From Pure Intuitions To Pure Concepts
Schopenhauer claimed that Kant had made an important discovery. This was his realization that time and space are known by the human mind (Gemüt) apart from any worldly experience. In fact, they are merely the ways that the mind organizes sensations. Succession is time. Position, shape, and size are space. The pure forms of time and space are the basis of the perceptions that constitute experience of objects in the external world.
According to Schopenhauer's psychological hypothesis, Kant "… aimed at finding for every empirical function of the faculty of knowledge an analogous a priori function … ." Kant's tacit reasoning was similar to the following: "If pure intuition is the foundation of empirical intuition, then pure concepts are the foundation of empirical concepts." From this symmetrical analogy, Kant claimed that the human mind has a pure understanding, just as he had previously claimed that the mind has a pure sensibility. This pure understanding, according to Kant, consists of pure concepts or categories which allow the mind to discursively think about the objects that are intuitively perceived as being arranged in time and space.
Read more about this topic: Schopenhauer's Criticism Of Kant's Schemata
Famous quotes containing the words pure, intuitions and/or concepts:
“What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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