On The Ambiguous Origin of Time- a Crack into Immanuel Kant’s Epistemology in The Critique of Pure Reason
Authors: Ngoa Kodena François 
Published: September 2024

In his transcendental analysis of the concept of time, Immanuel Kant holds the problematic view that time is not an empirical concept. In other words, time is not engendered by “experience,” but rather conditions the latter. Assuming this statement to be true, would time then be the most universal intuition imposing its magnitude on the mind? That is the critical question examined in this contribution. I start by looking at the historical context of Kant’s theory of time. I then proceed by examining the status of experience in the genesis of time. In a third moment I turn to the role of the mind in the emergence of time. This point leads me to the so-called Copernican Revolution in Kant’s epistemology. Finally, I endeavor to show that Kant’s exploration of time is an image of his general theory of knowledge, which appears as a constant oscillation between intuitions and concepts. A transcendental analysis of time leads the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to the following problematic assertion: “time is not an empirical concept.” This negative definition of time in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” can be interpreted in at least two different ways, raising different types of problems. First, to attempt a definition of time is to situate the latter within the horizon on the thinking subject. In this context, time would be the construct of her/his mind. It is the “inner state” of the mind which produces time, making it the “a priori formal condition of all appearances in general.” Obviously, there is a kind of purity here surrounding time such that one cannot but wonder about Kant’s motivations for seemingly preserving time from the stain of experience. Why is Kant suspicious of experience in his definition of time? If he keeps it aloof, there is certainly a history that informs his distrust of the empirical realm as the source of knowledge. He accepts the general Humean point that knowledge cannot be a-posteriori and, therefore, cannot emerge from experience. In a word, the progenitor of time would then be the subject. If such were the case, Kant would line up with the subjectivist and the idealist traditions retrospectively rooted in René Descartes and Plato. Secondly, the “not” in Kant’s definition (“time is not an empirical concept”) appears as a call for the avoidance of a “reality” (matter) that cannot be erased when dealing with time. In other words, if Kant mentions experience, this may be due to the stubbornness of the latter to resist erasure when dealing with time. But is the fact of being called or identified as “experience” not an indirect way of acknowledging its tremendous input in the advent and the survival of time? Put bluntly, can time be totally disconnected and removed from phenomenological and objective conditions? Assuming the response to be positive, the following quote would not support such strong and radical abstraction, since Kant nuances his position in declaring that time is “a pure form of sensible intuition.” And since intuition indicates the receptive character of the mind, that is the way the said mind is affected by spatial objects, it would suggest that experience is the immediate progenitor of time. Kant, of course, contends that time is not engendered by experience but is rather its condition. The affection of the mind certainly expresses its passivity as the active external objects somehow “act” on it. Would time then rather be the most universal intuition imposing its magnitude on the mind? This is the ambiguity that I explore in this chapter. I will begin by looking at the historical context of Kant’s theory of time. Afterwards I will proceed by examining the status of experience in the genesis of time. In a third moment I will turn to the role of the mind in the emergence of time. This point will lead me to the so-called Copernican Revolution in Kant’s epistemology. Finally, I will attempt to show that Kant’s analysis of time is an image of his general theory of knowledge, which appears as a constant oscillation between intuitions and concepts.