Immanuel
Kant on Time – A Theory from the Heart
"Immanuel
Kant suggested that the world must have a beginning in time – yet it could not
have had a beginning. Image by AndreasToerl
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) lived in Könisberg in East
Prussia, and, according to Bertrand Russell, he led an uneventful life despite
the French Revolution and the Seven Years’ War, during part of which Russia
occupied his country. Kant was a proponent of the Rights of Man, and once
said, (quoted by Russell) “…there can be nothing more dreadful than
that the action of a man should be subject to the will of another.”
In his great work, Critique of Pure Reason, which
is a combination of rationalism and empiricism, Kant differentiates time and space in the following way.
1. Different times are not coexistent but
successive.
2. Different spaces are not successive but
coexistent.
A
Priori: What Does it Mean?
Understanding ‘a priori’ is essential in
order to comprehend Kant’s rather difficult theory. A priori means
something known to be true or false before you experience it. (A posteriori is
the opposite, and means something whose truth you can only test through the
medium of experience.)
Unique
Conception of Time
Kant believes that our knowledge cannot transcend
experience, but that this knowledge, in part, may have a basis other than
experience.
Time is not an empirical conception, in other words,
a conception gained through experience. If it were we couldn’t conceive of a
“before” and “after” as Kant explains in his Critique of Pure Reason. Time,
therefore, exists a priori: as Kant said, “Phenomena can be annihilated
in thought, but as a universal condition, time cannot.”
Time:
Phenomena, Experience, Intuition
Kant is saying is that we experience phenomena
through experience, via our senses, ie. a posteriori, leading to
understanding. Time itself is a necessary condition or foundation, on which all
our intuitions are dependent. In other words, phenomena (or matter) may
disappear, but time cannot.
Kant is very clear about this, when he says: “For
neither coexistence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation
of time did not exist as a foundation a priori. We cannot think of a phenomena
as unconnected with time, but we can present to ourselves time void of
phenomena.”
Kant believes that time, for us, is intuitive. We
can only understand phenomena in its relationship to time but we can “…represent
to ourselves time {that is} void of phenomena.”
Time, concludes Kant, is a “pure form of the
sensuous intuition.” Different times are just parts of one and the
same “time.”
To the above, Kant adds the conception of change and
motion. “…change of place, is possible only through and in the
representation of time.” Again, he is asserting that unless we have
intuition a priori, we cannot comprehend the possibility of change.
Therefore time is nothing other than the form of the internal sense.
Time:
A Thing-in-Itself?
Time is not a thing-in-itself, because if it were a
thing-in-itself, it would be real, but without presenting to us a real
“object.”
Nor does time exist perfectly within things
objectively. If time were in things “…we could not discern it or
intuit it by means of a proposition a priori, ie. “outside of the
world.” In other words, if time were within things or phenomena, how
would we be able to conceive of a “before” or an “after?”
“And precisely because our internal intuition
presents to us no shape or form, we endeavour to supply this want by analogies
and represent the course of time by a line progressing to infinity,” says Kant. This line to infinity implies a sense of
only one dimension.
Kant
viewed the nature of time in a similar fashion to his understanding of the
nature of space. Image by Greudin
Philosophical
Contradictions: Kant’s Time Antinomy
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant “proved”
in one of his four famous antinomies – the term means a philosophical
contradiction – both that time had a beginning, and also, that it did not have
a beginning but was infinite.
Kant made examples of these antinomies to prove that
it can be futile to try to use reason to resolve specific, unanswerable,
metaphysical questions.
Professor Raymond Tallis explains this paradox in
the publication Philosophy Now.
Professor Tallis says:
“The world, Kant says, must have a beginning in
time, otherwise an infinite amount of time – an “eternity” as Kant called it –
would have already passed in this world – but no infinite series can be
completed. On the other hand, the world can’t have had a beginning in time,
because this would imply a period of empty time before the world came into
being, and nothing (least of all, a whole world) can come into being in empty
time, as there isn’t anything to distinguish one moment in empty time from
another.”
As Tallis says, there would not be a reason why one
moment in time should give birth to the world.
Kant’s Legacy
Although Kant’s contemporaries and his successors
claim his theories contain a few inconsistencies, they generally consider him
(quote from Jeremy Harwood, 100 Great Thinkers, 2010, Quercus, ) “…the
most influential philosopher since Aristotle.”
Kant founded an alternative system of philosophical
thinking, in claiming that the existence of knowledge is a priori to the
existence of the human mind, and this idea had great influence over his
successors.
Bertrand Russell described Immanuel Kant as a philosopher
who “appealed to the heart.”
Resources:
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. (1781).
Translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn, Pennsylvania State University, Elecronic Edition.
(2010-2013). Accessed October 6, 2013.
Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy.
(2004). Routledge Classics.
Tallis, Raymond. Did Time Begin with a Bang? (2012). Philosophy
Now, Issue 92, September/October, 2012. Accessed October 6, 2013.
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