THE FIRST ANALOGY

Abstract

The Analogies of Experience: preliminaries The Analogies of Experience assert that experience must fall under the categories of substance, cause and community . The third Analogy, concerning community, does not require extended discussion. It says: ‘All substances, in so far as they can be perceived to coexist in space, are in thoroughgoing reciprocity.’ Kant is here making the interesting and rather Spinozist claim that we could not know that two things coexisted in the same universe unless they had causal commerce (= community) with one another. His attempt to prove this, however, is a failure which is not even incidentally valuable except for a few flickers of light which it throws on the second Analogy. The remaining sections of my book will centre on Kant's abominably organised ‘proofs’ of the first and second Analogies. This thirty-page stretch of the Critique , for all its obscurities, ellipses and repetitions, is one of the great passages in modern philosophy. The so-called principle of the Analogies of Experience says: ‘Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions.’ The Analogies do indeed concern necessary connections—between the different qualities of a single substance, between cause and effect, and between things which interact with one another. The principle which covers all these at once, however, is so general as to defeat even Kant's capacity for doing philosophy at the level of the extremely abstract.