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The problem with which Kant is concerned in the Transcendental Æsthetic is primarily the epistemological problem: "How do we come to have knowledge of geometry a priori?" By the distinction between the logical and physical problems of geometry, the bearing and scope of this question are greatly altered. Our knowledge of pure geometry is a priori but is wholly logical.
It doesn't EXIST, it HOLDS or OBTAINS, it belongs to another dimension from that of either facts or fact-relations, belongs, in short, to the epistemological dimension and with that big word rationalism closes the discussion. Thus, just as pragmatism faces forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity.
Thus those objects of whose existence we become certain through perception are said to be data. There is some difficulty in connecting this epistemological definition of "data" with our psychological analysis of knowledge; but until such a connection has been effected, we have no right to use the conception "data." It is clear, in the first place, that there can be no datum apart from a belief.
Concerning sense-data, we know that they are there while they are data, and this is the epistemological basis of all our knowledge of external particulars. Sense-data at the times when they are data are all that we directly and primitively know of the external world; hence in epistemology the fact that they are data is all-important.
Only this much may be pointed out immediately, that Goethe if not in the scientific then indeed in the poetical part of his writings did fulfil what Heisenberg rightly feels to have been his true task.2 We mentioned Heisenberg's speech as a symptom of a certain tendency, characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically its own epistemological foundations.
If this comes at all when I know your headache, it comes not with the object, but quite on my side of the "epistemological gulf." Some day of course, or even now somewhere in the larger life of the universe, different men's headaches may become confluent or be 'co- conscious. Here and now, however, headaches do transcend each other and, when not felt, can be known only conceptually.
Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind.
For the transcendentalist, who holds knowing to consist in a salto motale across an 'epistemological chasm, such an idea presents no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it might be inconsistent with an empiricism like our own.
Nor will the practical uses to which they have been put with so much success be criticized in any way. But there are certain deceptive ideas which became connected with them, and the result is that to-day, when man is in need of finding new epistemological ground under his feet, he is entangled in a network of conceptual illusions which prevent him from using his reason with the required freedom.
He starts with but one sort of thing, truth-claims, but is led ultimately to the independent objective facts which they assert, inasmuch as the most successfully validated of all claims is that such facts are there. My universe is more essentially epistemological.
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