Spatial Time: The Unity of Two Kantian Forms of Intuition

The First Critique’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” discussing the contribution of sensuous cognition to our knowledge, apparently distinguishes and separates the form of the internal sense, time, from the form of external sense, space. Both forms are of our intuition, the reception and order of data, which make a cognitive manifold. Nevertheless, time is the successive order of one perception after the other or of one perception before the other in a manifold structured in an irreversible order, whereas space orders its manifold one beside the other or one over or under the other, which is reversible. Yet, CrV B50, for instance, argues that all temporal relationships, except for the irreversibility or temporal arrow, can be expressed in spatial images. I show that besides the temporal schematism of the intellectual categories and in addition to it, the bridge between our temporal form of sensuous intuition and the categories of our intellect, there is a spatial schematism which functions in a similar way. Following Bergson, I, too, think that Kant’s image of time is spatial and the actual image of time that the “Transcendental Aesthetic” presents is a spatial one. Such an image has served natural sciences, and, therefore, Einstein considered time as the fourth dimension of space. There are also Kantian grounds concerning rational systematization and the unity of our reason that justify the variation, reconstruction, or revision that is named “spatial time.”