Part 1 — THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC SECTION II TIME METAPHYSICAL EXPOSITION OF THE CONCEPTION OF TIME (continued 2)

“The mistake ... lies in employing the understanding contrary to its vocation transcendentally [i.e. transcendently] and in making objects, i.e. possible intuitions, conform to concepts, not concepts to possible intuitions, on which alone their objective validity rests.”[633]

The question why no mention of this argument is made in the second edition of the Critique is therefore answered. Kant had meantime, in the interval between 1783 and 1787,[634] become aware of the inconsistency of the position. So far from being a paradox, this assumed conflict rests upon a false view of the function of the understanding.[635] The relevant facts may serve to confirm the view of space as an intuition in which the whole precedes the parts;[636] but they can afford no evidence either of its absoluteness or of its ideality. In 1768 they seem to Kant to prove its absoluteness, only because the other alternative has not yet occurred to him. In 1783 they seem to him to prove its ideality, only because he has not yet completely succeeded in emancipating his thinking from the dogmatic rationalism of the Dissertation.

As already noted,[637] Kant’s reason for here asserting that space is intuitive in nature, namely, that in it the parts are conditioned by the whole, is also his reason for elsewhere describing it as an Idea of Reason. The further implication of the argument of the Prolegomena, that in the noumenal sphere the whole is made possible only by its unconditioned parts, raises questions the discussion of which must be deferred. The problem recurs in the Dialectic in connection with Kant’s definition of the Idea of the unconditioned. In the Ideas of Reason Kant comes to recognise the existence of concepts which do not conform to the reflective type analysed by the traditional logic, and to perceive that these Ideas can yield a deeper insight than any possible to the discursive understanding. The above rationalistic assumption must not, therefore, pass unchallenged. It may be that in the noumenal sphere all partial realities are conditioned by an unconditioned whole.

Concluding Paragraph.[638]—The wording of this paragraph is in keeping with the increased emphasis which in the Introduction to the second edition is given to the problem, how a priori synthetic judgments are possible. Kant characteristically fails to distinguish between the problems of pure and applied mathematics, with resulting inconsecutiveness in his argumentation.