of information and thought is the processing of this information into knowledge claims (67). These data-processing images fail at the very point where we need more clarity. What is the immediate reception of information or data, if not a type of knowledge claim? Second, the author argues that sensations are the matter of intuition and that raw sensation already exhibits spatio-temporal form before...