Universality and Particularity in Kant's Transcendental Idealism

Kant deems that time and space are the elements that depend on the mind; moreover, he says that some physical objects exist independently of the mind. Thus, there are differences between ideas and objects. Descartes and Lock are the philosophers who are enthusiastic about how to draw some references to one object from another. Kant took after Descartes' and Locks' ideas to think that appearances are the representations that the mind impacts on physical objects but not on the objects themselves. Thus, all the facts about space and time and the objects in this frame can be conceived only when they appear in front of the intellectual mind. Actually, Kant's transcendental idealism should be considered as empirical idealism because he has imposed a space and time which he calls an intuition method for which we can take a look at. By looking at this frame, we are using our sensible perceptions, and this makes his theory become an empirical theory.


Now if this intellectual mind is an individual then it will lead us to a denial that there is not a common time and space frame in any unified world. Kant's picture will give us a single object plus a number of many different individual minds in which they are similar to Leibniz's monads. If each object appears in front of an individual subject in a different event of a different space and time frame then what is the connection in which all individual minds have to one another? For some critics, they have a common connection in space since the space frame acts like the Cartesian coordinate system that can apply to all physical objects, but for me time is not a common frame since each individual mind live in a different time frame in the chronology of history. A person who lives in the modern era will have a different viewpoint than the viewpoint of a person who lives in the classical era. However, if we find that John Lock has a persuasive theory then we can sponsor his viewpoints about the main and the auxiliary qualities of material objects. It is not because that they have many characteristics that we cannot conceive except when we use the scientific tool to conceive but it is because of our own sensible agents that make them appear in front of us with different colors,different tastes and sounds which all of these object do not possess in their instrinsic nature. To call the whole physical world in term of transendental idealism we must talk about the mutual difference between the appearance of the things-in-themselves according to each empirical subject since each individual can make a difference. Any idea that is presented by each individual will be impacted with the label "empirical" which is a representation or a description or an activity of the subjects who are perceiving the physical objects and it is these activities that will produce a physical world in which those individuals exist.


When there is no sun's light our eyes will not perceive colors, so the objects that we see will be blocked with a black color although they have their own colors; the sun's light is a representation that makes our brain change and makes us have a distorted perception. A black color has two different qualities, one primary quality and one secondary quality, but in the above example, black color is a production that exists independent of the mind. A black color in the dark or in the light still has a black color while a green color in the dark will become black color and under the light will have a green color, and this is an example of the particularity of idealism. Black color has another different meaning; i.e., it is an empty set in which it does not contain anything including the sun's light; thus, empty space means black color and all physical objects that have black color are perceived the same as with black color by the mind. Thus, according to the mind, the empty space and the objects that have black color have one similar quality while the truth is that they have different qualities in each of them; and this is an example of the universality of idealism.


The third circumstance that can show the universality and particularity of Kant's space and time is that he says that taste and color are not the necessary conditions under which the objects themselves become our sensible object; they are connected with the forms as the effects accidentally added by the construction of our sensible agents. Thus, they are not a priori representations but they are only our basic senses. In another word, there is not any color or any space that can characterize what a subject can understand in its natural instinct. They characterize an object only when this object appears in front of a subject. However, space is a part of the form which must be imposed by a subject and so it can be understood as a priori knowledge. In contrast, color is a part of a sensible agent; thus, it is nothing but the material that is imposed by a subject and is an accident appearance in the construction of a subject that can be altered in different ways from one subject to another. Space and time are the general manner in which physcial objects can be appeared as having the same characteristics while color is the manner in which the objects appear as accidents. Kant accepts that all objects except human beings may not have sensible forms and so may not perceive as the objects in space; thus, if each individual among us has this sensible agent then it may be necessary that objects appear to each of us without space. In both cases, the necessity is that if a subject is an experience subject who has certain laws then everything will appear to him or her in the general manner that are applicable by those laws and each individual mind that imposes a space that is something that each mind can possess the same way then all the different minds will be similar to this are in which all our agreements about space will be a ridiculous fact as to the case in which all of us perceive colors in the same way. Kant obviously wants to say that an object of experience appears necessarily as having a space characteristic and does not appear necessarily as having a color characteristic.