L0_T — Time (Norman Kemp Smith Translation)

Transcendental Aesthetic · Section II · Time

1. Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come within our perception if the representation of time were not presupposed as underlying them a priori. Only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time or at different times.

2. Time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove time itself, though we can quite well think time as void of appearances. Time is, therefore, given a priori; in it alone is actuality of appearances possible at all.

3. The possibility of apodeictic principles concerning the relations of time is grounded upon this a priori necessity. Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive. These principles cannot be derived from experience, for experience would give neither strict universality nor apodeictic certainty.

4. Time is not a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts of one and the same time, and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition.

5. The infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it.

– P 076 – The concept of alteration, and with it the concept of motion, as alteration of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time. Only in time can two contradictorily opposed predicates meet in one and the same object, namely, one after the other.

(a) Time is not something which exists of itself, or which inheres in things as an objective determination.

(b) Time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state. It cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it has to do neither with shape nor position, but with the relation of representations in our inner state.

(c) Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever. It has objective validity only in respect of appearances, and if we abstract from the subjective conditions of sensible intuition, time is nothing.