Draft for comments in class - Philosophy Seminar
If Kant asserts that metaphysical science is impossible for lacking a representable object in intuition, it is because he has not meditated deep enough about the very notion of "ob-ject". Intuition of any object is intuition of a finite form, whose borders with other objects immediately reveal us the limits of its entire set of possibilities of action and passion (in other words, possibilities of acting or suffering actions). Looking at a cat, we know by means of intuition that it cannot fly. If this information about the cat were absent from in-tuition, than it would be a false intuition, or else, it would be the intuition of a generic cast of a cat which is not a cat. Looking at a square, we instantly know it cannot be divided by one segment of a straight line into two squares, and if cut by an exact diagonal line, there will be two isosceles triangles as a result. To be able to immediately know these facts is to have the intuition of the square. A simple and passive perception of a square shape, regard-less of any of its inherent form properties, is not yet an intuition: it is pure sensation and matter for a possible intuition which will take place at the precise moment when the square begins to show something of its internal constitution. Hence, intuition is not just a senso-rial perception of a static form. Rather, it is the intellection of a finite system of possibili-ties, the grasping - no matter how diffuse and vague it may be at start -, of an algorithmic formula of an organized and unitary set of potencies. A set whose integral form exactly en-folds both identity and unity of the object of intuition. In view of this, that set of potencies is simultaneously intuited in poles apart: positive and negative. Positive, for the assertion of potencies - at least, of some of them - which reveal themselves in the form of the object. Negative, for the limits that distinguish these potencies from other possible or surrounding ones absent from the object itself, exactly as in the case of the cat, which is instantly per-ceived as a walking and not a flying animal. In short: a form is perceived in one instanta-neous and inseparable way as an articulated set of possibilities and impossibilities.