Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy

By Malcolm Torry

Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy is what it says it is. The book asks how we might understand the writings of a number of continental philosophers actologically: that is, with reality understood as action in changing patterns rather than as beings that change. It also asks how the different continental philosophies might enable us to develop an actology: an understanding of reality as action in changing patterns. The philosophers whom we study are Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. A whole new way of understanding reality casts new light on their philosophies and raises and answers some significant new questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jan 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666798579

Malcolm Torry

Malcolm Torry is a priest in the Church of England who for thirty-four years served in full-time posts in South London parishes and is now priest in charge of St Mary Abchurch in the City of London. Since 1984, Torry has been heavily engaged in the global basic income debate and has published numerous books, chapters, and articles on basic income, and also on religious and faith-based organizations.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The actological action in changing patterns lens through which I here read texts written by a number of philosophers from the continent of Europe has evolved during the past forty years, beginning with a paper that the late David Edwards, then Provost of Southwark Cathedral, invited me to present at a meeting of a theological society. The idea then took further shape in a sabbatical essay that Robin Gill, then Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent, and David Atkinson, then Canon Missioner in the Diocese of Southwark, and subsequently Archdeacon of Lewisham and Bishop of Thetford, both read, and on which they offered valuable comment. I then extracted from the essay five articles that Bill Jacob, then Archdeacon of Charing Cross, published in Theology, of which he was the editor.¹ In 2014 I retired early from full-time parochial ministry in order to give to the Basic Income debate the time that it needed, and also to return to philosophical and theological study, in relation to which I wrote a Master of Philosophy thesis on action, change and diversity in the western philosophical tradition, which then became Actology: Action, change and diversity in the western philosophical tradition, published by Wipf and Stock in 2020.² I am most grateful to all of the above, and particularly to my two M.Phil. supervisors, Professors George Newlands and Simon Oliver.

Mark’s Gospel has been a constant and welcome companion throughout many decades of Christian faith and more than forty years of ordained ministry in the Church of England, so a natural next step was to write Mark’s Gospel: An actological reading.³ This reads the text through the lens of an understanding of reality as action, change and diversity, and so understands God, Jesus, ourselves and everything else in that light.

As well as those named above, numerous individuals have contributed to the development of the ideas to be found in Actology and Mark’s Gospel: An actological reading by their willingness to discuss them with me. There are too many to mention all of them, but particularly significant contributions have been made at various stages by Dr. Martin Cressey, Canon John Byrom, Professor Stephen Sykes, the Rev’d James Bogle, Mr. Renford Bambrough, the Rev’d Jed Davis, chaplains of the South London Industrial Mission, members of the congregations of St. Catherine’s, Hatcham, St. George’s, Westcombe Park, and Holy Trinity, Greenwich Peninsula, and participants in seminars held in relation to the Archbishop’s Examination in Theology. I am more than grateful to those who made possible several periods of study leave of varying lengths: staff members and officers of the parishes that I have served for their willingness to shoulder additional burdens; Bishops of Woolwich for permissions to take sabbaticals; and St. John’s College, Cambridge, for hospitality for varying lengths of time during the past forty years.

Actology: Action, change and diversity in the western philosophical tradition, studies philosophers from Heraclitus to Wittgenstein and John Boys Smith in order to discover the thin action, change and diversity stream running through western philosophy, as opposed to the being, unchanging and unitary river that has dominated it for two and a half thousand years. During my preparation of the MPhil thesis on which the book was based, and as I wrote the book, I identified a significant knowledge gap, and so have now undertaken a taught MA course in Continental Philosophy with Staffordshire University. It is on work undertaken during that course that the current book is based. The course constituted the most challenging intellectual task that I have ever undertaken, and I am most grateful to Professor David Webb and Drs. Bill Ross and Patrick O’Connor for the commitment and expertise that they brought to the educational experience, and to the voluminous and sometimes vociferous online discussions with other students both during the taught modules and during the associated student-led reading groups. It is a great sadness that Bill Ross died suddenly in August 2022 and so was unable to receive a copy of this book as a thank-you gift. His death was a personal sadness because he had been enthusiastic about assisting me with the next stage of my actological explorations, and I was very much looking forward to continuing to work with him on the material of the new taught module on cosmology in which he had invited me to participate as a guest. Now we won’t be able to do that.

I am grateful to Wipf and Stock for offering me a series of my own, Actological Explorations, of which this is now the third volume, and for the encouragement and expertise that they have brought to the publishing process.

I am of course constantly grateful to my wife Rebecca and children Christopher, Nicholas, and Jay, for putting up with my various study and writing projects.

1

. Torry, Action, Patterns and Religious Pluralism; A Neglected Theologian; ‘Logic’ and ‘Action’; On Completing the Apologetic Spectrum; Testing Torry’s model.

2

. Torry, Actology.

3

. Torry, Mark’s Gospel.

Introduction

There is a sense in which this book, Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy, is a sequel to Actology: Action, change and diversity in the western philosophical tradition. That first volume surveyed the thin action, change and diversity stream running through western philosophy from Heraclitus and Parmenides, through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Marx, Blondel, Bergson, Iqbal, Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, and the process philosophers, to Studdert Kennedy, Wittgenstein, and John Boys Smith. As we studied those philosophers we discovered that Parmenides’ poem, like Heraclitus’s fragments, can best be understood at the change end of the change/unchanging spectrum, and on the diversity side of the diversity/unity distinction, and that it can speak of both Action and Being, both actions and beings, both change and the unchanging, both diversity and unity. Hesiod’s chaotic action is the primary reality, and order is secondary.

We then recognized that if Plato had added verb-based universals to his noun-based ones then he would have been able to understand the whole of reality as belonging on both sides of the Action/Being distinction; and that if Aristotle had understood that just as there is no motion without things, there are no things without action, then there would have been no God without enérgeia. For Aquinas to have understood "in actu as in action as well as in actuality" would have led in the same direction. Already in these early philosophers we had found the building-blocks of an actology.

In Hegel we found a Geist-shaped dialectic, and in Marx a social and economic one. There is evolutionary change everywhere, with the action in dialectical patterns and driven by an end-point that is itself action in patterns, although we recognized that the dialectic itself does not appear to change. And then in Blondel’s Action we found a true universal, a Platonic Form, a category in which all action belongs and that we can understand as itself constituted by change. For Blondel, Being is Action, so here we found an action-based conceptual structure that is unique in its consistency and breadth, and measured against which Bergson’s attempt at a metaphysic constituted by movement and change appears rather less consistent.

When we studied Teilhard de Chardin’s texts we had to cease writing separate paragraphs about philosophy and theology, as we had been able to do up until then, because here they were intimately related to each other: or rather, they constantly related to each other in the most intimate way. Here we encountered a theocosmology that encompasses everything (or rather, every action) within a single evolutionary process, although for true consistency the Omega Point on which reality converges ought to have been understood as constantly changing patterns of action propelling all reality towards itself.

We found in Whitehead’s process philosophy a conceptual structure that retains some rather undynamic elements and a God to match, whereas in Studdert Kennedy’s poetry we found a God enmeshed in the ubiquitous suffering action of the world. In Wittgenstein we found language embedded in the rest of a constantly changing reality so that meaning is actions in patterns, and in John Boys Smith we found a ubiquitous evolving evolution. Everything, or rather every action, and every bundle of actions in patterns that we experience as a relatively stable reality of some kind, is action in changing patterns, with its source in Action: so that what actions in patterns, and action in changing patterns mean changes along with everything else. There is nowhere that we can stand to survey the shifting landscape.

So in the early Greek philosophers and Aquinas we have found the building blocks for an action-in-patterns metaphysic; in Hegel and Marx we have found an understanding of history as actions in patterns if we can understand dialectic as a changing pattern of actions; in Blondel, we have found reality understood in terms of action; in Bergson we have found aspects of reality understood in a similar way; Teilhard de Chardin invites us to contemplate God and the cosmos in terms of actions in patterns; Whitehead and the other process theologians invite a more consistent treatment of reality as action in changing patterns than they achieved themselves; in Studdert Kennedy we have found a suffering God active in amongst the world’s suffering; in Wittgenstein we have found language understood in terms of actions in changing patterns; and John Boys Smith invites an understanding of changing patterns of changing language.

It is these conclusions reached in Actology: Action, change and diversity in the western philosophical traditions that constitute the lens through which I have read Mark’s Gospel in the second book of this series; and it is through that same lens that we shall now read a number of continental philosophers: Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. The selection is a purely pragmatic one: these are the philosophers studied during the modules of the master’s degree in continental philosophy that I completed in 2022 and during the student-led discussion groups that we ran during the two summer breaks. Readers will discover that some of this book’s chapters are close readings of one or two texts by a particular author, while others take a broader approach to a philosopher’s oeuvre. This reflects the different origins of the chapters, with those representing a broader approach starting life as essays written during the taught modules, and the close readings emerging from the discussion groups.

There are of course other philosophers who might have been studied in relation to our actology. Particularly relevant would be Jean-Luc Marion’s understanding of the action of giving, so readers might encounter his philosophy in a future volume.

The overall purpose of this book is to understand the philosophies of a variety of authors through an actological lens, and to ask what those authors might contribute to the construction of an actology: an understanding of reality as action, change, and diversity. The reader will have to judge whether this dual purpose has been fulfilled.

1

Does Immanuel Kant need an additional category and maybe an additional regulative principle as well?

Introduction

This chapter will discuss the project that Kant carries out in his Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter "Critique")¹ and will ask how action, and the related terms of motion and change, fit into it, in order to answer the question Does Kant need an additional category, and perhaps an additional regulative principle?.

Kant’s project

For the sake of brevity, we shall not stray beyond the boundary of the Critique of Pure Reason into the Critique of Practical Reason, nor into the other works in which Kant reflects on human action; and neither shall we stray into his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, or other scientific works, except to mention that in them can be found discussion of the motion of matter. We shall not discuss in detail some of the complexities relating to Kant’s use of terms, nor much of the detail of the argument, and neither shall we be able to explore in any depth the historical context, except to say that Kant’s Critique was largely an attempt to resolve the conflict between the twin trends of the philosophy of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism, represented for Kant by David Hume, insisted that only what we can experience with our senses can result in knowledge, and rationalism, represented by Christian Wolff’s interpretation of Leibniz’s philosophy, sought knowledge by arguing on the basis of what appeared to be necessary ideas.² As we shall see, Kant’s project makes positive use of both approaches and successfully reconciles them, while avoiding the rationalist determinism of Leibniz and some of the followers of Spinoza.³

What we shall do here is provide a general overview of the understanding that Kant sought of the process by which we gain knowledge so that he could ask about the possibility of metaphysics.⁴ This will enable us to ask about the place of action, motion, and change within the project, and the place that they might occupy within it.

Kant’s stated aim was to conduct

the critique of our power of reason as such, in regard to all cognitions after which reason may strive independently of all experience. Hence I mean by it the decision as to whether a metaphysics as such is possible or impossible.⁵

The first task was to study the use of reason when dependent on experience. We receive intuitions of objects, outer intuitions, by the mind’s being affected by the object in a certain manner,⁶ which is sensation; and the result is appearances, with the matter of each appearance given by sensation, and the form being the ordering of the appearance into a manifold ready to be synthesized into cognition: that is, knowledge that provides us with experience. Everything presented to the mind is a presentation; and as well as the presentations resulting from outer intuitions, there are presentations to which no sensation contributes, which Kant terms pure or transcendental. Among such pure presentations are the pure forms of the sensible intuitions available in the mind a priori (logically prior to experience) rather than a posteriori (as a result of experience).⁷ In the Transcendental Aesthetic, space and time are treated as forms that the mind has to give to intuitions if they are to be presented as manifolds: networks of intuitions related to each other in space and time.⁸

Space is not an empirical concept that has been abstracted from outer experiences. For the presentation of space must already lie at the basis in order for certain sensations to be referred to something outside me (i.e., referred to something in a location of space other than the location in which I am).⁹

Time is not an empirical concept that has been abstracted from any experience. For simultaneity or succession would not even enter our perception if the presentation of time did not underlie them a priori. Only on the presupposition of this presentation can we present this and that as being at one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (sequentially).¹⁰

Space and time are transcendental in the sense that they are necessary conditions not given by experience, and they are a priori intuitions and not concepts because there is only one space into which parts fit, and only one time into which parts fit, whereas concepts encompass multiple examples (the concept of a horse encompasses multiple horses).¹¹ Salomon Maimon, writing in 1789, resisted this conclusion, and placed space and time among the a priori concepts on the basis that they function in the same way as other such concepts, and that the one space and the one time can be seen as syntheses of intuitions of individual spatial and temporal relations,¹² which themselves rely on diversity as a necessary condition of the possibility of intuition:¹³ but however we decide in this dispute, Kant has found a legitimate and distinctive exercise of pure reason: the provision of the pure forms of space and time as transcendental and necessary conditions for experience.

Then, in the Transcendental Analytic, Kant asks how the mind processes the manifolds towards cognition. The first edition of the Critique contains a detailed description of a staged process. After the manifold has been gone through and gathered together into a unity of intuition by an act called the synthesis of apprehension,¹⁴ different presentations are then associated with each other by a pure transcendental synthesis of imagination by which a previous presentation is reproduced and then associated with another presentation, and so on.¹⁵ Then follows recognition in the concept: that is, concepts, or rules, are applied to the now apprehended and associated intuitions to determine them as something in particular, and thereby deliver cognition. And so, for instance,

the concept of body serves, in terms of the unity of the manifold thought through this concept, as a rule for our cognition of external appearances.¹⁶

A consequence of this process, and necessarily underlying it, is what we might think of as a deeper necessary condition: a

unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of all our intuitions; and hence a transcendental basis also of the concepts of objects as such, and consequently also of all objects of experience.¹⁷

This necessary condition Kant calls the transcendental unity of apperception,¹⁸ in which

the original and necessary consciousness of one’s own identity is at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts—these concepts being rules that not only make these appearances necessarily reproducible, but that thereby also determine an object for our intuition of these appearances, i.e., determine a concept of something wherein these appearances necessarily cohere.¹⁹

The unity of the mind is not an empirical reality (as empiricists such as David Hume correctly recognized), but it is a necessary condition for cognition to occur: for only if we have unified minds can we associate presentations with each other and recognize them with the concepts in our minds in order to have knowledge of anything at all.²⁰

When Kant turns his attention to the concepts that we find in our minds, he finds two kinds. Concepts such as horse, house, and so on, are contingent in the sense that there might not be any horses or houses, and they are a posteriori in the sense that they are given by experience as well as enabling experience to take place. However, there are also concepts, pure concepts of understanding, that are a priori and necessary. These categories, which are similar in function to Aristotle’s,

underlie all formal unity in the synthesis of imagination, and, by means of this synthesis, underlie also the formal unity of all empirical use of the imagination down to the appearances (i.e., use in recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension) . . . Hence the order and regularity in the appearances that we call nature are brought into them by ourselves; nor indeed could such order and regularity be found in appearances, had not we, or the nature of our mind, put them into appearances originally.²¹

Two examples of categories are cause and the permanence of substance. We apply these categories to intuitions that have been apprehended and then associated in the imagination in order to experience causal chains of events and substantial objects respectively. So experience itself—i.e., empirical cognition of appearances—is possible only inasmuch as we subject the succession of appearances, and hence all change, to the law of causality;²² in substance alone, and as determination, can everything belonging to existence be thought;²³ and motion, and change generally, can only be understood as variation in some permanent substance.²⁴ The outer intuitions do not carry causality or substantiality with them, which is why these pure concepts of cause and substance have to be applied in the understanding, and possibly in the earlier phases of synthesis,²⁵ if we are to experience events as causal and caused, and objects as substantial. In Kant’s view, experience in general is only possible if the mind applies such categories to the manifold of intuitions:²⁶ categories that he describes as

only rules for an understanding whose entire power consists in thought, i.e., in the act of bringing to the unity of apperception the synthesis of the manifold that has, in intuition, been given to it from elsewhere.²⁷

The second edition of the Critique, published in 1787, does not divide the stages of synthesis in such a clear way, but the overall message is the same: Intuitions are brought under an original synthetic unity of apperception by a process of synthesis,²⁸ and concepts are applied to the manifold; and the categories are more in evidence than contingent concepts²⁹ because Kant’s aim here is to describe the legitimate use of transcendental pure concepts of understanding in order to go on to discuss their potentially illegitimate use.

Kant distinguishes throughout the Critique between synthetic judgements, or propositions, and analytic judgements: the former providing new information about the subject, the latter merely stating what is already in the definition of the subject and so providing no new information. So The horse jumped the fence is synthetic because it provides information not provided by the definition of a horse, and The apple is a fruit is analytic because the fact that an apple is a fruit follows from the definition of an apple. The concepts applied in the understanding are synthetic when applied to intuitions because they enable experience to occur, which means that such a priori concepts as causality and substance are a priori synthetic concepts, and thus somewhat strange because they enable experience to occur but are not themselves given by or subject to experience. Kant has found that synthetic a priori concepts have a necessary and legitimate use in the ordering of intuitions into experience, and that the principles of pure understanding . . . contain nothing but . . . the pure schema for possible experience.³⁰

Several consequences follow from the analysis that has led to this proposition. First of all, nothing has been said so far about noumena, that is, things in themselves, things as such.³¹ Experience stems from appearances, and not directly from objects in the world; and the pure concepts of understanding can therefore take us to experience of phenomena, but not of noumena.³² "Objects of experience are never given in themselves, but are given only in experience and do not exist outside it at all."³³

A second consequence of both intuitions and concepts being required for cognition is that applying concepts in the absence of intuitions is not a route to cognition. This means that such concepts as a supreme being, free will, and a beginning for the cosmos, which are studied in the Transcendental Dialectic, are the result of reason running beyond the boundary of experience. Arguments can be put both for and against the objectivity of these concepts without any check on reason being provided by experience.³⁴ This is the realm of transcendent metaphysics, as opposed to the metaphysics of experience that deals with the necessary conditions for knowledge, such as time, space, and the categories: that is, with the transcendental rather than the transcendent. However, such concepts as free will, God, and the beginning of the cosmos, might still be regarded as regulative principles, or regulative ideas, in the sense that they can direct the understanding to a certain goal by reference to which the directional lines of all the understanding’s concepts converge in one point.³⁵ They therefore have a legitimate use, but only as long as we do not regard the ideas as referring to objects of some kind lying outside the realm of empirically possible cognition.³⁶ While this might appear to be a negative statement, Gardner ought not to have offered a more general initial assessment that the Dialectic is negative . . . . It denies legitimacy to the . . . transcendent metaphysics,³⁷ because, as he himself recognizes, while transcendent metaphysics has no relationship with objective knowledge, it is perfectly legitimate as regulative ideas that drive the mind to work towards unconditioned totality:³⁸ an attempt that we shall make later in this chapter.

We are now in a position to ask how Kant treats action, change, and motion, in the Critique.

Action, change, and motion

Before studying action, change, and motion in the Critique, we must take note of an essential conclusion of Kant’s project: that appearances when synthesized in the understanding result in cognition, but we still have no access to any noumena, or determined objects of which the appearances are appearances.

How in a thinking being as such there is possible an outer intuition—viz., that of space (specifically, a filling of space with shape and motion). Finding an answer to this question is, however, impossible for any human being; and we can never fill this gap in our knowledge, but can only mark it by ascribing outer appearances to a transcendental object: an object which is the cause of this kind of presentations, but with which we are not acquainted at all and of which we shall also never acquire any concept . . . we treat those outer appearances as objects in themselves, without worrying about the primary basis of their possibility (as appearances). But if we go beyond their boundary, then for this the concept of a transcendental object becomes necessary.³⁹

It is interesting to note that here Kant chooses to use transcendental of the external object. This could be correct because we might suppose that assuming the external existence of such an object is requisite for experience. However, transcendent would also be correct, and perhaps more understandably so, because any such object is beyond us and unreachable in itself.

We now know that when we speak about action, change, and motion, we cannot go beyond cognition that is the result of appearances understood by the application of the concepts of action, change, and motion: so we shall now study those concepts as they appear in the Critique. If space had permitted then we would also have studied the related concept of difference, or diversity, which, as Maimon has pointed out, must be a necessary condition of the possibility of intuition if space and time are to be intuitions (and concepts) relating to the appearances of objects.⁴⁰

Human action

In the Critique, in Kant’s other works, and in the secondary literature, most of the material about action is about human action,⁴¹ and in particular about the interaction between the mind and the body in terms of a relationship between inner and outer appearances,⁴² and about human action in terms of both causal determination and the freedom of the will.

All actions [alle Handlungen] of a human being are determined in appearance on the basis of his empirical character and the other contributing causes according to the order of nature; and if we could explore all appearances of his power of choice down to the bottom, there would not be a single human action [Handlung] that we could not with certainty predict and cognize as necessary from its preceding conditions.⁴³

Kant employs the example of a malicious lie:

The blame is based on a law of reason; and reason is regarded in this blaming as a cause that, regardless of all the mentioned empirical conditions, could and ought to have determined the person’s conduct differently.⁴⁴

As Kant makes clear: Freedom is being treated here only as a transcendental idea, so what he has shown is that "nature at least does not conflict with the causality from freedom."⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ He goes on to discuss moral principles of reason that can give rise to free actions⁴⁷ ⁴⁸ (a subject that he pursues more fully in the later Critique of Practical Reason) and to a moral world that is

an intelligible world . . . a mere idea; yet it is a practical idea that actually can and ought to have its influence on the world of sense, in order to bring this world as much as possible into accordance with the moral world.⁴⁹

Action as the causality of the cause

Watkins finds that nowhere in his voluminous output does Kant provide an explicit definition of action. However, in lectures that he gave between 1790 and 1791, it is clear that "an action is a determination of the substance’s power [or force] [Kraft] by means of which it causes its effect":⁵⁰ so action relates to substance generally, and not only to human action; and substances rather than events are where causality should be located. This means that gravity is a mutual relationship between substances, as is the action and reaction of billiard balls that collide.⁵¹

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant suggests that pure but derivative concepts of understanding can enable him to depict completely the genealogical tree of pure understanding: and so, for instance, "we can . . . subordinate . . . to the category of causality the predicables of force, action [der Handlung], undergoing."⁵² So for any causal relation, action, which leads to the concept of force,⁵³ has to occur as the causality of the cause.⁵⁴ So action is a pure . . . concept: and we shall return later to the question as to whether Kant ought to have regarded it as a category alongside cause, and maybe as a regulative principle alongside free will, the beginning of the cosmos, and God.

Change and motion

"Change [Veränderung] is a way of existing that ensues upon another way of existing of the same object . . . Hence change can be perceived only in substances. As Kant puts it, only the permanent (i.e., substance) undergoes change."⁵⁵ Although the substance does not change, appearances vary, resulting in a variety of perceptions in time. Imagination then determines an inner sense in relation to time relations and creates a manifold of successive appearances.⁵⁶ Change . . . is an event; and an event, as such, is possible only through a cause:⁵⁷ and, as we have discovered, this causality leads to the concept of action.⁵⁸ Kant then argues that

all change is possible only through a continuous action of the causality; . . . neither time nor, for that matter, appearance in time consists of parts that are the smallest; . . . as a thing changes, its state passes through all these parts, as elements, to the thing’s second state.⁵⁹

Change, like action, is an a priori concept, and, like action, it is not a category because it is obtained only from experience⁶⁰ and so is not a priori. It is also derivative: action is a derivative of cause, and change is a derivative of the predicaments of modality, which are the categories of possibility (and impossibility), existence (and non-existence) [Dasein and Nichtsein], and necessity (and contingency).⁶¹ And as Maimon would suggest, change must also be derivative of the concepts of identity and difference, because without being able to identify two objects or states as both the same and different on the basis of unsynthesized sensation, those two concepts are required.⁶²

As we have seen here:

The concept of change, and with it the concept of motion (as change of place) [Bewegung (als Veränderung des Orts)], is possible only through and in the presentation of time; and . . . if this presentation were not (inner) a priori intuition, no concept whatsoever could make comprehensible the possibility of a change, i.e., of a combination, in one and the same object, of contradictorily opposed predicates (e.g., one and the same thing’s being in a place and not being in that same place).⁶³

However, even though

as formal condition of the possibility of changes, time does indeed precede them objectively; . . . subjectively, and in the actuality of consciousness, this presentation is still, like any other, given only through the prompting of perceptions.⁶⁴

Because change is an a priori concept that we apply to the presentations that are given by perceptions subject to the necessary condition of time, it is not itself an appearance, and no change occurs in it.⁶⁵ We can only apply the concept of change to appearances, and not to itself; and because cause is a category that is applied to outer intuitions, and is not itself a matter of experience, the understanding does not at all disclose to us a priori the possibility of a cause that changes the state of any things, i.e., determines them to enter the opposite of a certain given state.⁶⁶

We do not a priori have the least concept as to how anything can be changed at all, i.e., how it is possible that one state occurring at one point of time can be succeeded by an opposite state occurring at another point of time. This [concept of how change is possible] requires knowledge of actual forces—e.g., knowledge of the motive forces, or, which is the same, of certain successive appearances (as motions) indicating such forces—and such knowledge can be given only empirically.⁶⁷

We have already found motion to be change of place.⁶⁸ Kant finds that to identify motion, or change generally, along with an a priori concept of substance as permanent, is a necessary condition of all time determination,⁶⁹ and that

this permanent something cannot be an intuition within me. For all bases determining my existence that can be encountered within me are presentations; and being presentations, they themselves require something permanent distinct from them, by reference to which their variation, and hence my existence in the time in which they vary, can be determined.⁷⁰

. . . the motion of a point in space . . . the point’s existence in different locations . . . is what first makes change intuitive.⁷¹

Kant suggests that only through drawing a line, that is, through motion, can we provide the permanent intuition that we need if we are to understand change as change of state in a permanent substance.⁷² This does not mean that motion could ever be somehow permanent: the movable must be something that we find in space only through experience, and hence must be an empirical datum.⁷³ However, just like change of other kinds, motion can be taken as act of the subject (rather than as a determination of an object) and consequently as the synthesis of the manifold in space.⁷⁴ This manifold is then recognized by a concept of motion in the understanding: and once this has occurred, because the objects of outer intuition, just as they are intuited in space, are actual . . . all changes are actual in time just as inner sense presents them.⁷⁵ And also,

we assert that space is empirically real (as regards all possible outer experience), despite asserting that space is transcendentally ideal, i.e., that it is nothing as soon as we omit the condition of the possibility of all experience and suppose space to be something underlying things in themselves.⁷⁶

Could we not say the same of motion? If we watch a tree blowing in the wind, motion is not a property of the tree. It is empirically real in relation to appearance, and ideal in relation to the thing itself. Motion, like space, would appear to be

empirically real (as regards all possible outer experience), despite asserting that motion is transcendentally ideal, i.e., that it is nothing as soon as we omit the condition of the possibility of all experience and suppose motion to be something underlying things in themselves.

So perhaps space and time might be functions of motion as a more fundamental reality. We thus find motion as a concept in the understanding; as an essential component of any determination of time; as the root of our understanding of change; and possibly as a necessary condition underlying the necessary conditions of space and time and therefore of the outer experience of which motion, space, and time are necessary conditions.

Konstantin Pollok finds that Kant’s concept of motion remains somewhat underdeveloped in the Critique, and that further development takes place in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786 and thus between the two editions of the Critique. Here motion relates to objects and therefore to the outer senses, meaning that the concept of motion is applied to outer intuitions and is not a pure a priori concept and so is not a category.⁷⁷ But having said that, Kant is committed, it would appear a priori, to the notion of the continuity of change, and therefore of motion, which rather suggests at least an a priori element to the concept of motion.⁷⁸ We can thus refine our conclusion: motion is an a posteriori concept in the understanding and not a category; it is an essential component of any determination of time; it is the root of our understanding