Esthetics transcendantale

See also: Esthetic (homonymy)

At Kant, the esthetic transcendantale is the study of the forms A priori of the sensiblility, namely the space and the Temps. “Esthetic transcendantale” is the name of the first started from the Critique of the pure reason .

The term of esthetics comes from the Greek aesthesis who meant theory of the sensitive one. Kant thus will make the study in this part of the sensitivity, which it defines as faculty to receive from the representations of the material objects which affect to us. The understanding is defined by contrast as the faculty of the concepts which enables us to think these objects; its study will consist not in an esthetics but in a logic (see logical transcendantale). Esthetics will be known as transcendantale because she claims to make the study a priori only principles of the sensitivity. The thesis of Kant is indeed that there exists a framework a priori in which the objects are originally given to us and who allows their representation. It is what Kant names the pure intuition (i.e. a priori and not interfered experiment). According to him, even if one takes from an object all his external characteristics (its color, its hardness, its divisibility), there remains about it always something: the extent and the figure, which constitute the pure shape of an object, independent of any experiment, of any feeling. Kant consequently will try to show that there exists a framework a priori of the intuition, which it names sensitivity the forms a priori, space and time. The existence of these pure forms of the intuition would be a requirement, for Kant, with the possibility of constitution of summary knowledges a priori by the subject.

Kant then will affirm that space and time are many forms a priori which hold " with the subjective constitution of our esprit" and not of the " beings réels" autonomous and heterogeneous with the activity of human knowledge. He postulates by là-même the ideality transcendantale space and time: those are only of pure forms which condition nevertheless the empiricity of the objects.

Kant establishes a major distinction between space and time:

1) Space conditions according to him our representation of the external objects, placed " out of nous". It thus constitutes the external direction.

2) Time as for him is the means by which the spirit intuitionne itself. It constitutes the internal direction.

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