Kant and Einstein

Kant

Kant taught the ideality of space and time.

This can be neither verified nor falsified.

but it does not lose interest on this account (rather it gains; if it could be proved or disproved it would be trivial). The meaning is that, to be spread out in space and to happen in a well-defined temporal order of ‘before and after’ is not a quality of the world that we perceive, but pertains to the perceiving mind which, in its present situation anyhow, cannot help registering anything that is offered to it according to these two card-indexes, space and time.

It does not mean that the mind comprehends these order-schemes irrespective of, and before, any experience, but that it cannot help developing them and applying them to experience when this comes along, and particularly that this fact does not prove or suggest space and time to be an order-scheme inherent in that ’thing-in-itself which, as some believe, causes our experience.

This is hum bug. No single man can make a distinction between the realm of his perceptions and the realm of things that cause it since, however detailed the knowledge he may have acquired about the whole story, the story is occurring only once not twice. The duplication is an allegory, suggested mainly by commu- nication with other human beings and even with animals; which shows that their perceptions in the same situation seem to be very similar to his own apart from insignificant differ- ences in the point of view - in the literal meaning of ‘point of projection’.

But even supposing that this compels us to consider an objectively existing world the cause of our perceptions, as most people do, how on earth shall we decide that a common feature of all our experience is due to the constitution of our mind rather than a quality shared by all those objectively existing things? Admittedly our sense perceptions constitute our sole knowledge about things.

This objective world remains a hypothesis, however natural. If we do adopt it, is it not by far the most natural thing to ascribe to that external world, and not to ourselves, all the characteristics that our sense perceptions find in it?

However, the supreme importance of Kant’s statement does not consist in justly distributing the roles of the mind and its object - the world - between them in the process of ‘mind forming an idea of the world’, because, as I just pointed out, it is hardly possible to discriminate the two.

The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing - mind or world - may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time.

This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant. This liberation opens the way to belief, in the religious sense, without running all the time against the clear results which experience about the world as we know it and plain thought unmistakably pronounce.

For instance - to speak of the most momentous example - experience as we know it unmistakably obtrudes the conviction that it cannot survive the destruction of the body, with whose life, as we know life, it is inseparably bound up.

So is there nothing after this life?

No. Not in the way of experience as we know it necessarily to take place in space and time.

But, in an order of appearance in which time plays no part, this notion of ‘after’ is meaningless.

Pure thinking cannot procure us a guarantee that there is that sort of thing.

But it can remove the apparent obstacles to conceiving it as possible. That is what Kant has done by his analysis, and that, to my mind, is his philosophical importance.

Einstein

Kant’s attitude towards science was incredibly naIve, as you will agree if you turn the leaves of his Metaphysical Foundations oj Science (Metaphysische AnJangsgriinde der Naturwissenschaft).

He accepted physical science in the form it had reached during his lifetime (1724-1804) as something more or less final and he busied himself to account for its statements philosophically.

This happening to a great genius ought to be a warning to philosophers ever after. He would show plainly that space was necessarily infinite and believed firmly that it was in the nature of the human mind to endow it with the geometrical properties summarized by Euclid. In this Euclidean space a mollusc of matter moved, that is, changed its configuration as time went on.

To Kant, as to any physicist of his period, space and time were two entirely different conceptions, so he had no qualms in calling the former the form of our external intuition, and time the form of our internal intuition (Anschauung).

The recognition that Euclid’s infinite space is not a necessary way of looking at the world of our experience and that space and time are better looked upon as one continuum of four dimensions seemed to shatter Kant’s foundation - but actually did no harm to the more valuable part of his philosophy.

This recognition was left to Einstein (and several others, H. A. Lorentz, Poincare, Minkowski, for example).

The mighty impact of their discoveries on philosophers, men-in- the-street, and ladies in the drawing-room is due to the fact that they brought it to the fore: even in the domain of our experience the spatio-temporal relations are much more intricate than Kant dreamed them to be, following in this all previous physicists, men-in-the-street and ladies in the drawing-room.