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In the first place Kant's act of experience is essentially knowledge. Thus whatever is not knowledge is necessarily inchoate, and merely on its way to knowledge. In comparing Kant's procedure with that of the philosophy of organism, it must be remembered that an 'apparent' objective content is the end of Kant's process, and thus takes the place of 'satisfaction' in the process as analysed in the philosophy of organism. In Kant's phraseology at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, this 'apparent' objective content is referred to as 'objects.' He also accepts Hume's sensationalist account of the datum. Kant places this sentence at the commencement of the Critique: "Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought through the understanding, and hence arise conceptions." This is expanded later in a form which makes Kant's adhesion to Hume's doctrine of the datum more explicit:

And here we see that the impressions of the senses give the first impulse to the whole faculty of knowledge with respect to them, and thus produce experience which consists of two very heterogeneous elements, namely, matter for knowledge, derived from the senses [eine Materiet zur Erkenntniss aus den Sinnen], and a certain form according to which it is arranged, derived from the internal source of pure intuition and pure thought, first brought into action by the former, and then producing concepts.

Also:

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

In this last statement the philosophy of organism is in agreement with Kant; but for a different reason. It is agreed that the functioning of concepts is an essential factor in knowledge, so that 'intuitions without concepts are blind.' But for Kant, apart from concepts there is nothing to know; since objects related in a knowable world are the product of conceptual functioning whereby categoreal form is introduced into the sense-datum, which otherwise is intuited in the form of a mere spatio-temporal flux of sensations. Knowledge requires that this mere flux be particularized by conceptual functioning, whereby the flux is understood as a nexus of 'objects.' Thus for Kant the process whereby there is experience is a process from subjectivity to apparent objectivity. The philosophy of organism inverts this analysis, and explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity, namely, from the objectivity, whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity, whereby there is one individual experience. Thus, according to the philosophy of organism, in every act of experience there are objects for knowledge; but, apart from the inclusion of intellectual functioning in that act of experience, there is no knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, II.VI.V

#alfred north whitehead #immanuel kant #pg 155