Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant's Schemata - Using Intuitions To Substantiate Concepts

Using Intuitions To Substantiate Concepts

Kant wrote that "To demonstrate the reality of our concepts, intuitions are required." Since empirical concepts are derived from perceptions, examples of the intuitive perceptions can be used to verify the concept. Kant asserted that pure concepts, or categories of the understanding, can also be verified by inspecting their intuitions or schemata. "If the concepts are empirical, the intuitions are called examples: if they are pure concepts of the understanding, the intuitions are called schemata." Schopenhauer described the use of examples in the following way:

Thus, since he aimed at finding for every empirical function of the faculty of knowledge an analogous a priori function, he remarked that, between our empirical perceiving and our empirical thinking, carried out in abstract non–perceptible concepts, a connection very frequently, though not always, takes place, since every now and then we attempt to go back from abstract thinking to perceiving. We attempt this, however, merely to convince ourselves that our abstract thinking has not strayed far from the safe ground of perception, and has possibly become somewhat high–flown or even a mere idle display of words, much in the same way as, when walking in the dark, we stretch out our hand every now and then to the wall that guides us. We then go back to perception only tentatively and for a moment, by calling up in imagination a perception corresponding to the concept that occupies us at the moment, a perception which yet can never be quite adequate to the concept, but is a mere representative of it for the time being.

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