Kant on Time

Letizia Nonnis unfolds Kant’'s conception of the nature of and experience of time.

- LETIZIA NONNIS

One of the most influential accounts of time in the West is the one produced by Immanuel Kant (17241804). It is my intention here to explore Kant's concept of time, especially the way it is bound up with language. This does not mean that I will reduce the problem of time to a mere matter of language, but I do want to demonstrate that language plays a crucial role in respect to time. To do this I will look at Kant's 1781 blockbuster The Critique of Pure Reason and in particular at the section entitled 'The Transcendental Aesthetic'. Although Kant doesn't spend many words on time, reducing the argument to a footnote at the end of the chapter, the argument is very close to the one he employs with regard to space. But even if one argues that time and space are asymmetrical with respect to the senses - time is part of the 'inner sense', and space is an aspect of the 'outer sense' - time alone is not sufficient to render our experience ordered and comprehensible.

I will argue that the concepts of past, present, and future are not essential to the nature of time as Kant sees it. The idea is that the distinction between future and past - integral to our sense of the flow of time - is inextricably conceptual, and as such does not belong to the sensory elements of our experience, but is thereby inextricably bound to language.

All this needs a little explanation.

The Language of Experience