Space, Time and the Body in Kant

What is it about?

This paper draws out textual evidence for reconsidering Kant's theory of space and time as "the forms of apriori intuition." I argue that this is not a theory of our mental representation of space and time, but an account of the topology of space and time based on an phenomenology of how we physically exist in space and time. I draw on textual support from the pre-Critical writings to the Opus postumum to show that apriori intuition was always regarded as self-intuition of ourselves as embodied at a "here" and at a "now" and with directional orientation in the space of possible "heres" and "nows". I then use this idea to briefly reinterpret Kant's "metaphysical expositions" of space and time in ways that are quite opposed to the traditional interpretations.

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Why is it important?

Although a few (largely overlooked) scholars have pursued this "externalist" line of interpreting the meaning of "apriori intuition," my presentation of this idea is more textually sound than previous attempts to read Kant in this way. This approach to reading Kant aligns him with the phenomenological tradition. Also, although not worked out in detail here, my approach argues that Kant's account of space and time is an account of the metaphysics of space and time itself. In other words, I argue that the reality of space and time in the natural world and outside of the mind, depends on some first-personal perspective occupying a "here" and "now." Without such "simples in appearance," the Leibnizian problem of the continuum has no solution and the world (in appearance) decomposes (conceptually speaking) not only to an infinite but indeterminate spatio-temporal manifold (that is a decomposition brought about by abstracting from the empirical reality of space and time but not its transcendental ideality), but it decomposes to the mere possibility of nature as such, which is referred to as noumenal reality, things-in-themselves, or transcendental matter.