42 Immanuel Kant, Experience, and Reality
Kant: Experience and Reality
Analogies of Experience
So Kant maintained that we are justified in applying the concepts of the understanding to the world as we know it by making a priori determinations of the nature of any possible experience. In order to see how this works in greater detail, let’s concentrate on the concepts of relation, which govern how we understand the world in time. As applied in the Analogies of Experience, each concept of relation establishes one of the preconditions of experience under one of the modes of time: duration, succession, and simultaneity.
1. Substance: The experience of any change requires not only the perception of the altered qualities that constitute the change but also the concept of an underlying substance which persists through this alteration. (E.g., in order to know by experience that the classroom wall has changed in color from blue to yellow, I must not only perceive the different colors—blue then, yellow now—but also suppose that the wall itself has endured from then until now.) Thus, Kant supposed that the philosophical concept of substance (reflected in the scientific assumption of an external world of material objects) is an a priori condition for our experience.
2. Cause: What is more, the experience of events requires not only awareness of their intrinsic features but also that they be regarded as occurring one after another, in an invariable regularity determined by the concept of causality. (E.g., in order to experience the flowering of this azalea as an event, I must not only perceive the blossoms as they now appear but must also regard them as merely the present consequence of a succession of prior organic developments.) Thus, Kant responded to Hume’s skepticism by maintaining that the concept of cause is one of the synthetic conditions we determine for ourselves prior to all experience.
3. Community: Finally, the experience of a world of coexisting things requires not only the experiences of each individually but also the presumption of their mutual interaction. (E.g., in order believe that the Sun, Earth, and Moon coexist in a common solar system, I must not only make some estimate of the mass of each but must also take into account the reciprocity of the gravitational forces between them.) Thus, on Kant’s view, the notion of the natural world as a closed system of reciprocal forces is another a priori condition for the intelligibility of experience.
Notice again that these features of nature are not generalized from anything we have already experienced; they are regulative principles that we impose in advance on everything we can experience. We are justified in doing so, Kant believed, because only the pure concepts of the understanding can provide the required connections to establish synthetic a priori judgments. Unless these concepts are systematically applied to the sensory manifold, the unity of apperception cannot be achieved, and no experie