Question According to Kant intuitions without concepts are blind. I'm not sure I understand this but suppose the color red is an intuition and the awareness of the color as red or a more rudimentary awareness of the color red is the the concept. Couldn't it be argued that Kant is wrong because without a rudimentary awareness of the color red there would no red at all? Or was that Kants point? It seems to me that the "concept" of red is a precondition of red as much as the intuition and that Kant seems to suppose that they are at least theoretically seperable.

Accepted:
May 9, 2013

Comments

It seems to me that your interpretation of Kant is spot on. By 'blind' he means that we would have eyes (or ears or noses) but cannot see (or hear or smell), unless concepts were operative. However, this 'would have' is quite hypothetical. Kant certainly does not mean to imply that there is ever mere sensory input without a concept. (There certainly may be pure concepts without any associated sensory input, or even any possible sensory input -- Kant analyses the problems that this raises in the Dialectic.) If I see a colour, I see the colour red, or lemon, or ochre. And if I don't recognise the particular colour, I still know it is a colour, so a concept is still operative. Likewise, if I hear a sound, I hear the sound of traffic, or of a violin, or of a creaking floorboard. If I don't recognise the sound, then I still know it is a sound.

Nevertheless, you are right that he is asserting some kind of difference between intuition and concept. But this difference is not one that I experience. Rather, Kant argues, it is possible to analyse a given experience into the intuitive and the conceptual parts. For example, I hear the sound of a violin. Now, if I were to abstract from this all the concepts I employ in experiencing it, what is left should be the pure sound, located in space and time. Maybe it is impossible for me to experience this pure sound as pure sound – because intuitions without concepts are deaf – but it makes sense philosophically to consider it as something fundamentally different from the concepts that I use to identify that sound. (Analogously, I can never experience my child as not specifically my child; however, intellectually, I am perfectly aware that others do not experience her in that way.) In the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' especially, Kant discusses all these fundamental differences between intuitions and concepts.