Kant’s Unconscious ‘Given’

Abstract

Kant appeals to unconscious representations for reasons that are deeply connected to his distinctive theory of cognition. He is an empirical realist, accepting the Empiricist claim that cognition must be based in sensory data. He is an idealist about spatial and temporal representations. He believes that human perception is always of objects or events with temporal and spatial properties. It follows from these three claims that the sensations that must begin the process of cognition lack spatial and temporal properties and so are not perceived, but unconscious.