Chapter 5 - Manifolds of Intuition and Perspectival Transformation

Summary

A distinction is made between the manifold of an object and manifolds of intuitions. The former is represented abstractly through judgments. But it can be given only in the form of manifolds of intuitions. By varying the perspective on an object of intuition, the perceiver can become acquainted with ever more details or aspects of the individual object or of the layout of the spatial scene. The details are “substantial parts,” i.e., spatial ones that can be arbitrarily rearranged, and the aspects are “qualitative parts,” or tropes. Perspectival shifts include zooming in, so as to access finer manifolds of intuition ad indefinitum. According to Kant, this is clarification of the perception. The possibility of this kind of clarification rests on the procedural containment of nested manifolds. It therefore requires an informational link to the perceived scene, or to a target object in the scene. By contrast, clarification of concepts is just conceptual analysis, and does not require any such link. Moreover, there are no fixed “pixels” from which a perception is composed. Perceptions are not compositional in any atomistic sense.