/lit/ - Literature

>>14538612
> There is not a separate space “out there”, according to Kant. Everything that we perceive as occurring in space and time are our representations. In short every space is our own creation, according to Kant.
This is false. Kant did not deny the existence of the thing-itself, reality-as-it-is, which would be absurd. Even without reading ant it would hae to be directly evident that when our minds are imposing their categories they are doing precisely that; imposing upon an external stimuli. Claiming that Kant denied the ding-an-sich, is saying he was a solipsist. You either haven't read him, or haven't read him well. The important distinction here is that the logical conclusion after theorizing our mind's categories, we have to conclude that we cannot make authoritative claims on life, the world or God, God being the ultimate 'ding-an-sich'. This does not affirm the existence of God, but doesn't deny it either. This was a great tregedy for Kant, as his Critiques were meant to save faith, ''um das Glauben zu retten''.

>The choice of which geometry to adopt when describing the physical world is a matter of conventionality, and even if you adopt the realist position (as I suspect Einstein and other spacetime substantivalists might) then one still must accept that it is ultimately a philosophical question, as there is no empirical distinction to be made between a world that is euclidean and a world that is not. "Science" has not and cannot prove what the "real" geometry of the world is. It can only gesture at an answer.
You are right in saying that the choice of which geometry to adopt is ultimately a conventionality,but that's a misleading way to put it. Einstein's relativity was 'proven' beyond a reasonable doubt, and if Einstein was at all versed in modern philosophy(most likely)he would have known this. But I must defend Spengler here and say that he attacked Kant's belief that the way he set out his categories was absolute, that they were necessarily connected to Euclidian geometry. The existence of non-euclidian geometry proves this. Spengler understood that a culture's geometry and mathematics are expressions of it's soul, expressions of the within(this may sound somewhat 'new-age' but Spengler explains why in detail). Of course this is not a matter of simple nuance, it was an arrogant thing of Kant to say, but this is typical of all systematising thinkers.
Important also, is to understand that Kant provided proof for space(german is less confusing and gets closer to meaning 'space-ness') to be an a priori construct and reading this is one of the most enjoyable parts of reading the Kritik. Kant provides us no such proof for time to be one of the a priori constructs necessary for perception. He confuses time with the number, he confuses time with mathematics. Spengler would say that the mathematics of a people are expressions of their experience of time, which will inevitably be expressed also in music, other art.
>1/2