Explain Kant's Claim Of Mere Appearances

In order to understand Kant’s claim that objects in space are ‘mere appearances’, we need to firstly understand where this claim comes from and the context surrounding it. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the discussion of time and space is an integral one, and where our ‘mere appearances’ quote gets its origin. When talking about space specifically, Kant make several claims, the most important one and the one that this essay will be focusing on is: “the subjective condition of sensibility under which alone outer intuition is possible” (A 26/B 42). This is Kant’s main view of space in which he titles transcendental idealism. There’s a lot to unpack from this claim in order to fully understand what Kant’s transcendental idealism actually

If you were to say that “space is the form of outer sense” then what you would mean is that you’re aware of items displayed in spatial order. It’s important to note here for clarity that spatial order only concerns space, if you were talking about time you would instead be talking about temporal order. Additionally, we can unpack Kant’s claim of transcendental idealism even further by looking at his use of ‘subjective’. What is he trying to say by calling a form of outer space ‘subjective’? In the dictionary subjective is defined as “based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.” If Kant was using the word subjective in this sense then it’s likely that what he meant was that the form of outer sense has something to do with us, the way we as humans view space. This seems to be the view he is expressing when he says “only from the human standpoint that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc.” (A 26-7/B 42-3). H.J. Patton’s analogy of glasses can be used to efficiently further our knowledge and understanding of Kant viewpoint on this

The pair of glasses have a blue tint to them and because of this it is safe to assume that the man cannot in any way alter or change what he see’s through his glasses, but it’s also clear that he will never see anything other than a blue tinted world. Patton therefore concludes that while the blue world he see’s is determined by his glasses and not the objects, he knows in advance of an experience happening that that experience will be blue. In this analogy, Kant’s claim about space and his transcendental idealism is supposed to be the man with the glasses on his face. In the same way that the man has the glasses that make everything seem blue, Kant’s claim is that humans have a cognitive faculty which makes everything we perceive spatial. Kant calls this faculty “sensibility”. Now this analogy isn’t perfect, there are some inaccuracies, Kant wouldn’t have said that sensibility is something permanently affixed to you like the glasses but rather its part of our mind. Nevertheless, this analogy is particularly good at introducing and helping us to understand the concept of sensibility, this is especially important as it starts to directly leads us to understand why Kant makes his ‘mere appearances’ claim about objects in