Kant's Line Analogy

In our reading of Kant so far, I have been most interested in his discussion of time. Time has always seemed kind of like a fluid, abstract entity to me, despite its very concrete presence in our lives. I have also never thought to connect it to space, and how the two are the conditions under which reality occurs. The most illuminating passage for me is when Kant makes the analogy of the line: “We represent the time-sequence by a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series of one-dimension only; and we reason from the properties of this line to all the properties of time, with this one exception, that while the parts of the line are simultaneous, the parts of time are always successive” (77). It is true that we can only be present in one moment at a time, but it is also true that all of the other moments that haven’t happened yet and that have happened in the past are just as present in the spectrum of time. These moments, along with space, are the conditions under which experience occurs.

            Also in that paragraph, Kant asserts that time is still an intuition. The line example works so well because it is rather intuitive and doesn’t take a lot of unpacking. We can all intuit the properties and significance of a line. So, despite how “this inner intuition yields no shape,” I think the analogy of the line has augmented my understanding of Kant’s point as a whole (77).