A Metaphilosophical Reflection on the Aristotelian and Kantian Treatments of Time

A METAPHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION ON THE ARISTOTELIAN AND KANTIAN TREATMENTS OF TIME A CONSTANT DANGER which besets anyone who endeavors to compare the doctrine of two philosophers on a single topic is that he might station himself at the attitude-perspective on one of the philosophers and criticize the other purely in terms of this vantage point. I£ criticizing one system or philosopher from the vantage point of another system or philosopher is not the prime reason for the seemingly irreconcilable rifts between philosophical schools, it at least contributes to these rifts. And very often, like the yankee in a foreign country, the philosophers must end up pointing at things or inventing terms on the spur of the moment, in order to make themselves understood, if possible, in lieu of the " language " of the strangers. In this article I will, of course, try to avoid "negativity" in the sense of argumentativeness. Does this imply that I will attempt to view the doctrines of Kant and Aristotle from above, as it were? Perhaps, more precisely, from between the both of them. From this " position" I would like to set myself the task, not of locating logical identities, nor of finding mathematically exact congruences, but merely of observing general symmetries in the doctrines of the two men on a specific topic. The fact that one presupposes that such symmetry can be found might, of course, suggest an a priori bias towards oversimplification . But if he analyzes the writings of both philosophers and happens to notice a notable similarity of content represented under notably different forms, this would seem to be a case of "a posteriori observation" in the domain of philosophy. That is, the "observation" of attitudes and an attempt to draw unified conclusions from these observations. 117 118 HOWARD P. KAINZ But i£ this be a valid approach, it would certainly be naive and undisciplined unless there were first a realization o£ the definite, solid differences in the viewpoints o£ the two authors in question. Therefore, before we examine the symmetries, mention should be made o£ the differences (£or without the differences, symmetry would not be there, only identity): Three major differences might be noted in the philosophies o£ Aristotle and Kant: 1) Aristotle set out to describe the physical world, going on the fundamental presupposition that the world was, indeed, intelligible. What was then necessary, upon this presupposition , was to make its potential intelligibility something actual, to bring its latent forms out into the open-in words, in concepts; and then, by a logical analysis o£ the properties o£ actual, intelligible form, to develop a metaphysics/ which, once made explicit, would in turn lend definiteness and clarity to the physical world in a semi-autonomous way. But Kant's interests lay not so much in describing and delimiting the physical world, as in setting proper bounds to man's faculty o£ reason. Under impetus o£ the faith that he could best serve science and philosophy by accurately determining, once and £or all, just what man could know and not know, and the various ways in which he could be related to the knowable, and the various ways in which he could be deceived as to the pseudoknowable , he set himself to accomplish a more "introverted " task. His starting point was reflection, and his goal the exploration o£ the faculty o£ reflection: reason. And therefore it is significant that, while Aristotle developed a system o£ categories o£ physical being, Kant developed a system o£ categories by means o£ which we must think. 2) In consonance with his concentration upon the domain o£ pure reason, Kant was primarily interested in solving the major problems raised by that ambiguous zone where subjective and objective meet; that is, the zone where intuitions 1 Cf. Physics, II, 2, 194b; I, 9, 192a. TREATMENTS OF TIME 119 are unified in concepts, or where ideas, rightly or wrongly, are given determinate phenomenal reference as content. In terms of his solutions to these problems, he also arrived at the corollary conclusion that we can know nothing about the positive reality of a substance behind phenomena, or a " thingin -itself," although we must presuppose some such reality because of the...