Chapter 14

The Subjectivized Space

How often have readers of the "Critique of Pure Reason"—certainly insightful, but in our opinion never deep-reaching—felt immediate surprise that a thinker who expressly sets out to find the enabling ground of cognition places what he believes to have discovered in cognition itself?

When Nietzsche expresses in "Beyond Good and Evil" that Kant answered the question of how knowledge is possible "by means of a faculty," he is expressing, in perhaps a somewhat drastic form, the astonishment we mean.

Consider the problem: To perceive colors, I must have a visual faculty. To perceive sounds, an auditory faculty. To perceive scents, an olfactory faculty. If in such faculties the conditions are not yet present for the perceived properties to simultaneously exhibit a spatial characteristic, I am free to assume further a spatial perception faculty.

However, the condition I thus assume necessary to make perception of something extensive conceivable—be it as different from the sensory faculties as one desires—completely agrees with them in forming an indispensable side of the experiential faculty.

If I call such faculties a priori, I must call them all a priori. If I conversely dispute the a posteriori nature of experiential contents, I have not the slightest reason to exempt spatial perception from it.

Yet this is precisely what Kant does, and in the most decisive manner. Why?

We will soon hear what motivated Kant to do this. Here we are initially concerned with the fact that indicating the necessity of an experiential faculty merely describes what is already inherent in the concept of experience itself: to the "object" as the related, there is a "subject" as the relating, and to the relatable generally a capacity for relating belongs.

If I focus on all possible objects of the external world and the fact that a "modification capacity of my senses" must correspond to them, so these senses can be modified, then a "modification of sensibility" is just as much the "intuition" of space as it is the "sensation" of a color. It is no longer clear what gives space the special character of being a priori if color lacks this.

Self-contradictions of a thinker are regularly the signal that his desires came into conflict with the facts and that, to settle them, he fell prey to an exchange, either by identifying the different or by multiplying the identical.

Our preceding investigations enable us to immediately specify which exchange is in question. Kant's investigations appear to address the enabling ground of cognition, but in truth, they concern cognition itself for the purpose of separating two cognitive faculties: one only "empirical," the other supposed to guarantee universally valid and necessary truths.

He thus continues Leibniz's errant thought regarding two types of truth: truths of fact and truths of reason.

We leave aside the logical untenability of dividing judgments based on degrees of truth and merely state: Kant, in the special persuasive power inherent in "apodictic" certainties, perceives the condition of understanding in general. He does not have the reality of space in mind, but entirely only the being of space—the conceptual objectified space, or what we call the spatial object.

The stubbornly held claim of the a priori nature of spatial intuition answers—or at least believes it answers—the question of the cause of the inviolability of basic mathematical judgments. The Kantian concept of space serves from the outset to determine the sufficient reason for the cognitive necessities of geometry.

Consequently, the mind's ability to be "modified" by spatiality transforms into an ability to produce the spatial in much the same way as it produces the dividing points, lines, and figures.

But in doing so, he confuses—in a manner that, due to its extraordinary paradox, can both astonish and captivate and certainly forms the "charm" of his considerations—the alienating experience with the definitive apprehension. He confuses becoming aware of space with grasping spatial objects.

In view of the almost hypnotic effect his doctrine of the consciousness-affiliation of space has produced, it may not be superfluous to briefly repeat the reasons that compel us to unequivocally reject it.

First: If we were to carry space in our "mind,"—which is ultimately what it comes down to—we would find it nowhere else but there, because the act of finding ascertains but does not create separation. Finding something presupposes it is already separate from us. But if space were in our mind, it could never appear as external to us in the first place.

Second: We would then have made the mind, for which Kant particularly claims non-spatiality, into a spatial fact—indeed into a volume that could no longer be distinguished from a physical volume. It is the peculiarity of spatiality not to be able to be in anything that is not spatial again, and thus in turn "inside" space. That which comprehends space is always also comprehended by space.

If, on the other hand, one thinks that Kant did not place space "in" the mind but merely the condition for space to "appear" via the mind, then this—incidentally quite inconceivable—assumption also leads to the conclusion just demonstrated and thus to self-negation.

Third: We can no longer escape the circle in which one moves who believes they may use the preposition "in" for the purpose of deriving space, without noticing that they have already presupposed the derivable with it.

Only in this way does Kant manage to contrast merely temporal "mind" with the space-time thing: by allowing "sensibility" to be doubly oriented—outward and inward—or by adding an "inner sense" to the "outer sense."

Had not a millennia-long history of thought made academically meditative spirits compliant to every type of replacement of reality with concepts, it would be inexplicable that the obvious deception was overlooked even for a moment. The supposedly critical idealism bases the emergence of the contrast between space and time on the difference of two faculties whose characteristic it unmistakably borrows from that contrast.

The sentence with which Kant begins his "metaphysical discussion" of the concept of space—"By means of the external sense, we represent objects to ourselves as outside us and these altogether in space"—is an unambiguous circular argument, since externality as the distinguishing feature of a "sense" that represents them cannot be mentioned unless in regard to a spatially extended world in which said "sense" has its place.

We hardly need to add that by the destruction of the reality of the spatial, the distinction between "spontaneity" and "receptivity" becomes equally invalid. There is no mental action except in relation to past impressions, and there is certainly no impressionable receptivity without the separation which first allows a receiver and a giver to be distinguished.

Should a Kantian object that the master indeed expressed exactly this with his much-discussed antithesis—"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind"—we would emphatically note that such phrases as "empty thoughts" and "blind intuitions" belong entirely to the category of wooden iron, contradictions in terms.

Thoughts without content are not so much empty as not capable of existing at all. Intuitions without concepts, however, are indeed capable of existing, but certainly not blind. Compare the animal world, which experiences spatially without conceptualizing space.

Fourth: Although we have not yet concluded the problem of "inner" and "outer" reality, it is nevertheless allowed to anticipate at least as far as required to demonstrate the untenability of the characteristic that, according to Kant, is supposed to guarantee the concept of interiority.

"Receptions" are occurrences, and every occurrence takes place in time. Now try to present a reality that, although exposed to temporal influences which must of course originate outside of it to be experienced as "influence," is nonetheless something absolutely spaceless, and you will confirm the impossibility of the undertaking, not only in fact but even in thought.

As should have already become clear from previous explanations and will be brought to certainty in what follows, space and time stand to each other in the relation of polarity, so that neither a timeless space nor a spaceless time comes to "appearance."

By removing space from interiority, Kant has actually also removed time from it, and thus not the experiencing and solely affectable interiority, but rather the thinking interiority or consciousness is considered. However, by immersing this very consciousness in the stream of time, he suppresses the principle of life and replaces it with mind—an unavoidable consequence of his original error, the confusion of alienating experience and definitive judgment.

The name "sensuality" only serves to obscure that, in truth the mind was given the ability whose function is Kantian "intuition." The name "receptivity" obscures that the condition of the possibility of receiving—namely, space—is rather produced by the receiving "mind."

And no matter how explicitly the acceptance of the conceptuality of this space is denied, we must not be deceived into believing that exclusively the conceptualized space or the space-object constitutes the subject and motive of "transcendental aesthetics."

With this, we come to the fifth, already decisive objection, which can be briefly formulated: it is completely wrong that the objective space is one and the same with the reality itself of the space's appearance.

The space-object arises through acts of spatial limitation—through drawing boundaries, measuring distances, and constructing figures. Just as surely as the boundary of space is not space again, but something related to space, so surely can the origin of that which is already presupposed in the concept of the boundary of space not lie in the boundary-grasping mind: the boundless uniformity of spatial appearance.

Kant's "intuition ability" is the willing assistant of the mathematically inclined mind, and apart from that, nothing.

"All intuitions," he states literally, "are nothing to us and concern us not in the least if they are not taken into consciousness." His "sensibility" and "imagination" are totally powerless establishments without the "transcendental apperception," which first gives birth to a world from the formless "material" of those two.

Supported by this decisive fifth objection, we can combine our rejection with a concession, which, however, may not please the Kantians: the space that the Critique of Reason speaks of is indeed subjective. The reality of the external, which is merely to be meant through relation, does not appear at all in the "transcendental aesthetics."

The space-thing beyond time, which remains instead of real space for the penetrating ray of the comprehending spirit, is certainly nothing other than a thought-thing and a reflected self, like all the "real" things we have dealt with so extensively, and would disappear unquestionably with the disappearance of the spirits related to it.

But this reference would not have occurred at all, and there would not even have been an assumption of a space-object without the compulsion that the spirit experienced from the external reality.

The geometric space of points, lines, and figures is indeed a mental construction. But the living spatial reality through which all appearances are separated and related—this cannot be derived from consciousness.

Here we raise a question to be solved later, from which one can again derive what the choice of research direction means for the metaphysical mindset.

If both the space-object and any arbitrary thing seem to agree in the demand of the predicate of existence, then we naturally wish to know in what their fundamental difference consists.

Whatever the answer may be, it inevitably leads to different features in the experience of reality. If the space-object and existing thing are merely compelled products of objectification, we must strive to explore those character differences of the experienced compulsions through which it happens that we come once to the discovery of objective space, and another time to the discovery of the thing.

Even the most modest result in this way would at least allow us to give some account of something neither Kant nor any other epistemologist used to ask: about the necessity of the interconnections of space and time, and further about the dependency relationships of the thing to both of them.

Anyone who thinks a little into our way of thinking will find it more and more astonishing step by step why anyone ever seriously considered the consciousness-independent reality of the space-object, considering the complete unanimity over the merely conceptual existence of the figures and propositions of Euclidean geometry.

We all agree that geometric figures are mental constructions. Yet somehow this obvious truth about geometric space has been used to deny the reality of spatial experience itself—as if proving that our concepts of space are subjective somehow proves that space itself is subjective.

And it will astonish even more when one must notice that not a few, especially among Kant's most astute successors, completely see through the sameness of the space of "transcendental aesthetics" with the admitted merely abstract space of geometry, yet nonetheless regard the indisputable subjectivity of it as refuting the reality of the external.

Lotze, for example, whom we have mentioned several times above, begins his excellent discussion on the nature of space with the refutation of all reasons that Kant claimed to have provided for the a priori nature of spatial intuition. He will not tire of illuminating the absurdity into which we inevitably fall as soon as we take mathematical points and lines as something independent of consciousness.

But instead of concluding from this that real space—without which it would be completely incomprehensible how one comes to the idea of points and lines—cannot be grasped with such constructions, he falls into the same error concerning their cause as the Eleatics fell into regarding the reality of motion, and incomprehensibly claims to have made up for the proof that Kant still missed: that it is not we who are in space, but space in us.

The pattern repeats: from the correct insight that our concepts of space are mental constructions, to the catastrophically wrong conclusion that spatial reality itself is therefore subjective.

But we remember that one not only seriously believed and believes such nonsense, but even considered it proven ,and moreover with the help of reasons, each of which seemed perfectly suitable to us to ensure the opposite—that is something incomprehensible only for those who have stopped confusing spirit with soul, thinking with experience, the ever-occurring reality with eventless being.

Whoever suppresses the soul, the experience, the reality from the outset will notice nothing of those difficulties, but will have exchanged it for the conviction of the provability of a fact which becomes a kind of madness when measured against its own peculiar sense of reality.

Kant's entire enterprise rests on the confusion of the alienating experience—through which we become aware of spatial reality—with the definitive judgment—through which we grasp the spatial object.

The space of geometry is indeed subjective, a construction of mind. But the reality of spatial appearance, the boundless uniformity of extension through which all things are separated and related, cannot be derived from consciousness. It is the experienced medium in which life and appearance meet, and without it, there would be no possibility of objectification at all.

The Kantian error is thus the supreme form of the error we have traced throughout: the replacement of life with mind, the substitution of experienced reality with thought-objects, the denial of soul in favor of spirit. What begins as an attempt to ground mathematical necessity ends as the denial of the spatial reality we actually experience—the living extensiveness in which we move, breathe, and encounter the world.